New Frost Mastery: Icicles!

[jtmzac]

...

But frost isn't going live how it is tomorrow. We all know its going to be changed further so constantly reminding us that its currently not viable every single ptr build is pointless.

And competitive is very much a personal opinion. We've had this discussion many times and I still think people's attitudes towards the need to play fire are a very large part of the problem (and blizz agrees). Complaining about frost constantly makes people thinks its worse then it really is.

If you like frost so much you just have to play it and show people what's really possible. The more people that just go fire because they feel they have to snowballs and just makes further people do the same.

[Polarthief]

But frost isn't going live how it is tomorrow. We all know its going to be changed further so constantly reminding us that its currently not viable every single ptr build is pointless.

And competitive is very much a personal opinion. We've had this discussion many times and I still think people's attitudes towards the need to play fire are a very large part of the problem (and blizz agrees). Complaining about frost constantly makes people thinks its worse then it really is.

If you like frost so much you just have to play it and show people what's really possible. The more people that just go fire because they feel they have to snowballs and just makes further people do the same.

We also know how retarded Blizzard is with things (e.g., buffing Combustion in 5.1 to nerf it even lower than pre 5.1 as well as a CM nerf kick in the balls), so who knows if it even will be good.

It's still pretty bad and the Amplification trinket only makes things worse. Until that thing gets nerfed and/or Frost gets some significant buffs, I don't see anyone straying from Fire anytime soon (at least until after they receive that trinket).

I do, and it's a good 20k or more lower than my Fire parses. I'm already lower in gear and middleish of the pack in my guild (that I'm a RECRUIT of, mind you), so trying to go Frost and pulling LESS DPS won't make anyone want to keep me. I don't have the luxury to play the spec I really want to (granted, we're not a bleeding edge, have to squeeze out every last drop of DPS, kind of guild, so there is some wiggle room, but going Frost is just gimping myself on live).

[Deleted]

So after thinking a lot about it, I`m a bit worried. The new mastery works only with 2 single target spells and another single target autocast. 2 of 3 "mastery spells" does not benefit from shatter, the remaining 2 PvE raiding spells which benefit from shatter are nerfed, FoF Ice lance (scaling nerf) and BF FFB nerfed (huge). Ice lance doesn´t benefit from mastery anymore. So maybe it´s worth to ignore shatter cap to get more Frostbolt and Waterbolt Crits? What about fights like Council, Horridon, Animus, Tortos? Where we dotted nearly everything? Still no benefit from mastery for our AoE and a few are nerfed (Shattered Frost Bomb, Frozen Orb, Cone of Cold and snapshotted NT/LB).

We still have a debuff for Ice Lance and Waterbolt, what makes target switching a pain in the ass anyway. Thinking of cleave fights, we´re usually tried to get 3x Frostbolt debuff (what a silly mechanic) and then we tried to dot both targets and spam as much FoF IL we can get (100% main target / 50% second target with IL glyph) Now we spam 100% of a nerfed FoF IL on main target + Icicles and 50% of a nerfed FoF ice lance on the second one. That means way more damage (our whole mastery) on our main target and less on our second (cleave target, no mastery). Switching target to get icicles on the other one is not an option because of the 3 stacks debuff - unless you start to debuff 2 targets, what will make frost even more clunky - Managing debuff on 2 or more targets, dots and icicles (with an another addon like mybigignite). What a nightmare!

There where a few fights already in ToT where I cast a lot less Frostbolt (Horridon, Council, Tortos, Primordius and Animus) and it seems like there are a lot more encounter in SoO where I cast less Frostbolts and our Filler gets buffed and is mandatory for our new mastery (with that mastery, it´s not a filler anymore).

Don´t get me wrong, numbers can be adjusted, but it´s the mechanic that will not work for me and every heroic progression raider. I´m 100% sure, Blizzard has not talked to a raider about this. Sure, the guys who jumps in LFR and do a few quests will love it. Most guys in forums will like it and it´s new shiny flashy spell animation till they have to raid with it, but our (my) needs were not served - yet!

