Kuni's Frost Mage PVE Guide

[Deleted]

2. BF-FFB scales with mastery, FoF-IL doesn't. Hence BF-FFB does more damage (even with splitting ice).

Once you correct these two you'll see that the second option pulls ahead.
With that said, you shouldn't count on chaining BF-FFBs, unless you play with frost bomb. But keeping one FoF charge (for that BF) is very beneficial with 2p.

Thanks for the clarification.
However, if you cleave, you need some minimum mastery for BF-FFB to pull ahead (around 40%). Otherwise, the better SP scaling of FoF-IL and higher initial damage will outweigh the mastery.
(1560+1.5SP)*(1+mastery*(1+0.5) - only icicle cleaves) for BF-FFB
(1674+1.6SP)*(1+0.5) for FoF-IL

On a second note, I think SimC needs to be looked at. ST fights are obvious. Cleave-fights should yield higher numbers according to the math (I have 53% mastery).
However, SimC gives DPE for FFB 247151 and for IL 302770.
Single target: (FFB*1.53) 370726 vs 302770 - FFB wins
2-Target cleave: mastery and cleave, FFB*(1+1.5*0.53) and IL*1.5 gives 443636 for FFB and 454155 for IL, which is weird.

[Deleted]

So are we okay now with comparing logs? Again, I had 9 ilvl less than you, we needed my aoe (we had rough time killing him with low alts) and if I go through logs, I really was ahead (fair margin) on most bosses (with 9 ilvl less, 3 weeks ago). But you always come around the corner with fights like klaxxi and garrosh. These are the worst encounter to compare imho.

I don´t know what your problem is. I get the impression that you think, beeing good in my own guild means, that the spec I play is pretty strong. You are the top geared guy in your guild atm. I would like to play frost, but frost is in a terrible state for PvE at the moment. Frost came broken on live servers (our identification spell Ice Lance was about to falling out of rotation!), glyphed Water Elemental was (or is still?) not able to cast on the move. Our secondary scaling is horrible (no clear reforge), our mastery is a real bullsh** compared to other classes, but you going ahead to defend this badly done work? Stacking haste waaaay over GCD - no other class would even think of this, because it would be a huge dps loss, but our spec design is so abnormally bad that we don´t gain significant better from other secondaries, even past instant and hardcast cap.

We are the guys who play this spec, we are the ones who have to say "Blizzard you did a pretty bad job, get your butt over here and fix it!" Every other class/spec will still say "frost is pvp, low, hindering raid, bla bla bla" well designed or not. Arcane too high? Have you recently seen other classes, or just look at the top guilds, there are not many mages into the first kill setups.

[TyralisUH]

The 3 specs are good this tier which is very fun. Tbh, I never thought Frost would be good but it kinda is. I wouldn't say it is in a ''terrible state'' but it might me more viable than people think. I'm not the typical guy who plays frost and says It's a good spec because they beat the other mages in their guild. I've played Fire/Arc most of SoO but Frost looks better than I thought, at least for some fights.

There is a thing I don't get though, just like pete said, why do some of you stack Haste beyond the GCD? I recently switched Frost for Thok's progression. Most guilds don't bring mages but I don't have a choice as I'm raid leading. Anyways, I went full mastery telling myself the pet and icicles's DMG would be good since we can't cast that much. I was very surprised of the results... I'm right behind warlocks. Even on pure single target fights, Frost-Mastery is very good.

So yeah, I don't really get the argument here. Pete is 100% right when saying that playing a spec and beating other mages in your guild doesn't make the spec good or even viable. But still, I think Frost is viable especially if you can get mastery/haste gear. Imo, the best way to go for progression was to give all the Mastery loots to Warlocks and get the crit gear for Fire so we don't lose gear. I still think this is the best way to go as Fire is a good progression spec and the raid probably benefits from it the most (not losing gear that is).

[gallamann]

I would have done heroic Nazgrim as frost for better add control / damage but felt arcane was stronger since the fight has low movement, but after killing it I think I could have done about the same damage with frost since I could have just left my pet hitting the boss during D-stance instead of standing around doing nothing waiting for adds.

