It’s actually more of a frostbolt buff than a nerf forcing us to play pure ice lance or lance+glacial.
Lance and Frostbolt with full stacks of Death’s Chill now do very close to the same amount of damage. Depending on procs and what not. Maybe Ice Lance is still slightly behind which it should not be according to the changes, it should be slightly ahead.
Anyways, because frostbolt cannot always cast, it needs the lance damage outside of goes. This is a huge buff to frostbolt build, even though pure lance or lance+glacial combo might be overall better than frostbolt, I am not going to complain. Also, ray is doing like 280k/tick with full stacks without mastery gear - full verse/haste. So ray is now BiS, 11.0 frostbolt was doing 500k/each every .9 seconds and ray ticks were only doing 200k/crits each every .5 seconds. Making frostbolt slightly ahead pre 11.0.2. Now its GG lol. These were all tested against full verse targets, with incanters and not optimized testing, so they are rough estimates.
So GG, the only problem I have is Frostbolt should do more considerably more damage than Ice Lance, not just 10% more with full stacks, but closer to 25% more with full slick ice and death’s chill stacks. Which means it should be doing 100k more, not 10-25k more. Currently it does 10-25k more but only with full stacks and good procs. So its hard to say, I only got to test a few duels. Won’t actually know 100% until Tuesday.
Another thing is there is no way to get 15 frostbolts with ice form as ice form only lasts 17 seconds Help. What?
Yea, I still dunno if Ray is better for frostbolt build, especially with blizzard doing 50% more damage and orb 10%. You also auto get permafrost lances from all the coldfronts. You have to lose a lot as frostbolt build to get ray, including cold front+perma frost lances and everlasting frost. Dropping glacial assault is not really an option now for frostbolt build as 6% damage is almost as good as subzero but for only 1 point. Ray will only crit for 280k with full stacks for the last tick and the ticks will be 280k>252k>226.2k>203.58k>183.2k which averages out to 457.992k dps. You also very likely have to have a smoke bomb or shimmer behind a pillar to use it, which is fine but you are using movement charges at that point and may not be able to connect later. Frostbolt can do 400-500k every .9 seconds with full verse+haste build at max stacks. So it is comparable but does not have all the conditions ray does. Also, you can procs lots of orbs and blizzards with cold front as frostbolt build. Which is really good for dampening 2s because its extra passive DPS, and procs frostbites lots! It requires you to play with an rdruid who will clone so you orbs do not break cc. I don’t know, really tough choice, just will have to see how it performs on Tuesday.
You also probably do not play frigid winds that much with an rdruid because dampening will be 80% and them running away does not really matter, you just switch to the other target and blast. Even if they spent a decent amount of time healing themselves behind a pillar at 20%, there is no way they would be at 100%. You def play 2/2 tempest barrier, no decurse cuz rdruid can shift it, except against lock and 2/2 arcane warding. You can go diverted energy, 0 block heal and short barrier if you want too. Since you will be yolo blocking almost every CC unless its late dampening. Can run double dps trinket and the 5% void elf damage is more damage for frostbolt than 586 intellect from orc. Allows you to racial while garroted and root beamed. Looking like a very solid build with a good rdruid prepatch. Probably blows on beta.
Yes, we know Frost mage is S Tier and does basically no casting but still full damage. All these really long posts are going to do nothing but eventually get you nerfed quicker, for future reference
No, I am okay with them nerfing Ice Lance and glacial and ray. Really the only thing we need is frost bolt and hard cast damage, and no breaking CC from random instant cast, explosions etc. Lmao. Actually it should spread awareness to the problem. Nerf the instant cast damage and buff the hard casted damage.
Help. What?