Last minute tuning to help balanced Arcane (specifically spellslinger) has unintentionally also nerfed Frost SpellSlinger which is a ~9-10% nerf to all spellslinger loadouts at all target counts. Frostfire also does not have the buffs that were on live last week and is performing 6% worse than expected until fixed.
The patch note reads that splintering orb max splinters generated was change to a max of 4 for arcane . However if you test in game this clearly has also changed to condition of splintering orb also maxing at 4 splinters generated for frost. This can be test on AOE dummies in any town or any aoe content by just using frozen orb and waiting a few seconds. Meters and the combat log will show only 4 splinters generated when it should be 6 in aoe situations.
While this might seem minor, with the current balancing for Frost Spellslinger and the self feed cycle of splinters into splinterstorm, this is currently nerfing frost by a over 9% in both ST and AOE scenarios. If you look at the logs for the week you can see frost underperforming just as bad if not worse than it was doing pre 11.0.5.
Additionally, Splinterstorm is only giving a 5% chance for brain freeze per storm, not per splinter. Unsure if this is intentional or not, but it means that splinterstorm will only generate 3 brain freezes on average over the course of a 5 minute fight.
62 Likes
Tested this at the Dungeoneer’s Training Dummy in Dornogal as SS Frost. I reset all damage meters and tested it. You can clearly see only 4 slinters are being generated. Damage meters also shot only 4 hits from splinters.
5 Likes
Ouch!
I haven’t been playing much for the last few weeks. So I am kind of behind on recent changes.
3 Likes
So basically they hit us with nerfs intended to go at Arcane (and it’s almost a 10 percent Spellslinger nerf), and now I have also heard people advising that we are supposed to ignore our Fingers of Frost procs in favor of just spamming Frostbolts/Flurries like a turret on Single targets otherwise we loose significant DPS? Doesen’t that make our set bonuses feel alot worse (or even next to useless on a single target boss fight)?
Hopefully at least some of this stuff gets reverted, at least Frost was fun to play with the crazy ice lances all over the place but now I guess we just spam frostbolts until the cows come home to roost. Sigh…
5 Likes
Ignoring IL procs is terrible. Not shattering with IL is terrible. I just came back and always play Frost mage. I dunno if I should just quit or reroll a warlock or something.
2 Likes
I was baffled by the splinter shatter change. People seemed to like it… but it went from frost getting a 100% chance to get winter’s chill effect on their main target to a 5% chance to reset the cooldown on Flurry.
I really, truly hate the changes to Frost here. I love it when the specialization let’s us focus on instant casts, on interactions with frozen orb, ice lance, and shatter. This current version really saps the fun out of it.
4 Likes
I was actually really starting to like the ice lance machine gun. I mean you’re really were slinging spells like a spellslinger. Now frost ss feels so bad
3 Likes
Upvote for visibility. Frost mage’s unintended nerfs didn’t even make Wowheads list of class bugs!
3 Likes
Yea it feels awful in this state need bug fixed asap, also put work in on fixing the terrible rotation, they made it worse than last week .
1 Like
Commenting for visibility
2 Likes
What a kick in the face with these nerfs and changes. My DPS suffered so much in raid tonight. Now Frost is almost “forced” to play with Death’s Chill and other +Frostbolt damage talents? They gotta either revert these changes, fix something, or give us a totally new tier set bonus. Blizzard has dropped the ball before but this one actually angered me enough to post about it.
2 Likes
For the first time 18 years, I’m shelving my mage.
1 Like
I will also potentially be shelving my mage for the first time in 18 years. Have always played my mage as my main since BC and currently it just feels terrible to play. The frost SS rotation is not fun, it is trash.
I was slowly starting to like FF as it was closer to DF S4 rotation and was getting sone buffs here and there and was playable and good in keys… but then Blizzard just oppsied the previous 15% buff to FFB and not a hot fix in sight …
2 Likes
I 100% felt the nerfs last night while doing stuff. Things took longer to kill and my splinters felt barely there.
2 Likes
Commenting for visibility. The rework has already made the spec arguably less fun and non-interactive with our tier sets, now we get a 10% nerf when we are at best middle-of pack? Unacceptable, please fix issue asap thanks.
2 Likes
for the first time in over a decade i’m logging in to the forums to reply to this.
Hi, i’m a long-term mage and have been playing for a very long time. as of last night, i am doing 30%~ less if not close to half the damage I was doing on Monday. No changes in gear, rotation, anything. I want to understand why a nerf to arcane ended up hitting frost as well, despite most of the frost changes being BUFFS. I knew something was wrong when i hit something with glacial spike and it didn’t add any frost splinters. Then I saw the frozen orb changes went through, but the arcane variation. It just makes no sense. Hero talents were a mistake if changing one spec is going to affect BOTH hero talents.
I don’t know if blizz is hemorrhaging developers or if they are using offshore third parties to do the “balances” but this is just embarrassing for a 20 year event. I’ve invest so much gold and time to get my gear and character where it is just to be shoved from top 3 to bottom of the barrel. It’s not like frost was OP, it was still overtaken by warriors and rogues anyday- especially in AOE situations. We were mid-tier at best so I want some answers as to who let this happen, and wtf the point of the PTR even is?
8 Likes
At this point I’m almost a bit afraid of them trying to fix the bugs, messing something else up, and making it worse. Frostfire so far has had a revolving door of issues that they just can’t seem to work correctly. And I’m not even talking about it’s poor tuning for both fire and frost, but just stuff not working… its like whack-a-bug.
2 Likes
