11.1 Frost Mage PvE feedback

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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I’d like to review the 11.1 Frost changes and highlight a couple of potential problems. The other Frost Mage thread seems to be predominantly focused on PvP discussion so I’m opening a new thread to discuss PvE.

Blizzard (and Frozen Orb)

Increasing the radius and duration of the spell is a good change, though I also expected the cooldown to be increased to match the new duration – casting Blizzard too often is a piece of feedback that is brought up semi-regularly. However, as it stands the radius increase only affects the targetting reticle and not the actual spell that deals damage (spell id 190357).

I’m more worried about the damage increase. The spell is now doing 200% more damage compared to 11.0.7 (+100% tick damage and +50% ticks) and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Blizzard used in single target rotations. Nerfing the spell requires some care, though. Increasing the tick time would have to be compensated by increasing the cooldown reduction of Ice Caller to keep the overall cooldown reduction rate the same.

I fully agree that 12 yd range is appropriate for a ground effect that lasts 12 seconds, but I wonder why the same logic can’t be applied to Frozen Orb. It also lasts 12 seconds (with a talent everyone takes) but its radius is only 9.5 yd. It’s also harder to position due to not having a targetting reticle, making the smaller radius especially punishing. On that topic: with every other class getting a choice node that lets them use their AoE spell with or without reticle, it would be nice if at least Frozen Orb got the same option (since it’s already a talent).

Winter’s Chill

Fingers of Frost Ice Lance not consuming Winter’s Chill is a great change. Proc munching has been an annoying aspect of Frost for quite some time and as far as I can tell, this change eliminates the problem entirely.

However, this change comes with a new problem. Using both Winter’s Chill charges in the short 6 sec window can already be quite hard (when shattering other spells like Comet Storm or Glacial Spike) and this change is going to exacerbate the issue. Even just consuming 2 Fingers of Frost and 2 Winter’s Chill charges is on the edge of what’s possible for characters with lower haste.

The Wintertide talent will most likely need to be replaced (or at least adjusted). With it, casting Fingers of Frost Ice Lance into Winter’s Chill is now purely beneficial, further encouraging us to overlap these procs on purpose and making the above issue even worse.

Freezing Winds

While Freezing Winds is a fun talent, I agree that it devalues Fingers of Frost too much and removing it will be a good change in the long run. The loss of these extra Fingers of Frost charges will also be somewhat compensated thanks to the Winter’s Chill change.

One downside of this change is that Coldest Snap – a talent that’s sometimes situationally useful outside of sustained AoE – now requires pathing through a talent that’s strictly meant for sustained AoE.

Mastery

Mastery is unfortunately becoming a dead stat, especially for Frostfire. In TWW, Frost Mages gained a ton of effects that aren’t affected by Mastery. The Frostbolt volley from the set bonus is the latest such item on this list.

As mentioned above, the situation is quite bad for Frostfire. Frostfire Infusion, Meteor, Excess Fire and Excess Frost make up a large portion of the total damage and do not benefit from Mastery in any way. Spellslinger is doing better, though not without issues. Frost Splinters only get a partial benefit from Mastery (0.75% damage per mastery point; Arcane Splinters get 1%), Volatile Magic doesn’t get any benefit.

Frostfire

I imagine these changes are mostly aimed at Fire since Frost didn’t gain that much from tracking the Fire/Frost Mastery buffs. Overall, these changes look fairly reasonable. The Brain Freeze generation from Excess Fire takes a large hit as it now happens every ~25 seconds (see below) compared to the previous ~15 sec. This might not necessarily be a bad thing – Frostfire was getting a bit too many Brain Freezes.

The cooldown reduction provided by Excess Frost has also been reduced to 5 sec (from 10 sec). The patch notes do not mention this, which makes me suspect this change wasn’t intended (the same thing happened when 11.0.7 launched and also wasn’t intended).

