Set bonuses in next patch

It is kind of messed up with the latest news on set bonuses. Arcane gets boring additions to touch of the magi. Fire gets combustion updates along with a burning mech. Frost gets the best pleasing aspect cause they get a comet storm addition. I don’t care about which set bonus does more damage, but once again frost is getting the better deal do to graphics. They get to eat cake and have their ice cream too by being able to talent into splitting ice and get comet storm thanks to the set bonus.

So you’re mad frost gets a random comet storm every 30 seconds just because it looks cool lol? I reckon arcane got the best set bonus out of the 3 specs. 18% increased magi is huge. It’ll be instant cast I would think for both burn phases and if I read it correctly you basically get a free 6 second Magi after as well?
Seems to be a lot more going on then a passive comet storm from frost unless somehow it’ll become the better talent for the 2% stacking damage increase and fire just gets a slightly longer combustion while also taking damage from combustion at the same time.
It’ll be interesting to see what builds come out of the new tier sets and which legendaries will go best especially with covenant legendaries coming into play. 2 second on combustion during lust is pretty big with the extra fb charges and I wonder if it’ll add to SKB mini combustion time or not.

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Exactly this. I do want see it in action though.

The Arcane tier set looks impressive. An 18% boost to damage every 45 sec seems kind of OP.

Frost tier set seems unimpressive. A Comet Storm every 30 sec during TV in a raid means maybe 2-3 CS’s and the associated damage increase of a max 10% over 8 sec doesn’t seem as impressive as arcane. Depends on how the raid fights are designed but keeping decent uptime on TV (which Frost is pretty much designed around this expansion) is painful in raids and one of the reasons I hate raiding as Frost.

Now add in the Covenant-specific legendaries we’re going to get to equip and I’m not entirely sure which spec will win out. Arcane loses there for raiding on pure ST fights (the Kyrian legendary is useless) but Frost gets a decent buff to ST damage.

Arcane or Frost in 9.2 … dunno yet.

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Honestly whichever dev designs frost mage needs to be let go, legit feels as if he/she has no idea what they’re doing. Arcane and fire set bonuses work around their strengths, frost mage you get a ball from the sky. What?

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Well when you design a spec for a whole expansion around one of the weakest CD’s of any DPS spec there’s likely not a whole lot you can do with it.

I don’t mind that it’s a Comet Storm … I like that spell and effect … and having it buff damage … great! The issue being they’ve tied it to a CD effect that’s almost impossible to get full benefit from in a raiding environment so it’s very laclustre compared to what Fire and Arcane are getting.

But let’s be honest: whatever dev works on mages doesn’t really care much about frost. The fact that it’s damage is built around procs and it’s the only dps proc spec that has a proc munching effect where a proc is wasted through no fault of the player is laughable.

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Base IV with Thermal void: 33 seconds
Proc chance: 25%
Internal Cooldown: 30 seconds

what cake are we talking about here? =.=?

Numerically, the Arcane and Fire bonuses are way better. Not to mention, if the target moves and Comet whiffs, your entire set bonus is essentially like not even wearing a tier bonus set.

The icing on the actual cake is that this further pigeon holes Frost into incurring more losses anytime it can’t DPS during Icy Veins, because it will triple dip losses: Thermal Void, Icy Propulsion, and now the Tier bonus as well.

If Zovaal’s fight is anything like Denathrius & Syl, it’s basically anti-Frost. Downtimes, yo-yoing from prio to aoe to single target, RPs, and a final burn will always favor bursty specs that need just 1 lego for any/all form of content.

The tier bonus would’ve been great if it were tied to Frozen Orb or something.

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Personally I don’t see an issue with the frost tier buffs. Being able to equip the venth legendary as well as freezing winds or frostburn will keep IV going pretty consistently. Majority of fights now I can typically get IV CD backup before it finishes. (Of course there are times where certain mechanics will screw that over, but having more Mirrors of Torment - AKA Brain Freeze’s from the cov legendary will help with that.)
So I’m not overly excited but not underwhelmed either…just eager to test it out.

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The tier set bonuses are just bad. Zero hope for frost to have another build than thermal void / IP.

Great work Blizz.

Edit: compare our set bonuses to the DK, warlock or shaman…

If frost storm effect is linked to frozen orb or blizzard it would be better, much better than to IV.

Regarding the ones for fire, increasing the duration of combustion… boring

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The fire set low key looks really fun too. It basically increases the APM with which you’d need to cast things in the combustion window from my first read of it.

Arcane though. Oof. That is so huge when you consider what the covenant legendary for Kyrian Arcane also does. Mostly in keys but still.