Is this correct? I can let my pet attack Naz during Defensive stance and he does not gain rage from that?

- - - Updated - - -

I am not sure Blizzard will care that Frost isn't represented well in the top 1% of guilds, they look at the whole raiding picture not just you folks going back and forth here who are in the top 1% of guilds. What are the bottom 80% of guild raiding frost mages playing, how are they stacking up against the other DPS classes in that 80% and remember they are going to toss the outliers (people doing 10% better or worse than every other frost mage).

I favor Frost at the moment because playing Fire is like playing with molasses on my cast times and playing Arcane shoves me into managing my position much more carefully due to RoP on top of having to pay attention to a damn mana bar.

However, I will probably move to Arcane simply because of the OBSCENE nature of its Mastery. Damn RNG Gods have been shitting upon me, still floating 536 iLvl and wanted to hit 545 or so to go Arcane. Also want to see where 2pc T16 puts Frost... three weeks and counting on that

[Akraen]

So are we okay now with comparing logs? Again, I had 9 ilvl less than you, we needed my aoe (we had rough time killing him with low alts) and if I go through logs, I really was ahead (fair margin) on most bosses (with 9 ilvl less, 3 weeks ago). But you always come around the corner with fights like klaxxi and garrosh. These are the worst encounter to compare imho.

I don´t know what your problem is. I get the impression that you think, beeing good in my own guild means, that the spec I play is pretty strong. You are the top geared guy in your guild atm. I would like to play frost, but frost is in a terrible state for PvE at the moment. Frost came broken on live servers (our identification spell Ice Lance was about to falling out of rotation!), glyphed Water Elemental was (or is still?) not able to cast on the move. Our secondary scaling is horrible (no clear reforge), our mastery is a real bullsh** compared to other classes, but you going ahead to defend this badly done work? Stacking haste waaaay over GCD - no other class would even think of this, because it would be a huge dps loss, but our spec design is so abnormally bad that we don´t gain significant better from other secondaries, even past instant and hardcast cap.

We are the guys who play this spec, we are the ones who have to say "Blizzard you did a pretty bad job, get your butt over here and fix it!" Every other class/spec will still say "frost is pvp, low, hindering raid, bla bla bla" well designed or not. Arcane too high? Have you recently seen other classes, or just look at the top guilds, there are not many mages into the first kill setups.

You want to know what my problem is?

1) Simcraft & the top mages: Math is an incredible tool, but the developer of said math is human. Even in a crowd sourced effort, things are still neglected.
2) Blizzard devs hesitance to address the issues with the frost spec and mage class as a whole.
3) Lhivera's corporate face to our class (he's a lot like Ghostcrawler, denial of problems)
4) Reluctance of people like you, Pete, to admit that frost is good, it just isn't great. It needs work, it could use even more of a buff, but why does frost have to be #1? Then the arcane mages will rightfully be upset. Frost is in a good enough spot right now with virtually no Quality of Life issues. There's benefit to what frost brings to the table.
5) Bombs. Our f'ing bombs. They homogenize the class to the point that we all are at each other's throats. Even if any of you like the bombs, they're the problem. They tear down the walls between our specs.

I've said a hundred times. If you're in the top 50 guilds, maybe you have to min/max, be the right race/spec/professions. But I swear to you, by week 5 when normal guilds are in the first 6-8 heroic bosses, the gear has more than made up the difference between frost and the other specs.

My argument isn't in a vacuum like yours, Pete. Frost mages can play exceedingly well and provide results. They can. This is not Dragon Soul. When you post here that frost is miles behind arcane, you're exaggerating. So here I am, having to jump on the opposite side so that the dozens of mages that PM me asking for help and the hundreds who read but don't post can understand that in their 12/14 guild or 1/14H guild, or flex guild, or LFR group, can go frost. They can play the spec they want. And maybe if you're so passionate about being frost, Pete, you could give up a little progression to play the game how you want? That's the decision I made years ago. I could go troll, spec arcane, and be in a much better guild. But here, I play how I want, and I really enjoy raiding more than I have since 2005.

[Libretto]

Frost is surprisingly decent for progression right now after the buffs, you just have to ignore all this haste stacking nonsense.

