RIP double Ice Lance?

[mage21]

Reports on Altered Time regarding the latest PTR are that double Ice Lance is kill.

Via user Causese:
https://gfycat.com/SplendidUnsteadyArmyant

Anyone that can confirm?

[stomination]

The stand still and ice lance at close range is dead.

Basically to do it now you would have to be around 20 yds out cast flurry then shimmer towards boss so u can land the double IL. Which is difficult and also not always available to do so. I think its also not a guarantee to land it even if you do that like maybe a 52-60% chance to succeed.


Now the above could be wrong but its what I'm understanding thru the mage discord.

[D3athsting]

Double IL gone, thermal void gone, t19 2p nerfed, this will bring frost back in line with other 2 crap specs we have, wp blizz!!

[Deleted]

Maybe I'll actually try Frost now. However, if it is still possible with Shimmer the most annoying and unintuitive part of double IL will persis: Using utility abilities for a damage gain.

Hopefully they will compensate with a base damage buff.

[Nitros14]

How nice. I was starting to feel pretty bad playing arcane.

[Deleted]

Sigh, just sigh...

[Wobe]

Losing double ice lance isn't going to force us to another spec, Frost was just too strong to begin with and the other specs were simply too weak. From what I can tell, out of 20 5 min dummy pulls on live and 20 on ptr, it's about an avg dps loss of around 80k. So pmuch a flat 6-8% nerf. But still quite a bit ahead of the other 2 specs.

So it seems like, unless things change, they've not changed the spec we'll be playing, just the amount of damage the spec can produce.

- - - Updated - - -

People overestimate the amount of time you're actually able to double lance in a fight and assume that's all that makes the spec viable, and that's simply not true. Granted, the DPS variance will change significantly due to not being able to abuse double lance on those pulls where you have amazing flurry procs during high haste points, but outside of that the Thermal Void change probably hurts just as bad as losing the double lance.

[Deleted]

@Wobe so now on PTR frost st dps is 5% ahead of Arcane while Arcane has sick Aoe? :d Nice.

[Makarena]

Time to play Glacial Spike then huh.

[antelope591]

Time to play Glacial Spike then huh.

TV will be extremely shitty with the nerf to it and no double IL, while GS is unchanged and will benefit from T20 a good amount. Yeah its almost certainly gonna be the go to spec. It just sucks that the legendary gloves are gonna be basically useless next patch.

[Rhov]

They should revert the TV nerf to compensate the 2xIL fix tbh.

[Deleted]

atm frost will still be the superior spec by a pretty considerable margin too due to how the encounters are made in ToS.

[kheath812]

TV will be extremely shitty with the nerf to it and no double IL, while GS is unchanged and will benefit from T20 a good amount. Yeah its almost certainly gonna be the go to spec. It just sucks that the legendary gloves are gonna be basically useless next patch.

tv nerf is only a 3% dmg loss....

[Deleted]

tv nerf is only a 3% dmg loss....

TV Nerf 3%, removed double IL another 4-5%, nerf to p2 another %. Sum up all those small nerfs and u will see that blizzard wants mages to just quit the game

[antelope591]

tv nerf is only a 3% dmg loss....

This is a case where the sims don't tell the whole story...consider it'll be basically impossible to get to second FO with IV once these changes go through. Right now if you have the gloves the only way you don't get to the second FO is if you fuck up badly. Even if you're using bracers/ring its not that hard to get to 2nd FO unless you have bad RNG. Its not even that rare to have 90-100% IV uptime on farm bosses, I do it often and I'm far from the best frost player. Take all those factors and you're easily looking at a 10-15% nerf for someone who's playing the spec optimally.

[Deleted]

This is a case where the sims don't tell the whole story...consider it'll be basically impossible to get to second FO with IV once these changes go through. Right now if you have the gloves the only way you don't get to the second FO is if you fuck up badly. Even if you're using bracers/ring its not that hard to get to 2nd FO unless you have bad RNG. Its not even that rare to have 90-100% IV uptime on farm bosses, I do it often and I'm far from the best frost player. Take all those factors and you're easily looking at a 10-15% nerf for someone who's playing the spec optimally.

except, sims actually take those things into account and its shows a fairly small nerf, negliable for ppl without gloves. dont get me wrong, its a moronic change but it was a needed one coz having a 90-100% uptime on IV is stupid, it should sit around half that at best, the things that worries me is if they are going to do what they said they would do and buff frozen touch, now that the conditions for said buff have been met or if it turns out that frost got the "fire" treatment and is unplayable then how long will it take to buff frost or we have to respec for the 2nd time in a row that new raiding content comes out which is utterly unacceptable but atleast atm from what ive seen, even with these changes frost will still be the best spec in ToS but it is really too early to tell.

[Sergio]

Anyone else concerned about how boring frost is going to be with double IL gone and thermal void nerfed? Literally the only interesting thing about frost right now is tracking cd's to know when to double IL and actually performing the double IL, and fighting the clock to keep IV up. With both those gone there is nothing interesting left in frost. ST is basically just reacting to 2 procs, aoe is even simpler, just spamming frozen orb and blizz. Not looking forward to playing frost with these changes.

[kheath812]

Anyone else concerned about how boring frost is going to be with double IL gone and thermal void nerfed? Literally the only interesting thing about frost right now is tracking cd's to know when to double IL and actually performing the double IL, and fighting the clock to keep IV up. With both those gone there is nothing interesting left in frost. ST is basically just reacting to 2 procs, aoe is even simpler, just spamming frozen orb and blizz. Not looking forward to playing frost with these changes.

my problem with double ice lance, and the reason im glad to see it go, is that it was just clunky and inconsistent. it obviously isnt intended as an actual class mechanic otherwise it would work 100% of the time without all the stupid range/haste level mental calculations. and even then 3 or 4 times out of 10 it just doesnt work anyway, which makes it a dps loss. and then it works even less often if you have bad ping or fps. and there are a lot of bosses where it just doesnt work period, maybe like 1 in 10 times, like krosus. i dont personally find it fun to do. i mean, its fun when it works, but its soul crushing when it doesnt.

[Kluian05]

Id much rather they just get rid of double IL and fix our dmg if it needs fixing after everything settles. With T20 I'm not even sure how much we lose with double IL gone. You're going to have FO up more often, which will result in more FoF procs. So the window that you can Flurry and free IL without munching FoF procs is smaller.

Also blizzard probably had to do something about Gloves/IV uptime because of the T19/T20 interaction.

[Deleted]

well yeah, with the 2pc t19 you will get enough brain freeze procs to essentially double the uptime on FO, effectively reducing the cd of FO to around 30 secs, if you have clarity relics, you'd prolly get to 20 secs maybe even 15 with good RNG, giving you an uptime of about 33-50% uptime on the t20 2pc buff(+30% ice lance crit dmg afaik) which is pretty massive and since there is no overlapse with the t20 4pc, meaning that even if you have a brainfreeze proc going, and you get a new 1, it still reduces the cd of FO by 5 secs, that will make reducing the cd of FO consistently much easier to do.