Frost needs a redesign in 11.2/next expac

Classes Mage
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Frost Redesign

Goals - streamline shatter mechanics so its easier for everyone to understand, remove the option for degenerate gameplay, provide a niche for frost to be played in raid encounters.

Issues

  • lack of niche
  • overly complex shattering - (fof, winters chill, freezes) all used in different situations, effect different things, and function differently
  • uninspired tier sets
  • hero talents creating unintuitive gameplay
  • resource bloat or drought for hero talents (FF has 80% more flurries over 5 mins than SS)

Niche

  • Arcane - Funnel/Execute/Burst
  • Fire - Execute/Low target cleave
  • Frost - 2t

Since DF, Frost is not special in its 2t capabilities, its often a mediocrely good spec there, and 2t fights are becoming gimmicky. Look at Silken Court for instance, frost was beaten by a lot of other specs due to the damage amp and the limited time the bosses were together, both very common in 2t fights these days.

# Spread Cleave:

A niche not filled by mage, and one that with more specs able to do it means that all the ones with this niche can be stronger, and fight design more common, as it would require less class and spec stacking.

  • Spread Cleave via Blizzard only - it can be exactly the same as it is now, with all talent functionalities intact, have cast time, freezing rain etc
    • just make it function like starfall and increase its cooldown to match the current duration (11.2 was a good change for this).
  • Cap Frozen Orb cdr so you can only get x per second
    • Gives us room for more abilities in our AOE rotation - Splintering Ray anyone? (its still a bad talent)

This is less intended to be our actual spread cleave or any type of uncapped aoe, and just a QoL change.

Take the above and also:
Splitting Ice always hits a 2nd target, when blizzard is active it hits up to 3 enemies effected by your blizzard at reduced damage. Look at Outlaw blade flurry for instance: Splitting Ice does its full damage to 2nd target, scales down for each additional target in blizzard. While blizzard is active splitting ice does 5-10% less damage – see below.

This preserves 2t strength without blizzard up, and when accessing spread cleave you lose value relative to melee classes if mobs are close, still strong though.

The below changes (shifting all shattering to FoF rather than WC) would strengthen our 2t quite a bit as well, which honestly can hardly be called a niche anymore compared to how much stronger we were at it in Shadowlands relative to other specs. They would also be a necessary change to enable this spread cleave.

Our aoe would still revolve around Orb, Comet Storm, with the same short cd minigames, but low target count cleave relies on splitting ice - I’m limiting it to spread cleave for 3-4 mobs because I do not want the issues ignite and spriest have to become a problem for frost.

Also worth noting Splitting Ice has in the past required mobs to be in like a 180 degree angle in front of you, def make sure this doesnt happen if the spread cleave route happens.

Core issues to be resolved:

Inescapable AOE loss compared to other specs due to Frozen orb - There are a few options:

  • make it as fast as arcane orb and apply a dot (same effect, can still shatter etc)
  • or make it follow a target. I prefer the dot fix, as it will do its full damage to all targets you hit with it once guaranteed. Just have the dot stack with separate durations, thats been done many times before. Can even lean into frostfire orb which would be awesome and tie into frosts history.

This would be a better more natural solution to the above thats a really great suggestion. But goes against my idea for Frost’s niche, and frost really needs one of those, similar to what prompted the move from Icy Propulsion, Frost has not been played at the very high level in a long time due to its design, and lack of specialties.

Mastery - commit to adding new effects to it or just make it shattered spells do more damage, because everything not on mastery currently is on shatter. Ridiculous its a dead stat for frostfire 1 yr+ into expac because someone didn’t want to whitelist the effects onto the same scaling as cms for mastery.

  • If shattering was shifted to FoF, add a talent that shatters the next X passive ticks or seconds after consuming FoF (to shatter orb, blizzard, and icicles/frostfire infusion and work with the above mastery)

Frostbolt - no one likes spamming it over our core rotation, yeet the frostbolt talents and prevent it from shattering.

Flurry recharge mechanic - Brainfreeze functions poorly, and the damage increase sometimes causes unintuitive flurry usage, which is not good. Reduce base cooldown to 20s/have its cd scale with haste, and have brainfreeze give 50% of a charge not 100% while removing its damage amp.

Shatter redesign

Remove winters chill.

Make FoF effect all spells except Frostbolt, Flurry, Blizzard, and Frozen Orb (IE can shatter GS and CMS against multiple targets just by using them to consume FoF).

