Kuni's Frost Mage PVE Guide

[oraz4000]

Ah well, don´t see it like you Ilya. Spoils is just the pinnacle of movement and target switching.

Iimmerseus: Lot´s of little blobs = movement & target switching
THe Fallen Proctectors; Council fight with more adds, more target switch and more movement
Norushen: Upstairs movement involved "downstairs" a lot of adds for movement and target switch
Sha of Pride: Well I don´t know, would say it is more bomb than target switch as it was on PTR - but we have no appropriate tool for that
Iron Juggernaut: That is what comes close to a tank and spank fight
General Nazgrim: Lots of movement lots of target switch
Spoils of Pandaria: The pinnacle of movement and target switch
Thok the BLoodthristy: It´s just an annoying fight ^^
Siegecrafter Blackfuse: Damn, another hardcore movement and target switch fight
Paragons of the KLaxxi: Well a council fight with a lot of cleave, short periods with adds and little bit of target switch

As said before: There has a lot of work to be done with frost to make frost an appropriate tool for SoO

*Edit* Stat Priorites have to change, with Ilvl 551 and the reworked amplification trinket, I`m @ 55.09% selfbuffed (19103) haste.

Pete after watching your Thok attempts i cannot agree more i struggle to see a way frost will be able to compete it just does not do enough damage, after switching to arcane you more than doubled your dps.

[reflection]

Makes me sad to read all this stuff -.- I really like Frost and I hope it's going to be viable in 5.4. I totally hate Fire for its RNG and arcane for being a turret doesn't look good for me.

[Leviatron]

Some of the recent ptr changes helped some, but I'm still not a fan of the slow launching of the icicles. I would rather them all launch at once. I can understand the fear of "to much burst" with AT 5/5 icicles, but I think reducing the cap to three would help lower that fear while also allowing all three be shot at once making it into one big icelance and maybe even allowing the use of icelance without having to wait for a FoF charge.

[Deleted]

Some of the recent ptr changes helped some, but I'm still not a fan of the slow launching of the icicles. I would rather them all launch at once. I can understand the fear of "to much burst" with AT 5/5 icicles, but I think reducing the cap to three would help lower that fear while also allowing all three be shot at once making it into one big icelance and maybe even allowing the use of icelance without having to wait for a FoF charge.

You allready explained the mainreason. This masterychange is only due to PvP. In PvE everything was fine eecept the scaling. But if they only increase scaling PvP would be broken. So they searched for a way to make 1 big hit into many smaller hits. This mastery is teir actual solution for that. And i dont think it will be changed back to 3 stacks.

[Sombrelune]

Did the 4P T16 procs for someone lately? I used to use my T15 to raid, but testing the T16 on dummies results in 0 icy boulders. When I first tried the T16 few weeks ago it did work.

[Deleted]

Ah well, don´t see it like you Ilya. Spoils is just the pinnacle of movement and target switching.

Iimmerseus: Lot´s of little blobs = movement & target switching
THe Fallen Proctectors; Council fight with more adds, more target switch and more movement
Norushen: Upstairs movement involved "downstairs" a lot of adds for movement and target switch
Sha of Pride: Well I don´t know, would say it is more bomb than target switch as it was on PTR - but we have no appropriate tool for that
Iron Juggernaut: That is what comes close to a tank and spank fight
General Nazgrim: Lots of movement lots of target switch
Spoils of Pandaria: The pinnacle of movement and target switch
Thok the BLoodthristy: It´s just an annoying fight ^^
Siegecrafter Blackfuse: Damn, another hardcore movement and target switch fight
Paragons of the KLaxxi: Well a council fight with a lot of cleave, short periods with adds and little bit of target switch

As said before: There has a lot of work to be done with frost to make frost an appropriate tool for SoO

*Edit* Stat Priorites have to change, with Ilvl 551 and the reworked amplification trinket, I`m @ 55.09% selfbuffed (19103) haste.

