Please give this a look:
And let us know your thoughts here!
11 Likes
not a fan of essentially being force to have a mixed spec. I like separate spec identity. Sure our talent trees now let us basically have some mixture of all specs but atleast it wasnt so forced. If I really gotta be casting fire spells as a frost mage I just wont be buying this new expac.
2 Likes
Overall I like it, will have to see how it plays. Not sure how many useful “frost spells” you have as fire that need cooldown reduction? I mean there is Frost Nova, Ice Nova (bleh so many buttons), Cone of Cold, Ice Block… the only one that feels meaningful to reduce is Ice Block.
IDEA: Meltdown feels pretty sucky. How about this: give that node the ability to cast a shortened ice block on an ally. However you want to reduce it. But this would give a compelling choice for that node: do you want more throughput on shields regularly, or do you want a save for your team? It would give Mages additional utility for the party/raid for whose who specifically go for FrostFire.
10 Likes
Based on the interview released, it’s unlikely you’ll be casting spells outside of your normal rotation. Frostfire Bolt replaces fireball (for Fire) and frostbolt (for Frost). You also proc random little Frostfire missiles that shoot off automatically that gain you stacks.
EDIT: I do like Sél’s idea of allowing you to cast a version of Iceblock on an ally. Since Imbued Warding affects Mass Barrier, it’d be nice to have another option for helping out your team with a more targeted defense. Sort of an AoE defensive option vs. single target defensive.
6 Likes
Not a fan of comet storm calling down a meteor either. I get most players dont care about the whole class/spec identity/theme stuff. But it really does affect how much someone like me can enjoy the game. Personally I am not saying to like can all this stuff. I think it can exist just fine, just wish we had options to stay like PURE spec identity if that makes sense.
Kinda sad Frostfire Orb didn’t make the cut, but this tree looks really fun. Spellslinger and Sunfury are gonna have to do some work to make me want to pick them over this.
8 Likes
Some PVP feedback regarding it.
- Talents would need to be reworked or changed in fire tree. No one plays Meteor nor is it worth picking up in any circumstance.
- How is Frostfire bolt going to interact with Tinder? What about with Severe Tempertures? Are you going to prenerf it and it double dipping with Tinder?
- Please consider changing meltdown to our shields? Maybe an ICD if its too strong? Doesn’t have much value or purpose on iceblock. No one is standing outside your iceblock glaring angrily at you waiting to be knocked back.
- Excess fire applying living bomb is really a sore topic for Fire PVP. It already is not played or picked up and does really poor damage in arena environment. Additionally this presents crowd control problems via baked in passive and uncontrollable cleave.
- Imbued Warding- Fire is already suffering from a lesser shield then Frost/Arcane from the blazing soul nerf which still hasnt been fixed are there any plans to change this with this talent?
- Everything else looks solid overall. Is frostfire bolt being a dual lockout expected to be a much larger damage increase then fireball?
- Will Frostfire bolt be extended to Glass Cannon and Flamecannon by default since it replaces Fireball?
Thanks for reading.
Additional edit:
Any chance of going full out and adding blue fire cosmetic to rest of fire spells? Perhaps even a tome of blue fire similar to warlocks?
Would love to see frostfire graphic meteor or flamestrikes. Mage class is due for some visual upgrades. If there was even an opportunity to just add it across board or via a quest this would be it with Frostfire spec release.
7 Likes
Does seem a bit better of a deal for Frost than for Fire, with various shatter interactions and BWave/DB CDR being generally better in keys/pvp than Ice Block CDR. (Why would I want a free Nova in PvE if I proc my cauterize? If this gave an Ice Block, sure.) Free crit on FFB if I use Combust…which already guarantees a crit.
As Fire I’ll probably place my hopes on Sunfury as it stands.
4 Likes
Obligatory CE and M+ title feedback.
Overall, well designed in that it appears at first glance to provide satisfying visuals and additions to our gameplay.
Starting with the dead talents:
[Meltdown]
This talent compared to an extra 25% on your barrier is horrible, the only effect it seemingly has with ice cold on is a blast wave at the end.
[Flame & Frost]
While the elemental affinity has some use in likely reducing (ice floes, ice block, and ice nova for fire) - (dragon’s breath, blast wave, and fire blast for frost), its counterpart in Flame & Frost seems wholly useless. I would wager you would find most people dont use cold snap enough for defensives, that trying to add a real utility use to it giving back cc spells isnt going to change anything.
These talents should likely be reworked.
[Frostfire Mastery]
I’m curious if A) it stacks off multiple enemy hits in AOE meaning at 8t you would fully stack it, and B) the spell effects also trigger it, the extra ice nova or living bomb for instance. Personally I am pro both occuring, we simply dont cast enough of the other specs spells in our kit to stack this reliably outside of frostfire bolt. which if everything else only gave 1 would be unbalanced given the frequency of frostfire bolt casts being very different for each of the specs in AOE and cleave.