Flurry provides 2 fof now, auto shatters itself (or not, just doesnt consume FoF). Max FoF cap at 4.

  • What does this solve?

FoF works against all targets, so GS would auto shatter against 2t with just FoF, helping 2t which massively struggles to consistently be better than fire/arcane’s currently.

Solves ranged issues which were entirely due to travel time shenanigans with winters chill. Simplifies shattering immensely. Currently we have the issue of being to close to a target causing our precast to not shatter, and too far it lands after flurry. Additionally if we are too far we dont generate icicles from Hailstones. FoF being on cast and effecting our spells aside from ice lance solves all three of these issues while making our gameplay and effects much more cohesive.

Hero Talents

  • Frostfire

Frostfire Empowerment only gives Excess Fire (reduces the ridiculous amount of Excess Frost we currently get)
Change excess fire to a flat 10s or less cdr on flurry. This will prevent the flurry dumping while ignoring WC that we currently do. Alternatively the above changes to flurry providing fof make it fine to use twice in a row, but excess fire should still be nerfed.

Add all the damn effects to mastery (the 11.2 buff did not fix mastery for Frostfire).

  • Spellslinger

Bit of a bland hero talent, splinter cleave being tied to blizzard while Arcane’s is on arcane orb feels bad, as it further forces us to blizzard or lose cleave value hurting potential builds.

Props to Blizzard the other things I had here before were actually fixed lol.

Other things I’d like to see

  • Coldest Snap doesnt reset orb (too many orb reset mechanics - blizzard, coldest snap, spellfrost teachings, need 5 orbs out for it to be as strong as 2 were in Shadowlands).
    • Tie it to Ice Nova instead (rework idea for this, make it reset nothing and just apply wc over 3t hits, and leave its current cd while increasing its radius) (then you just cms → ice nova every 25s in AOE, and have consistent AOE WC) and ya know, then we wouldnt be forced in melee at all. Could also reverse this if we go with the redesign above where this talent instead makes our freezes (Freeze and Ice Nova only preferably) provide a FoF and debuff damage amp at 3t+ (much like how our Water Elemental’s damage buff was originally a debuff, except without stacks).
  • Glacial Spike replaces frostbolt at 5 icicles rather than being a separate button (it already has delayed spellqueuing, this prevents us from holding for flurry and removes a button).
  • We do still have a bit of resource bloat - not against flurry going back to requiring brainfreeze to cast. Would still prefer no winters chill as the urgency of brainfreeze with this would cause more frequent munching due to tuning.
  • Stop frostbolt from shattering pls, the dilemma every expac of us shattering ice lance or frostbolt is annoying. Also makes us easier to tune in pvp/no weird balancing in pve.
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It would be amazing to get a blue in here to simply acknowledge that they see really well thought out post like this.

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Blizzard please listen to this man, do something, do better

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It needs to happen.

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Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post Manather; the frost mage community really does benefit from what you do.

There are a lot of things to unpack here that I am definitely interested in having a discussion about, but just going to shoot off some quick initial thoughts here:

  • Regarding the lack of niche, just a minor addendum, Coldest Snap added a quick snap AoE ability for a very cost-effective point investment. While this is also handled by other classes, the unique mechanism for activating it ensures it was never part of the regular dps rotation that you’d feel bad holding for adds. It would be interesting to see this preserved if we do get a rework, maybe not via Cone of Cold, because of the melee requirement.
  • The best thing about removing Winter’s Chill is that it removes the problems associate with pre-casting in Shatter Combo. The worst thing about removing Winter’s Chill is also that it removes the pre-casting in Shatter Combo. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a section of Frost mage community views pre-cast-Flurry-IL-IL as an integral part of Frost mage. On the other hand, I suppose there is no better time to break the mold than during a rework.
  • Without pre-casting and other Frostbolt buffing talents, Frostbolt/FFB only serve as FoF fishing mechanism and GS builder. Do you intend for Glacial Spike to be part of the baseline kit for Frost? Otherwise Frostbolt seems extremely marginal in a non-GS build.

That’s all I have for now, but Frost AoE and hero talents are also very interesting topics that I might have more comment on later.

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I’m going to move my comments from YouTube to here - sorry if you’ve seen this before Manather.

I didn’t know I could actually post here since I’m an EU player. I post quite actively over there on a mage which I’ve been playing for 18 years. I’m not nearly as good, but that certainly doesn’t prevent me from having an opinion on a character I’ve played for long enough for get the right to vote. :stuck_out_tongue:

After a night’s sleep and reflection, I think what makes me so viscerally dislike this idea is that the whole point of frost is to control an enemy and use the control to deal damage. By moving all the shattering into Fingers of Frost you have utterly destroyed our legacy and fundamentally upended 20 years of class design.

