Frost mage gameplay

[Norrinir]

We've seen a lot of numbers tuning happen to Frost, but I've been wondering what are other frost mages' problems with the gameplay - be it useless spells, rotation, talents, etc. Feel free to add your own opinions, agree or disagree with me.

There's a TL;DR at the bottom of this post.

Right now, I think the biggest problems that actively make the rotation less enjoyable are Flurry and Water Jet.

Water Jet

Water Jet is an awkward spell, the main problem comes from the fact that WJ has no travel time, while Frostbolt has and is rather slow. You have to adjust for distance to target, your target's hitbox (using WJ on bosses the size of Kromog is especially annoying) and your haste. While Icy Veins and Time Warp are up, it's nearly impossible to get 2 FoF charges out of WJ unless you're standing in melee range - Frostbolt can travel for up to ~1.5 sec while WJ lasts 1.7 sec.

Adding travel time to Water Jet doesn't really solve anything, it just moves the problem into pet micromanagement (you have to adjust for pet position instead). Instead, I think Water Jet should last 50% longer and only generate up to 2 FoF charges (to allow for more room for error).

Also, for some reason Water Jet is not affected by Rune of Power and Incanter's Flow while Waterbolt is.

Flurry

Flurry also exposes some problems related to travel time. Currently, if you have less than roughly 3000 haste, Flurry into Ice Lance stops working at max range and the less haste you have, the smaller the distance from which it works. Flurry into Ice Lance should just work on all gear levels.

The other problem is the Flurry combo (Frostbolt -> Flurry -> Ice Lance). For talent setups that seek to abuse Chain Reaction the combo can add around 10% extra crit to Frostbolt which in turn leads to about 5% overall DPS increase. Now, I don't have a problem with the combo itself (it's actually fairly interesting interaction), the actual problem is that you need to stand far enough for it to work.

Either the combo should be broken (doesn't work at any range/is DPS negative) or made consistent (works at all/most ranges). Losing up to 5% of your DPS because you stood slightly too close or the encounter didn't allow you to stand far from the boss is just silly.

Those are two main problems for me, there are other smaller problems or wishes that I think would lead to better gameplay.

Baseline AoE

Baseline AoE is just bad. We need to pick up every possible AoE talent to fix it. Blizzard cannot really be buffed much more because then it will just creep into ST rotation (which should be reserved for Arctic Gale).

However, Frozen Orb does not have such constraints. Blizzard could once again reduce the remaining CD of Frozen Orb upon dealing damage and Frozen Orb could do more damage (to feel more like an actual cooldown). This not only fixes baseline AoE damage (and makes Orbital Strike trait not completely worthless), but also leads to more engaging gameplay.

To keep Blizzard from ST rotation, the passive could be restricted to Blizzard hitting 2 or more targets or maybe just make the reduction work for each target hit and tune the numbers accordingly.

Boring spells

There are also some spells that are useless or don't feel like a cooldown at all. Frozen Orb has already been mentioned above. Ebonbolt is basically the same thing, except it doesn't have the niche of being also AoE spell. Ebonbolt really needs something unique to differentiate it from Frozen Orb.

Cone of Cold is another spell I miss a lot. The slow is sometimes useful, but right now, it's barely worth a keybind. I think Cone of Cold could be used to make AoE more engaging, either some interaction with Blizzard/Frozen Orb or just flat damage buff (150-200% sp coefficient should make sure it's worth using but also isn't too strong to force yet another mage spec into melee range to do AoE).

Chain Reaction

Other minor issues relating to artifact and talents. Chain Reaction is too strong. This wouldn't necessarily a bad thing, but the trigger condition is too restrictive and has weird effects on our rotation. The Flurry combo is one example (where the damage loss from Brain Freeze proc munching is far, far outweighed by the gain to Chain Reaction uptime). Another example from personal experience: after getting the Ice Lance bracers, not using lvl 90 talent is a dps gain over both Frost Bomb and Arctic Gale simply because casting more Frostbolts leads to higher Chain Reaction uptime that makes up for the lost damage. Basically, it's a trait that punishes us for not casting a filler spell.

Other talents and traits

Orbital Strike is next to useless, but this was addressed in the Frozen Orb section.

