[Mage] Hey Akraen... (Why Frost is good)

[ripponesan]

It is/was in peoples mind for years that frost is not viable and just for PvP.

While this has changed, the minds of the People are still a bit behind. Same as with Paladins in BC. If you were a Paladin and telling the People that you are tanking ,they went like "Wut? LOL dude Paladin is meant to heal, as he cant tank and cant do DMG."

It will take some time for this "Frost is for PVP but not for DMG" idea to vanish out of peoples minds.

[Deleted]

If someone still thinks frost is bad..... Daewyn the Mage from Paragon is playing frost at the moment or this id or whatever ^^ just look it up at wowprogress.... now that fastest kills are logged you can see the specc currently played....

so if any officer or gm asks to respecc someone... just tell to look at this mage ^^
I'm hoping to get the 2p t16 this id.... buf arcane is still good after the nerf.... switching from 4x hc t15 to 2x t15 + 2 hc offpieces makes up a lot ^^ just hate the supid high amount of crit on all the gear....

[Mctriple]

Frost is viable, even for HM progression. However, it's understandable that some guilds will have officers that want you to play the top spec. I've never understood such strong spec loyalty, so I tend to agree with that, but then whenever I play a class with multiple specs for the same role, I've always changed to the overall, current top spec for the class. Frost is not that for mages at the moment. Saying that frost is "is as good as/better than Arcane" is objectively incorrect. It's viable, but nothing more.

[Abhorsen]

Until you post parses of you beating every single similarly geared frost mage on specific target dps (like tidal shaman et al), and overall effective damage then my argument stands true.

So this I'd assume is in reference to what you posted on Page 1 of this thread. The only issue is, those aren't similarly geared Mages at all. You're 5 ilvls higher than both of them, not to mention one of them was also using Frost Bomb for some unknown reason. That's not a fair competition and I'm sure you know it. On Galakras this week, as Fire I topped specific target dps for my guild (though being 10 man I obviously didn't have anyone to directly compare to) and when comparing to top ranking 10H Frost Mages at similar levels of damage to me I did as well as if not better than a lot of them. This isn't saying that Frost isn't viable, or that Fire is necessarily the best as I don't believe there is a single best spec overall this tier (this may change with full BiS considering Fire's scaling).

While it is definitely true that there are a number of individual factors which contribute to how well a spec performs, there are mathematical limitations that are near impossible to overcome. I'm all for playing whatever spec you enjoy most, but somehow somewhere along the line your message of playing what you enjoy most and championing Frost as a viable spec has become perverted, perhaps this is all just an issue with the way in which you communicate it. It's strange to hear you denounce those who would say Fire or Arcane or whatever are the only viable specs, and then you yourself talk in such absolutes about Frost.

When it comes to Frost being viable, I know that it definitely is. I went Frost tonight for a bit to play around and had a blast, my numbers were decent but it wasn't as amazing as one would expect considering the way you speak about it. Being passionate is fine, but there needs to be some degree of realism to it. I just don't see any fights where it would be "flat out the best". I will swap specs during progression if I think there's even the slightest chance of better performance, I'm not cutting edge I just feel as a Mage who lacks any real raid utility it is my role to provide the maximum amount of damage I can.

I will however stop this rant now as I see that you're more reasonable about the matter than your initial statements had indicated, I also can understand how you feel somewhat trapped in your position and as such don't think it would be fair to continue this. However I will end with this, what really set me off was what you said about swapping to Fire might as well mean we swap to a Warlock, this is bullshit. People seem to forget that they don't play a Fire Mage or a Frost Mage or an Arcane Mage, they play a Mage. There is a substantial amount of raid utility to be gained from being able to adapt by spec to different fights and to insist that making use of this ability to radically change the way we deal damage in order to best suit an encounter is in any way similar to being sat for a Warlock is frustrating to say the least.

Note: I've probably made a number of mistakes in my line of thought, I may have misinterpreted or straight out missed things you've said but I'm in a similar situation in regards to sleep on raid nights (one hour of sleep last night) with the added pressure of assignments and exams. I am always open to reconsidering my previous statements and will gladly swallow my pride if I've made unjustified claims.

[Deleted]

Can't generate proof if all you will listen to is having the "top mages" getting parses.

Only way to convince you guys at this point is for Vykina to be like "GUYS I FOUND A THIRD SPEC ITS CALLED FROST WOW ITS GOOD TRY IT"

You are so toxic it actually hurts, we get it you like Frost, I just don't get why you make such a big deal about it, no one cares what spec you play. I played all 3 specs in SoO progress because I'm a Mage, not a Fire Mage or a Frost Mage - depending on what was needed for the encounter. I can agree that the 3 specs have never been closer, but there is still a pegging order which is easily visible from playing the specs yourself and logs, after all you said in the past that there is little skill required right? So logs should be accurate from "top mages" to mages in lower ranked guilds.

