Is it worth using after the buff?
I’ll most likely test it out in raid this Sunday with imp scorch, ice shards, and 6% claw debuff.
My highest crit with ice shards but no ignite is 1636 using +50 dmg helm CD but didn’t have my best gear on at the time so was missing maybe 20ish frost spell power. Wasn’t using the gnomer buff at the time either. (or attacking a beast for 5% buff as a troll)
Assuming they stack additively, scorch+claw add 21% dmg.
1636 x 1.21 = 1979.56 crit
1978.56 x 1.4 = 2771.384 crit with ignite
This is a stock standard 3 second cast that crits.
Icy veins + coldsnap is 40 seconds of 20% haste, which brings the cast down to 2.5 IIRC.
Assuming 2.25 cast with no crits and hitting for 700 a cast (it will be more but I’m more geared than the average bear) it deals only 311 DPS.
A crit deals 350% of the damage of a regular attack, or 250% bonus dmg. At 33% crit chance that means crit gives your overall damage a boost of about 82.5%.
311 x 1.825 = 576.575 dps
Personally, I will be stacking icy veins, berzerking, +50 dmg helm, +7 frost weapon enchant, +15 frost+arcane elixir, power infusion after 5 stacks of scorch, potentially demonic pact, epic engi belt coin toss, and the 1% crit cloak over the 11 SP cloak.
I think my crits will be well over 3500 damage and if I can prep LOW hp I will have the 1.75 or even 2 second cast time.
I would love to get lucky and hit a big 1500-1900 dps for a few seconds. This will be my talent build.
wowhead . com/classic/talent-calc/mage/-0552020023011-0235
I think it’s definitely viable, I don’t think it will be better than hot streak, maybe with more gear at later levels but that is tricky because more crit also makes fire exponentially better because their rotation evolves higher and higher with more crit chance.
It’s one of my favorite spells and I will definitely be using it at 50/60 for my main nuke in pvp and if blizz doesn’t nerf it back to weak status I will use it for PVE also.
if it double dips scorch and frosts version of scorch it would be a sick build for cheese stacking
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scorch is 15% fire damage, which should apply to it, winter’s chill is 10% crit chance, or maybe you meant ice shards the 3/3 talent that gives 6% frost damage. It should benefit from all of those evidenced by the name alone. I don’t know all of the behind-the-scenes mechanics, but I learned it likely ignores all but the highest spell power value meaning if you have 200 overall power, a +15 sp fire elixir, and the +16 spell power ring, it will scale as if you had 216 frost damage instead of 216+15 fire sp, obviously meaning you want to go hard into either frost or fire spell power.
Just burnout, winter’s chill, and critical mass will give us 31% crit before gear/INT. Moonkin and mage scroll is +4, any kind of raid buff will probably have 2-4% more. This spell is going to be a nuclear bomb in PVE. (as it should be)
just if it benefits from both same time
I’m a truck driver
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It literally is designed to benefit from both at the same time. You use ice talents to buff the crit damage by 100%, this is factored into the final number for fire’s version of crit bonus (ignite) causing the spell to crit for a ridiculous 350%. (+50% crit damage boot rune involved as well)
If it hits for 400 it crits for 1400, no other ability in the game does that. That is what makes it fun and unique in identity.
I think I can get mine to 800 critting for 2800.
I might go for a CDL. Any tips on what containers make the best emergency bathrooms?
it wont be good until next phase when you can go 0/31/10 with 5 in ice shards, then it will be bis dps
It feels good in pvp with brain freeze procs
Doesn’t ignite benefit from imp scorch and CoE as well? If it does, it would put the crit modifier to 360% I think.
In PvP or pve?
I tried it out in PvP as a 31 frost mage. 3 seconds cast is a long time. I found myself almost never using it in bgs. Usually I’m running around spamming living bomb and rank 1 frostbolt to slow people, and throwing out chrono heals. I think I ever only used it as an opener on sheeped targets. I switched back to arcane barrage that sometimes proc off rank 1 frostbolt. I think I like this better. The cast time is just too long in this current PvP meta.
Wow I missed that, if so this spell is even better than I thought.
For PVP I think this spell will work best at 50/60 when we can talent into ignite and flame throwing. The fact that we can run a mainstay nuke in frost spec that slows, dots, and most importantly will be 41 yards, is a huge bonus. It also has some cool interactions with other slowing effects where it doesn’t get peeled off by cone of cold because it has a dot, so it creates extra dispel padding for enemies to clean up.
One concern I have, will ignite damage or the frostfire dot break frostbite/frost nova? I know living bomb does, which makes it kind of iffy to run as frost.
I’m sure it has a chance to, but based on the damage it deals it won’t happen often. You can think of FFB as a better version of fireball for the sake of dotting rogues out of stealth and using it to get some heavy shots in on people who are at full hp to help burst them down, I still find uses for FFB and frostbolt because we don’t have enough talents to push FFB over the edge yet. (in pvp)
For dotting rogues there’s living bomb. And while FFB may be better than frostbolt, I’m not sure if it’s worth using over missile barrage, which can trigger off rank 1 frostbolt.
When I say dotting rogues I mean out of polymorph, which is traditionally done with max fireball+ r1FB. You can run living bomb for sure but I take FoF and ice lance because a crit is the equivalent of an instant cast fb or ffb and you get 2, 1100-1200 dmg instant off a proc is really nice.
Running living bomb gives you a lot less to capitalize on when FoF procs and I would switch to burnout under those circumstances, which incidentally is what I plan to test out at higher lvls, burnout, FFB, max FFB talents, and living bomb as a filler.
Mage artillery build.
Yea I run burnout and living bomb. I’ve been rune’ing for group play and I find the instant casts of living bomb allows me to position myself better for chrono heals on allies. I just rarely find myself having time to cast a 3 sec spell, other than as an opener. Rather be spending 2sec to throw out a heal that easily heals for 1k.
Right now I see myself as a dotting, crowd control healer 
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I love Frostfire Bolt! Looking forward to trying this out on my little mage when she can get it.
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