Yea frost got shafted :confused:

Edit: unless they’re counting each hit of comet storm for the 2% debuff in which case it’s decent not great

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This is another potential issue with the lego. Does it reset the internal timer when one clips IV to drop a rune? Or does it carry on with the old timer when the buff is re-applied? Depending on the ICD and when one clips the IV, you’ll incur losses with either from RoP downtime or Comet downtime

Ultimately, Frost being further tied down to its DPS cooldown is conceptually a bad idea in my opinion. This would be great in M+ with something like Necro/NF Frost though, but it’s likely very underwhelming for meaningful CE prog.

If I’m not wrong it does count each of the 7 Comet shards as giving the 2% debuff; the overall max is capped though, you’ll never get 14%

The Frost set is disappointing and needs to be revised. I was hoping for synergy, something that interacts with BF, or FoF, or Frozen Orb, or Winter’s Chill, something to spice up the rotation a little or making it more interesting…

Comet Storm has no synergy with the spec at all or how Frost works in this xpac. This won’t affect the rotation one bit; it’s completely passive, you just continue your rotation as normal and get a random Comet Storm every now and then. Given the 30-sec cd on the Comet Storm proc, I’d anticipate we’d get on average 2, maybe 3, Comet Storms per Icy Veins. Its power is tied to how long we keep IV up, so if we get screwed over by a mechanic or boss intermission that causes IV to drop, or if the Comets don’t actually hit the target properly (which is extremely common), then the power of the Frost tier set diminishes exponentially. It’s so much more incredibly weaker than the Fire and Arcane ones.

It would be more synergistic, and fun, to replace it with Frozen Orb instead. Or make it interact with the core mechanics of the spec.

I seriously hope this doesn’t require us to talent into Comet Storm as well to benefit from the +dmg% bonus. Splitting Ice is a significant strength of Frost and being forced to abandon that to gain the potential of +10% bonus from the talented Comet Storm is not what I would call fun given the lack of any synergy.

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Yeah, looks like it’s capped at 10% for 8s. I’m hoping there’s some tuning going on here, because with Arcane (already a bit of a pumper for ST) getting 18% into its burst phase, and Frost getting a pretty lacklustre 10% for 8s while still being one of the weakest ST specs in game, it’s all a bit bleh.

The Frost 4pc bonus will be ~2.6% damage increase assuming it proces every 30s like clockwork (and it doesn’t end 4s before the next proc or things like that). Even if you took the CmS talen and it worked off this set bonus, its nowhere close to enough to compete with 5% IL damage from SI on ST fights. They would need to buff the damage bonus to 25-30% if they expect this to make CmS compete with other talents.

If the RNG gods smile on you and you have a few FoF/BF procs in that time, awesome, it’s a decent little bit of passive damage. If you’re unlucky and spend a lot of that time casting Frostbolt then you’ve just missed out on a lot of potential damage. If there’s downtime on bosses, you lose even more potential damage while IV ticks off.

I’m also not convinced that the Venthyr legendary is any good at all. While it will extend the first IV a bit, I feel that it will desync with the second, leading to a shorter-than-usual IV.

As others have also said, tying our 2/4pc to IV is awful. The spec is already so heavily investing in keeping as close to 100% uptime on that as possible just to normalise its damage. This just further pushes the need to keep IV going, while cemeting TV as the best talent by a considerable margin. It’s not compelling gameplay and its not good design.

I think there were a few Frosties out there hoping that the tier sets would give us a little more freedom. Not sure why, given Blizzards history of locking us into very specific talents/builds for the past 5 years, but still. It’d be great if the set bonuses actually did something for the specs and how they played, but honestly we all knew deep down that Blizzard wasn’t going to do anything new or attempt to fix/balance classes at this point in the expansion. Maybe by 10.1.5 we’ll be in a decent spot.

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Frost got the worst deal. If a target is moving our set bonus is worthless. Aesthetically Frost has some lame spells and animations. Icy-veins needs an updated graphic. It doesn’t compare to Combustion, the old arcane power or the new Arcane power.

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Shame about frost.

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I really like the arcane set, I think the 4 piece set may even lead into some new builds based around CC as I can see Venythr being very strong and might even be able to use the expanded potential legendary with sinful delight and high mastery, the pew pew pew build! who knows maybe even Fevered Incantation could fit in.

I’ll sit and hope they do something with the frost tier set to make it a bit more on par with the other two.

Was hoping to re-roll to Warlock (again) next tier but haven’t had any luck recruiting a mage so I guess I’m filling that role again in 9.2. Love mage in keys … hate mage in raiding.

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The theory-writers have chimed in on WoWhead:

Arcane: Interesting, good bonus
Fire: Potential big damage with a risk
Frost: Crap

Anyone else just tired of being a mage?

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