Frost change 7.2.5

[nirdana]

Let's not forget that it is only PTR, who knows how it's going to look on live.

[Anaman]

Not sure if it's just me or not, but I don't have any of the ideal frost legendaries (Belo'vir, KJ's), never messed with double Ice Lancing, and most of the time I don't reach a 2nd Orb for my IV anyway....and I'm still parsing very well for my ilvl (almost every fight above 85% just this past week, including a few orange parses). This also smooths out the overall play for frost. Rather than IV lasting 30-40 sec sometimes and 60-80 seconds other times, it will level off to about 45-55 sec each cast, which levels out the spec. For people saying not getting 2 or even 3 orbs during one IV is going to kill off the frost spec is just plain wrong. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of complaining due to a slight (imo) nerf. Also, I've always been a huge fan of people choosing talents based on playstyle, not choosing them because that's what's necessary to compete. This change might help the frost spec not be so cookie cutter.

Final note, it is just PTR right now, none of this stuff is set in stone yet.

[Unreal]

About half your parses are blue, the rest is either green or grey (And those are hc, where you can easily get all ranks orange to begin with). Your opinion is welcome, however don't feed us false information regarding your presonal level of play.

It's quite a substantial nerf, although I do like the idea of a shorter IV uptime. Blizzard should compensate the dps loss however.
Most top parses involve avoiding mechanics/tunneling the boss in close range to maximize your IV uptime. I can't think of any class for which it is as punishing to get out of bossrange as it is for frostmage right now. Even getting out of melee range results in a dps loss, unless you're doing it to double il through shimmer or the likes.

[Anaman]

About half your parses are blue, the rest is either green or grey (And those are hc, where you can easily get all ranks orange to begin with). Your opinion is welcome, however don't feed us false information regarding your presonal level of play.

It's quite a substantial nerf, although I do like the idea of a shorter IV uptime. Blizzard should compensate the dps loss however.
Most top parses involve avoiding mechanics/tunneling the boss in close range to maximize your IV uptime. I can't think of any class for which it is as punishing to get out of bossrange as it is for frostmage right now. Even getting out of melee range results in a dps loss, unless you're doing it to double il through shimmer or the likes.

Look at my ilvl parses. This week was a substantial increase from last weeks parsing because I went from a potato to a real computer. It's quite easy to look at my numbers per ilvl. And if it's easy to parse that way, everyone should do it correct? Esp w/o double IL, no frost specific legendaries?

[Ticklestick]

Not sure if it's just me or not, but I don't have any of the ideal frost legendaries (Belo'vir, KJ's), never messed with double Ice Lancing, and most of the time I don't reach a 2nd Orb for my IV anyway....and I'm still parsing very well for my ilvl (almost every fight above 85% just this past week, including a few orange parses). This also smooths out the overall play for frost. Rather than IV lasting 30-40 sec sometimes and 60-80 seconds other times, it will level off to about 45-55 sec each cast, which levels out the spec. For people saying not getting 2 or even 3 orbs during one IV is going to kill off the frost spec is just plain wrong. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of complaining due to a slight (imo) nerf. Also, I've always been a huge fan of people choosing talents based on playstyle, not choosing them because that's what's necessary to compete. This change might help the frost spec not be so cookie cutter.

Final note, it is just PTR right now, none of this stuff is set in stone yet.

This. I am in a similar situation and i can see that for those who are very specifically specced around extending IV then it is a nerf however it should come as no surprise to any frost mages who have been paying attention to what blizz have been saying for quite some time. IV is meant to be a CD not something that has an 80% up time. Also remember that they have indicated that they thought frozen touch was underpowered. I expect frozen touch to be buffed. For those stacking a ton of haste, you may want to look at putting away versatility gear because this change will definitely change stat weighting towards more versatility.

[Ticklestick]

I'd also like to ask if anyone has actually been onto the PTR to test the changes? It's all well and good losing your minds on various forums but unless you have any testing data your artguments are based purely on speculation and hearsay and carry very little weight.

[broedrost]

for those who are very specifically specced around extending IV then it is a nerf

??? if you spec thermal void this is your goal. Your post makes zero sense to me.