One unfortunate side effect of these changes is that they make it impossible to perform the Coldest Snap combo (FO → CmS → CoC → CmS → FO) without munching Excess Fire (unlike Excess Frost it doesn’t stack twice). You can’t cast Ice Lance if you want both Comet Storms to be fully Shattered.

14 Likes
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I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw it, but I feel sure that I saw something addressing this and saying it is a bug. And it should still be 10. I’ll have a look around.

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Winters Chill

With the concerns over winter chill duration, the FoF changes have further exacerbated our issue with active talents as spellslinger. Currently its looking like even with comet storm talented, we do not want to cast it in ST.

Partly due to globals that dont generate splinters, and in a large part due to the short duration of winters chill and the amount of spells we have to fit into that window (Our fof + the 2 spells to consume winters chill, which both need to be cast and land before it ends).

On top of that, 6s base duration just feels horrible to play with. I dont want to have to make a weakaura for the expected cast and travel time of GS to tell if I should cast it into this winters chill, or potentially munch winters chill with another flurry. GS is already a divisive talent, adding this additional layer of complexity is a bad idea.

Frostbolt into Winters Chill

This problem has come up a lot recently, and looks to potentially make another return in 11.1. The primary issue being ice lance has no way to generate flurries. Ideally a talent that helps it directly or indirectly generate flurries would be added so this isnt a constant irritant on the spec. Quite literally the S2 or S3 4 pc from DF (S3 preferred, indirect generation from GS).

Mastery

Can’t stress how bad it feels to be regressing every single patch with our mastery stat. It took a lot of work to bring it back from being dead in DF, and it feels like in TWW each tier we’re sliding much further down the line on it being a dead stat.

Blizzard

This is an excellent piece of advice. Blizzard functions well as a frequently cast spell due to being able to adjust to mob movement, but its not satisfying to have to cast it so often nor have a prior cast become so easily disregarded by movement. Changing it to be higher radius higher cd will make it more impactful, and give us casting space for other neglected AOE abilities – like the dead talent splintering ray.

Sidenote, its name and effect would be well served as an ability that mimics starfall, helping avoid the issue that near all of frost mages AOE is small ground placed effects.

Niche

Something that has been bothering me as a mage player since DF has been the state of the class’s niches.
Historically:
Arcane - Burst
Fire - Execute/Burst
Frost - 2t/Funnel

Now:
Arcane - Burst/Execute/Funnel
Fire - Mobility (not something any mage spec struggles with, but with how fire’s resources have been made infinite, its become true now) (while Fire technically still has execute, Arcane’s execute is significantly stronger)
Frost - 2t

The problem has become we have lost our strong funnel damage (which arcane has taken over), and 2t which was never really a common fight area, has become the place for gimmick bosses. Silken Court is not a 2t fight, its damage amps make it much more suited to burst classes, with large portions of the fight being single target. Amirdrassil’s Council fight had 3 bosses that were constantly separated, making it a spread cleave fight, a boomkin/warlock niche. Similarly Amalgamation Chamber was a spread cleave fight.

Basically - Frost is lacking an identity. The reason you play frost is just if it does substantially more damage.

10 Likes
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Further feedback, mostly echoing what others have said.

Blizzard Changes

Overall I like the size increase and the duration increase. I think having it be relevant for damage in M+ (and not just orb CDR) is reasonable (although maybe not to the degree it currently is).

I don’t mind having a 12 second duration and an 8 second CD, as it allows for replacing a blizzard faster if mobs move out of it, but I also don’t want degenerate gameplay of casting it on CD to overlap casts. Maybe it can function where only 1 Blizzard is out at a time? This may also reduce the damage it is currently doing in M+ if we avoid overlaps.

I do worry that without any adjustments we will take bilzzard talents and use it in single target. If frozen orb damage becomes relevant with a tier set, and Freezing Winds damage buff (or spellfrost teaching on top) becomes important we may be sending it on CD. This would be bad gameplay.

Again with pathing, I do think freeing up coldest snap would also be good.