Lonely Winter is in a better place now. I'm not sure if it's just my particular gear, but I've been finding LW setups in the top 20 talent setups (out of 243 possible, not counting level 30 and 75 tiers).

There are also two talents that add extra charges to our spells (Ice Ward and Cold Snap). I think they should also reduce the cooldown of the affected spells to make them more useful. Cold Snap is especially bad in that regard, as full recharge takes whole 10 minutes.

TL;DR

• Increase duration of Water Jet by 50% to give more room for error
• Fix Flurry so that Flurry into Ice Lance works at all haste levels
• Remove the weird positional requirement on Flurry combo
• Reduce dependency on AoE talents by buffing baseline AoE
• Make Ebonbolt and Frozen Orb feel more like cooldowns
• Buff Cone of Cold so that it isn't dead useless
• Chain Reaction shouldn't punish casting non-filler spells

[Blinkblink]

Good points, especially regarding Chain Reaction, feels as it responsible for much clunkyness.

Not to disregard your other points as they are just as valid but I don't feel they have as much of an impact.

For example when using Splitting Ice most of my damage spread in M+ comes from Ice Lance by a considerable margin. CR is just a relatively big multiplier so it follows that it has a significant impact on my overall DPS.

I don't mind that part so much, probably many specs have a normal artifact talent that is leagues above a golden one.
Chain Reaction still feels awkward design-wise and doesn't align well with the rest of the frost mage kit, I think it stems primarily from some of these issues:

• Like you mentioned, it encourages only taking passive talents - as anytime you are casting something other than frostbolt it can cost you CR uptime/stacks.
• The ramp-up mechanic is very counter-intuitive, you don't see anyone starting their rotation with only frostbolts until 3 stacks on CR because they want to get their cooldowns rolling asap.
• Similarily, if I try to capitalize on a good timing (3 stacks of CR + Incanter's Flow peaking) to dish out a 3+ FoF procs, I get punished because I lose all my CR stacks right after.
  I would have been better off DPS-wise to mostly ignore my IF cycle and gradually dish out my FoF procs to maintain CR.
• Very little control since crits are RNG, if I'm using Splitting Ice my only way of forcing a crit Frostbolt is with the pet Freeze, which doesn't work on bosses.
• CR uptime in a decent rotation can just outright be a gear-check as it is so dependent on crit/haste.

Maybe the devs would consider reworking CR slightly since it has potential to be a more interactive mechanic.
Just extending the duration or making it only lose one stack instead of three when the buff expires would add much needed consistency.

A more interesting change would be to allow Brain Freeze Flurries to trigger CR, at least that meshes into the kit well, considering you can hold on to a BF proc when you know you won't be casting Frostbolts for a few seconds and can use it to refresh the duration right before it expires.

[Norrinir]

Chain Reaction has a huge impact on talent choices and stat weights, but has very little impact on actual gameplay. As you noticed, trying to game Chain Reaction is usually pointless (Kuni et al tried to modify frost APL to take advantage of Chain Reaction and they came to the same conclusion), so you can just ignore it. In fact, that's probably for the best as trying to game a mechanic that you have very little control over is just exercise in frustration.

The only way in which it makes our rotation actively less enjoyable is the Flurry combo. Chain Reaction is the sole reason this combo is DPS positive (it's a guaranteed way to proc Chain Reaction), which in turn introduces that weird positional requirement into our gameplay.

If we don't want to punish not casting Frostbolt, just include more spells in the trigger condition and tune the damage bonus accordingly (say all non-periodic non-Ice Lance crits with 10% damage per stack). This way, CR will be more consistent and also not as punishing to talent setups that cannot maintain high uptime on it.

[visc]

TL;DR
1 Increase duration of Water Jet by 50% to give more room for error
2 Fix Flurry so that Flurry into Ice Lance works at all haste levels
3 Remove the weird positional requirement on Flurry combo
4 Reduce dependency on AoE talents by buffing baseline AoE
5 Make Ebonbolt and Frozen Orb feel more like cooldowns
6 Buff Cone of Cold so that it isn't dead useless
7 Chain Reaction shouldn't punish casting non-filler spells

Great job of listing some of the main issues with frost. Since the initial build is up on the PTR, lets see how they've changed so far.

1,2 & 3. No change. Could do with a quality of life update.

