I feel that the only thing that frost mage has going for it is ice lance, and while it can be fun to use ice lance it shouldn’t be it’s sole focus.
Talents like Ebonbolt, Comet Storm, and Ray of Frost can actually make frost mage feel like a d&d mage to me, and this makes it fun for me anyway.
What are your thoughts on the direction of frost mage so far and what changes do you think can be made to improve it.
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I’d love to see some glacial spike love. Maybe make frost bolt give a stacking haste buff that caps at 5 bolts to make spike easier to get off. Either that, or increase the damage by a ton.
Or make glacial spike an instant cast after getting 5 stacks but lower the damage.
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I loved GS when I was able to set a Doom CDR to flash when it came up. I have no idea what Blizzard is doing atm. This game is 16? years old and they still can’t balance s***.
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On November 10:
- [With regional restarts] Splitting Ice’s Ice Lance damage to secondary targets reduced to 65% (was 80%).
- [With regional restarts] Ice Lance damage reduced by 10%.
Game over.
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Probably not, but getting off a nearly 2s FB in PVP isn’t happening when you’re the focus. If you do happen to get it off, you probably aren’t getting procs. But hey, Full Moon and Gpie are fine.
They can’t balance because they’ve become extremely reliant on borrowed power systems to balance everything. This expansion they’ve somewhat shifted from that (it’s still there, but not AS bad), and now it’s revealing that some specs were literal garbage this entire time. I doubt they even have the competence to resolve the issue.
I don’t understand why they don’t have a mechanic where frost bolt like the more icicles you have, the more damage and faster casting speed you get. Something like that would counteract going dry of procs and when you get your procs, you obviously spend them and so you don’t just feel terrible after launching 5-6 frost bolts with 0 procs on single target…
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No there damage needs to shift. Ice lance should not be the main source of damage it should have a different feature. The best times to play frost through out history whether when it was the pvp only spec or pve+pvp was when icelance was not its main source of damage. They’ve turned Frost mage into some sort of slot machine damage dealer where casting frost bolt is the equivalent of drawing cards… it does no damage and a has chance to allow you to do damage but if you don’t get lucky you do quite literally nothing. This is why frostmage is horrible in pvp it was a spec in the past that was highly consistent and very controlled and is now a spec that has no control and is completely random. The same weakness that killed combat rogue when they switched it to roll the bones slot machines outlaw.
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forgot Nov 16
[With regional restarts] Rune of Power (Talent) duration is now 12 seconds (was 15 seconds).
[With regional restarts] All damage abilities reduced by 4%.
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Because that’s too similar to the slick ice legendary I suppose. Honestly they should just untie slick ice from icy veins but give it a stack cap or a max duration OR make it work with rune of power, icy veins and ice form (though ice form already increases frostbolt damage but who cares? Still have to get to cast it to get it off 
) OR reduce the icy veins cd.
That being said though, things will change when it comes to that when we’ve unlocked all conduit slots and can use both icy propulsion and ice bite in combination with frostburn/slick ice. I think that might actually be the reason they’re not changing stuff for single target frost atm.
In the meantime, I advice to use icy veins on pull and NOT use mirrors of torment at the same time but instead do icy veins, frostbolt, frozen orb, frostbolt/proc rotation, rune of power when the icy veins rune is gone (and then on cd), mirrors of torment when icy veins duration is over. I used to do mirrors almost directly on pull but that way you get way too many procs during the icy veins window to not munch more than usual. When you get your mirror brainfreeze procs during rune of power, though, there’ll be less procs overall due to no haste buff and you’ll actually be able to use them - not munch them - and shatter them. Not sure if that helps anyone but it has helped me stabilize my dps more rather than it being good only during icy veins and garbage the rest of the time.
- Only adding that last part cause I’ve seen many guides advising to use mirrors on pull but in my opinion and experience that just leads to increased proc munching during icy veins and leaves you with absolutely nothing once icy veins is on cd. Could of course also do it the other way around and open with RoP + mirrors and then use icy veins after - just feels slightly worse for me to do it that way.
