Right, I did not think about this. I don’t see being locked on fire in PvP a great big deal. I’m usually running at the person I wanna DB, not casting frostbolt during this time. I usually don’t run ring of fire. So I’m really only losing blastwave/fireblast. The more concerning part for me is FFB exploding for 40% damage when icy is up and breaking polymorph setups.
Agreed 100%, I worry if frost doesn’t get deepfreeze, it will make frost the worse mage spec for rated arena. I also worry they are countering this by providing huge instant damage instead.
I don’t like that comet, drops a meteor and does 60% of a players health when you shatter if it crits. That’s too much damage for 1-2 globals. Plus they might have frost bomb and living bomb from casting ice lance on them or w.e the hero talent is. It’s going to be hard to have poly setups as rogue mage with all the hero nodes that provide extra aoe. Especially if comet+meteor is still doing that much damage, we will be forced to pick those talents instead of ones that don’t cleave.
Ice form is not reliable right now because it only lasts 17 seconds and also doesn’t apply the frost damage icy veins does. 17 seconds allows for 2-3 frostbolts+flurry and resheeps. At best you will get 5 stacks of slick ice before it expires. You are right, the other issue is it being dispelled. Though, I rather have it last 30 seconds and dispel-able than 17 seconds and not dispel-able.
Also yes, if it’s only 17 seconds, it should effect frostbolt, ray, comet, flurry and frost bomb damage.
Really hope there’s no ramping spell power in there. That alone would make the Deathborne play style really unappealing to me. I know it was datamined, but I’m still hoping they don’t implement it.
Tbh, DF frost is twice as good as SL frost. Mostly because there are a variety of spells added. I like having DB/blastwave and ray hitting hard is especially nice. It will be hard to choose between casting ray or frostbolt when you have a 30% stack of spell power. This won’t allow us to ray on openers. We would have to save it for 30 stack. It will also cause other spells like comet+ice nova or glacial/ray to prioritize over frostbolt when you have a 30% stack because frostbolt doesn’t scale well with spell power. The only way to solve this would be to make the stacking effect low 5% and stacks would be gained from both spellhits and non hitting spells (barrier/ai/invis/mount/alter/mirrors/etc) but then it’s not very deathborne esk. Deathborne animation was also ugly too. Keeping the stacks low allows us to play ice form too. Currently ice form is trash because it only lasts 17 seconds and doesn’t gain frost damage that icy veins provides with Water Ele.
I would be happy if they just fixed fractured frost so it can proc twice in a row. Currently it can’t. Frost is great right now as is. Just won’t be as competitive as arc/fire without deep.
I have concerns about the base viability of Frost Mage in The War Within in both Mythic+ and PvP content. I don’t have the Alpha so I’ll voice my concerns here.
In Dragonflight, the utility between each Mage spec is roughly equivalent. The largest gap in utility is Arcane lacking one additional major defensive CD compared to Fire (Cauterize) and Frost (Cold Snap), and Frost having random roots with the Frostbite talent. This generally means that whichever spec deals the most damage in a certain type of content is the preferred spec for that content.
In The War Within, the Sunfury hero talent tree includes the Gravity Lapse spell, an instant, 3-second duration, AoE stun. To my understanding, this ability does replace Blast Wave, meaning that the amount of utility remains the same. However, it’s well-accepted that a stun ability is significantly stronger than a knockback ability. Frost will continue to have no access to a stun outside of PvP content, where Snowdrift is still rarely taken due to its extreme unreliability.
This change in the parity of utility between the Mage specs may cause Frost to lose favor, particularly compared to Fire, unless Frost is the highest damage-dealing spec at any given time. This leaves Frost’s viability over the other specs more up to its current damage tuning rather than its design.
In order to keep the utility parity similar, I suggest giving Frost access to an on-demand stun. There are many ways to go about this, but in the interest of having as little impact as possible, I recommend the following:
Replace the Frostbite talent node in the Frost tree with a new choice talent node:
– Frostbite
– Deep Freeze
The properties of Deep Freeze are as follows:
– Instant
– Stuns one target
– 3-4 second duration
– 45 second cooldown
– Triggers the GCD
– Does not break on damage
This should keep the utility between each spec fairly even, by giving Frost access to a single-target stun in replacement for the utility of Frostbite, but not giving Frost too much power due to having both a stun and knockback effect (Blast Wave) at the same time.
It is possible to just tie them to different binds in a macro - for example no mod for current target, shift for 1, ctrl for 2 and alt for 3. Then you would still need just 1 space on ability bar currently occupied by Snowdrift.
I just want there to be actual competitive choices which the current trees tend to fail at. The big one of course is to make Glacial Spike not be mandatory. Even if most seem to like it, it’s too dramatic of a gameplay change to force on the spec. Going further, I’d like to see the left side of the tree get more love. Fractured Frost and Cold Front are both fun talents that I’d love to play with but they’re completely unviable right now.
I have bar space, I just don’t have bind availability unless I buy a different mouse but I love the form factor of the logitech g603, the weight the double AA’s add are nice too.
I would play fractured frost 100% in current meta if it could proc twice in a row. Though its currently bugged, where it can’t proc twice in a row on the same target. Making the true proc chance actually less than 50%.
I’ve played mage to a high level using only target 123, focus 123, and party 12 binds. I do have binds set up for CS 123 and Poly 123, but fairly sure I’ve never pressed those. Even if you prefer having 123 binds for everything, I think Deep is a big enough decision to get away with not using them for it.
Oh, and I’ve got a mouseover focus button, but that’s mostly for non-arena gameplay.
Glacial Spike is a satisfying ability, but I’ve always said that its very existence is problematic for the spec. Realistically, it always takes power away from the spells which build it, regardless of whether or not it’s taken. Frostbolt can’t deal high damage without making Glacial a DPS loss to take.
I 2. this. I absolutly hate glacial! and hope there will be another viable playstyle in the next addon! Give us back the old NILF ( ) gameplay or something new. But not Deathborn pls.
I had to install gladius so I can right click to focus, sarena does not have the functionality. I guess I will just bind frost stun to my focus 123 bind if we get it.
Give us back the old NILF (
) gameplay or something new. But not Deathborn pls.