So what are your thoughts on Lonely Winter being made baseline and being treated how Lone Wolf has been treated for Marksman Hunters? By that I mean we get the extra damage without a pet and lose it when it’s summoned, but the talent is made baseline and something else takes its place in the tree.
I think it’s fair, but also something that would only ever come with 10.0 instead of the next patch.
Yeah that would be a good idea.
Seeing as right now 99.9% of grouped PvE activities you run that talent. The only time you don’t run it is solo questing and PvP, and even PvP sometimes you run lonely winter.
Making it baseline, and work similarly to lone wolf, is a good common sense solution, which is how you can be sure that Blizz will never implement it.
I think a bunch of talents should be baseline now so they can bring in new talents to mix things up. I don’t see that happening.
Yeah, we’ll see when 10.0 comes. Unfortunately 9.2 won’t be able to do any of that considering what’s already on the table.
This.
I kinda forgot Frost even had a pet.
Pretty much. Talent rows 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 could easily just be removed at this point and the baseline dps increased to compensate.
Get rid of Wele completed and make it into a CD talent to replace or be tied to IV. Then there’s not even a need for LW and they can just buff all damage.
Ice Floes should be baseline, and we should have 2 blinks like WoD.
Buff baseline damage and remove T3 talents.
Balance the T4 talents - eg: Ebonbolt cd reduced by a lot, and proc munching addressed to make FT worth taking.
Give us the 10% slow and Ring baseline.
FR and SI should be baseline too, like they were previously.
Get rid of TV and then balance CmS, GS and RoF.
Looking through the current talents, there’s so much that used to either be baseline, was part of the Artefact weapon or (for chain reaction) was a legendary. None of it is very exciting, and most of it could be removed. I wouldn’t even care if they don’t replace it with other stuff.
I’d rather the Water Elemental be given the Lone Wolf treatment, but I do share the sentiment regarding stuff that used to be baseline. I also wish they make some of the stuff in Shadowlands baseline coming the next expansion like Freezing Winds legendary or Shifting Power.
Dropping into your post to give you a +1!
Blizzard!! Please heed our calls for action <3
I mean either they make it baseline or they keep it as a talent but give mages a extra ranged nova.
Lets face it, pets suck and most people dont wanna play ele, but losing the ranged frost nova is huge.
I like the elemental, I don’t use it M+ because currently is a dps loss.
The lone wolf suggestion is a good one.
What is the dps loss? my understanding is that its basically so insignificant that it doesnt matter unless you are pushing like +20 keys and you need everything to be perfect You should just play what you enjoy.
My experience is as soon as lonely winter was added even when it wasnt BIS for dps people still picked it just so they didnt have to deal with the pet getting LOS’d pulling mobs etc.
Oh ok, I see. Then I will use it 
. I’m currently doing M+ below 15+. The water elemental is the reason I started playing the class 
It depends, really, but if you’re not pushing high keys you can pretty much play what you want (just don’t ever touch Glacial Spike lmao).
Lonely Winter helps a little with ST damage, which os Frost’s weakness, but Bone Chilling doubles down on AoE + extra Nova for shattering. The Nova can be used to shatter CmS from the tier set in 9.2 too, so you’ll probably see a lot more Water Elementals in 9.2 in M+.
And this is how it should be with Lonely Winter baseline. Use the pet for added utility in AoE, but dismiss it during bosses that are most likely pure ST.
I did a talent check on Raidbots on myself last night.
Going with Bone Chilling instead of Lonely Winter was a 5% drop in dps for single target and a 3% drop for mythic dungeons (using their mythic+ beta option).
Basically, Bone Chilling is less dps. But not so much it would make a big difference for casual gameplay. Unless you’re competing on the damage meter.
all the time. You do literally no damage without it. Slapping people with buckets of water isnt fun
Thank you for this!
I’m actually amazed they are that close, given one is a straight 5% dps buff, and the other is 25% to our top 4 spells. I didn’t think Welly would account for that much. Either way though it still feels bad. They’re both essentially passive talents, so in theory you would think they would be virtually identical in their gains (would it be that hard to buff BC to 6% or 7%?) at which point you could almost combine them into a single talent of “If your Water Elemental is not summoned, X spells gain 20% increased damage”.
Not that I think it will happen, but I’m hopeful that the entire Frost talent tree gets a big look at before next expansion as pretty much every talent row needs a lot of work.
That’s only considering the current patch though. There is definitely value from running Bone Chilling in M+ in 9.2 with the new tier set because the elemental can freeze a pack when the commets are falling, essentially guaranteeing 100% crit on all 7 of them and buffing both Blizzard, Frozen Orb and the commets, which Lonely Winter doesn’t.
The question will be if it will going to be worth it sacrificing the ST/funnel damage for raw AoE.
This is the kind of flexibility that’d be cool to have baked in like Hunters do.
100% on this. Like I said, I feel that BC/LW should just be one talent. Welly out, you get its damage and BC, don’t summon (or sacrifice it) and you get the 25% to those spells. Gives players options, and allows for another talent to go into that row.