Why is it that every mage spec has to be a convoluted mess?
Frost used to be (still KINDA is) the easy spec. Frostbolt spam, brainfreeze procs, flurry.
Arcane and fire have always been mechanically more complex.
So why cant there be a “casual” mage spec? Frost was really chill to play with without a ton of maintenence.
Im tired of complexity for the sake of complexity. For those who wanted complexity you had fire and arcane, why did you need frost too?
I agree that complexity just for the sake of complexity is silly, and that the 10.1.5 changes (along with two decades of bandaid patches rather than building a new core gameplay loop for Frost) resulted in the spec being a little bloated and unnecessarily convoluted for the damage it does.
However, I also don’t think that the vast majority of players are upset that Frost is no longer spamming 2 buttons, whether that is the awful NoIL build where you just spammed Frostbolt and GS, or the SL playstyle where you just essentially just used Frostbolt and IL. Both were pretty garbage from a play perspective.
There could easily be a middle ground, but Blizzard isn’t willing to spend the time to invest in Frost (or Mages in general). The core gameplay of Frost hasn’t really changed since TBC - cast filler, get proc, use proc. It’s had a few variations of that, but the issue is that 20 years later its still the same. It’s an outdated design, and one that would need them to completely rework the spec from the ground up. Blizzard isn’t going to do that.
According to who? Was there a mass exodus of frost players?
Why switch flavors of your favorite drink? There are other flavors to try if you are tired of it (fire/arcane). But that doesnt mean you want your favorite drink changed to something else.
Dont need to reinvent the wheel.
I was ok with old frost. If i ever got sick of it id switch to fire/arcane or another class.
These very forums. People were pretty vocal everywhere about how awfully boring both noIL and necro cold front frost were
I’m actually quite happy with how Frost turned out after the 10.1.5 rework. Of course there are still problems with both the spec and class trees but I don’t think old Frost was better in any way. It’s also probably the most complex of the 3 specs now, not that it’s actually difficult if one puts in a bit of practice.
Its disheartening. BM hunter has been a meme “2 button” spec for years. And yet its highly played despite its “complaints”
DH is pretty straight forward and heavily played.
Sometimes its nice to have an easy uncomplicated spec to play. Press the glowy button for Frost was that spec.
Theres 3 different flavors of mage. Having a “Bm hunter” mage spec makes sense. If you want convoluted fire/arcane were right there
Now are the people who want a uncomplicated rotation just supposed to delete their mages?
Slick Ice Necro was pretty fun imo. Perma Icy-veins also was very fun and fast paced.
I really loved MoP frost. I don’t think I’ve liked frost since. Deep Freeze really needs to come back; I can’t believe Frost mage… can’t freeze enemies. And the old Glyph of Icy Veins was really cool.
I though Legion frost was alright. The Ebon bolt combo had a nice flow to it, though I preferred the Glacial Spike animation instead of Ebon Bolt’s and wish I’d swap them.
Other than that, I don’t think I’ve liked WoW’s version of frost mage for the majority of WoWs existence.
I like Frost having a set of offensive spells. When I created this guy (back in 2005), it was mostly Frostbolts with the occasional Cone of Cold. Ice Lance was a later addition, followed by Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost. I like Flurry (though I sometimes miss Frostfire Bolt). It’s not overly complex to me, and I never feel like I’m overwhelmed like I do when I try to keep the order of maximum value for Arcane and Fire.
Apparently the opinions of non-hardcore mage raiders have never meant anything. So yes? I guess that’s how the die hards are kept happy? I use the term “die hard” very loosely here as it’s people who use spreadsheets and like sparkles and nothing else. Ideally blizzard would use talent trees to express something like that: more complicated rotations yield 10-20% better perf but are harder to play, low apm rotations do decent if you understand them.
You if you want ez mode mage and you never cared for water elemental, evoker is there with open arms. Devastation Evoker is basically a priority queue: empower → essence abilities → spammy abilities until 1 of the other 2 is up.
Frost used to be a comfortable go-to when I wanted to play mage.
Now with all the jumbled connections of spells, GS, RoF, Comet Storm, 2 stacks of Winter’s Chill and the horrible need to be in melee for your Orb/CS/Cone of Cold combos I won’t touch it.
Frost needed to be more than just ice lance spam but now it, like Arcane, is too much.
I like alot about the new rework, comet storming and resetting it feels great, I just really don’t like fitting glacial spike and ray of frost into the rotation.
It’s still leaps and bounds ahead of Arcane as far as I’m concerned when it comes to gameplay. Sure you have to be in melee, but so does Arc, and at least for Frost you don’t have to spend half the fight stacking your cooldowns for 10 seconds of burst. But yeah… Blizzards only solution to making Frost work was to buff all the things, which sure made us do some damage.
However, rather than actually fix the underlying issues, they just built off a 20 year old design and 100% guarantee in TWW we’ll see that same problems that will undoubtedly be ignored.
Agreed that the core rotation never really needed to change. I liked that it was the whack-a-mole spec. I can see the argument that it may have been too easy in the Frostfire Bolt days and Flurry did make it a bit less braindead (albeit visually less satisfying).