[Phair]

Is this correct? I can let my pet attack Naz during Defensive stance and he does not gain rage from that?

Yes, you can. Pet attacks do not trigger the defensive stance rage mechanic. The BM hunters in my guild abused the hell out of this for our kill yesterday.

Frost is surprisingly decent for progression right now after the buffs, you just have to ignore all this haste stacking nonsense.

Yup, I've been playing frost almost exclusively for single target encounters using a very similar build you're using and have been getting very competitive results, though I stop haste at 9522 for the extra LB tick outside of meta procs (Not sure what breakpoint you're going for)

[Bedacles]

Frost is surprisingly decent for progression right now after the buffs, you just have to ignore all this haste stacking nonsense.

What do you suggest for a haste "breakpoint"? I must admit I am a little confused with all the bomb discussions recently and Frost Bomb looking viable....I was set around NT breakpoints before. Do you think going for the 54% (1 sec GCD) is the place to get to before stacking mastery...or are you doing 9762 as someone else suggested, or somewhere in between?

[Erikc]

Long time lurker thought I'd just jump in here. Been trying to find if there's discussion on frost mages atm but meh nothing solid.

I suppose I consider my main spec arcane for the moment but I didn't want to gimp myself so I settled for having arcane stay around the 9762 NT breakpoint so I could switch between the specs. Before the frost buff few days ago I woulda stayed arcane on most fights but just doing some testing on dummies, dungeons, LFR and flex it seems it's actually catching up (more testing needed).

Not sure if this is what the other frost mages have noticed but it seems to be the trend. Obviously I'm not in a hardcore progression guild right now so being able to switch between the 2 specs using the same stats is convenient.

Running into GCD cap wasn't so prominent with my crappier gear last tier but I've caught up with the legendary quest line and even as arcane at that NT haste breakpoint with lust and meta proc I'm still capping :P. So yeah it's fun I have to say finally not having to collect 2 sets of gear and it sure beats fire RNG.

[Akraen]

Frost is surprisingly decent for progression right now after the buffs, you just have to ignore all this haste stacking nonsense.

That's... just ridiculous. I'm clearly just wasting my time.

Any interested mages, feel free to PM me with questions. MMO-C can reap what it sows at this point.

[TyralisUH]

That's... just ridiculous. I'm clearly just wasting my time.

Any interested mages, feel free to PM me with questions. MMO-C can reap what it sows at this point.

What is ridiculous exactly? You're just gonna defend yourself by saying Mastery is ridiculous? With haste stacking, you're only gonna fall below the GCD which is a huge DPS loss. The haste is only good for procs while Mastery is good for burst DMG, heavy movement fights and the more intel you get, the better the mastery scales up.

[Malfecto]

I think he's calling the reference to "haste stacking nonsense" ridiculous. You guys can compare logs all you want, but you can't account for how each of you play unless you actually are in the same raid and are under the same conditions to really compare the two. So...

I was trying to do a simple thought experiment with some rough napkin math. Assume some rounding that we can throw out to lag and make the following assumptions:

600 second fight, 100k frostbolts at a target dummy no bombs, no release of icicles except by those pushed out by being over the 5 count and releasing them all with IL at the end to clean everything up. The values I use below are achievable extremes using the gear I have available to me that can both reach +/-100 SP.

Scenario 1
Mastery - 65%
Haste - 50%

1.3 s cast

462 casts

first 5 frostbolts yield 500k + 5 x 65k icicles stored.

FB 6 and every FB after yields 165k total dmg

That leaves 457 casts less final cast (below) 456 casts.

on cast 462 release 1 FB and remaining icicles for 425k.

total damage is: 500k + 75,240,000 + 425k

76165000 over 600 s - 126942 dps.

Scenario 2
Haste 63%
Mastery 45%

1.2 s cast

500 casts

first 5 frostbolts yield 500k plus 5 x 45k icicles

FB 6 and every FB after yields 145k total dmg

That leaves 495 casts less final cast (below) 494 casts

on cast 500 release 1 FB and remaining icicles for 325k

total damage is 500k + 71,630,000 + 325k


72,455,000 over 600 s - 120758 dps.

