Frost mage 1 shot @ 110

[Ehrenpanzer]

Buffing the damage of something they nerfed to the ground and is currently bugged. So weird! Good logic!

They identified it literally months ago and only children think this will exist in live.

I;d like to believe that... I really would...... but then I remember ret pallies in Wrath.. DeathKnights for the first 6 or so months...druid/warrior combo at various intervals..I could go on and on and on

[Lulbalance]

So again; You think anyone with that setup is always going to be able to pull that off? That there won't be any stuns, roots, snares, interrupts or any other alterations to their rotation based off the events going on in the match, or whether or not their crit chance will allow them to achieve that result?

Again; It's RNG & Conditions. If you think every Frost Mage can just do this by following your simple "guide" then you're being a fool.

Any 1700 mage can string this together, you sound iffy.

- - - Updated - - -

Frost mage allowed to hard cast a 3 second spell while stationary in a 3 vs 3 arena.

Git gud.

Git gud at reading the talents. We have a couple abilities that make us immune to interrupts / knock backs and silences and stuns on short cds..so you have 2 outs really. That's kinda my point, there is no real setup and that's not gud.

- - - Updated - - -

It's dealing the full PvE damage, so it's probably missing the pvp multiplier. Imagine it doing 25% only in PvP.

This is actually useful info, didn't know that.. if that's true = good!

In any event.. even if it's not true; will likely get nerfed soon due to attention, so that's a plus. Hopefully it comes with a single shatter buff.

[xhisors]

Git gud at reading the talents. We have a couple abilities that make us immune to interrupts / knock backs and silences and stuns on short cds..so you have 2 outs really. That's kinda my point, there is no real setup and that's not gud.

inb4 trinketing frost nova to get behind a pillar. /pokerface

[n0cks]

Git gud at reading the talents. We have a couple abilities that make us immune to interrupts / knock backs and silences and stuns on short cds..so you have 2 outs really. That's kinda my point, there is no real setup and that's not gud.

Emmm, maybe I'm wrong, or there's something I'm missing, but if you're referring to Ice Form, it just makes us immune to knockback and stuns, not interrupts.
Do we have anything else?

Anyway, the funny thing is that if you get interrupted during Glacial Spike, you just cast off a Polymorph while locked on Frost school and then come back with Glacial Spike when you're not locked anymore... it's a win/win situation (if you don't die while trying to do so).

[Charge me Doctor]

Because Blizzard has a history of fixing every single bug that has been pointed out during alpha/beta before it hits live servers.. Oh wait not the case.

Oh my god you don't even know what bugs on beta do exist then, if you think that crap that goes live is actual bugs.

Believe me or not, but non-interractible NPCs, mobs that cast one-shotting spells, phasing issues and other stuff is way more important that glacial spike doing full damage in pvp instances instead of what, quarter?

[Hottage]

Git gud at reading the talents. We have a couple abilities that make us immune to interrupts / knock backs and silences and stuns on short cds..so you have 2 outs really. That's kinda my point, there is no real setup and that's not gud.

You don't necessarily have to lock out a spell school to prevent the cast, just putting enough pressure on the mage to force him to avoid is enough.

As has also been mentioned, for this setup to work he's had to basically do nothing for the first 3 min of the arena besides Ice Lance to be able to charge up that shot.

This means that first 3 min of the match the other team was playing 3 vs 2 and still failed to score a kill.

It was fun to see the big numbers on screen, but his team would have won easier if he'd just focused on the fight instead of charging up his epeen cannon.

[Seneca]

You don't necessarily have to lock out a spell school to prevent the cast, just putting enough pressure on the mage to force him to avoid is enough.

As has also been mentioned, for this setup to work he's had to basically do nothing for the first 3 min of the arena besides Ice Lance to be able to charge up that shot.

This means that first 3 min of the match the other team was playing 3 vs 2 and still failed to score a kill.

It was fun to see the big numbers on screen, but his team would have won easier if he'd just focused on the fight instead of charging up his epeen cannon.

Where did this "3 min required" come out from? Genuinely interested.

Also, why are we talking about the very, very best possible scenario? I mean, if GS hits for 1.5x the total health of a player at the very best, why can't a frost mage simply use GS when not all stars align and hit for, let's say "just" 70-80% of a healthbar?


Btw, I would prefer a setup where frost mages are always good rather than being one trick ponies. I say, nerf what is OP/unhealthy (both for the player and/or the victim), buff what is UP.

Emmm, maybe I'm wrong, or there's something I'm missing, but if you're referring to Ice Form, it just makes us immune to knockback and stuns, not interrupts.
Do we have anything else?