Let´s see how Blizzard react on feedback from community.

[jtmzac]

...but going Frost is just gimping myself on live

I think this is where the problem lies since you shouldn't have to feel gimped by playing the spec you like. I'd like to know what blizz thinks but I really think as long as you're a good player you shouldn't be forced to play a certain spec just to clear the tier before the next one comes out (e.g. the guilds that are 11/13 now).

I understand they can only tune the specs to be so close to each other but there must be another way to solve the problem. Being punished for playing what you enjoy just isn't fair. In 25 you can get away with playing sub-optimal specs as long as the gm/rl is open minded but in 10 there isn't really a choice.

I think there needs to be a combined effort from both blizz and the community to achieve solutions and change peoples attitudes.

I'm not going to give up on frost being better then fire. It will happen.

[Polarthief]

I think this is where the problem lies since you shouldn't have to feel gimped by playing the spec you like. I'd like to know what blizz thinks but I really think as long as you're a good player you shouldn't be forced to play a certain spec just to clear the tier before the next one comes out (e.g. the guilds that are 11/13 now).

I understand they can only tune the specs to be so close to each other but there must be another way to solve the problem. Being punished for playing what you enjoy just isn't fair. In 25 you can get away with playing sub-optimal specs as long as the gm/rl is open minded but in 10 there isn't really a choice.

I think there needs to be a combined effort from both blizz and the community to achieve solutions and change peoples attitudes.

I'm not going to give up on frost being better then fire. It will happen.

I completely agree that I shouldn't be forced to play what I don't want to, but I'm not going to hold back my guild for personal reasons unless the "holding back" is very miniscule (e.g., losing 5k-ish to play Frost instead)

Again, I completely agree. They just didn't bother/care to do anything about it. Fire has had these scaling issues since fucking LICH KING. That also includes Cataclysm and MoP, and now with CM, I think they finally understand that they fucked up because there isn't any easy way to nerf Fire without making it absolute shit/feeling like shit because gear tiers aren't making you feel stronger once you get nerfed.

Third time, I agree.

I'm not going to either, but I am very doubtful about Frost topping Fire on the end-of-the-expansion tier, especially with their attitude towards Mages this expansion in general (failing MULTIPLE times to keep Fire in line, ignoring L90 talents SINCE MoP BETA AND REPEATED THREADS, etc). Seems like "6.0 will fix it" is their overall feeling.

[Deleted]

Please don't derail this thread again Polarthief. I'd rather not see it get locked.

[Polarthief]

Please don't derail this thread again Polarthief. I'd rather not see it get locked.

I'd recommend going back to seeing who started what. Started here: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post21798209 and people kept replying to me, so I replied back as there was more to talk about. Gotta love how I always get the hate for "derailing" a thread when I wasn't even the first one to start it (I guess I know how Ghostcrawler feels, except I have significantly less power and less hate)

Also, this thread alone kinda (but not really) broke a rule about not posting duplicate threads. The "Free For All" thread was made as a non-strict discussion thread for most Live and PTR Mage stuff. This is just a sub-section of said thread (where we've already discussed it, too). I wouldn't be surprised if it got locked because we already had a PTR discussion, but it probably won't because it's just a focused part of it.

[Tobedeleted123]

Damn I really like frost and they are making frost cooler and it really looks like they are working on it. I'd love to raid frost, but I can't get rid of feeling that I'm crippling my raid group because I simply push much more damage when I'm fire. Shame :/

[Pandacally]

Ok here are my thoughts about it, some of them were already reflected by other players.
As this change is not live on PTR, we (have to) assume that the things quoted by Lhivera are true.

I'll start with:

Q: Are Icicles modified by damage-decreasing effects?
A: Yes. If your target is taking 50% less damage, it will also take 50% less damage from Icicles.

