So I’ve been reading around wondering what the deal is with frost mage. Everyone can see it’s underperforming and they nerfed it heavily before release.
Generally I would assume that keeping most specs near middle of the pack is the optimal goal in the design philosophy barring certain raid mechanics that make some specs shine versus others.
So why not just give frost mage 3% more dps or whatever, let it inch toward the middle and call it a day? Why the silence?
This is all I can think of:
Pride. They nerfed it too much and don’t want to admit they made a mistake.
Scaling. Frost mage will get out of control on damage if the base modifiers are turned up too high, so they are starting it low.
Incompetence/lazyiness. They just don’t care.
People are playing the spec wrong… like… EVERYONE. It could do more but no one knows how.
Raid mechanics. The class just doesn’t shine well with the fights, but tbh Huntsman Altimore has a lot of 2 target windows, but there is a lot of single target so it’s sort of true.
Ion likes to secretly pick winners and there’s a very closely held secret that each spec gets to have a “turn” to shine and they rotate this around on purpose while trying to hide it.
Frost is considered the easier of the three specs to play so they want it lower. Harder specs should always do more damage no matter what. Fire is harder to play than frost (I guess?) so it gets to do more damage.
I’m going to make a grand assumption here. I’m going to assume that someone on the team will actually read this forum. If you will grant me that assumption I propose thus:
Someone should make a proposed frost magechanges thread in this forum
I would offer to, essentially like the beta forum threads, but I haven’t played frost since Legion. If mages could get a proactive thread up and keep it at the top of this forum. I know someone just posted a proposed flurry change, but I haven’t seen a lot of people looking at it.
I’ve actually become a bit skeptical about that ever since I read a wow reddit post that says blizzard likes to have overperformers and underperformers and buff and nerf them in order to maximise boost purchases. So who knows. If it’s true, it’s disgusting.
Very possible. This has happened several times over the course of the game, with many different issues. It seems to be somewhat endemic to programmer/designers in general, but it’s the consumer that ends up paying for it in the end.
This is the only explanation that Blizzard can defend. Not sure it will eventually prove to be accurate, however.
Probably not this, but I could see it being a resource issue (i.e., Activision has them so spread out that they can’t whack all the moles at once.)
Nope.
If that’s the case, the spec has inherent design flaws that go beyond pure numbers.
Could easily see this being the case.
Could be, although it seems to be more rooted in Blizzard putting too much stock in Frost’s defensive/CC abilities at the expense of damage output. Put plainly, CC in raids is too niche for Blizzard to handicap Frost in the name of it.
Option #8: They are working on buffing Frost as we speak, but they are running the numbers and making very sure they don’t over buff in the process, so the buffs wont go live for a month or so. I.e. it’s still very early in the expansion.
I actually think this is pretty likely, adding that it definitely won’t happen during the world first race. We won’t get anything until the first tuning pass on Mythic CN at the earliest.
You want us to speculate on what we think Blizzard might implement as frost mage buffs? … well ok.
Frostbolt damage increased by 5%. However, to prevent this major buff from unbalancing the game, Ice Lance damage is reduced by 25%.
Frostbolt has a new unique icon.
Artwork and name change update. “Water Elemental” is now “Frosty the Snowman”.
Players may now drink from your Frosty the Snowman. This is done by clicking and channeling on it. Each second spent drinking grants the drinker 5% of their max mana and takes 25% of Frosty’s max health.
Ice makes it hard to move quickly and slows reaction time. All frost chills are buffed by 10% to make them more competitive in PVP. However, handling ice also slows speed and makes you clumsy. To reflect this frost mages are limited to walking speed only and can no longer run.
To better reflect its use in combat “Frostbolt” has been renamed to “Snowball Tickle”.
I do not get this logic of frost being easier than fire. Fire is a 2 button spec in all content if anything they are on even ground with frost having an infinitely higher skill cap in pvp than fire. Arcane imo is harder than both in raiding environments due to positioning requirements, mana management and cooldown management. I still think fire is the only true zergy feeling caster spec where you don’t really think at all you just press buttons. Fire to me is like the demon hunter of caster specs.
Properly knowing when and where to combust and also performing that combustion rotation perfectly regardless of raid conditions is pretty difficult relative to other class rotations. I agree with you, though, that fire mage is pretty brain-dead outside of the combustion window.
You forgot one:
8. “We’d rather you not play frost mage.”
Blizzard obviously left frost in an unfinished state and they are unwilling or unable to fix it now. Frost needs more than a simple numbers buff. It needs its core issues (RNG) addressed.
How I would fix it:
Allow brain freeze to stack up to 2 times.
Allows mages to dump fingers procs before using brain freeze.
Ebonbolt is now baseline. Reduced damage and CD.
This guarantees brain freezes at regular intervals and provides RNG protection.
Ebonbolt talent replaced with new talent: Early Frost
Every 15 seconds gain the early frost effect, causing your next non-instant flurry to have a reduced cast time and be guaranteed to grant 1 charge of fingers of frost.
New (non-RNG) proc to spice up the rotation and smooth out the RNG of fingers procs.
Plenty of “knobs” to tune: Effect frequency, cast time reduction, amount of fingers procs granted.
Nothing. No speculations. It happened before with other classes, it will happen to mages as well. Mages will be the laughing stock of this expansion. Blizz dont read logs nor their own forums. Once they decided which class they think is not worth it, its final. Sadly, frost is what it is this expansion
Pride: They have shown pride but I doubt this is the case.
Scaling: They have complete control when to apply blanket damage increases and nerfs so I doubt this is the case.
Incompetence/lazyness: They have been pretty incompetent in fixing world quests bugs so this might be the culprit.
Raid mechanics: No, we are consistently 20% behind in any type of content.
Ion: He doesn’t play this game, he is just a face. I like the dude (ironically) but this guy is there to get blamed for stuff an ORGANIZATION decides.
Frost is EZ: Well if you think Frost is ez you should step into Arena :D. No kidding I have played all past expansion as Beast Master and I can tell you THAT is EZ, even in Arena.
No no no, the problem with Frost is the design. It was designed so long ago that the current design is no longer valid. The game has changed, all other classes and specs have changed some more some less but have been updated to the current raid mechanics and new pvp mechanics.
Our current Frost iteration comes from a crippled version of the Panda expansion or maybe Cata I don’t remember now.
Developers have to sit down in each raid encounter and think what would Frost need to excel in this encounter… At the same time, they need to sit in an arena and do exactly the same… and so on. with M+. Once the design is done they need to ensure the damage is on par to the other classes and specs.
That is what the spec DESERVES but we won’t get because it’s too late, the expansion is done, and those types of changes are only done when the expansion starts and Influencers are worth nothing they only spent hours bowing down to big brother activision.
But the combustion window is also really static. There’s only ever one sequence we want to do things in because we want to quickly get and keep up Infernal Cascade during it. Also, since its all instants or scorch, there’s never going to be movement considerations either.
I’d call it more punishing than Frost and less autopilot since you need the awareness to hold fireblasts when Combustion is coming off CD. However, the execute window for fire is so braindead that it almost offsets that imo.
I’ll add: It’s very subjective what is or isn’t difficult. I played a job with an incredibly tight and complicated burst window for 2 years in FFXIV which also has terrible netcode making it even harder to execute. Maybe it conditioned me to learn Combustion quickly.
