Frost will be king in shadowlands

Frost is getting the best legendaries, the fact that u now launch a frozen orb instead of comets is amazing!! Not only for AOE but for ST!!! And wear that with the other piece which reduces FO cool down !!! I mean holy cow…

Fire comes in 2nd place , the only one I like is the free pyros for 6 seconds, no cool down or casting time.

And then there’s árcame who got the worst legendaries lol, if I play arcane it stinks that u don’t get any love lol

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I’m happy for the people who play frost and fire, and I feel for those who wish arcane was better.

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I’m not convinced.

First up, do we know when we’ll have access to the legendaries and what the requirements will be? If it’s like the past 2 expansions, Frost will be terrible because we won’t have all this gear to un-break the spec until the last raid tier. Maybe Blizzard will look at actually fixing the specs instead of saying “this item will fix it” late in the game.
NoIL is still looking incredibly strong too, and without major changes it will be stronger than the standard GS spec.
We’re also likely losing the ability to run the FOrb build, as the only thing making that even viable is azerite and high haste.
A lot of the “power” will come from tuning, and Blizzard has shown time and time again that they’re incapable of making even minor balance adjustments until major patches if at all. Again, if we’re undertuned we’ll be stuck with a bad spec for at least 1-2 raid tiers.

Honestly though what it comes down to is this - fix the spec first, then look at adding interesting gear. Arcane and Frost have a lot of problems with their core design, and 1 or 2 pieces of gear isn’t going to solve them.

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I’ve always loved arcane , or was the first spec played, but after years of just watching other classes and my own mage specs get buffed and do well while arcane never gets that love I just finally said screw it and I’ll go with fire, I hate fire and frost, every patch and every expansion I pray that blizzard will give árcane something good or new

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How do you figure arcane and frost have design issues not fire? These two feel fluid regardless of gear-azerite-build. Take away bracers alone and fire feels like garbage instantly, on top of it already being clunky.

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Well of course every spec will feel clunky without their full gear, but once you have what u need , fire takes over, looking at these Warcraft logs, fire is way far ahead of frost and arcane, frost comes in low second and arcane is way at the bottom, and these new legendaries favor fire a lot, free combustion windows free pyros and on top of that free crits, fire is just fine and will be for SL

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Your basing everything off fire being broken damage wise. Talking about design wise how is the spec held up by specific gear and passive damage well put together? Returning Pflames baseline will help the feel but passive damage being the overwhelming top will never be a good design and that goes for any spec/class.

I think lucid makes the spec much more fluid than the bracers tbh. Losing both of those is going to cause fire to feel so slow compared to what it is now.

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Yes agreed, bottom line if there’s a spec that needs heavy rework I’m going to go with the one that’s currently band aided by borrowed power and disgustingly broken passive damage. Can’t let rando bads just spread bad takes unscathed.

I don’t that I agree with you that passive damage is somehow a bad thing. If all of the ignite was just built into the initial damage, that somehow would make it more valid in your mind? What matters is the end damage number, not really how you got it.

Passive damage and borrowed power topping your meters is terrible class design and isn’t fun. That’s my opinion and seems to be the popular one as well.

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Usually frost starts out strong and with gear arcane and fire overtake it. True almost every new xpac

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Again, why is passive damage unfun? I get the borrowed power argument but a huge part of fire’s flavor is the ignite dot. It separates it from frost and arcane and I think thematically fits very well. My guess is that if you told mages that ignite would be removed and everything would be front loaded that you’d have a lot of unhappy mages.

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A lot of people like to button smash.

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The fact that they added Siphon Storm, the absolute worst azerite trait from BfA that no one ever uses is just another sign the devs don’t give a rat’s posterior about arcane.

Frost is looking good though.

Unless they add baseline RNG protection to frost (not through legendaries or talents), I’ll stay away from it.

I agree with your post, but instead of just giving a <3 I also wanted to point out the cute transmog you’re rocking!

Edit: My biggest PvE “issue” with Frost is Icy Veins being a crappy DPS cooldown with an insane cooldown to boot. It should just modify all your casts to treat the target as if it were frozen (buff on the mage, not the target). In its current form it’s very underwhelming when compared to what Combustion and Arcane Power offer.

Edit 2: I doubt Frost will be king, but I hope it will be, even if just for a while. It’s been the garbage PvE mage spec since like MoP launched, and only “shined” for like the first week of 6.0 when all the mage specs were dead weak (so by shine it was slightly better than Arcane/Fire) but once they rolled in the buffs it fell off again.

It’s always the spec that seems to be poorly thought out because it usually ends up getting buffed later on in an expansion (including BFA) to make up for its poor performance. It’s never completely dominated logs over all other DPS specs in the game on expansions while both Arcane and Fire have done so.

Ultimately, unless they give it a competitive DPS cooldown/rework Icy Veins it’ll likely never dominate. 3 min cooldown for a 20 second Haste buff is just pathetic.

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This post didnt age well :wink: lmfao

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Laughs in frost mage.

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Jesters of shadowland

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