4. No change. I thought this would get looked at. Greater than 3 targets frost aoe isn't viable. One of three things needs happen before it is. Either baseline aoe spell damage increase, lv 90 talents damage increased or entire rework of aoe mechanics.
5. No longer grants FoF, instead a BF. Assuming one can always shatter a EB by casting flurry straight after (if at range). Damage up from 900% SP to 1100% SP. Good change
6. SP increased from 27% SP to 57%. No effective change.
7. Nerfed from 20% extra damage per stack, to 10% per stack. Good change, is it enough?

[Norrinir]

I tried playing a bit on the PTR. My thoughts so far.

Talents

Shimmer now competes with Ice Floes (2nd tier) and Glacial Insulation. Cauterize is gone (for frost mages at least) and replaced with baseline Cold Snap (which is back to its WoD state but with longer cooldown).

I'll definitely miss having both Shimmer and Ice Floes. In its current state, I just can't see myself ever taking Glacial Insulation. It boosts my physical damage reduction from 19% to 25% (mind you, fire mages have 15% physical damage reduction on their shield just from an artifact trait) and the extra Ice Barrier from Ice Block is almost inconsequential. Needs rework, otherwise it might as well not be there (especially when the competition is Shimmer and Ice Floes).

Rune of Power is down to 40%. Hurts RoF builds a bit but otherwise not a huge deal for Frost.

The change to Frozen Touch is puzzling. If the intention is to weaken Thermal Void, this is absolutely not the way to do it. If you want to reduce the uptime of Icy Veins, then change the talents in a way that does that but still maintains the consistency, which is one of the nice things about Thermal Void. See https://www.altered-time.com/forum/view ... f=5&t=3247" target="_blank

Basically, we traded variance due to Chain Reaction with variance due to Thermal Void, except variance with Thermal Void is way more frustrating.

5th tier lost Ice Floes, replacement is passive that increases the slow effect of your slows by 15%. This tier also needs some rework, right now it's looking like Ring of Frost in almost every scenario. I want to like both Frigid Winds and Ice Ward, but they just don't do enough. Some ideas: Frigid Winds increases slow duration by 15 sec (in PvE) and makes them undispellable (or something). Could be nice for weeks with Necrotic for resetting stacks or for kiting Ichors on Il'gynoth. Ice Ward also reduces recharge time of Frost Nova by 10 sec and when Frost Nova ends, it reduces movement speed by 70% for 3 sec. Or makes Frost Nova unbreakable for 2-3 seconds. Just something to make this talent interesting.

Baseline spells

Frost Armor removal is weird. The extra 8% haste does not devalue haste rating, it's still one of our best stats. If anything, this might make the secondary stat situation even worse. Loss of the movement slow on melee hits kinda sucks, but I assume it would be pretty silly with the extra 15% from Frigid Winds in PvP.

Cold Snap is now baseline, it's alright change. You'll still pretty much only use it on Ice Block.

Cone of Cold buff, as mentioned above, does pretty much nothing. Still a waste of GCD. The coefficient needs to be above 120-150% for it to matter. Also, I like how they preemptively changed the honor talent Burst of Cold. Someone might have actually picked it with the CoC buff, can't let that happen.

Huge Ice Lance buff to account for the reduction in FoF procs and the nerf of Chain Reaction. Reasonable change.

Flurry still seems to be causing issues, even more so now that we lost 8% haste. Flurry into Ice Lance still doesn't work at low haste levels. Chain Reaction change might kill Flurry combo (need to test this one).

Sad to see the Ice Barrier nerf. Shield of Alodi is now 60% boost at 3/3 instead of 100%. The duration change is really weird, I don't see how having 60 sec duration with 25 sec cooldown caused problems in any way.

Blizzard now only has 2% chance to generate FoF on damage (at first I thought this means the FoF proc change scales with number of targets hit, doesn't seem to be the case). Certainly doesn't help Frost AoE.

Artifact

Ebonbolt now gives Brain Freeze instead of 2 charges of FoF. Can't use it to shatter Ebonbolt at max range, it travels too fast. Small nerf to overall number of FoF+BF procs and thus a nerf to Thermal Void, otherwise probably dps gain. However, this exposes the problem that lead to the inclusion of Icy Hand. Wasting FoF with Ebonbolt felt awful, now the same thing happens with Brain Freeze and it's even more awful, as Brain Freeze is way more impactful.

