Frost spec, ideas of talents/spells.

[Toriankel]

( I'm French, excuse me if there are any mistakes ).

i started playing my mage when 1.8 and the emerauld dragon's where released. I remember running Molten Core and i liked playing frost on ragnaros.

But since then i never played frost again in raid. and i do miss that. Blizzard is breaking there heads on how to improve pve frost damage without making frost mage insanely good in pvp.

I came up with a spell and a talent i wouldlike you to discuss and tell me what you think about it.

First, i'd do a spell named : Hypothermia ( or whatever it's called in english ). It wouldn't be otherised in arena's ( like the warlock's maledection ).

It would go on this base : Everytime you cast a frost spell on a target ( by frost i mean frb / cone of cold, not ice lance ), the target get's a debuff. At 30 stacks, the target is considered completly frozen, and you must now throw a fireball ( gained with brain freeze or wathever ) to shatter the target, causing a frost explosion of 37000-41000 damage ( and works as well as an aoe ). I don't think in battlegrounds this spell would have any effect.


Secondly, i would do a talent named "Frost statue". This talent would be based as the hunter talent "sniper training". When the mage doesn't move for 10 seconds, he starts getting frozen, and gets a buff wich increases damage done by the mage by 5%. If he does'nt move for 10 second's more, he gains another +10% damage ( for a total of +15% ). And if the mage doesn't move for 10 other seconds, he gains the "Frost statue" buff, +10% damage ( +25% all in all ), and every three seconds he gets a free 100% critical ice lance ).
I don't think this talent would be used in pvp. I know that with my mage i don't stay more thant 3-4 seconds without moving. and for the fights that requires a bit of moving, lets say that the buff lasts 5 seconds.

What do you think of these ?

[Cracka_Bob]

interesting... but OP

however, maybe make hypothermia not stack as high and not do as much damage and have a 1 min internal CD (similar to a lock's curse of doom)

good luck on the frost statue... the tooltip would be too long

make it something like "when the mage stands still for 10 seconds he/she gains Winds of the North increasing damage by 2/4/6%. Stacks up to 3 times. After 3 stacks the mage becomes a Frost Statue, increasing the Winds of the North effect by 50%.

[Cracka_Bob]

wow... no one has any more ideas?

[Tiga]

I wouldn't go for a "huge hit" ability even if it required 30 stacks or whatever...

I think deep freeze deserves a PvE function, so what I have been suggesting is a 60 second debuff (10 seconds in PvP) that increases damage taken from the mage that cast the deep freeze. You could make it stacking, so that you could use cold snap to get two stacks early in a boss fight and then progressively add more stacks every 30+ seconds (deep freeze cooldown+time to get a fingers of frost buff).

Assuming PvP needs a small buff, the 10 second debuff would increase shatters slightly, but the long duration and stackability in PvE is what makes it a potent PvE buff. The mage will trade one GCD and one FoF charge for longer term increased damage on that target.

In terms of what kind of damage increase it is, I think I would go with a slightly higher crit modifier. Something along the lines of 10% per stack, which you could then stack up to 3 or 5 times. The reason I think a crit modifier would be good is that crit rating is currently pitifully bad for frost PvE and really needs to be brought closer to the benefit fire gains from crit.

What would be especially nice would be that maybe the long term DF debuff (you could call it "brittle") could be considered a combat snare, so it could proc TTW as well, improving frost mage DPS on non-tanked adds. Either that, or just put back the snare on the frostbolt glyph (I think the glyph change is the right solution).

In terms of complexity of implementation, it's probably not the easiest way to buff frost, but it adds the 51 point talent into PvE without making it overpowered in PvP (especially if brittle is dispellable and possibly even trinketable).

Other frost changes I would make:

- Brain freeze should make the DOT component of critical hit fireballs scale with the spirit of the mage (frost needs better spirit scaling and brain freeze is currently underpowered in PvE).

- The water elemental should scale with haste and crit too.

If the deep freeze change is "too much work for 3.3", I guess a simple spell power multiplier increase on frostbolt would go a long way too. The "brittle" debuff could also be used to buff ice lance - possibly only after the target has more than two stacks of brittle (which would never happen in PvP).

The key things to consider are:

- Frost could use one more button to press in PvE.
- The skill reward (skill cap) of frost in PvE should be higher.
- Frost PvE needs better benefit from crit and spirit.
- Brain freeze is currently slightly underpowered in PvE.
- The frostbolt glyph is really annoying (see below).
- The TTW talent combined with the frostbolt glyph makes frost mages bad at dealing with adds in raids, whereas frost mages used to be one of the best classes for adds in TBC (combined nuke+snare in one).

Especially with T9 set bonuses, frost is riding annoyingly close to the soft cap on crit (if your frostbolts crits about 64% of the time in a raid, you are at the soft cap - anything more and you are over it). I have recently seen suggestions to buff shatter to 100% crit chance and that's about the worst thing that could be done in terms of making crit scale better for PvP and PvE. Unfortunately I have a EU WOW account, so I can't participate on the US DD forums and express my opinions there (the frost discussion on the Elitist Jerks forum has pretty much died since Lhivera's Blizzard forum ban was lifted and the EU mage forum seems to get very little attention from Blizzard).

[Cracka_Bob]

i still like the frost statue idea... could be a 3 point talent (to the left of empowered frostbolt) and when you get Winds of the North your character would turn blue (kind of like a warriors last stand, but blue instead of red) and when you become a frozen statue, your character has an outline of itself (about the same size as you would be if you had bloodlust/heroism) but with an "icy" texture moving the same way as your character and maybe have snowflakes (like the ones from ice lance) surround you

[Tiga]

I just don't like the "don't move" type of talent, because I think a good mage will use every opportunity to move to a better position. For frost, this means brain freeze procs, summoning the water elemental & mirror images (global cooldowns). Modern raid encounters already punish casters heavily by forcing them to move all the time - a talent like that makes movement fights even worse for frost.

At the moment, frost PvP probably needs a buff too, so as long as the changes do not overly favor PvP, I think there's room to implement changes that buff PvP (slightly) and PvE (more).

[Bumbl3b33]

It would be awsome if your suggestions were implemented, and there was a New Age of the Frost Mage.

I can see it now in bgs
-OMG frost is soOP
-I didn't even get a chance to move :'(
-NERF FROST
-IMBA BASTARDS

That would be awsome