This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Mages in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.
Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.
Apex Talents
Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.
To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.
Thank You
We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!
We’re taking a pass to reduce button and aura bloat in the Mage core tree. We’re also consolidating defensive power to simplify the landscape of Mage defensives and make them more approachable. In Midnight, Barrier spells should be potent, consistent, and reliable. Mirror Image and Invisibility spells should now be able to be used for their utility instead of tacked on defensive benefits. We’re also removing Shifting Power. Shifting Power was uniquely powerful for Fire Mage and substantially less interesting for Arcane and Frost but it came with its own set of tuning challenges that made it difficult to balance their cooldowns appropriately with its existence. Fire Mage will be getting some spec-specific adjustments to make Fire Blast more accessible to compensate for the loss of Shifting Power. We’re also reducing Shimmer’s power to help make the decision between Blink and Shimmer feel like more of a meaningful choice. Players who want to maximize uptime and display mastery over an encounter and its mechanics should feel empowered to express that through Shimmer, whereas progression and more reactive Mages should enjoy the increased availability of Blink.
Arcane
In Midnight, our biggest goal with Arcane is simplifying the decision-making around when to Arcane Barrage by reducing the number of effects and folding the remaining ones into a new resource called Arcane Salvo. Arcane Mages can talent into different ways to generate Arcane Salvo and should expect their Hero Talents to provide some unique behaviors that might augment their cadence of Arcane Barrage drastically. We’re also removing all effects that refund Arcane Charges when you Barrage while adding some new and unique ways to regain charges throughout the tree to help reinforce the Arcane Charge climb as a core part of the Arcane Mage experience. Lastly, we’re introducing a new area damage spell called Arcane Pulse that will replace Arcane Explosion when learned. This spell features a 40 yard range, ramping damage, mana cost, and area effect per arcane charge, and should feel like an intuitive and powerful option when doing rotational filler in AOE.
Fire
With the reintroduction of Phoenix Flames and the addition of Hero Talents, Fire Mages have had an easier and easier time generating Hot Streak. This impacts the tuning of Pyroblast and Flamestrike and the pace of Fire’s combat in extreme ways. In Midnight, we are heavily increasing the damage of Fire Mage’s premier damaging spells like Pyroblast, Flamestrike, and Meteor while reducing their access to guaranteed crits by removing Phoenix Flames. We’re also changing Kindling to be a flat cooldown reduction on Combustion to reduce how punishing imperfect uptime can be. We’re increasing the cost in the Fire talent tree to access Ignite spreading functionality to help make the Ignite spread playstyle more distinct from Fire’s other builds and damage profiles and also make it easier to tune around. In Midnight, Fire Mages should be casting Fireball more often, and in exchange, will see significantly increased damage coming from their Hot Streak consumers, Meteors, and Combustion windows.
Frost
Frost Mage is receiving a gameplay overhaul in Midnight targeted at simplifying their rotation by removing competing spell priorities and giving each spell a much clearer place in Frost’s rotation. In Midnight, Frost Mage features building and spending debuff gameplay centered around two reimagined mechanics: Freezing and Shattering. Frostbolt and Flurry apply stacks of Freezing and Ice Lance consumes them to deal significant bonus damage. Alongside this core mechanical change, we’re doing an overhaul of Frost’s talent tree targeted at reducing button bloat, reinforcing rotational clarity and priorities, while also removing a significant number of auras. One such change is the removal of Icy Veins as Frost Mage’s burst cooldown, now being replaced with Ray of Frost. Our vision for Frost Mage in Midnight involves a consistent damage profile with smaller peaks relative to the burstier specializations of Arcane and Fire, but a higher consistent damage output. We feel that Frost Mage has historically been deemed as the more approachable of the 3 mage specs and we like that for Frost’s identity, Our goal for the rework is for that perception to continue while also offering new Mastery for those players who heavily invest in playing Frost.
Frostfire Hero Talents
The Frostfire Hero Talent tree added many auras, most of which you were incentivized to track and play around. It was also filled with damage procs, many new damage events, and provided an influx of Brain Freeze and Phoenix Flames charges to Frost and Fire respectively. In Midnight, we’re reworking the Frostfire Tree completely to let its gameplay more directly enhance and elevate the gameplay that exists within the Fire and Frost trees instead of overwhelming it. We’ve also moved Isothermic Core to the capstone location and integrated it more deeply into the tree’s talents, since the community has made it very clear that it is a fantastic visual spectacle and an exciting moment gameplay-wise. In Midnight, Frostfire Mages should have more intuitive rotational priorities, less auras to track, and punchy, big moments of damage and excitement with Frostfire Empowerment and Isothermic Core.
This feedback will be for specifically fire mage. Before commenting on the apex talents, I wanted to give some feedback on the rework in general. For context I have played fire mage in every iteration of every patch since eternal palace in mythic raid and m+.
I think that the rework in general is something that a lot of long time fire mages have been asking for for a very long time now. Over the course of time, Combustion has become weaker and weaker to the point where it was less a cooldown and more a damage stance. The stated goals of fire mage putting power into pyroblast meteor and combustion are excellent design directions. The list of spells removed really cleared out the bloat of the spec and returned fire to its purest/cleanest form.
Combustion
Combustion will matter again. I think a lot of people are hung up on the simplicity of the filler rotation and do not have a grasp on how much of an improvement this will be for combustion. When you press combustion matters. Lining it up with mechanics matters. Thats amazing. Also, we are able to choose between 90 second and 60 second cooldown combustion. Thats amazing. We no longer have variable cooldown reduction. Thats amazing.
I am very much ok with a boring filler rotation in exchange for an exciting, fireblast filled combustion. My best analogy to this spec is eternal palace fire mage without rune of power, and thats amazing. (yes. spamming thats amazing). I really really really dislike the idea of making the filler more interesting to sap power and excitement from combustion.
Ignite vs Flamestrike and Meteor
I think this is a fantastic way to handle the two halves of the fire mage tree. Being able to divest from ignite in favor of nukes is an extremely healthy way to make ignite cleave/spread strong with weaker single target. When you need the single target, we can now opt to reduce ignite and increase nuke. This makes tuning a lot easier, and let’s us branch out in the talent tree based on encounter design.
Design Goals for Simplicity and Approachability for Midnight Goals
I cannot possibly overstate how much of a success this rework is for these goals. Fire mage is now the epitome of easy to understand with an easy to understand path to mastery. There is still significant room for skill expression on executing combustion with zero margin of error, you have to actually hard cast, and you now have to time your cooldown properly. This spec can be played with zero addons, and it should work flawlessly with the new goals of Midnight. Absolute slam dunk win.
Potential Issues/Wants
Perhaps have firefall interact with flamestrike AND pyroblast/fireball?
I think that pyroclasm is great, but the animation is lacking. I would love if pyroclasm used the greater pyroblast skin in order to visually make it pop similar to mind flay insanity for shadow priest. The graphics on this would go a LONG WAY to making pyroclasm amazing.
Scorch being 30% or 40%-0% may cause issues with crit as a stat. I really like the idea that crit gives crit damage conversion and spell power conversion…also crit stacking leads to more fun filler rotation naturally. Fire mage stacking crit would be a healthy way to address boring filler.
Meteor position in tree is difficult for ffire if you want meteor on single target.
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
I think that the apex talents for fire mage act like lucid dreams/mechagon bracers. For this version of fire, this flooding of fire blast resources is incredibly satisfying and addicting to play. Having it feel like lucid dreams has been used every time you press combust would make this exceptionally exciting. I would not trade this for the world. The only thing I would worry about is potentially bad luck protection? But this depends on the “substantially increased” proc rate in combustion. I think this would also provide a nice source of variance and randomness so be excited when a combustion just goes wild with procs. 10/10 no notes.
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
The apex talents flood you with resources while performing normal rotation. Extremely approachable.
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
I would only not select my apex talents if the refund rate on fire blast was too low. I severely doubt this to be the case. I would hope it procs like 3+ times per combustion so the stacking and fire blast refund is felt. The flooding of fire blast in combustion is historically VERY popular.
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
No. Frostfire and Sunfury will both love this as combustion is the real engine behind fire mage now.
Frost Mage Alpha Feedback — Identity, Agency, and Gameplay Health
Building off earlier feedback, this rework shows promising intent — Freezing as a core mechanic, stronger rotational planning, and a shift away from Icy Veins are exciting steps. But serious issues remain that limit Frost’s cohesion, flexibility, and ability to claim a distinct role in competitive content.
This post focuses on:
Raid niche and identity
Rotational clarity and mini-burst control
Overcrowded tree structure
Ice Lance overreliance and lack of Freezing depth
Frostfire’s disconnected design
Mastery scaling and spell integration
Identity and Competitive Role
Frost lacks a well-defined strength that justifies its inclusion in high-end raiding.
