About Frost Mages (NOT a whine thread)

[Deleted]

So, I previously returned from a long, long break from WoW, to be more exact, I pretty much completely skipped Wotlk content aside from leveling few chars fron 70 to 80 after the launch and now I decided to come back and see how things are with the new expansion. The first thing I did in Cata was to lvl two of my chars, a warrior and a mage to the new lvl cap, 85.

Now the thing is, for the past few weeks when I've been reading the official forums every now and then, there are whine threads about frost mage OPness pretty much everywhere I look. People seem to think that you can just lvl a frost mage to 85, go to arena, bg, tol barad or wherever in quest greens and easily melt the faces of other players, no matter how badly they outgear you.. so, erm, where does this come from?

I know, I just recently started playing again and might have lost the tiniest bits of my so called skills during my break, or then I might just be getting old, but I surely as hell am not able to pull things like that off in PvP situations in my quest/dungeon blue gear. I've had a few duels as well as 1vs1 situations in BGs against players who have slightly better gear obtained via PvE, but still zero resilience like myself, and it's not like I can just backpeddle and spam icelance on the occasional freezes to take them down if they've got any idea how to play their class, I've actually lost many of those situations even I was supposedly using my abilities to the fullest (CDs aren't always there though).

Of course, things change with better gear and such and it is only stupid to go in capped BG in quest blues and expect to own everyone (I didn't expect, nor own), but there are so many people claiming that even the most half-assed, undergeared backpeddlers can win anyone just by rolling a frost mage, I'm just very confused because of this, I mean, are there really that good mages out there or is everyone just exaggerating this stuff?

And now you're probably thinking "hah if u not pwn wid ur frostmage then u just sux l2p nab", which very well might be true, no denying that, but I do have to mention that I used to (USED TO) be a rather skilled PvP mage during vanilla-tbc era and I did put a lot of dedication to the class, so I still do have the basic skills of a mage, in stead of being some keyboard turner.

[berenzen]

The primary complaint is that frost mages have a bunch of control, if they can get a deep freeze off on you while your trinket is down, they'll hit you for maybe 30-35k , if you have no resilience, closer to 35-40k.

Yeah, being a solid frost mage doesn't take a lot of skill, but the curve is steep, but like all other classes, you won't win by being half-assed. As for all the complaining, most of it comes from people running into a few better than average frost mages, then blowing it all out of proportion.

[caninepawprints]

Frost Mages are the only class I don't like to fight in battlegrounds. I will actually go out of my way to avoid an encounter with one. If I do try to tangle with one, I lose almost every time. Their ability to kite me around is phenomenal and I stand little chance.

Doesn't mean I want Blizzard to nerf them, though. I have a Frost Mage. She's level 82 because I haven't been paying much attention to her while I'm working on other classes. She will reach level 85 soon enough, and when she does, I don't want my favorite spec to be nerf'd.

[Hotfish]

Good ice lance spamming is not brainless, simple spamming. GOOD ice lance spamming requires setting up and a bit of planning into the execution of the spam. The object of the Frost game is to ice lance whenever the target is frozen, or with fingers of frost. So, you maximize ice lance's damage by freezing, then immediately comboing with ice lance. Nova -> Ice Lance. Cone of Cold -> Ice lance. Pet Freeze -> Ice Lance, Deep Freeze -> Ice lance times 3. Throw out a Frostfire Orb -> Ice lance spam for 10 seconds.

You never, ever use a naked ice lance. Naked, meaning the absence of an amplification from freeze or fingers of frost.

So, to the opponents of frost mages, they perceive the frost mage just spamming ice lance mindlessly. In reality, however, that frost mage is probably taking a good bit of effort setting up his ice lances to almost always be amplified with freezes and fingers of frost.

[Deleted]

Frost is bad because of it's mastery being in family of % increasers.
Just have a look, proc-a-strike masteries scales with all your gear, that's true - however if you proc extra strike/shot from powerful attack, it's still same as if you proc it from basic attack - that kind of mastery is easy to balance as it usualy involves no other abilities.
On other side badly designed masteries as fury/feral/frost and others do have - increasing effectivness of everything or something are based on already existing abilities in addition to scaling from gear. That means if there's already an effective ability, such as raging blow or rip, it'll be scaled even further with mastery, while it won't reflect on weaker abilities that much - which is usualy inflating numbers provided by that mastery and making strong abilities extremly bursty.
If your frost spells had a high chance to launch extra waterbolt or something, you'd probably want to spam lance no matter of situation, however they could've just make that extra attack effective at a situation ( say debuff stacked by frostbolt or something ) and it'd work.
I don't quite understand why they changed mastery they gave frost at first preview anyway, currently it's one of few masteries that do quite little for PvE while having catasthropic impact on PvP.
If frost mastery was different you'd not take 30-40% of your hp in a deep freeze, and maybe mages would be given a chance to fight back targets they cannot freeze.

[Swizzle]

Frost is bad because of it's mastery being in family of % increasers.
Just have a look, proc-a-strike masteries scales with all your gear, that's true - however if you proc extra strike/shot from powerful attack, it's still same as if you proc it from basic attack - that kind of mastery is easy to balance as it usualy involves no other abilities.
On other side badly designed masteries as fury/feral/frost and others do have - increasing effectivness of everything or something are based on already existing abilities in addition to scaling from gear. That means if there's already an effective ability, such as raging blow or rip, it'll be scaled even further with mastery, while it won't reflect on weaker abilities that much - which is usualy inflating numbers provided by that mastery and making strong abilities extremly bursty.
If your frost spells had a high chance to launch extra waterbolt or something, you'd probably want to spam lance no matter of situation, however they could've just make that extra attack effective at a situation ( say debuff stacked by frostbolt or something ) and it'd work.
I don't quite understand why they changed mastery they gave frost at first preview anyway, currently it's one of few masteries that do quite little for PvE while having catasthropic impact on PvP.
If frost mastery was different you'd not take 30-40% of your hp in a deep freeze, and maybe mages would be given a chance to fight back targets they cannot freeze.

Actually...this is a pretty valid inference on why Frost is strong. The only down side to the argument is that Frost Mages have little to no Mastery at the current level since crit stacking is far more important. Even with Mastery factored in, Ice Lance does less to frozen targets than it did in the past. With Mastery, it does between 220-240% increased damage to a frozen target compared to the 300% it used to do.