The science behind Frostfire Bolt: "Slushy Bolt" impossible due to the Leidenfrost Effect

Think about it for one second, which is about how long it takes a Frostfire Bolt to hit an enemy at maximum range after its creation.

A massive block of ice is not going to fully melt in 1 second, even if it’s dipped in a bucket full of lava. Try to put an ice cube on a fire on your stove - doesn’t melt that quickly.

The reason it would not melt is because of the Leidenfrost Effect, which protects the ice due to the sublimation of ice molecules on the surface of the ice into steam around the ice, giving it a protective layer. The same effect protects a hand that has water on it, if you dip that hand very quickly into molten metal. If anything, that icicle is going to be enclosed in very highly-pressurized steam surrounded by fire, which increases its impact potential, creating a localized explosion at the moment of impact upon the target.

Frostfire Bolt is far more impactful and damaging than the name suggests, when you look at it scientifically.

You can watch the Leidenfrost effect in action on Mythbusters if you don’t believe me: both guys dipped up to 4 fingers into water and then molten lead at 450 Celsius / 842 Fahrenheit, and the fingers came out unscathed.

Please bring back Frostfire Bolt for retail. It should never have been removed in the first place.

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Well reasoned.

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A wizard did it.

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Very interesting, I did not know about it.

Another reason to bring back frostfire bolt.

Thank you.

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Basically this. While I appreciate the science, this is a world where we conjure arcane and elements from essentially nothing. A world where a midget with a pointy stick can conceivably kill a master of magics. A world where a gigantic demonic god drove a sword into the planet. The whole “fire and ice make drippy water” logic is stupid in a game that is so far removed from realism.

I mean if you really want to bring ‘lore’ into it, you could easily have the Mage create an ice cube, surround it with an arcane barrier, and then light it on fire…

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OP’s arguing that science supports FFB, and that Ion’s reason to remove it (Ion called it a “slushy”) was stupid. We all agree. :stuck_out_tongue:

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[insert any decision he has made since the end of Cata] is stupid.

Was FFB removed in Legion? The expansion after we saw Dadghar conjure up a nuke made of all 3 Mage schools?

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Yep, it was replaced by Flurry in Legion.

That’s right, after they tried to have BF grant FOrb procs which mostly got stuck on pebbles. Can you even imagine if that was a thing now?

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TBH, Flurry looks dumb, and I’d much rather just get FOrb procs, even if it got stuck.

I’d love a talent that would replace Flurry procs with a more interesting animation, like FFB, Glacial Spike, or even just Comet Storm with the exact same functionality of Flurry… just looking less idiotic.

I don’t understand how snowballs hit harder than most frost spells, or why they chose snowballs to replace the supposedly bad “slushy.”

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Legion was low-key one of the worst things to happen to frost mage.

Deep Freeze? Removed.

Frostfire Bolt? Traded in for throwing snowballs.

I feel lingering resentment every time I cast Flurry knowing it replaced an actually cool spell because the mage class designer got it in their head that every mage spec needs to be mono-school.

Well, except Rune of Power who gets to hang around as the cockroach that never dies.

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I think they changed FFB to Flurry not for the monoschool, but because FFB deals its dmg immediately, while Flurry just sets up dmg for the following 2 spells. It was a way of spreading out the dmg profile, nerfing instant burst in the process.

If they simply wanted to make Frost monoschool, They would have simply given FFB the Ebonbolt animation… and Ebonbolt wouldn’t be shadow - frost dmg.

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Another reason mentioned for why it was removed was because it was “impossible to balance”. I think this can be dealt with very easily.

FFB gets burns and talent contributions from Fire, with snares and talent contributions from Frost. If either or both of these seem overpowered, nerf the individual contributions. Decrease snare from 40% to 20%, or burn from 8 seconds to 4 seconds. Nerf the burn damage. Nerf the snare duration. Take its contributions from frost and fire talents and nerf those by up to half if you must. Just getting rid of it altogether is as boring and unimaginative as putting in snowball Flurry.

