This idea that Frost Mage is unviable is completely bizarre to me. I convinced a guildie of mine to try it out because he hates Arcane. It took me weeks to convince him and in his first night of trying Frost, and screwing up a bunch, he out-damaged 6 of his top Arcane parses. One week of Frost, compared to many as Arcane.
Here’s four of them:
Any Innervates he was receiving could go elsewhere as well. People in more casual, slower guilds should really open up their minds a bit. There’s so many people out there playing something they’re not great at and hate, because it’s the “meta.” They could be having more fun and potentially performing better with a spec most people consider garbage.
People should game a little, instead of trying to robotize their gameplay.
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Frost Mage is for Molten Core \o/.
Despite it having only a few buttons, arcane is by far the most difficult mage spec to maximize your potential on, but I’d definitely have someone go FFB before frost.
That being said I definitely have plenty of fun improving on my arcane parses, as it gets more and more difficult to consistently hit 99s as the weeks go by, since everyone else is improving as well.
Reminds me of the one button elementalist mage spec in the MMORPG called rift. Was literally 20 abilities mashed into a macro and it would just fire them one after another in a priority list by simply slamming this one macro over and over again.
I adviced a few of the mages in my guild to use that spec despite a much lower ceiling because they couldn’t handle more than one button and they gained 40% DPS overnight, still far below the real specs but whatever works I guess.
Do people say it’s unviable, or is it just not played because the other specs are capable of doing significantly more damage?
Frost mage and elemental shaman just were never brought up to date for WOTLK. They stay amazing in vanilla and tbc content and even the wraith leveling content, and then fall off a cliff once you get to raid content.
I always tell people play what you want/is fun, but the truth is that most mage players are flat out bad and playing a class thats beyond their capabilities(I even see it just in leveling dungeons). Nerfing yourself to a lower damage spec is fine, but if he ever wants to play at a better level, he needs to research his class and learn2play the real dps specs(fire or arcane)
This is going to sound quite critical but this person isn’t parsing high to begin with, they’re decent but they’re not getting 95’s for the most part. He’s not a well performing Arcane Mage so it makes sense that when he switches to an easier spec he’d perform better. If they didn’t know how to manage their mana then they should learn how to, there are videos and there are training dummies but those are likely not enough. Practising in raid is a viable option too, it’s what I did to learn mana management because you can’t exactly get a 1-1 raid expirience with a training dummy.
Arcane, while not having that many buttons makes you know how to use your mana well else you suffer for it. Mana managment is the schitk of Arcane and when one only goes 1-4 repeat without changing anything their dps will suffer for it. Take the Mage your showing off here, their avg parse is 91.8, pretty good but if we go into a fight by fight basis he doesn’t perform near that 91.8 for the most part.
If your guildie doesn’t like Arcane it’s probably because they don’t know how to manage their mana properly, the information is out there on youtube etc.
Honestly you should’ve told them to go Fire, Fire is what Mages will be playing for the most part in Ulduar and getting him used to the rotation now is better than learning it while progessing through Ulduar.
I don’t know who’s saying that Frost is unviable, personally I think it’d be a fun spec to play only I don’t because it’s dps is nothing when compared to Arcane. When you 800-1,600 less dps to get the same parse you know that the spec is bad, now bad doesn’t mean unviable it just means it’s bad just like how Ret Paladins at the moment are considered by some to be bad and while people get Ret Paladins into their raids I don’t think people will go out of their way to get Frost Mages into their raids.
Why would they Innervate a Frost Mage and not the Arcane Mage? Actual question because Innervating a Frost Mage makes zero sense to me. Frost is the most mana efficient spec for Mage, why would a Frost Mage ever need an Innvervate?
He’s saying an arcane mage would want an Innervate, but frost wouldn’t, so it can be used elsewhere.
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Same difference really. In SoO Demonology was a decent spec, but virtually no one played it because Destruction was king for progression and Affliction picked up the other few fights. I remember a few threads for “Help our Warlock with DPS” and they were Demo logs, and it was like “Well I mean he could just go Destro and get a massive DPS boost” but nope they only wanted to play Demo.