Now, this shows a difference between a 20% mastery swing and a 13% haste swing. The question I am going to pose to you guys, is which one benefits the most from raid procs. Assuming both benefit from haste and int, how do we determine which benefits more from what? I know this is an oversimplification, but I'm trying to find a baseline that we can add conditions to for comparison.

Just accounting for the difference in meta procs (based on my last logs from mastery forge and last logs from haste forged over same fight count) of 22% and 35% respectively:

Scenario 1 yields 22% of casts at 1 s

so that's .78 * 462 = 360 casts at 1.3 seconds or 468 s of the fight leaving 132 seconds left at 1 s casts or 132 casts. This brings the new total to 492 casts. 492 casts minus the first 5 and last 1 yields 486 casts at 165k, new total being 82,105,000 over 600 seconds or 136842 dps.

Scenario 2 yields 35% of casts at below/effectively 1 s

So that's .65 * 500 = 325 casts at 1.2 seconds or 390 s of the fight leaving 210 seconds at 1 s casts or 210 casts. This brings the new total to 600 casts. 600 casts minus the first 5 and last 1 yields 594 casts at 145k, new total being 86,955,000 or 144925 dps.

That's just one example, granted in hastes favor, but now its someone elses turn to take this baseline and add something that shows, using same "gear" and available raid procs, where mastery can push ahead of haste.

[Deleted]

You want to know what my problem is?

[...
4) Reluctance of people like you, Pete, to admit that frost is good, it just isn't great. It needs work, it could use even more of a buff, but why does frost have to be #1? Then the arcane mages will rightfully be upset. Frost is in a good enough spot right now with virtually no Quality of Life issues. There's benefit to what frost brings to the table.


I've said a hundred times. If you're in the top 50 guilds, maybe you have to min/max, be the right race/spec/professions. But I swear to you, by week 5 when normal guilds are in the first 6-8 heroic bosses, the gear has more than made up the difference between frost and the other specs.

My argument isn't in a vacuum like yours, Pete. Frost mages can play exceedingly well and provide results. They can. This is not Dragon Soul. When you post here that frost is miles behind arcane, you're exaggerating. So here I am, having to jump on the opposite side so that the dozens of mages that PM me asking for help and the hundreds who read but don't post can understand that in their 12/14 guild or 1/14H guild, or flex guild, or LFR group, can go frost. They can play the spec they want. And maybe if you're so passionate about being frost, Pete, you could give up a little progression to play the game how you want? That's the decision I made years ago. I could go troll, spec arcane, and be in a much better guild. But here, I play how I want, and I really enjoy raiding more than I have since 2005.

Reluctance to what? I´m in a lucky position, that I am the one in our guild who says who has to sit on bench, and who will be in the first kill setup. How do you think a progression works?

#13 in Skada says to #11 "We switch you with another Warlock, we need another few % dps and no, we don´t switch me, because A) I play what I like and love and B) I´m the officer, sorry dude"

Vacuum, really Akraen? Is this even an argument? I played nearly every PTR boss from 10nhc to 25m heroic with both specs, did a lot of testing outside PTR raiding. Hell, I even streamed my tests and started some spontaneous math with Nathyiel (btw thank you so much for your support and a whole night on googledocs and on my stream ) I killed 10 heroic bosses so far and even now, I´m still switching to frost first, look what the spec is capable of and compare! Every fight. What about you?

I got a looot of pm´s every day and I still answer questions about frost, the best possible reforge and so on. I post on our forums, still do tests and report bugs. I applied as frost mage in my current guild. They laughed the first time I told them that I wanted to progress with frost and now I´m one of their officers.

310k dps on heroic Malkorok with frost? Well, not really that bad, but after checking logs the result was nearly 15% wasted on Adds. If you kill a boss a few seconds before enrage, things like that become important. I switch back to Arcane next week, because Arcane does 350k dps and only 5% on Adds. This is needed, because next week we have to switch in the classes with not that much dps, but they need the weapon here. You say you play in your guild because you love the frost spec and this is why you avoid heroic progression guilds? I always play for the challenge!. At the beginning of ToT my goal was to kill as much bosses as they let me and try to stay into the setup. After the first boss my goal was to become the best mage in the guild - with frost.