Burning Determination may grant a 8 sec interrupt immunity http://www.wowhead.com/spell=198063/...-determination

So basically you can spam Polymorph endlessly, if the enemy team interrupts you, you are then immune to interrupts for 8 sec, on top of what Ice Form already gives (stun and knockback immunity). Said that, you can still be silenced (garrote, strangulate, solar beam, etc.), disoriented (blind, fear, cyclone, etc.) and incapacitated (polymorph, sap, mind control, etc.).

(You can also be rooted, but it should not make any difference, generally speaking).

[Hottage]

Where did this "3 min required" come out from? Genuinely interested.

This post explains the setup:

Since I have tested this on beta myself , I will explain a little bit of what happened before that 2 mil dmg since people seem to believe frost can chug 2 million dmg whenever they want.

As some people stated above iceform , deep shatter and glacial spike are at work here and as you can see he has no pet so he is running lonely winter with ice nova as a reliable ranged freeze tool , ice nova has a 25 sec cd so most of the time in iceform he's able to pull one 1 reliable combo of frostbolt ->icenova -> icelance every 45 secs.

Since Iceform is dispellable , you can expect it to be removed almost instantly in higher lvls of competitive play , so 1 reliable combo is the most optimal usage.

And as you can see glacial spike stores icicles and combines them, that includes empowered icicles from the superfrostbolt every 45 secs.

What this means is that this mage in the vid has done 5 superfrostbolts in order to get that glacial spike dmg, 5 x 45 secs =3.75 mins of him not able to use any frostbolt outside the empowered ones to get the max number of dmg on that glacial spike.

If you look at the timer in the video ( which most of you didn't notice ) it shows he's been in that arena for a good 6+ mins and since that part is cutoff it is mostly due to erase the fact that he's been running around doing icelances at best during iceform downtimes, meaning non existent dmg.

Something that will never happen against good players, ever.

Frost mages did get nerfed, glacial spike cheese is the only broken damage ability left for mages, and that needs a good few mins to set up while crippling your overall damage.

[Deleted]

You don't necessarily have to lock out a spell school to prevent the cast, just putting enough pressure on the mage to force him to avoid is enough.

As has also been mentioned, for this setup to work he's had to basically do nothing for the first 3 min of the arena besides Ice Lance to be able to charge up that shot.

This means that first 3 min of the match the other team was playing 3 vs 2 and still failed to score a kill.

It was fun to see the big numbers on screen, but his team would have won easier if he'd just focused on the fight instead of charging up his epeen cannon.

I keep reading your 'amazing' PVP advice, it literally makes no sense in an actual arena scenario, I could be wrong here and you may be this amazing player and I apologise if that is the case, but have you ever got your 1500 achievement?

EDIT:
Just checked, you have only reached 2k arena achievement, what makes it worse is that it was in 2v2. Confirmed you have no clue what your talking about

[Hottage]

I keep reading your 'amazing' PVP advice, it literally makes no sense in an actual arena scenario, I could be wrong here and you may be this amazing player and I apologise if that is the case, but have you ever got your 1500 achievement?

EDIT:
Just checked, you have only reached 2k arena achievement, what makes it worse is that it was in 2v2. Confirmed you have no clue what your talking about

I like how you first mocked me assuming I hadn't got 1500 rating, then change to mock me for only getting 2000 rating.

You are correct, I haven't bothered with competitive arena for a long time (because I can't stand how flavor of the month it is), and that means I don't know how to play?

That's an interestingly narrow-minded assessment.

[Deleted]

Eddit grammar.

I mean, let's pretend for a moment that it is 100% RNG & Conditions. Would, being oneshot all of a sudden, make it any more healthy/balanced?

That's the point, it doesn't matter if you have to setup something, if you have a 0.1% chance everytime you join an arena to kill your enemies, or whatever.

Being hit for 1.5 times your total health goes beyond any possible acceptable form of balance.

A spec can be competitive almost regardless of mechanics. But the mechanics can be setup that it results in unhealthy gameplay for it to be competitive.

Frost has a low sustain and is very susceptible to interrupts. To make up for it, it has additional roots ,slows and burst.
On itself this can be an interesting aspect as it requires setup and ads diversity (less homogeny )

The problem is too many melee have ridiculous uptime and counters to roots, there are only 2 melee SPECS that stand out of being normal/weak on this department.
With the high uptime of melee the only way for frost to be balanced is to have ridiculous spike DMG. It's really the melee uptime and the additional cc against casters that's feeding further unhealthy gameplay.

