Frost Mage 4.0.1 Questions/Bugs

[Holyspartann]

1. I noticed that spirit is not a stat that we want whatsoever. What changed to make it terrible? I know it used to give more crit wiht molten armor is that what has changed?

2. Spell Pen - Is this important whatever, should we gem for it to hit the cap, if yes, what is the cap? Are there other means besides gems to get spell pen?

3. FFB Bugs: When glyphed, FFB is consuming 2 stacks of fingers of frost and not one, some people also said it is doing more damage unglyphed than glyphed?

4. Since most of the things we do are based on "frozen targets" so mastery is very important. Has anyone noticed that Deep Freeze is not scaling with mastery or is it just me. Also are the other spells scaling incorrectly with it.

5. Spell crit for frost should be 33.34% for 100% crit chance correct?

6. Hit is capped at 17% correct? Also draenai does not stack and shadow priests/druids no longer give 15% correct?

7. Spell haste vs Mastery, since frostbolt cast is so low should we even stack haste at all? What is the amoutn spell haste required to reach the 1sec GCD on frostbolt. Also should we we reach this before or after heroism/icy veins etc...

8. Are pets not scaling correctly with spell power that we have?

Noting that frost mages NEVER go oom, spirit is a waste obviously, but why is it useless now?

[Swizzle]

1. Healer stat

2. No in PvE, 120-130 in PvP

3. Haven't seen it

4. Mastery is important, haven't seen the Deep Freeze bug

5. Yes, for Ice Lance, Deep Freeze, and FFB

6. 17%, draenei buff is self only, there are no hit buffs

7. Check the haste calculator millamber has in these forums

8. Mine is

[Maarsch]

On the spirit thing. Molten armor used to be "3% crit + some percent of your spirit"
Now it's just 3%. The spirit doesn't do anything

[Skarrd]

I've had 45k deep freeze crits, it definitely scales with mastery.

[Styxz]

I've had 45k deep freeze crits, it definitely scales with mastery.

Before reforging, df crit for ~30k with no cds. Ffb crit for ~17k and ice lance was like 15kish.

After reforgeing df crits for ~30k no cds. Ffb ~25k and ice lance ~21k

I figure somethings not right with deep freeze =/

[Swizzle]

Before reforging, df crit for ~30k with no cds. Ffb crit for ~17k and ice lance was like 15kish.

After reforgeing df crits for ~30k no cds. Ffb ~25k and ice lance ~21k

I figure somethings not right with deep freeze =/

Where are you testing? Dummies can be stunned, so not there. Maybe in a heroic? Did you have the same buffs/debuffs in both runs? How much did you reforge? What did you reforge to?

[Styxz]

Where are you testing? Dummies can be stunned, so not there. Maybe in a heroic? Did you have the same buffs/debuffs in both runs? How much did you reforge? What did you reforge to?

Reforged to 19.5 mastery (around 48% shatter dmg)

Wouldn't call it "testing" per se. Just noticed my ffb's were getting closer and closer to df dmg; which has not noticably changed.

Also yes, I observed this in various encounters with immune mobs (raids, randoms, trash etc)

Wouldn't call it concrete by any means but I believe lhivera also mentioned df not scaling with mastery a while back on the beta forums.

And idk what happened but I actually have hit dummies with df and delt normal (~30k) dmg.

Was happening on ptr for a bit so I assumed it was a bug. Only I've hit one on live too a few days after the patch =/
Maybe it was already considered stunned?

*ignore spelling errors, I'm at work on my drroid >.<*

[Kuni Zyrekai]

I can tentatively confirm DF isn't getting mastery. I haven't done hard tests but there's no way in hell it's getting +46% damage.

Edit: Very confirmed. 26k DF at 3.5k SP, not cool.

[Deleted]

Dunno about the FFB thing, but it also happened to me to have some spells, randomly, consuming 2 charges of FoF.
I also had FoF proc while I was casting a FFB (with normal casting time) and once it shooted, it consumed the FoF charge. Odd...

Wondering a few things on current lv 80 build. I'm using this one atm, minus the glyphs of course, since they're bugged.
A few questions concerning that now:

• Prime Glyph of Molten Armor vs Prime Glyph of Ice Lance?
• 1 point in Ice Shards is probably a bad habit from pre-4.0.1 builds. Since Blizzard doesn't benefit anymore from FoF, it's kinda useless to make it able to proc it, and we don't really need the 5 more yards for Ice Lance, do we? So I guess this is is a skippable talent. Opinions?
• Improved Freeze is good but... I can't seem to make good use of it. Isn't there a way, a macro, to make it get used directly under your current target, without manually selecting the area you want to place the freeze on? Because without such a macro I'm really having issues making good use of this talent.
• I'm not aware of how the "damage during spellcasting" mechanics changed post 4.0.1. Will we need those 3 talents in the fire tree in the future?
• Thinking about Early Frost and Shatter, they're really good at start, but slightly reduce the relevance of Haste and Crit. Guess maybe people will be able to skip 1 point in them in the future, when their gear will become much better? Supposing for example someone will reach 50% base crit raid buffed, you'd need only 1 point in Shatter. Opinions?