Tried switching the haste (Over 15162? self buffed ?) to mastery or even int now ?

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Judging by my own stat graphs, I'm assuming we're going int past GCD capping frostbolt under meta. That said, the cleavcicles might push mastery up enough on most of these fights to be worth gemming over int. Frostburn was already pretty close to that point, adding cleave to it could very easily push it up enough.

[Deleted]

It needs to be 5 stacks max or so. Unless excess Icicles buff the ones you already have stored up, a max stack of 3 would force you to either cast a non-shatter Ice Lance every three Frost(fire)bolts or forfeit excess Icicles while you wait for FoF to proc, making Mastery less attractive.

[Deleted]

It needs to be 5 stacks max or so. Unless excess Icicles buff the ones you already have stored up, a max stack of 3 would force you to either cast a non-shatter Ice Lance every three Frost(fire)bolts or forfeit excess Icicles while you wait for FoF to proc, making Mastery less attractive.

Pls reread the mastery. The iciles dont overwrite. If u get one over the cap the first is autofired. So on paper its nealry irrelevant if we have a cap of 3, 5 or maybe 7.

[Deleted]

Judging by my own stat graphs, I'm assuming we're going int past GCD capping frostbolt under meta. That said, the cleavcicles might push mastery up enough on most of these fights to be worth gemming over int. Frostburn was already pretty close to that point, adding cleave to it could very easily push it up enough.

If the stat priority is (Hopefully) changed to favour mastery it would make going dual spec arcane/Frost alot easier. Seems to be ALOT of cleave fights, the icicles glyph combined with the 'baking' may produce the same optimal build for both Arcane and Frost ?

One can only hope...

[Deleted]

Pls reread the mastery. The iciles dont overwrite. If u get one over the cap the first is autofired. So on paper its nealry irrelevant if we have a cap of 3, 5 or maybe 7.

Where does it say that?

"When the Mage damages an enemy with their Frostbolt, and Frostfire Bolt, and the Water Elemental's Waterbolt, (14% + 1.75% per Mastery) of the damage done is stored as an Icicle for 15 seconds. Mastery: Icicles also increases the Water Elemental’s Water Bolt damage by (14% + 1.75% per Mastery). Up to 5 Icicles can be stored at once. Casting Ice Lance launches all stored Icicles at the target."

(granted this MIGHT not be the most current version, as I have seen a post from Lore that states that the Waterbolts no longer generate Icicles but instead get a direct buff from Mastery like on live, but it is the one from the latest patch notes.)
I am not on PTR myself, but the videos of the animation I've seen only ever seem to launch icicles when an ice Lance is cast and not on the 6th Frost(fire)bolt.

[Kuni Zyrekai]

They've auto-launched overflow icicles since inception.

[Deleted]

Oh neat

[Tiga]

If the stat priority is (Hopefully) changed to favour mastery it would make going dual spec arcane/Frost alot easier. Seems to be ALOT of cleave fights, the icicles glyph combined with the 'baking' may produce the same optimal build for both Arcane and Frost ?

I think Blizzard will want Frost mages to keep on using Frost Armor. However, if they don't do something about the haste capping for 5.4, we may go for some mastery simply for that reason. The haste soft caps & procs and interaction with RPPM make it extremely fuzzy where that change is going to happen exactly. I think ideally there will be a change that helps with haste capping and mastery will be balanced so that even at extreme amounts of haste, it is slightly worse than haste.

[Kuni Zyrekai]

If the stat priority is (Hopefully) changed to favour mastery it would make going dual spec arcane/Frost alot easier. Seems to be ALOT of cleave fights, the icicles glyph combined with the 'baking' may produce the same optimal build for both Arcane and Frost ?

One can only hope...

Frost will still stack haste to around 15.6k minimum, it's just a matter of what happens past that point. We won't know for sure until a lot of testing is done, and simulation catches up to PTR. Tiga over in the icicles thread showed a DPS increase on the 1.75% version. Given mastery was less than 0.5 DPS/point behind haste for me on live, that's quite the interesting development.

