[TC] Feedback and analysis after WoD launch

[nathyiel]

I compile a lot of the feedback and issue over the period from launch to now. It end up being huge, very huge.
Some issue from WoD are still here, a lot are new. Some come from the lack of balance, other from gameplay or bug.

I haven't done the infamous testing of FoF & BF proc rate. But I will try to check at it too.

What is the actual state of the Frost mage spec ?

1. Feedback & Balance
2. in detail
3. Know issue & bug
4. Proposition

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1. Feedback & Balance
The first two things that every mage notice in WoD are : how low Frostbolt’s damage are, and how fragile we now are. Mage are Glass Canon and Frost mage is really made of thin ice. But WoD also show a return of the kitting as it’s the best tool for mage to survive some encounters.

leveling and questing.

The leveling process, and by extension the whole PvE experience, are really fine and smooth. But talent choice can have a great impact. As example, if leveling with Unstable Magic do good result, Ice Nova seem the talent of choice while Frost Bomb show to be difficult to use.
Frostbolt’s lack of damage can lead to some very dangerous situation leading to 2 possibility : kite or death.
The change to Deep Freeze is really impacting here. Before it was both a control tool, stopping a mob to reap us to death, and a DPS tool allowing us to burn him alive. Actually, there so little use of this spell that I have removed it from my binding.

dungeon

Frost in dungeon feel really good with it have similar problem.
Survivability is mostly provided by healer. But with some fight mechanics that require soloing mobs quickly while taking constant damage , the low frostbolt’s damage/low survivability problem show up fully with bad luck or bad timing.
AoE is strange as it’s difficult to know when to go full AoE or to keep Cleaving. Improved Blizzard perk really feel good.

PvP

The first concern is with Deep Freeze. Why choosing to make it break on damage ? Removing the frozen effect (and its associated cost) could have been enough to keep the burst capability in-line. Know these spell is more or less useless because the risk to push Stun on DR is great.
My second concern is for Multistrike PvP change. how is intended to work with Brain Freeze proc generation ?



2. In detail

Survivability

If it don’t really show during leveling, the questing in level 100 area are really a pain to manage heal between combat. Outside of the difficulty to find safe place to sit and eat, it’s the frequency to do so that are problematic.

Frostbolt damage and proc randomness

Frostbolt damage feel a lot too low but these feeling is reinforced by the proc randomness. Because of the way Brain Freeze proc, it’s not frequent until 620 ilevel. Fingers of Frost proc are really present only during Frozen orb and every 30s with Water Jet/Freeze. But outside of it, it’s just Frostbolt spam.
I think Fingers of Frost as too much way to proc it. It’s random but can be generated.

Cleave, AoE and Mastery.

It’s difficult to know when to AoE and when to keep the rotation and just cleave. Our AoE rotation is centered around Frozen orb and Ice Lance spamming, with Blizzard to quickly recovering Frozen orb. Cleave depend a lot on Ice Lance too but outside of Frozen orb, it just don’t proc enough. When to switch between the 2 rotations is very difficult to find out.
Those two situation are also problematic as Mastery is ignored. The biggest the pack of mob is, the less these stat is interesting. It’s to the point that our AoE just ignore it completely. It just make gearing even more complicated.

L75 versus L100.

There is a strange feeling after hitting level 100 : the new talent feel weaker and less important than those at level 75. It can explain by the fact that is the level 75 that do damage on all those pack of mob, not the level 100. The only one, that are useful in cleave and AoE situation, is Thermal void. At contrarily, Prismatic Crystal and Comet Storm are weaker as the number of mob increase.
There’s two explanation of this situation : Prismatic Crystal and Comet Storm are shared damage, and the balance of damage between those two talent’s rows. But pushing part of the AoE damage from L75 to L100 could help a lot in making this talent interesting.

Level 75 talent

Frost bomb and Unstable Magic are amazing talent but have some specific difficulty.
Frost Bomb is difficult to apprehend by the casual player. It’s not really a DoT but not a really a Debuff too. A lot of player liked the old mechanism. Why not pushing the main damage as a timed explosion while keeping the AoE on Frozen Ice Lance? It will reward player skill while it will be : “put frost bomb on main target” for more casual player.
Unstable Magic problematic come from its randomness. During questing or in dungeon, it’s not rare to not see an explosion on two pack in a row. It feel that these talent not worth it compared to Frost Bomb or Ice Nova that have guaranteed result. A possibility would be to change the proc rate at 40% or more while reducing the damage, if not 100%. The player will see a more regular AoE, knowing that these talent is a good option.
Ice Nova has another problem. In dungeon, it’s the perfect tool because it offer very good damage and AoE control. But adding tank control ability, it’s possible to push mob into stun DR.

Level 100 talent

There is a lot of issue with this Comet Storm.
Its damage are low for a 30s Cooldown of the level 100 talents. Those talent change the rotation around their use. But Comet Storm damage are not important enough so all other Frost aspect, like Fingers of Frost or Frost bomb, is more important. It’s damage are weaker than Ice Nova or Brain Freezed Frostfire bolt. The logic say that the rarer a spell is, the mightier it is. A 30s spell should hit harder than a 25s spell or a proc that proc every 10s. It should feel like Meteor : “nuclear attack incoming”.
Part of its damage can be avoided easily. Even snared mob can avoid one or two comets. Root are break by the first comet, allowing the target to move outside of the small area of effect.
There’s a lack of interaction with other class mechanism. Other level 100 talent have interaction except Comet Storm. It’s just a fire and forget spell. It don’t put a snare on mob, Shatter or generate Icicle. There’s a lot of possibility.



