Frost Talents, Stat Weights, Racials, Trinkets, FAQ

[Frosted]

Added BRF - PTR Single Target talent comparisons.

[Dannemmar]

Where can i find a trinket-comparison sim with the stage 4 alchemy trinket ?

http://ptr.wowdb.com/items/122604-stone-of-fire

[durrtygoodz]

Where can i find a trinket-comparison sim with the stage 4 alchemy trinket ?

http://ptr.wowdb.com/items/122604-stone-of-fire

Well, you could sim yourself : ) : ) : )

[Chev]

Where can i find a trinket-comparison sim with the stage 4 alchemy trinket ?

http://ptr.wowdb.com/items/122604-stone-of-fire

In general, people are holding off on running trinket Sims with the stage 4 Alchemy & Inscription trinkets until the 6.1 builds are a bit more stable, especially since the number of trinket combinations mean the Sims take a long time to complete only to have to do them again if something changes with the trinkets (like they did on the live servers just after WoD launch).

[Frosted]

Small sample of some pre-lim frost trinket sims. Ignore DMC 4/4 for now, I need to figure out why it's not working right. Alch trinkets should be fine though.

Those alch trinkets have the mastery -> versatility change included in them.

[Zenith]

If I were to play Frost/Fire for BRF with one gear set (Frost for single target/light cleave, Fire for AoE), what should i enchant with? I'm guessing crit or mastery? Not sure about mastery though, as it doesnt affect MI.

[Breaktheice]

So what was the idea behind the 15% MI nerf? Looking at the BRF PTR Sims the talent now seems worth it basically ... never? I can see Frost just bouncing between RoP and IF depending on level of movement in the fight.

Can't wait for BRF (Probably because of 4 Piece, i love Thermal Void )

[TLTeo]

My guess is it's meant to be a burst talent, so if you need help for example with Imperator transitions you'd go for that. I think it's like ~1% behind IF/RoP now, so you wouldn't gimp your raid too too much by going for that

[Chev]

So what was the idea behind the 15% MI nerf? Looking at the BRF PTR Sims the talent now seems worth it basically ... never? I can see Frost just bouncing between RoP and IF depending on level of movement in the fight.

Can't wait for BRF (Probably because of 4 Piece, i love Thermal Void )

Sim's are a great source of information but they are not the final word. Think about how a talent can be used and if it is suited to that fight. As TLTeo said, MI is going to be very handy on fights that you need burst on, or when targets take extra damage.

[Breaktheice]

^Actually no, if IF/RoP is doing better than MI by default, then when a target takes increased damage, it will still be better to run IF/RoP over MI.

Justifying MI is good for when burst is needed is also very, very situation based. It'll basically only work if you need said burst once every 2 mins. Saving MI extensively for a short burst phase, and therefore missing out on a MI use will backfire. Always. The delayed burst window of opportunity is very small and it's difficult to accurately predict as well. Not only that, all that pre-planning and such will still probably put it behind IF/RoP.

Right now, a MI delay with TV is very hard to pull off. But if you do manage to pull it off, it is a DPS increase. After a 15% nerf I don't think there'd be any situation where MI would be favored over IF or RoP.

[Frosted]

^Actually no, if IF/RoP is doing better than MI by default, then when a target takes increased damage, it will still be better to run IF/RoP over MI.

Justifying MI is good for when burst is needed is also very, very situation based. It'll basically only work if you need said burst once every 2 mins. Saving MI extensively for a short burst phase, and therefore missing out on a MI use will backfire. Always. The delayed burst window of opportunity is very small and it's difficult to accurately predict as well. Not only that, all that pre-planning and such will still probably put it behind IF/RoP.

Right now, a MI delay with TV is very hard to pull off. But if you do manage to pull it off, it is a DPS increase. After a 15% nerf I don't think there'd be any situation where MI would be favored over IF or RoP.

MI has some points on IF. It doesn't lose any DPS when you move like IF does (even though it's small), so if we're talking about a movement heavy single target fight MI still might be competitive? Maybe

I think you're caring about the wrong things if you're looking at a situation where you want MI for some predicable burst phase. At that point, you are no longer interested in overall DPS, so average DPS losses in order to delay MI for said burst period would actually be a gain. It depends on what you care about for the fight, really. The problem is that there really are 0 fights like this. No fights have these short periods of vulnerability that you can abuse wtih MI, and fights that have "hard parts" that you might want to try and use MI to burst through also have non-trivial other parts - so the DPS loss of using MI on those fights is not justified, since it's important to be doing good DPS for the entire fight.

