Checking the notes from today there are dozens for fire and arcane whereas frost has an incredibly measly amount.
The half-rework made the spec much better but why is it that frost mages always have to settle for less than the other specs.
Arcane obviously deserves its changes they were needed. So don’t get me wrong here but every expansion is the same thing. Fire sees the most attention and then gets continued attention throughout the expansion. Arcane gets massive reworks that either work okay or not at all but it gets attention in alpha and beta and then ignored til the next alpha or beta where blizzard spins the rework wheel again. Frost gets like “here have 5% frostbolt damage and 10% ice lance damage and shut up.” and that is EVERY SINGLE expansion launch.
Frost still has lots of issues and anti-synergistic talents abound in the spec that actually cares about maximizing its spells synergies. Couple with the gigantic spellslinger nerfs last beta patch and its baffling that blizzard still refuses to show this spec any attention. Doubly so considering frost is as beloved as fire and arcane. It just seems unpopular people just don’t play it because it typically either is low tier or when it is high tier its because blizzard repeatedly buffed one button too many times (rather than actually giving attention to the spec like in the rework or like literally every other class they work on (and this is evident when after the rework and more buttons than ice lance finally started to do stuff people played the heck out ofit)) and so the spec becomes focused around one single button and considered boring.
Yeah.
I used to love Frost. But I was playing it on the beta yesterday and man it’s just bland.
Frost Fire Fire Mage is so much better than Frost Fire Frost Mage.
And Spellslinger Arcane mage is so much better than Spellslinger Frost Mage.
Why play Frost? was my take away from my Mage Beta play testing.
I play a lot of Affliciton Warlock these days and its the same other there. Patch notes after patch notes with a ton of Destro and Demo stuff. As much as I love Affliciton you play Diabolist Destruction Warlock in TWW and it’s like it was developed by an entirely different company (for the better).
Some of the stuff in the hero talents just reveals the discrepancy between the specs. Frostfire meteor for frost comes down at regular strength but oh comet storm is way too weak so it comes down for fire with a 50% damage bonus.
Little things like that show just the difference in numbers tuning between the specs and noticing it really drives in my point I feel because the few times frost ever surpasses or just competes with fire (much less the rest of every spec in the game) is not because the spec has been perfected but because blizzard overtunes it after a series of patches where the only work they can be bothered to put into it is increases to the damage of rotational abilties. Meanwhile the core problems persist and when the expansion rotates over and they have to go back to their modifiers something gets out of wack and they “fix” it by nerfing throughput only to have to repeat the process again. Despite the rework it is still a flawed spec it that needs actual attention.
Its like the sam vines boots theory but for class tuning. Some specs get a thorough rework done on them and they remain viable for ages. Others constantly need micromanaging because they put the barest minimum effort into them. The major breakdown in this analogy though is that the expensive boots that last ages in the case of wow specs constantly are getting fixed up and tuning and having extra bells and whistles while the broken down garbage boots get squat.
I’ve been saying this for a while and have lost all hope that Frost will be receiving any changes. Meanwhile Arcane looks amazing so… def hanging up my Frost hat which makes me really sad.
Trust me, you don’t want to get the kind of dev attention Arcane got with this week’s build, it just reversed course on all the positives of last week’s build.
We now have 47 unique individual talent nodes in the spec tree, the most of any spec in the game and a few of them are still 2 point talents. 14 of the talents are Arcane Missiles talents spread throughout the tree and Chrono Shift is now harder than ever to talent in to.
This tree is horrible and the devs have completely missed the mark on what the issues were despite having received EXTREMELY clear and precise feedback (in fact they doubled down on the issues).
I have a Frost Mage that I’ve been using for leveling for the last few expansions. Running dungeons with her is frustrating,
as I have to move in the middle of long casts to stay alive.
I’m not in beta. What Mage spec would you all recommend for TWW?
Most every class has 2 point nodes and arcane has the same amount of two pointers in inconvenient locations as frost. Arcane’s tree was cooked so its a shame that its still not looking good.
That said, frost has been the same design since legion. Sure, blizzard finally got around to making ray of frost actually do something but besides that the biggest change has been ebonbolt was old yeller’d and frost’s mastery was made to suck slightly less.
I would take repeated failed attempts at making the spec work than the “redesign” being a repeat of the current design, leaving it in a semi-functioning state for a decade after the previous decade’s functioning state (at least functioning as a pvp spec) was hacked to bits for absolutely zero benefit for the spec.
They said at one point that they were happy with frost’s overall design. Best you can hope for is numbers tuning at this point.
What’s messed up is that its pretty clear frosts moves are perennially under-tuned. I’ll go back to my petty comet storm example. It functions in a similar manner as meteor as a big spell that sets something up. Meteor (can) set up living bomb, comet storm (can) set up a tiny damage boost on what its damaged. However, the frostfire talent shows that comet storm’s damage is tiny enough that it needs a 50% boost in damage despite it being easier for fire than for frost to get the 100% crit chance required to make comet storm even worth pressing at all.