I really feel like you’re lampooning frost as frost.

The problem

Shatter used to be simple. This is how it worked: If the enemy target was frozen, you got a much higher chance to crit and your crit damage was increased, and it consumed the freeze after the end of the 0.4s tick window which the whole game had if it did a sufficient number of damage because that’s how roots work.

Then Fingers of Frost was added because some mobs can’t be frozen. Then Winter’s Chill was added because some mobs can’t be frozen. Then some spells don’t consume Winter’s Chill but benefit from it and it’s just this whole mess.

I think it’s really really simple to fix this. And it’s all about Winter’s Chill - completely contrary to your idea. That was the right solution because you see it’s about controlling the enemy. Shattering should be about the state of your enemy - this is fundamental to what Frost is.

So, here’s my idea

All spells that provide a root also provide Winter’s Chill. There are no spells that only provide Winter’s Chill. All that currently do, are removed or redesigned.

It’s applied to the target. All spells that benefit from Shatter (which is no longer all of them, for example Blizzard and Orb won’t - it’s going to be the big hitters) will Shatter and consume Winter’s Chill and the root. Both can be dispelled. Any player can shatter a frozen target, consuming any Winter’s Chill of their own on the target as well if there is one, however players do not consume one another’s Winter’s Chills.

If two spells hit within a 0.5 second window, both benefit from the shatter. Now I understand that this is problematic apparently because it allows 3 spells to hit using Shimmer?? But I don’t see why. I said two spells.

Frostbolt deals more damage than Ice Lance, and Ice Lance is useful for shattering with frostbolts and that is how it finds its niche within PvE - and also it doesn’t require standing still, so that’s another reason to use it.

Now we’ve restored the traditional tBC-era Frost Mage, basically, but it works against targets that can’t be frozen. All the procs we know from today. Shatters are rarer, but when you do shatter something it shatters to pieces. It should be ridiculously satisfying to Shatter - Glacial Spike levels satisfying. More!

Though we don’t actually want Glacial Spike because Glacial Spike is just a combo point system with 1 finisher. Nobody asked for that thing, it’s dumb. Get rid of it.

Comet Storm goes, Comet comes in. Works just like Meteor, but it shatters with ONE hit and therefore takes away the shattercombo. How do we use it? Water Elemental Freeze or Nova a whole pack, drop a meteor on them, and it deals enormous damage. Cone of Cold also deals a lot of damage and, through a talent, can freeze enemies itself and therefore apply Winter’s Chill. It both benefits from and provides Winter’s Chill. That means you can frost nova and then comet storm and then cone of cold on the comet storm hit, and that’s your AoE shatter. You can replace Frost Nova with Freeze if you have Icy Veins up to save a GCD. You can do a slightly lesser shatter by forgoing the frost nova in case the enemies need to move (most AoE situations involve mobs that can be frozen)

Ice Nova is out. Flurry is out.

Frostbite can proc some Ice Lance shattercombos as well.

The quirks of Frost Mage

It’s a quirk of frost mage to have to move in and out in ways that other ranges specs don’t. It’s always been with us and it always should be. Some bosses are designed to mess with this, but then again some bosses were designed to not be hit from behind that was screwing rogues but that’s okay. But Blizzard too kit out and made rogues not rogues and now nobody plays rogues anymore. Dead class, like… we don’t have to design every class to be the best against every boss. I know this messes with compositions and viability for Method or whatever, but I don’t care. 99% of people don’t care because 99% of people don’t play like that.

It’s gotta be simple

  1. Encase enemy in frost (if you have something available for it).
  2. Hit enemy with frost spell. Try going for 2.
  3. Repeat.

Your choice of spell should depend on how many targets you want to hit.

Our rotations have way too many buttons, we have way too many procs. It’s chaotic; and it’s recent as well. Frost didn’t use to be like this. I don’t know why suddenly we have 7 procs to track, and actually it can get even worse if you pick certain talents.

Stop messing with iconic things

I don’t like your Starfall idea either. It fundamentally takes out the way Blizzard works as the spell Blizzard. It’s been working this way since Warcraft 2; it’s got literally 30 years of history. It briefly had a channel but otherwise this is just how it always worked. Why are you messing with something so iconic? And I really think this applies to your ideas in general. You’re messing with things with so much history of working that it beggars belief. Like I honestly think you should just quit the class and go play Moonkin because that’s clearly what you want to do.

