Kuni's Frost Mage PVE Guide

[Libretto]

H twins is a considerably more difficult encounter on 10-man than 25, as is megaera. (conversely, H ji-kun, lei shen and iron qon are jokes on 10 comparitively)

consider this before deciding what to go with. You may find the horridon staff is actually the best itemized weapon you can easily obtain for now since it also only requires 500VP to fully upgrade vs 1000 for MH/OH.

You can reforge out of the horridon staff's hit. I still have plenty of hit I can reforge out of even at 537 ilevel.

As for a "best off-piece", pre ra-den I personally believe the H DA helm is the best available. tier chest has an extra socket and tons of mastery for the inevitable switch to arcane, no easily available legs have a third socket, DA helm is haste/mastery with int socket bonus, tier helm has a crit socket bonus which is virtually worthless. In addition since you'll probably be coining H DA whenever you kill it for the first few weeks, it means anything the coin gives you is an upgrade you want, same as coining megaera generally is. Even if ra-den is on farm the helm is arguably still the best available option, and even if not the difference is very small (coming down to the 60 extra int on a leg socket bonus)

[Akraen]

Getting Heroic TF Dinomancer's really was a nice way to not worry about weapons this tier anymore.

[Deleted]

I have a question regarding frost in tot at higher ilvls, everywhere I read that fire is supposed to be better, but unless Im doing something horribly wrong in fire, there is no way I would do more dps in my current gear than frost.

At first it looked like fire would do more dmg, but since Ive been playing around with simcraft to perfect my statweights Ive gotten such an increase in damage out of frost, that the current dmg I do as fire is 20k dps lower (frost 145k dps)over a period of 8 min on a dummy (selfbuffed, flask+food,heroism).

It seems to me that my gear is currently way better itemized for frost than fire, and I wonder if anyone could confirm that to me, and if the dmg that I do is good enough to stay frost for the remainder of the tier.

I raid casually about 6 hours / week and our current progress is 10/12 so I doubt Ill see much bis hc gear.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...eflap/advanced

[Hasufer]

http://www.simulationcraft.org/530/Raid_T14H.html

Fire and frost are quite close on a "dummy" fight (if u can trust simcraft), but fire pulls ahead on multitarget fights with the constant ignite spread/combust spread, where we only got il cleave and nt multidotting + orb eventually Furthermore fire is currently capable of reaching a quite high amount of crit, really pumping the spec to extremes (watch a possible inc CM nerf again :P) with 4set adding more than 5% crit på pyro as well.
Almost all fights in ToT has teh possiblity of tweaking fire to do sick dps, but frost will never be a bad option once u get the hang of it

Frost scales well with haste and mastery as well, but they are quite hard to compare, as crit is the core of the fire spec, whereas we can benefit greatly from both haste, mast and even crit to an extend

[Mastamage]

Getting Heroic TF Dinomancer's really was a nice way to not worry about weapons this tier anymore.

I had always thought the horridon wand + magaera off-hand would be our BiS but after trying to push as much haste as I can I might try out the horridon staff and get the haste/mastery chest from ji-kun...the hit from the staff should off-set the hit I lose on the Council chest I currently have.

[Akraen]

I had always thought the horridon wand + magaera off-hand would be our BiS but after trying to push as much haste as I can I might try out the horridon staff and get the haste/mastery chest from ji-kun...the hit from the staff should off-set the hit I lose on the Council chest I currently have.

Technically you get the most haste out of Suen-Wo Heroic TF'd 2/2. This is second best for that.

Overall I realize dagger+OH or wand+OH are slightly better. However this is an ilvl 549 weapon that doesn't require me to wait for a later boss or have to upgrade two items. It's "close enough" and the peace of mind of being done with weapons is great.

