That’s why most mages stayed fire or went arcane I think.
Frost just isn’t designed for this type of raid content.
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Sun Kings Blessing. Have you really not heard this news?!
I have been working 15+ hour days this week. We had a restaurant get shut down for a gas leak so I have been picking up the extra calls due to the other two techs being in that call for 4 days
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I think he meant on top of the normal food buff.
For starters, they aren’t clueless enough to compare a hard hitting spender in a builder/spender class to a filler/proc generator in a proc based class.
I wonder if the key to making frost a solid contributor in raids is to do something to make Glacial Spike viable again.
The whole basis of uptime on Thermal Void (called one of the worst CD’s in the game) seems to be a problem. The raids are always designed with a crap ton of movement which makes it pretty difficult to keep that uptime.
The uptime is meant to keep haste up to allow for more casting to get more procs for Ice Lances and Brain Freezes but there’s still (many many years later) issues with proc munching.
Two target cleave is supposed to be a “niche” and buffing Glacial Spike gives a big ST and, if talented, 2 target buff.
Bliz always goes to one extreme or the other in their feeble attempts to balance and “fix” classes. Last expansion, ice sickles were a meme to be ignored. In making them more viable, they’ve fixed nothing and left frost as an undesirable raid spec for what, if memory serves, is 4 tiers of raiding in a row?
I was happy to switch to my lock when my guild needed one for raiding. I don’t even bother doing raids on my mage anymore. 4-5 keys per week, keep up renown, and otherwise ignore.
It feels like the devs keep making the same designs in one form or another while ignoring what makes them problematic. Legion Frost at one point could get very high uptime on Icy Veins (Vashj gloves, on-use Frozen Touch, Thermal Void, Frozen Veins, etc). It took a while, but they made changes so it was not back-to-back usage of Icy Veins.
Legion Shadow Priest suffered if it could not maintain uptime on the boss and stay in voidform. They tried to address that in BfA via a few changes, but then they borked it all up. With azerite armor and essences it was back to long duration voidforms that wanted to avoid interruptions.
Now here we are in Shadowlands repeating this for the third expansion in a row. Once again it is Frost, but Frozen Veins has been switched out for Icy Propulsion, for FoF generation old Frozen Touch has been replaced with Freezing Winds, and Thermal Void is still trying to make an underwhelming cooldown feel good.
A few changes I think I’d like to see:
- Address proc munching. It does not matter if you adjust the aura buff to account for it, it still feels bad.
- Baseline Splitting Ice. Two-target cleave is one of Frost’s strengths. Why do we have to talent into it?
- No more means of extending the duration of Icy Veins or reducing the cooldown. Change cooldown to 90 or 120 seconds. Change it to grant procs of Brain Freeze similar to how Freezing Winds works with Fingers of Frost. Maybe double or triple the Frozen Orb cooldown reduction granted by Blizzard while Icy Veins is active?
- Delete Focus Magic, replace with updated Thermal Void (plus a new spec option for Fire and Arcane). Maybe have the updated Thermal Void: Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost generated during Icy Veins deal X% additional damage to primary target and cleave nearby targets for Y damage. Tuning for cleave damage could be something like the 1/SQRT(N) that Balance druid uses for Shooting Stars. This gives one active choice for big damage windows, one fully passive choice, and one passive choice that has a more narrow focus on when it is providing power.
Wouldn’t something like this make it so Frost does not tank when a fight has forced downtime? It would free up the chance to have the final talent row be three active abilities each tuned to be useful at some point. Icy Veins might actually be more enjoyable to use.
The above is just some rambling ideas from someone that thinks more significant changes are warranted across all classes.
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Well, if all goes then there’s good news.
In the recent developer update they note that they’re going to do more for tuning of talents (conduits and legendaries as well) for everyone in the 9.1.5 patch.
This is good news.
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Colour me sceptical that they’ll adress any major issues or fix any of the specs. At best I’d be thinking a few minor buffs here and there, or potentially reducing the effectiveness of other mandatory talents like they have in the past. “Easier to nerf once talent than buff 5” as they say. They can’t win in that situation anyway, as they’ll either over-nerf talents or over-buff others if that happens to the point where there’ll always be a clear winner in each row.
Also note they don’t mention balance of classes, just the talents within the specs. This likely means we’ll still have outlier classes doing 20% more than the bottom specs, with the added bonus of trash talents still being trash.
Blizz just needs to suck it up and announce they’re working on major overhauls for half the specs in the game.
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I will say this as I have said before. The reason for mages to be where they are as people on the forums keep complaining about (literally the only place I’ve heard the complaints about mages position) is likely due to the domination socket bonuses, these things were not tested at all in ptr and we are seeing specs that were gutter trash tier rising to top tier dominance where they’ve received little to no changes at all outside of pvp. What needs to be adjusted across the board are the bonuses and how the interact with the different specs and classes as some clearly benefit more from them than others.
Do you possibly believe arms with the tiny bit of some buffs could possibly top the mage class as a whole when they were just bottom feeders in all of last patch even with lots of buffs to it without the domination shards? Seriously, think about it really hard considering how these untested broken bonuses are affecting things.
Wasn’t arms a perfect (blade)storm of getting buffs in nathria while already being borderline acceptable, being the enh windfury bug fix’s biggest beneficiary and in a raid where most fights have adds to execute cleave off of? Also arms tends to start weak in general just due to badly needing stats to fuel their rage starved rotation
If you want surprising comebacks I’d go with sub rogue which low key started existing again this patch.
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As long as Propulsion exists in its current form, Spike will remain dead. The problem isn’t TV, it’s the synergy it has with Propulsion that buries all other talent builds.
Also Spike is sadly a DPS loss right now, if one refuses to use TV they’re better off running nothing vs running Spike.
They just need to remove the bonuses. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that they enjoyed Azerite, Corruption, the neck, Covenants, Conduits, Domination or really any of the “one size fits all” systems that Blizzard has tried to swing by us in the past 5 years. What people have been begging for is simple fixes to the classes as baseline, tuning passes on the spells to allow us to “bring the player not the class” and maybe tier bonuses back. Spend less time flailing about with ‘new and improved system X’ and just fix the actual game.
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The problem with blizzard tuning is they never understand the root of a classes problems. They just slap on 5% dmg buff and call it a day. Frost mages are stand still turrets that suck at single target that require high uptime on boss. SoD raid mechanics are single target, high mobility and/or high burst phases.
Give us splitting ice baseline, move thermal void to that talent row, buff dmg on glacial spike (dont make ice lance release icicles), fix proc munching, increases dmg on frostbolt. Just some suggestions, but I remain skeptical at any actual balancing anytime soon. Knowing blizzard it’ll be increase dmg of spells by 5% /patonback.
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The “new best in slot” was an old legendary that was fixed. 800 gold on my server for the 225.
The corruptions were at least impactful. Though broken