A long time Frost Mage player, theorycrafter and simc dev here. A quick preface to my feedback: I quite liked the initial alpha rework. There were some cool ideas and solid design goals. It wasn’t perfect and needed some polishing, but I thought it headed in the right direction. At some point, though, the rework took a wrong turn and after trying it out, the beta version of the spec feels worse than the live version.
Ice Lance and Shatter
Ice Lance feels horrible at the moment. It does so little damage even with full Freezing stacks that there really isn’t any reason to cast it.
I don’t understand this developer note. For the most part, Shatter is Ice Lance. Instead of doing triple damage to Frozen targets, it now deals its bonus damage through Shatter. So effectively, the note is saying that Ice Lance continues to dominate Frost’s damage breakdown. And I mean, it should? I think it’s reasonable to expect Ice Lance to be a major part of the damage breakdown.
Even before considering talents, there’s clearly something wrong. Ice Lance with 5 Freezing stacks does ~330% spellpower as damage. Frostbolt does 320%, Frostfire Bolt does 600%, Flurry does 630%. Over the years, we’ve had plenty of situations where Ice Lance couldn’t keep up with the rest of the spells and was dropped from the rotation entirely. This rework has the potential to solve this once and for all, but it relies on Shatter actually doing decent damage.
AoE rotation
The current AoE rotation is just plain boring.
The developer note implies that Shatter isn’t really meant to be a part of the AoE rotation, which leaves us with casting Blizzard on cooldown and using Frozen Orb/Comet Storm once a minute, which simply isn’t engaging. Comet Storm might be exciting if you could actually use it to control the Freezing stacks, but it mostly just consumes what the preceeding Ray of Frost applied. What’s the point of talents like Frostbite, Wintertide and Cone of Frost if the Freezing stacks just go to waste?
A common complaint about the live version of Frost is that the ST and AoE rotations have no interplay. However, the AoE rotation has enough stuff going on (Ice Caller, Coldest Snap, more frequent Comet Storm) to at least be interesting, even if it lives in its own bubble. But all that is going away. From the initial rework, it seemed that Shatter was meant to substitute for these interactions and bridge the gap between the ST and AoE rotations. Now we’re told it wasn’t meant to do that and we’re left with a hollowed out AoE rotation.
Limiting Ice Lance’s ability to effectively consume Freezing in AoE will also lead to a lot of target-swapping.
As per one of the earlier developer notes, that’s not a desirable behavior. And I completely agree! Keeping track of a relatively short debuff on multiple targets would be hard even with combat addons. The entire premise of Fractured Frost is that it consumes Freezing fast enough that you don’t have to care about it beyond the primary target. Is that no longer the case?
Fingers of Frost
It’s possible to entirely waste Fingers of Frost. If the target doesn’t have any Freezing stacks, Ice Lance will consume FoF but doesn’t actually do any Shatter damage. This feels horrible.
Freezing
Freezing stack generation has a very strong feast/famine feel to it right now. You generate a ton of stacks during your cooldowns and barely anything outside. Ice Lance consumption went up multiple times to keep up with the cooldowns, but that means that Ice Lance takes forever to set up anywhere else. Having to cast 6 Frostbolts or 2 Flurries to get a single Ice Lance off just feels bad.
On that note, I really dislike the talents that modify Ice Lance’s consumption. Clearly, these talents are theoretically sound. More Freezing consumed in the same amount of time = higher DPS. But their gameplay effect is that you just end up casting fewer Ice Lances. Ice Lance is my main tool to handle movement. The talent sets up perverse incentives where you’re asked to trade your main source of mobility for a bit of extra damage.
Thermal Void is the worst manifestation of this problem. It rewards pooling by making you cast even fewer Ice Lances. I’m not sure why all these talents are pushing us towards not casting Ice Lance. I don’t want to pick them but will likely have to because they’re DPS positive.
Also, since the consumption is variable, keeping track of how many stacks you have vs how many you’re going to consume is precisely the sort of thing I’d be using a WeakAura for.
Flurry
None of the gameplay elements that made Flurry exciting are there. I’ve always thought of Flurry as an enabler, but it’s currently just a dumb nuke. It certainly does a lot of damage (possibly too much), but it doesn’t meaningfully change how you approach your rotation. It doesn’t even give enough Freezing stacks to cast a single Ice Lance!
I honestly liked the Flurry combos. Some version of Flurry into Ice Lance has existed for almost 10 years, so it’s a bit sad that none of it was preserved.
Ray of Frost
I think having Ray of Frost as your main cooldown is pretty neat. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a cooldown that’s so vulnerable to disruption. I don’t think I’m overexaggerating when I say it’s worse than the infinite Icy Veins we used to have. If you have to move or get knocked back during Combustion or Arcane Surge, you at worst lose a GCD. If it happens during Arcane Surge cast, you can just recast immediately. If that happens as Frost, your entire cooldown is gone.
We don’t even have Ice Floes to help here. I think it should be castable while moving (either baseline or as a talent that’s hard to skip), especially if you want Frost to remain the more approachable spec.
Icicles
Having 5 Icicles floating above my head at all times is quite an eyesore. Could we at least hide them while out of combat?
Frozen Orb
The delay between Frozen Orb launching forward and tracking its target is very annoying. I mean, some tracking is better than none, but I don’t understand why it can’t track the target from the very beginning.