Two-target cleave, Frost’s theoretical strength, is rarely rewarded in actual raid encounters. Worse, it often contradicts modern encounter design — e.g. on fights like Dimensius or One-Armed Bandit, ranged are expected to target far or priority adds, where Frost does not have the cleave radius to hit another add. And important 2t boss fights like Silken Court are increasingly gimmicky, with damage amps and large swathes of spread cleave.
Arcane brings burst and funnel. Fire brings cleave, execute, and powerful utility. Frost is left without a hook that would make a raid leader say “we need a Frost Mage here.” Slows are very prevalent among a large amount of other classes at this stage in WoW.
Give Frost a clear niche, or empower its 2t to consistently be available in all situations.
Comet Storm – Overplaced, Underwhelming
Comet Storm is awkwardly placed and poorly integrated:
It’s tied to Ray of Frost, which limits its use to once per minute, especially frustrating in Frostfire builds where it’s meant to be a core spell (and compared to Spellslingers consistent Orb cdr, much weaker in AOE).
It doesn’t interact with Master Lancer, Force of Will, or cleave talents — meaning it’s often strictly worse than Ice Lance spam.
Its 6y radius makes it unreliable in real encounters.
Ice Lance, Freezing Overload, and the Master Lancer Problem
The Freezing → Ice Lance → Shatter loop is currently overwhelming.
Frost is generating too much Freezing, and Ice Lance is the only consistent consumer. This leads to long, monotonous chains of Ice Lance (10–14+ in a row), especially in Spellslinger.
Master Lancer overcentralizes the kit, making every decision revolve around delaying all other spenders just to enable huge Ice Lance spam during a stacked window.
Other spells that consume Freezing feel unrewarding in comparison, and don’t benefit from core talents like Force of Will or Master Lancer.
Suggestions:
Introduce more ways to consume multiple stacks at once. Glacial Spike is a strong candidate — let it consume all Freezing and reapply a few for flow. As it replaces frostbolt, this will naturally cycle your freezing without additional difficulty, and help prevent or break up the long 10+ chains of ice lance.
Rework or replace Master Lancer — instead of incentivizing Ice Lance spam, allow it to amplify Shatter damage universally, opening the door to GS, Comet Storm, or future options.
Ensure Force of Will, Attuned Familiar, and other effects work with all Freezing consumers — not just Ice Lance.
Fingers of Frost should count as a Freezing consumption, or otherwise trigger effects like Splinters for consistency.
AOE Points Spread too Far
Gate 2 is overloaded, especially in AoE builds:
Too many essential AOE talents are split up, with no ST benefit, requiring massive re-investment for even casual AOE potential— Fractured Frost, Splitting Ice, Freezing Rain, Cone of Frost as the culprits.
Even worse, 2-point filler talents like Improved Shatter, Icy Hands (Improved Clearcasting is +2 max charges for 1 point, why is frost any different?), and Deep Shatter tax builds unnecessarily just for baseline throughput.
And gating higher than 4t ice lance behind a 2 point node in gate 3 makes AOE builds much more restrictive, its incredibly hard to justify Glaciate when you will essentially always need Winter’s Whisper for dungeons.
Suggestions:
Reduce most Icy Hand (we’ll only ever take 1 point of this), and Shatter nodes to 1-point (especially crit/damage nodes that can be merged). To path through the middle of gate 3 is still more costly than going down the sides, but is feasible for a wider range of builds.
Flip Freezing Rain and Cone of Frost — putting burst AoE behind sustain AoE feels backwards for raid usage when that sustain AOE would go unused.
Ray of Frost and Mini-Burst Control
Ray of Frost as the central cooldown is a promising direction — it’s cleaner and more thematic than Icy Veins. Two charges offer good flexibility. However:
The vulnerability of channeled CDs is concerning. Movement or knockbacks can completely shut down our primary cooldown, something no other spec has to deal with for their major burst.
Hand of Frost’s 8s window is too short. It undermines agency — there’s no time to line up meaningful burst like GS, Orb, or CMS during that window.
Visual clarity is also lacking. If this is Frost’s signature CD, it deserves a stronger aesthetic — it currently feels underwhelming and flat.
Splintering Ray
This talent requiring 5t to even beat Frigid Focus makes it entirely uncompelling. You feel punished for trying to enable Ray for AOE due to losing the massive 100% damage amp, rather than excited for the cleave potential and power it should provide on AOE packs. Being a hybrid that still provides some ST value would greatly help this talent.
Frostfire – Strong Bones, No Hooks
Frostfire lacks synergy with the new kit:
Major spells don’t generate or consume Freezing — they exist in a vacuum.
Frostfire Empowerment is hard to access in AoE, and lacks proactivity — it often feels like a background effect you’re waiting on rather than playing around.
Its core loop (CMS → Ice Nova → AoE) has been broken, and Comet Storm’s Ray-gating reduces frequency where Frostfire should feel strong.
The more freezing we have access to the less we interact with this tree, as ice lance taking over makes us use less Frostfire Bolts, Glacial Spikes, and Flurries.
Suggestions:
Let Pyroblast, Meteor, and Ignite interact with Freezing or Shatter, or generate Freezing stacks.
Improve FFE access, possibly letting any cast or a broader pool of spells generate Empowerment.
Add internal synergy (e.g. CMS or Blizzard empowerment baked into FFE, not Ray) to avoid awkward rotational detours.
Mastery
It currently works with Shatter, but ignores many core spells and talents — including Frostfire, Spellslinger effects (Splinters), Blizzard, Cone of Cold, and even key AoE paths. It does not work with frozen orb.
This is trending towards it being a dead stat from the getgo, and after experiencing that all of TWW due to neglect of a few whitelisted spells I really hope that isnt the case for Midnight.
Other Feedback
Freezing should jump to another target when one dies, like Splinters. Losing 10–15 stacks on death feels overly punishing.
Freezing’s ramp time makes me worried for our ability to do any target swapping or damage quickly dying priority targets.
Blizzard vs Frozen Orb: Currently, they don’t interact, and Blizzard has no talent hooks. If we’re choosing one, Orb is more dynamic. Consider giving Blizzard to Frostfire and Orb to Spellslinger, splitting their AoE design.
Spellslinger overperforming in AoE: With Orb CDR scaling through Haste, and strong feedback loops via Infused Splinters and Augury Abounds, this tree is significantly ahead of Frostfire in every AoE metric.
Winter’s Blessing feels gutted especially post-Icy Veins. Consider restoring this fantasy in some way.
Cone/Ice Nova melee requirement: If we’re expected to use these rotationally, consider removing roots or allowing one to replace the other to reduce melee uptime pressure. Cone also has a much lower cooldown at 12s base vs Ice Nova’s 25s base. Given shatter is where the majority of our damage comes from, its hard to see a world where Ice Nova’s moderately higher base damage makes it worth it over the lower cd of Cone of Cold. This would restrict us to melee even more than in TWW. Ice Nova needs to not root when talented into Cone of Frost, a similar change as was made to GS.
Icicles being hasted as well would feel amazing.
Final Thoughts
Frost Mage has great potential with this rework — Freezing and Shatter have the bones of an engaging, build-up-and-burst spec. But right now, Frost is being held back by:
Too much Ice Lance dominance (really need a massive st focused consumer)
Poor tree structure
Weak Frostfire/AoE cohesion
Mastery that doesn’t interact with half the kit
A spec identity that lacks a compelling niche in raid
Also a very large concern for me. Looking at it from a PvP perspective mainly, a channeled ability being our main burst/dmg cooldown makes it weak to a bunch of things:
Shadowmeld
Other mages greater Invis (now a 1 minute cooldown, FYI)
Rogue Vanish
Feign Death
CC in general, but especially interrupts.
The difference between getting 1 tick vs all of them in a pvp setting is incredibly devastating. It’s like getting your icy veins purged/dispelled after a few seconds back when it was purge-able.
Also all the talents that help boost ray’s damge and utility all depend on length of channel.
I suggest a few things to help with this:
Innate CC immunity during the channel only, baseline. Yes, all CC, all interrupts.
If not full CC immune, absolutely uninterruptible.
Ability to move while channeling this spell (Ice floes style, btw are we getting ICE floes as a passive in FROST tree or not?)
Either #1 by itself or a combo of #2 and #3 together.
These improvements need to be BASELINE or at the very least, baked into the Frost Talent tree.
Also, please please please don’t create a core mechanic problem and solve it with a PvP talent.
The rework seems like a good step in the right direction, addressing many of the pain points that have historically plagued Frost: conflicting rotational priorities, dependence on weird travel time interactions, AoE that falls apart whenever the tank moves even slightly, etc.
That being said, I’d like to comment on this particular point raised in the dev note:
Our vision for Frost Mage in Midnight involves a consistent damage profile with smaller peaks relative to the burstier specializations of Arcane and Fire, but a higher consistent damage output.