Saying I'd be clueless on how to play Frost is pretty amusing also, I'm really not sure what your issue is.

tl;dr Don't tunnel yourself into one spec when you have 3 different tool boxes to choose from.

[Deleted]

Slightly offtopic, but @Vykina, could you provide some WoL's from your progress fights you did as frost? Would love to see them.

[Akraen]

The warlock comment is another topic entirely. They are simply better and we've been in their shadow the entire expansion.

Admit it Vykina, you could have done progression as frost. I don't think you would intentionally play frost incorrectly, I think you would stack mastery, get lower multitarget numbers, then point out that we are inferior to arcane in multitarget-- that's what everyone else who has "tried frost" has done.

I'd love to eat my words on that.

[Deleted]

Slightly offtopic, but @Vykina, could you provide some WoL's from your progress fights you did as frost? Would love to see them.

It was from Siegecrafter where I played Frost, the logs weren't uploaded anywhere though, just a few people logging personally. Since we went for the tactic with killing Empowered Mines a lot we needed a DPS team who was good to get them down, Frost did really well on them but Frost also was doing quite less single target boss damage than Fire, so we decided to replace Frost Mage on the mines with a Destro lock, since they were capable of the same if not more Mine damage while maintaining high boss damage, not to mention Fire was really strong at killing the Missile Turrets also since they always align with Combustion.

The warlock comment is another topic entirely. They are simply better and we've been in their shadow the entire expansion.

Admit it Vykina, you could have done progression as frost. I don't think you would intentionally play frost incorrectly, I think you would stack mastery, get lower multitarget numbers, then point out that we are inferior to arcane in multitarget-- that's what everyone else who has "tried frost" has done.

I'd love to eat my words on that.

I could have played Frost sure, but why would I limit myself to one spec, especially the overall weakest out of the 3, in cutting edge progress there is really no way that I would play an inferior spec on a difficult boss. Let's take our Garrosh kill for example, it's ifs and buts, but we were literally 1-2 seconds from wiping, since Frost does less single target damage than Fire, how could I justify playing that?

Btw, I'm quite aware how to gear/reforge for Frost thanks, I wouldn't intentionally play wrong to try and prove a point. Frost is viable and you can think up as many bullet points as you want, but when it comes down to playing the absolute best spec for the fight Frost usually goes out of the window.

[Erolian]

@Vykina

I'm pretty sure everything you just posted is basically exactly what the majority of mages doing any sort of progression understand and know. It's just forums have a way of cultivating "issues" or whatever that don't really exist.

Nobody says we can't or won't play frost because its awful (if they know what they're talking about anyways) its more like we can't or won't play frost in most situations because it simply isn't the best for the raid. If and when it is we would obviously swap to it

[Deleted]

@Vykina

I'm pretty sure everything you just posted is basically exactly what the majority of mages doing any sort of progression understand and know. It's just forums have a way of cultivating "issues" or whatever that don't really exist.

Nobody says we can't or won't play frost because its awful (if they know what they're talking about anyways) its more like we can't or won't play frost in most situations because it simply isn't the best for the raid. If and when it is we would obviously swap to it

Yea, I agree, and remember that my opinions are always given from a top world guild stand point where I'm looking to maximize DPS to the absolute maximum for each encounter, if personally you aren't in a cutting edge guild and/or don't care that much about maximizing then you should 100% just play what you enjoy.

[Akraen]

Yea, I agree, and remember that my opinions are always given from a top world guild stand point where I'm looking to maximize DPS to the absolute maximum for each encounter, if personally you aren't in a cutting edge guild and/or don't care that much about maximizing then you should 100% just play what you enjoy.

And that's a very fair and valid view.

Can you also admit that now with item levels from weeks of farming that it matters even less?

I think the world of guilds like mine clouds the waters a bit. I think it is reasonable to say that if you look at my guild alone, before I got this gear, last tier, tier 14, whatever, that I produce results that not only justify the spec during our late to the party progression, but also top mages that we bring who play other specs.

So do you strictly attribute that to skill? I play frost much better than arcane or fire. So if I am at 95% potential of a spec that is 5% behind then that is better than if I (or another player) is at 80% potential of a spec 5% ahead.

I suppose my point is that, just worded with the culmination of explaining to a community of people worried about a marginal dps gain from doing something like a gem right but they can't maintain the basics of uptimes and snapshots.

