Frost Mage falls FLAT in high keys - Lets fix it?

Classes Mage
1

I’m not playing frost mage, but I’m writing this to help fix a situation in medium keys to higher keys, basically anything above a 20.

Bottom line: Most frost mages just aren’t tanky enough and stacking verse is too penalize for them to play in higher keys.

Frost mage do decent damage, yes. But the way the class plays one cannot expect a frost mage to ice block before AOE comes out, they are DPS proc dependent and won’t stop casting. And thus they get 1 shot.

Fire fixes a lot of these issues by allowing them to stack a little verse and have a cheat death. But, frost mages overall seem the squishiest.

Pug key holders get baited into taking one, and then the frost mage dies 4-6 times in a run. Adding tons of time to long boss fights. Yes, a mage in theory could ice block at the right second and /cancelaura to immediate cast again, but how many mages would do this?

A lot of frost mages aren’t going to stop playing frost and switch to fire either for higher keys. Thus my only thought is that Blizzard needs to save us because at this point it almost feels like these frost mages are joining keys to troll them. A lot of them aren’t trolling. They just want to play their favorite spec and we need to make it more viable.

My thought is that this specs need better suited defensives for PVE, but NOT PVP.

Or swop their best stat for orb damage scaling in PVE to versatility, the way PVP frost mages play. That wouldn’t change much of anything for PVP or PVE. But allow them to survive more aoe damage. And then if orb is doing too much damage in PVP we could just balance it was it was the same, before the verse buff.

Other options are (not sure these would break the game):

  1. Remove the defensive aspect from Invis, but increase DR from Mirror Images and reduce its CD.
  2. Change gold snap to a 40% 5 second DR on a 1 min CD and stop it from resetting ice block. PVE mages seldom use cold snap anyways. And do frost mages really need two ice blocks for PVP? Maybe the DR for PVP would be 3 seconds vs. 5 for balance.

Thoughts? My goal is to help mages and stop frost mages from bricking keys. It’s just too much work to save all the teams externals to keep them from being 1 shot during aoe damage in m+.

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I believe you are playing with people who are standing in fire.

But the best solution from a class perspective is to add Cauterize and Cold Snap as general tree capstones, which has been suggested heavily since beta.
A re-design of Cold Snap makes it a generic defensive rather than the unique position it is in now of the opportunity for 2 immunities within as little as 30s of each other.

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Icy Veins needs to be baseline frost mage ability. Currently, the entire tree revolves around reaching Icy Veins first.

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Its more the nodes after Icy Veins are required to make it a good spell, than it is actually reaching IV. IV without icy propulsion or thermal void is useless in frost’s current iteration.

3 Likes
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Would building those into IV as baseline do the trick? Icy Veins was always one of the weakest 3 min CD-s before IP and TV were introduced.

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Please no. Both IP and TV together are already problematic for Frost’s health. I’d rather them not double down even more on these by baking them into IV.

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You can build them into IV and re-work the other mage spells so they are more in synergy with it.

Also they are not problematic. Both of these TV and IP during their prime made Frost Mage super nice to play. Obviously they got nerfed/redesigned to their current watered down versions. Even so if you are playing well you can easily can get a 90% uptime on it. Later on with us getting more secondary stat it’s going to be even more easier to maintain it, since we will be able to reach the crit cap probabl really soon. Every Ice Lance or icicle will crit. Thus IP getting massive gains in value.

TV in Nighthold and IP during SL season 2 mythic + season. This is the two times when Frost mages were like one of the best class in the game. Logs prove it.

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I don’t think the issue is with the power of IP/TV. In fact there’s been quite a number of threads about it an what the IV uptime meta is doing to Frost in general, and part of that is that with IV being such a weak cooldown on its own both TV and IP are essential to making it not completely terrible.

The problem is that not only do a lot of players not enjoy the meta game based around keeping IV up as close to 100% of the time, but what it does to Frost in the long term, specifically for IV. With IP/TV in the game, we’ll never see IV made into a good cooldown. There have been a lot of suggestions to make IV better, including adding a spellpower bonus to it, adding multistrike back to it, or combining it with Welly to make it a strong burst cooldown.

Again, like so many of the other issues that lie with Mages, it would be great if there was another viable option within the talent path. Currently IV-TV-IP is the only option for both ST and AoE.

They were the two times in the game Frost was one of the strongest, but I would argue that it definitely wasn’t the best in terms of player happiness or enjoyment. In fact the awful gameplay that revolved around RoP-TV-IP for Frost was the reason why I quite after so many years. Like so many players, I care less about raw output and more about whether a spec is fun to play. Frost absolutely wasn’t all through BfA and SL, and it doesn’t look like DF really fixed that. They can do whatever tuning they want, but at the end of the day if the spec isn’t fun for the players then why bother?

