Feedback: Frostfire in The War Within

Classes Mage
99

I mean - I get what you’re saying, but the term “Frostfire” specifically is very iconic. I don’t see the difference between saying, “I’m an Elementalist Fire Mage” and “I’m a Frostfire Fire Mage.” It’s still redundant. You’re either a Fire Mage or a Frost Mage specializing in Frostfire.

It’s like saying “Dark Ranger” is too generic. It doesn’t have to exactly telegraph what you’re doing - the point of the Hero Spec is that they are based on iconic archetypes. Frostfire has the recognition that none of the other suggestions do.

EDIT: In fact, I’d go so far as to say things like Thermomancer or Cryomancer or Elementalist are even more generic than Frostfire. Those can exist in any other fantasy setting. Frostfire Bolt is an iconic World of Warcraft mage spell. It’s very specific to the fantasy of the game.

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100

DKs have one called Rider of the Apocalypse. Anything goes, pretty much.

101

I’ll break this down one Talent at a time for good feedback.
Before I do that, I love the idea of frostfire.
Frostfire Mastery: This looks cool and unique. It reminds me of the new final fantasy game where I have to swap between fire and frost. The problem with it in wow that I’m worried about is complicating rotations to maximize it. Having to use Ice nova, Frost nova on bosses (not the spells intention) or having to use Iceblock(Ice Cold) as an offensive spell. If this happens, it will be awful to play.

Imbuing Warding/Meltdown: Imbuing warding is awesome. No complaints. Fantastic talent. Meltdown however looks like a Pvp talent. If that’s it’s intention great talent. If not it’s awful. There aren’t many times I see anyone use this. I would suggest either extending Ice Cold/IceBlock or reducing its CD. If you want to keep it, then add a different trigger, like applying a regular Ice Barrier/Blazing Barrier because we are using it as an emergency button with big dam in M+ and Raid.

Frostfire Bolt: I like that it replaces frostbolt or fireball. No complaints.

Elemental Affinity/Flame and Frost I like this talent overall. Cauterize resets Iceblock/Ice cold, and basically gives us a cold snap. and cold snap for frost resets Dragons breath for an extra interrupt. No complaints.

Isothermic Core Amazing talent. Passive talents are great.

Severe Temperatures/Thermal Conditoning These are decent talents, I’m not sure about dam increase on FFB. In this current tier and rotation. Fire spec is about spamming pyros, and FB which means we would overcap on stacks, and Frost you would average 3-4 stacks. The only 2 situation I see us maximizing this is FFB-Flurry-IL-IL-Flurry-GS. That would give us 5 stacks, which we always don’t do in our rotation or, FFB-flurry-IL-ROF-IL-GS. Our opener which changes based on how many icicles we create. I’m not really sure how to fix this one. will brainstorm.

Frostfire Infusion How good this talent ends up depends on proc rate. If the proc rate is high enough, then the severe temperatures talent is much more useful. if it doesn’t have a good proc rate, than it’s probably useless.

Excess Frost Horrible horrible horrible talent. This isn’t every useful in raid or M+. for pvp prob good. In Raid if we have adds that we can use to maximize this we run into the problem of freezing them in place and the tanks can’t gather them. no control over this is bad, and holding dps cds to try to control it, is even worst. In M+ noone will take mages during Sanguine week. Freezing adds in sanguine is awful. I would change them to different talents. This is up for debate, but off the top of my head, it should proc frozen orb at 200% effectiveness. That way it will gives both specs more aoe to play around with without the possibility of messing with tanks, and affixes.

Frostfire Empowerment I like the talent. I can see it complicating fire rotation, but overall its probably a good talent depending on proc rate.

Excess Fire I like the frost version of this, but I’m not sure how I feel about the fire version. Fireblast is key to our rotation with pyro, it would be wierd to hold for an AOE situation. IL is different because we can plan around it better with icicles. You probably don’t want to double down on a single spell, but I like if PF would apply the Living bomb and decrease the CD on a fireblast by 2 secs, that would probably be better, but I would have to play the spec to know for sure.