Every spec is “viable” from the standpoint that you could probably always kill normal modes with really bad raid comps, but people like to go look at rankings, and know what they should be playing based on performance. Sometimes it’s a bit more gray because specs are very close to each other, but when people see a noticeable gap between two of their specs a lot of people say that one is dead.
Ah I see I misunderstood the statement, thanks for making that clear to me.
Fun fact, Arcane was the best PVE spec in molten core and BWL but arcane missile was so bad that you still casted frost bolt.
You did need one frost mage to get the winter chill debuff on the boss (10% increase crit chance for frost spells).
I tried, but I was able to gaslight him easier with some top parsing Frost Mage from China that had nearly identical stats to him.
His Sapphiron was 700 DPS lower than yours, but yours was 1:08 quicker. At the same timestamp as your kill, he was doing 6400 something DPS compared to your 6793. I don’t think Frost is as bad as people think, especially on longer fights coming up in Ulduar.
You should try Frost out before we get into Ulduar. I’m curious to see what your numbers would look like in those faster kills. Let’s gooooo!
Also, don’t forget this was his first time as Frost. If we compare it to your most recent raid (not best parses cause that’s not fair, he only did Frost for one raid and learned it at the same time. Didn’t even realize that Cold Snap resets the CD on Deep Freeze until late in the raid), he was a lot closer. He beat your Fire Mage on most fights. He was 100 DPS lower on Gluth than you were despite our kill taking 10 seconds longer.
It’s just so much closer for most people than they realize because they focus on top parsing Mages in the top guilds. They look at logs without knowing how to properly analyze and interpret the data.
He beat your Fire Mage on Heigan by 1100 DPS and our kill was 50 seconds slower. He was actually doing close to the same DPS as you were at the same timestamp that your kill ended (about 7,100):
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I brought my frost mage from SoM over to WOTLK and didn’t respec to Arcane or Fire for raiding.
It comes down to the fact that I enjoy the simplicity of the rotation and being one of the lowest rated DPS classes is fun for me to serve as the benchmark for bottom boards – when I out pump others everyone can /point and /laugh!
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Doesn’t matter what me and my guildies performance was, if I get a 90 doing let’s say 5,000 dps and he gets a 90 doing 4,000 you know that the latter spec is worse than the former, I’m not saying it’s not viable it’s just worse than the other spec and when it’s a choice of 3 it’s also the worst spec to play as a Mage because the other spec does 4,500.
This isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact. There’s no point in comparing dps on kills because it should be comparing parse dps. I have too much unnecessary movement on Sapph, I don’t hit her as much as I could and I can’t get a good opener on Heigan when moving into position, at least one that I’m happy with.
Compare parse dps, see the difference and you’ll understand. Unless you already understand and this is just pointless posturing because I said that Frost is just bad spec to play (again doesn’t mean it isn’t viable) when compared to Arcane and Fire.
I’m not going to play Frost, I think it’d be interesting but I’d much prefer to play Fire which I will be once Ulduar comes and with Ulduar being so close learning a new spec seems pretty pointless to me.
You do realize there’s a lot of factors for that discrepancy in DPS to parse ratio, right? The specs are a lot closer than most people, including yourself, realize they are on slower fights.
All the best Mages are playing Arcane. The kill times are much faster because the guilds are better. It’s easier to parse 99 on a Frost Mage because there’s significantly fewer parses and the Mages playing Frost are usually in worse guilds.
I’m not trying to argue that you’re bad or something, it’s the opposite. My buddy came close to some your most recent clear numbers after playing Frost one time, and beat your Fire Mage on a bunch of fights by a large difference. I think if you went Frost for a single week, you’d be surprised. That’s what I’m saying.
You’re not properly interpreting the data on logs. You’re doing a basic, surface level analysis and not taking important statistical differences into consideration.
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The simple explanation is that arcane has higher potential dps, but you have to be skilled to reach it. Frost has lower potential, but it’s easier to reach that max. Thus, a bad or mediocre player will do better with a simpler spec.
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Do it. Deep down in the cold recesses of your soul, you know you wanna do it.