It's Cold Outside is another nerf to FoF generation. Don't mind this one that much, as it's less RNG and thus less variance.

The above mentioned Chain Reaction change is also here. Absolutely a good step forward, if it kills the Flurry combo remains to be seen.

Legendaries

The new Frost specific legendary is fairly boring. Looks like the effect is a 2% increase on ST, more on AoE. Could be nice for dungeons.

The changes to FoF generation make both of our top performing legendaries much worse. Vashj hands lose out big time as the uptime of Icy Veins goes from 80-90% to around 40-50%. Magtheridon's bracers also lose out as the buff will run out way more often. If the intended effect is around where it is now (4-5% increase), both of these legendaries will probably need some changes.

TL;DR

• Glacial Insulation is worthless
• Frozen Touch change is just frustrating variance
• If TV is a problem, reduce expected duration of Icy Veins, don't add more variance
• Ice Ward and Frigid Winds don't do enough
• Haste is still desirable with Frost Armor, no need to take it away
• Cone of Cold still worthless
• Flurry still broken at low haste
• Wasting BF procs now even worse thanks to Ebonbolt
• Chain Reaction change is great
• Legendaries that depend on TV might need some changes
• Baseline AoE is still awful

[Astralio]

i really wanted to write anything that could be usefull, anything constructive, like you are doing vituscze (and thank you big time for that)…
but i actually just want to throw up.
the only thing i d wish, is consistency. i m not that gifted of a player, i have my shares of 90% + Performances but no way near the top guys, i put A LOT of time into exercising, searching Forums, simming and everything (like probably most of you guys), and i m really sick of having to do rework all over again beacause of this revamping all the time.. i get the feeling that they start with strong fire, let them people gear and spend A LOT of time for fire, dump it big time and push Frost, let them people gear for Frost, dump it, what now, arcane?

i know it s not getting me anywhere, i shouldnt follow the "highest performing build", not be crushed beacuase after all i found a really nice and enjoyable build in bc/tv, not feel fucked cause my awesome legendaries lose strenght, and remember that most classes get buffed and nervet,just stay with one and be happy…
but just wanted to get a little steam off.

If i m the only one, excuse me. if a lot feel that way, Blizzard should know

[Norrinir]

I've been trying to keep my feedback up-to-date over at the WoW forums: https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17614491797" target="_blank

Feel free to add your thoughts there or link it over from the US forums and start a dicussion there.

[Steelbane]

My feedback is:

• Cone of Cold needs to hit like a brick (as it used too), they tried to make it a 'slow' spell and I can understand it needs to be balanced for PvP, but it makes no sense in its current PvE state, ive only kept it on my hotbar because im praying they will fix it again & its a muscle reflex to use it.
• Blizzard needs to be instant &/or target based (instead of ground cast), id be happy to see FoF procs used either for ice lance (as per now) or for instant cast blizzard (player chooses which, same as fire mages do).
• Frozen Orb also needs something, either double the FoF procs &/or 10x more damage
• Ebonbolt, they can do whatever they want, but its the least fun artifact out there, its basically an extra slow frostbolt, it should either be instant, or hit aoe like most do, or hit a single target for 50 bricks.. certainly the cast time should be shorter regardless.
• I loathe pets and id like Lonely Winter to be a genuine option.. like it is for Marks hunter (and atleast their pet can taunt/tank, ours is useless), perhaps water elemental would only used by ppl who really want to min-max with pet abilities in their rotation, but I personally think the frost complexity is perfect 'without' involving additional pet abilities (including a ground targeted cast which is very clunky).
• I really miss the Flurry-Lance pewpew instacombo that stopped working last patch, it felt 'cool' & 'fast', now it still kinda works but feels terrible, I dont really care what they do but id like to see the mechanic clarified/fixed as an intended mechanic, or removed as the earlier posts mentioned.
• RoP is a generic mage issue, and blizzard have mentioned that they need to fix this.. im actually quite used to it now, but it just shouldnt be something just our class has to manage.. and I hate that I have to give up dps or take a dumb risk.