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I don’t think the issue is with the power of IP/TV. In fact there’s been quite a number of threads about it an what the IV uptime meta is doing to Frost in general, and part of that is that with IV being such a weak cooldown on its own both TV and IP are essential to making it not completely terrible.

Well this is why I suggested building them into it and then we have an extra 2 talent points that can be spent elsewhere. Also reworking spells like GS so they work better with the current kit.

The problem is that not only do a lot of players not enjoy the meta game based around keeping IV up as close to 100% of the time, but what it does to Frost in the long term, specifically for IV. With IP/TV in the game, we’ll never see IV made into a good cooldown. There have been a lot of suggestions to make IV better, including adding a spellpower bonus to it, adding multistrike back to it, or combining it with Welly to make it a strong burst cooldown.

Whether people enjoy it or not is not an argument that one can really proove. This forum is for example only a fragment of the playerbase, and there are x amount of type of players. Hardcore, semi hardcore, casual, pvp, pve etc.
What we can see however that frost mage is the most popular spec among the 3 mage specs(more frost mage paeses than the other two combined), so this could mean that players actually like this playstyle the best rather than the bursty aspect of fire/arcane OR/And people enjoy when they are useful, doing damage.

IV was never a good cooldown on its own. That’s why Blizz tried to make it a lot stronger over the course of the last x expansions.
TV was broken–> frost mage was broken. Got nerfed and basically became an utter garbage class. BfA frost mage is a prime example. Not a single tier there where it wasn’t outshined by fire or arcane.

The IP came. Made frost mages broken again, got nerfed ans here we are.
Also there is no point making it another burst cooldown. You have fire and arcane for that. If you want to play a bursty spec you have those. No need to make all 3 spec to play around burst. Imagine suggesting making all warlock class to do dots and dot damage mostly. If you enjoy a more bursty playstyle you have 2 other specs that fulfill this playstyle.

Again, like so many of the other issues that lie with Mages, it would be great if there was another viable option within the talent path. Currently IV-TV-IP is the only option for both ST and AoE

That’s why i advised reworking some of the spells. Also it’s way easier to rework certain spells to the already existing main cd/mastery than reworking the whole class. Because if you rework the main CD then basicall you will have to redo the whole class anyways.

Also we all know that perfect balance is impossible. One build will always be BiS. And people will gravitate toward it. RoP on frost is perfect example. You can play both IF and RoP on Frost, both are a viable option with mi or dps difference, but since RoP gives Frost like 3-5% DPS people go for it anyways.

They were the two times in the game Frost was one of the strongest, but I would argue that it definitely wasn’t the best in terms of player happiness or enjoyment. In fact the awful gameplay that revolved around RoP-TV-IP for Frost was the reason why I quite after so many years. Like so many players, I care less about raw output and more about whether a spec is fun to play. Frost absolutely wasn’t all through BfA and SL, and it doesn’t look like DF really fixed that. They can do whatever tuning they want, but at the end of the day if the spec isn’t fun for the players then why bother?

You could argue that, but then I will ask you to show me something that indicates that.
Frost mage playarbase was all time high during those periods of times in the last few expansions. Aside from the brand new DH and the Bm Hunter we basically were the most played spec if we look at the amount of parse numbers

So this tells me the way it played and was doing great numbers appealed to people.

EDIT: sorry about the many edit, not native speaker and typing on a phone. Made a lot of typos that needed fixing.

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I’m on the camp of deleting [Thermal Void] and reducing [Icy Veins] cooldown to 1.5min or 2min. If needed, buff [Icy Propulsion] to 1.5 cdr and/or give it a diminished effect for AoE spells.

It’s another conversation if [Icy Veins] is reworked in its entirety though.

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With the current state that would be a death sentence for Frost Mages.

TV out that means no extra 10 sec duration. So only 25 sec.
And TV and IP together is 2 seconds. +1 to the duration and -1 to the CD so that would be 0.5 sec nerf alltogether.

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Those extra seconds could be baked in of course. Shortening the cooldown and increasing the cdr would be preferable so it isn’t as punishing by downtime but I’d prefer no infinite cd uptime. The only reason I think this wouldn’t be done is because of high RoP uptime like in 9.1.5.

[Icy Veins] would need to be changed to not only a Haste huff to justify the removal of [Thermal Void] and no more 100% uptime. I’m all for it though.