The DPS difference between the weapons isn't big enough to care. Get whichever heroic TF you can first

[Oloden]

After being fire from 5.2 to 5.3 i decided to go back to frost because I am sick of RNG lol....my questions are -
1) I have BotH 2/2 upgraded as first trinket and the VP trinket as 2nd but im not liking the amount of haste the proc gives becuase it makes it feel clunky when i go under the GCD....anyone else switch back to RoY 2/2 upgraded because of this situation (I have yet to get my hands on Wush)
2) If i do stick with the VP trinket im thinking it is worth to reforge more into mastery over haste to a point (if that were the case i would end up with 11261 haste and be close to the 21 tick mark with IV unglyphed)
3) If i do go with RoY and stick to reforging haste i end up with 12688 haste and IV glyphed puts me at the 18 tick marked self buffed.

Any advice/input is appreciated greatly thanks

Link to my armory - - - http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...loden/advanced

[Narsha]

Hi guys, finally started to use simcraft with amr this weekend. Have been using the amr default statweights until now with good dps results but understood I can do more so of course I want that.

Well, I loaded up and simmed my char and it told me to go pure haste. I've regemmed and reforged, simmed again and changed a few last details and I kinda have many questions but one simple thing I'm too dumb to understand: Do I automatically go for NT over LB now that i am maxed on haste, or is it still up LB for single target and NT for more?

Sorry if I've overlooked it and thanks for all the info, a lot of us lurkers appreciate it!

Edit: On cellphone, fixed

Edit again: Almost regret this post now, feels like I'm looking for a simple answer to a complex question.

[Bedacles]

After being fire from 5.2 to 5.3 i decided to go back to frost because I am sick of RNG lol....my questions are -
1) I have BotH 2/2 upgraded as first trinket and the VP trinket as 2nd but im not liking the amount of haste the proc gives becuase it makes it feel clunky when i go under the GCD....anyone else switch back to RoY 2/2 upgraded because of this situation (I have yet to get my hands on Wush)
2) If i do stick with the VP trinket im thinking it is worth to reforge more into mastery over haste to a point (if that were the case i would end up with 11261 haste and be close to the 21 tick mark with IV unglyphed)
3) If i do go with RoY and stick to reforging haste i end up with 12688 haste and IV glyphed puts me at the 18 tick marked self buffed.

Any advice/input is appreciated greatly thanks

Link to my armory - - - http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...loden/advanced

1) I don't think RoY should even be in the same sentence as the VP trinket but I could be wrong but the VP alone even without the Haste buff is probs better overall. That being said I don't currently enjoy quite enough haste to experience your situation.

2) There is a whole separate thread (and what is becoming a complimntary guide to this one) about haste and ticks of NT and IV etc

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ght=Frost+Mage

Mastery is clearly the way to go but not if you can get close or reach another breakpoint with haste.

3) 12684 is a magic number...but I don't understand what it has to do with RoY. I believe you should be able have the VP trinket and whilst reforged to 12688 haste and IV unglyphed to enjoy some serious NT output.

[Mastamage]

1) I don't think RoY should even be in the same sentence as the VP trinket but I could be wrong but the VP alone even without the Haste buff is probs better overall. That being said I don't currently enjoy quite enough haste to experience your situation.

2) There is a whole separate thread (and what is becoming a complimntary guide to this one) about haste and ticks of NT and IV etc

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ght=Frost+Mage

Mastery is clearly the way to go but not if you can get close or reach another breakpoint with haste.

3) 12684 is a magic number...but I don't understand what it has to do with RoY. I believe you should be able have the VP trinket and whilst reforged to 12688 haste and IV unglyphed to enjoy some serious NT output.

I believe what he was trying to say is that the added haste proc from the SPA trinket feels clunky. But honestly, if THAT feels clunky than so will the meta / lust proc'd at same time.

[Deleted]

I believe what he was trying to say is that the added haste proc from the SPA trinket feels clunky. But honestly, if THAT feels clunky than so will the meta / lust proc'd at same time.

The 3 at the same time feeled clunky, toss out the SPA and you're golden

[Akraen]

Can everyone define "clunky" please?

I just don't see what you all keep saying about it. So what if Frostbolt goes below 1 sec. I love how smooth frost feels, even with IV+Meta+Hero+Time Lord all up at the same time. Nether Tempest becomes hypnotizing and you barely cast any frostbolts at all, just machine gunning frostfire bolts and ice lances. It's glorious.