Fire is another way to handle the melee uptime. It ideally wants to cast fireball as well but it has the options to just purely go with instant spells for a while and wait until their charged back up. Again I'm fine with outliers, Beasthunters are similar......So I’m not saying fire mages shouldn't be this way.
It's just ridiculous that ranged specs need to be extreme in one department in order to be strong in pvp:
- Affliction lock, instant dots+ insane healing
- Beast hunters Insane Mobile dmg (uninterruptle by kicks)
- Fire Mage Insane Mobile dmg (uninterruptle by kicks)
- Frost Mage insane burst (still not sure if it will be a strong spec but that is what's needed to become this)

If this is a problem melee uptime has to be addressed as well.

Why should I put 10x more efforts to counter a frost mage oneshot burst compared to, let's say, an arcane mage? (which can just be randomly tunned/interrupted 1 time every 2 min, when he activates all his CDs?).

I agree with the idea that the overall skill requirement should be fairly spread with some outlier specs as exceptions.
But do you think melee is harder than casters? What I see melee’s tactic is keep charging and zerging, using it's mobility abilities are natural.
The frost mage needs to be able to get around all the melee mobility and interrupt. And it's only when the frostmage/ caster reached a specific skill lvl it forces the melee to be smarter with its mobility. Dispell is another strong disrupter for casters, further increasing melee effectiveness.

[Sorshen]

This shit is still hitting 1.5m. This is on the MoP warrior 5stack TfB level of epicness.

[Deleted]

Since some one commented about it.
I wouldn't put too much faith in the pvp talents being great ways to tune things. Only the last 2 branches are spec dependant and mechanicly they don't really alter them.
Tweaking them might also mean making certain talentsetups too weak.

Most of blizzards balancing will be done with the predetermined stats a spec has going into pvp.

The only hope is because they've so much changes they are expecting balance to not be as great and know they have to do bigger changes during expansion despite their past phylosphy.

PS: I'm not saying 1.5million dmg with a long setup is healthy if it will be a commonely used strategy.

[Deleted]

I like how you first mocked me assuming I hadn't got 1500 rating, then change to mock me for only getting 2000 rating.

You are correct, I haven't bothered with competitive arena for a long time (because I can't stand how flavor of the month it is), and that means I don't know how to play?

That's an interestingly narrow-minded assessment.

If I was that bothered about asking about 1500 I would have changed that in the edit?

'I haven't bothered with competitive arena for a long time' This proves you have no clue about current arena.

'because I can't stand how flavor of the month it is' This just proves that you have no clue because it is not flavour of the month, gladiator can be achieved with literally any setup, rank 1 is a little different, which is a tiny micro fraction of the pvp community anyway.

'and that means I don't know how to play?' You may know how to play if it was a few years ago or whenever you last played, but the game changes all the time and you have to adapt to it, so at the current moment as you have not done any arena as of late, your knowledge of the game in terms of arena pvp will be very limited.

That last quote is backed up by the comments you were saying about PVP, makes 0 sense, in some cases your statements made 0 sense for any point in time in the history of arena.

[Seneca]

This post explains the setup:

Ok, I've already read that, but why can I mage only cast 1 "superfrostbolt" during Ice Form? Because Ice Form gets dispelled?

so most of the time in iceform he's able to pull one 1 reliable combo of frostbolt ->icenova -> icelance every 45 secs.

"Most of the time" seems quite arbitrary.

Since Iceform is dispellable , you can expect it to be removed almost instantly in higher lvls of competitive play , so 1 reliable combo is the most optimal usage.

Hunters and DKs lost their purge. Not all enemy teams will have a purge effect and let's pretend the fact that, for whatever reason, you are never able to CC the "purger" before going for Ice Form.

Moreover, why are we still talking about the case in which all stars align, when simply killing your enemy is more important than going for a GS which hits for 1.5x/2x of a player total health?

But do you think melee is harder than casters?

No, I think that they are more braindead than ever, but in a ideal game, it's the braindead specs which should get healthy, not the contrary.

[Hottage]

'because I can't stand how flavor of the month it is' This just proves that you have no clue because it is not flavour of the month, gladiator can be achieved with literally any setup, rank 1 is a little different, which is a tiny micro fraction of the pvp community anyway.

Sure any class / setup can work and there are a few Retribution paladins at very high rating. Those players are far better than I ever will be at arena PvP, I'm not ashamed to admit that.

However you cannot deny that there are certain classes and setups that have (and continue to be) considerably easier to rank up in, some classes / specs being significantly more desired for multiple seasons / expansions.

