Our Guild's mage

[Mastamage]

I don't really understand you Akraen. If you look at WoL right now, frost is a SOLID 50-75k dps behind fire/arcane on every single fight. Some fights (Malkorok, Jugg, etc) it is upwards of 100k behind (not just looking at top 5, just overall looking through first few pages of each fight for mages).

Why would you gimp yourself so hard? I understand (but severely disagree with) the notion of "play what you enjoy cause its a gaaaaaame", but really? Why put yourself that far behind?

To others, 520 is not too low for SoO. My guild is 10/14 right now with a 512 windwalker and a 523 retadin. It is completely possible, just need competent people.

Yes, let's use WoL as a basis after 5 nights of raiding a new tier, that's a really good idea.

In our guild (Akraen and I play Frost in), Frost is competitive with both Fire and Arcane. We're not gimping our raid or ourselves if we can effectively kill bosses (currently 10/14). We enjoy the spec we play and we're very good at it. Not everyone has to have bigdickdps to be happy. What I don't understand about YOU is why you bring this negative attitude into yet another thread and toss around your bullshit? You're what's wrong with the current mage community.

[phenox]

I hope they never make me a moderator for the sake of people like you.

You can have him play any spec he likes. Only constraint on spec choice *might* be in the world top 100 guilds that are trying to meet ridiculous DPS checks without having a full set of normal gear before attempting heroics.

There is no clear advantage of any of the specs for any of the fights. You will get a lot more DPS out of your mage if you allow him to play the spec he is best at rather than the one the top mage in the world is best at. Have him do some practice and go with what fits him the best.

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Frost does incredibly well in high movement situations, especially with 2pc and a haste build.

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If you can finagle your gear to 12684 haste, give frost a try with Nether Tempest. If you like how it feels, you can really do some awesome gameplay in SoO. Frost/Arcane is nice, since there is gear overlap and both specs have amazing strengths.

+1 i 100000000% agree

[Dusteyy]

Yes, let's use WoL as a basis after 5 nights of raiding a new tier, that's a really good idea.

In our guild (Akraen and I play Frost in), Frost is competitive with both Fire and Arcane. We're not gimping our raid or ourselves if we can effectively kill bosses (currently 10/14). We enjoy the spec we play and we're very good at it. Not everyone has to have bigdickdps to be happy. What I don't understand about YOU is why you bring this negative attitude into yet another thread and toss around your bullshit? You're what's wrong with the current mage community.

Ha ha, wowwwww. Easy killer. Anytime anyone disagrees with your frosty mindset they immediately hate mages and are the "issue" with the mage community. You just need to calm down.

Since you are the second person to mention me using WoL, I will address this against my better judgement. I was simply using it as a very loose reference to what numbers people are putting up. I even stated I was not just looking at the top 5 but rather the first few PAGES. Again, just calm down. All I am stating is that frost does not, numbers-wise, perform as well as arcane or fire. That's it. I am not sure why you all get so incredibly butt hurt about that statement when it is 100% true.

Play whetever the hell spec you want to, I honestly do not care. If you want to be the best asset to your guild possible, you will be fire (arcane on galakras, nazgrim, and paragons). You simply cannot disagree with that statement. If you wan't to play frost because you really "enjoy" it, then by all means go for it.

Stop being so defensive over frost.

[Kenbud]

Frost is competitive with both Fire and Arcane. We're not gimping our raid or ourselves if we can effectively kill bosses (currently 10/14). We enjoy the spec we play and we're very good at it. Not everyone has to have bigdickdps to be happy. What I don't understand about YOU is why you bring this negative attitude into yet another thread and toss around your bullshit? You're what's wrong with the current mage community.

You seem to use the word competitive very loosely. Unless you are talking lower ilivl then frost is miles behind fire and arcane, that's just the way it is. I wish it wasn't so because i love frost but at 553 ilvl the difference is enormous and it is really getting old to see your bullshit about how it is "competitive" i made this argument and defended frost until mid 540s but i cant anymore. I do 100% agree that you should play the spec you want and as long as you are not super progression minded and kill bosses then who cares? but here are people, probably the vast majority actually, that would like to do the best possible for their no for themselves. This means playing the spec that but put the most plain and simple. For example Akraens 5 rank Frost on Sha of Pride at 228k DPS is not competitive with my rank 3 Arcane of 310 DPS, that is a very wide gap.

We enjoy the spec we play and we're very good at it.

Debatable.

[Akraen]

I'm just the leader of the revolution that's all.

Mastamagee is my deputy.

We're here with our CoCs out ready to rock.