Q: Can Icicles trigger on-damage procs?
A: No.

This makes absolutely no sense at all. Why double-dip on reduce, but not on +dmg buffs? Seems like Lhivera got it very wrong. I think will double-dip on everything.

This "double-dip" is one of the points that breaks pvp frostmage in my opinion. I'll give an exemple: Lets say, you cast a frostbolt at an enemy player which would do 100k. This will be reduced by 65% resilence to 35k. You have 50% Mastery, so 17,5k of this 35k is stored as an "icicle". Now you launch this icicle with an icelance proc, but it is reduced AGAIN by 65% resilence, doing ~6k dmg instead of 17,5k. So 50% Mastery in PvP brings you now 6k more dmg on your ice-lance burst.
Compare to before, 50% Mastery increased your icelance dmg by 50%, which i would say is roughly 5 times the icicle dmg. But then again, to generate icicles, you need to cast or procc Fb/FFB in the first place, whereas with the old mastery, you could (skillfully or at least "aware") shatter into frozen targets and your magebomb/frostorb/icelance/frostbolt/FFB were all increased.
So yeah, this does not only bring "mage burst" under control, it completely undermines it and makes it cowardly weak and even more "unskillful" (now its just FFB/icelance, before you needed to shatter and time your magebomb/frostbolt whatever)

For PvE, this "double-dip" might be a skillful addition (but apparently positive +dmg modifiers are not intended to work, we'll see), if it weren't for one other issue

If you generate a new Icicle when you already have five, the oldest will immediately launch at the target hit by the spell that generated the new Icicle, and the new one will be stored.

Take any fight, where you need burst. For example Ra-den.
As a pro-mage, you'll want to have 5 high-hitting icicles for the addspawns, and indeed, 10sec before spawn you get lucky and have 3 FFB procs. FFB does ~300k, with 50% Mastery, thats 3 times 150k icicles, quite decent. But now you also have 2 icelance procs (5 sec before addspawn) which you can not use, because you would launch your icicles at the boss. Ok unfortunate. So what can you do? You cast FB at the boss, your waterelemental hits the boss, and in this 5 seconds, you have generated 4 new icicles (Waterelemental icicle does like what? 20k?). Because icicles are capped at 5 stacks, your "high-hitting" icicles from the FFBs are still hitting the boss, and when the add spawns, you only have "weak" icicles left.
#or short: Its impossible to "save up" good icicles for moments when you need them, without stopping to cast Frostbolt/Icelance and stopping your pet to cast. So yeah, this icicles are just a random shit almost passive mechanic that can not be used efficiently to hold burst while still doing "normal" dps rotation.

So yeah, you dont care about that, if its still worth gemming for Mastery and a dps increase compared to the old mastery?

Q: Are they treated as periodic damage?
A: No. Each Icicle is effectively a single direct-damage spell cast.

Q: What if I have a shit-ton of haste?
A: Then the Icicles will launch very quickly. There isn't really any minimum interval. They're not bound by any sort of global cooldown.

As some have already pointed out, this mastery has another very concerning weakness: It does not effect our bombs or icelances or infact any other spell than FB, FFB and elemental DMG. So yeah, mastery rating in that sense can only increase our single target dmg. Whereas haste still influences magebomb ticks, casting time of all nukes and channeled spells, FFB procc generation etc. So I do not see the stats priorities shift from what we have now, that mages go full haste or gem int before using mastery after crit cap is reached. In fact, many have calculated that our ice-lances do significantly less dmg, but the "additional" dmg from icicles should even that out. But what about glyph of ice lance and cleave fights? What about NT multidotting? The new mastery does not effect nor address any of these issues, depressingly weakening Frost on non-singletarget fights.

So yeah, tl:dr: I don't know who gave the input on this mastery, but apparently it opens many new weaknesses while not addressing the old ones, besides hard-nerfing frost PvP.