You’re changing our shatter into a weird version of Starsurge and you’re changing Blizzard into Starfall. Off you go.

Closing thoughts

Frankly, if they do this, I won’t play Frost anymore. Not even if it’s good. There’s just no point having it in the game. You transformed into dollar store moonkin.

Also, I think other posters are upvoting you because you’re you and you make great guides and you’re experienced. I respect that about you as well and I do use your guides. But other than Taynnic, I don’t think any of them took a critical view before giving you an upvote. They just saw your name, said “great idea”, and that was that.

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I have mained frost mage for a long time (WotLK, Cata, then BFA through TWW). While I agree with you that Manather’s idea does uproot the legacy of what frost WAS, I have to agree with him that this HAS to change in today’s raiding and M+ dominant end-game environment. Tradition can be remembered and kept where relevant, but tradition also have to make way for new ideas when environment has changed, and tradition is only holding us back. Here, I am specifically referring to the idea of control. It can and should stay, for some ccs and flavor, but it cannot be the centre of our damage-dealing mechanics. As DF/TWW opens a new era of WoW (talent trees revitalized, new flight style, hero talents, new sagas) with new time skip, we have to let old tenets go.

Now, I don’t agree with some of Manather’s idea like starfall-style blizzard, but roots can be problematic in raid and M+, root applying winter’s chill makes it worse, and others shattering your shatters is the worst. At this point you might as well suggest changing raid and M+ to suit the spec instead of changing the spec to fit the environment. There’s always classic, TBC, etc catered to nostalgia.

The core of frost, is frost. As long as we are thematically designed around that with slow and freezes still around in a non-disruptive manner, I accept and encourage change.

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Bro wants to play frost boomie . Nah

Imo just cut down the spec AND class complexity. 2 much fluff for no reason.

Frost worked great in SL as night fae and it was rather simple, while having its niche. Bring it back while toning down complexity

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This is a fundamental mistake that will ruin the game completely if taken to its logical conclusion.

Firstly and by far the most importantly, the environment is the same for everyone. If you design your specs around being optimal for the current environment you make them all the same with different coats of paint, and that’s exactly what Manather is doing - he’s changing frost mage into discount moonkin. Why did he pick moonkin? Because it’s good.

And you’re just openly admitting this. 30 years of history mean nothing to you. It seems that to you the only thing that’s holy about frost mage is that our spells look like ice. I’m sorry, I’m not on board.

Secondly, frost works decently 90% of the time as it is and will continue to do so with my redesign ideas. These problems only manifest when bosses have unusual positioning requirements, and that’s okay.

For me the real problem with frost, as with most specs right now, is that it generates a ton of visual noise, procs, and tons of tiny numbers, and all of this is obscuring the satisfaction that mages are supposed to come with: Big chunky hits. I can’t see the numbers, and I can’t see the chunk of damage unless it’s Glacial Spike.

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Mostly agreed on the issues raised, and to add on:

Niche: Yes, 2T is really a niched niche, we need way more than that. I’m also in favor of turning Splitting Ice into a spell reminiscent of Glacial Fragments in Shadowlands:

Splitting Ice: Hitting an enemy under the effect of Blizzard with Glacial Spike, Ice Lance, and Icicles deals 100% damage to nearby enemies. This damage is reduced beyond the first additional target. (Edited: changed from split to square-root scaling as per Manather’s suggestion.)

With Hailstones, Ice Lance can be a significant AoE spell with both itself and the generated icicles benefiting from Splitting Ice.

Shatter Redesign: I don’t agree with the removal of Winter’s Chill, in fact I’d like to centre the redesign around Winter’s chill as a debuff playstyle and use FoF for other purpose: merge in dead talents like Deep Shatter and Subzero into FoF to buff ST spells, and maybe have it being choice node with Splitting Ice:

Fingers of Frost: Your next Glacial Spike has no cast time, or your next Ice Lance deals 100% additional damage.

For AoE, I am not too keen on the idea of Blizzard functioning like Starfall, we can make the following modifications to make Blizzard a mini cooldown, and Orb a big cooldown with IV:

  1. Freezing Rain: Blizzard applies Winter’s Chill to all enemies it damages and slows them by 30%. (1 minute CD).
  2. Winterstorm: When you activate Icy Veins, your next Frozen Orb is empowered.
    2a. Empowered Frozen Orb: The empowered orb slows all attack, casting and movement speed of enemies affected by 30% and renders them x% more vulnerable to frost damage for its duration.
  3. Coldest Snap: Blizzard resets Frozen Orb and calls down a Comet Storm.

