MDI just confirmed the meta comp that the leader boards have shown us for awhile now, and guess what frost didn’t appear in it. So why the frost nerfs when they weren’t even in the comp? Frost can’t really be in the because you are unable to plan around your burst windows and in M+ burst is king. It is that simple, and this is why frost can’t be meta.
Fire is in the meta because they have the ability to force procs into their damage window so they can plan for and set up insane damage windows as long as they aren’t burning fire blast and phoenix flames you can load those into your combust window along with PI, lust, aug. Frost on the other hand is billed as steady damage because you can’t force brain freezes like you can with fire, you can make it more likely to get fingers of frost but brain freeze is unpredictable outside of your longer cd icy veins. You could proc a bunch on a trash mob, at the end of a pull when it is wasted, you could get a series of procs on a boss, or you may not get procs at all and you are in a dreaded dead spot where it just feels real bad. M+ content strongly favors burst, frost is billed as steady damage, you have some ability to create burst windows but not enough to be favored in M+.
Also everyone should welcome back WW monk to the meta.
MDI players would play a spec 100% of the time over another spec even if the difference was 1K overall DPS.
Why wouldn’t they?
The fact that Frost is played almost as equally as Fire in 20+ whilst Fire is currently “God Comp” is testament to the fact that is is a strong spec.
You don’t see this with other classes.
MM isn’t close to BM, it’s a landslide.
Feral isn’t close to Boomkin.
Devastation isn’t close to Augmentation.
Sub/Assassin to Outlaw.
Etc.
what data are you looking at that shows frost is competing equally with fire in M+?
When I look at any random dungeon on warcraft logs for score I see the top 100 fire mages score vary by about 8 points or so, but when I look at frost I see a tremendous drop off in score in the top 100 averaging around 20. You have to scroll to about the 1500th fire mage to see scores comparable to the 100th place frost mage. Only about 1-6 frost mages manage to hang with the score fire mages in roughly the top 300 or so. Nothing about that screams even playing field to me. They certainly are not being pulled into meta comps.
Examine the logs yourself. Frost mage is middle of the pack, they do not need a nerf, how the balancing team arrived at this conclusion is beyond me. Toggle to any dungeon you see fire way up on top (because of plannable damage), with frost and arcane neck in neck (about the middle somewhere)… every… single… dungeon. So explain to me again why frost got nerfed when they seem balanced with arcane. Fire is out of control, that is the only spec where anyone can make an argument with data for a nerf, and that is because the rotation style is ideal for M+.
Yes. Top players play the top spec, even if it’s minimal gains. Because that’s what top players do. Frost Mages are middle of the pack because all of the good players are playing Fire.
If Fire is nerfed and Frost is left untouched, Frost just replaces Fire. God Comp remains unchanged.
I see what is happening, they are looking for any spec that has any score over 3600 and nerfing that, frost had a single data point over that mark so it got nerfed. Interestingly enough enhance shaman also had a single data point over that point at well, but they didn’t see a proactive nerf. I can’t agree that frost would replace fire in the god comp because of my original argument the top players need to plan their damage and frost isn’t nearly as reliable because of how the playstyle works. One other factor is cauterize, fire gets a cheat death for free.
Changing 5 variables at once and then trying to predictively nerf where they suspect the top players will move to doesn’t make sense. Mage may not even make sense after they sort out how these changes impact the top group comp. There were so many interactions that make that comp strong, group buffs, utility, PI, lust, survivability, etc… The review on wowhead by Tettles and Squishei even called it out “I’m surprised by the preemptive nerf since it wasn’t seeing much representation”. The nerf isn’t supported by data, it was a theory craft nerf and it wasn’t applied consistently.
This is why a lot of people are predicting that enhance is just going to be the new mage.
It’s terrible game design and soul crushing to manage the game this way.
Not to mention it’s completely irrelevant to anything besides M+ but the nerfs affect the game globally.
I don’t know that I’d characterize frost AOE burst as quite high, I play regularly with the same group, so far AOE on frost is keeping pace with the demon warlock and a bit below ret paladin/enhance shaman AOE. So if those are also quite high then yes I agree. Frost AOE relies heavily on cone of cold for a reset, but at some point you end up with frozen orb on cd, comet storm on cd, blizzard on cd, shifting power on cd, CoC on cd and on the bottom half of the priority list is flurry (because brain freeze is up), so it isn’t the powerful side of rotation but it is in the priority list.
Keys feel so awful now, thanks a lot blizzard. I really wish they would use data when nerfing classes, this was purely speculative, frost seems to always get dumped on. It is like none of them bother to play the class in higher keys. Not having on demand damage and a free cheat death is a substantial advantage. Even if the base damage for frost was higher than fire, frost would still not get chosen for higher keys in M+.
I leveled my Mage to 70 this week and geared up to iLvl 435 and I have to say Frost Mage is pretty intense to play for AOE damage. The constant need to refresh Blizzard, use Flurry before Comet Storm, cast multiple Frozen Orbs, and manage all your other procs + abilities is a lot.
Compared to Shadow Priests it feels like 2-3 times the workload to do the same kind of AOE damage.
I feel that this is half the issue with the Frost nerfs. Yes it was strong (though not as strong as other specs) but the rotation to pull that off is also significantly more involved than others. The argument is that given the complexity compared to other specs, shouldn’t it be one of the best for AoE rather than slightly above mid?
I mean, when you have a standard ‘rotation’ of: Blizzard > Orb > CmS > Nova > CoC > Orb >CmS > Blizzard > SP > etc before you even think about aspects like IL/GS/Flurry/AE. Heaven forbid you also have deal with the weekly poly/curse affix (which apparently half the pugs just ignore because “oh, I didn’t talent for that”). Meanwhile, Starfall go brrrrrrrrrr.
MDI players play Fire over Frost because Fire has Cauterize and benefits better from Aug buffs than Frost does, if they both did equal/within margin of error damage they’d still be playing Fire purely because of Cauterize and nothing else.
Feral has been played over Boomkin in the MDI before in this expansion. Feral vs Balance is the same kind of deal as Fire vs Frost and Arcane, one spec brings Solar Beam and the other doesn’t, so the one that doesn’t has to be ridiculously better to get picked (including against other classes).
Feral’s niche is having some of the strongest uncapped AoE in the game, that isn’t what’s required more than just having a comp that can survive the key levels that the Exodia comp is being played in.
Aug is a different role (yes it’s technically a DPS but let’s be honest, it isn’t)
watching MDI, even with fairly significant nerfs the comp didn’t change at all. The synergy is so strong with the buffs, utility, survivability, tuning imbalances. Thankfully they nerfed frost. (That’s sarcasm in case it wasn’t obvious)