EDIT: By thinking about it for 5 minutes, I also came up with an idea how these issues with the mastery could be fixed and made more useful und skillful to use. It's actually really simple.
a) At reaching 5 stacks of icicles, they are not launched automatically, but an old "low dmg" icicle is "overwritten" if the newly generated icicle would be higher damage.
b) Icicle launching are now triggered by Fireblast, not by icelance.
This would make icicles more controlled and not disrupt rotation.
These changes can also be introduced as glyphes if somehow the old design is easier for casuals (more compelling) or whatever.

[Deleted]

So after thinking a lot about it, I`m a bit worried. The new mastery works only with 2 single target spells and another single target autocast. 2 of 3 "mastery spells" does not benefit from shatter, the remaining 2 PvE raiding spells which benefit from shatter are nerfed, FoF Ice lance (scaling nerf) and BF FFB nerfed (huge).

Why is BF nerfed? The mastery effects FFB so BF is the same. Only the DMG comes later and in smaller portions. The result will be the same.

Ice lance doesn´t benefit from mastery anymore.

But it get an scaling buff. We have to see final numbers and calculations to see whats the ending here.

So maybe it´s worth to ignore shatter cap to get more Frostbolt and Waterbolt Crits?

The advantage is: The value of crit after Shattercap will be higher because of FB scaling with mastery.

What about fights like Council, Horridon, Animus, Tortos? Where we dotted nearly everything? Still no benefit from mastery for our AoE and a few are nerfed (Shattered Frost Bomb, Frozen Orb, Cone of Cold and snapshotted NT/LB).

Shattered AE has not that much use in Raiding. OK there are bosses where it helps but not to much.
The question will be again in the end: Is NT/LB/FB a better GCD-Use or should i throw another Frostbolt. There we need final numbers.

We still have a debuff for Ice Lance and Waterbolt, what makes target switching a pain in the ass anyway. Thinking of cleave fights, we´re usually tried to get 3x Frostbolt debuff (what a silly mechanic) and then we tried to dot both targets and spam as much FoF IL we can get (100% main target / 50% second target with IL glyph) Now we spam 100% of a nerfed FoF IL on main target + Icicles and 50% of a nerfed FoF ice lance on the second one. That means way more damage (our whole mastery) on our main target and less on our second (cleave target, no mastery).

Thats true and i hope they will get away with the debuff completly. We have to wait and pray like usual.

Switching target to get icicles on the other one is not an option because of the 3 stacks debuff - unless you start to debuff 2 targets, what will make frost even more clunky - Managing debuff on 2 or more targets, dots and icicles (with an another addon like mybigignite). What a nightmare!

I thought icicles are on you so why switching to stack them on another one?
I think most overvalue this small little things. If the information is correct and the icicle dont get lost because they autofire after the 5th stack then i dont think u ever have to think about them. Ofc like said above: There will be these add-situation where u maybe hold them back to release a small burst on a specific target but it will be really difficult to manage and i dont think it will be rewarding.
So you do the normal things: Dot everything, have stack on maintarget, cast procs when they occure, fill with FB.

There where a few fights already in ToT where I cast a lot less Frostbolt (Horridon, Council, Tortos, Primordius and Animus) and it seems like there are a lot more encounter in SoO where I cast less Frostbolts and our Filler gets buffed and is mandatory for our new mastery (with that mastery, it´s not a filler anymore).

Why does this mastery makes FB mandatory. It makes it stronger. The question is: Is it stronger then the mainspells? At this place with this numbers i dont think.
If they change something it could become. But as we have seen in 5.3 they are aware of that. It would be stupid if we need to only cast FB. But again: Wait for final numbers. Then we can decide for which stat and rota we have to go.

Don´t get me wrong, numbers can be adjusted, but it´s the mechanic that will not work for me and every heroic progression raider.