For (1) it’s simple, I really don’t like the range of CoC and how it doesn’t hit if enemies are too near or too far. I see this as a QoL improvement and having Blizzard applying WC makes Blizzard (an iconic spell of frost mage) a meaningful spell to cast and do away with instant-casts. We also sort of keep the CDR idea with (3) where Blizzard can directly reset Orb every minute. We can either make every tick of Blizzard refreshes Winter’s Chill, or simply have Winter’s Chill being a debuff that lasts the duration of Blizzard, but the idea is to turn into a mini-cooldown:

5 icicles → Orb for FoF-> Hardcast Blizzard (12s WC debuff+instant CMS) → GS with FoF (see Splitting Ice above) → reset Orb → Comet Storm → Ice Lance with FoF → Splintering Ray (buff it please) → 2x IL with FoF (12s WC debuff should end around here)

With (2), we have a stronger CD window with slight change to rotation, spending FoF from first Orb on IL before sending reset, empowered Orb and GS with the FoF:

5 icicles → Orb for FoF → Hardcast Blizzard (12s WC debuff+instant CMS) → IV+IL with FoF → reset Orb (for Winterstorm debuff+instant CMS+FoF) → Comet Storm → GS with FoF → Splintering Ray (again, buff it please) → 2x IL with FoF (might have remaining WC debuff here due to IV haste).

Hero Talents: For Frostfire, mechanically I propose
Excess Frost: Frost: Your next Flurry triggers Glacial Assault with 100% chance.
Instead of getting cdr on comet storm, just call some of it down immediately. Since GA is computed separately for each flurry, this only triggers on the first flurry bolt.

Mechanics aside, there’s also the problem of insufficient fire (and for fire mages, frost) in flavor. It’d be thematically on point if Frostfire Infusion actually infuse the spell of the other spec into our spells, e.g.:
Frostfire Infusion: Frost: Glacial Spike has a x% chance to turn the target into a Living Bomb. Fire: Pyroblast has a y% chance to explode and call down a Frozen Orb.

For Spellslinger, maybe a rework can change the focus by moving away from Glacial Spike (aka Signature Spell) and Comet Storm to empower Frozen Orb, Ice Lance, and Ray of Frost. Since Spellslinger is shared with Arcane spec, maybe we can replace Signature Spell with something more slinging and a little bit of arcane vibes:
Signature Spell: While channeling Ray of Frost, launch a splinter at the target every 0.5s.

As you said, orb resets are not good. We can also infuse some arcane magic into Spellfrost Teaching:
Spellfrost Teaching: Empowers Ray of Frost to blast a path through your target.
Remember Essence of the Focusing Iris from BfA? This is how we recycle fun stuff, Ray of Frost now blasts a 5yd wide beam to and through your target into the sunset.

Mastery: At this point just make Icicles and baseline passive, and bring back
Mastery: Frostburn: All damage against frozen targets increase by x%.

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Well, yes, ultimately we don’t want to become all the same. But also, we also need our class to be able to adapt to how raid and m+ are designed. You are only thinking in extremes, but we could be redesigned to be optimal in some of the M+ dungeons (or raid encounters), but not so much in others.

First, the issues raised:

  1. Is our 2T niche still relevant?
  2. The problem of shatter (WC and FoF).
  3. Hero talents & mastery.

The main bulk of your answer deals with (2). I do agree that WC is more functionally and thematically interesting than the FoF solution Manather’s suggest. But in your earlier response to Mana, you suggested letting others consume our shatter, that’s literally throwing us down the irrelevance oblivion (we are not augvokers, we are not support role). Going back to old stuff that worked in old environments is not going to solve new problems caused by a new environment.

You mentioned 30 years of history, but I disagree that history is important just because it is history. History is meaningful only if we can learn good things from it, otherwise it belongs in the museum. There are many ways to be thematically frost, it’s not just spells being icy (on on end) or let’s go back to classic/TBC style (the other end). We think of the properties of frost and ice on small scale (slows, freezes, preserving) and large scale (showers, storms, avalanche), and we see how we can redesign things that fit the current state of raid and M+ (functionally relevant) while keeping things thematically relevant. E.g. slows and root are good tools for kiting tanks or kiting when tank is dead, but if our core rotation is throwing out roots here and there we might just be griefing others (and ourselves) at time.

