Our talent tree is in desperate need of some real attention. We are both the only spec in the game with 0 choice nodes, and the spec with the lowest number of nodes in our tree. Which is insane to have on the same spec.
Frost suffers from a massive lack of choice in its talent tree, there are no viable alternatives to its established playstyles. There are ways to make pressing frostbolt more consistently in AOE feel fun (frostfire empowerment for instance) and all the fractured frost/deaths chill changes failed to encapsulate that. There are ways to make cold front fun (through more limited opportunities to cleave high damage frostbolts throughout the entire rotation). Frost just hasnt received the design attention it needs at all this expansion.
Splinters and meteor/ice nova also need to be added to our mastery, as right now them not being on it tanked the value of the stat (which everyone mentioned during beta). And is a re-occuring problem with frosts mastery. If its changed to the MoP version (of increasing frozen damage) this wouldnt be an issue anymore.
Frost def needs a rotation that isn’t entirely thrown off by hero talents… but NGL fire is on life support so here’s hoping both can be looked at in one tuning pass
The nerfs to splinterstorm coming on the anniversary patch are gonna really truck the specs performance in pve as well. The amount of splinters we’re going to lose going from basically 100% winter’s chill during veins to their change is going to have so many ripples on the performance. This means less throughput from wintertide, less orb resets from spellfrost teachings - which itself means much less aoe damage as orb resetting once or twice is massive by itself but also results in more freezing rain - and the lack of orb resets also means that lances will be less damage.
Now, spellslinger frost’s rotation is not good. Its actually toxic as heck. So trying to actually do something to the rotation is a good thing. However, they aren’t compensating frost in any way for these changes.
Frostfire is pretty far behind spellslinger in pve. Its rotation, coincidentally, is ALSO toxic as heck due to the few paltry but, frankly terrible, changes that frost received going into TWW. Ironically, frostfire frost is rather toxic for PvP and any compensation that spellslinger frost would need to counteract (as lets be real, spellslinger frost isn’t outperforming by a metric that would require the heavy nerfs its going to get) the anniversary changes is going to supercharge it for PvP, but that’s another story.
Yeah, the spec played fine post rework but at the same time it was like it was stuck together with duct tape and now with the hero trees it doesn’t look like it’s holding on anymore. It’s either proc overload with Frostfire, making it extremely busy or literal Ice Lance spam with Spellslinger (thank god WC from Splinterstorm is getting removed in 11.0.5), not to mention the mastery problem.
Practically everything in the first gate should be baseline, along with with maybe Hailstones. Splitting Ice should be way higher up in the tree, probably the first thing at the second gate. Frostbite and Subzero should be removed and Frostbite maybe could be moved back to being a PvP talent. Everything that has to do with Frostbolt should get either reworked or removed and we need some real capstones as well as some actual choice.
I agree and that is why I created threads for Frost and other Mage specs on PTR forums that contain most mentioned here issues, so if you like the suggestions there you could support them or if you have your own suggestions - post them there. That thread also contains links to other Mage specs threads, so even if you are Arcane or Fire main you could post suggestions about them in their respective threads as well.