I loved frost from the beginning. I always was the guy with nearly #1 on the target (brofisting Deep Freeze). Not always the guy with #1 overall damage but I always "did the job". Now with Icicles and cleave and autocleave and what not, the specs evolves a little bit to fire. I absolutely dislike it.

You have good gear for a guy without one heroic kill, just wait a few weeks and wipe a few times on things that has to be killed quickly in heroics. Frost is a little bit closer to fire and arcane than at the end of ToT, but the gap is still rising again. Frost was on par with the other specs at the beginning of ToT progress, now frost starts a little bit behind and the other two specs scale pretty well. Mages are not the top specs anymore and on my level, I simply cannot afford to play frost.

By the way, I always said frost is okay for normal mode and slow heroic progression (outgear), but not on my level (and I don´t play on top level). I do not want to discuss this all day. Boxed is an frost lover (lol) like me and he came to the same conclusion like me. Our guilds are head to head and I think he knows what I´m talking about.

[Libretto]

What do you suggest for a haste "breakpoint"? I must admit I am a little confused with all the bomb discussions recently and Frost Bomb looking viable....I was set around NT breakpoints before. Do you think going for the 54% (1 sec GCD) is the place to get to before stacking mastery...or are you doing 9762 as someone else suggested, or somewhere in between?

I've been playing at 9762, the NT breakpoint. Mostly laziness not wanting to reforge/gem whenever we get to a boss I want to use NT on like Protectors, Galakras, Norushen (in its new incarnation) or Spoils.

That's... just ridiculous. I'm clearly just wasting my time.

Any interested mages, feel free to PM me with questions. MMO-C can reap what it sows at this point.

I realize you love haste. If it works for you clearing normal modes or heroic modes "months behind" or whatnot, that's fine. You have some great normal mode parses. Unfortunately, I have played both haste and mastery stacking, and for heroic modes this tier mastery is the better option. A big reason you want to spam stack haste is being able to put NT on multiple targets, but there's only four fights where this is really a viable option: Protectors, Norushen (after the hotfixes), Galakras and Spoils. All but Protectors are better played as arcane IMO. Certainly, as frost on a multi-target fight, NT makes up a decent portion of your damage. However, as I have said repeatedly in the past, going below GCD is the most incredibly huge problem the spec has, and you're below GCD whenever the meta procs or during lust, a good 40% of a fight. LB's GCD is always 1 second regardless of your haste. In addition, haste was benefitting RPPM trinkets last patch - this patch it is not. So exactly what is haste giving us now that it wasn't last patch?

You've spent a lot of time talking about how amazing haste is, and last patch that was (somewhat) true due to RPPM and a cap on available gear. This patch, RPPM is no longer buffing haste scaling, and way more powerful gear is available. This patch has more "stand and burn" fights. The fights this patch involve either one target for all (juggernaut) or most (blackfuse) of the fight, or one target with mostly irrelevant adjacent mobs to pad on (paragons), or one target with very short lived adds (shamans, thok, malkorok, immerseus). Frost does well on these fights, but arcane does just as well if not better for some of them. Frost's advantage, frankly, is that it is considerably easier to play than arcane, and is much less punishing for mistakes on positioning. I played our first shamans and juggernaut as frost because as arcane, a single positioning mistake would have dropped my DPS on the fight by 15-20K, whereas with frost I lost almost nothing having to reposition. For rekills I'll be more likely to play arcane. For progression on Malkorok, Spoils, Thok etc, I'll be arcane.

[omgwtfimcow]

Hello everyone

Sorry for my bad english

I am sure this is asked many times. What is the haste cap for frost mages atm? I reforge my gear via Ask Mr. Robot and stackin haste.