Frost fire Changes

It seems like the changes were made for fire in mind when tracking procs, as frost mainly cared about the comet storm CDR, and excess fire was a nice perk. It is less to track, but makes Frost’s AOE combo and generation very convoluted and breaks a lot of the shatter combo.

To do the combo now, it’s Orb → Comet storm → Cone of Cold → Comet Storm → Orb.

The window is tight, but doing so allows all hits of both comet storms and meteors to be shattered, much like how fire wants to land it’s meteors in combustion to have it’s comet storms be affected.

With the changes if you were to Comet Storm back to back now without pressing ice lance you much a proc of excess fire. Likely this isn’t much damage in AOE, but losing a proc feels bad. Making excess fire stack to 2 (even if only for frost) would alleviate this issue.

Winters Chill

I think avoiding proc munching is always a good design, but the way this is now implemented is going to lead to a lot more gameplay consternation. Winter’s chill being 6 seconds means that even if it can fit 2 ice lances in, you are not likely going to get another spell in anyway, effectively still munching the procs.

The worrying part is having to worry about winters chill expiring during casts or travel time of Glacial Spike, Comet Storm, and Ray of Frost. It can already sometimes be as stretch to get all ticks of ray on the last stack of Winters chill, so getting more than 2 spells in regardless will be hard. I worry this will require weakauras to track travel time.

Wintertide is also a talent that buffs Finger’s of Frost empowered Ice Lances sent into a Winter’s Chill. If this talent still exists, it will encourage IL into them, and trying to game travel/spell casting time.

Increasing Winter’s Chill duration would be helpful, but I worry then it also may cause other degenerate play if the duration is too long (see Aethervision and how a longer duration made gameplay with it worse for arcane).

Mastery

As above, most of Frost’s damage now comes from spells and abilities that no longer really function with our mastery. For frost fire, significant portions of our AOE are not affected, and for spellslinger our splinters are affected less. Although the other specs (although maybe fire will like mastery more with this rework) might not be stacking mastery either, having a stat that effectively does nothing for the majority of your AOE in a dungeon feels bad. Make it increased damage on frost spells, and a lesser flat % on other spell damage.

Closing

I think that the Blizzard spell changes can be fun if tuned properly, but the rest of the changes although well intentioned are going to lead to frustrating gameplay and potential need for weak auras.

2 Likes
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Fingers of Frost and Winter’s Chill

The change to Fingers of Frost (FoF) seems to be a step forward, but not entirely in the right direction.

The struggle of getting all your spells with longer cast or impact times into the Winter’s Chill (WC) window is already present in 11.0.7 but got dialed up to eleven with this change. By having FoF not consume WC you basically eliminated the feels-bad problem of munching proccs and introduced a new problem of having your WC stacks run out before you can consume them normally.

Juggling cast times, travel times and debuff durations to avoid your Glacial Spike not shattering because the WC expired mid-flight is neither fun nor rewarding. This affects the core mechanic of all Frost builds negatively and makes optimized gameplay unnecessary stressfull and/or third party tool (WeakAura) dependant.

The very obvious solution to this very obvious problem would be to increase the WC duration.

Spellslinger

The FoF + Splinter change has adjusted the importance of having and consuming WC for good, effectively making the Frostbolt spammy builds obsolete.

However, one of the major overarching problems of the Frost Spellslinger design remains: The over-importance of Splinters, which heavily devalues every other spell and talent in our repertoire that does not generate or interact with them. The consequence of this is that quite a few build-defining spells like Ray of Frost are only worth casting under certain conditions (e.g. only outside of Icy Veins). Comet Storm seems to be not worth the button press at all now. Passive talents that benefit Frosts base toolkit seem to always be the better choice for Spellslinger.

Frosts talent tree already has a lot of generic and terribly uninteresting talents, with the new Freezing Winds being the latest addition to this list. The Splinter problem described above continues to further limit the build diversity of Spellslinger and makes optimal play with the affected spells unintuitive and potentially frustrating.