And i think this mechanics are good. They push the scaling of frost a little bit and make another good destinction between PvP and PvE: Burst was allways the biggest problem. For an raid it is nearly irrelevant if the dmg comes in 10 hits with 100 dmg or 1 hit with 1000 dmg.
As said above: I dont see us doing other things with this changes like we did before. All the changes come down to one visual thing and many smaller numbers. (which i hope will be adjusted that there addition gets the right big result)

[Deleted]

With Ice lance no longer from mastery but being Spell power buffed, better to gem intellect over haste maybe ?!

No idea if these changes buff or nerf us but I'm glad target switching is not penalised (I think :??) any more.

[Sombrelune]

I m 100% agree with citizenpete.
This new mastery will maybe be an " up" in patchwork boss, but a significative nerf with cleaves or aoe phases.

+29% damage in icelance doesn't match the nerf with frosburned icelances. In my Gear In Live I have 51% mastery full buff.

To me icelance is the core of pve frost mage arsenal.

If icelance was the builder , and another spell the launcher it will be a more cleaver mechanic. In fact with this version why a spell launcher, in the first place? Icicles will autofire anyways. FFB could be the spell launcher, or Fireblast like Pandacally said. But what if it was a water elemental new spell? One stone Two birds .

[TyrianFC]

I dislike the name more than anything. Icicles sounds lame and conjurs up the image of icecreams to me. Maybe something like

Impaling Frost
Frost Shards
Frost Sliver
Splinters of Frost
Spiteful Frost

[Raugnaut]

If a 6th icicle is generated the oldest icicle fired instantly. You can't waste them but you can probably use them sub-optimally on certain fights.

That actually makes it a whole lot better in my eyes. Essentially, after 5 casts, or until you use Ice Lance, all your abilities deal ~12% more damage. with a small amount of burst with FoF ice lances.

[Deleted]

Why is BF nerfed? The mastery effects FFB so BF is the same. Only the DMG comes later and in smaller portions. The result will be the same.

Maybe I should add, that burst is nerfed. I was talking about burst in that case.

But it get an scaling buff. We have to see final numbers and calculations to see whats the ending here.

Yeah might be, numbers can be adjustet, but the fact that FoF Ice Lance doens`t built stacks is pretty bad imho - just thinking of situations where you are showered by FoF procs.

The advantage is: The value of crit after Shattercap will be higher because of FB scaling with mastery.

I don´t see this as an advantage. If they going to raise the shatter cap, yes it would be, but GC already stated, that they are pretty satisfied with the current cap and not going to change it.

Shattered AE has not that much use in Raiding. OK there are bosses where it helps but not to much.
The question will be again in the end: Is NT/LB/FB a better GCD-Use or should i throw another Frostbolt. There we need final numbers.

See, I just wish our AoE would benefit a little bit from our mastery. Just like Warlocks do. They dot everything they can to bring a bigger portion of damage to a certain target. (Dotting Venomous Head brings more damage to the Frozen, Fire or Arcane than without) The lost of shattered AoE is just "small" (not every encounter has freezeable adds) but now everything is gone in terms of mastery.

Thats true and i hope they will get away with the debuff completly. We have to wait and pray like usual.

I`m going to pray with you

I thought icicles are on you so why switching to stack them on another one?
I think most overvalue this small little things. If the information is correct and the icicle dont get lost because they autofire after the 5th stack then i dont think u ever have to think about them. Ofc like said above: There will be these add-situation where u maybe hold them back to release a small burst on a specific target but it will be really difficult to manage and i dont think it will be rewarding.
So you do the normal things: Dot everything, have stack on maintarget, cast procs when they occure, fill with FB.

There are many situations where u just fired a FoF IL and then an adds spawns or you have to switch target. Then you need to ramp up frostbolt debuff and build up Icicles stacks to "burst it down" - but the damage is not instant, it is affected by your haste rating. Then next add comes and you have to do it again - have you been on the PTR and in SoO Raids lately?