Clunky to me is how frost bomb feels. It's a very fast cast time on a varying cooldown. You can't get a real rhythm with it because it's so variable. Then it plants you down. I never enjoy any casters that have multiple cast-time spells in their rotation. One nuke, the other instants is the reason I love frost apart from thematics.

[Deleted]

It's a good define. It's the opposite of cool to use.
A fixed duration with a scaling damage explosion would have work better but there's a little PvP problem ... with 400k non-crit explosion

[Mastamage]

Can everyone define "clunky" please?

Clunky can be defined by what the spell queue, it seems. If you don't have a good keyboard then your frostbolt casts will keep going when you want to use a FFB proc as you smash your keys. I have a good keyboard so I don't really experience it. Most people don't like going under the GCD, mainly because they think its forbidden. I love being able to push out constant blue bolts.

[Jaylol]

Can everyone define "clunky" please?

I just don't see what you all keep saying about it. So what if Frostbolt goes below 1 sec. I love how smooth frost feels, even with IV+Meta+Hero+Time Lord all up at the same time. Nether Tempest becomes hypnotizing and you barely cast any frostbolts at all, just machine gunning frostfire bolts and ice lances. It's glorious.

This spammy FFB thing wasn't happening at all to me when I tried it. It seemed like there were still streaks of FFB where it wouldn't proc for a couple seconds, than would proc over itself for a couple ticks. That, along with trying to spam your buttons when you're below the gcd, makes for some really clunky gameplay, imo. But then again, it's all subjective. That, along with my tests showing virtually no dps loss/gain, is why I won't be using your "superior" unglyphed IV method.

[Libretto]

I find myself getting increasingly severe input lag as I go further and further below the GCD on frostbolt cast. That is "clunky".

I've found absolutely zero difference between glyphed and unglyphed IV across the ~220 or so pulls of Lei Shen that I've done, about half using each. Unglyphed has always been superior for multi-target fights even going back to MSV progression. Primarily, I unglyph it for two reasons: One, it opens up more glyph options for individual fights, such as blink etc. Two, it can be used during low haste periods to attempt to smooth out bad RNG or force RPPM trinket procs. While there is almost certainly a "cap" on RPPM trinket proc rates (where you will simply not get more PPM beyond certain haste levels), unglyphed IV is generally still better on non-patchwerk type fights despite my continued belief that spam stacking haste is the wrong way to go.

[Hasufer]

This spammy FFB thing wasn't happening at all to me when I tried it. It seemed like there were still streaks of FFB where it wouldn't proc for a couple seconds, than would proc over itself for a couple ticks. That, along with trying to spam your buttons when you're below the gcd, makes for some really clunky gameplay, imo. But then again, it's all subjective. That, along with my tests showing virtually no dps loss/gain, is why I won't be using your "superior" unglyphed IV method.

That was what I wanted to express as well

[Akraen]

/shrug - Do what you will. It's not a huge difference, but then again neither is frost bomb if you're comfortable with it. Hell you could do a frost bomb mastery build with mage armor and have good results too.

I just share my experiences for total theoretical maximum DPS. To each his own.

It's also possible that this comes down to hardware. I have an incredibly high-end PC, 18-22ms latency, a mechanical keyboard, and a Mionix 8k dpi mouse.

[Hasufer]

Hehe on that account I'm fairly ourdated, sitting on a 5year old pc and havn't had spare cash to upgrade due to studying :P So ye, it could mean something I guess

[Jaylol]

It's also possible that this comes down to hardware. I have an incredibly high-end PC, 18-22ms latency, a mechanical keyboard, and a Mionix 8k dpi mouse.

Very true. I don't have the best setup right now and stay at 75-100 latency pretty much at all times so that doesn't help the issue. I'd imagine it would be much, much smoother if I had sub 20 ms like you and some really good machine, but yea. If that's the case, I wouldn't be surprised if you got slightly better results going unglyphed.