Simple topic that I’m interested in people’s thoughts on. Ray of Frost is currently a talent in the capstone section of the frost spec tree and many seem to agree that it’s not strong enough to warrant a place there. What changes do you think would make it competitive? As a starter, here’s some ideas I’ve seen floating around:
Here are a few more ideas. At least some of them I’ve already read elsewhere on these forums.
Make each tick generate an icicle, and let each tick have a chance to generate an extra icicle via Splintering Cold
Add it to Piercing Cold’s crit damage increase
Have each tick count as a Frostbolt with regards to not only Icy Propulsion but also Slick Ice
Have it benefit from Fractured Frost
Have it radiate from the target a reduced damage plus chill AoE
Ray of Frost has potential, but it never receives enough development time to nudge it high enough. Being able to use Winter’s Chill to shatter it feels pretty good, but there is so much opportunity cost associated with not casting Frostbolt. I wonder where the break even point is once taking into account the Icy Propulsion design they are pushing forward into DF.
I think part of the issue is the pvp component. Having a big slow makes it quite strong and is a big factor in why it’s never been competitive for PvE. That said it would be so simple to buff it for PvE while having it be less effective in PvP to compensate, and not like that style would be limited to this spell only.
There’s a lot of ways it can be buffed too. You can just straigh up buff the damage significantly to make it worth using, or you can have it interact with other talents etc. I’d personally prefer the former as it’s simpler and effective, and as Blizzard has shown they’re not capable of properly balancing things when they have to take into account 40 other abilities.
What would you guys say would be the least they could do to actually make it something frost would want to pick up? I feel like buffing it’s damage would be one, but it’s kind of boring and the long channel time breaks the momentum of the rest of the playstyle.
Before even considering any of those, it just needs to scale off of mastery. This is kind of a core issue with frost that they give us all these things you can spec into that don’t scale. Few classes have this issue. But yeah, haste scaling too. At the end of an expansion, you really feel abilities that don’t scale.
Completing a full channelling of Ray of frost should give a brain freeze/Flurry charge back.
Completing a full channelling of Ray of frost should incapacitate the enemy target for 4 sec. This would allow the mage to get a free shatter combo with the brain freeze/Flurry charge they’re given.
If the two other changes are insufficient, its damage in PvP should be increased.
That’s how I would improve Ray of frost for PvP. It would make it an excellent pick against feral druids.
I actually like this one a lot. I haven’t followed the mage tree so not sure mechanically if it’s possible but would be cool to glacial spike, use ray and the glacial spike again. All combo/psuedo combo points can be generated this way by rogues, feral, and unholy so would be nice to have frost do this as well.
Ray of Frost has always struck me as a really strange ability that feels out of place. We just… stand there, for 4 seconds, channeling a lazer beam. Just seems so odd and not having particularly engaging gameplay.
If it’s to continue to exist, I’d personally like to see it have a shorter channel time and shorter cooldown.
Deep Freeze already has more counterplay than most stuns.
It’s just unfortunate that they have Ray of Frost and Glacial Spike … two very fun spells … but they keep throwing all their money into Icy Veins which is not only a boring CD but also incredibly weak/almost useless if you can’t keep uptime on it.
But this is mages we’re talking about. All they ever do is give each spec one functional build and one spec that does well while the other two are in the dumpster and they stroke their neck beards and pat themselves on the backs.
I think half of that is that for so many years we’ve been asking that IV be made into a cooldown worth actually casting. The Blizz interns saw that, took it to management as a “they want IV to be better” and that was misinterpreted. Instead of just outright buffing IV to make it a strong cooldown on a 3min timer, they derped and somehow though DR and a high uptime was what we wanted while touting the line of “Hey guys, we’re listening”. Now for DF, they’ve once again looked at raw data to see “well 99% of Frost runs the IP conduit for PvE so it must be a great idea” and shoveled that crap into the next expansion.
Frost has so many cool ideas that are implemented poorly. Actually, that basically sums up the last 2 expansions. Hey but maybe 11.0 will give us what we want…
While on the topic of ray of frost. I think it would be nice if it looked more intense as the beam continued. Like the graphics of the beam became more intense with some snowy particles as the beam persisted.
Looking at the numbers, its a 5s channel that deals 120% spell power, frost bolt is 50% with 2s cast time.
you can cast 2.5 frost bolts during the channel and frost bolt scales with mastery, can proc brainfreeze and has 5% more spell power scaling.
Is the power ramp enough to compensate for that? i dont know…
I think ray of frost needs to create icicles and grant procs over the channel, first 2 procs being FoF and a brainfreeze for finishing the cast. That means it will always scale better than frost bolt and there is risk for cancelling early that isnt just lost damage ramp.
I think all of that has been suggested here already so perhaps its redundant for me to add to that, but it essentially replaced 2.5 frost bolts and it needs to be strictly better than 2.5 frostbolts or else its just potentially a talent point to be worse than your basic filler…
Make it function as an ideal 2.5 frostbolts however and you have a skill that is always going to be an increase.
I suppose its atleast 5s of movement with ice floes.
Its probably an issue there as a fundamental design for frost mages having everything you do stem from your filler. If anything replaces your filler it needs to also compensate the potential damage loss from procs. The ability can be strictly better than frost bolt in a vacuum but unless it also accounts for the potential proc damage its going to miss out since the value of frostbolt comes more from proccing better skills than frostbolt itself.