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My issue with this is that Frost Mages right now have a 90-95% uptime, 2/4/5 BL and with this they can kinda put up an even fight against other classes in some cases (like st without many movement, cleave etc)

So yes, if you reduce it to let’s say 70% uptime or even lover you going to need to do it in a way so that dps loss is somehow regained.
Idk it feels it’s a little bit more difficult to fix this ‘issue’. Also this fix would not mean that GS or CoMS or any other spell will be more used. In BFA we had a period without TV and I tell you it wasn’t pretty. One of the poorest performing class on BoD was frost mages.

If i have to say 1 negative thing about the TV/IP playstyle then I would say that it makes Frost mage pretty tunnely and single minded. So what I mean that during IV you need to funnel the boss 24/7 without stop otherwise you get penalized, since TV only works during IV. (Thanks blizz changed this for IP) so Frost Mages are kinda discoursged to do mechanics and stuff that stops them icelancing the boss.

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Yeah I’m familiar with BfA Mage. Pretty bad class overall until the end of Eternal Palace where Fire started picking up to being completely broken in Ny’alotha due to corruptions.

A hefty rework is needed in the trees to fix some of Frost’s problems, not just [Icy Veins]. IV is just more obvious because it’s supposed to be our most powerful button but it needs as close to 100% uptime as possible to remain competitive and it does so by both reducing its own cooldown and extending its duration at the same time while having a whooping 3min recharge time. It’s also tied to [Slick Ice] stacks increasing the layers of uptime dependency unnecessarily.

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Fire was not that bad. S1 was nice, Blaster Master, got nerfed so in BoD was utter garbage. And from Eternal Palace it was super nice.

I’m fine with rework until it’s
A, CE competent (like current Frost)
B, Not relies on burst. We have 2 specs that burst reliant we don’t need another one.
C. I find it personally fun. GS in BFA was not fun.

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All specs are, it’s just a matter of how good they are at contributing to the team. The only class that may be close to a burden on Mythic Raszageth currently might be Priests due to having no mobility to survive Tempest Wings by themselves. A spec might be bad at certain fights, but they can all get CE.

Fire is in-between the two because it’s also super reliant on uptime due to SKB + [Kindling] shenanigans, which a lot of people dislike.

That’s extremely subjective. I know people that were having fun seeing big GS crits at the time. I’d argue that stuff like how it was back then where it gave birth to the no IL build should never happen though.

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All specs are, it’s just a matter of how good they are at contributing to the team. The only class that may be close to a burden on Mythic Raszageth currently might be Priests due to having no mobility to survive Tempest Wings by themselves. A spec might be bad at certain fights, but they can all get CE.

CE competent means that I (or others) are not bullied for playing it. Like frost was this expansion before the 4 massive buffs it got or surv hunters etc. Obv all classes are, but what I mean that we don’t become a meme spec like survival hunters.

Fire is in-between the two because it’s also super reliant on uptime due to SKB + [Kindling] shenanigans, which a lot of people dislike.

Yes, it’s disliked mostly because it’s really frustrating to use and heavily punishing to use. It can fell off and you have to restart building the whole thing up.
The one minute mage back in BFA was a lot better.

That’s extremely subjective. I know people that were having fun seeing big GS crits at the time. I’d argue that stuff like how it was back then where it gave birth to the no IL build should never happen though.

I know it’s subjective. That’s why when I would be fine with a rework, if I will find the new kit fun and engaging. I really enjoy the Legion and DF playstyle since I have to play the class during all the fight and not just pump and dump.

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I really don’t get why some people go full doomer when someone says to delete TV. A major cooldown is not meant to have an uptime of >90%; they really shouldn’t have a >50% uptime tbh. When a major cooldown is up near permanently then it’s not a major cooldown anymore and is just a maintenance buff and shows that the major cooldown is so weak that it has to be up permanently to be competitive, which is bad design. If anything, IV should last ~30 sec or so and be made stronger, and Frost should be tuned accordingly so the overall dps output is the same.

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That’s why we have TV and IP and with those 2 Icy Veins suddenly is not a weak major cooldown and is able to maintain itself 90-100%. It’s a unique concept that’s not found in any other class. Maybe SH had something like this when they had to be in their shadow form as long as possible. You have two other specs that do not revolve around doing this, play those.

It’s not dooming. Saw what frost mage looks like without TV:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/21#dataset=90
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/22#dataset=90
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/23#dataset=90
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/24#dataset=90&region=2

Bottom tier every single tier.

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Two of those very logs you posted show TV being the primary row 7 talent in the majority of logs recorded. So Frost is low on the meters WITH TV being the primary talent. This has nothing to do with TV and is just low numbers tuning.

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