Changing from fire to frost for pve

[Deleted]

Hi there community,

I've been raiding for a while as fire and I've found fire way to rng for my liking with my current gear, so I decided to go frost.
Did a few LFR and heroics as frost to learn the basics and I have the feeling that my dps is way lower then it otherwise would have been as fire.

I figured theres plenty of mages here so they might be able to give me some tips on my gear/gemming etc, or perhaps my dps is supposed to be low as frost with my current gear.

I find it pretty weird as I've read that frost and fire are pretty much equal pve dps wise.
Is frost supposed to outscale fire perhaps? I'm pretty confused 0,o

Theany

ps* Everything the armory shows is reforged/gemmed for frost to the best of my knowledge
pps* Armory shows me as not being hit capped, but I'm at 15,01 ingame so that must be a bug or something -.-

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Theany/simple

[Ryoushi]

Sims showed fire and frost as near equal, but in practise fire comes ahead by a mile. Reasons for this could be errors in simcraft with alter time/PoM handling, resulting in smaller simmed combusts, or some other bug. People have argued about frost or fire quite some time, but I think the general consensus now is that fire is just better, period.

I swapped (somewhat begrudgingly I might add) from frost to fire, but I do a fair bit more DPS after learning how to play fire properly. If you're really set on playing frost, it's still not the worst spec overall in-game.

Your gear seems to be very fire oriented, not a lot of frost pieces. Until you've swapped some gear around you won't have a whole lot of success even getting close to fire's DPS. A good place to start would be the 483 PvP ring with hit and haste. And I believe that frost gems pure int in red slots, int/haste in yellows and int/hit in blues.
Incanter's Ward should probably be swapped with invocation. IW is great if you're guaranteed to proc it every time, but with the way frost (and evocation) scale with frost, you're probably better off going for Invocation. This also helps with burst at start, as you're guaranteed to have invocation up, and trinkets etc. proccing almost immediately. I'm assuming you're using the haste armor, using pet freeze on CD (can be done mid-cast too!) and make proper use of Alter Time (get 2 FoF procs, Brain Freeze proc, invocation up for 6+ seconds and trinket/tailoring proc for 6+ seconds+ BL if at all possible)

Aside from that I can't find much more at a quick glance. Good luck with frost, if that's what you're set on playing!

[Deleted]

thanks for your quick reply.

yea, I figured that frost most be a bit lower then fire due to gear. But to be fair, most of my pieces have haste on it ^^.

I might go fire again, but frost adds some utility/slows for certain heroic bosses that have adds and whatnot.

I still find it frustrating tho, as with my current gear fire is sooo rng as I'm only around 27% crit or so.

[Duffie]

Long time Mage, but rarely post

To get started i love playing both frost and fire specs for PvE. With my current gear i am able to hit near 30% crit, 12-17% haste and 30%+mastery as fire. When swapping to frost i prefer Mastery> crit cap> haste due to using the 2 piece mage set (+14% to icelance). Im at, as frost, 45% mastery, 24%crit and about the same 12-17% haste.

I use fire for single target sustained dps. With pulling off up to 5 pyros using AoT and inferno blast im able to keep up 90k+ dps at all times. As frost i am able to still pull the 90k dps but i use frost strictly for burst damage fights. Anything with adds or something that needs to die, fast. Elegon for example i go frost to burst protectors and the orbs.

I the end i swap specs so much and can pull near the same numbers i choose whatever i feel like as long as i know that ill pull equal dps in either spec.

For some reason i cant link my armory but look up Duffie on Tichondrius. My a lil gnome mage

wowprogress. com/character/us/tichondrius/Duffie should show dps on bosses and items.

Also i use AskMrRobot for enchats forges and gem. Dont always trust it, some times the forges i pick over the bot generated ones are better.

[Ryoushi]

I feel your pain on the crit issue Also, your haste just seemed a tad low to me. When I was still frost I always hovered between 6k and 7k haste, might be because of that.

I too hate the crit randomness at times. There's some small things to get your fire DPS up a fair bit though. I assume you've read about building combustions and all. What I hadn't read into that (well enough) was that you're best off getting HS + HU, then casting 1 more fireball and fire off your macro with PoM/Alter Time/Pyro. That way you fire your HS Pyro, activate PoM and alter time, if one of the fireball or pyro crits you get another pyro, and if either of those pyros crit you have a huge ignite (Fireball + Pyro + Pyro and if you have the time, + Pyro), at which time you're better off just combusting straight off. I've gone away from addons like combustionhelper and just made the font on crits a lot larger. Common sense = bigger combusts

Also, when you have heating up and you can Inferno Blast you should queue a fireball and queue inferno blast to go at the end of the cast. If Fireball crits you have hot streak AND heating up, at which point you fireball again + hot streak pyro to fish for that extra hot streak. 2 chances at a crit > 1 chance at a crit. At least I think it works that way :x

I know fire is rough in not so good gear, but in my gear I keep up well with people who have way more gear, due to fire being so good when played properly.

[saintminya]

I understand the appeal of frost, though IMO it is far better suited for PvP. If you're concerned about competitive dps i would suggest arcane. They have slow, self heals, and a nice dot in the form of nether tempest. Though of course it is a personal choice, and IMO frost is still better than fire.

[reynoldrraine8]

I wouldn't be surprised, that company is a shambles.

[dennisdkramer]

I understand the appeal of frost, though IMO it is far better suited for PvP. If you're concerned about competitive dps i would suggest arcane. They have slow, self heals, and a nice dot in the form of nether tempest. Though of course it is a personal choice, and IMO frost is still better than fire.

No offense but your comment makes no sense. A spec being pvp viable doesnt make it less pve viable.. Arcane's DPS is not, in practice, competitive on most fights.. they dont have any different self heals than the other specs, all specs have nether tempest, and frost is definitively NOT better than fire. Fire will do more dps, on average, on every raid fight in the current tier that I'm aware of.

I'm perfectly happy with my frost mage - its just an alt anyway - but that's the truth of the matter.