Im fine with the changes to Frozen Touch though, itll take out the bad luck periods you sometimes get as a Frost Mage (it should have a hidden bad luck check though, like fire does), plus its an extra passive for single target and a real competitor to Splitting Ice for raiding.

In general I dont think any class should have a dozen abiltities in its burn phases, like heroism, iv, rop, FT, FBomb, RoF, WaterJet, Freeze, CometStorm is a lot of potential spells that have to be cast and woven into a rotation, thats not including the actual proper frostbolt, icelance, flurry, blizzard, orb rotation... I know some ppl love complexity, but it shouldnt have gotten to this point (imo), frost used to be quite simple.. certainly to achieve 90% of potential damage.

[Steelbane]

Just want to add another whinge on Blizzard (the spell not the company!).. since last year I unfortunately picked up the Legendary 'Blizzard' belt, im still yet to land an actual dps gaining legendary.. which is a shame cause its the 1 spell I just dont like in the rotation, it usually does about 10% of my DPS, but I reckon I lose 9% of that due to the messed up flow.. there are only a few occasions it comes in intentionally useful (i.e. an aoe pack coming in 'after' plenty of time to charge flurries, but even then its dwarfed by most classes aoe.

But ive also been playing my Boomkin, and that is essentially the same thing as Frost Mage has for AoE (i.e. Starfall is a targeted AoE circle), you can only use it every now and then, but often enough and you can plan for it.. its not that dissimilar to Blizzard, but Starfall is instant cast & it actually hits hard.. its very hard to go back to both having to click/aim and then wait for a cast time, all while the mobs may end up moving anyway.

[visc]

With the current disarray that frost mages are in I thought I'd bump this thread for 7.1.5


I'm only listing problems, not solutions. In no particular order and ignoring baseline damage:

1. Baseline AoE (Blizzard/FOrb) is average. But falls down to sub par when:
-adds die too fast (or halfway through) for blizzard/orb to tick through.
-Any movement of adds outside of Blizzard target area.
-No burst AoE

2. AoE talents are sub par. Comet Storm is useless. Ice Nova too. AG & UM are near useless. FrostBomb better, but still not good enough. None add to the Orb/Blizzard baseline aoe.

5. TV is mandatory, too much synergy with other talents & relic traits.

6. Comet storm & Ray of Frost no synergy with other talents & relic traits.

7. TV execution still too hard and punishing for non patchwork fights.

8. Ray of Frost too hard and punishing (or not rewarding enough) for non patchwork fights. (why is RoF on this talent line?)

9. Water Jet still too punishing and RNG.

10. Cone of cold still sucks.

11. 4 Completely useless relics: Joust, Shield, StormRages, Orbital strikes.

12. Mastery is not valued enough.

[Amoc]

visc hits the nail pretty much right on the head. Before clearing Normal Nighthold, I actually though Frost mechanics were in a better place. The only fight I felt like we were really screwed on was Helya.

Now I know that a spec's performance is purely contextual. Nighthold absolutely dicks Frost mages. There are only a handful of fights where we function properly (Spellblade, Star Augur and Krosus IMO) and even on these we're pulling sub-par damage at all levels of play.

It's almost like the whole raid was designed around Frost's weaknesses:

1) We don't have ANY burst AoE, so we're neutered for Skorpyron and Tichondrius.

2) We have to hard-cast almost everything, so on heavy-movement fights (like 75% of the encounters) our DPS drops considerably without near-perfect play and positioning. On most fights (especially Elisande, Botanist and Gul'dan) you run out of Ice Floes/Shimmer fairly quickly and have to cancel casts. I'm sure it will get better as we start to get a feel for the fights, but for those three above I don't think there's enough in our kit to handle it.

3) Our lack of instant-casts also screw us pretty heavily for target swaps. If you don't have any procs saved, your only option on a target swap is Frostbolt. When things are dying quickly (like Empowered Eyes, Botanist plants, Tichondrius slimes etc), there's a strong possibility that you won't even get casts off before your target dies.

4) The two previous issues bend us over while we're trying to manage Thermal Void. I still freaking hate the way this talent is designed, but at least it's better than before. Honestly I think 90% of our design problems stem specifically from this talent. There are just too many things to juggle while trying to balance this into the spec.