[Xinder]

for those who are very specifically specced around extending IV then it is a nerf

??? if you spec thermal void this is your goal. Your post makes zero sense to me.

I think his overall point is that Blizzard has said multiple times they hate when we can get 100% uptime on our major CD and dislike TV for that reason. So they have done things like the stat squish to prevent us from getting so much haste we end up with 100% uptimes. I think their overall fight uptime goal would be in that 40-50% range that most people can get to now if you don't have the gloves. Most of my uptimes are in that range in my logs as I don't have the gloves and need to get really lucking to go any higher than that.

[Norrinir]

This change is not as horrible as it might seem at the first glance.

The only things that are hugely affected by this change are Frozen Touch, Bone Chilling and Lady Vashj's Grasp. If you don't use any of them, this change will have only minor impact on your overall damage.

The main benefit of this change is that it opens up the design space. You can now buff Frozen Touch without making it overpowered, you free up space in rotation for spells that don't directly contribute to IV uptime (one of the reasons why UM is the go-to talent). Before this change, Flurry refunding FoF would be overpowered, now it's in the realm of possibility.

I enjoy high IV uptime as (probably) most people here do, but if they don't mess up BC, FT and LVG, I could see this leading to a more healthy spec overall.

[nirdana]

I think they could leave the high uptime of IV and just remove double IL (but it was fun) and make other talents viable. From the start you could play RoF, now it does so little dmg that you nearly burst higher with spamming IL.
Same for GS it does nearly less dmg than casting frostbolts (considering that it can proc flurry)
It would be just great if you could choose talents (and i dont mean choosing between UM/AG and FT/SI) and decide if you really want to play uptime game.

[Mage]

This change is not as horrible as it might seem at the first glance.

Only assuming they will buff FT and don't fix double IL.
Without double IL and with new IV, other stuff being left as is, dps is going to tank by a metric ton.

[Shitbird]

I think they are trying to preemptively balance around our set bonuses for t20. We will be using frozen orb a lot more, which would lead to infinite IV uptime.

I just hope we don't suck really hard before getting 4pc.

[Noro]

The only things that are hugely affected by this change are Frozen Touch, Bone Chilling and Lady Vashj's Grasp. If you don't use any of them, this change will have only minor impact on your overall damage.

I supposed the impact regarding those three different things is a decrease in IV uptime and thus DPS (mostly asking regarding Bone Chilling because I don't see it often)?

I understand that it frees up space for buffing other aspects of the spec without making IV uptime unctrollable. Yet, the way it is I don't understand how a 40% uptime at best post nerf can only result in a 3% dps nerf. I'm mostly talking about patchwerk style bosses with low movement. Today if I only achieve this kind of uptime on this kind of boss the fight is clearly failed, and will result in something much lower than 3%, I mean the difference beetween 40% uptime and 80% can't result in only 3% dps loss. Regarding other fights, doing mechanics, longer fights etc... I understand the nerf won't be as big as it is, considering IV uptime is usually lower.

The main reason I'm posting, is because I'd like to point out that thoose change result in weird things regarding legendaries. Gloves, become almost useless but so do any other set slot piece, T19 (with ok ilvl, around 900+) seems to be stronger than any legendary filling a set slot.
Using old set pieces doesn't seem to be a normal way to progress, BiS equipement will be a mix of old and new sets and average legendaries. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

It kind of feels weird to farm old raid to get the strongest equipment.

What do you think about GS, can it be relevant considering ToS will have higher ilvl? New traits don't synergize well with GS, but TV being brought down will the scaling be better with GS ?

I understand it's only speculation.

Thanks

[ColdasIce]

This change is not as horrible as it might seem at the first glance.

The only things that are hugely affected by this change are Frozen Touch, Bone Chilling and Lady Vashj's Grasp. If you don't use any of them, this change will have only minor impact on your overall damage.

The main benefit of this change is that it opens up the design space. You can now buff Frozen Touch without making it overpowered, you free up space in rotation for spells that don't directly contribute to IV uptime (one of the reasons why UM is the go-to talent). Before this change, Flurry refunding FoF would be overpowered, now it's in the realm of possibility.

