I believe the one and only solution for frost mage is 
… leave the spec the way it is right now with the procs and everything and just make this minor change:
-Put Flurry on a 6-8 sec CD (affected by haste) 2 sec cast time (affected by haste) and apply winter’s chill. thats it
-and ofc well buff all damage by 10% at least
putting flurry on a CD (and still proc brain freeze) I believe will help with the downtimes when there is not procs and you just found yourself spamming frostbolts for 20 sec. WIth this change every 6-8 sec we then get a guaranteed brain “freeze proc”, and also a cool and bursty way to start the fight opening with flurry followed by ice lance 
so instead of having a rotation like:
frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt - ice lance - frost bolt - frost bolt - frost bolt…
our new rotation will be something like
flurry - ice lance - ice lance -frost bolt - frost bolt -flurry -ice lance -ice lance - frost bolt - flurry - ice lance - ice lance - frost bolt…
and if you get the procs well use them 
thoughts?
8 Likes
Not a bad idea; probably will never happen sadly.
1 Like
I like this. Giving a spec more agency with their procs is a good thing. It’s why I love fire
I actually do agree that a HUGE buff for the class would be a way to generate procs while on the move. That might be all the fix thats needed on top of frost bolt damage and speed increase.
Aside from taking a talent for it as Ice Flows does this, but it should honestly be passive… Make Ice Flows a passive buff that is on a 20 second internal cooldown or something… every 20 seconds you get a 3 charge on the move frost bolt.
I like your idea. I feel the struggle with Frost is very much the RNG (and dmg aura being too low). I would also like to see:
- Ray of Frost on a much shorter cooldown so we can force fingers of frost to prevent bad RNG. Frankly I would LOVE if we could have Ray of Frost replace Frostbolt. It would actually change the feel of Frost to something like a shadow priest or aff lock(?) where a channel spell is the main filler.
- Change a no-so-popular talent like Bone Chilling or Frozen Touch to instead allow Winter’s Chill to splash, helping our AoE damage.
Straight up damage buffs would definitely help make us more competitive, but it would feel much better to have options to slightly change up the rotation as well.
All they gotta do is undo the nerfs they did in the prepatch.
19 Likes
another solution, while not as interesting, would be to buff the base damage of frostbolt.
3 Likes
Well Onlysolution is right here! But I play arcane/fire, so I guess that’s the call.
In all honesty, I dont see them actually changing any of our spells. The most they would do is lay a blanket 5% damage increase… but we can always hope!
Frostbolt is a very small portion of our DPS, though (like 12-17%). Even if they buffed Frostbolt by 10% that’d only be a 1.2-1.7% upgrade in our DPS, which would still put us way behind everything else.
2 Likes
I would rather they do what they did with Fire mages and have frost bolt have a “pitty” trigger for Flurry; 3 Frost Bolts == 1 Guaranteed Brain Freeze. Fireball gets something similar where you get a stacking crit modifier so it seems like it would make sense enough considering the two specs are similar in what is trying to be accomplished (trigger a proc).
2 Likes
Slick Ice legendary should not just be during Icy Veins, but all the time. It compensates for the long cast on Frostbolt and the damage increase. Icy Veins like Boomy Incarn or Ret Wings should not be a dispellable buff. Making these two changes alone would improve the class in all aspects tremendously. Only Frost Mage should have a 3.5 second Deep Freeze as we are the only class in the game without a stun. Mind you Shadow Priest has all of this and offhealing capabilities. We just want to be competitive like the other casters.
1 Like
Yes, I’d like something around those lines.
IMO hard casting Flurry without the Brain Freeze proc makes no sense at all. So it should have a CD just like a Fire Blast and a chance to proc with skills that chills. If you have a charge ready then it’s as if you had the Brain Freeze proc.
I think something like this would allow us to start encounters with something to throw and after that will still have to cast frostbolts to get the chance to proc and to add a little damage.
I think they made Frostbolt to do very little damage because they didn’t want us to be casting frostbolt all day. Well as it is right now you are still casting frostbolts all day…
1 Like
This would be a nice change, but it would probably have to be longer than 8 seconds. Maybe something like 10s with 2 charges to give us something reliable to hold onto in case we have to move a short distance. I’ve had a mental wish list for a while, it goes something like this:
- Thermal Void baseline with a heavily AOE passive taking its place, retune the other 2 so Ray is the ST option and Spike is the cleave option.
- Add Blizzard to the part of our mastery that increases frozen orb damage
- More use of the reworked Winter’s Chill (For example, Ice Nova could apply a single stack)
- 2nd Brain Freeze stack so we don’t have to lose FoF procs to avoid the risk of overwriting Brain Freeze (since it’s better to Flurry at the end of FB right now if you’re already casting and have both procs)
- Baseline AOE damage buffs accompanied by some nerf to Glacial Fragments so it doesn’t feel so necessary in M+ (especially on fortified)
But I think it’d be really difficult for Blizzard to apply these kinds of design changes when effects like those from legendaries and conduits are already in the game. We’ll have to be happy with a flat % damage increase at some point in the future or change spec.
1 Like
All we need is Ice Floes, Ebonbolt, and Freezing Rain baseline and for the double ice lance thing to not be a thing (not splitting ice, the double ice lance into Winter’s Chill debuff). That’s a stupid playstyle where you have to gauge your range to up your DPS. Maybe have Slick Ice Legendary affect Glacial Spike.
Been here since day 1. Back when mages actually didn’t suck. Going to give you all a tip. People like me who use to farm people cried so much back in the day they will NEVER let this class be good again.
It is their game. If they wanted to fix it they would fix it. I left this game for the past 5 years because mage has been total trash and it has stayed that way.
2 Likes
In fact, I’m game with ditching the splitting ice lance thing. I’m tired of breaking CC just because I want the extra 5% damage of Ice Lance. We need an alternative talent for that one. Since as of now it’s the only viable.
The really pathetic thing about it is that we don’t even really take it for the cleave. We take it for 5% increased ice lance damage and a 2nd Glacial Fragment proc on AOE.
1 Like
Flurry, instant cast, 2 charges, 10s cd
Frostbolt, 1.5s cast, cast-able while moving.
Do some design changes like that and probably don’t even need to increase the damage.
1 Like
I would play that mage. All day.
Exactly why you don’t “balance” (I’m trying to type that with a straight face) classes around gimmicks, rng and borrowed power. I’m all for customization and options, but the devs have proven for 16 years they can’t balance classes/specs and they manage to do an even worse job when you throw in things like Legiondaries, Azerite armor and now covenants/crafted legiondaries. This game worked pretty well when you had talents and normal/heroic gear. We’ve since added rng socketing, titanforging, tertiary stats, LFR, mythic, mythic + and the above and this is what you get: classes/specs doing 25-30% more/less than another.
Stop the gimmicks Blizzard, just go back to what worked.
1 Like