Frost has been the higher consistent DPS for quite a while now and it hasn’t seen basically any play at the top end. Modern raid design makes burst very desirable, which sets the bar for consistent damage quite high. As we saw most recently in Manaforge Omega, this isn’t a bar that Blizzard is willing to push with Frost given the nerf it received immediately at the start of the season.
Now, I’m not saying that Frost needs to have burst like Arcane or Fire, but Frost does need some sort of a niche that sets it apart from the other two specs. Something that makes you look at a raid fight and say this is a Frost fight. In TWW and prior, this was supposed to be cleave, but it didn’t bear out in practice – both Fire and Arcane had good cleave of their own and there just weren’t enough opportunities for consistent cleave damage to shine.
Looking at the current talent tree, there is nothing like that. In fact, I’d argue that Frost just picked up another downside to its damage profile: slow target swapping.
Cooldowns
I think that having Ray of Frost as the main cooldown can actually work. The main downside is that Ray, unlike Icy Veins, doesn’t do anything on its own in AoE. You can sort of fix that with Splintering Ray, but that means giving up on Ray being a strong single-target cooldown.
I think a choice between Ray being slightly stronger on AoE or slightly stronger on ST could be interesting. But picking between Ray doing literally anything on AoE or doubling its damage isn’t very fun.
Apex talents
Apex talents seem quite strong, I cannot imagine a situation where I wouldn’t want to pick them up. I especially like the extra charge on Ray of Frost, which will give Frost a lot of flexibility in raid fights – something it has historically lacked.
Talent tree
As was already mentioned in the previous post, you really feel starved for points in the second tier of the talent tree. Especially when talenting for AoE, there are so many core passives you need to pick up that you are left with basically no choice at the end.
As an example, when I want to create a talent build for Mythic+, I have to start with the core Frost passives: Brain Freeze, Icy Hand (at least 1 point), Ray of Frost and the choice node below it, Improved Shatter (2 points), Winter’s Blessing. That’s already 7 out of 12 points. Then I pick core AoE passives: Everlasting Frost, Wintertide, Splitting Ice, Fractured Frost. This leaves me with a single point to spend before moving on to the third tier.
On that note, it feels pretty bad having to invest 4 points into Shatter. Especially when two of these points are in the third tier where it constrains what capstones you can take.
As a minor note, given how the damage of Ice Lance shifted from the spell itself to the Shattered Freezing stacks, many of the talents that increase Ice Lance damage will have to be reevaluated. Increasing Ice Lance damage by 10% isn’t worth much when the majority of Ice Lance “damage” comes from Shatter.
Stats
Mastery
As it stands, mastery has three major issues. Firstly, there is currently a bug where the mastery increases damage of the affected spells by ~1% regardless of the amount of mastery on your gear (i.e. the effect doesn’t scale with mastery rating).
Secondly, it seems that mastery might not affect Blizzard, Cone of Cold, Ice Nova, and Frozen Orb, even though they generate Freezing stacks (through talents). It’s a bit hard to tell due to the above bug. If mastery doesn’t affect major sources of AoE damage, it becomes a dead stat in AoE fights and Mythic+.
And finally, mastery has no interaction with the hero talents. In TWW, this was a major issue for Frostfire (since mastery didn’t interact with Meteor, Frostfire Infusion, Excess Frost nor Excess Fire).
Crit
The crit scaling on Shatter is weird. Right now, there are two talents that change how Shatter interacts with crit: Improved Shatter and Deep Shatter. The former doubles the crit chance of Shatter and the latter adds crit bonus damage.
As an example, if you had 10% crit chance, Shatter would crit 20% of the time and its crits would deal 210% of the normal damage.
The end result is that crit is more than twice as powerful as other stats for Shatter (its effect is doubled and there is a double dip through Deep Shatter on top). If we assume that the current damage breakdowns are representative of where Shatter is meant to be (i.e. about a third of the total damage), this would make crit by far the best stat. Probably to the point where we would be stacking crit at the expense of all other stats.
When I first read the talents, I assumed it would work more like Chaos Bolt: Improved Shatter would make it always crit and Deep Shatter would add crit damage scaling on top. This would keep the crit scaling consistent and while still delivering the fantasy of Shatter critting more often.
I should add that in that case, the effect would have to increase the total crit damage and not just the bonus portion, similar to Chaos Bolt. E.g. with 10% crit chance, crits would deal 220% of the normal damage (and not the current 210%).
As it stands, Shatter scales exceptionally well with critical strike all the way up to a 50% base critical strike chance, which is high enough that you could reasonably stack it on every single piece of gear.
Haste
Adding haste scaling to Frozen Orb, Flurry and Ray of Frost is an excellent change. Especially now that Blizzard no longer reduces the cooldown of Frozen Orb, which previously, in a roundabout way, made the orb cooldown scale with haste.
However, it seems that Icicle generation isn’t affected by haste, contrary to what one might expect. Icicles are generated every 6 seconds (5 with the talent) regardless of your haste.
Freezing and Shatter
The rate at which Freezing stacks are generated is too high at times compared to how fast they’re consumed. Some Spellslinger builds in particular have long periods of Ice Lance spam. When you take the already high Ray of Frost generation and combine it with Splinterstorms that generate many extra stacks through Infused Splinters, Ice Lance can hardly keep up. The Freezing stack generation should be toned down a bit during these windows or spread out over a longer period of time.
The debuff on the targets also doesn’t offer much flexibility. Firstly, 20 max stacks is pretty low given that a fully talented Ray of Frost generates 16 stacks alone and is very likely to overcap if there are any other background sources of stacks (Blizzard, Frozen Orb, Infused Splinters, etc).
Secondly, the 8 second duration is going to be quite constraining when swapping targets. If the new target is nearby (i.e. within the range of Fractured Frost), you’ll first need to build a couple of stacks on the new target before you can Shatter both, which could easily take more than 8 seconds depending on the situation. And if the target isn’t nearby, you either give up on the main target stacks completely (leading to a significant damage loss) or try to keep them refreshed every 8 seconds (leading to a non-negligible damage loss on the priority target).
Hero talents
Spellslinger looks fairly complete. The talents complement the base Frost gameplay pretty nicely, interactions are sound and interesting. You get a ton of extra Freezing stacks from Infused Splinters, but you also consume them more quickly thanks to Polished Focus. Attuned Familiar is also a choice node, so nobody will feel locked into playing with the Water Elemental if they want to play Spellslinger. There is a minor concern that Water Jet will have to be turned off as it doesn’t generate any splinters through Attuned Familiar.
Frostfire, on the other hand, has none of that. It certainly has the proper visual flair, but all of its damage is “dumb” in the sense that it doesn’t interact with anything Frost is doing. A lot of the fun parts are just gone (e.g. the double Comet Storm/Meteor combo with Coldest Snap) with nothing to replace them.
Bugs and Strange Interactions
Finally, here’s a brief list of impactful bugs and unusual behavior that I’ve noticed for Frost Mage so far in the Alpha. Note that these aren’t all negatives in terms of the gameplay they create.
With Comet Storm talented, if you cast Ray of Frost while Blizzard is on cooldown, it will cast Comet Storm passively during the channel. This is pretty fun given that the normal behavior of Blizzard being replaced can be a little awkward, especially because it can really help you to avoid overcapping Freezing stacks, particularly if you want to use both Rays of Frost in quick succession.
Overflowing Energy is triggered by Ice Lance instead of Frostbolt/Glacial Spike, so you can end up in situations where you have 10 stacks and every Frostbolt and Glacial Spike will critically strike until you get an Ice Lance crit.
Mastery: Freeze and Shatter currently doesn’t scale with the Mastery stat at all.
Any remaining Freezing stacks refresh back to their full 8 second duration whenever you consume some of them on that target. Assuming the duration stays at 8 seconds, this is a very good thing because otherwise you’d see very frequent waste of stacks, especially in AoE, but it is not explained in any tooltip.
Frozen Orb’s new movement behavior where it chases after your target is great, but it’s a little awkward that it doesn’t start to chase the target for about 3 seconds. In particularly unfortunate cases where you hit the edge of a pack of mobs due to how the tank suddenly moves them, this can result in a lot of missed ticks. It might be better if it redirected to the new movement as soon as it slows down due to dealing damage. It’s also still possible to fully miss your Frozen Orb, which is a little weird given that it’s now a spell that cannot be cast at all without a target.
Ok so I spent a bunch of time with different fire mage talents/combos etc. One of the things I wanted to talk about in general was the “boring filler” divide in the fire discussion amongst people invested in fire mage.
So how does fire mage actually feel like to play on alpha?
To answer this simply, you can break an encounter down into three parts:
Bloodlust: On pull, combustion with bloodlust is extremely fast paced and fun. High apm, very large burst, infinite mobility, and what feels like infinite fire blasts.
The downtime after bloodlust until 30% or 40% health: This is the part of the fight you hear the most about. a lot of fireballing in between combusts that are exciting. This is a lot a fireballing/frostfirebolting. It’s not an exaggeration to say its spammy.