If you agree that I make any sense with what I've just said I'll drop this all pretty much for good and just go on being happy helping those interested in frost.

[audacitymage]

Each spec is definitely viable, and can be classified with pros/cons pretty easily:

Fire:
Good single target, but a bit behind arcane in a vacuum
No problem with movement
Good situational AOE (spread combustion)
Very easy to play for progression (can move, very few cooldowns to manage, easy rotation etc), so can focus on mechanics

Arcane:
Best single target
Insanely strong multi-dotting AOE
Movement sucks
Harder to play for progression (Rune, have to manage mana/cooldowns well to optimize damage)

Frost:
Decent single target (probably ~ equal to fire)
Decent movement (much better than arcane, not as good as fire)
Easy rotation for progression (no rune, cooldowns not very important like arcane)
Decent situational AOE (frozen orb)


The problem for bleeding edge progression is that frost sits in the spectrum between Arcane (single target turret min-maxing for progression) and Fire (movement and easy rotation for progression) in every category. It doesn't beat out Arcane or Fire in any single category so anyone trying to min-max for bleeding edge progression is going to play either Arcane or Fire, there is absolutely no reason to pick Frost.

Where frost DOES come in though is flexibility. Frost is very viable playing above 10k haste, with the rest into mastery (ie with Arcane gear). Yes fully stacked haste is marginally better, but that is besides the point. The point is that this allows people to play Arcane for most fights, and switch to Frost for fights with excessive movement, or where Arcane is just very hard to play for progression. This isn't ideal, but is near ideal and great for people not in a top 3 kind of guild that don't want to change their gearing on a per fight basis (which a top 3 guild player would do, or get swapped with another viable class).

Side note: there is also a huge lack of parses for Frost making it hard to compare to the other Mage specs. For example I got a rank 3 parse on heroic 25 shaman this week with no heroic weapon, and two ToT trinkets, using arcane gear (omg only 11k haste). That would never happen for Fire or Arcane.

[Deleted]

And that's a very fair and valid view.

Can you also admit that now with item levels from weeks of farming that it matters even less?

I think the world of guilds like mine clouds the waters a bit. I think it is reasonable to say that if you look at my guild alone, before I got this gear, last tier, tier 14, whatever, that I produce results that not only justify the spec during our late to the party progression, but also top mages that we bring who play other specs.

So do you strictly attribute that to skill? I play frost much better than arcane or fire. So if I am at 95% potential of a spec that is 5% behind then that is better than if I (or another player) is at 80% potential of a spec 5% ahead.

I suppose my point is that, just worded with the culmination of explaining to a community of people worried about a marginal dps gain from doing something like a gem right but they can't maintain the basics of uptimes and snapshots.

If you agree that I make any sense with what I've just said I'll drop this all pretty much for good and just go on being happy helping those interested in frost.

Don't really know what you mean about ilvl, if you mean now that progress is over and it's farm content, yea it doesn't really matter about what spec you play anymore, just have fun.

I think of course you will perform better in the spec that you find most comfortable, but in reality none of the specs have much depth and can all be played to a high level without much thought. You said earlier you had logs where you did more as Frost than top 25 Fire or Arcane logs, but I can't see that on any public ranks.

A lot of people do think that changing 1 gem or reforging 100 of one stat into another is gonna increase their DPS by huge margins, I see it every day, but yep, it comes down to playstyle more than anything. I just think people need to realize that you have more than 1 spec as a Mage and if you want to play one in particular then there is really no need to force it down other people's throats and just give accurate information for those asking so they can make their own informed decision.

[Libretto]

I think during progress, had you played frost you probably would have done about the same damage as you would have with fire or arcane on most of the fights.

However, I know you play fire most of the time, so unless fire was particularly awful on a fight, there'd be no reason to play anything else. And the fights fire isn't as good on for progression happen to be fights arcane is very good on, and better on than frost.

It's like I said earlier, there isn't any single fight this tier where frost is -the best spec- of the three. There's just some where frost is -as good- as the others. So there's no compelling reason for top mages to play frost if they already play the other specs well, as most of us do. This tier lacked a definitive fight like say heroic conclave where frost was particularly amazing at doing a specific job.

[Boxedwaffle]

Amen. As long as you can stay hard in the yard, you're Gucci.

[gallamann]

There is certainly a vast gulf between top 100 guilds who are sporting the top 100 geared mages and a guild like mine that is 9/14 normal running 10 man. Folks like me who have done years of hardcore raiding and never want to commit to that again, are enjoying the hell out of frost.