We're having fun and progressing. This dude is ilvl 520. He's not in Method. He should start with what he's comfortable with, then move on to what he wants to be. If that's fire, I support him 100%. I don't hate fire. I don't want to see all mages in the world playing fire... or arcane... or frost.

I want to see mages being mages, loving each spec, having fun-- not sitting with an empty specialization tab waiting for Vykina to take the piss on us each patch. I don't think I'm the ridiculous one here.

@Kenbud: Competitive with my guild, not with arcane/fire parses from top guilds. Also, I have a normal BotH and I was testing bombs. On some pulls I was using UVLS. Don't hold the parses against me until heroics please, k?

@theRestofYouFoolsCitingWoL: Wait for set bonuses. 2pc is huge for frost.

[Mastamage]

Play whetever the hell spec you want to, I honestly do not care. If you want to be the best asset to your guild possible, you will be fire (arcane on galakras, nazgrim, and paragons). You simply cannot disagree with that statement. If you wan't to play frost because you really "enjoy" it, then by all means go for it.

Frost is working just fine as an asset to the guild so absolutely no need to play Fire or Arcane.

[Kenbud]

We're having fun and progressing. This dude is ilvl 520. He's not in Method. He should start with what he's comfortable with, then move on to what he wants to be. If that's fire, I support him 100%. I don't hate fire. I don't want to see all mages in the world playing fire... or arcane... or frost.

I want to see mages being mages, loving each spec, having fun-- not sitting with an empty specialization tab waiting for Vykina to take the piss on us each patch. I don't think I'm the ridiculous one here.

100% Agree

@Kenbud: Competitive with my guild, not with arcane/fire parses from top guilds. Also, I have a normal BotH and I was testing bombs. On some pulls I was using UVLS. Don't hold the parses against me until heroics please, k?.

Your Deputy doesn't seem to have the same mindset

[Akraen]

He's a lose cannon, I ignore 98% of what he says. But he's my frosty pal.

He injects trees for a living and uses sonic blasts to move soil. Pretty sure that's jostled his cerebral cortex and only rage happens.

[Kenbud]

If you want to be the best asset to your guild possible, you will be fire (arcane on galakras, nazgrim, and paragons). You simply cannot disagree with that statement.

I can absolutely disagree with that statement. If the arcane mages you play with or yourself are not pulling at least equal numbers to fire then they/you are not good with arcane or don't have the gear for it. Equally skill/geared/iteamized arcane mages will beat fire on a majority of SoO fights and the ones that favor fire arcane will be right there.

[Drooul]

if he's new at mage just have him try all the different specs in lfrs or somewhere he knows the fights and can focus on the specs rotations, strengths, weaknesses. then once he finds the spec he is best at have him play that.

[Mastamage]

He's a lose cannon, I ignore 98% of what he says. But he's my frosty pal.

He injects trees for a living and uses sonic blasts to move soil. Pretty sure that's jostled his cerebral cortex and only rage happens.

I have an issue with putting thoughts to paper or text (I get high anxiety when dealing with issues I care about). Most RL people can safely ignore 100% of what I say when it pertains to a rant, just ask Ghostcrawler.

When I say "competitive" I'm strictly talking about our guild (and I didn't make that very clear). No way in hell would I expect Frost to compete with an Arcane or Fire mage in a top progression guild. We play Frost, we still kill bosses.

Rage only happens when Fire is mentioned post after post disregarding what a player wants to play.

Now that I look at it, Akraen is like a Frosty Robert DeNiro in Goodfellas and I'm just Joe Pesci. (Disclaimer: EU people may not understand that one).

[Raggamasta]

Anything above 496 I'd say fire.

This is probably the worst advice a low ilvl mage could get.

[Deleted]

How anyone can do low dmg as a mage is beyond me. Prob the easier class I've played...loved it as an alt, just braindead dps and still do well. :P

[Deleted]

Ha ha, wowwwww. Easy killer. Anytime anyone disagrees with your frosty mindset they immediately hate mages and are the "issue" with the mage community. You just need to calm down.

Since you are the second person to mention me using WoL, I will address this against my better judgement. I was simply using it as a very loose reference to what numbers people are putting up. I even stated I was not just looking at the top 5 but rather the first few PAGES. Again, just calm down. All I am stating is that frost does not, numbers-wise, perform as well as arcane or fire. That's it. I am not sure why you all get so incredibly butt hurt about that statement when it is 100% true.

Play whetever the hell spec you want to, I honestly do not care. If you want to be the best asset to your guild possible, you will be fire (arcane on galakras, nazgrim, and paragons). You simply cannot disagree with that statement. If you wan't to play frost because you really "enjoy" it, then by all means go for it.

Stop being so defensive over frost.