Execute: During execute, you will have 100% crit rate on fireball leading to a significantly more engaging filler rotation as you generate more fire blasts, more pyroclasms, more sunfury orbs, and other procs reliant on hot streaks. This filler is fun because 90% until execute was spammy.
So all in all the vibe:
100% until 90% = amazing
90% to 30 or 40% = slow with short spikes of amazing
30 or 40% to dead = great
What’s different from live?
The main difference from the war within fire mage to midnight’s alpha version #1 is the removal of unleashed inferno’s cooldown reduction. Kindling on average would give you about ~30 seconds of cooldown reduction…so it’s still there more or less. The removal of phoenix flames really isn’t a big deal, and scorch is just a fireball replacement…you feel the removal of scorch in movement, but rotationally you don’t care that much.
Frostfire unleashed inferno isn’t THAT different really as the cooldown on combustion isn’t changing much from what is on live realms.
The major removal really is sun king’s blessing…it is quite good in the current season in m+, but I don’t think many people know that or play it. I really don’t think this talent is compatible with the design direction of midnight given its cognitive load on tracking stacks…so it’s removal aligns with design goals.
In the war within, you primarily casted:
fireball or scorch
fire blast
pyroblast or flamestrike
phoenix flames
meteor (as ffire)
In midnight, you will primarily cast:
fireball
fire blast
pyroblast or flamestrike
meteor (as ffire)
The most major button removed was phoenix flames, and this was the worst button in the rotation; it was nothing more than fire blast with a travel time. There were other spells you casted, but they were extremely rare between button pushes, and they really didn’t add much to the experience. Fire mage has always been dominated by fireball, fire blast, and pyroblast because that is the core of the spec. Nearly every attempt to augment that gameplay loop has just made it worse.
Fire mage is about to get extremely easy right?
No, not really. I have seen countless players over the years struggle to perform combustion correctly or perfectly, and when only 20% of the fight is in combustion, literally any mistake you make will be punished with a large loss of damage. In the war within, you were punished by missing cooldown reduction. In midnight, you will be punished by missing raw damage. The filler will be extremely easy, but a significant increase in pressure will be placed on performing combustion correctly on top of timing it correctly. Mistiming it’s effect can miss major add spawns for ignite.
Also in midnight, an additional layer of difficulty/nuance will show up in how to min max the use of pyroclasm procs. You will have some combustions with zero, and some with three procs. Min maxing when and how you spend these as well as stacking the deck to try and get one to enter combust are mini games to play that people don’t really see right now.
There will be significant room to master this spec and distinguish yourself even if nothing changes before release. Fire mage is and has always been the premier dunning kruger spec.
So here’s the divide:
On one hand, people have in general over many tiers come to view combustion as a foundation for the rotation as if it were a damage stance. They have viewed combustion as the engine that enables the spec to work. When the uptime of combustion goes from 40%-60% (depending on which version you play in what patch) down to 20% on alpha, it’s going to feel like 80% of the fight fire mage is simply “turned off” compared to the war within.
On the other hand, you have people who remember the midnight version of fire as a return back to the days where combustion was a big deal, and when it was pressed the fire mage really made a significant impact in the rotation. The fireball spam of the filler was just the cost for having a cooldown that was this significant. Midnight fire as is today is most comparable to lucid dreams eternal palace minus rune of power.
I don’t think either side is necessarily “wrong” personally. We each like what we like. The side that likes more button presses wants less filler and more combustion. The side that wants less combustion could not care less what happens between combustions as long as combustion itself slaps.
What I think I want most from fire mage is for anything that is added or changed to not cheapen combustion for the sake of mindless button mashing. I personally do not want to see high combustion uptime, and I do not want to see combustion cooldown tied to spamming fireball. I am someone who could not care less what happens when I’m not in combustion. If filler were made more interesting…I do not care as long as my combustion is bursty, special, and worth spending effort to time correctly.
I want combustion to be something that moves the needle on if my group kills a fight by tying it to important damage windows or add spawns. I don’t want it to be like the war within where the only correct way to play fire mage is to send combustion without thought because trying to add nuance to the spec leads to significant damage loss. I want to be part of contributing to damage strategy again. Midnight design accomplishes this.
I would want something like this added if we were going to augment the rotation:
Put meteor on the RIGHT hand side of the tree just where it is at the moment and a player casted greater pyroblast on the left hand side for an aoe mega nuke vs single target mega nuke talent path choice. Player casted Greater Pyro will need a certain amount of fireballs cast at which point enough stacks enables you to cast greater pyroblast. It would give fire mages a mini game to play between combusts.
The point of that interaction is to give the players who wants more to the spec a reason to be pressing fireball. At the same time, the players like me who do not want to cheapen combustion have a spell we can now line up to precast into combustion, and the filler now enhances the gameplay I enjoy without cheapening the cooldown. I’m sure there are a thousand ways to achieve this besides that random idea, but something like this works for both sides of the debate.
So what do you do if nothing changes and you like the fire mage on live servers?
The answer really is frostfire hero tree. The combustion cooldown is 60 seconds, and its likely that you will add meteor to your rotation of casted spells (this hits SO HARD by the way…i love how much power is in this spell). Combustion is back up again right as the frostfirebolt spam is getting dull. You get 15% free crit rate on the filler and 10% increased casting speed. This is very noticeable as you cycle through hot streaks more often, and you cast a meteor every time you enter combustion with 1 meteor in between. This is very similar to frostfire unleashed inferno on the war within servers without the maintenance buffs.
Been playing frost since BFA, CE raiding and some title m+ seasons, I’ve also been pretty involved in theorycrafting and APL work for it since 2022.
Let me start by saying I like the interesting ideas in the Frost rework, I think theres a lot of things that have changed for frost here that look exciting. Now lets talk problems.
Splinter Resource Generation
Splinters and splinterstorm generating freezing causes a massive influx of freezing around cds, a problem that S1 DF also had which also led to its large amounts of ice lance spam.
Splinter frozen orb cdr is good, but so was a hasted orb. The problem is since spellfrost teachings is flat cdr you double dipped from the haste value. You have the tech to change cdr based on haste, if this was employed on spellfrost teachings, and Orb scaled with haste again that would be great.
Spellslinger already gets pseudo haste scaling from SFT, removing base haste scaling from orb prevents Frostfire from the same opportunity.
Splinter Targeting
Its been 2 major patches since FiredUp did his bug abuse, it would be great if we found a fix that let splinters actually hit your primary target again. Currently they will hit anything you are in combat with, which hurts us quite a bit when splinters can apply freezing, but also like to hit the pylon that is taking 99% reduced damage on Forgeweaver .
Force of Will
This talent is a bit awkward, as since you just increased the base Ice Lance shatter to 4, Spellslinger’s Polished Focus makes it 5, and to not lose a splinter youre forced to always take Heart of Ice. Also Comet Storm was increased to 2 freezing consumption, but this node is still specifically Ice Lance?
Ray of Frost
I do think some way to protect this cast would be nice. Personally I think old Ice Floes staying as a choice node with Shimmer wouldve been perfect, especially as fire wants it to protect pyroclasm casts. But we’ve yet to see what the Frost tree iteration is aside from some early datamining.
Frigid Focus vs Splintering Ray
This choice node feels very punishing. We have to destroy any value Ray’s damage has on anything but 6t+, just to get access to AOE freezing application on our main CD. Honestly it feels like they should be merged into 1 point, or frigid focus removed and base ray buffed. I dont think theres a world where the sides of this choice node being overwhelming ST vs basic AOE functionality feels good to choose ever.
AOE
Fingers of Frost
I essentially never get this unless its from Flash Freeze or Glaciate, which is a symptom of the ice lance rotation to be fair. But also, Flash Freeze is currently giving you max FoF stacks per Glacial Spike, which seems unintended. Honestly, I rather like it.
This should cleave to the max targets regardless of freezing stacks. Otherwise youre very punished for spending Fingers of Frost without waiting for your blizzard and orb to RNG give you freezing, or you save your Cone of Frost to ensure your FoF will cleave the max targets. This is a bit unintuitive, and certainly going to cause a major damage and skill difference in frost mages that understand how this works, vs those that dont. Highly recommend it just cleaves to the max targets possible for ice lance.
You removed my Weakauras, add a 3rd Fingers of Frost overlay for its 3rd stack. And add it to the cooldown manager tracked buffs.
Also Improved Clearcasting is 1 point for +2 max stacks, feels like Icy Hands should perhaps be the same.
This needs to function with effects that consume freezing, currently you are unable to proc Hand of Frost while using FoF. And I would be shocked if consuming freezing didnt show up on at least 2 of our tier sets this expansion.
Winter’s Whisper
This is a pivotal AOE point and shouldnt be pushed behind the 2-pointer of Glacial Attunement. Making it or freezing winds a capstone off each other would be a really good thing. If Winter’s Whisper stays locked behind Glacial Attunement it severely limits build variety for M+.
