Will Blizz ever make frost viable??

[emjay]

I see frost mages beat FFB mages all the time in damage. Beating arcane might be another story, though.

wow those FFB mages must really suck.

i have perfect EQ and im unstoppable nr1 as FFB or arcane specc. with frost its just IMPOSSIBLE, you have no chance to reach the dps of ffb or arcane, seriously your FFB mages SUCK ASS

Remember when you absolutely HAD to raid as Frost? That was so fucking awesome.

No it wasn't, be happy we have 3 top end specs, and 4 viable ones, some classes don't even have that.

first of all the damage difference wasnt that big and nobody said we had to specc forst, only bad guilds did that.

[Zelimagi]

Steady:

Yes you do lose a overall DPS when you cast ice lance. However, casting it will give you more damage in a situation.

I've raided Frost post 3.0 on my mage when he was wearing his Karazhan garbage. I was in a raid with guildmates who were bored and lost a night to do sunwell due to certain players not showing up. I was up against fully equiped T6 raiders, and came out as 7-8th on the charts for damage with my rotation.

It looked like it was doing well, yet sadly everyone hit 80 and heavier and stronger specs just tossed Frost into a small hole. I really miss being Frost...that was the most fun I had in TBC.

[thatfrostmage]

Im not to deny the Frostbolt spamming nature of Frost but there is a lot more to it. Most of the potential success running Frost comes down to timing and raid coordination. A well geared Frost mage scales as well as any class with raid buffs if not better. I raid 21/0/50 (not PoM) which does sacrifice a couple % of damage for some raid utility (1/2 Improved Counterspell to keep trash organized, 1/2 Magic Attunement, Focus Magic). Timing your CDs, using CDs or potions in conjunction with procs, making the most of Bloodlust/Heroism, and being able to wipe threat fast with Invisibility can all help you match up to any class/spec in damage. I am usually within 5% of our comparably geared FFB and arcane mages. Now dealing with timing around procs and Bloodlust/Heroism does leave room for error and losing your Elemental early can gimp you a bit, but with practice you can minimize these risks.


Coordination
--------------
- Arcane Mages and Warriors know to keep up slow effects
- I can keep up Winter's Chill on multiple targets using Blizzard or the occasional Ice Lance to renew the debuff, improving raid DPS without much of a DPS loss myself

Timing (doing a bit more than spamming frostbolts)
--------
- Mana Gem (Tier 7 buff)
- Icy Veins
- Water Elemental
- Trinkets when applicable
- Damage buffing pots (haste, spell damage)
- Cold Snap (get another pet and Icy Veins)

[Topcraft]

I see frost mages beat FFB mages all the time in damage. Beating arcane might be another story, though.

So, either the FFB mages haven't fully mastered their rotation (for whatever mysterious reason), or the player with the frost spec outgears the FFB mage by a fair margin.
Admittedly, there are certain encounters in Naxx where I out damage FFB mages. Generally, not so much. It's usually about 500 dps behind. It's not whether or not someone plays it properly, it's a simple fact. Overall, frost does less, no matter how well someone plays.
It's a shame, because I do like frost. As a guild (and I guess about every other half-raiding guild in the game) we're at a point where clearing Naxx is about as common as blasting through Kara in a few hours. This allows me to take a 'fun' spec. In this case that is Frost. Even though it's hardly interesting spamming Frostbolt and the odd ice lance of fireball, it's a change. In a week or two I might go back to FFB, or Arcane.

In all fairness, if you can clear an instance without any deaths, who cares what spec you are?

But when Ulduar gets released, I will spec the FOTM cookie cutter spec again, because that's what's best for progress and the guild. When there is a bigger margin for playing around, and encounters become more familiar, I will probably start switching between specs again.

Can't wait for dual-specs. And good thing I'm a scribe

[Backwardpawn]

I highly doubt that frost will ever get any buffs at all, but if it did and it became comparable to the other specs now I would go frost.

Those who think frost is a spam spec, are absolutely incorrect and have not truely raided as frost at all. Frostbolt is your core spell, which activates all of your secondary abilties that increase your DPS. You must learn to use Fingers of Frost correctly, plan your Brain Freezes, know when to use your water elemental, and know the right time to use your Icy Viens.