With its duration, I’m worried there is potentially a problem with incorporating defensives into our rotation or other downtime with not being able to reach 8 of even our main element within 12s.
[Firefall & Cold Front + Isothermic Core]
If firefall’s effect also triggers isothermic core this would make this talent massively imbalanced between fire and frost. Because firefall is much stronger for fire than cold front is for frost, and cold front doesnt even trigger comet storm and as such couldnt trigger isothermic core.
Cold front and fractured frost are in a very poor state though they both seem relatively encouraged by the design of this tree, the main flaws come from frost’s tree design.
- Fractured frost being 2 points is too expensive in our very limited 3rd gate
- Fractured frost having rng design doesnt work very well with actually doing aoe dmg, you need to spam frostbolt and pray for it to cleave with a very real chance it does nothing - a design like inexorable assault could be amazing, stacking up to 5 and consumes a stack to buff frostbolt and cleave
- A no ice lance playstyle in AOE is not encouraged by our talent tree - Fractured Frost should have a path to Coldest Snap so you can avoid Freezing Winds
A bit of the ideal lean in for this tree is to encourage use of fractured frost which is a talent that has never and will never see use in its current iteration. A design that is more gameplay engaging and less of a punishing mechanic could have wonderful synergy with this tree by multi-stacking frostfire mastery in one cast and sending out multiple cleaving frostfire bolts from the instant proc.
[Excess Fire]
Living bomb is insanely weak, as is this node is good for frost only for the free brain freeze generation which is nice to have in lieu of our tier sets but also much stronger than fire’s 10s pf reduction.
[Excess Frost]
Good, but I do want to call to attention that ice nova consumes winters chill at the moment which should be changed like our other aoe spells. Likely the ice nova triggers before flurry hits but this should still be fixed.
Random roots are a plague in m+ for messing up intended ccs and also during sanguine week. Consider adding a talent to the general tree replacing one of the useless ones that makes your roots only slow (and for frost apply winters chill for 1s, which is the minimum root duration). This talent would also solve a lot of problems for frost like its overly complex aoe rotation when incorporating freezable or unfreezable mobs, and their frequent roots tendency to mess with group ccs among other things.
[Frostfire Empowerment]
Frostbolt is very weak, this dealing cleave dmg is likely to be quite subpar even with a guaranteed crit. Fireball has a much higher spell coefficient on top of the extra value of generating a heating up.
[Flash Freezeburn]
Ideally you would refresh and get max stacks after consuming the proc, so that you dont miss excess frost or excess fire uses due to poor proc timings from this talent.
[Frostfire Bolt Cast Speed]
With the talent that reduces the cast time of frostfire bolt by 10%, and slick ice the cast time of this is far too low for frost. If we assume your character has 28% haste, then in just icy veins with your fire mastery stacked you have a 0.86s cast speed frostfirebolt. This is without factoring in lust.
(base cast being 2s, 1.4s with the 30% total reduction of slick ice + ffb 10% reduction cast speed reduction. 1.4/(.63+1) = 0.86s) (1.63 being your haste with icy veins 1.2 * base haste + fire mastery 1.36). The global cooldown is 0.92 in this scenario, and with the max reduction this spell is always below the global cooldown no matter what.
10 Likes
I was thinking the same. Shatter interactions are a big deal.
1 Like
I feel like Frostfire Tree needs to augment a few other spells to be fire+frost.
For frost maybe having Frozen Orb become Frostfire Orb and Flurry deal Frostfire Damage as well.
For fire maybe have Pyroblast/Flamestrike become frost empowered dealing frostfire damage once every 6 seconds.
6 Likes
I disagree, fire only uses meteor in combust atm so the comet storm would fully crit, and the ice nova would as well if you werent playing alexstraza’s fury. Frostfire empowerment is also a lot stronger for fire baseline given it would be a guaranteed heating up proc.
bit antithetical to the whole system, but maybe spellslinger will be a viable option for you then.
6 Likes
Time to start my series of Mage feedback now that we’ve got Frostfire in front of us. All of the feedback I’ll be putting here comes from the perspective of someone that prefers Fire, but can and has played Frost at a CE level. My focus is mainly raid but will have relevance to M+ where applicable.
I had to reread and think through the tree a few times, but overall I’ve come to like this tree and how it interacts, or doesn’t interact, with both main specs. The main mechanic is this Frostfire Mastery/Empowerment cycle, and I think this is where the main question mark is. As it stands, a large amount of how this is going to feel is going to come down to how often empowerment procs. In a perfect world, you press your major CD, get a proc within that initial 12 seconds to get another 12 seconds of full stacks, and finish out your cd with it. From there you maybe on average get an extension every other time, to actually be able to stack both to 8. Free stats are always appreciated, and having a free GCD to move with that will hit hard and advance the gameplan is a good addition.