Sadly, you didn't really go into much else of what I've wrote since you were to busy being arrogant and spiteful. Instead, you retreat into a position that absolutely no one is even questioning, and make it seem like we're a bunch of fools questioning gravity. But alas, lets go through this once again and slowly:

a) WoL is NOT in ANY WAY reliable for us right now. For one thing, it never has been because even the "first few pages" still skew Fire quite a lot in favor of RNG-lucky fights. Raidbots data has been a better way of gauging specc performance by logs on live, but that requires a few more weeks and parses of a lot more people. More importantly, for the latter bosses, there are about 5 Frost Mages each. On some of those parses, the difference between the first, second and third Frost Mage are about 50k DPS each - thats not even remotely consistent and allows 0 comment on the state of Frost right now. Heck, I rank on every fight I've been in, even though I played through them with a killer headache and far below what I know I could potentially do.

The point is: WoL is accurate to show us what Arcane and Fire might be doing right now, because lots of good people play those speccs. But for Frost the information just isn't there yet, so there is no way to compare the results.

b) If I had to take a VERY rough guess, I'd say Frost is, depending on player performance, theoretically somewhere between 5-10% behind the other two speccs, allthough I see situations that favor Frost more than it favors the other speccs, and I'm interested to see what especially the 2pc-bonus can do for Frost. That is obviously not a small gap, but it's not a huge one either. If shadowpriests were 5% behind warlocks, people would still bring them if they are decent players. This is not the Sunwell, we don't min-max that heavily on speccs anymore.

Again: I AGREE that the gap is there, and this is not the issue here. I'd just argue the gap is realistically much smaller than you make it out to be, namely because of a few factors mentioned already: 1. Too little data on Frost right now to correctly see what it can do 2. Too little work and information on Frost to really min-max the specc properly. Since there are so few of us, we have to rely on gut and guesswork a lot, which I believe hinders the specc. 3. The top-heavy bias of the mage community will always make gaps seem larger, because the best equipped and most skilled mages obviously go for the "best" specc. If the difference between Arcane and Frost was, say, 3% in theory, having Blatty compete against me on a boss could easily make that difference go to 10% because of skill and gear. That doesn't mean that I could do 10% more with Arcane, I would still only do 3% more.

c) Now, all that being said, you are of course right: If I want to be the absolutely min-maxed optimal tool for my raid, I will always specc the theoretically best specc. No one is arguing against that. All that us "frostys" (when have we stopped being mages again?) are saying is that Frost is not a garbage specc, and it IS pulling its weight in raids. No one wants to force you to take a 5% damage loss just because you need to support a weaker specc. What we are saying is this: People should play what they like, because it realistically impacts their performance and their enjoyment of the game more then some badly calculated numbers on someones spreadsheet.

5%, even 10%, are differences well within the range of what skill, gear and RNG can change easily. In reality, if you have equally geared Frost and Arcane mages, as Akraen is saying, you will rarely see the Frost mages fall radically behind. Could these same mages perform sightly better as Arcane? Maybe. But thats not the point. The point is that they maybe want to be Frost, maybe perform better with Frost, or maybe would quit the game if they had to play the mindnumbing stupidity that is Fire this expansion once again. That's all there is to it - people might WANT to be Frost, because it's more fun for them.

As long as they make an informed decission, and are doing well in the context of their raid, what exactly is the harm? No one is selling people that Frost is the go-to specc. We're saying its decent, and people should give it a try if they think they might like it. Is that so offensive to so many people that they need to barge in with religious zeal and proclaim how bad Frost is? Just stop pretending its so godawful, and maybe give it a shot, or at least keep an open mind about it. The "best asset to the guild" is not even a valid concept in raiding below the top 100 margin. If I apply to Method, of course different rules apply. But as long as I'm doing fine in my raid, I should be good. I have yet to see a raid where a 5% DPS increase from a single raidmember magically makes all bosses so much easier. In reality, such an increase is barely even noticeable. So many other factors play a vastly more important role that people should just chill out a lot more about speccs. Instead of fighting over them, we should be working to point out what might be strenghts and weaknesses of each specc in terms of playstyle, and help each other out as best as we can.

[Kenbud]

I'm not going to quote that walk of text but I will tell you the gap between frost and fire/arcane is more then 10% single target, it might possibly be closer in a cleave but then multidot as arcane is much further.

[Deleted]

Clearly, that well written and eloquent statement completely discredits all of my arguments by picking at the random number I gave as a VERY rough guess for a situation that is at best theoretical anway. What is your point exactly?

[Kenbud]

Clearly, that well written and eloquent statement completely discredits all of my arguments by picking at the random number I gave as a VERY rough guess for a situation that is at best theoretical anway. What is your point exactly?