I have posted a long list of potential changes in response to Manather’s suggestion (just above), which IMO addresses his concern. While it looks nothing like the old and current frost mage, I’d strongly argue that my proposal on Freezing Rain, Winterstorm, and Coldest Snap fit the frost theme strongly, and those are the kind of changes I’d like to see. Frost mage is first and foremost, frost. All the iterations of frost are just our interpretation of frost, none are more correct than others thematically, so it simply boils down to finding a unique interpretation (playstyle) that is sufficiently distinct from others (like boomie) but also relevant in today’s raiding and M+ environments.

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@ blizzard: double the range of cone of cold please. tired of having to come to melee range for a fundamental part of my aoe rotation

starfall-like blizzard sounds fantastic imo

and to anyone arguing about nostalgia and history you know what im about to say. theres this whole other world where you can immerse yourself in the game as it used to be and play it to your hearts content. sorry, its 2025 not 2004 the game is different now

that is all

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In what way? I don’t recall suggesting that. Is there something I didn’t think of?

In that case I disagree with you. This class is full of players who play it for what it is, even in a time like now where it isn’t particularly powerful.

To just pull the rug from under them and completely change the fundamentals of the class for 20 years because of something that mildly annoys you in +15 keys is honestly a terrible thing to do.

If your control is griefing others, you’re not using it correctly. You already slow and root a ton with your core rotation today. You can grief with it either deliberately or by being bad, but if you use it well you can enable a form of chainpulling that isn’t possible otherwise.

People play their classes for more than its themes.

Sometimes an overhaul is warranted, but you always have to keep in mind that the players who like it now should continue to like it.

I am still salty over back when my feral druid was my main and it was split in two, completely undoing the core concept of the spec, which was shapeshifting between scuffed warrior and scuffed rogue to combine them and make for something very powerful in its own right.

I imagine many hunters and rogues have a similar experience.

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Any player can shatter a frozen target, consuming any Winter’s Chill on the target as well.

Any player. You said it yourself.

If your control is griefing others, you’re not using it correctly. You already slow and root a ton with your core rotation today.

You clearly have not experience how a cleaving Glacial Spike can root a footbomb in Motherlode. It prevents the bomb from being kicked. Sure, it’s a design flaw but it seems like the chances of that being fixed is smaller than spec reworks. The root already presents itself as an occasional problem now, tying WC to root abilities will simply exacerbate the issue further by providing the incentive to root more aggressively. So no, 100% disagree with root abilities providing WC as a solution.

In that case I disagree with you. This class is full of players who play it for what it is, even in a time like now where it isn’t particularly powerful.

The consensus I get from the mage discord is most commonly DFS4 frost mage being the best iteration. That contradicts what you suggest. I can also say that there’s more people who love the frost theme more than how frost plays mechanically. In the same words, to not change the fundamentals of the class when it is impeding the current gameplay because it mildly annoys you is honestly a terrible thing to do. That is equally valid and equally trivializes the frustrations of some players. Statements like these are subjective unless you can produce a survey on a representative sample of active frost mages. Maybe you are part of the majority, maybe you are in the minority, who knows. It’s fine to state what you want or prefer, but “99% of players don’t care” or “full of players” are just imaginary statistics. The forums are here for people to state their views, but only moderators and developers might have a real sense of what the player base wants (backend engine keywords summary). As far as subjective statements go, I rest my case.

Personal views aside, giving clear ideas focusing on they fit into today’s raid and M+ environment while staying true to its theme is perhaps the best way to help the spec change for the better.

P.S. As Icecreambolt said above, classic/TBC/WotLK realms exist for nostalgia and history.

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I agree, like Arcane Orb usually is for Arcane its great to have our quick AoE ability not included in our ST. With the Freezing Winds rework Coldest Snap has decent bit worse of a cost effective investment just due to how worthless Freezing Winds is in burst cleave situations.

For sure its seen as integral, but the precast is also one of the reasons we have such an issue at range, and tbh its confusing for new players while aside from with GS, not feeling that special for long time players.

Overall we would be casting more frostbolts in the above changes, removing WC and limiting FoF to 2 per flurry would cause you to have to spend more of your time on frostbolt. So it wouldnt become a niche ability, still a core part of the rotation, just with no potential to become a “spender” (in reality its never our spender, it just enables passive effects when we ignore ice lance in favor of it - stacking the ffb dot, letting splinters and orb have higher crit rate)

Personally I think Glacial Spike is needed for Frost. Without it you have no thought in your rotation, and its not too difficult to use while shaking up your rotation in a satisfying way.