Even the “monoschool” train of thought that guided decisions since Legion diverges from the mixture of abilities which mages in old school Warcraft were capable of, so there’s no lore basis for it.

Simply removing the spell altogether was not the right choice if they wanted to retain the fraction of the playerbase that thoroughly enjoys that playstyle. Imagine how many players left or played less just because it was removed, and development along the Frostfire track not pursued any further.

To a degree, I’m one of them, and it’s a big reason why I’m back playing Wrath Classic now.

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Honestly, FFB was such a cool ability. Definitely don’t get the same level of satisfaction from Flurry. But, then again, I’ve felt this way about the rest of the class for many years now.

I’d say it was more of a way to make Shatter meaningful in PvE. I’m not sure how concerned Blizzard is about instant-cast burst for Mages, given the Legion overhaul of Fire.

Was this the case? In Cata, I remember there being a viable PvE build for Fire mage involving the glyph for FFB, but it still wasn’t better than the Fireball build. And I’m pretty sure it didn’t see use in Fire PvP, either.

Legion class design completely nuked Mage, and then they decided that they’re done making sweeping class changes each expansion. So we’ve been stuck with Legion mage ever since.

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fire has a significant portion of dmg delayed through a DoT. Frost had always done its dmg immediately until Icicles, and then later through Flurry.

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Icicles was introduced because Shatter mastery wasn’t useful in raiding, but then the Shatter passive still wasn’t useful in raiding, so they introduced Flurry. Sure, a lot of Fire’s damage comes from Ignite, but it still deals very high instant-cast burst damage in a very short amount of time during Combustion.

Idk, this just seems more plausible to me than wanting to slow down Frost’s damage, because they certainly didn’t try to slow down Fire’s.

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No, if I had the time or will, I’d look up the developer notes for it at the time (MoP). They specifically said Frost did too much upfront dmg, so it was hard to balance around chunking. It was especially strong in PvP, but Deep Freeze had been balanced to do high dmg to bosses that were immune to stun (as a short experiment), so it wasn’t worthless in PvE. They just chose the route of delayed dmg, instead of running the risk of making Deep Freeze on bosses too strong.

They did, it just wouldn’t work well. Fire was about building a large DoT, then multiplying it with combustion. It was very delayed dmg. The problem it had is that any small mistake would cripple all dps. The new combustion returned fire to its original roots, but still brought a new form of “delay dmg” by making it so you ONLY do dmg during combustion.

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I can’t find any evidence to support this, so I’ll just take your word for it. It does sound very Blizzard-like to make a change like this in one expansion, then go completely backwards on that decision and redesign another spec of the same class to do the exact same thing (with even greater power) in another expansion.

It just seems so odd that trying to spread out Frost’s damage is the direction that they would take. That’s how Frost is meant to work in PvP: short-lived, high burst. Frost’s damage profile being so spread out is one of the reasons why it’s been struggling for so long and why Fire has been so dominant.

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Not really. The change to a pvp-only spec for Wrath and Cata was pretty bad, and what was done to Frost in both BFA and SL was also pretty bad. While Legion did make changes, Frost was surprisingly fun to play. I for one enjoyed having CmS, EB and GS as part of my standard rotation and IL hit like a truck (but also wasn’t 70% of our damage).

I can see where they’re coming from in some sense. Having it as a spell that was used by both Frost and Fire made it a bit wonky. Initially it was somewhat of a trade-off as it was the same initial damage as Fireball but it traded the little extra dot for a slow. I think some time later it was changed (in Cata or MoP from memory) and it was just Fireball with a slow.

Part of the issue for Frost as well was that it was functionally no different from Ice Lance in that it was an isntant-cast proc that dealt upfront damage. While the spell looked awesome, it didn’t actually feel that great to use when the end result was no different from having an additional IL proc.

Unfortunately, rather than just making FFB a Frost-only spell, or a Fire-only spell they removed it completely. Fire didn’t get a replacement, and Frost ended up with Flurry which is objectively worse. My preference would have been to keep FFB for Frost and have it apply the WC debuff for 1 spell (like Flurry worked in Legion) rather than completely replacing it.

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