Help me be a better Frost Mage for my Guild!

[danyl]

Mod edit: Moved to Q&A

Firstly, just want to apologize if this is the wrong way/area to post this.

My guild is currently working on progression through Heroic ToS (currently 8/9H looking to get KJ down this week). I feel like I'm bringing us down in the damage department, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong. Some fights, I'll parse green for my ilvl and others I'll parse gray. I don't believe my gear is bad and I think I have a pretty solid idea of the rotation, but clearly somethings wrong as I am pretty sure I should be doing better than what I'm currently pulling! Please help me get better!

Information:


Legendaries: Helm, Prydaz, Norgannon's, Shard of the Exodar
Set Bonuses: 4pc T20 and 2pc T19
Logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CqjbzPtkfTZNRxvA - this is from our most recent ToS run. I'm the Frostmage Danylle
Armory: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/chara ... ad/danylle

I know I'm doing something wrong and feel terrible. I just want to be better

Thanks Kindly!
Danyl

[danyl]

Forgot to mention. I've been simming myself and usually anything other than the current gear set up appears to net me -10k give or take, so normally I keep the 2pc for utility rather than an ilvl upgrade of 1 or 2 levels etc.

[nickseng]

Just had time for a quick glimpse through your logs and 1 big thing leapt out at me

Your crit% of your IL, frostbolt and Ebonbolt are horrible.

There was one instance where you only had 58% of your IL critting!

I'm not sure if you're just spamming Ice Lances willy-nilly or what. And you need to make sure you shatter your frostbolt and Ebons

[danyl]

Duly noted. Most times, I find myself throwing a few Ice Lances out when I am not in a position to cast (ie movement for mechanics like in avatar, maiden etc). Should this be avoided? I kind of considered it "squeezing in damage".

And thanks for the look over!

[danyl]

Also, just in case I'm missing something, when you say "shatter my frost bolts" I assume you mean using an FoF proc after a frost bolt, correct?

[Katsumi]

What he means is to use a Flurry right after a Frostbolt. The Flurry travels faster, will hit before the Frostbolt, apply its debuff and will make the Frostbolt crit. Whenever you get a Brain Freeze Proc you want to use the combination Frostbolt-Flurry-Ice Lance. You should also Flurry immediately after you cast an Ebonbolt, the same mechanic applies.

Other than that, you never want to use Ice Lance without a FoF proc. If you need to move it's more beneficial for your raid to spend the first GCD on your Ice Barrier, which you only need to do if you are out of Shimmer stacks. If you need to move more than that you messed up your positioning somewhere before that moment.

However, Avatar is likely the only boss where that won't be sufficient, because shimmer doesn't help to avoid the incoming ground effect. If you're out of procs and unlucky you can find yourself forced to ice lance there. That's one of the reasons many switch to Fire for that particular fight.

[danyl]

Ok, so after watching around 3 hours of videos last night and reading what you've all posted I think it's safe to say I've learned a fair bit.

Only use Ice Lance with FoF procs, always shatter when available (Frostbolt/Flurry/Ice Lance or Ebonbolt/Flurry/Ice Lance).
From what I can gather the normal rotation appears to always use Frostbolt before expending FoF procs (stack dependent)
No wasting Ice Lances during downtime

Is there anything I may have missed in there? thanks everyone again for all the help!

[Xinder]

You don't have to use frostbolt before expending FoF procs, but what you can do is if you're only at 1 FoF charge or 2, you can fish for another proc with frostbolt casts while waiting for your Incanter's flow stack to get closer to 5 before you consume the FoF procs. That's assuming that the buff timer on FoF isn't about to expire, of course use it before you lose it no matter what IF stack number you're at, it's just something you can keep in mind if you have room.

Also out of curiosity, is there a reason you aren't using the Helm and Shard and 4pc T20? Did you sim it and it not do better than the low ilvl T19? I only ask because for myself personally, I had 895 and 900 T19 and Helm/Shard with 4PC T20 simmed about 20k more than 2pc + 4pc with bracers/shard. Given your T19 ilvl is lower than that I'd wager a guess that if you have a way to keep yourself at shatter cap you could use helm and shard to do more dmg. Also assuming you have another piece of T20 you can use in place of the helm slot.