[Morve]

@Amoc
I don't agree with point 2 or 3.

Botanits plants - Ussualy 2 spawn (at least on hc), as soon as it happens use Freeze rather then Water jet, with Spliting Ice which you should have, thats 2 IL that will cleave. In fact on my 1st hc kill i was 2nd just after a Balance druid on them, and we had a Fire Mage too.

Empowered eyes - They don't die too quickly in heroic and you can premptively lay down a Blizzard and also cleave with IL, same for Elisandre and Pink or both elementals.

Atm i am 2nd mage on gul'dan playing frost, so it cannot be bad.

[Kumpare]

Normal and Heroic Nighthold are both mostly behind me. I have played solely as a frost mage and I feel like I'm at the point where I can pinpoint the stuff I both love and hate about frost mages.

Pros:

• I love the rotation. Unlike in two other specs mage has, I feel like there's always a little bit of min-maxing possible. Sometimes the optimal play is obvious, but very often it's not and you have to alter the rotation. This creates more gap between a good and an amazing player, which I think is good. Frost also has plenty of cooldowns you need to manage, which affects the previously mentioned gap even more.
• The 2 target cleave is awesome. Especially with the glacial spike. I genuinely feel like a frost mage, a master of the ice, when I send down multiple ice lances with a single cast or two gigantic bombs of glacial spike. I wish they would make glacial spike more viable, but I understand that this ability in particular can be hard to balance.
• Despite the ability getting a lot of negative feedback, and for a reason, I like the water elemental's Water Jet. Why? Because it makes your pet more than just a passive damage increase. In PvE even beastmaster hunter's dont have this much interaction with their pets. They press kill command and, if the pet is in range, they do damage. It wouldn't really matter if the hunter himself did the damage. But with frost mage, you are co-operating with your pet in order to gain FoF procs. This is awesome.
• Honorable mention to Glacial Spike. I love this talent. The talent was strong enough to create its own play style. The skill ceiling is a lot higher than on TV builds and less dependant on legendaries you have. All though a bit rng with crits, I love this talent and it's such a shame that it's barely not viable due to nerfs to frostbolt and mastery.

Cons:

• No matter what build you're using, you're very dependent on how much and how often you or the enemies have to move. All other classes, even all other specs, have SOMETHING to cast whilst moving, even if it's poor damage.Frost mage has nothing. Sure you can throw in the 90k ice lance while moving but this feels very wrong and does next to no damage. Before you had shimmer and ice floes to rely on, or you could even save frozen touch to use on the move, but now you have nothing. Not to mention how important it is for TV build to constantly cast something.
• All builds are very RNG dependant. If you get tons of FoF procs and your Chain Reaction uptime is near 100% everything's awesome and you're approaching other classes dps levels. However. Once you hit your 13th frostbolt without a single FoF or Brain Freeze proc, you feel bad. Very very bad. When I did 2-minute pulls on class order dummy, I could see as much as 100k dps difference between two pulls on a regular basis. My average pull was around 510k (no consumables, using TW). A 20% variation on dps this often is absurd. Take in bad RNG from boss mechanics and we are looking at an over 30% dps difference between two pulls, even if you play them perfectly.
• Shameful mention to Frozen Orb. This ability is, in my opinion, the biggest problem frost mage has at the moment both damage-wise and gameplay-wise. They have somehow taken this ability, the most iconic and one of the coolest looking abilities and made it do poor dps while also being annoying to use. And I'm going to tell you why, but this ability is so bad that it needs its own list to tell you exactly why it's as bad as it is.

Everything that's wrong about Frozen orb:

• The RNG. I'm 99% sure something is actually wrong with how this thing generates FoF procs. Way too often it happens to me where you shoot your frozen orb, and even against 2-3 targets, you only get the one guaranteed proc. Sometimes it generates procs so often you can barely use them all, and sometimes it's just the one. That is a lot of RNG for a 1 minute-cooldown ability.
• This thing slows down way too early and goes way too slow after it has slowed down. It stops at every critter on the way, which is VERY annoying in dungeons, and if you see a juicy looking pack of monsters, but one of them is tanked between you and the tank while rest of them are behind the tank, the orb will only hit the first mob! This could be easily fixed by letting the orb travel to at least to the center of the hitbox of the first target it hits before slowing down.
• It does no damage by itself. Like, at all. Now that blizzard reduces the cooldown of frozen orb, I think we are very close to seeing frost mage do some nice AoE damage, if the mobs are pulled into tight enough pack, stay alive long enough and don't move. Now notice these requirements. If any of these requirements fails, frost mage AoE dps is very very VERY low, no matter how much dps frozen orb and blizzard do. This is why I'd personally suggest at least doubling frozen orbs damage and change it so that it creates a guaranteed FoF proc on every 4-6 ticks it gets on any mob, instead of just random chance.