Frostfire

The stated goal of reducing the incentive to track auras has spectacularly missed the mark with the 11.1 Frostfire changes.

Whereas the 11.0.7 Single Target rotation didnt really care about any of the buffs, it is now more important than ever to track and play around Excess Fire, Excess Frost, Frostfire Empowerment and Brainfreeze.

While playing around buffs and proccs can lead to a rewarding and unique gameplay loop, the relevant buffs need to be visually present on the screen. Currently they are not so we will be back to rely on third party addons to properly track them.

The problem of having Excess Frost but not a flurry charge to spent it has been solved with the changes. The problem of having your bottom line filler Frostfirebolt, which you have to press eventually, generate two valuable buffs which can easily be munched remains. The latter means that casting Flurry just to get rid of the Excess buffs, sometimes basically back to back and without caring about WC or icicles, will most likely be the new optimal gameplay. Excess Frost being able to stack to 2 is a good start, but still fails to prevent the munching issue in the regular core gameplay loop.

1 Like
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Prelim thoughts:

Lance has lost a ton of power here. Good goals, good changes towards those goals, probably need to see Lance buffed an absolute ton though. Possible return to quadruple against frozen?

Cryopathy needs to be addressed with the loss of a good chunk of our FoF generation just gone now. It was usable with old Freezing Winds coming after a Ray cast, but right now it feels like it relies on getting a TA-IV at the mid-point.

Talent tree is comically barren now. The only components we don’t take in most builds in the top 2/3rds is Frostbite, Subzero, and usually Deep Shatter, two of which are arguably pvp talents. I like the 1 point talent nodes, but uhh… guys we need things to spend on in the upper tree. Lower third is fine, even though I disagree with Death’s Chill existing at all, the point amount is mostly fine. Splintering Ray still useless+too expensive to get.

Mage continues to be the only caster class with no option to auto-target our AoE abilities, and Blizzard is cast something on the order of once every 5 seconds. I’m lookin at Shadow with their following orb and Shadow Crash on target and feeling quite jealous.

What’s with the love of absurdly irrelevant ramp on Frost? Bone Chilling, Wintertide, Chain Reaction, (previously) Cryopathy? Plus a ton of past removed things. Nobody wants it, but it’s like someone decided we need this for some reason.

Echoing most with their concerns about mastery, splinter gen interaction with ray/cms.

Positives: Rid of munching, rid of infinite-FoF, GA placed in a more central location, extended WC duration, splinters on FoF, VERY happy overall.

3 Likes
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Overall happy with the changes to Blizzard, Freezing Winds, Wintertide, and FoF not consuming WC – these are steps in the right direction.

With the reduction of Wintertide from 2 > 1 point. This extra point doesn’t feel exciting given there’s nothing interesting or meaningful that isn’t already talented to actually use it on.

Based on this week’s PTR build, Frost has the lowest number of unique talents and lowest total talent points in the game, which has been the same position since TWW Beta. That, coupled with being the only spec in the game to have zero choice nodes, with Frostbite and Subzero essentially being PVP talents that do nothing in raid or boss encounters, and having dead weak talents like Deep Shatter and Splintering Ray, Frost has no real options, and most builds look near identical. Players have no real options to opt out of Glacial Spike or even Ray of Frost given there’s nothing else to spend talent points on, and now no option to opt out of Comet Storm either given its new placement. Some of these active spells don’t even interact with the Hero trees at all, which deprioritizes them during Icy Veins.

It’s frustrating to see specs like Retribution or Mistweaver that have 14 and 16 choice nodes respectively giving them a plethora of options and variety, yet Frost Mage can’t even get 1 choice node.

Please can we get a couple of choice nodes and more talents that give us different options for how to play, rather than just continuously adding uninteresting damage modifiers. Let players opt out of some of the active spells if they wish. It’s getting to a point where the current tree structure doesn’t really work anymore and can’t move Frost 's design forward without substantial change. I understand that Frost is mechanically very fragile, but if this is stifling design then perhaps Frost needs a bigger rework.