With full raid buffs I have %45 haste %50 mastery and %21 crit. Any suggestions about stats? Thnx

[Xomniuri]

The haste cap without the new tier set bonus' is 50% raid buffed, with new tier set bonus' the question becomes iffy
Akraen goes flat out haste to get more FFB procs
Citrique on the other hand stops stacking haste after the 9762 NT break point then stacks mastery

You'll have to make you own choice

p.s. IMO all mage specs are broken, arcane tied to the ground, fire too reliant on crit gear and frost capping out and scaling like a piece of shit

p.p.s. I like Akraen am a die hard frost fan, but i won't hold my guild back by doing sub par dps cause i like to play a certain spec over another, after all i'm a mage, they revamped cata arcane and made horrible now they've done it to frost, just have to hope mages get an entire rewrite like warlocks did in 6.0

Bring back
Cata Arcane
MoP Frost
BC Fire

[Deleted]

According to SimC haste/mastery reforge plots (and my gear, 2p16 and 2p15) the optimal value for haste is around 13500 with a dps range of about 600 for +-1500 haste for LB. For NT, the optimal value is a little bit higher, at 14501 with a plateau of dps difference of about 300 for up to 1200 haste less, due to the additional tick under Meta/Lust. LB leads with about 280k vs 275k.
On multi-target fights (i.e. adds), haste is way stronger. I usually stick to the optimal values for ST, but then again, we are not a hardcore guild and are still doing normal modes, so ymmv.
In the end, IF you trust SimC, load your char and do the plots, I found it quite dependent on the gear I have, especially the set boni.

[Deleted]

@citriqe: While I do partially see your point, I still think it's a bit silly the way you state it. Basically, Akraen is one of the very few people here who consistently try to improve on their frost-specc-play, and is nice enough to share it with him. The whole idea of using Frost Bomb for example would have been silly to me a few days ago, but makes quite a bit of sense now. So dismissing his ideas out of hand because you have different experiences is not only a bit disrespectful, its also not at all helping.

The level of progression is partially relevant to the discussion of "Frost or Arcane", and no one here is likely arguing that you should stick Frost if you're a progress guild working on a tight enrage timer. But that is entirely beside the point. This is the Frost-thread, and we need not derail it into that boring old discussion. The issue here is: How do I BEST play Frost (and once we figure that out, maybe one can consider a bit better how it performs in comparison to the other speccs).
Now, Pete has been making a lot of very solid statements on the issue, and it is mostly due to his statements that I decided to go Arcane. But if I were to play Frost again, which I very well might want to do soon, I would still carefully consider Akraens position on the issue.

Now, I'm not a big fan of the school of thought that goes "it works for me so it's obviously the best". I understand Akraens frustrations, but I've been saying for well over a patchcycle now that we are simply lacking the math to prove any statweights we are considering at the moment, or even settle the issue of which bomb to use when. Actually, I do trust simcraft enough for straight single-target to accept the notion that mastery has become a more important stat to us, and I believe Akraen is still undervalueing it a bit. But that is my personal opinion, not a statement of fact. And it is the same for you, critiqe, because quite frankly, you never established any source but your own experience for your claim that haste-stacking is "nonsense". That is simply not enough.

What we need to do is not fight about how good Frost is, compare logs of decidedly different kills/mages, or hate on each others guilds because they have less prgoress. What we need to do - in this thread dedicated to playing Frost well!- is find out how to play Frost well, in this very content. We still have vastly different schools of thought competing, a multitude of different encounters to consider, and a sheer endless combination of gear, trinkets etc. to consider. Heck, I'm not even sure if any mage actually already has the 4pc and can give a confirmation on it's damage for Frost

So maybe, just maybe, bury the hatchet for a while and stop blaming each other. I'm still confused about Frost, and it would be nice if we could actually clear up that confusion and not go to each others throats

[Erestron]

Let me throw in a little question: If our problem is the bordered scaling of our secondarys, why not stack the one stat that has no caps and that all of our casts scale with? Why not stack Int and get the highest possible haste-breakpoint "passively" ? Has somebody tested this, yet? And if so, are the outcomings so bad?

[Mastamage]

Back on topic: I've been at 61% haste for this past raid lockout; I'll be doing a haste to 53.84% > mastery build for a flex run tonight to give it a test. I should at 57% mastery raid buffed. I'm hoping to get some results out of it to compare to the previous flex runs of my haste build.