Why does this mastery makes FB mandatory. It makes it stronger. The question is: Is it stronger then the mainspells? At this place with this numbers i dont think.
If they change something it could become. But as we have seen in 5.3 they are aware of that. It would be stupid if we need to only cast FB. But again: Wait for final numbers. Then we can decide for which stat and rota we have to go

Just one situations: On Animus heroic, I dot my Anima with NT, fire 1 frostbolt and maybe a proc like FFB/IL and blink into my position. Bloodlust comes and I put my dot on boss, frozen orb and alter time. Just after alter time I dot the living f*** out of the animas and ignore every IL/FFB proc for dunno... 30 - 40 seconds? Then the "finish the adds" commands comes and I do what? Finish adds with icicle stacks from waterbolt in 3.33s (assuming 50% haste)? Every fight with multiple targets will lead into less mastery (more waterbolt mastery = less mastery)

And i think this mechanics are good. They push the scaling of frost a little bit and make another good destinction between PvP and PvE: Burst was allways the biggest problem. For an raid it is nearly irrelevant if the dmg comes in 10 hits with 100 dmg or 1 hit with 1000 dmg.
As said above: I dont see us doing other things with this changes like we did before. All the changes come down to one visual thing and many smaller numbers. (which i hope will be adjusted that there addition gets the right big result)

That is not true. It really count´s in which time damage comes. Again, you really should look over the bosses and their immense requierment for movement and target switching in SoO. For a fight like Baleroc, yes it doesn´t matter.

But the change is not deployed on PTR yet, a lot of testing has to be done.

[Raugnaut]

Basically they aren't double dipping on buffs/debuffs lets take horridon for example

He takes 200% more, but lets say 100% just for the example in increased damage at the end of the fight, lets say your frostbolt does 100k normally.

Okay so it does 100k you get an icicle, with lets say 50% mastery, that does 50k. So with the buff, your frostbolt does 200k, and the icicle is 100k. Now if the buff double dipped it'd do 200k, which is where the icicles would go a little overboard in the amt of dmg they are doing. Frost would get exponentially stronger for any mechanics that increase dmg taken or done. So to reduce that they didn't let it double dip. :3

But also exponentially weaker on any fight htat has a reduced damage buff- on 50% less, a 100k frostbolt becomes a 50k frostbolt, and then the Icecicle goes from 12k->6k, and then is reduced 50% more to 3k, making this a fairly large pvp nerf.

[Not Againnn]

I dislike the name more than anything. Icicles sounds lame and conjurs up the image of icecreams to me. Maybe something like

Impaling Frost
Frost Shards
Frost Sliver
Splinters of Frost
Spiteful Frost

gs said too many spells are "____ frost" or "frost ____"

this is the age of the thesaurus

[IsrafaelMage]

Shards would be actually nice, sounds like diamond shell in D3.. They could add that frost mages got em stolen from tortos :P

[Polarthief]

I dislike the name more than anything. Icicles sounds lame and conjurs up the image of icecreams to me.

What kind of Ice Cream have YOU been eating? o_O;

I personally like the name, though I think there's much more important matters at hand to discuss. Regardless, it's still "Frostburn" anyways, so you could probably send some suggestions over to Ghostcrawler.

[Lurkers]

a) At reaching 5 stacks of icicles, they are not launched automatically, but an old "low dmg" icicle is "overwritten" if the newly generated icicle would be higher damage.
b) Icicle launching are now triggered by Fireblast, not by icelance.
This would make icicles more controlled and not disrupt rotation.
These changes can also be introduced as glyphes if somehow the old design is easier for casuals (more compelling) or whatever.

These seem like good ideas, but i would add...

c) Waterbolt from elemental does not generate an icicle (waterbolt ice lances would be terrible, as others have pointed out)
d) Icelance generates an icicle
e) fireblast replaced with a frost themed version, along the lines of how inferno blast replaces that spell for fire spec (e.g., iceblast--super creative name)

This would ensure that the icicles are a little more robust with damage, while throttling their generation rate (slightly).