Frost gives me control over adds that is stellar, and there are plenty of opportunities in SoO to leverage that control in 10 man raiding.

Arcane, I refuse to play simply because of those shitastic 90 talents.

Fire, I used to play, but Blizzard has made it pure hell this expansion to reach appropriate gear levels to enjoy fire as a casual raider. For example, at start of ToT Frost for me was clearly a ~15k DPS increase over Fire, so you play along as Frost, gearing for Frost (we had a bad start to ToT as we had to fill two raid spots and gear them, we killed Lei Shen 2 weeks before 5.4 patch release). SoO hits and my gear is still Frost and no doubt in my mind my Frost spec will beat Fire in my gear, and the cycle starts anew.

We will probably be 2 more months to reach Garrosh, given 2 raid nites of 3 hours a week and the fact that people always need a weapon or trinket off early bosses which will delay our skipping those for several weeks.

The top mages rarely keep in mind the masses when they talk about "best" spec. While I agree Fire/Arcane is better than Frost at high gear levels; the masses are never going to reach those gear levels, and further in 10 man raiding a Frost mage may be the best mage spec for the majority of mages.

Edit - typo

[Drutt]

Frost is viable, even for HM progression. However, it's understandable that some guilds will have officers that want you to play the top spec. I've never understood such strong spec loyalty, so I tend to agree with that, but then whenever I play a class with multiple specs for the same role, I've always changed to the overall, current top spec for the class. Frost is not that for mages at the moment. Saying that frost is "is as good as/better than Arcane" is objectively incorrect. It's viable, but nothing more.

Completely agree with this.

I've spent ridiculous amounts of gold re-gemming and re-forging between all three mage specs this expansion. I consider myself a mage first, and everything else second.

I've raided as all three specs in SoO. Frost will get the job done, but if you're looking for the absolute top spec you can be as a mage right now, it's not frost. That isn't the same thing as saying frost is awful, though.

Frankly, I don't care what spec I am. I just want to play the one that ticks the most boxes in a raid. When that spec is frost, I'll switch.

[Corleggy]

The top mages rarely keep in mind the masses when they talk about "best" spec. While I agree Fire/Arcane is better than Frost at high gear levels; the masses are never going to reach those gear levels, and further in 10 man raiding a Frost mage may be the best mage spec for the majority of mages.

All the mages I see say to play whatever you want for fun if you're casually raiding. The best spec discussion is usually by people looking for that small percentage boost, which really doesn't apply if the player skill isn't able to achieve it anyway.

It would be near impossible to use forums to show which spec wins with every different mage's gear, that's when you have to take it into your own hands and test log/sim or use things like ask mr robot. Just never expect it to be perfect and if you really want to see the largest performance increase just look for tips/tricks on the forum and try to get the most out of your movement and cleave.

[Akraen]

All the mages I see say to play whatever you want for fun if you're casually raiding. The best spec discussion is usually by people looking for that small percentage boost, which really doesn't apply if the player skill isn't able to achieve it anyway.

It would be near impossible to use forums to show which spec wins with every different mage's gear, that's when you have to take it into your own hands and test log/sim or use things like ask mr robot. Just never expect it to be perfect and if you really want to see the largest performance increase just look for tips/tricks on the forum and try to get the most out of your movement and cleave.

This is basically it. The "best" spec is the one you play the best. Then it's up to the raid leader to decide if you're worth bringing. A raid leader who insists you play spec A when you'll always perform better with spec B is a dumb raid leader attempting to micromanage too much. It worked in Dragon Soul, but not now.

[Corleggy]

This is basically it. The "best" spec is the one you play the best. Then it's up to the raid leader to decide if you're worth bringing. A raid leader who insists you play spec A when you'll always perform better with spec B is a dumb raid leader attempting to micromanage too much. It worked in Dragon Soul, but not now.

It does depend on the progression you're after to a point. The player in a guild pushing somewhat decently is usually expected to be good at all their specs. I know personally I can play any of our 3 specs well enough that I'll be going for the best spec within reason(I won't be regemming unless we are spending 2 nights+ on it).

You have to remember if you join a guild and the guild wants every raid to min/max then that is what everyone in the guild should be doing, nobody is forcing you to stay so you are choosing to play by their raid rules.

I enjoy all 3 specs and am glad frost is now able to compete decently but I won't be going frost if it is better for my raid to be arcane for example, some fights this tier do have decent enrage timers.

I guess I should also mention a decent raid leader would identify if a person is quite a bit better at a certain spec, sometimes they just want to push you. The game would get boring if I played the same spec every expansion/tier.