If all frost is going to see is numbers tuning its going to yet again need another rework as blizzard reworks all the classes who’ve yet to be reworked (or like shadow have seen a bakers dozen SUCCESSFUL REWORKS that all get nerfed and then need to be reworked again because the spec didn’t work post knee-capping) and then frost’s already outdated design is too much a hindrance to numbers tune to the level of the other specs and blizzard does the inevitable dreadful decision: spend a little bit of time working on frost mage. Meanwhile they will continue twiddling with frostbolt and ice lance damage causing the spec to fall back into a degenerate play pattern because of fundamental design decisions based on arbitrary metrics like “oh we need a spec for players to learn with” as if fire hasn’t been one of the easiest specs in the game for a near decade now.
To be fair, they’re all horrible, some are just worse than others. It’s the problem created by Blizzard when they decided they needed 30 (+30) talent points for every spec instead just fixing and slightly expanding on the cata versions. Turns out it’s more difficult to balance 10 milion possible combinations than 60, and you have to try and get your ‘creatives’ to come up with something that at least pretends to be interesting, all the while interacting with the 4 abilities you actually use.
With that said, I still think all 3 specs need a full revamp. Not a tweaking of talent nodes or positioning. A full “delete it all and start from the beginning” type rework. They’ve all desperately needed it for well over a decade, and it really shows.
Ice Floes. Despite what the “guides” say, it will solve almost all your movement problems. At least from a game mechanics point. If you’re old and slow like me, you’ll still stand in fire.
It’s way older than that. If you look at it broadly, not including CmS, Ray and GS, the base gameplay has barely changed since WoD, and even that really just added the FFB proc compared to the TBC build.
The amount of talent points isn’t the issue at all, and there are plenty of spec trees that work just fine right now, Feral is a very good example of a talent tree done to perfection under the current system, Arcane in Dragonflight was a very good talent tree that is largely the reason for why the spec was so good for high end raiding this expansion.
The issue is adding way too many similar talents that all accomplish the same outcome when you could meet the same answer by combining a lot of them together and pathing the tree in a way that doesn’t make utility compete with throughput.
Raw talent count isn’t an issue if you have enough points to where you can make interesting builds through choices that don’t feel awful to make and your tree is pathed in a logical way that doesn’t just throw up talents on a plate. DF talent trees have the advantage over MoP talent trees to where you can have multiple unique builds.
We simply just don’t have enough talent points for how many individual talents there are now; this wasn’t an issue in Dragonflight.
I said this just the other day. Still illusion of choice and now much harder to balance due to more combinations than before. This was a change that didn’t need to happen.
That pretty much sums up the entirety of changes that Frost has had for the past 10 or more years. “Hey, we gave you some tuning, what more do you want from us?”
They’ll just continue to ignore that Frost hasn’t really felt good to play for a while now, and while it’s better than it was in BfA/SL, it went too far in the other direction and Frost now has 20 active abilities used frequently.
The reality is, that Frost is based off gameplay from TBC (a game old enough to order its own drinks) and hasn’t seen any major changes to its playstyle or base concepts. The spec - and Arcane and Fire for that matter - needs a full rework. Decide what it is going to be (proc-based, resource-based, build/spend) and then design it around that with modern gameplay in mind.
Blizzard has gotten too complacent in the fact that veteran players that haven’t left yet, probably won’t leave if they just get another 2+ years of the same stuff.
Hell, if they aren’t willing to devote an enormous amount of dev time to Mage, at least don’t remove playstyle options going into TWW. As it stands, Glacial Spike is losing our current tier, isn’t getting buffed alongside everything else, and has no interaction with our Hero Talents.
Unless they pull out some huge number buffs, I worry that we’ll be relegated to no-glacial becoming the only viable way to play. I understand this is preferred for some people, but the option should still be there. It was amazing having Glacial Spike be viable for 2 seasons for the first time in years.
The funniest thing that could happen is that glacial spike is once again marginalized for frost.
It was a useless talent from implementation until mid-BFA where it became the only button that did anything and then it marginalized ice lance.
Then in shadowlands it was yet again a non-viable option all the way to the latter half of dragonflight where blizzard FINALLY, after 3 and a half expansions, FINALLY managed to make every button in frosts tree worth pressing.
These are spells, which have been failsons since wod in some cases. Finally our spec used them and they did stuff.
And it would be so gosh darn funny if less than one expansion later, LESS THAN ONE YEAR LATER, spike and friends are back to being dead talents whose viablity depends on massive over-tuning due to poor design and when viable causes baseline abilities to die.