Tab Targeting
Due to ice lance not cleaving unless freezing is on a target, youre often forced to tab target and flurry prior to ice lancing to force additional cleaves onto your 3rd or 4th target. This feels terrible.
I’m testing this while Blizzard isnt working for freezing application, but even with orb out the generation is inconsistent in lower AOE counts.
Frostfire
Comet Storm
This does not feel worthy of a capstone, and its trigger is too infrequent. Also please increase its radius.
The big problem with this aside from it not interacting with Force of Will, or Master Lancer, is its infrequency of use is juxtaposed by Spellslingers frequent use of Orb. This coupled with the fact that FF has to invest the 4 points in the 3rd gate to always take it, really harms Frostfire’s build variety, and it doesnt come close to the power feeling Frostfire had for it in the War Within.
Frostfire currently suffers from a lack of consistent AOE options, and minimal freezing/shatter interaction. Since it has infrequent access to orb, its freezing generation in AOE is poor at best. Which makes it quite hard to get the benefit of all 16 freezing stacks that Comet Storm is capable of shattering.
Frostfire Shatter/Freeze Interaction
I would suggest a shift for Frostfire. Instead of Blizzard, let Comet Storm permanently replace Orb. Have each of its comets guaranteed applied 1 freezing, but Meteor consumes 10. Frostfire then has a bit of a self contained combo, where you Ice Nova → Comet Storm to have a massive burst of damage.
Additionally this would be a theme. Pyroblast and ignite have no purpose atm for Midnight frost. This could be tacked onto them as well, with Pyroblast shattering a stack or two of freezing. Since it hits before Glacial Spike, this would allow Glacial Spike to re-apply the amount it currently does (and you can just flurry prior to casting it to ensure there are freezing stacks for Pyroblast).
Ignite’s place could be as a passive way to reduce Comet Storm’s cd. Similar to Spellfrost teachings.
This could equalize both specs in sustained AOE, while providing them different flavors. Since Orb provides more freezing it should be the more attractive option for Spellslinger, but if spellslinger wants burst it would be able to talent into Comet Storm for burst freezing and damage.
Alternatively to solve Frostfire’s AOE problem you could make Frostfire spells that shatter do a % of that damage in AOE.
Frostfire Empowerment
This feels great, especially when used on Glacial Spike. However, its rare you are able to use it on Glacial Spike outside of right after Ray, because this is only proc’d by Frostfire spells. Given we cast very few of those in AOE, it would be great if this was changed to all spells. FFE has always felt the most awkward when it procs while chain casting frostbolts, and thats the most likely scenario for it to proc in for midnight Frost.
Master Lancer
Doesnt work with any other consumer, this talent needs a rework. Its terribly strong and honestly the backbone of the midnight spec atm driving its complexity.
Deep Shatter
This 2 point node is more egregious than Improved Shatter. Due to how overwhelming Shatter damage is, this will always be taken, and perma locking in 2 points in the 3rd gate is incredibly limiting. As we will certainly be taking other capstones, this can definitely go down to one point. To get it and Heart of Ice → Master Lancer is still more costly in talent points than going from Rimecaster → Flash Freeze → Master Lancer (as an example if you also took Glaciate). So it still adds an additional cost to the middle path.
Freezing
Debuff
For the past several expansions Frost Mages have been using a number of Weakauras with shared functionality called Instant Winters Chill. What this did was on cast of a spell that consumes winters chill, it removed that stack from your UI indication. This was necessary because at high haste or far distance it is incredibly hard to play around a debuff when you have a number of spells in flight.
While the timing of this becomes less important as freezing isnt as restrictive as winters chill, it will still cause reduced player performance and odd behavior on fights like Dimensius and Fractilius, which are quite common in raids these days.
Please implement a maximum travel time for Frost spells, shorter than the current one for Fire spells (this could also be slightly reduced) so that debuff gameplay is not atrocious on a very common raid design, bosses with large hitboxes.
Duration
8s is too short. Festering Wounds had a 30s duration before its removal in midnight. 8s makes target swapping impossible, and that will occur in raids. Since its duration is refreshed when consuming the 8s duration never drives any decision except to really really make you not want to swap targets. Which is generally fine in m+, but will not fly in raid.
Visibility
This is terribly hard to see on nameplates. And yes, debuff on the cd manager will help with this in ST, but not in AOE. If the above duration is increased to 30s it would greatly help if the stack count was the highlighted part of the debuff, not the duration. Given we are trying to shatter a specific number of freezing.
Deaths
Splinters transfer to another target when they die, freezing should do the same. If target swapping is so limited we shouldnt be punished for sticking with our target till they keel over.
Freezing Generation Rate
This is really high during cds, and kind of bad outside of cds. You can not consume all the freezing generated during your cds, and I think this is what drove the increased shatter by ice lance change recently. But that only makes the out of cd rotation feel worse, as you run out of freezing faster. So the delta between the amount of freezing you get during cds and how quickly you are able to use it out of cds needs to be adjusted.
Cone of Frost
Please move this above Freezing Rain. In raid if I want to do cleave I am at the least taking Fractured Frost and likely Splitting Ice already. Cone of Frost is not terribly strong and gating it behind Freezing Rain makes it likely that Blizzard will be cast in ST when talented, and causes me to waste an additional point for something I dont want, sustained AOE.
Empowering Cone of Frost in the Frostfire tree (replacing Dual Casting Adept) could also be a solution to Frostfire’s poor amount of consistent freezing in AOE.
I can see why you may not want to, if it would make us cast CoC/Ice Nova in ST, which would be less than ideal. A similar target cap restriction to Coldest Snap for more ease of access would be great.
CD Imbalance
Current Cone of Cold has a 7s cd with Time Manipulation, and Ice Nova has a 20s cd. These need to be equalized or we will need to be in melee more than we have been in the past. Of the two I’d say making them both 10s cds with Time Manipulation, and having Ice Nova not root with Cone of Frost talented would be great (disruptive to have core abilities root, the root removal from Glacial Spike should be followed).
Piercing Cold
We have no way to increase the crit rate of our base spells anymore, this should be changed. Also Pyroblast should be included in its list of effects. Frostfire’s Glacial Spike is tuned with that as part of its damage in mind, yet it interacts with none of the relevant talents nor benefits from things like using FFE on Glacial Spike.
Glaciate
This talent feels very good. However since it generates 5 icicles and you are only ever at 0 when you just cast Glacial Spike, it does feel a bit bad to always overcap on at least some icicles. Would be nice if icicles could stack a little higher perhaps to account for this overcap.
Can not repost harder. Amazing points that really need to be considered.
Shatter bases its damage on how many Freezing stacks are on the target, up to some consumption limit. This also applies when the Freezing stacks aren’t consumed thanks to Fingers of Frost.
So, to get full value out of your Fingers of Frost, you need to have enough Freezing stacks on your targets. On a single target, the Freezing stack generation is high enough that you can do this consistently without too much effort. However, doing the same on secondary targets is far more complicated because the generation is much lower and less consistent.
Fingers of Frost doesn’t last that long, so waiting for enough stacks isn’t feasible. Even if it were, you’d likely have to Ice Lance before that point to avoid overcapping stacks on the primary target.
Despite the above, the solution is to spread the Freezing stacks evenly by swapping targets, which is problematic for multiple reasons. Firstly, juggling an 8 second debuff on up to 6 targets is just hard. There’s no room for error and failing to refresh the debuff is quite punishing. Secondly, even just tracking the debuff on all the targets presents significant issues, especially in a world without combat addons.
With how Shatter is curretly set up, we’re not talking about some minor optimization either. The difference between Fingers of Frost saving 10-15 Freezing stacks versus the full 36 is massive. As per the developers’ notes, target-swapping shouldn’t be necessary in AoE thanks to Fractured Frost and while we likely won’t have to target-swap to consume the Freezing stacks with Ice Lance, target-swapping to generate stacks will be optimal.
I wanted to make a post to point out a very serious problem with the burnout talent. If you cancel aura combustion, you can force this talent to proc. it is very likely that it will be a gain in some scenarios to cancelaura combustion to get that proc to go off at the right moment.
Having said that once this issue is fixed……………………this talent is very cool.
Also out of left field…..the ability to press combustion a second time to force the burnout to go off (but not cancel combustion) on your own schedule might be a fun "skill expression” addition honestly. You would then just have it automatically go off at the end of combustion if not pressed.
This is incredibly weak. We barely flurry in ST, and our FoF generation is basically non-existent outside of Flash Freeze and Crystalline Refraction. It also favors Spellslinger heavily, with multiplicative damage scaling for Blizzard, and Spellslinger’s much higher shatter damage through Polished Focus and Master Lancer.
Based on my recent logging, the 2 set would be 0.2% dps in ST for frostfire, and 0.1% for Spellslinger. Even if you add frostbolt (as datamined) that only brings it up to 0.7% and 0.3% respectively.