My thoughts is that this is the most challenging spec of all the mage specs. Arcane, from what I've been reading, has become a "spamming spec" from the current ABar coeff nerf, and Fire/Frostfire is all about spamming one spell too. All mage trees revolve around spamming one spell, provoking reactive spells from the main spells, useing a DPS increase spell to speed up or power up your damage, and keeping a raid DPS increasing ability on a target up at all times.

Both Arcane and Fire trees have a single reactive ability, but Frost has two which can be used together. The two reactive abilties from Frost are differently used than the other two mage trees, because they require timing and reaction unlike the two other trees where you use them whenever it is provoked.

If you don't like or cannot play spam specs, then you should not even be playing a mage at all. I hear hunting is easy!

I've played all specs over my years as a mage. I spend thousands of gold over and expansion in respecs alone testing out the different specs. I'm sorry to say this, but frost isn't nearly as difficult as you're trying to suggest.

Sure, you have to time your cd's and manage your pet. You time your cd's with any mage spec so that points kind of off key... and besides, any fire tree you have to insure you have cd's up for molten fury, and for arcane you have to make sure you have enough mana to blow through a high dps rotation while they're up. Frost? You can really just use your cd's as they come. Have to wait for a situation where you're not going to be moving soon, but that's still the case with the other specs. Water Elemental you have to manage well, but thats still just finding a time where it can put out the most dps and not die. Not really too difficult.

Okay, so.. I agree that all mage specs are essentially spam fests. However for arcane you can't just spam AB 100% of the time. You spam it a lot, but you can't just ignore your mana for that long. Fire tree's... well you were totally wrong about the one nuke/one reactive ability with this tree, because we're continually keeping up scorch's, and living bomb. So tell me, what is the best way to use a fof proc? Frostbolts. The whole ice lance bs is a joke. It's a waste of time. The ONLY time it'd be useful as at the tail end of a mobs hp, or while on the move. Guess what!? The other trees have fire blast, and arcane barrage... ice lance is simply your best tool for that tree in those situations. Brainfreeze? Weak. I don't know why blizzard didn't model this after hot streak... at least by giving a free nuke that benefits from the majority of your talents.

Point being, cd's aside, arcane has it's nuke, it's mobile and finishing spells, and it's proc for missiles.. all while managing mana. Fire trees have their nuke, their mobile (did i mention our mobile spell help proc our reactive talents?) and finishing spells, keeping scorch up, living bomb, and our hot streak procs. Frost? Well you have your nuke, mobile and finishing spells, and your weak reactive talent. Winter's chill has to be kept up but if it's close to falling off an ice lance can refresh it, much easier then casting a 1.5s spell... and it's built into frostbolt, whoop!

So honestly I don't see what you're trying to get at here. You love frost but you can't see these glaring irregularities when comparing to our other trees? C'mon.

[Athor]

If u made frost have as much dps as fire whilat keeping the suriveabilty, you know what u are, a survival hunter/unholy dk/feral druid

[Backwardpawn]

If u made frost have as much dps as fire whilat keeping the suriveabilty, you know what u are, a survival hunter/unholy dk/feral druid

Or they could.. you know.. give you enough talents to make you good enough in pve.. if all your talent points are spent on offensive talents then I guess you really don't have all those great frost defensive tools, eh?

Kind of like they do with every other tree for every other class?

[Zelimagi]

Backward, if doing shatter combos and using brain freeze is so bad, then how did I get 7th in damage in a guild BT raid with full t6 raiders when I was in blues and Karazhan epics in post 3.0?

Explain. I mean after all...you are the mage guru here because you have been playing so long.

[karthaege]

Viable
adjective
Capable of success or continuing effectiveness; practicable

No where does it say best. Blizzard themselves have said they want different specs to be viable, not equal, at pvp and pve. They have accomplished this to a greater degree than ever before. I'm not saying it is perfect, just merely the fact that it is much better than it has been in the past.

While it may not be equal to ffb and arc, frost is at least viable. Could it use some improvements? Sure. I can't think of a single spec that couldn't use some improvement for any class. However, as have been said before, there are 4 viable raiding specs for a mage. Maybe they aren't all equal but to make them equal would require total equality with pve and pvp. This jsut will not happen as long as Blizzard makes spells do the same in pve and pvp.