Other requests:

  • Extensive feedback since Beta about the Frostbolt-centric capstones being universally disliked by players, being boring and forgetful in combat, and actively encouraging Frostbolt-spamming builds and playstyles at the expense of our toolkit. These degenerate rotations are already occurring now, actively ignoring some of our toolkit in favour of Frostbolt, and this gameplay is not fun. Please replace these.
  • Blizzard to be used without the reticule. Either to cast directly on the target or to be Starfall-like, which arguably is more on theme with what a Blizzard actually is.
  • Glacial Spike AoE-based talent, similar to the recent DF tier bonuses.
  • Updated visuals on Ice Barrier and Cone of Cold, they’re 20 years old.
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What do you mean Wintertide is consumed on first impact??? HELLO? RNG PROC EXTRA ICICLES? BLIZZ?

2 Likes
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Going to comment on PvP, we feel the same, well, at least we should, but many of us have become ok with the fact that blizzard is allowing/forcing us to play Mastery when every single PvP’er who has ever played Frost Mage knows that skillcap scales linearly with haste, not mastery. Oh well. You can stack mastery and spam Ice Lances like you could in Cata to obtain high cr, but it won’t show much correlation to skill, which is exactly what mastery does to Frost Mage. Mastery kills the haste to skill, linear skill-curve.

But yeah, Mastery is dead, or should be, and we should not force it in game modes like PvP. Selecting Glacial Spike now instead of Frostbolt build because we hate instant casting Ice Lances is going to force us to play Frostfire Frost even more. I love the piss out of the “Look again” Displacement range in 2v2, and Frostfire does not get that. We should not be killing Spellslinger Frostbolt; its already a subpar spec in 2s.

Big Sigh. Big Mad. I am not 100% against killing Frostbolt build in favor of Glacial Spike, though its going to suck in 2s, because Frostbolt build does not require us to get precog as much as Glacial Spike would. Which is going to nerf the survivability for us dampeners by a lot. Against DK, Warlock, DH, and other specs that have multiple cast stops, precog is nice. Many times as Rogue + Frost Mage in 2v2, precog is not even worth it because both players, or at least the players with cast stops on the other team, are always CC’d.

Not sure what to think about this. Not a complete fan of killing Frostbolt damage by 10%; really would like to see a damage buff to Frostbolt in PvP, especially for the Spellslinger variation, not the other way around, i.e., a Frostbolt nerf and Glacial Spike buff. I would prefer to play spellslinger in PvP, not Frostfire. “Look again” is too strong, and forcing orange, red, and yellow animations as a Frost mage feels super hacky.

However, to do this, we need to increase Spellslinger dispel protection and single target output and stop forcing cleaving variations with Frozen Orb procs, etc. Hard thing to balance. Not sure what these developers will do. Because of the positions of talents in the new Frost Mage tree in 11.1, having freedom to spec becomes very difficult. You need to allocate a certain amount to certain abilities just to get to the next tier, so it will become a thing of only having 1 build that works. Which I am okay with, as long as it’s not Glacial Spike for the most part, or if it is Glacial Spike, at least have a dampening version of it. They need to give everyone 1 build per spec that fits all in PvP and not allow us to change talents, in my honest opinion, but that is for another discussion really. That way its more balanced and organized at the highest levels of AWC. Though playing Glacial Spike 100% forces playing Frostfire(+mastery), big sadge. Which is already the case in most games.

I would like to see some Spellslinger or pure Frostbolt buffs like dispel protection for Spellslinger and single target damage buff to Spellslinger Frost, so it is the goto spec in 2v2, but now with DKs having perma double grip on cooldown and many other classes having increased ability to gap close and stop hardcasting, it makes it very hard for Frostbolt or Glacial Spike variations to work. Unless Glacial Spike takes out 66-75% of their health on a crit and Frosbolt 45% without significant ramp up, like they were in Mop and Wrath, respectively. At least do it against those classes that have multiple Frostbolt/Glacial Spike stops. I doubt we will receive any of the changes I am requesting, as they are already nerfing Splinters by 10% on PTR. Oh well.