Flash Freezeburn
Perfection, feels absolutely amazing for Frostfire Frost.
Mastery
The coefficient was reduced to 1, the same as vers, but this effects vastly less things, so it needs to be bumped up.
Comet Storm
The placement of this talent is still a big problem for Frostfire, being forced to always take it heavily restricts your points in the third gate. Especially when you want to look at GS or AOE synergy, it just feels impossible. Contrasted with Spellslinger, which doesnt have to care about this spell at all.
For its investment its also not particularly strong or reliable, could really use a baseline radius increase for consistency (example: the cluster of three dummies in Stormwind are not each hit by all 7 of Comet Storm’s comets). And a dmg buff since the Meteor change to Fire nerfed Meteor for Frost.
Winter’s Whisper
This being gated behind a 2 point node in the 3rd gate that you otherwise may not want feels very awkward when its essentially required in sustained AOE/Dungeons especially.
If it was below Freezing Winds, and Flash Freeze was changed to be Hailstones → Flash Freeze I think the third gate would feel a lot more balanced with the left side empowering Comet Storm + AOE, and the right side empowering Glacial Spike + Ray of Frost. While allowing you to sink some 1 points into some weaker capstones.
Freezing Rain
This talent feels bad with how little we have access to orb in Midnight. The infrequency of the instant blizzard just makes it feel very odd and tacked on.
Cone of Frost
Given this is a burst AOE talent, it would be great if it was moved above Freezing Rain, so we could take it in Raid when we have no interest in sustain AOE, but need access to some AOE for short lived adds.
Being that FF is the burstier variant of Frost, you could add a talent (perhaps replacing Duelcasting Adept) to increase this to 8 targets and apply more freezing. Or simply make the talent 8 targets baseline, frost has never been a 5T focused specialization. This would synergize well with Comet Storm and Meteor, having more shatter potential than ice lance, and a higher target cap.
Master Lancer
This talent is too strong and heavily incentivizes close tracking of freezing stacks on all targets and pooling of fof to chain ice lance as many times as humanely possible. This does not feel good with the reduced ability to track debuffs in the War Within. It also doesnt work with Comet Storm.
Deep Shatter
This being 2 points yet a required talent feels incredibly limiting as Frostfire especially, I feel always unable to talent into the GS nodes like Glaciate and Hailstones on the right side of the tree, even though I very much want to.
Frostfire
I still feel like most of this hero talent is just out of place with current frost. Why do Frostfire Flurry and Pyroblast exist? They just do damage and apply ignite (while not scaling with mastery), which also just does damage. Also Dualcasting Adept increasing our fire crit damage makes little sense when Shatter is its new form.
Contrasted with Spellslinger, which has Splinters that generate freezing and cdr, Frostfire feels wrong.
Spellslinger
Polished Focus
15% increased damage for Shatter and 1 increased Shatter stack is insane when Shatter is the majority of our damage. In ST this far outweighs any value a Frostfire node provides.
Augury Abounds
The 10s window after Ray needs to be trackable or changed, due to our 2 charges of Ray and Ray generating splinters, we likely want to cast this as late as possible to either double Ray’s splinter generation, or just wait until the window is over. But we have no way to track the window in the base UI.
Force of Will
This needs to work with other spells like Comet Storm that consume freezing.
Freezing Consumption
The effects like Master Lancer and Force of Will need to work with Comet Storm (and Meteor) as well as Ice Lance.
The rotation is very ice lance heavy still as the only consistent consumer of freezing in both ST and AOE. This reduces our resource generation significantly and may get stale.
Target Swapping
Still very awkward. Fingers of Frost requiring 1 freezing stack to get its value feels weird, when it could be the perfect vector for target swapping if its target just always took the shatter damage.
Cone of Frost being restricted as it is also heavily hurts AOE and Cleave target swapping, as its our only way to get Freezing on more than 2 targets at once, and the only other option is to tab target flurry (this would feel terrible to do).
Visibility
Please make the stacks the highlighted part of this debuff. Theyre important to see, and the duration tracker just blocks them always.
Target Cap
Historically Frost has been the 8t cap spec of mage (along with Fire). But this rework changes it to be more of a 5-6t spec. With Ray of Frost only effecting 6t, Ice Lance 6t, Cone of Frost 5t. This puts us more directly in competition with Arcane which has historically been dominating that 5t spot, I worry that Frost is not set up to be an equal in this space.
Especially when Arcane’s 5t cleave is gained automatically as they are forced to talent through Arcing Cleave, yet we need 1 talent for 6t Ray (Surge is automatically AOE), 1 talent for 4t Ice Lance (Barrage like surge is basically 5t always with no talent investment), 1 talent to make Ice Lance 6t (in the 3rd gate no less), and 2 talents to make Ice Nova apply freezing.
Quoting again because this really needs to be considered.
Bugs:
Everlasting Frost - doesnt generate fof
Blizzard - doesnt generate freezing even when talented
Going to try to keep each point short so its more actionable. To preface, I was previously optimistic but also upset at the changes in previous weeks:
Apex talent changes are great. Only thing is i think the design to be reduced chance every time it procs (starting high, going lower per proc) is maybe not ideal for implications of combustion feel. When you have pyroclasm procs, you are overrun with Fire Blast anyway, and when you dont have any, you are running out quickly and the reducing frequency seems maybe contributes to this.
Maybe piggy backing off previous comment but running out of Fire Blast feels REALLY bad in combustion now that scorch and phoenix flames is gone. Perhaps something to reduce fireball cast time in combustion or even instant cast fireball in combustion?
The new pyroclasm sunfury talent is fantastic. I wish it wasnt a choice node but I kind of get why it is. My only comment is that I kind of wish it was not tied to meteor and instead was simply tied to when your phoenix is summoned and expires as well (so two per combustion). The latter is mainly because if you get a late proc in combustion, if you cannot fit it in combustion, it has to “survive” hyperthermia duration and THEN be castable and you can get unlucky and have it expire. Could be a symptom of low haste levels but seems like unnecessary friction
The new talent spread/locations/choices are great overall. It feels like I am making actual choices in both the middle and the final gate which I think is something very important. Being able to choose my combustion CD for specific profiles, and gaining points in return to invest into other things feels like meaningful choice. Picking spell effects I want in exchange for others I am ok dropping seems cool too.
Re: previous point though, some of the talent points are very boring and are basically tuning knobs but these tuning knobs stand as a choice with more exciting effects. If numerical tuning of these knobs is good, they are mandatory and losing effects is sad. If the tuning on the knobs is bad then getting the cool effects is nice but then why do these dull points exist (maybe as just a passive option for less experienced players or those who want a simpler option?)
Pyromaniac is a great proc that looks cool even though its not highly impactful. Can it be higher in the tree? I do not like having to spec Flamestrike and Fuel the Fire to advance past the first gate. Fuel the Fire should be baseline and Pyromaniac should be more accessible. Cinderstorm kinda suffers from this as well in that it feels inaccessible but I think given its more iconic and has more effects tied to it maybe its ok.
Frenetic speed is a bad and unfun talent and will never be taken in any content I am almost sure. Its pure utility in a space where many damage nodes are impactful and points are sparse. Please reconsider this talent to either be something else (like fireball cast while moving instead of movement speed) or remove this point and present another interesting execute option.
Perhaps not a big issue since choice is important but the bottom gate having: [Fiery Rush, From the Ashes (which is contingent on having Feel the Burn), the middle core keystone choice node, Pyroclasm (contingent on Flame Accel)], feels like it asphyxiates alternatives. These nodes all feel borderline required for fire to feel good and functional but it occupies a LARGE percentage of available points. Would like to see maybe 1-2 of these nodes merged, or made baseline, so we have 1-2 more points to play with for cleave considerations or at least some of the contingencies swapped. I think if From the Ashes and Feel the Burn is swapped for example then the choices become more interesting. Pyroclasm and Flame accel could use a similar treatment because there is no world you would ever take Flame accel without pyroclasm since the former is amplifying the value of the latter. swap them around and increase the strength of flame accel imo so that choice is more interesting.
Execute feels kind of odd with how its all guaranteed crit fireballs but not pyroblasts. The intuitions/feelings are swapped in a sense given how much damage fireball does in execute. I dont necessarily dislike it, just reporting the felt dissonance between normal intuitions of spells and results of presented execute options. I would be OK with it going live like this because I cannot think of more elegant solutions (faster cast time is something I thought about but even with guaranteed crit, the travel time might be problematic as it can create weird feeling moments especially with pyroblast not being a guaranteed crit).
Overall, very good changes from previous build and the vision is becoming more cohesive and enjoyable even for someone who does not like the simplification changes. It provides the exciting moments sometimes without being much more complex conceptually. I am excited to see what more changes can come.
PS: I am pretending some of the bugs that exist are just bugs and will be fixed. reporting them in game when i see them instead of mentioning them here
WAY too much talent tension in the third gate, suggest dropping the left+right 2 pointers to 1 point.
