jesus there should be like a hotfix for how bad frost is on that fight.
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Yeah lol, I don’t find it all that fun for fire either. It’s all about padding on phase 1 and hoping it doesn’t drop off too much. Must be tough on frost with all that movement in phase 2.
Yeah my dps is trash on that fight lol…
Well, were starting to feel the repercussion of the layoff blizzard did. The staff in charge of balance got cut and this is the game we have now.
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What’s happening is the raid designers are disconnecting more and more from the reality of what these specs can do.
Frost from what I understand has an old design, and the new raids want more and more movement.
Frost has basically no instant casts that matter. FB requires you to stand still… ice lance is instant but only useful with a proc from FB. Blizzard requires you to stand still.
If they keep making raids like this Blizzard will eventually have to redesign frost.
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I think it will be pretty decent on it when the freezing winds buff goes live. Fire will still be much better likely.
This is one those fights where Ice Floes really shines because you can weave in Frostbolts while dodging Massacre and swirlies on the ground while at the same time not overshooting with Shimmer.
Sire is very movement intensive, especially in P3. No caster likes to move unnecessarily, even if they have mobility DPS options. They’ll just do better damage if they can stand still and tunnel.
That said, Frost’s ability to double block, coupled with its other survival resources such as MI, Alter Time, etc. make it one of the best specs at surviving and soaking in P3.
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Blizzard needs to rethink their raid design and stop pushing the game to be nothing but instant moves.
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Immobility is only one of the issues. The other issue is Frost mage does not have (enough) burst on demand. This is making fights like Sire Denathrius challenging. During those many brief periods when people can stand still and cast during Sire fight, fire mages can instantly pull combustion. But frost mages are unlikely to have icy veins ready due to much longer CD. Without icy veins, Frostburn is a piece of trash. It’s true that double ice blocks is valuable in Ph3 but it does not compensate for the lack of damage.
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This is a poor argument at best. Icy Veins does not have a dedicated cooldown time, courtesy of Icy Propulsion. For me it’s always up as soon as we start P2 and once more before P3 starts if I want (but I hold this till P3 starts since we cheese P2).
Frost lacks a strong burst by design but at the same time Frost is one of the best cleave specs in the game. It can do decent DPS on this fight if you decide to cheese P2, because you can cleave onto Remoria. In concept this is basically the same as Huntsman and his dog, which is another fight where Frost is great.
Point being you can always nitpick a fight or phase of a fight where the spec will do well. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to expect Blizzard to perfectly balance every fight around every spec at the same time, otherwise ALL the fights would look the same. Some fights favor strong ST burst specs. Other fights favor cleave specs.
This fight is bad for almost all casters, even Fire mages. The only casters that can handle this fight exceptionally well are Boomies.
This is also subjective to how much damage you’re doing in the first place. Double Ice Blocking is more of a loss for a high geared Frost mage than it is for a low geared one. Again, if needed you can nitpick and argue this till SL rolls over to the next expansion.
I agree Blizzard will never be able to make all the classes perform equally well in all of the fights. But differentiations should be looked at with a grain of salt. If you look at the average dps for each class (I use warcraftlogs data for the week of Feb 20 -27 on heroic level), from the top class Affliction Warlock to the bottom class frost mage, totally 24 dps classes, frost mage is 27% lower than Af warlock. First of all I am not sure this is OK. But this is not the biggest problem here. If you look at the % drop between each class from the top to the bottom, 2/3 of the drop occurs within the top 21 classes, while 1/3 of the drop occurs in the bottom three classes, being Demo warlock, Arcane Mage and Frost Mage. In other words, the dps differences among the top 21 classes are much much less significant than the they are vs. the bottom 3 classes. This situation has remained like this for quite some time. Even the 12% buff frost mage got does not help move it higher on the ladder. Please let me this is just another fight frost is not good at and not a significant design issue.
Every class will suck in some content, I generally agree, although I am not quite sure about it for the gods specs currently. But consider this: Sire Denathrius is the endgame of endgame at the moment. As a frost mage, I can deal with skipping a few Mythic + dungeons. But please tell me which class will be OK to be designed so invalid for this fight as frost mage currently is that it is frequently kicked out of this fight, primarily due to the design? Yes there is room for players to improve their skills, but does it mean we can ignore the systematical discrimination that exists against some classes?
And yeah, if this does not change, I will continue to complain until next expansion and even beyond.
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If you look at mythic CN, which is where most organized groups are at this point, Frost mage has shot up to 4th and 5th place on warcraft logs. Icy Veins even did an article on this.