Cooldowns and borrowed power did a decent job of adding spice to the spec without ruining it. The current talent system that encourages you to also run (and shatter) GS, RoF, & CS is way too hectic. And add Shifting Power to all that too just to make it a bit more crazy. At least with TWW we should be able to go back to dropping GS (the real obtrusive element) without gimping ourselves too hard so I’m hopeful.
Never did the noIL stuff because it seemed too degenerate, lol.
Forget about mages. I moved on to lock and dk and giving balance druid a try. Blizz mage team do not play frost mage beyond normal raid and mythic 0, matter of fact. Otherwise nobody would have centered an entire tier around the longest hardcast spell for frost. In mythic you see your mage trying to pull off one glacial spike while dh and ret are already in 250k dps frenzy mode.
And I could not have laughed louder when the latest tuning started with saying something like we have been closely monitoring community feedback. Totally BS - where is buff to affliction - need at least 10% buff on spell dmg ? when will warlock team get rid of Malefic Rapture - community been complaining it ofr years ? Where is the buff to devastation evoker?
Now if you think about it, jokers who made Office software are taking care of your favorite MMORPG…
GS is a non-issue in almost all content, and being unable to “pull off” the cast is a player issue, not a design issue. Frost has a lot of problems, but GS is not one of them. It’s barely longer to cast than Frostbolt, hits like a truck, cleaves, and can be cast while moving if you take the talent that lets you do so. The only time it would be too hard to get the cast off, is during very specific phases in Mythic raid, in which case you’re also going to see problems on every other caster. As for melee going ham on pull, thats always been a thing, and is a tuning issue, not an issue with GS.
Yes, I’m sure its the same devs… Moving on, I’d argue that given the “quality” games and expansions that Blizzard has been releasing over the past decade or so, I don’t really see how MS could do that much worse of a job short of adding in a p2w option or hiring the staff from Rocksteady who are getting laid off.
You can blame players on 99% of the issues on this forum according to your logic. Giving mage long cast glacial spike is like giving holy priest another long cast healing spell, it is poorly designed. And when tuning issue has been out there for too long it becomes a design issue.
I miss setting up shatter combos 
I was AFT for 4 years. I came back to a HUGE HUGE nerf bat. I played Frost Mage because I loved having a pet. Yeah, this ICY Veins thing… pet isn’t a pet. It’s just a dot now. AND now Frost bolt takes so long to cast… I cant even use it in pugs… everything is dead before I can hit it. Groups get mad I ain’t putting out DPS but… wth… my cast time is too long.
I don’t know why they didn’t just add more content to Vanilla Classic. Instead they added like 20 abilities and made it a convoluted mess too. Base Vanilla WoW is such a good game and the questing/leveling experience is so well done. That is what TBC did wrong, they removed all the fun mechanics like kiting dragons to town, they removed all the hard content, aoe farm spots, they added more spells and just ruined all challenging content. If you wanted to find challenging content, you had to join a raid in TBC. Which, its not even challenging, it becomes challenging when your team mates don’t have a clue what they are doing. In Vanilla it was not like that, in Vanilla if you wanted challenging content you can full buff yourself and fireblast kite spellmaw with perfect blinks on cooldown at level 50 to everlook and watch him heal himself from spellstealing your buffs. This is just one example, but finding challening content wasn’t hard in Vanilla. You could aoe ZG crocs, you could aoe ziggarauts. Like, why does all the challenging play have to be secluded to organized group play now? You no longer can just roam the world and find tough gameplay. Just give the players what they want. Finding easy content like your grandmother would play is everywhere, but challenging content is not. What the players want is challenging content all over the world that you can find if you go looking without a million spells to mitigate the challenge. All they need is new dungeons/areas to play in. Not new spells. A lot of thought was put into original vanilla, now, adding new spells is just guest work at what makes the game good and what people want. The problem is, those spells and abilities were put there, with the same game philosophies that built original WoW and that is that challenging content should be accessible to anyone just as easy content is accessible to anybody. i.e. casual players/grandmothers. Just ask Ghostcrawler what went wrong with WoW after TBC came out. I’m sure he would give you an ear full about the lack of challenging content accessible to solo players or non full party groups - i.e. groups of 2,3,4. They made the game too easy, they gained lots of players, but long term they lost a lot of the players who loved a challenging/immersive game anywhere in the world, not just dungeons/raids and very places in the open world.
When expansions came out, lots of mage players had to turn to entering dungeons/raids alone to find challenging content. Especially mages. Just look up the faxmonkey challenges, they no longer exist as it became too hard to find fresh challenges. With new content coming out every few months or years, there should be an endless supply of challenges but there simply is not. This is mostly because they stopped following Ghostcrawlers principles in the name of selling more subs. If the game is not challenging, mages like faxmonkey can’t create challenges for others to try. The average players skill has increased but the game has only gotten easier for challenge seekers to the point where challenges as solo player don’t exist. Especially in the open world. In Dragonflight we have a 50 yard leash, where the mobs will reset if you attempt to kite them or use any type of skill when interacting with them. Luckily I stopped looking for solo PvE challenges a long time ago, mostly because they seized to exist. I hope blizzard will figure it out, but with modes like plunderstorm, and rehashing classic+making it a mess a spells, it seems they wanna just keep releasing casual content.