Second gate, particularly on AoE, is crowded to the point that it feels like you want to drop Brain Freeze to pick things up.
So many talents increase our base spells, but the base spells amount to like 3% of your damage each. Are we looking at a re-balance between them and Shatter at some point? Would love a note or something.
Crit’s still going to be insane due to Improved Shatter/Deep Shatter, you just made how long it’s crazy for longer by making it x1.5 instead of x2. Consider additive flat value instead.
Flurry feels weird. It doesn’t give you enough to Lance into. Can’t believe I’m asking for more Freezing stacks, but it would be nice that it would allow the use of at least one cast of Ice Lance.
Force of Will feels bad when you Shatter 5 stacks, would like it to give 50% for 3 splinters in that case.
Water Jet is useless on Slinger, should probably interact with Attuned Familiar in some capacity or will be turned off.
Frostfire Empowerment on Icicles hitting 5 is cool, but can be consumed by a spell mid-flight and just feels bad.
Fingers of Frost requires Freezing on any given target, which still feels bad. Letting it full stack cleave would help address some of the questions I have below.
Utility nodes on both trees + defensive on Slinger are sad, to say the least. Look Again doesn’t even get 1 cast off. Reactive Barrier requires you to be sub-25% health to get nearly the same benefit as Frostfire’s Barrier. Fire CDR for what Fire spells?
What exactly was the point of Captured Thoughts? No thoughts are being captured here other than confusion. For all three specs.
Okay so, what’s the actual intent for Frost AoE? What are we doing in M+? You’ve stripped everything we had in terms of Coldest Snap burst, Ice Caller CDR, SFT ate another 50% nerf this build… Freezing Rain still exists, instant Blizzard feels real nice, but you’ve nuked Orb availability and thus uptime of the buff. Evidently you want us to build Freezing on AoE, but between stack differentials noted above and the fact that it can just feel like I hit Lance and did next to nothing on AoE feels excessively bad. Fingers of Frost granting us the pure Shatter bonus on full target count would go a long way here. So would stripping the RNG out of Blizzard/Orb Freezing gen, or at least making it a lot more reliable.
Comet Storm exists, but doesn’t interact with any of the Shatter talents (Master Lancer/Force of Will).
Pair these with the fact that we have no uncapped AoE outside of Comet Storm anymore? Blizzard is 8t soft, Orb is 8t soft, Cone is 5t hard, Splintering Ray/Fractured+Whispering is 6t hard. What is Frost bringing to the table in high keys vs say, a Warlock? Vs the other Mage specs? Flat damage profiles are already a detriment in every aspect of this game because it’s never tuned competitively, this is dangerous territory.
Missing Talents
We’ve been watching Ice Floes change over the alpha via datamining, and given that it is in a non-pathing location, it needs to be extremely strong to be worth the point with how crowded the tree is. The original Frostbolt/GS while moving is significantly better than Ray while moving. Please don’t kill Ice Floes.
Attached Water Elemental talent likewise is in one of the most ridiculously crowded trees. Given the Water Elemental does not scale with Mastery (once again), is purely single target, and does not provide proc generation, this talent is going to need to be extremely strong as well. Currently Water Elemental is only used either for Splinter generation, and..not used on Frostfire, as the Rimecaster branch is inaccessible due to point limits and CmS+Master Lancer requirements.
Target Swapping
You did it, we won’t have to target swap with Ice Lance. We’re going to instead tab target Flurry/GS/Frostbolt around the pack to maximize Freezing coverage because the relative dpct of a Lance that hits full consume on 6t vs full consume on primary+1-2 on everything else is absurd. Tracking this in an addon-less combat environment is going to be the biggest headache in the spec. I foresee /cast [@mouseover]Frostbolt/Flurry while we try and aim at nameplates with no Freezing, and /cast [@focus]Lance/Ray on something big and beefy to soak the Ray damage that’ll outlive most of the pack.
Likewise, mobs dying with Freezing feels really bad. You’re just back to nothing, especially open world/delves. Give it the Splinter lossy re-assignment? Make them burst? I don’t know. Feels bad.
Hand of Frost 1 is boring. It’s a damage proc that adds more Freezing stacks on a spec that has issues dropping Freezing stacks as-is. I guess it might feel cooler if it had an animation that was worth anything, but right now I can’t find myself excited about it. You did so well on removing the “chill of the grave” styled things from this spec with the revamp, why are we leaning into a giant hand?? I can kinda sorta see a D&D “mage hand” styled effect but right now it feels more akin to something Death Knights would have than us.
Hand of Frost 2 is, somehow, even more boring than that. It’s a damage buff that we have no method to actually take advantage of, on a spec that’s supposed to be flat damage. It doesn’t add enough Freezing to Lance off of, it doesn’t last long enough to build up a good stack and chain Shatter, it simply feeds into Master Lancer’s “I want to buff Shatter to hell and back when I drop like 9 Lance casts back to back” but now you’re adding rng to it.
Would like to highlight the anti-synergistic component of it and Heart of Ice/Polished Focus, where more single consume events will proc more Hands on average, even with the increased proc chance per stack consumed. Feels like an odd tension.
Hand of Frost 3 is amazing, but not because we particularly care about the Hand spell. The second charge on Ray of Frost is the star of the show.
The second charge means that you will never, ever, ever not talent into it. Adding a charge to your cooldown is one of the most amazing things you can offer a dps spec.
This is not a bad Apex Talent, but it is definitely being held up by the fact that it hits like a truck and gives Ray a second charge. The aesthetic is lost on me, and most people in the Discord currently.
I think I would like it better if we had one of those bi-directional nodes like some specs have. This would give us the potential to trade the questionable damage buff for 2 more points in the crowded third gate, and relieve some of the pain points there.
Going through talent options, these are the themes I find myself going for:
I really like Burnout. I find myself trying to go for this most times i build a tree
Fire’s Ire → Pyromaniac → Cinderstorm I find myself avoiding constantly. Cinderstorm as a capstone feels boring and weak compared to every other option and requires 4 points to get to
It feels really difficult to get Burnout and pyroclasm without sacrificing some important ignite talents like feel the burn. I think I like this choice in the end where you go for fire blast + ignite or nuke
I find myself experimenting with dropping 1 point from kindling for a 90 second combustion to invest more heavily in meteor. I think I like the concept of choosing between 60 and 90 second combustion and gaining points in meteor by doing so. If meteor is strong enough this may be a cool choice
Dropping cauterize and both kindling points never feels worth it. I think thats a good thing.
I will never take Frenetic Speed.
I find myself avoiding controlled destruction because theres too much value nearby in other talents
I could never justify any points in spontaneous combustion. I like the feel of how it plays, but its cost is too high
I wish meteor was even more accessible. I feel really bad not having it because of how satisfying it is.
Combustion entry can be quite awkward without spontaneous combustion. You quite often have to fireball right as combustion begins to generate hot streak. I would like if combustion activation simply always granted a hot streak to make the entry more seamless.
Losing the haste scaling on Frozen Orb’s cooldown is unfortunate. The reduced frequency of Frozen Orbs makes all the other Orb talents less fun. Freezing Rain in particular just doesn’t feel good with much lower uptime. Everlasting Frost, Wintertide and Permafrost Lances will be hard to justify, especially since the second talent tier is already packed with many important talents. Historically, this wasn’t a huge issue because of how much cooldown reduction was provided by Ice Caller, which also gave Frozen Orb some indirect haste scaling.
Clearly the interaction of the hasted-reduced cooldown with Spellfrost Teaching (where haste increased the relative strength of the cooldown reduction) was too powerful, but I’m not sure this was the right way to fix it.
Improved Shatter
Reducing Improved Shatter to just the first point brings the value of crit into saner territory and also frees up desperately needed choices in the second talent tier, but even a 1.5 crit chance multiplier results in extremely strong crit. And while we likely won’t gear all the way to the new Shatter cap (66.6%) at the expense of everything, crit will still be better than anything else until about ~40% (assuming Shatter doing third of the total damage).
An additive 50% crit chance, together with Deep Shatter, would result in strong crit but not to the point of making all other stats bad.
Flash Freezeburn
This is an amazing change and something Frostfire desperately needed. However, it’s really easy to waste the Frostfire Empowerment on Frostfire Bolt. It happens in two different ways: (1) if you gain the 5th Icicle while casting Frostfire Bolt, the bolt will just eat the proc and (2) if you cast Glacial Spike while Frostfire Bolt is in the air, it’s the bolt that explodes and not Glacial Spike.
Fingers of Frost
There’s one major issue with the new Fingers of Frost behavior: to get the full Shatter, there needs to be at least one Freezing stack present on the targets. You can still completely waste Fingers of Frost if you’re not careful.
The bigger problem is that all of the annoying target swapping will still be present in AoE situations. The goal will be to maintain at least 1 stack on up to 6 targets (rather than 6+ stacks on 6 targets), which still has all of the issues that Manather pointed out above.