I want to have a similar niche to Boomy, the damage isnt intended to come from entirely from our Blizzard, its more of a mixture of Spriest, Boomy, and Destro. The damage comes from your splitting ice to targets inside your blizzard when looking at a spread cleave scenario. Functionally frost would play exactly the same in ST, and the same in AOE, and would require you to perform that rotation as we know it well to do good spread cleave – unlike boomy which presses one button. We just would not require all our targets grouped all the time.

Personally I don’t like casting Blizzard in 2t, dont really like casting it as frequently as we do in general, and this would remove the value of our 2t by forcing consistent blizzard casts, lowering our st as a result. 100% increased damage split amongst all enemies would be a bit weak once you started adding mobs, since its value never increases past the second target.

These are good ideas, though without blizzard being a consistent spell we would need something else for AOE, though Frost Bomb could take its place as something that consumes FoF or however it worked in earlier iterations. I do like the way you used Blizzard to replace Coldest Snap.

I would like to state, I dont mind Winters Chill as a concept, its just its range failures are very apparent in modern WoW with the large hitbox mobs WoW likes to do (and anytime you have to stack near a boss, also frequent). And these suggestions dont fix that core issue.

Not sure what you think the fundamentals are, sharing shatters has never been an integral part of Frost’s design. I’m sticking to FoF shattering all our spells - which is exactly how it worked when it was introduced in its heyday. We still have a lot of control as part of our rotation, and freezes remain an option. You seem to want a separate rework, as what I am speaking of is still modern frost – almost exactly how we currently play, just with a blizzard that hits everything in 40 yards and the added ability to cleave to mobs not grouped.

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Okay, that’s not what I meant. I somehow managed to write the very opposite of what I meant.

I apologise for that.

I’ll go back and correct it since it’s causing confusion.

What I wanted to say is that any given player applies it and when that given player shatters it with anything, that Winter’s Cool goes away regardless of whether the enemy was frozen or not. This is unlike the current situation where oftentimes frost mages can cast many spells that benefit from Winter’s Chill but does not consume it, and that’s just silly imo.

I’ll go back and fix it shortly. Once again, sorry for that one.

Yes I have, and firstly that’s a bug - these entities don’t even have life pools and should not be targeted by any spells, and quite frankly I think this 2p niche is causing trouble, both here in PvE and in PvP.

A frost mage can no longer hit one target. Unless you’re spamming Frostbolt without CD’s everything cleaves and AoE’s, and this gives you a lowered amount of control of your actions. And actually even in that trivial case it’ll eventually pop Icy Veins automatically and cleave anyway. This is a huge issue that affects many classes and ties back to what I called noise earlier.

There should be no such thing as Glacial Spike, and even if there should there should be no such thing as Glacial Spike cleaving two targets since it’s explicitly a single target spell by design, and even if there should there should be no bug attacking things that aren’t a target.

WC was added as a stand-in for mobs that couldn’t be rooted or got broken out too fast. I don’t know how it morphed into its current state, but it’s very confusing to me.

… really?

Wow.

I absolutely hated it and groaned when I realised that the S2 set bonus was returning.

Can’t exactly say I was thrilled in 10.1.5 where suddenly I had to add 7 new spells to my bar midseason. That kindda sucked, actually. And S4 is just that same thing copied over. As a matter of fact, why is DFS4 remembered more fondly than late DFS2? It’s the same class and the same set bonus.

99% of players don’t play like that because 1% of the players play at those levels according to our scoreboards on raiderio. No survey is needed.

Whether the opinions of the 99% align with mine is a different discussion, but I suspect many of them do because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be playing it.

I’m not interested in replaying the same game I’ve already played, I’m interested in frost mage being carried forward as frost mage rather than being transformed into a frost themed moonkin.

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Hmm, I really do think it would be good to use the two hero talents to generate slightly different playstyles for frost mage. FF leans towards empowering GS, more frequent comet storms and meteors while avoiding ray. SS leans towards enhancing orb, lance, ray for fast-paced high mobility action while avoiding GS. Also, having each hero-tree focus on one area (GS vs lance+ray) allows the tuning freedom to balance both trees better due to an additional degree of freedom.

Yeah, I agree with what you said about split damage, I just didn’t want it to sound too OP off the bat. Standard square-root scaling after 2 enemies would be fine.

Perhaps, bringing back the old Freezing Winds that generate FoF (my version that empowers GS or IL) during Frozen Orb can fill the rotation gaps left behind by the change to Blizzard.