Finally I'd like to say a few words about some misconceptions/bad arguments I've heard.

1. Frost mage has no burst AoE

[/b]
So what? While this is true, since Comet Storm is a very weak talent, not every class has to have everything. Balance druids and shadow priests don't have reliable burst of AoE either and they are both doing fine. Even more than fine, boomers are one of the top specs in nighthold at the moment. I think it's perfectly okay to have poor burst AoE, but if the huge list of conditions that frost has for AoE is met, I'd like to see some kind of reward instead of still falling greatly behind on other dps.

1. Water Jet sucks/is unreliable!

It isn't. It works exactly the same way every time. Some bosses have weird hitboxes and you need to adjust your use for the water jet and on high amounts of haste the water jet goes away too quickly so it becomes more difficult to use, but it's always possible to get the 2 procs off of it unless the target moves a lot. That being said, I wouldn't mind if water jet duration would be lengthened a bit and make it so it can generate up to 2 procs. This is because when I'm learning a new boss fight, I'd rather focus on learning the boss's mechanics than study the boss's hitboxes so I can optimize my water jet.

1. Cone of Cold needs to do damage!

I hope not. I don't want to have a dps loss if I can't go into the range of Cone of Cold. I like it as it is as a slow spell rather than a dps rotation spell as there are other ways to balance frost mage's AoE.


tl;dr: read first sentence of every point made.

EDIT: a word

[eek711]

A lot of people hating on Cone of Cold. I agree, it's a throwaway ability that does very little. You already have a plethora of slow/root options, and having a spell that's essentially a dedicated slow is redundant.

However, how about having Cone of Cold consume Brain Freeze for extra damage? Or possibly have it consume brain freeze for another effect (AoE winter's chill?). Either way, I think it adds an extra dimension to our ability to AoE and creates interesting combos that can be possible.

[Steelbane]

My feedback is:

• Blizzard needs to be instant &/or target based (instead of ground cast), id be happy to see FoF procs used either for ice lance (as per now) or for instant cast blizzard (player chooses which, same as fire mages do).
• Frozen Orb also needs something, either double the FoF procs &/or 10x more damage
• Ebonbolt, they can do whatever they want, but its the least fun artifact out there, its basically an extra slow frostbolt, it should either be instant, or hit aoe like most do, or hit a single target for 50 bricks.. certainly the cast time should be shorter regardless.

Looks like some of my concerns are being met in 7.2 with new weapon artifact skills, Ebonbolt is getting some fun factor and if they insist on Blizzard being a ground based target, atleast make it instant and make it hit hard.. theyre on the way with this, they are really trying to force the frozen orb / blizzard relationship, but they are going softly softly on it.. its not even ballpark imo for aoe dps.

Here are the patch notes coming if you didnt read wowhead:

• Obsidian Lance: Increases the Frozen target multiplier on Ice Lance by 10%.
• Freezing Rain: While Frozen Orb is active, you cast Blizzard instantly.
• Glacial Eruption: After Ebonbolt damages a target, a pillar of ice bursts from the ground at that location, dealing X Shadowfrost damage.

[Venno]

I'd really like my water jet to be reliable. Both Helya and now Krosus have weird hitboxes making it harder to reliably generate two FoF procs during water jet.

[nirdana]

I'd really like my water jet to be reliable. Both Helya and now Krosus have weird hitboxes making it harder to reliably generate two FoF procs during water jet.

Both heyla and Krosus are too far away. That results in higher flight time of frostbolt.
Water jet on the other hand seems to have no flight time (debuff appears right after the short cast)
You have to use water jet during the flight time of frostbolt. The momemnt is going to differ on the range from the bosses.