Point in case: the representation of Retribution paladins (the spec I enjoy playing the most, since classic) at high ratings (> 2200) has been abysmally low for the entire of Warlords and majority of Mist's of Pandaria, because playing other classes is simply easier.

Given the choice between re-rolling to participate in arena - or not participate - I choose not to participate, as I want to PvP on the character I enjoy playing.

Does that mean I don't understand how arena works and the mechanics at play? Certainly not.

[Deleted]

Sure any class / setup can work and there are a few Retribution paladins at very high rating. Those players are far better than I ever will be at arena PvP, I'm not ashamed to admit that.

However you cannot deny that there are certain classes and setups that have (and continue to be) considerably easier to rank up in, some classes / specs being significantly more desired for multiple seasons / expansions.

Point in case: the representation of Retribution paladins (the spec I enjoy playing the most, since classic) at high ratings (> 2200) has been abysmally low for the entire of Warlords and majority of Mist's of Pandaria, because playing other classes is simply easier.

Given the choice between re-rolling to participate in arena - or not participate - I choose not to participate, as I want to PvP on the character I enjoy playing.

Does that mean I don't understand how arena works and the mechanics at play? Certainly not.

I can see I have touched a sensitive subject so I will leave it here, you should have just played ret hunter shaman, really no problem getting safe glad with that comp, but its too late now, I guess we shall wait and see what Legion has to offer.

[wholol]

Ok, I've already read that, but why can I mage only cast 1 "superfrostbolt" during Ice Form? Because Ice Form gets dispelled?



"Most of the time" seems quite arbitrary.



Hunters and DKs lost their purge. Not all enemy teams will have a purge effect and let's pretend the fact that, for whatever reason, you are never able to CC the "purger" before going for Ice Form.

Moreover, why are we still talking about the case in which all stars align, when simply killing your enemy is more important than going for a GS which hits for 1.5x/2x of a player total health?



No, I think that they are more braindead than ever, but in a ideal game, it's the braindead specs which should get healthy, not the contrary.

Deep shatter requires the target to be frozen, since playing with lonely winter means you have no pet nova your only ranged freeze is ice nova,of course unless you want to save your nova(s) for nuke phase instead of peels, you basically want to kite melee with just blink as frost ? you know mages are squishy enough as it is.

Purges might be gone but you can expect enhancement shamans in a lot of melee cleaves, but let's say in an ideal scenario where you can pop iceform -> FB -> ice nova -> FB ->nova->FB->nova-> icelance against absolutely oblivious players then yes you can most likely shorten that nuke phase to 2 iceform dumps.

One more thing I would like to mention, any usage of freedom granting abilities once they see the mage use iceform renders this build absolutely useless.
And I mean proper timing of freedom, like at the end of the superfrostbolt cast where the icenova is soon to follow, not only would it waste icenovas cd it would also cripple that burst phase by forcing the mage to have to spellsteal in which case follow up CC and/or purge will end any attempt at a kill window.

What this means is that unless frost comes up with another viable build for 3s it will not be competitive enough with the meta at 110, most likely fire will be the go to spec.

[Sin Cara]

It's nerfed now, so no reason to cry.

[Charge me Doctor]

Ok, I've already read that, but why can I mage only cast 1 "superfrostbolt" during Ice Form? Because Ice Form gets dispelled?



"Most of the time" seems quite arbitrary.



Hunters and DKs lost their purge. Not all enemy teams will have a purge effect and let's pretend the fact that, for whatever reason, you are never able to CC the "purger" before going for Ice Form.

Moreover, why are we still talking about the case in which all stars align, when simply killing your enemy is more important than going for a GS which hits for 1.5x/2x of a player total health?



No, I think that they are more braindead than ever, but in a ideal game, it's the braindead specs which should get healthy, not the contrary.

two out of five healing specs can dispel ice form without any problem. Also couple of DD specs can do that too. Dispels are not something rare.
Realistically if you get more than one deep shatter frostbolt without a pet - you won a lottery.

This guy took an opportunity to run around and stack damage for huge glacial spike and succeeded. It was only possible in a already won match (because, effectively, it was 2v3 match, mage can't afford to do anything besides ice lancing outside of ice form) or in a staged match.

Sure, he could get more deep shatter frostbolts into enemy in a single ice form by using it after CSing nature school of a shaman to be protected from purge or whatever, but a hit like this will require you to dump at least two ice forms

- - - Updated - - -

What this means is that unless frost comes up with another viable build for 3s it will not be competitive enough with the meta at 110, most likely fire will be the go to spec.

That saddens me deeply. I enjoy playing fire mage in PvP, but i hate playing fire mage vs fire mage. It's just too boring