I think ideally there will be a change that helps with haste capping and mastery will be balanced so that even at extreme amounts of haste, it is slightly worse than haste.

Would be potentially cool, but I don't think it's feasible. There's going to be a point where you're just not getting any real benefit out of more haste, where mastery has no cap. I don't mind having a trade over past a certain point, though. It's at least semi-interesting, and allows for variant gemming. The amp trinket combined with "final tier, all sockets turn red" deal will push our effective GCD cap under meta frostbolt point around in strange directions. Amp's higher ilvl versions will do interesting things as well. Have to wait to see what the actual gear's haste values will work out to.

[pyrostorm9001]

Where does it say that?

It doesn't. This is a new mechanic so expect the tooltip to be a work in progress as time goes on. No doubt the auto-launcher was added as a final adjustment, before being pushed to the ptr.
I imagine the tooltip will be updated to reflect the final result come live.

[Tiga]

There's going to be a point where you're just not getting any real benefit out of more haste, where mastery has no cap.

There's only one raid tier left in this expansion and then the ratings go back to their starting points again at level 95 (and possibly more than that will happen). Blizzard doesn't need to eliminate haste caps - they just need to extend them a bit.

Two ways to work beyond current haste caps come to mind:

a) Allow frost mages to play with a reduced GCD cap (say 0.8 seconds). This will allow instant casts to scale all the way to 87.5% haste and frostbolt up to 150% haste.

b) Haste in excess of some value X also automatically increases your mastery or spell power by some portion of the excess haste. You'll still hit the haste caps, but your spells will automatically start doing more damage.

In a way a soft switch to mastery would be interesting: if your raid doesn't have the haste buff, you can use Frost Armor and if you do, you go with Mage Armor. In that sense, I don't think it is exactly bad to have a haste limit. For scaling purposes though, I would prefer to have two secondary stats that are not capped so much that they feel worthless. Hit and crit are capped, so that leaves haste and mastery.

[Deleted]

There's only one raid tier left in this expansion and then the ratings go back to their starting points again at level 95 (and possibly more than that will happen). Blizzard doesn't need to eliminate haste caps - they just need to extend them a bit.

Two ways to work beyond current haste caps come to mind:

a) Allow frost mages to play with a reduced GCD cap (say 0.8 seconds). This will allow instant casts to scale all the way to 87.5% haste and frostbolt up to 150% haste.

b) Haste in excess of some value X also automatically increases your mastery or spell power by some portion of the excess haste. You'll still hit the haste caps, but your spells will automatically start doing more damage.

In a way a soft switch to mastery would be interesting: if your raid doesn't have the haste buff, you can use Frost Armor and if you do, you go with Mage Armor. In that sense, I don't think it is exactly bad to have a haste limit. For scaling purposes though, I would prefer to have two secondary stats that are not capped so much that they feel worthless. Hit and crit are capped, so that leaves haste and mastery.

I think it's more that the legendary meta gem fucked us over. Like... Without it, our haste caps wouldn't be as significant and reachable as they are currently.

[Tiga]

The legendary meta gem is a big DPS increase for Frost. Maybe one reason why it has such high uptime for Frost is that the caps prevent us from getting 100% full benefit from it.

[Kuni Zyrekai]

There's only one raid tier left in this expansion and then the ratings go back to their starting points again at level 95 (and possibly more than that will happen). Blizzard doesn't need to eliminate haste caps - they just need to extend them a bit.

I'm still not entirely sure it'll be a huge issue. Again, we're looking at almost pure red socket gear, so we're losing about a quarter of our gem based haste by default. If Blizz decides against haste jewellery again, we could just end up not going all that far past 15.6k. There's still benefit for it by way of the elemental and the ~65% of non-meta frostbolts, along with the bombs.

I'm just personally hoping for a soft point where we switch.