It ranks 5th this week on the 95th percentile
It ranks 4th on all percentiles
You’re literally picking the ONE fight that has everything going against Frost and using that to say that the spec’s buffs were not enough.
This is exactly what it is.
Even if you go and look at high performing mages, on mythic CN, for mage rankings (US and EU), Frost is now dominating the fights that let it use its cleave kit efficiently. It is ranked #1 on Huntsman, with 7 of the top 10 being parses by Frost. It also ranks in the top 10 for mythic SLG (#2 and #3), though it is worth noting that not many guilds have killed this boss.
Point being, it’s found its niche as the 2 target cleave spec among mages. It’s also got consistent single target damage, but lacks a strong burst. To say a 12% buff is not enough simply because of its underperformance on 1 fight which works entirely against it is wrong.
There were always be fights in a tier that favor certain specs over others. This fight just happens to be Frost’s kyrptonite. It’s also worth noting that Frost will parse worse than other specs but might be sacrificing this damage in order to double block to spare the group a wipe. As long as it secures the kill, what makes you say the double block isn’t worth the damage loss?
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Not just mage specs, or even casters in general but everyone! Because they boxed themselves into a corner with their 4 different levels of difficulty (no other game has that many and most don’t go beyond 2) they are forced to keep adding more and more mechanics to each encounter and by the time you get to last phase of the highest difficulty it becomes ridiculous and mechanical overlap requires players to have almost superhuman reflexes but mostly just luck or to outgear it.
This is because ever since they decided to turn WoW into the poster child for eSports they balance the game around people who play the game like it’s their job because it really is! Meanwhile the rest of us that make up 99% of the player base might as well be chopped liver.
If you look at statistics you can see that ever since Legion the overwhelming majority of players have hit a wall when it comes to the final bosses at the heroic level and have to outgear the encounter by a significant margin to complete it. Right now there are far more people that already have 2 or even 3 Mythic Nathria kills but haven’t gotten Heroic Sire down yet. This is either bad design or purposeful overtuning in order to keep content relevant longer by dangling the AOTC achievement just out of reach.
Legion was a great expansion, arguably one of the best WoW has ever had, but the path they chose to take since has destroyed the spirit of the game. And all that for a Faustian bargain with the streaming platforms and the eSport nonsense which so far has inexplicably been a license to print money. I just can’t wait until it crashes and burns like all other similar fads have in the past. Maybe then gaming can go back to its roots and to what made it so appealing to so many people.
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Fire mages who have Cauterize and who will, throughout the course of a long fight like Sire, also get another Ice Block just from the massive CDR provided by Shifting Power. Oh and did I mention they have absolutely unhindered mobility during the entirety of their major DPS cooldown?
While both Frost and Arcane have their niches (cleave and burst AoE, respectively) they literally can’t DPS on the move and have no execute on top of not providing nearly as much utility or survivability (especially so for Arcane). In other words there is nothing that Frost or Arcane can do that Fire can’t do better and with significantly less annoyances like slow ramp up or reliance on multiple shorter CDS or RNG like proc fishing.
That’s not balanced, it’s a joke.
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I feel I am arguing for the majority of the frost mage players while you are focusing on a small portion of it who are luckier than average pug players to have a stable guild and progressing in mythic. So who is cherry picking? I don’t think it’s too much to ask Blizzard to make lower level content more accessible for the majority. If buffing frost mage’s damage by 12% is still not solving this accessibility problem for the majority, then maybe simple damage buffing isn’t the right way to go. Maybe mechanic changes are possible to allow both high end players and average players to do Ok on this fight. Again. Sire Denathrius is the last boss of the current end game, so every body wants to do it. But the reality is Frost mages in pugs are frequently dismissed from the group or denied the access, not only because it’s the lowest DPS, but also because it’s so much lower than other specs (please look at my numbers again). It’s OK that frost mage is not the best DPS at this fight or in any fights. But it shouldn’t be this bad as to be shut away from this content. So, no, this is definitely not just another fight frost mage is not good at. This fight shows the content discriminates this spec to an unacceptable extent.
Let me paste this article that you mentioned here:
Frost got buffed multiple times over the last couple of weeks, but it took a while for people to pick up the spec, largely due to having a different best Covenant than Fire, and also requiring different legendaries, making it rather difficult to swap to it.