Like I said, that will also be hard because of the way the tree is positioned now and how you have to spend talents to get to other tiers. It is kind of icky at the moment.

Forcing Frostfire as Frost still does not fix the need to have /cancelaura Excess Frost, /cancelaura Excess Fire, and /cancelaura Frostfire Empowerment macros. I fear I will never be able to play AWC control style in 2s this expansion. I am bind-capped and we desperately need a button debloat. I am not going to suffer through 2000 games changing my binds to play this game, like many Rank 1s already have to make room for cancelaura binds. Luckily for many rank 1s, they picked up the game when it already had 100s of binds, so they did a setup that allowed them to have ample room for more spells. Playing since classic, I have no room for new binds without changing what I am accustomed to. I think the game is in End of Life at this point. Usually, I am at 1500 games played and in the top 5 ladder as Frost Mage this deep into the season because I play with everybody. Since TWW, I can’t even play properly without typing /afk. It is very sad what they have done and are doing. I think these developers have absolutely no concept of PvP and how their changes relate to the different game modes (2s, BGs, 3s, SS, etc.).

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I take it back, you sidewalk-drawing chalk and crayon monsters. Nerfing Frostbolt by 10%, what are you thinking? Wow.

Are they having a 3rd grade classroom balance their game, ai or are they outsourcing the balancing to China? I seriously can’t tell. Any American with Mangos private server can do 110% better job than they are doing. My god. There is no way the EU balancing team made these decisions. EU is supposed to be the premier of AWC play. Holding CDs for Go, perfect re-cc, dampening, mana burning, +many other comps/strats. God, this is horrible.

0 faith in this team at all. Absolutely 0. Just not even going to take Wintertide because Icicles and Glacial Spike are worthless. Driving me further and further away from this game with every patch. Big sigh.

So disgusting their changes should be criminalized. Glad I cancalled my sub.

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Also why Blizzard (as well as Flamestrike) still cannot get to choose cast-on-target despite mage constant demand? Warlock can have it, ele shaman can have it, shadow priest can have it, why not mages? Is it too difficult to implement the coding? Is it making mages too strong or what? Can a dev come out explaining what’s their concern on allowing mages having the cast-on-target option?

It really feels like the dev is playing favorites towards certain classes at this point.

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Seconding Mana’s and Norri’s feedback. A few more notes based on the last few changes, mostly about the many pain points from spell tuning:

  1. Mandating picking Comet Storm makes little sense when one of two hero trees (spellslinger) does not really want to cast it in ST. As it stands, we will be picking the ability without pressing it. Spellslinger not focusing on CmS is fine, but then we should be able to just spend talent points elsewhere.
  2. To add to Mana’s points about Mastery - Ray of Frost is also in the same spot. In fact, ray is so weak that it effectively costs two points - unlike DF, it is never worth picking without Crypoathy (and Splintering Ray has been undertuned and unpickable since its introduction). We’re back to the same situation as early Dragonflight, where our mastery does not scale well enough (back then it was due to IP and active abilities not being tied to mastery, now it’s both hero trees not scaling with mastery). The only saving grace right now is Signature Spell for Spellslinger.
  3. The current implementation of Wintertide feels awful. The stacks resetting once you pass 5 icicles mean that random splintering cold procs, or just having to hold GS for Flurry (which Spellslinger must do) waste the buff completely. It should not go off at all once we reach 5 icicles, unless GS (or Ice lance I guess for non-GS builds) is cast. Also, tieing more bonuses to Frostbolt casts makes Ice Lance comparatively weaker which always encourages degenerate play (see below).
  4. The whole reason for toning down FoF generation (which is positive) is to put more power into those procs so that they feel satisfying. Right now that is not happening at all, if anything the (justified) removal of the old Wintertide is achieving the opposite. And once again, low tuning of Ice Lance further encourages degenerate frostbolt spam.
  5. Hero tree tuning is problematic once again. This time, it appears that it’s Spellslinger that is significantly behind Frostfire, to the point of being unplayable.
3 Likes
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I think the changes in this week’s build are on the right path, but not quite there.