On the range failures, I haven’t given it much thought, but having Orb/CMS consume FoF to crit might not be feasible because those spells are currently designed to proc crit separately for each tick/comet. How do we manage flurry charges for FoFs then? I think it opens another can of worms. If travel time is a problem, remove travel time. Redesign the concept of Flurry to a single target Ice Nova (calling it Frostbite to mourn our lost talent) might be a simple solution to the problem:
Frostbite: Wraps the target in ice dealing x% damage and applying Winter’s Chill to the target. (Works like Flurry but no travel time)
With Ice Nova shattering GS at melee range, this likely works just as well. And, just kidding, we should use better names like Icy Vines or Cold Draft.

On that note, if Blizzard applies AoE WC, then Ice Nova is pretty redundant as a spell that freezes enemies for AoE crit. Can be removed. An additional free point in class tree would be great for additional utility/defensives.

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Your rework makes it play nothing like the current frost at all. It doesn’t even remotely resemble it.

You moved all shattering from being a state of the target to a state of the player and you changed Blizzard into Starfall.

These are enormous changes. Again, it breaks with 20 and 30 years of tradition respectively. Surely there must be a way to get Frost working that does not involve completely deleting the history of the class?

You also want to completely overhaul the way Frozen Orb works and are messing with the importance of movement and positioning to homogenise it with other classes.

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This I definitely agree with, hence my suggestion to tie Splitting Ice to Blizzard. When no Blizzard is cast, single-target spells stay single-target. We need to get out of 2T niche, and we need the autonomy of deciding between single target and cleave/AoE, especially when we specifically do not want to hit another target (aggroing yellow mobs, balancing boss health in council raid encounters, needing adds to stay alive for whatever mechanics).

I meant to say DFS2, the season when the rework happened. Recalled wrongly because the set bonus and play style was the same. But yes, the reintroduction of Glacial Spike alongside Comet Storm and Ray of Frost was exciting for many. At that point I wasn’t too thrilled with the bloated number of spells as well, as such I’m advocating splitting GS and Ray as two area of focus using hero talents, the additional degree of freedom makes balancing between the hero trees easier too.

Just because 99% of players don’t play at that level doesn’t mean 99% of players don’t care about the things 1% care about. Just because I can’t get into FIFA/NBA doesn’t mean I don’t care about soccer/basketball. If frost is designed to better suit at least some encounter at highest level (RWF, TGP, World first keys), we face less frustrations and annoyances playing those encounters at lower levels (H raids, M10-M12s) because the encounter is largely the same. A lot of community perception also trickles down from the top, albeit unnecessarily.

Added:

I don’t want to start a new reply on a small thing, so I just edited it in. There’s a PVP talent Concentrated Coolness that makes Frozen Orb castable at a set location and no longer moves, and it’s already there for a few expansions. I think it is the perfect solution to the AoE loss issue raised, and it’s not exactly an overhaul of Frozen Orb too.

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I’m not sure how you think people currently shatter, but pressing flurry and ice lance twice is fundamentally identical between current and my proposed version – and FoF already exists. You act like not having a debuff means the end of the world, when the buff that replaces it has more history that the debuff, since you care so much about that. Freezes still exist, and you could still use them to the same effect as you have since vanilla. Not sure how you think Frost currently plays or why your fantasy is so set on a debuff that does nothing but making the target “act” frozen must be on the enemy rather than you empowering it to “act” that way (which again, has more history than winters chill, I’m not pulling a legion survival hunter here).

That winters chill is a debuff doesnt matter, we never use Flurry like an exposure debuff for extended shatters, only ever to directly shatter our main abilities right after (Ex: Flurry → CMS → Ice Lance → Ice Lance). I’m not removing shatter as an identity, I’m putting it back on one buff, FoF, like it was prior to winters chill.

Blizzard is already unrecognizable from its classic version being channeled, and able to consume FoF.

Positioning of Frozen Orb/your own positioning has a negligible effect unless you are just blindly aiming it before. Its not a skill representation, its rng with how your tank decides to move the pack.

This would exacterbate the precast problem because that precast would be guaranteed to hit after you apply winters chill. And the issue with melee range is that the time between winters chill being applied and the spell landing is not enough time for the server to register winters chill – so you’ll have flurry hit and then your precast glacial spike within 0.1-0.0s and the GS wont consume winters chill, probably due to spell batching. This would be the same for freezes most likely, havent tested it recently.

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