I love mages. I already have a max level one and leveling another. Now, I love frost. The visuals of it and the theme of it, however, it does have one big issue, and that is too much RNG is tied to it. It doesn’t feel good spamming like 20 frost bolts without any procs. Taking frozen touch helps make it a little better, but not by much really. Also, there’s a bunch of dead talents. Who uses Thermal Void and Ray of Frost really? Ray of Frost sounds like a pretty cool spell and I’ve used it, but it feels out of place. Comet storm feels like it should be baseline, not a talent. And glacial spike I feel should also be baseline. But casting it feels too slow. Not sure if it’s affected by haste, but it doesn’t really feel like it. I’d suggest making it a instant cast with a cooldown on it or a slightly faster casting speed? With our nerf to shimmer in Shadowlands, it’s not gonna feel good having to interrupt our GS casts to move. Just a few ideas.
i pretty much only use arcane on my mage because it doesn’t rely on procs like fire or frost
I can say I’ve NEVER seen that happen. Maybe 5 tops, but not 20.
Frost is a great spec, I’ve been a Frost Mage since Vanilla.
The crux of your argument is true: Frost is very proc reliant, especially on non-Glacial Spike sets. This can be problematic when you want to quickly push a phase or pump out numbers. Frost does have talents to generate procs, but again these usually come at a trade off as you’re not in another talent.
Who uses Thermal Void & Ray of Frost > Frozen Orb build favors either of these over Glacial Spike.
Ray of Frost “feels” out of place > That’s just your opinion.
Comet being baseline > Not a bad idea, perhaps? But will likely need tuning. There is an Azerite trait that launches a mini comet, perhaps they could implement something like that into Frost’s kit to spare us the GCD.
Glacial Spike baseline > Um no, it’s incredibly powerful.
Glacial Spike instant > Very OP.
Glacial Spike affected by Haste > Yes, all of your offensive spells (even instant cast spells) are affected by Haste.
Shimmer nerf > Most Glacial Spike sets will favor Ice Floes over Shimmer, especially if you’re also talented into Edonbolt. Shimmer also loses some value in mythic+ dungeons as Blink provides you with the utility to break out of a stun/root, which can allow you to easily bypass many annoying boss and trash pack mechanics.
Frost is relatively average in terms of variance. The procs mostly just affect playstyle, and you fire GS on CD anyway on most of the fights in this tier.
Then you haven’t played the spec long-term or haven’t paid attention.
You’d be 100% incorrect.
I’ve been playing Frost since Vanilla, my first AND second mains were Frost mages, and I still have my first Frost mage from Vanilla which I play daily.
You’re exaggerating or you’re doing something wrong.
20 Frostbolts without a proc is indeed a stretch. I’d say 6-8 is possible given bad RNG.
If you’ve played that long and claim you haven’t had a procless streak over 5 then you haven’t noticed or are compulsively lying. You can expect very regular 5-10 streaks without procs, and a streak as high as 15-20 is common over the course of a raid clear. The highest I’ve had this tier is 27, the highest I’ve seen is 32(ish?) on a fellow Mage.
Looking at my most recent Frost clear in a Heroic sale, my notable procless streaks for BF while specced into FT are:
14 Wrathion
10 Ra-den
14 Drest’agath
10 1st N’zoth
14 2nd N’zoth
Yes I was exaggerating maybe a little bit. However I have had instances where I would have a long streak of no procs, even with frozen touch talented. I’d just like to see it toned down a little bit.
I assume you’re only talking about BF procs.
Are you talking about any procs?
I was assuming we were talking Brainfreeze procs. I’ve gone an entire Time Warp with no proc or only one proc. Definitely have cast twenty FBs without getting it. And yeah I have Frozen Touch.
According to our guild’s raid leader (a Frost Mage), the top parsing Frost build for Mythic Maut as of a few weeks ago was Thermal Void since NoIL isn’t great during stone phase. I think it plays a little better with Infinite Stars than Glacial Spike, too (not recommended for Maut) due to more Haste.
Hello, Frost Mage here.
I’ve had multiple times I’ve been in the teens casting Frostbolt without a BF proc. It happens. To say that it doesn’t get that high, is a lie.
This is really a “I’ve never seen a five buff Roll the Bones in my life” kinda thing.
It’s all rng. Some people can win the bad luck lottery and probably regularly go into the 10s of fb casts with no procs while others will have never even have heard of bad luck like that.
oh, was it about Brain Freeze? I thought it was about any proc. In that case I do agree with you, one can easily go into 2 digit Frostbolt casts without a BF proc.