Wintertide

On paper, this seems like a decent replacement for the old Wintertide. It’s not terribly exciting but to be fair, neither was the old one.

However, the buff is consumed when an Icicle or Glacial Spike deals damage which the talent doesn’t mention. This interaction makes the talent really annoying. Without Glacial Spike, the talent buffs a single Icicle every 5 Frostbolts, making it essentially useless. If you want the buff to apply to Glacial Spike, you need to be super careful not to overflow any Icicles (that will otherwise consume the buff). This is sometimes impossible to do in practice because random Icicle procs exist (Splintering Cold talent).

Fingers of Frost

We’re seeing further reduction to Fingers of Frost’s proc rate but nothing is being done about making Ice Lance feel more meaningful. In fact, the Wintertide rework reduces the average Ice Lance damage by a substantial amount.

Even prior to this build, there were already talent setups that would only cast Ice Lance with the 20% extra damage from Wintertide. The base damage of Ice Lance is simply too low to compete with the rest of the kit.

Talent Tree

I’m always in favor of turning 2-point talent nodes into 1-point nodes. However, there also needs to be a place where to spend the extra talent point that was freed up.

Frost will soon be at the point where you simply get to take all the talents in the second tier, without having to make any choices. Second tier offers 16 points to spend (realistically only 14, since Subzero is extremely situational), compared to the 12 you need to spend.

The numbers also paint a similar picture. Frost’s spec tree allows for 1,506,962 distinct ways of spending 30 talent points, the least of any spec in the game. As a point of comparison, this number is highest for Restoration Druids, a total of 337,633,306,901 ways. In more human-approachable terms, it’s as if Frost had 13 MoP-style talent tiers while Restoration Druids had 24.

Obviously, some spec has to be at the bottom, but there’s no reason for the gap to be this wide.

3 Likes
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The orb nerf is like 40% less fof procs for slinger.

Actually insane changes, I don’t know how someone can make a great spec at the start of an expansion and ruin it over the course of a single patch.

This is nuts I tell you. It seems that good design is more about luck and the stars aligning rather then actual skills from the designer.

The fire and arcane changes also look bad, the only change I actually like without any caveats was the winter chills, slinger change to make shards proc from fof too, and the range and duration increase for blizzard.

The new wintertide is also trash, as well as just boring, why couldn’t you just bring back the S3 DF tier set is beyond mez or the S2 set from df.

By the way, even if they changed this talent to not consume the buff, it would just become a boring amplification buff that you must upkeep, which sure isn’t too much of a problem considering you cast spike anyway, but it certainly doesn’t add anything to the gameplay, if anything there is a risk that it will detract, and even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t make it better either, so why are you wasting time designing such trash? Instead of coming up with actually good talents that have a positive effect on the rotation?

What a disaster

Also, as others pointed out they killed mastery scaling, specifically for frostfire, in my tests for slinger mastery still scales well.

The issue is blatantly obvious, FF stuff doesn’t scale with mastery, meteor doesn’t, excess fire/frost procs don’t scale either.

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Talent Tree

Frost is one step closer to having the absolute best beginners talent tree - because you cant skill bad talents if there is no choice of talents to begin with. If this was the goal with the recent changes, well done.

However, for everyone that isnt a complete beginner the talent tree feels almost comically locked in and predetermined with how little choice is given up until the last two rows of talents. Now add the restrictive synergy of Spellslingers Splinter mechanic and you can comfortably predict that you will be left with a single viable build.