Since the buffs, people have had some time to now get these new legendaries and swap Covenants, which caused Frost to shoot up a lot last week. Frost is still not a better spec than Fire for progressing bosses, which means that most of the Mages that have gone Frost recently will be those done with progress and thus very geared, and since the sample size is still comparably very low for Frost, these couple of players will push the rank of Frost up quickly. ( The title of this article is “castle-nathria-dps-log-rankings-and-analysis-week-11-the-rise-of-frost-mage” for whoever is interested.)
It clearly pointed out the small parse and the connection between existing high level gears and fast rising ranks. I.e., this is not representative of the majority who is still struggling with progressing or who just doesn’t get invited at all.
??
If you’re talking about Blocking between P1 - fight end, then a Frost mage can easily Block 4 times throughout the fight (twice in p1, twice in p3). It’ll Block more versus a Fire mage even with Shifting Power, and what’s more important is it can block twice in the third phase which is where everything goes haywire if soaks are missed.
You’re also turning this into a Frost vs Fire argument, which was never my point. My point was (to whom I quoted) that saying a 12% buff “doesn’t feel enough” based on Frost’s performance on ONE fight is just wrong given how the spec is in the top 5 on the 95th percentile of mythic CN (and #4 on all percentiles in the same difficulty).
All specs have some fights that they struggle with. This just happens to be “it” for Frost. Doesn’t make the spec weak.
Arcane’s legendary is an execute once its target is <35% HP.
With all due respect, YOU are cherry picking 1 fight where Frost struggles to put up great numbers for and equating it to a nonsensical claim that a 12% buff was insufficient. It’s as silly as saying since Disc Priest does so much better than a Holy Priest in M. Hungering, that Holy needs a buff.
With all due respect, you can’t be nitpicking about the fine nuances of balance while also saying you’re talking about the “average” player. I’ve seen average pub players who don’t even know their rotation at all. If you’re looking at THEIR level, then this entire argument is pointless.
And while you’re averaging out everything, MOST guilds are in early mythics, not in heroics.
It’s because a mage who was Night Fae before Frost’s buffs has little reason to go back to Venthyr and then roll Frost. But if you just look at something like patchwerk fight sims, Frost is currently ahead of Fire after its buffs.
Frost does need stuff like proc generation fail protection, and a rework to where other talent options are viable, but it doesn’t need a numbers bump because you found 1 fight they struggle with.
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I assume this “whom” didn’t mean 12% buff is not enough, but that it’s gone towards a wrong direction, or at least it shouldn’t be a standing-alone fix. It looks like this “whom” also mentioned possible mechanics changes are needed which again was ignored in your argument.
Again, the author of this article clearly pointed out there is a small parse and the frost mages are newly re-rolled from fire mages with existing high ilvl. So how is this ranking representative of most players’ situation, even to the ones who are allegedly in “MOST” guilds that’s in early mythic? Clearly they are not at mythic sire yet. Can frost mages progress to later stage of mythic, even sire? How much slower will that process be compared with other specs? Will it continue to be overtly challenging and even disabling for frost mage in this fight on mythic level? Should frost mages re-roll to fire, going through covenant changes, and when they have top gears, re-roll back to frost which they love?
I challenge you to look at the bigger picture. Look at how many arguments you can find in various forums that ask for a re-design of frost mage for the sire fight, before and after the 12% fix, vs how many are actually confident or comfortable with this fight. Look at non-frost-mage players’ comments on this spec, too, about its underperformance in this fight. Look at the parses, not only this Icy Vein report but more data, and see how under represented frost mages are in the fight of sire, and their low ranking. Can you really say it’s because most of them don’t know their rotations? And at last, look at how you are missing my point. I am simply arguing this fight reflects that there is an unproportionally big gap between the bottom dps group (where frost mage falls in) and the other dps groups, which prevents lots of them from participating (again, compare the parse of the same ilvl on other fights vs this fight), and this justifies a mechanics change, not to make it top, but only to make it generally viable. Four ice blocks alone does not make this spec viable for this fight because the primary concern of the group is each player outputs enough dps and frost mages simply have a hard time meeting that expectation, not because ilvl, not because rotation problems, but mainly because its mechanics.
I’d really love to see that I am wrong and frost mage is as viable as you think. And I’d like to see I have an equal chance in this fight as other classes and specs. It’s just more evidence and my own experience tell me it’s not the case.
Except doing so is a DPS loss because it nukes our damage output to effectively 0 while we spend at least 6 seconds ramping back up to 4 charges before we start doing damage again. Meanwhile, fire gets perma crit with 100% mobility during execute. What a joke.
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Still better than Arcane on that fight and pretty much all other fights.
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