The final ability is fine. Nothing great but nothing horrible.

Honorable Mentions I think it would be cool if you used Excess fire and Frost to incorporate Ice form or Frost bomb as passive way to bring soem pvp talents to pve for frost and Greater pyro instant cast or glass cannon. that would be cool.

Conclusion This is only an early look. I would need to play the spec to give more on it. I appreciate anyone opinion who thinks we should add other spells that would be fun to mess around with, and may alter this feedback if someone presents a good idea. Thank you for reading.

Very Respectfully,
Rocket Ron
Fire/Frost Mage

1 Like
102

Yes, i know you didn’t do that.

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103

I keep noticing people mentioning having to use CC or defensives for damage and I have no idea where this is coming from.
The only talent I can see maybe affecting your PvE rotation is Flash Freezeburn in that you would maybe want to hold Combustion/Icy Veins until your Frostfire Mastery stacks are low. Though holding off on those cooldowns would probably be a loss and definitely not worth the brain power.

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104

Final thoughts:

I think the coolest talent in there is actually the instant cast w/ AOE cleave frostfire bolt. It’s gonna have amazing synergy for fire w/ Flame Accelerant. I think I posted a similar idea before, glad to see it here.

The meteor + comet storm is gonna hit like a monster truck in AoE, frost + fire mages are gonna love it.

I’m trying to think about the Thermal Condition (the cast-time of frostfire bolt reduced by 10%), and idk if it’s gonna be able to compete with Severe Temperatures, even if the cast time was reduced by 100% since I probably expect Frostfire bolt to not hit as hard as some of Fire and Frost’s spenders (i.e. Pyroblast, FoF IL, etc.) and the Frostfire Empowerment talent below it synergizes really well with Severe Temperatures but not as well with Thermal Conditioning.

Overall great tree!

Can’t wait to see what you do with Sunfury and Spellslinger. I tried my hand at making some, let me know what you think! (also please give use Arcane Laser I beg of you; I put it in the Spellslinger tree because Frost has Ray of Frost).

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I am pretty ambivalent on the names and frankly don’t understand why people are making such a big deal out of it. But if I was to pick an alternative name for Frostfire I would probably go with Thaumaturge. It really works here because it refers to a particular kind of magic user who specializes in the miraculous and mixing ice and fire certainly fits the bill. Good luck getting people to spell it right though. :dracthyr_hehe_animated:

2 Likes
106

To be fair, there’ll be a lot of buffs to track with the Frostfire tree.

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Realistically you only ever track the filler instant cast proc. The other ones will just happen passively without you needing play around them. The biggest thing will just be for frost ensuring it does a GS → flurry in AOE when Excess Frost triggers.

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There’s also the Living Bomb thing, if that’s going to be worth it at all since LB does so little damage and now that I read it needs to get to maximum stacks of Fire Mastery and since the Mastery stacks don’t get refreshed I guess it’s not that much actually. I forgot about it not refreshing so I thought there’d be more stuff to track.

I’m just really not looking forward to having to cast Cone of Cold, Ice Nova and Frost Nova as Fire or Fire Blast and Dragon’s Breath just for the stacks since it feels disruptive to the rotation. Hopefully the play will be not to worry about it and let the procs do the work about generating the stacks.

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109

Small nitpick, but it would’ve been cool to have more spell replacements like a Frostfire Barrier or Frostfire Storm instead of double barrier and the Meteor/Comet Storm node. Dunno why only Frostfire Bolt got that treatment.

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110

Best one I’ve seen so far. :+1:

Agreed.

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111

Bye bye the game will be better off

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Fire already casts ice nova so that might be more prevalent if you are at 7 stacks and its about to fall off, but theres no chance in hell you ever cast cone of cold or frost nova, its just not worth it. Frostfire bolt is going to be the only thing you stack it with, aside from the ice nova snipe if needed.

For frost, same deal except sniping with fire blast. Which tbh I dont think will be a common occurrence, certainly you will not be pressing them anywhere near on cd.

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113

The same applies for frost right? I don’t see frost using things like blast wave or breath or blast just to stack fire mastery.