Build Diversity, personal preferences, interesting choices - all things that cannot and will not be expressed with the 11.1 Frost talent tree.

Wintertide

The new talent has some potential but is yet another minigame really necessary when we’re already optimizing Icicles for Glacial Spike? At least thats what I think the intention behind Wintertide could have been - the implementation however is just horrible and has been done with zero regard towards our other hyper limited talent options, Splintering Cold in particular. Getting a Splintering Cold procc, overcapping on icicles, launching one single icicle which then consumes all Wintertide stacks and then losing out on the buff for the next Glacial Spike is just silly.

Also, non-Glacial Spike builds have been on the edge of being viable again. This has been likewise nullified by Wintertides current implementation.

Blizzard

While pure ST builds with Blizzard are now definitely not viable anymore it appears that it is still a small gain to cast instant Blizzards in ST with a M+ specc for both Frostfire and Spellslinger (outside of Icy Veins)… lmao.

To summarize: In AoE we cast Blizzard simply on cd just as often as before and in ST you now also cast it but with two buffs you have to track to get value out of it. Safe to say the cognitive load didnt decrease.

3 Likes
16

Did some playtesting to get a better feel of these changes.

Wintertide:

This buff just cannot be consumed by Icicles, this needs to be fixed. Either the buff is not consumed at all and is another maintenance buff that Frost has to manage, or GS consumes it. The former is currently my preference.

This new talent also solidifies GS as a mandatory talent, which further reduces the little choice we have. Non-GS builds need to be viable.

Spellslinger:

  • The new 8 sec duration on WC is better than before but WC is still expiring a lot, particularly in AoE. There are still just too many FoF from the extra Frozen Orbs to be able to consistently consume all the WC stacks.
  • But even a potential 10 sec might not be enough in those occasional scenarios where you get multiple back-to-back Frozen Orbs from Spellfrost Teachings. The question is, how many WC are fine to lose before it’s a design problem?

Frostfire:

  • I had to set up weakauras to track all the buffs now, as without monitoring those I was munching a lot of Excess Frost and Excess Fire buffs. This is in contrast to live where it doesn’t really matter too much. This is additional complexity.
  • The gameplay feels rewarding and purposeful. I find the flow of Frostfire to be a little smoother than Spellslinger and I’m finding that’s due to having access to more Flurries.
  • I am finding that random Frostfire Empowerment procs are disrupting the flow and it’s a little frustrating. When I’ve already got Excess Fire and Excess Frost buffs while having no FoF and needing to build up more Icicles for GS, a random Frostfire Empowerment will cause a friction of not being able to cast GS yet and having to choose between not wanting to cast a naked unbuffed IL, or casting a naked Flurry without shattering something into it, or consuming Frostfire Empowerment and munching your Excess buffs. None of these decisions feel good to make.
  • Needing to cast a naked unbuffed IL just to proc Excess Fire so you can get a Brain Freeze to shatter GS doesn’t feel good. I’m finding this happening more often that desired.

Winter’s Chill - the problem?

It’s starting to feel like the crux of a lot of the problems with Frost can’t be resolved due to how WC currently works.

Needing to precast Frostbolt/GS into it to consume that mid-flight WC stack, WC often expiring mid-RoF channel, the short duration of 2 WC stacks on a single targeted enemy, conflicts and issues with difference in spell speeds and distance standing away from bosses for which spells consume WC first before they hit, WC expiring while a spell is mid-flight, etc.

It feels like a lot of this could be resolved by just making WC a player buff that is consumed on spell cast in place of the Brain Freeze buff, which would potentially address Frost’s tuning and mechanical fragility and likely give much more freedom in design.

Blizzard:

In AoE, still casting Blizzard every 5 secs or so. I don’t feel there has been a reduction in cognitive load if we’re still casting it at the same interval as now on live. Can you explain more of what cognitive load you’re trying to reduce through the Blizzard changes because I’m not seeing much of a difference.

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