Changes I’d like to see
Glacial Spike gets the Chaos Bolt treatment. Every cast auto crits, but the spell doesn’t benefit from shatter in any way and it doesn’t consume WC.
Ray of frost stays the same. I like that it doesn’t consume WC but does benefit from it. It is also my favorite spell in the whole game.
Winters Chill can only be consumed by Ice Lance and Frost Bolt. IL and FB are guaranteed to crit when hitting an enemy with WC effect on them.
A talent that allows Blizzard to apply WC of all enemies hit.
Option 1: A talent that makes Ice Lance hit all enemies currently standing in Blizzard.
Option 2: A talent that makes Frost Bolt hit all enemies currently standing in Blizzard.
Option 3: both option 1 and 2.
Fingers of Frost procced IL’s consume WC but the damage is increased even further. Instead of 4x maybe 5x or 6x.
Allow Frost Bolt to benefit from FoF procs making the spell instant cast and allowing it to do more damage when consuming an FoF proc. Maybe 2x or 3x. The idea here is to just give players another spell to spam during FoF procs instead of the usual IL spam.
Im convinced they do not understand what they want out of spell slinger as a fantasy. They described it as a spec that is constantly flinging spells. Yet every time it starts to look like it could be interesting they go back and gut the ability to generate that slinging aspect of it. Because they think its too good. And proceed to compensate it … with Aura buffs. Its the laziest balancing I think i have ever seen from them.
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Spell slinger should have been the no GS alternative finally. Unluckily for us, it sucks to suck. I don’t think Blizz cares about Frost mage this expansion. We can try again next year.
Most players like Glacial Spike
Mage started very promising in tww, but it’s been very inconsistent.
I’m not liking the solutions that blizzard is implementing as of recently.
I personally really like the baseline frost gameplay but it needs some refinement
1: remove bottom left side of the talent tree, aside cold front.
2: cold front doesn’t proc from enough things, creating issues with ability usage and especially unintuitive ability usage, also cold front should automatically send an orb, no GCD loss.
3: remove slinger and frost fire brain freeze generation, instead make excess fire and splinter storm give buffs to icy veins, like a slight CDR on icy veins, or a stacking buff possibly not something as boring as “you do 5% more damage.” as examples.
4: the reduced brain freeze procs due to the changes to frost fire and slinger would be made up with the season 2 and 3 df sets as new talents, in place of boring % modifier talents like Wintertide or subzero.
5: treat blizzard and rain of fire the same way you treat Starfall. Orb would follow target, or attach itself to a target, or ice lance hits would teleport orb to the target it hit.
6: a capstone for slick ice.
One final note, I personally actually liked temporal anomaly, so I’m not happy at all that it is gone
Frost Mage is always left aside, the chance of this expansion’s problems continuing into Midnight is high, but it doesn’t surprise me at all, they listen to Paladin players but we who play with other specializations are screwed, I feel sorry for those who play survival hunter and Warlock Afflic, anyway, what’s left for us Frost Mage players is to keep a cool head and hope they listen to us.
from the looks of the midnight talents, frost is getting a big rework.
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Classic case of “be careful what you wish for”. They’ve utterly gutted the spec (along others). Frost mage after the DF 10.1.5 rework was a great version of frost (my favorite to date), just needed to be tuned properly so it wasn’t perpetually bottom barrel in damage tier after tier. If these changes hold, we’ll be closer to a wrath version of frost and likely still bottom tier damage quietly justified under the “most approachable mage spec” mark they have stated they are aiming for.
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Rets a braindead spec and its been consistently a top performer. Sure there are probably ulterior reasons like being a holy knight fantasy and being the only dps spec of the paladin class but its still a glimmer of hope for frost mages.
Isn’t bm currently one of the best specs in the game? This reasoning sounds a bit weird in that context.
Yes, there is some variation depending on how you want to frame up the performance criteria, but nonetheless it is safe to say BM is comfortably in the top quartile of performers currently. However, that’s a snapshot and not what I would use for projecting future performance (e.g. Midnight). For that, looking at historic performance data and current trends in spec performance is going to be the stronger predictor.
In that context BM has been one of the few specs that has been worse than Frost Mage in the modern era (e.g. Legion through DF). I had long suspected there were trends in the performance of specs for some time, but it was all anecdotal and feely. So, I decided to compile and analyze spec performance objectively and it is clear that some specs are perennially undertuned and others overtuned. I haven’t updated with TWW data yet, but I probably should because it will change some of the rankings (e.g. Arcane will move up and Frost will likely slide down). I can’t post the link in this forum, but I would be happy to send the link via DM or discord if anyone is interested in digging into it.
TLDR summary is that on average BM ranks 7.1 from the bottom which is the lowest of any spec and frost on average is 8.0 from the bottom which is the third worst (would likely be 2nd worst when updated for TWW, replacing Arcane). BM is on average 3.9% under the mean performance of all specs and frost is 3.0% under the average performance of all specs again landing at worst and 3rd worst compared to all other specs. For contrast Shadow Priest and Demo Lock are two of the best performers with average ranks of 16.8 from the bottom and 4.8% above the mean for SP and 15.8 from the bottom and 2.2% above the mean for Demo Lock.
As far as BM and Frost and complexity versus performance is concerned, it is only objectively true that they are both habitually amongst the bottom performers. It is my suspicion that this is at least partially due to the perception that they were the “most approachable” specs of their respective classes and their lower end tuning is justified accordingly. Blizzards Midnight patch notes (finally) attesting to the fact that the see Frost mage as the entry level spec helped in substantiating the suspected correlation.
What I find particularly aggravating about this is that Frost has now long been a relatively complex spec to play compared to other specs and offers a healthy amount of opportunity for skill expression. It was arguably as or more difficult to master in tiers subsequent to 10.1.5 than it’s sister specs. Unfortunately, I suspect Blizzards perception of the spec was never updated, as it has continued to be treated and tuned as the non-progression, no-sweat training wheels spec that doesn’t have a place in RWF raid comp considerations. That is especially off putting given how well SF Arcane has performed over this expansion relative to its rotational simplicity.
Anyways, hope that helps to clarify why I am pessimistic about the stated design goal behind the changes to frost mage and the resulting implications in regard to future tuning.
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Just unplug your brain and play four-button fire mage. 