Ultimately you're right in that we probably will see MI fall away in favor of IF for frost mages, leaving one to wonder what the purpose of the talent is? Maybe they just intend for it to be a solo-play talent.

[Breaktheice]

Ultimately you're right in that we probably will see MI fall away in favor of IF for frost mages, leaving one to wonder what the purpose of the talent is? Maybe they just intend for it to be a solo-play talent.

Exactly this is my question! What's the point of this talent post-nerf? Even on solo play, it's sometimes annoying (for example: since it drops your threat, your target will sometimes kill them then your pet then your barracks bodyguard too )

As it is, Frost was the only spec that really utilized MI since for Fire it was only worth it on a single target encounter that lasted say, 2:40-3:00 mins. And Arcane never really meshed well with MI given how they don't benefit from Mana Adept.

And now it seems MI is a lost cause on Frost too. Makes one wonder why they even decided to make MI a talent. Furthermore, I think mages would have been better conceptually if MI remained baseline (the MoP one) and the talent summoned images that would give each spec relevant boosts for their duration. Not necessarily just a stronger Frostbolt/Fireball/Arcane Blast. And of course, the talent would replace the baseline version. Just like how Greater Invi replaces Invi.

[Frosted]

Added some stuff showing spec comparisons (single target) as a function of ilvl to the OP.

[Dannemmar]

^Actually no, if IF/RoP is doing better than MI by default, then when a target takes increased damage, it will still be better to run IF/RoP over MI.

I disagree. Let' assume that MI does 1% less damage than IF.. but it does it's damage in a 40s window over 2 min.
So if you use it in phase wit increased damage you are doing a bigger portion of your total damage in the double damage window.

And sometimes you want to do more damage in a specific time for encounter mechanic like using MI during Ko'ragh shield recharge

[Imnick]

Added some stuff showing spec comparisons (single target) as a function of ilvl to the OP.

Could you label those graphs? I'm partially colourblind and thus have no idea which blue/purple line is meant to represent which spec.

[Frosted]

Added some stuff showing spec comparisons (single target) as a function of ilvl to the OP.

Could you label those graphs? I'm partially colourblind and thus have no idea which blue/purple line is meant to represent which spec.

Sure, I can change it up a bit when I get home today.

[Faenya]

Did something change for frost? I could've swore that haste, especially after its buff a few weeks ago, was second behind MS for frost. Now I just sim'd myself again and haste is absolutely last stat weight wise.

[Faenya]

Scale Factors for Faenya_Active Damage Per Second
Int SP Mult Vers Crit Mastery Haste
Scale Factors 5.60 4.95 3.15 2.68 2.62 2.61 2.30
Normalized 1.00 0.88 0.56 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.41
Scale Deltas 350 350 350 350 350 350 350
Error 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07
Gear Ranking wowheadlootrank
Optimizers askmrrobot
Ranking Int > SP > Mult > Vers ~= Crit ~= Mastery > Haste


There's the cut and paste on the portion of the sim that I'm talking about

[TLTeo]

As usual in WoD, secondaries for frost also strongly depend on your exact gear and talent setup.

[Frosted]

Scale Factors for Faenya_Active Damage Per Second
Int SP Mult Vers Crit Mastery Haste
Scale Factors 5.60 4.95 3.15 2.68 2.62 2.61 2.30
Normalized 1.00 0.88 0.56 0.48 0.47 0.47 0.41
Scale Deltas 350 350 350 350 350 350 350
Error 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07 0.07
Gear Ranking wowheadlootrank
Optimizers askmrrobot
Ranking Int > SP > Mult > Vers ~= Crit ~= Mastery > Haste


There's the cut and paste on the portion of the sim that I'm talking about

If you're having a problem with SimC (or think it's wrong) please post the input profile you gave it, and if you can host the HTML online to view. It's basically impossible to troubleshoot random questions without those things. Thanks