Pretty much all of these types of weapons don’t do any additional frost damage or other school of damage, only physical. I’ve tested this multiple times in prep for Viscidus in AQ40 with iceblade hacker, I did have the frost bolt proc weapons prior to that and they work fine.
This means you don’t get frost dmg added to a weapon that states it does additional frost damage.
I do remember a bug back in Wotlk with an axe from Storm Peaks rep that caused multiple embue’s to proc twice which these weapons may of been effected during the hotfix during 3.0.3
item: brunnhildar axe
These are the weapons i’ve tested so far with no additional frost damage outside of the proc itself there’s no base +5 frost damage.
item: iceblade hacker
item: warblade of caer darrow
item: cobalt crusher
Correct, Its basically physical damage that ignores the armor, basically. At least that’s how it worked back in vanilla.
I use the Cold Rage daggers, at least that’s what we used in vanilla because they do actual frost damage on a proc. I think you can also use frost oil, cant actually remember if that works but I remember it procs decently enough.
Yeah frost oil definitely works, used it for my 3 man lvl 60 viscidus kill during mop, I was just thinking having it frost damage on every hit would be better than a proc as it will be much faster than frost oil and Cold Rage dagger, unfortunate that it doesn’t currently deal frost damage at all and only shows physical dmg in the combat log, I’ve even tested it during scholo on the dark shades and it just states immune even though it should deal 1-5 frost dmg which it doesn’t
It was definitely changed during 3.0.3 and not changed back for classic wow
Did a little diggin and found that theory goes that they did it intentionally in vanilla so that the code was simpler, less “stuff” to do server side keeping things more efficient.
do you have patch notes/hot fix numbers? would be great to settle this as “working as intended” if thats the case, i certainly remember things with +frost dmg hitting for frost dmg up until patch 3.0.3
Let me get some links. Nothing confirmed by blizzard development.
From 2006 https://classicdb.ch/?item=13982#comments
According to the comments section of the time, the frost damage shows up as white damage, and passes through armor and is a component of the total DPS value of the weapon. Warblade of Caer Darrow.
Sounds like its as I thought it was, they are just white damage that passes though armor, like a spell attack. Maybe it has a frost damage spell check for things like frost protection, that I dont know.
As for would that count as frost damage? Easy to test, Duel a player with a frost protection pot and see if that will expire before the timer, if it does then we have our answer.
If they do consume a frost protection potion, then it should in theory work vs Viscidus. =)
We wanted to take a moment to clarify that the extra elemental damage from weapons such as Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, Iceblade Hacker, and Warblade of Caer Darrow are behaving as expected in WoW Classic and do not actually cause additional non-physical damage to the target. They do however still inflict extra damage in the amount specified in the tooltips. This is not noted in the combat log separately and is simply calculated as additional physical damage added to the weapon’s attack.
That being said, it has been noticed by players that when using an elemental barrier such as a nature/frost/fire protection potion or a shield that absorbs a specific element, you will see an “absorbed (X)” message in the combat log. This is also correct and working as expected, and such effects will reduce the damage of attacks by such weapons by the amount of extra elemental damage specified in the weapon tooltip.
Ultimately the way these weapons function is a very old quirk/bug with how original World of Warcraft was built. While definitely strange and unintuitive, these weapons are behaving exactly as they did in the original game and we have no intention of changing them to behave differently in WoW Classic.
I hope this helps provide some clarity around this very odd quirk inherent to these types of weapons!
this might sound kinda dumb and I’m likely missing something, but if frostward is still checking if it’s frost damage and absorbing it despite being physical, why wouldn’t viscidus have a similar check built it?
This question remains though. Does the range of magic damage ignore armor? If it’s calculated as physical damage, that implies there is absolutely nothing special going on.
Thanks for the clarification Aggrend, glad it wasn’t something strange from 3.0.3.
Based on this info viscidus won’t add a “frost hit” using these weapons so I’ll need to get a Darrowspike and Glacial Blade and douse them in Frost Oil
similarly if a player becomes immune to physical damage - such as with blessing of protection or limited invulnerability potion - they still take a small amount of elemental damage each swing from iceblade hacker and thunderfury.
I can 100% guarantee that the 1h axe that drops from Scholo [Frostblade Hacker] does literally nothing. I counted thousands of hits with it, with and without cold damage/spell power, and even did PvP with mages who had Frost Ward up, and no where did I see anything about cold damage being dealt, taken, or absorbed.
The direct damage the axe didn’t seem to function as a 58-111 damage axe either, however over a period of several hundred white autos I got bored and didn’t tally a higher sample size to narrow it down whether or not the flat cold was added into those hits.
