Lonely Winter is better than you think.

[Deleted]

Provide some data first - this is just useless feelcrafting.

[Deleted]

You do know you can alter it with a glyph right?

What do you mean? Replacing it with a little prettier(but still ugly) version? Or reducing its size for only 15%? It was 75% in WoD, now it is only 15% smaller size with that glyph lol.

Anyway i am not a fun of pet's AI, so i play with LW only and always

[Penric]

When LW came out I was happy as a clam. Very happy with the change.

[Deleted]

Figured it out. No food buff/no flask. Used potion and hero.


https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/LPKWJ3nkr6MQDT8h/

Incredible. I can't manage to keep IV up for much longer than it's core duration; I barely proc ice lances... How the heck do you manage?

[NoClueWhatToDo]

Incredible. I can't manage to keep IV up for much longer than it's core duration; I barely proc ice lances... How the heck do you manage?

Frozen Touch/Ebonbolt/Frozen Orb.

[thingmabobby]

Hell.. Maybe BC will be much better than LW when and if I get legendary gloves for frost... But right now LW is just performing really good.

Anyone else playing with LW as frost?

Hi there! For reference I'm in a 9/10M guild working on mythic Helya as a BC/TV Frost Mage (Thingy-Blackhand) with mostly 90-100% parses. I sim my character all the time to test different things out and LW crossed my path the other week after being incredibly frustrated with Water Jet on long-range huge hitbox boss fights like Helya. So I decided to test out LW instead of BC. I theorized that I would lose a decent amount of uptime (20%-ish) from losing Water Jet and random pet FoF procs, but gain some damage to my other core abilities from the LW talent. I figured this would be especially made up for because I have both the legendary gloves and bracers. What I found was the sims put LW 5k less than BC for me with a couple of gear swaps because LW wants more haste than BC does. This was enough for me to test it in-game.

I unfortunately made a dumb decision and tried it on mythic Odyn - an already difficult fight to maintain IV uptime. My dps suffered drastically compared to BC. Logs:

BC (39 traits, 6:51 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done
LW (42 traits, 6:43 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

Upon realizing my mistake, I then decided to join a heroic Ursoc pug. I was expecting to do a bit more damage, but it was still decent and probably comparable to BC. I don't really have an exact fight to compare with so take it with a grain of salt. For LW I got 2 IV's and BC just 1 so I missed out on a period of +20% damage on the BC log (and less traits). The BC log was also a much shorter kill.

BC (37 traits, 1:51 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done
LW (43 traits, 2:34 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

In then end I guess it comes down to how competitive you want to be and how well you can play with the water elemental. I'm sticking with BC for now as I do more damage with it, but next patch LW looks to get even more competitive so I'll be re-visiting it then. I know these aren't the greatest comparisons and testing, but it was enough for me to stick with BC.

BTW - I wanted to take LW specifically for mythic Helya, but I'm already taking splitting ice for the necessary cleave damage. Sims drop me about 60k going splitting ice instead of frozen touch and LW instead of BC which makes me lose tons of uptime on an already hard fight to maintain it. Sadly it's a no-go.

[NoClueWhatToDo]

Hi there! For reference I'm in a 9/10M guild working on mythic Helya as a BC/TV Frost Mage (Thingy-Blackhand) with mostly 90-100% parses. I sim my character all the time to test different things out and LW crossed my path the other week after being incredibly frustrated with Water Jet on long-range huge hitbox boss fights like Helya. So I decided to test out LW instead of BC. I theorized that I would lose a decent amount of uptime (20%-ish) from losing Water Jet and random pet FoF procs, but gain some damage to my other core abilities from the LW talent. I figured this would be especially made up for because I have both the legendary gloves and bracers. What I found was the sims put LW 5k less than BC for me with a couple of gear swaps because LW wants more haste than BC does. This was enough for me to test it in-game.

I unfortunately made a dumb decision and tried it on mythic Odyn - an already difficult fight to maintain IV uptime. My dps suffered drastically compared to BC. Logs:

BC (39 traits, 6:51 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done
LW (42 traits, 6:43 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

Upon realizing my mistake, I then decided to join a heroic Ursoc pug. I was expecting to do a bit more damage, but it was still decent and probably comparable to BC. I don't really have an exact fight to compare with so take it with a grain of salt. For LW I got 2 IV's and BC just 1 so I missed out on a period of +20% damage on the BC log (and less traits). The BC log was also a much shorter kill.

BC (37 traits, 1:51 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done
LW (43 traits, 2:34 kill): https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

In then end I guess it comes down to how competitive you want to be and how well you can play with the water elemental. I'm sticking with BC for now as I do more damage with it, but next patch LW looks to get even more competitive so I'll be re-visiting it then. I know these aren't the greatest comparisons and testing, but it was enough for me to stick with BC.

BTW - I wanted to take LW specifically for mythic Helya, but I'm already taking splitting ice for the necessary cleave damage. Sims drop me about 60k going splitting ice instead of frozen touch and LW instead of BC which makes me lose tons of uptime on an already hard fight to maintain it. Sadly it's a no-go.

