It does depend on key level, like I said above a 22 necro becomes the predominant choice for frost mage. Below that I’d highly recommend just playing freezing winds nightfae. Its burst damage isnt great but it has really good sustain and has all of its cooldowns pack to pack. Idk if you also simmed this way but I did not remove lust which is a big reason why there is a huge difference between necro and nf and your monk and your mage.
In reality the specs specialize in different things as frost is focused on sustained damage and monk on burst which is why with short sim timings like this monk wins overwhelmingly. When in keys packs both wont live this long and the monk then won’t have cds for 3 packs ish.
Generally good secondaries to aim for with frost are 31-33% crit, 20%+ haste, and then the rest into vers or haste with vers being better aoe and haste better single target.
With freezing winds nightfae its important to focus on the new changes to the aoe rotation in season 3. So your opener becomes blizzard → frozen orb → icy veins → frost novaing in reaction to your comet storm → and using your fingers of frost procs → you can then either use night fae now while not overcapping on fingers of frost procs (really good weak auras on wagoio for freezing winds tracking) or you can save it to use after you recast rune of power.
Thats because you have nothing to associate with it. Pulling more mobs will result in your tank dying without them planning their cd usage throughout the dungeon for it or the healer having an external for them. Tanks get hit hard by mobs, you will literally get one shot by brutes in SD or the Stitchwerks in NW or the wicked bolts in Halls. And healers don’t have it easy either its incredibly difficult to heal a high tyrannical SD for all the bosses and plenty more examples.
Its different crowd control lol. Instead of having to sheep 5 mobs before pulling you can rotate aoe stuns or disrupts like chains/dragon’s breath. You have to coordinate who is kicking what for most every mob in the game.
The game has evolved to be different in the past 15 years since wrath or however long its been. It is definitely not easier than the 1 button spam of those days and is in fact much harder to do dungeons at a high level.
I mean taking 5 minutes a trash pack b/c the mobs hit disproportionately hard isn’t really that fun.
It’s more interesting to see how many mobs you can pull while managing stuns and kicks, your tank has to manage their cds appropriately, your healer has to be able to make up for unavoidable damage that might come in, and your dps have to be able to put out enough damage so that they kill the pack before it kills you.
Yea, I am doing that rotation. When things line up really well and I’m not getting beat on, pulling threat, out of range, whatever tf pug tanks do, I’ve seen upwards at 45k on AOE pulls on my Mage.
I am capable of running 20-25s but I am not willing to give up my personal time to play like I did in Wrath and Cata. I generally find that I top out at 18s before pugging is more trouble than it’s worth.
Again with pugging, I generally do not have globals, or distance available to blink in and get a frost nova off when I should, but I do when I can. And I do generally run NF and Freezing Winds. It does ok sustained, but there are some runs, sometimes back to back, where I finish with 16k-18k overall and some others where it’s like 11k. Buffs maybe? Shaman in group maybe? Stuff generally dying too fast? Hard to tell.
That happens at what M+ level? I think it should be happening earlier and with fewer monsters pulled.
So that’s why I say that Tank/Healers should hit the binary wall (just can’t keep up or get one shot) earlier. That way the required DPS doesn’t grow so high than we see the need to max output from the tank and healers as well as the DPS.
Mirrors image dissipates threat - so if you use it before a pull you just won’t get aggro. Its essentially a 40s threat reduction in addition to its defensive capabilities. You just have to use it before you generate the threat or they will actually take all of yours and die 1 by 1.
It does kind of suck, but I prefer playing relatively close to the mobs as NF FW since the frost nova is quite important. So generally I shimmer in closer while doing the blizzard. But whatever works for you.
Frost really doesn’t have that many high value things to press in aoe, regardless of what you do you’ll end up with dead time spamming frostbolt or arcane explosion. So the one global for frost nova doesn’t set you back as much as you’d think. I could link you a video if you’d like that has a good visual explanation imo.
And yeah around that level frost really just isn’t the best spec. Just need to be sure you have icy veins for every aoe scenario even if it means losing out on some single target uptime and your damage will go up a lot. Generally that means you need to be proactive on using frost nova to make sure your icy veins will be up for the next pack.
I mean people are going to always push the envelope in terms of what is challenging, so there will always be a “max output.” Even if +10 is the highest players feasibly could do, you’d still see a significant disparity between classes.
The quicker the ramp up in difficulty though, the worse an experience it is for players overall, it makes a lot more sense that a player might be able to time a 15, but a 25 is out of their reach, there is a gradual curve there that assumes that you understand the relative difficulty each key level.
It would seem pretty weird for player to make it through a +5 and then a +6 is basically impossible.
It depends on the season and the players. But likely around the +25 level you hit a wall where you can’t yolo it anymore.