My point is Frost fucking sucks when you compare it to fire or arcane. There isn't a slight difference, its not 5 or 10% and mages are not so far ahead as a class that our weakest spec competes with top tier players on other classes. Playing frost is a detriment to your raid, unless you're a 10 man and you absolutely need the snares and slows, because we are a pure dps class that is all we do. Frost has its time to shine but 553 ilvl in normal gear is not that time. Now if progression doesn't really matter and its about enjoyment then by all means play the spec you like, I personally love frost. But people do need to stop making slight of the disparities in Mage specs and tell it like it is because "frost isn't THAT bad" arguments give the less experienced players the wrong idea. Eloquent enough for you chief?

[announced]

i prefer playing frost. but im jus restarting my mage and trying to get used to this new arcane thing where we cant camp anymore. (quit mage jus around before 5.2 came out) overall though arcane is nice but it gets punished hard in movement fights, you really gotta have good rune placement and mana management or you will be screwed for arcane. honestly i wouldnt touch fire just cause i hate the rng bs involved with it. blizz screwed fire so many times its making me paranoid to see what they'll do next.

[Deleted]

Kenbud, your idea of eloquence baffles me. More importantly, your idea of science, data and proof baffles me. All you do is rehash the often-proclaimed statement that Frost is bad. I get it. I say and argue that it's not that far behind. You "refute" that idea by stating: "but Frost is bad!". Where is the logic in that?

If you can bring me clear, valid data that shows Frost is vastly behind in comparable conditions, I will agree that it is a broken and dead specc. Hell, I openly admitted that I believe it is bad off in many ways right now. But where do you get the idea that it's so far off that it is unfeasible for people to play? The statement "playing frost is a detriment to your raid" even... where do you get that from? Is Frost actively healing bosses now? No one is giving less experienced mages the wrong idea here. We're just stating that people shouldn't jump to conclusions and completely ignore Frost.

Now, I know that there is a certain level of guild that feels it has to ensure every "outer" circumstance is perfect to achieve success in raiding, because you orient yourself on the example of high-end progress guilds. I get that, and I agree with it in many parts. It's a valid point of view when you're struggeling to down certain bosses. But these guilds and raidleaders oftentimes are so focused on imitating progress guilds that they can lose sight of the more basic things that might hold their raid back. Having a mage play Frost is likely not going to prevent boss kills, because Frost is NOT that far behind.

If you have a Frost mage who is constantly last on all your pulls, by all means make him go Arcane. I doubt he will improve a lot. But if you have a mage who feels more comfortable with Frost, and is doing good DPS well within the average range of your guild, there is rarely any need to make him switch speccs (excluding stuff like Spine or Ra-Den, obviously, but no one is talking about these). If you believe the only role of a DPS is to compete for topspots on the meters, maybe you are right. My experience has shown me that it rarely is about those top spots though. It's about consistency in performance, and the general performance of a raid. Frost is in no way detrimental to these factors.

Now, neither me nor anyone else knows yet how Frost is going to perform in the reality of SoO heroic raiding. It might be awful. I'm hoping it won't be. I'm thinking it might be mediocre compared to all other classes. And that means I might have to switch to Arcane IF we hit a boss where we are struggeling to reach DPS-requirements. No big deal. But I'm not going to listen to you tell people how Frost is absolute crap when there is just no proof for it yet.

[Malfecto]

Everyone needs to chill out. Christ on a cracker, this poor guy comes here, a guest in our house, to seek advice to improve his fellow raider and their enjoyment of the game, and all I see after a few posts is a wall of bickering.

Ilya, If you look at Kenbud's logs, he has played frost, quite well. I don't think his goal is to disparage frost just for the heck of it. This is analogous to a baseball player who holds the grand slam record, who always used the Slugger brand bat, suddenly turning around and saying he likes the Hitter brand better because something is off with the Slugger.

Can he still hit home runs with Slugger? Sure, but Hitter brand is easier to use.

I love frost. I'm playing with arcane because I don't wish to revisit fire (my meds refill is not up for another month), and I want an edge for our 10 man. I don't need to do it though. I know I can play frost and we will accomplish our goals.

That said, Kenbud, I think really, to put so much emphasis on one player's potential 10-15% difference in dps from one spec to another is inflating the issue. In 10 man, sure, it has a bigger impact, but really its washed out in 25 man unless you are carting about a handful of mages.

Finally, Can we all please show some modicum of respect for one another? We are all here because we are passionate about the mage class. Well... some of us are here seeking information, and some are just here to stir the pot, but really we need to shape the fuck up. Tired of this constant bickering. You don't win a fucking trophy in heaven for being right on the god damn internet boards.

So be cool. Or be elsewhere.