Which if good honestly, i don’t wanna press those buttons as frost just to stack a buff, they would have to do some crazy stuff in order to make those optimal presses, and honestly, why? It would only ruin the gameplay when frostfire bolt already exists.

Ultimately, do you think that this tree favors frost or fire more? In my opinion, it seems to be 60/40, in favor of frost.

And how would you fix excess fire? The living bomb is not bad, but kinda weak, the problem is the 10 sec cdr on phoenix flames, that part is virtually useless. I was thinking that if the cdr was on combustion that would definitely make it better, but i already know about the complaints about “not a real cd” and sustain damage if that were to happen, some people really DO NOT LIKE CDR.

I would personally like that though, they can just significantly buff unleashed inferno, which they should anyway, and then we still have the other talent tree which could favor burst, so you have both profiles, and both playstiles.

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Frostfire has a lot of awesome sounding stuff. I always enjoyed the concept back in the day. But shouldn’t Frostfire Bolt be the first node? That just seems weird. And puts that middle row in a pretty obvious and unfair place of priority.

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That would never happen in ST/low target cleave since we’d be casting frostfire bolt. In AOE we almost never would cast it aside from the instant (which gives 8 stacks) so you will not be able to stack to 8 fire outside of the proc – Excess Fire being far weaker than Excess Frost in AOE and the inability to actually cast 8 fire spells between procs means any idea of spamming DB/BW for stacks is DOA. So yeah frost wont be doing that.

We might possibly use fireblast very rarely if the buff with expire at 7 before we can cast frostfire bolt. We’ll just have to see how it works out first. It will also likely not be too impactful to do this.

Both gain relatively equal value from Isothermic Core due to Combust and Winters Chill. If Firefall triggers this then it will heavily lean in fire’s direction though. Already it leans in fire’s direction since combust is guaranteed 100% crit rate, and the main combust has a crit dmg increase on it.

Excess Frost is very good for both, and Fire will have a 100% crit rate on that pumped up ice nova where frost will not be shattering it at all likely. In AOE frost will gain a free shatter on its frozen orb/blizz from that, but again its likely better for fire as it will still have 100% crit rate on it and ice nova is uncapped. Very strong. The CDR is better for frost as its a relatively larger portion of comet storms cd than meteors.

Frostfire Empowerment heavily favors fire, fireball has a 40% higher spell power coefficent, and the effect always critting is a reliable source of heating up for fire where that crit is antisynergistic to frosts rotation as it means you actively want to avoid using it in winters chill, which may cause you to overcap procs at times. If they rework fractured frost to something reliable (which needs to happen for it not to be dead), this node could also be very strong and insanely fun for frost however.

Excess Fire is much stronger in ST for frost than for fire, but in AOE fire likely wins out because frost will again likely not intentionally shatter such a weak effect, where fire will consistently have it at a high crit rate.

Overall it depends on how often frostfire empowerment procs. If fire reliably gets access to excess frost, then it will be benefitting a lot more from these talents. With some rotational changes this could be equally strong for frost. A well balanced tree with a lot to look forward to as either spec.

Change the PF cdr to 5s of fire blast cdr (not being charge based makes it insane in high haste), and then living bomb is fine if they actually tune the base spell. The issue is, excess fire and incendiary eruptions force them to make it weaker than its 30s cd since you get so many free procs. But yeah just buff the crap out of it and remove the SQRT scaling past 1 in favor of SQRT past 8 or smthing.

Doesnt really matter except when leveling since you have all the nodes at max level always.

2 Likes
116

Oh yea, why didn’t i think of fire blast, it’s such an obvious solution.

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Another knock back when block ends? Exactly what they need because frost mage is having such hard times to kite melees … :upside_down_face: :grin:

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I would just have them swap spells instead. Kinda like arcane throws a free barrage now, why not throw a free Frozen orb. Use to be part of a legendary anyway. We have prior leggos, and spells effects they can just tag on. I think the living bomb is fine, as logn as they tune it. I assume they usually tune stuff they want used to be better.