I’m confused, because you are essentially saying you want to put a cap on mythic+'s infinitely scaling system. Most people’s cap is their skill level or that of their group. For instance - people have timed +31s this season. Of the top 0.1% of mythic+ players, most are probably still getting 1 shot in +29s to tyrannical bosses that have 0 counterplay or they can’t live the mobs on fort weeks. When you see a timed key at the highest level you often don’t see the hundreds of keys it took to get to that level.
The vast majority of the wow population just can’t do +25s which is why mythic+ is scalable - its to provide whatever challenge people want to them. The system has problems and sure the 2-7 range you could afk half the key and still time it but making that harder would just decrease the amount of people receiving relevant rewards from m+. Of which I would consider 15 the norm even if the average key timed is actually around an 11.
WoW dungeons have a different kind of difficulty now than in the past. One that generally most players don’t reach as they are content in lower key levels. Which is fine as thats how the system was designed, but that doesn’t mean its easier than before, its just more widely accessible.
Yea, I mean, I appreciate you trying to help and coming down from your dickish attitude before, but I always use MI on pulls. I have stuff macro’d for cooldowns on pull. I also have Tower Ranger, did the Frost Mage Mage Tower, etc. Not a bad player. Not the best in the world, but not a bad player. If I suck at something I want to know why and I will change it.
So areas like the hallway to the Abom boss in Theater of Pain. I will use MI upon entrance because I’m not using it on the inevitable azzpull of the Vile whateveritis, but after that all bets are off. Not saying it’s always the tanks fault, but I learned how to raid from people The Transcendent on Medivh, one of the first guilds to get Rag down etc. And they taught me one thing, never ever stop pressing buttons. I always keep that in mind.
If I ran with the same group I would have a plan, literally, of what to use when, on what packs, and everything would be up for the boss. The reason I like the Ice Lance build so much is because you generally CAN have all CDs (aside from MI) up every single pack, especially on fort weeks.
It’s fun, but don’t call it hard please. All the stuns and kicks that you mentioned also occurred. It wasn’t just CC 3 and go afk in UBRS.
When people stop calling M+20 easy, then we’ll consider it hard. (tautology!)
My opinion is that completing a 15 should be doable by 80-95% of players that want that. We should see failure rate of even good groups in 15s around 5%. Each M+ beyond 15 should drop that by 5-10%, so that by M+20 it is so difficult that even playing their best at most just over half the groups will complete. M+26 should be so hard that playing perfect will only net you a 5% chance of luckily completing the dungeon.
When players of classes that deal adequate DPS stop whining that they can’t get into M+30 groups and instead complain about how difficult M+16 is, that is when I think it would be good.
Mirror image is on the GCD btw, you likely know that I just want to say it as I’ve ran into another mage that macro’d it and icy veins together but icy veins isn’t on the gcd. Which made their rotation a decent bit clunkier.
The issue with that is frustration. All +26 dungeons are not equal. From a key pushing standpoint you are very happy timing a +25 to get a +26 Necrotic Wake, you are not happy to get a +26 Streets. If you could pick and choose the key level and dungeon then it wouldn’t be a big deal to have a lower success rate, but most of these keys do have a very low success rate at the higher levels you just can’t see it anywhere.
But how many is that? Only 22% of players have keystone master. And this tiers key levels are heavily inflated, it was only like 17% or lower last season. And thats just people who have essentially timed all +15s. Its very uncommon.
Also this irks me, but why would you want the hardest content to be doable via luck and not pure skill? If I took 5 people I raided with and spammed a +30 NW for 48 hours we probably still could never time it. And thats a skill issue.
Well the problem with designing endgame content around the 80-95% of the playerbase is that most of the people in that bracket are terrible. The reason most people can’t complete a 15 in time is because the vast majority of wow players are basically afk.
The issue with that is frustration. All +26 dungeons are not equal. From a key pushing standpoint you are very happy timing a +25 to get a +26 Necrotic Wake, you are not happy to get a +26 Streets. If you could pick and choose the key level and dungeon then it wouldn’t be a big deal to have a lower success rate, but most of these keys do have a very low success rate at the higher levels you just can’t see it anywhere.
But how many is that? Only 22% of players have keystone master. And this tiers key levels are heavily inflated, it was only like 17% or lower last season. And thats just people who have essentially timed all +15s. Its very uncommon.
Also this irks me, but why would you want the hardest content to be doable via luck and not pure skill? If I took 5 people I raided with and spammed a +30 NW for 48 hours we probably still could never time it. And thats a skill issue.
Those higher keys absolutely does require cc. Along with propper cd usage from tanks and healers AND the dps.
These mobs hit hard. Take the shard from halls. That could be a potential wipe on tyrannical and a guaranteed wipe on fortified if you want to go in with none of the above.
That’s what I think should be occurring at M+20. With more damage output or more abilities that make it harder for players, we’d see slower fights which would make it possible to create non-meta based groups that compete for top honours.