Mastery
As far as I can tell, all of the producers and consumers are now included in the Frost mastery, which is a great change. However, Mastery currently provides 1% increased damage to Freezing producers/consumers per mastery point, which makes 1 mastery point worse than 1% of versatility.
Flurry
In general, Flurry just doesn’t feel good now that it doesn’t even provide enough Freezing stacks to cast a single untalented Ice Lance. Some version of Flurry into Ice Lance existed since Flurry’s introduction and it feels weird losing that. I’ve even thought about just not talenting into Brain Freeze because I just don’t intuitively want to press the button much anymore.
Captured Thoughts
I’m not sure what the purpose of this talent is. We try to utilize procs as they come, so adding a really long duration to something that’s instantly used is really weird for all the specs. It could sometimes be used to avoid having procs expire during downtime, but for Frost this doesn’t really do anything because we care about Brain Freeze for the cooldown reset and not the damage buff.
Adding to this, the limited duration on Frostfire Empowerment can cause it to fall off during downtime. This will be noticed every pull after a raid boss, where you get rezzed → wait more than 20s to pull and dont have an empowered Glacial Spike on pull.
Consider making Frostfire Empowerment with Flash Freezeburn talented an innate feature of Glacial Spike for Frostfire, while the Frostfire Empowerment proc can stay Frostfire Bolt only to solve both issues. Alternatively giving it an infinite duration as a bit of a bandaid, but that would leave the terrible feeling situation where an inflight Frostfire Bolt consumes FFE intended for Glacial Spike.
Buff Visibility
Clearcasting
The legion version of this spell overlay needs to return. There is no reason I should have to track it on the CD Manager just to see its stacks, when there is a perfectly useable spell overlay that has been used for it in the past, and that I personally have been using since it was removed as WA.
Pyroclasm
Similarly this overlay needs to showcase if you have 1 or 2 stacks, relying on a CD Manager Icon (which this currently isnt in the CD Manager) would be ridiculous. The overlays are the default way to display information, because they resonant much better than numbers in boxes. They should display information that is this critical to the buff by default.
Fingers of Frost
This needs an overlay for the 3rd Fingers of Frost proc. Sidenote, Icy Hands should not be 2 talent points when especially the 2nd one provides very minimal to no dmg value.
Due to frost’s pooling gameplay (Master Lancer L) I had to frequently glance up to my buff bar to see the remaining duration on Fingers of Frost. I would vastly prefer this have an option to show on the spell overlay itself. The CD Manager would not be a good fix for this.
Frost Feedback
Splintering Ray
This feels so core to ray, that I forgot to even swap to the ST version when I was on dummies. I think the nodes should be merged. Its very strange to otherwise have no AOE interaction with our main cd. As a comparison, Surge is automatically AOE, and has a followup node to increase its damage. Ray would do well with that.
Alternatively, baking in Splintering Ray as it is, and leaving the followup node that would instead provide an option between ray hitting 3-4 more targets, or doing more damage. So for lower cleave and ST/priority focus you can take the more damage, or the more targets in large dungeons.
Frostfire
I quested a bit as both hero specs and Frostfire felt much more fun. However the talent points just feel terrible. With how strong Glacial Spike and FFE is I really wanted to go Rimecaster and Hailstones, but when Comet Storm and Deep Shatter are required, my only option to do that is in pure ST if I decide not to play Heart of Ice and Master Lancer, which are far more powerful than Rimecaster and Hailstones.
Using Glacial Spike as Frostfire, and getting that FoF felt like my high point especially on AOE, and being unable to lean into that was dissatisfying. I ended up just untalenting Comet Storm to play Master Lancer and Hailstones.
AOE Investment/3rd Gate Points
Mentioned quite a bit before, but to recap.
In the 2nd Gate: Splitting Ice, Fractured Frost, Freezing Rain, Splintering Ray are all required AOE talents (Optionally Cone of Frost which is likely always taken as well)
In the 3rd Gate: Winter’s Whisper (taking this for just 2 more targets feels like a talent point that shouldnt exist, but will still be necessary in dungeons) and Freezing Winds (this quadruples your Blizzard Freezing generation, it will literally always be taken, it with freezing rain is liable to make Blizzard used on ST).
We are just stretched too thin, with at least 4 points required in the 2nd gate, and 2 in the 3rd gate for AOE. The placement of these AOE nodes in the 3rd gate and the requirement to path through 2 point nodes to reach them heavily limits build diversity. Deep Shatter being required as it is needs to be 1 point. Comet Storm either should be more accessible as its required for Frostfire, or be decoupled from being a required spell so that it can better suit its capstone status.
With the loss of any functional FoF from Frozen Orb (we will not be speccing 1 proc per 1 minute, sorry), it feels like FoF generation is really really low. Combined with Flurry not granting enough Freezing to Lance off of, it starts feeling really bad really fast. We lost the Flurry>Lance combo, we lost GS being a piece of texture as a combo point payoff spell, we lost Frozen Orb CDR, the spec kinda devolved really badly from a moment to moment decision feel. Maybe if Flurry granted a FoF charge on cast? You keep the Flurry>Lance combo feel, you address the rarity of FoF, seems like an easy win?
Related: Icy Hand is pointless outside of Crystalline Refraction because FoF is so damn rare.
Glacial Spike seems incapable of proccing either FoF or BF, despite being a functional Frostbolt drop in for almost everything else.
FoF needs to not need Freezing on targets. The differential between 6t Freezing and 1t is absurd.
I am not particularly looking forward to optimizing when to Ice Lance on AoE. It feels like the optimal play is going to be swap targets when your target is >15 so you can spread around Freezing stacks, to optimize 4-6 consumes across all 6 targets involved, and optimize Master Lancer. Given the change to nameplates, this sounds hellish.
I hate Master Lancer, btw. This is going to become really degenerate really fast, gameplay-wise. It incentivizes stacking Freezing really high and dumping everything in one pile at once. That might be okay on single target, but on AoE it’s going to take the above issue and crank it to 11. You solved consumption target swapping, not generation.
Did you intend for Blizzard to become single target rotational? There is a reason we leaned so heavily on Orb CDR for the Frost AoE solution.
Still don’t like Rimecaster/Glacial Attunement being 2 pointers. They’re such minor components of your damage and the third gate is so restricted as-is. Frostfire NEEDS Comet Storm, Slinger really wants Heart of Ice to optimize Force of Will generation. Master Lancer is so damn strong it’s mandatory. I want to be able to take Glaciate! I want to (possibly) take the attached Water Ele talent that’s still nyi! That’s to say nothing of things that are likely just Good like Hailstones and Flash Freeze. I have 5 points to play in 11 nodes. Lemme have 7?
Nuke Master Lancer, put Heart of Ice there. We get an extra point to play with, Frostfire can opt out of it, it solves a lot of the bad feeling tension in gate three.
Mobs dying with Freezing stacks sucks. A lot. We have a debuff redirect mechanic in the spec with Splinters, just let them do that.
FFE is consumed by any spell in flight, so the one you get for 5 icicles is gone. Just buff GS baseline as Frostfire.
If you FoF-Lance while/just before Comet Storm is falling/cast, you apply the non-consumption to the comets/meteor. Idk what weird scripting you’ve done for FoF but that’s funny.
Overflowing Energy stacks on Lance cast, and is consumed on/benefits Frostbolt/GS casts. I don’t hate this, I’d consider keeping this. It really helps GS out and makes Piercing Cold an actual valued talent.
Temporal Realignment can’t proc if Alter Time comes off cooldown while you’re sub-25%. Should probably run the health check script periodically instead of just once at the 25% gate.
Frost AOE just feels bloated, even moreso now that it looks as though you will want to swap targets to spread your freezing around. It feels very awkward pressing both Orb and Blizzard in AOE with neither really having any oomph behind them.
We will be casting Blizzard in ST unless something is adjusted. With Freezing Winds you can generate ~10 freezing in 1 blizzard cast. Same cast time as frostbolt, about triple the damage, and 10x the freezing.
Freezing as a mechanic I dont think works well in a post WA/addon world. The amount of tracking needed in AOE is insane. As a ranged class the delay in its application on large hitbox raid bosses will make them miserable, experiencing a lag in the consumption and generation of freezing on the target, something that for Winters Chill a WA was widely used to solve by displaying based on cast.
Heavily agree that FoF is too sparse, and GS absolutely needs to generate resources. Master Lancer needs to go. Its sad that I feel like I can never justify the right side capstone area, for AOE winter’s whisper and all the center nodes are just required, and as FF you need CMS always so you cant even take them in ST since Master Lancer is also required.
Our base AOE capability should be improved. Compared to arcane which gets surge doing aoe and barrage cleave for free, we need to spend 2 additional points to be as effective on the same number of targets in theory (fractured frost and splintering ray), likely we need more because we have to actually be able to apply freezing in AOE, something arcane not requiring a debuff doesnt need to consider.
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