It seems that frost mages are at the bottom again at the start of phase 3 raiding, blizzard will you ever make them viable in raids? I’m not even holding out for them to be strong in Molten Core at this point as I’m sure fire and arcane mages will still have a rune/way to do more damage to fire elementals (frostfire bolt or w/e) and still come out on top.
I feel like all the talks about other classes needing nerfs/buffs (paladins/shamans/hunters/warriors, etc.) frost mages just never get heard and remain the quiet child in the corner no one pays attention too.
Frost was viable in era PVE because mages were straight up broken. Why should the PVP control spec also be top DPS, when mages already have great DPS specs?
Blizzard shares a single brain cell with half the community on the forums when working with frost mages. Has been trash in pvp and pve since phase 1, yet you still see the forums finest say its mages “pvp” spec despite you don’t use any of the frost runes that make frost mage frost mage. Instead you play an alternate version of fire if you want to put a few more points into frost spec. Ice lance, fingers of frost and brain freeze hasn’t been touch once despite how bad it has been since the start of SoD. Not even a pity buff.
Frost mages shouldn’t be viable in pve content. It makes sense as a pvp spec and that should be what the focus is on for improving it. Frost is all about cc at the cost of less damage compared to fire, that falls directly under the pvp category.
In actual Vanilla WoW and Classic, frost mages were an efficient spec because of the low mana cost of Frostbolt compared to Fire Ball and the fact that Molten Core and Blackwing Lair mobs were immune to Fire damage. Otherwise, the spec is pretty low on damage. This was somewhat made better in TBC. That said, I would like Frost to not be bottom-tier DPS.
I’m not asking them to be top dps, would be happy around middle of the pack as I get they have more control toolkit talents over arcane/fire which I would expect them to be above them unless we’re talking about a raid like MC and hopefully then it would be arcane/frost above fire just for that raid at least.
I’ve done at least 60+ BFD runs in phase 1 as I have a ton of alts and never ONCE saw a frost mage or frostbolt being casted. Same again with phase 2. There has to be solutions with runes or something for frost mages having a viable spec/rune setup to run in PVE content where the raid leader says no thanks, we don’t want a bottom dps, fire mage only. Not everyone that wants to play a frost mage fantasy enjoys PVP. We pay a subscription and can voice our opinions just like everyone else to blizzard. Of course, I welcome any concerns on the other side as they should be taken into account with any changes blizz may add to boost frost mage pve dmg.
WCL is fixing the frost FFB spec (formerly known as Winters Chill FFB spec) to be classified as frost mage, so there will be plenty of “better” performing frost mages in the logs once that change goes into effect.
0/10/31 spec will be considered frost as it should
0/31/10 spec will remain as fire ofc
Alot of raids will be running a frost mage technically. Some info from the mage discord pins:
If you have more than 1 DPS mage: You should run 1 FFB-Winter’s Chill (0/10/31) and 1 FFB-Scorch (0/31/10) They do similar dps and they do more than 2x Fire-FFB.
What’s the difference between FFB-Scorch and Fire-FFB? Wouldn’t the mage that doesn’t have to worry about putting up and maintaining Imp Scorch be the highest DPS easily since they can just spam FFB non-stop?
Also I’ll believe it when I see it that 10/31 is good, much less 2x as good as Fire lol. No Critical Mass/Fire Power/Combustion = no bueno.
I might have accidentally written ffb-fire and ffb-scorch but those are both technically ffb-fire semantically.
if you are interested in the actual numbers, feel free to join the mage discord and check sims/run your own, ask for advice. The guys in there are hella helpful and put in tons of work.
So with the WCL changes can blizzard delete ice lance and replace it with something else since they have committed to leaving it as a dead spell. Like at this point why does it even exist.
Oh I see what you are saying. Having 1x FFB/Winter’s Chill mage and 1xFFB/Scorch is more overall DPS between the 2 of them than 2x FFB/Scorch mages. It sounded like you were saying both FFB/Winter’s Chill and FFB/Scorch do 2x more dps individually than Fire/FFB which made no sense to me lol
I am not 100% on how Piercing Ice scales but I think it my technically still be a buff over playing just fire mage. You will still have the 15% extra scorch damage +10% extra crit. The what would determine if its a buff if Piercing Ice works like spell power or not. Currently SP it just chooses whichever higher SP stat you have so having 100 fire and 20 frost sp doesn’t give you 120 sp just 100. But since piercing is just a % it might still count but not 100% sure. I am sure someone in the mage discord knows.
If it does though I would suspect it to be in order of
WC mage with no Scorch mage < fire mage with no Winter chill mage < WC mage with scorch mage < Fire mage with winter’s chill mage
