Dear Blizzard,
I really appreciate you releasing frost mage changes so early in the PTR cycle. You have absolutely gutted the spec but at least you gave me enough time to reroll before 10.1.5 comes out. You guys continue to remain clueless by turning frost mage into a 3 minute spec now and just randomly buffing talents on random spots of the tree without a clear path forward.
Sincerely,
New evoker
Yep frost mage changes seems absymmal right now. They have absolutely no idea what to do with it. The removal of IP is just such a bad move without touching TV ot the cd time of IV.
I do like Summon Water Elemental being removed and Icy Veins temporarily summoning it.
Yeah, the Water Elemental changes are really good. I love my ele but having a perma ele was a bit of a nuisance and also optimally not a good idea to spec into.
Yeah getting rid of CDR on a 3 min CD is beyond me. I’ve only ever played mage since Vanilla, but I’m not happy with Frost changes so far. I guess We’ll see. Frost spec is currently in surgery.
3 min CD that is one of the weakest in the game, takes forever to ramp up dmg with the water elemental and no cdr.
That was the problem with havoc, meta was a weak cooldown, 3 minutes long and didnt get enough uses out of it on most raid fights.
Honestly, devs just call it a day and leave frost mages as it is instead of wrecking the spec completely.
Man, ive just rerolled to frost mage and read alll your feedback. Makes me wanna cry, what a waste of time.
So, uh… Why they reducing Frostbolt damage though. That’s the number that needs to go up since we spend most of our time doing it. I guess Glacial Spike supposed to replace that damage, but that cast take too long, not fun… and swirlies hit faster than it casts.
Just combine Wintertide with Deep Shatter and make it increase Frostbolt damage all the time instead of only vs. frozen targets. PvP is dead anyways so who cares what that does to PvP. Make the 60% increased Blizzard damage happen at all times instead of just during the instant-cast one. Hard-casting Blizzard feels awful enough already, but let’s not make it do 60% less damage on top of having a cast time. And while we’re at it, let’s buff the base damage of Blizzard. Get rid of all the icicle talents and just make Mastery apply bigger damage boosts to icicles/glacial spike. Change Fractured Frost to be a 1 point talent that makes Frostbolt always hit 5 targets. Get rid of Icy Veins haste and reduce the cast time on all our spells to compensate as if we had 100% Icy Veins up-time. Make Icy Veins instead increase damage/crit damage. Get rid of all the Icy Veins talents except Snap Freeze. Water Elemental should be a choice. I’m okay with the new talent, but put it where the old Water Elemental was and tune it to be equal to Lonely Winter. Undo this projected Glacial Assault/Comet Storm swap. And make Glacial Assault a 1-point talent that fires 7 icy comets instead of one. Could even make it a choice talent with Comet Storm if you want to keep Comet Storm there. Stop making talents/set bonuses that increase our chances to get our RNG procs. Maybe switch the 4 piece of the current tier to do the same thing it does in the 2 piece but for Ice Lance as well. We miss our Ice Lances shattering into 5 pieces. And can we separate Icy Veins & Shimmer so we can have both talents again like we did at the beginning of Legion back when Mage was really good? Maybe take some of our defensives off the GCD so I’m not spending most of my time in raids/m+ on GCD from defensives as well as on GCD from all the instant-cast spells I have to spam.
On a surface level, these changes actually sound like positives to me, assuming that tuning will happen across the board and noting that there are still likely to be changes made.
IV hasn’t felt good to use since classic where having a Haste boost was amazing given how little haste players had access to. Since then it’s just remained weak, so adding Welly to it seems like the right idea. The removal of IP is also great, and while I get that some players enjoyed that play style, it wasn’t for me. Maintaining a buff as long as possible to deal normal damage never felt good and just contributed to IV being bad. The 3 minutes does seem excessive though, given what other classes have, but if tuned right that could be some amazing burst every 3 minutes. If not, maybe look at reducing to 2 mins.
Now all they need to do is build some other build options like GS, make CmS viable, and add something else that boosts Frosts’ 3-10 target capability.
You can reroll fire, it actually looks fun without triple managing pyroclasm+skb+rune of power
They just need to make a 100% Frostbolt spec and I’ll be happy. I miss vanilla mage. Only thing I don’t miss about it is mana management… Would be cool if that could be a viable option again. All these procs and priority based rotations are not fun. I want all my damage to come from me theorycrafting my gear/talents and spamming Frostbolt on single target. Wouldn’t mind an AoE build that had the same philosophy: Deathborne or w/e the spell was from Shadowlands felt really good, if that could just be what our AoE looked like, but maybe Frozen Orb / Instant Cast Blizzard can stay to supplement that. Also like the interaction with Icy Nova / Freezing Cold / Frost Nova while Frozen Orb / Blizzard are active for the guaranteed crits. Also have a talent where Frostbolt had a chance to shatter on hit or maybe guaranteed chance against frozen targets and make Fingers of Frost apply to Frostbolt or something.
It’s the vocal minority that wants things to be “not boring” which ruins it for the rest of us simpletons who just want to spam Frostbolt. So why not have an option for both of us? A more vanilla feeling build for boomers and whatever the heck you’re trying to do on the PTR for zoomers. Have both options viable based on talent choices. I know that’s a nightmare to balance and one or the other will be the meta… so in that case let Frost be the boomer build, Arcane be the zoomer build, and Fire be somewhere in between.
100% agreed…
Blizzard! Hire this man!
IDK. MoPs endgame frost was one of my favorite specs all time. Probably 3rd behind final 2 tiers of BFA fire and 1st tier legion fire pre-nerf. If they could somehow get back to MoPs version of frost that would make a lot of people happy imo. It had 2 ways to build it that were both very good. You could go haste or cap haste a certain points and go mastery. I liked the mastery build myself. I think they should take a look at MoP for a few specs probably. I remember resto shaman being super fun to play in mop as well as prot pally.
Fire gets 1 min combustion back and frost gets cdr taken from 3 min cd. Make it make sense.
It’s only half of the changes. Boom makes sense
Also combustion is a way stronger CD than IV ever was.
Correct! so many spells now give cdr to combustion
one of the weakest CD and now also one of the longest CD. Makes SOOO much sense, glad they listened to the feedback that was given to them even from dragonflight beta that icy veins was hurt by IP aoe nerf by just taking away IP completely.
At the moment I’m trying to decide on fire mage or warlock to replace my balance druid. I feel like my raid DPS as balance is just terrible no matter what drops I get.
man its like yall dont know how to read
" * Developer’s note: The Frost Mage changes listed below are currently in a state of flux and are partially implemented for this week’s PTR deploy. The in-game talent tree and mage abilities will not be fully updated with the changes below, but will be for next week’s deploy. We’re detailing these changes in advance to get early feedback despite some of these not being testable in the current build."
What? You mean wait until things are actually complete? And miss a chance to be the one to start a snarky ill-informed whine fest on the forums?? That’s crazy talk.