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Dunno about the FFB thing, but it also happened to me to have some spells, randomly, consuming 2 charges of FoF.
I also had FoF proc while I was casting a FFB (with normal casting time) and once it shooted, it consumed the FoF charge. Odd...

Wondering a few things on current lv 80 build. I'm using this one atm, minus the glyphs of course, since they're bugged.
A few questions concerning that now:

• Prime Glyph of Molten Armor vs Prime Glyph of Ice Lance?
• 1 point in Ice Shards is probably a bad habit from pre-4.0.1 builds. Since Blizzard doesn't benefit anymore from FoF, it's kinda useless to make it able to proc it, and we don't really need the 5 more yards for Ice Lance, do we? So I guess this is is a skippable talent. Opinions?
• Improved Freeze is good but... I can't seem to make good use of it. Isn't there a way, a macro, to make it get used directly under your current target, without manually selecting the area you want to place the freeze on? Because without such a macro I'm really having issues making good use of this talent.
• I'm not aware of how the "damage during spellcasting" mechanics changed post 4.0.1. Will we need those 3 talents in the fire tree in the future?
• Thinking about Early Frost and Shatter, they're really good at start, but slightly reduce the relevance of Haste and Crit. Guess maybe people will be able to skip 1 point in them in the future, when their gear will become much better? Supposing for example someone will reach 50% base crit raid buffed, you'd need only 1 point in Shatter. Opinions?

Glyph of Molten Armour not used for frost with proper glyphs. Frostbolt/FFB/ice lance.

Skippable, yes. Does help proc val'kyr with nibelung during blizzard though, so up to you.

No way to do so without clicking. I've personally got it bound to one of the buttons on the side of my mouse.

Ignite beats out everything available to frost. It's either that talent or range on fire blast, and even then you still need a point in it. Take it. We're the only class who didn't get that baseline.

Correct, but again you lack the places to dump those points. Early frost gives full benefit until you hit 30% haste, when it slowly is worth less and less. I'd personally keep shatter full points for solo play/heroics. That said, if I was so far over haste/crit, I'd be reforging as much as possible to mastery. It's a pretty strong stat for frost.

Edit: Closer inspection of your spec brings up some odd questions. Mostly, why not deep freeze? It accounts for a fair bit of frost's DPS even though it's not benefiting from mastery currently.

[Skarrd]

Hm, perhaps I was remembering my 40k+ crits from icc and 30% buff fucked it all. Pretty sure I've gotten mostly high 20's while soloing MC and such, so yeah, that wouldn't make much sense with like 3.8k SP and 51% increased damage on frozen. That's lame.

[Deleted]

Deep Freze IS there lol, of course! I just somehow forgot to click on it on the build I just posted. No questioning that! Aiming for THIS at level 80, and looking forward for something like THIS when I'll be level 85, altough I'm sure by then a lot of glyphs/talents will have changed so I'll have to adapt the build.

I never valued Ignite until now, didn't consider that it procs on Frostfire Bolt and in the future it will proc on Frostfire Orb as well I guess. But then again that's gonna become an option at 85.
But once again, I'm failing to see how much spellinterrupt (Burning Soul) is important post 4.0.1. I'm sure it depends on the fight, on a fight with a lot of raid damage Burning Soul will be better than that 3% haste from Netherwind Presence, and vice-versa. What should I am for atm? Leaning toward Netherwind for now, since I'm not raiding very seriously with my Frost Mage (just an alt) atm, guess for the usual normal ICC PUGs I'm doing right now, and with my insanely bad gear, this is probably going to be a better option than Burning Soul? (not questioning this for level 85, since I'll need those 3 points to access Ignite)

As for the no macro for Improved Freeze... thought so =/ I have it on a side mouse button as well, activate it with that and use it with left click. Will have to remap keybindings so I can still use the basic spells with my left hand while I position the mouse with the right hand. Something I haven't been doing so far on Frost Mage since it wasn't necessary 'til now.

Last question: anybody having issues in buffering Ice Lance/Frostfire Bolt/Deep Freeze on the last bit of Frostbolt casting? I know Blizzard changed the way input buffer is read from the server, maybe that's the issue. Or maybe it's just a problem I'm having locally? Since my connection has been awful lately, thought maybe it was just my problem and not related to this change that happened in 4.0.1

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Right now on live, burning soul isn't that manditory to frost. I've raided frost since before the patch and honestly I'm not even used to having any pushback protection. It's not that bad. I'm personally running 3% haste/master of elements.

And yeah, the precast system is screwing with me a lot more than I'd like. I had some lag earlier in ICC today and I couldn't get a lance off for a good 20 seconds. I hope they implement a way to turn it off and go to how it used to be.