The Meteor/CMS freebie is pretty neat all things considered. Hopefully Meteor moves fast enough to make shattering it as frost comfortable. And in Fire’s case, Meteor is a very high damaging spell when it’s taken, and baking more damage into it just makes it more appealing. The wording suggests it won’t interact with Firefall, but it would be nice to have confirmation on that front.
For a few statements about potential friction, the two Excess talents have some odd considerations. Depending on the proc chance of Empowered, these two effects could be common or exceedingly rare. The case they feel rare could be the more likely of the two, as each spec is going to have trouble stacking their opposite Mastery to max before the timer runs, and proccing empowered helps but delays the other effects trigger even further. And if empowered has a high enough chance to chain, it’ll be unlikely that these effects will be seen much. Right now it’s mostly fine because the effects seem relatively low impact, but if they end up being tuned highly enough, there’s a world where you delay casting filler or, god forbid, cancel aura your maxed out mastery stacks to build towards the next. Again, with current tuning and abilities that feels unlikely to happen but it’s definitely a concern to be noted.
On the same topic, the rewards for the two procs also feel a bit unbalanced between specs. Meteor and CMS are fairly mirrored spells, so those make sense, but PF vs BF are most certainly not. It could be argued this is due to the effects having more impact for the spec that’ll have a harder time stacking the buff… But CMS is generally more useful than Meteor is. This might change with tuning, but as it stands PF is a questionable button to begin with and already has a large amount of CDR attached. I don’t think anything more has to be said about the niche effectiveness of Living Bomb, but it’s free damage so it’s not that big of a deal, and it has its place in mass AoE scenarios.
I want to bring up minor Empowerment friction next. For Fire, getting the instant cast that always crits is great, but it does have some odd edge cases where you already have a Pyro ready to go and now you have to send it without queueing like normal, due to your filler being locked in that state. For Frost, there’s going to be occasions where you get this mid shatter and not obliterating your Winter’s Chill with an auto crit would lose you your Mastery stacks, which also feels somewhat bad. I think these are enough of an edge case to not be too big a worry, but they’re a piece of friction to consider.
Lastly, I’ll go over the dead talents here. Flame and Frost feels incredibly odd for what it does. Cold snap resetting DB/BW is fine and all, but having Cauterize reset anything is… Odd? It’s hard to think of too many PvE use cases where I pop Caut, need to Nova, and already have Nova on CD. This is probably more of a PvP thing, but even there I can’t imagine this is all that useful. Meltdown has the chance to be downright disruptive in knocking things back you don’t want to knock back, though moving while blocked could have its uses. Of course, Ice Cold also exists and is better than Block 9 times out of 10.
Overall, while I have nitpicks and some friction concerns, I would say this is an overall pretty good tree. It won’t do much to shake up Frost or Fire gameplay aside from maybe making Meteor a more attractive standalone spell, but it gives the stats both want and adds a little spice to the second to second gameplay that’ll at least make things a bit more interesting.
1 Like
It’s a big giant yawn from me.
Seems like just a bunch of passive stuff that has no real effect on the gameplay of either spec. Most of it is just adding spells from one school into spells that the other already uses (e.g. adding Comet Storm to Meteor). A little bit of it is incorporating spells that no one takes because they are so bad.
Oh, I guess your main nuke “changes.” Whatever. Not impressed.
5 Likes
Love the theme of the tree. I’ve been wanting Frostfire to come back in some form for years.
I kinda wish Isothermic Core just made Meteor and Comet Storm do Frostfire damage, with a Frostfire visual, instead of just one spell triggering the other. Maybe some other effect too, if that’s too basic for a talent, such as making Flamestrike, Blizzard and Frozen Orb do Frostfire also.
Oh, and Meltdown is just a dead talent. There’s no way it ever competes with Imbued Warding.
I’ll add more thoughts when I’ve had time to digest this tree some more.
I would die of happiness if they gave us a cool, flavorful blue fire questline, like they did for Warlocks.
4 Likes
Melt down should be a PVP talent at best. I think that one should be scrapped.
1 Like
This is their stated design intent for the Hero Talents.
6 Likes
Yeah, I like the sound of that talent a lot, but only in a world where Living Bomb actually does meaningful damage.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; the Incendiary Eruptions talent is holding Living Bomb back. It cannot be powerful as long as that talent exists.
3 Likes
I like how this looks. It seems to deliver on the idea of blending different schools of magic together to synthesize something new, instead of the old (old, old, old) frostfire builds of old in Wrath.
2 Likes
I like how Flame and Frost will reset (among other things) Ice Cold when you Cauterise meaning I will always be able to Ice Cold after Cauterise while still using Ice Cold pro-actively.