I'm having the opposite results as you. LW is doing better than BC. It's probably because I suck ass at keeping high up time on IV. I know RNG can play a part in it as well, but I feel like I should at least have a 60% or so up time even with bad RNG.. The best I can get is around 50%. I guess I'm used to always have my pet auto-cast Water Jet. (First expansion as a Mage, still learning).. Any tips on when to use Water Jet? I would assume you want to use it when you are casting Frostbolt and have nothing else to do.

What about your opener? I've been pre-casting Ebonbolt at around 2 seconds on the pull timer, then going straight into casting IV-FO. I normally get 3 FOF stacks right off the bat using doing it that way.

[thingmabobby]

Water jet can be very annoying to use especially when there are distance differences between you and your pet and the target. The general thing I go by is casting water jet about 3/4 into your frostbolt cast. On a fight like helya I've been casting water jet as I complete my frostbolt cast because of the insanely long travel time on her.

My opener is pre-pot ebonbolt, frozen orb, icy veins and dump FoF, frozen touch and dump until 0-1 FoF, frostbolts into water jet, dump to 0-1 FoF, then trying to build up chain reaction with frostbolts as long as I'm not losing procs or missing cooldowns.

[stevenho]

I unfortunately made a dumb decision and tried it on mythic Odyn - an already difficult fight to maintain IV uptime. My dps suffered drastically compared to BC. Logs:

I'm curious why are you implying LW has it harder to reach the expected (simmed) IV uptime compared to BC. Odyn is a pretty hectic fight and another thing to monitor and press (water jet) should make reaching the IV uptime harder, not easier.

[thingmabobby]

Having water jet and the random procs from the water ele improve uptime over not having a water ele if you're able to take advantage of them. Odyn indeed can be hectic, but it's not impossible to use your abilities to generate procs instead of not having any at all. A significant part of our dps when taking TV is how long you can keep icy veins throughout a fight and from my experience BC will outperform LW if played properly - even with movement.

[Mohd]

This topic has caught my attention to the point where I made an account on this forum, and tested both BC and LW talents on the dummy, each for 5 minutes TWICE for each talent.

Before I put the links up, I'd like to say that I keep my pet spells casting automatically, and I don't pay much attention to what it's doing, I've also tested that previously, within patch 7.1.5 LW was ahead of BC in damage (Included a link for my mage's armory, been a frost mage since Cataclysm) but even though it pulls ahead on the target dummy, I still think that the water elemental WILL provide sustained DPS during fights with heavy movements especially in the Nighthold.

Also, don't look much at the DPS, focus more on the damage output and the curve of the DPS from the graph, as it seems the logging did NOT stop after 5 minutes when I left combat, and did not start exactly like an encounter would.
Bone Chilling Test #1 :

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mary&source=10

Bone Chilling Test #2 :

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mary&source=10

Lonely Winter Test #1 :

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mary&source=12

Lonely Winter Test #2 :

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...mary&source=18

Also I've attached the Skada image of each of those segments in the below link :

http://imgur.com/a/VQ571

Also, here's a link to my logs, I've only ever played with BC, because I think it's better in terms of sustained DPS from the pet :

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...114835/latest/

Testing was done while I was at work, at 1 PM, so I'm not tired but that may have contributed to some lag and mis-casted Ice Lances (Without procs)

Link to my armory :

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...C3%B3hd/simple

PS : I don't know what caused the variance in damage between test 1 and test 2, but they seem to be inline so I wouldn't worry about that.

[Deleted]

@up
We have one guy with high archeology skill

This topic is outdated as hell to the point where LW is now in most frost builds.

[Mohd]

@up
We have one guy with high archeology skill

This topic is outdated as hell to the point where LW is now in most frost builds.

I actually found this topic using a google search, when I was debating LW over BC, I still use BC and will continue to do so :P

[Deleted]

Looking at warcraft logs the best parses mostly use LW. Personally I get so annoyed at the pet bugging out or having my guldan trink proc at the wrong time so I dont get 2 ff procs from water jet that I just use LW.

[Deleted]

I'm curious why are you implying LW has it harder to reach the expected (simmed) IV uptime compared to BC. Odyn is a pretty hectic fight and another thing to monitor and press (water jet) should make reaching the IV uptime harder, not easier.

Think it might be that he meant that he can't keep as high IV uptime with LW as he can with BC. This in combination with Odyn already being a hard fight to maintain the uptime on makes it worse.

[D3athsting]

Pretty sure that lw it's fairly superior with leggy bracers i got yesterday

[FloydSummerOf68]

It varies. With legendary bracers and gloves bone-chilling is superior for me as I can keep up Icy-veins for typically 2 minutes 15 seconds and without the water jets that would be nearly impossible as they're giving me a lot of additional up-time...sometimes I can get full 3 minutes (legendary gloves, manual water jets and 4-piece set). The only time lonely winter proves superior is on krosus because it's hard to time the water jets properly to always hit multiple ice lance crits off of it.

I could see lonely winter being better if you dont have the legendary gloves and ESPECIALLY if you aren't manually firing off water jets to maximize icy veins up-time.