[danyl]

Generally, the reason I don't run the helm/shard is because the 19/20 set sims always just a SMIDGE higher

It's kind of upsetting!

[nickseng]

You don't have to use frostbolt before expending FoF procs, but what you can do is if you're only at 1 FoF charge or 2, you can fish for another proc with frostbolt casts while waiting for your Incanter's flow stack to get closer to 5 before you consume the FoF procs. That's assuming that the buff timer on FoF isn't about to expire, of course use it before you lose it no matter what IF stack number you're at, it's just something you can keep in mind if you have room.

Doing those are a good way to munch your FOF/BF procs.
Don't try to game your IF, or hold on to your FOF charges. Just spend them as they come.

[Xinder]

You don't have to use frostbolt before expending FoF procs, but what you can do is if you're only at 1 FoF charge or 2, you can fish for another proc with frostbolt casts while waiting for your Incanter's flow stack to get closer to 5 before you consume the FoF procs. That's assuming that the buff timer on FoF isn't about to expire, of course use it before you lose it no matter what IF stack number you're at, it's just something you can keep in mind if you have room.

Doing those are a good way to munch your FOF/BF procs.
Don't try to game your IF, or hold on to your FOF charges. Just spend them as they come.

I didn't say always do it or keep frostbolting if you get a BF proc. If you only have 1 FoF proc and are sitting at 1 IF stack there's literally no reason to fire off the FoF charge. Even if you just threw out frozen orb you can wait until you get to 3 FoF charges before launching an IL. Gaming the IF stacks isn't something to be done all the time, I get that, but if you're in scenarios like I tried to describe there's no reason not to at least glance at where your IF stacks are at because you get more benefit if you're in the 4-5 stack range then you do launching FoF charges at 1 stack of IF. You're talking a shattered IL with a 4% dmg increase(1 stack of IF) versus a 16-20% dmg increase(4 and 5 stacks of IF respectively).

I see no reason why it shouldn't be something people can choose to do as a little bit extra to improve as a player. Their choice if they want to, but I see no harm in providing the suggestion. Again, I'm not advocating trying to game IF every second of a fight, but when you see moments or opportunities to hold on to a FoF charge or two and not munch anything while waiting for IF to get to higher stacks, it can help eek out a bit more dmg.

[nickseng]

I didn't say always do it or keep frostbolting if you get a BF proc. If you only have 1 FoF proc and are sitting at 1 IF stack there's literally no reason to fire off the FoF charge. Even if you just threw out frozen orb you can wait until you get to 3 FoF charges before launching an IL.

There is a reason why you shouldn't do it .... it's to avoid munching FOF charges. The more FOF charges you're holding, the more likely you're gonna have FOF charges when your BF procs. And when that happens, you'd prioritize your BF over IL, which means you munch a charge.

But you don't have to take my word for it. They've simmed and tested the various scenarios.

https://imgur.com/oT8NzWT

[Xinder]

I didn't say always do it or keep frostbolting if you get a BF proc. If you only have 1 FoF proc and are sitting at 1 IF stack there's literally no reason to fire off the FoF charge. Even if you just threw out frozen orb you can wait until you get to 3 FoF charges before launching an IL.

There is a reason why you shouldn't do it .... it's to avoid munching FOF charges. The more FOF charges you're holding, the more likely you're gonna have FOF charges when your BF procs. And when that happens, you'd prioritize your BF over IL, which means you munch a charge.

But you don't have to take my word for it. They've simmed and tested the various scenarios.

https://imgur.com/oT8NzWT

Ok. We can disagree about how there are instances and times where looking at your IF stacks and launching FoF in a window where it's at 4-5 can be helpful.

[danyl]

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone! After last night's Heroic Kil'Jaeden pull, I parsed 77% on our first pull!

Thanks everyone!