[Abandon]

They might not change spells, but they can change talents to give more options for extra PVE damage in a way that could not affect PVP too much, like a stacking buff for Icelance every frostbolt hit, so if you stack up three or so frostbolts in a row it does much more damage. In PVP you rarely if ever would have enough time to cast three frostbolts without being interrupted/silenced/stunned ect.

[Backwardpawn]

Backward, if doing shatter combos and using brain freeze is so bad, then how did I get 7th in damage in a guild BT raid with full t6 raiders when I was in blues and Karazhan epics in post 3.0?

Explain. I mean after all...you are the mage guru here because you have been playing so long.

Lovely, yeah lets bring in wws reports and talk about differences between dps from other classes. That's what this conversation is about, yeah? I don't know, how do I consistently beat heroic raid geared players when at best I have two 25 man pieces? This argument isn't about your ability to perform against other players. This is all about your ability to perform well with all the pve specs of the mage class. It's your job to provide a counter to my statements, not mine.

If you want to talk about how classes & specs scale differently then that's a whole other story.

I mean it's really funny, because it's pretty well known that if you were to shatter combo with every fof proc you'd be at a consistently lower dps then if you were to get two frostbolts to crit off the fof. I already stated that, yes.. it can increase dps in certain situations. Those situations being the tail end of a mobs hp, and on the move. Maybe you got 7th because you were trying really hard, and the others weren't? Maybe you know how to squeeze every bit of damage onto a mob that you can. Congratulations you're not retarded, but that is not the argument here.

Now if you're talking about frostbolt-frostbolt-ice lance on a fof to squeeze some dps out of a bug that blizzard probably isn't worried about fixing because it can't be as easily replicated in pvp, then FINE you can do some more dps because of a bug. This awesome extra dps still isn't going to bring you anywhere near the dps I'll put out with other specs, and might I mention is still argued over because that ice lance on a ghost fof can't proc another fof.

[Muffins_]

Viable
adjective
Capable of success or continuing effectiveness; practicable

No where does it say best.

wisdom. people want all specs to be equal, but it's not realistic to think that blizzard is going to go around and change the numbers for everything until each individual spec does the exact same dps. different specs are better on different fights, different specs fit different playstyles. it should all be about how you want to play. as long as each spec can sustain average dps, people should be happy.

[Backwardpawn]

Viable
adjective
Capable of success or continuing effectiveness; practicable

No where does it say best. Blizzard themselves have said they want different specs to be viable, not equal, at pvp and pve. They have accomplished this to a greater degree than ever before. I'm not saying it is perfect, just merely the fact that it is much better than it has been in the past.

While it may not be equal to ffb and arc, frost is at least viable. Could it use some improvements? Sure. I can't think of a single spec that couldn't use some improvement for any class. However, as have been said before, there are 4 viable raiding specs for a mage. Maybe they aren't all equal but to make them equal would require total equality with pve and pvp. This jsut will not happen as long as Blizzard makes spells do the same in pve and pvp.

I don't think you'll find many sane people that think 'best' is what we're looking for. If viable just means you can stay alive and do some dps, well 0/0/0 would be viable, pvp specs would be viable. I just want to 'bring the player, not the class/spec(to a degree, obv)'. Given a situation where you need to squeeze out as much dps to make an encounter happen, and given a choice between fire/arc/frost... the viable choice would be fire or arc.

Let's get another thing straight here. FFB and Fireball are hardly different specs. They're both essentially a fire tree spec, only with a different nuke and different off-tree talents. They're single target rotations differ only by replacing one spell. This is of course just my opinion.

I'm not arguing this because mages are lacking so bad they can't make it by.. that's not it. It's not about things being so hard that every spec needs to do comparable damage. Things are insanely easy nowadays, and it's part of the reason I run a casual guild. I don't expect my players to farm gold and mats every day to get every little extra boost in dps they can, because it's not anywhere close to needed. My argument is with blizzard not backing up their ideals... that change quite frequently.

[Lysah]

wow those FFB mages must really suck.

i have perfect EQ and im unstoppable nr1 as FFB or arcane specc. with frost its just IMPOSSIBLE, you have no chance to reach the dps of ffb or arcane, seriously your FFB mages SUCK ASS

first of all the damage difference wasnt that big and nobody said we had to specc forst, only bad guilds did that.

Not my FFB mages. I've seen WWS reports, go loot at the EJ forums for them.

Thanks for making that assumption, though.