I played the glacial spike build in bfa and god how I loved it. Something just feels undeniably great about throwing a giant spike of ice into the face of an mm hunter who’s hiding on some rock during battle for nazjatar 
- even though it pretty much doomed you when you were running alone with warmode on (in my experience - I’m definitely not great in pvp though)
Also felt good in PvE. Yea, you had to build it up and that made it slow but it was reliable - unlike rng based procs - and once it hit, it really hit - (again) reliably. The proc rng we have atm leaves me in situations where, even just on world trash, sometimes I devour them, sometimes they devour me. It kinda feels like gambling for procs sometimes when on day 1 you somehow get lucky and can solo Executioner Aatron with relative ease and the next day (or minute) some vampire boi in halls of atonement almost kills you with his stream of anima.
What annoys me about SL frost mage is that I feel like, for other classes and specs, conduits and legendaries are there to make their already good rotation and dps even better, whereas for frost they’re there to make an unbalanced, not well thought out spec work somehow (eventually). Slick ice shows me blizzard knows frostbolt is too damn slow and doesn’t do enough damage, icy propulsion shows me blizzard is aware that the icy veins cd is way too long the way it is, ice bite shows me they know they’ve nerfed ice lance too much, etc. etc.
Now since they designed those conduits before they nerfed frost at the end of prepatch, it’s way too obvious the biggest (maybe only) reason they nerfed frost into the ground was so the conduits and legendaries would be necessary for us to do good dps. Without the ice lance nerf we wouldn’t really need ice bite as much. Without the shimmer cd increase we wouldn’t need flow of time. If they weren’t aware our interrupt cd is way too long (particularly in pvp) and actually changed that, grounding surge would be redundant.
This all makes me come to the conclusion that, since frost was one of the better balanced specs that wasn’t that dependent on borrowed power (we could’ve played without the mastery stacking in bfa - blizzard just broke the entire system there), they changed our spec to be at least as disbalanced as others so we’d be as dependent on borrowed powers/expac systems as other specs - just unfortunately they also went too far with that. In my opinion, they willfully destroyed one of the specs that was working fairly well generally speaking just so we’d have to work towards basic balance within the spec and rotation throughout shadowlands. And breaking the balance on one of the few specs they had not previously destroyed entirely is unforgivable and stupid and might’ve been a hasty decision (judging by the sudden extreme nerfs at the end of prepatch).
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Frost just needs a lot more of their MOP tools returned to them. Having 90% of actions spent casting Frostbolt repeatedly is horrible, feels like trash and takes away a lot of control from the player.
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I really really miss Glacial Spike; most “mage” abilities are visually lack luster aside from a few iconic ones but Glacial Spike is just so good with the way the icicles combine to form the spike and then the satisfying huge burst of damage.
Meteor and Comet Storm are perhaps the only other ones that I would say are equally as awesome.
I would be 10/10 happy as can be if they just made Comet Storm and Glacial Spike baseline.
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I’d kill for living bomb back. Getting brain freeze procs without having to worm frostbolts through a team expending every kick and stun into me would be so good.
I think that’s why the abilities you listed are talents. They’re not for everyone, but are there for taking if you find them fun.
Personally? I do not find ray of frost, glacial spike or ebonbolt fun to use.
So many classes have on demand, little to no cast time burst. GS takes setup and thats the last thing I need in pvp right now
What if it crit for like 20k if you got it off? Wouldn’t that be fun?
Ok I’ll allow it
Yeah I’m sorry but blizzard didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They didn’t bother to investigate what effect their changes were having on the spec at all and the balance on expansion release was terrible and still is.
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To answer the original question posed by the OP:
No.
Let’s do something different. I’m so sick and tired of building up Crit/Haste (primarily) to try and simply get a single proc. Why not give us a little complexity?