I enjoy high IV uptime as (probably) most people here do, but if they don't mess up BC, FT and LVG, I could see this leading to a more healthy spec overall.

Long time reader, ended up making this account, cause I kinda want to address this.

In my opinion, considering Blizzard's design choices in this expansion, and also previous ones, this is a bit of wishful thinking, extremely optimistic. In an ideal world, it is true that nerfing some problematic gameplay aspects would open up new possibilities, for better spec balance and maybe even nicer, more fun gameplay.

However in the real world, Blizz implements very harsh nerfs (like 50% Combustion, destruction of Pyretic Incantation, nerfing Overpowered from 100% to 70% to 60% while Arcane was nowhere close to a top performing spec), and then they just stop, move on, and your turn for spec balance might come the next patch, after 3-6 months. So if you're hit hard by a nerf, if your tier and trinkets are not helping, if you don't scale up properly, if encounters in the new raid are not favoring your spec - tough luck till next raid, more or less.

As for this change itself, from my perspective, it's simply very bad. I consider Frost a strong spec, but others are stronger, and I'd rather have a Mage spec that is able to top damage if played correctly in most fights. Why I consider it very bad? Because it hits our potential. It gives a decent baseline DPS, and it kills the top outliers that achieved great numbers by having a good combination of skill, experience, gear and RNG. Killing "potential" is always making a spec more boring. I would definitely have the variance that Arcane had in HFC, instead of guaranteed mediocrity.

All in all, I think mages that ask for "balance" and agree to nerfs being justified, and sometimes even come up with statements such as "Fire is OP" back in EN for the 0.01% that had luck with Shard+Marquee as their first legendaries, or Frost is OP nowadays, even as the spec is just hovering above mid tier, nowhere near Affliction, well, these mages should be a bit more realistic about how Blizzard does balance. There's a very high probability you'll end up like Fire after you're "balanced", at the very bottom.

We should try to prevent that and have our class' best interests in mind first, because nobody but us mages want this class to top damage and be great.

[Norrinir]

I don't think the main intent of this change was to nerf our DPS. They already tried to address infinite IV before (see 7.1.5), but it surfaced again with set bonuses and double IL.

Sure, I might be optimistic on this one, but we also know they said they'd eventually do something like this, that they want to address Frozen Touch being weak (which, according to them, they couldn't because infinite IV was still a thing) and that they want LW to be below the other options in that tier.

And while you might enjoy specs with high variance, there are a lot of people who don't. In fact, my favorite iteration of Frost this expansion was right before 7.1.5 when it was one of the most consistent DPS specs in game. There will still be room for optimization that separates good mages from great mages, it just won't be a hole the size of a crater it is right now.

[Norrinir]

As far as 7.2.5 is concerned, it's still a bit too early to make any conclusions. Glacial Spike is also supposed to receive some changes, so there isn't much point talking about TV vs GS.

[Peguinha]

i think they will "kill" frost like they did with fire.

I hope it does not happen but knowing blizzard as we know it will happen.

[Eyliria]

Mage discord updated simulations with the thermal void change shows a ~3% dps loss. Hardly fire levels of apocalypse.

What it does is destroy very short fights where we could heroism back to back with shard and demolish everything.

But that's farm content.

[Makz]

i think they will "kill" frost like they did with fire.

I hope it does not happen but knowing blizzard as we know it will happen.

We are currently on track to have 1 spec per patch - Fire was godly in 7.0/7.1, Frost is godly in 7.2/7.2.5 and Arcane will be the go-to spec in 7.3.

For frost, outside of an Ice lance nerf due to coefficient for it stacking too high, I dont really see any other nerf coming. You lose gloves in 7.2 by running triple tier set, so mostly will end up sticking to bracers plus shard/sephuz. I would like to see how Sephuz sims with more 7.2.5 changes as if you can line it up with your IVs the extra haste(and flat haste bonus) could offset lower IV uptimes.

[Mage]

and that they want LW to be below the other options in that tier.

Do you have a source for this?
Designing a talent to be intentionally worst in a given row goes 100% against their philosophy of "choice vs mandatory".