[Conran]

Not my FFB mages. I've seen WWS reports, go loot at the EJ forums for them.

Thanks for making that assumption, though.

]
aaah don't mind him :P
maybe the palyers he compares himself with as being unstoppable (my bet is that he doesn't decurse, or something like that, because my DPS is more important =O) are the real noobs : :P

*bit off topic now and not related to the quote i made*
Comparing yourself trough others isn't really a good thing, some ppl are good, some are casual and some are terrible, but just having fun

If i compare myself to my pretty much semi-raiding/casual guildmembers, i'm one of the best DPS, gearwise and dmg wise (and yes, i do keep scorch up myself and i decurse)
but if i compare myself to the 25man pugs i usually play, i'm somewhere between 3 to 9th posiotion DPS wise, great part of that is because of my gear, mostly Naxxnormal and HC's gear

You don't notice a great player, because of his DPS, nor his gear
But by the way he plays, far less mistakes (sarth wall), having all his items enchants and gemmed with the best

[Topcraft]

You don't notice a great player, because of his DPS, nor his gear...
...But by having all his items enchants and gemmed with the best

Actually...
Certain pieces of gear require a tough fight, like Sarth 2 or 3. Right now there's hardly any encounter or gear that sticks out as 'wow that guild is progressing fast' because there aren't enough high end raids yet. But think about Blades of azzinoth, Thoridal. It required your guild to be good.

And enchanting and gemming your gear with the best stuff doesn't automatically mean you're a great player. Anyone can get it.

[Steady]

Quad:

I was in a similar position to you 3.0 TBC, playing frost and (as my gear was similar to others, i.e. T6/SWP level), completely dominating other Mages on Brut (around 3.1k, while Fire was usually at about 2.6k) though of course Hunters were absolutely ridiculous at the time :-\.

As it is now I find it hard to see how a guild could refuse to take a frost specced mage on the average Naxx farm night, for example, but for guilds pushing for Sarth+3D (especially 10-man), Maly 6 min and the like Frost would simply gimp your raids ability to kill the boss as the extra 500-1k DPS could make or break such an encounter attempt.

Similarly in the future, perhaps Ulduar, there may be some hard DPS checks á la Brutallus/RoS/M'uru, and this is where Mages who enjoy frost want to be able to say "I'm contributing to the raid's effort and competing on the meters" rather than "I'm doing sub-par DPS and causing problems just because I like playing a non cookie-cutter spec".

[sleepyb]

Frost is viable in PVP and heroics. It's arguably competitive (after TtW) for 10-mans (maybe not at top gear levels?) and weak in 25-mans. But really, if you're at high enough gear levels that you think frost is awful, your guild is probably doing raids without any wipes or troubles. So why not play the spec that you think is fun, if its only doing 5-10% less dps?

(also, stack haste if you're doing frost, frost in frostfire crit gear is going to look a lot worse than frost actually is)

[Ticker]

You clearly didn't play during MC/BWL, or even do Onyxia.

Lol prebc frost was still bad, the only reason you spec'd frost is becasue everything was immune to fire =/

Short answer to the OP. Frost will never be top dps in raids. Never ever. The buffs required to frostbolt alone are far too high and it would make mages overpowered in pvp.

ps:

Frost is arguably competitive (after TtW) for 10-mans.

No. Not even close. Not if skill is not a factor. (2.5 second cast, 3000 damage. 3 second cast 5500 damage. Simple math)

[seen]

A reply to all the people who say pve specs and pvp specs blabla. pretty much telling mages who like being frost to stfu and accept that frost is only good for pvp::

Blizzard can figure out a way to buff frost for PVE only and not make much difference to PVP. Even I have a good idea for a fix.

Make damaging frost spells with a snare effect give a stacking buff (stacks 5 times) that gives 2% haste and lasts 10 seconds.

OR

Make damaging frost spells with a snare effect give a 15% chance to proc some buff called "ZOMG deepfreeze does damage" and then you can cast a deepfreeze which does more damage than a regular frostbolt. (kind of like how instant pyro procs- hotstreak are used in fire and fbb specs). maybe even make that 15% chance to proc "ZOMG deepfreeze does damage" a part of the fingers of frost talent.

sounds heaps easy if you ask me. just that blizzard are too stupid, uncreative and scared to change any specs that are used in pvp