3. know issue & bug

Water Elemental

Welly show some serious A.I. problem with Line of Sight, Water Jet auto-cast confusion. It also forget that it’s invisible and keep attacking it’s target.
There’s some difficulty around Water Jet. Maybe the tool-tip isn’t clear enough.

glyph choice

Our glyph haven’t change that much. Some are very situation when other feel near mandatory. None of those glyph are real choice like it’s the case for glyph of Arcane Power. The most interesting choice of glyph is Icy Veins because it trade Haste for Multistrike. Because Haste have so many “soft cap” and the spec use so many instant spell, using the glyph do better damage in most case, “infinite IV” being the exception.
Cone of Cold, Water Elemental and Splitting Ice can’t be called “good glyph” as they just add mechanism. even more, glyph of Water Elemental is so fundamental that not using it result in dead pet on a lot of fight.



4. conclusion
The spec is in a very good situation globally. It’s not too much gear dependent like Fire and it perform well. Even if most of the issue are small and don’t feel important, there’s an accumulation that give an awkward feeling.
Fingers of Frost generation is a good example. It feel like Dev haven’t choose if it’s a proc to react, a resource to manage or a filler spell.
Comet Storm is another good example. Very well designed and awesome animation but it just have no situation to shine.

Finally, it make me think that it was tuned around the T17 bonus, especially the 4-pieces that give a lot of Fingers of Frost proc, but forgetting that it won’t be here before the Blackrock Foundry raid.

[Mumrit]

Misc thoughts, not in any particular order:

I think it's important to emphasize that frostbolt feels weak. It isn't actually weak (It's DPET is still decent for a filler), but it's damage being backloaded in the form of icicles leads to one of two things happening.

1.) You hit a 6th stack of icicles, firing off your first stack at the target for a delayed hit. Instead of seeing frostbolt hit for 6k (it's effective damage per cast), you instead see it hit for 4k and then a half second later a small 2k hit.

2.) All of your frostbolt damage is fired off when you proc Icelance, thus seeing a large chunk of damage followed by several smaller damage increments reminiscent of a DoT.

IMO, Icicles does a good job of making Icelance feel more powerful, even though it's goal was to make frostbolt feel more rewarding. The damage done when casting frostbolt just doesn't translate well.

While soloing, I'm more inclined to run away and spam a non-FoF icelance on a mob if I don't have an immediate means of generating a proc (frozen orb, waterjet) rather than try to hard cast frostbolt. Either way, I seem to suffer the same amount of down time at the end of a pull. The spamming of ice lance just allows me to take less hits for nearly comparable damage when factoring in the cleave.

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Questing in level 100 zones does feel like an absolute chore unless you're using a bodyguard. It's worsened by the rate of spawns when an area is well populated. While most classes are able to move from mob to mob healing, we have to find a safe place to sit and eat often unless we're using cool downs on nearly every pull. It's a break in the action that makes the experience seem slower than it should. It's to the point where if my bodyguard dies for whatever reason, I'll simply go do something else for an hour rather than suffer the downtime between pulls.

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I could have not received a level 100 talent and not noticed it while soloing. PC doesn't interest me for much of the same reasons that RoP doesn't. CmS seems entirely too weak compared to it's counter parts, and beyond it's fun graphic it's interaction with the spec just leaves it feeling entirely too vanilla for a level 100 ability while also costing a key bind. By default I've taken TV, which feels like it's rewarding me for spamming non-FoF icelances even more.

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I'll leave RoP out of this because I simply never liked it. I like the idea behind MI, but they die too quickly when questing. It's a large chunk of damage to be missing for five or so seconds of having a mob leave me alone every two minutes. I wanted to use it, but I've switched to IF and pretty much just ignore it. I'm not sure that's an intended way of selecting a talent. My mindset is literally, "I lose too much by taking the one I want."

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Our glyphs are extremely limited. It feels like we've been left behind where there has been a lot of chance to add flavor to the class.

[TLTeo]

I don't feel like soloing at 100 is that bad (and i usually go without a bodyguard), but i do rotate cooldowns a lot. PC actually feels handy in that i can pop MI, pull a bunch of mobs and cleave them all down very quickly. I can't do this very often, but it makes up for the downtime when my cooldowns aren't up. I found that Ice Ward is extremely useful, much more so than during levelling (but then again i was in mythic gear).

Other than that i very much agree, especially on glyphs. It's too bad they didn't take any of Imrick's awesome ideas from this forum.

[Dutchmagoz]

I actually really like frost now! Having a lot of fun with it. A fair bit of diverse talents as well, I see myself swapping ice nova/fbomb and mirror images/incanter's flow quite often.

There are some negatives I have with it though:

- No real glyph choices. Right now, splitting ice and icy-veins glyphs are mandatory and a single target + aoe dps gain in every single situation. This only leaves 1 spot actual working room.
- Outside of cooldowns, our DPS is really low. Our total DPS overall is quite good, but it's so extremely frontloaded on frozen orb / PC / [fbomb/IN] combo. Outside of such combos, our DPS just feels really bad, especially on multiple targets. Casting frostbolts for 6k each [in very high gear] on a pack of 3 mobs is just really silly. I'm not really sure on how to fix this without scaling issues though.

[nathyiel]

How to fix it is the real problem.
I think all those are all tied between them.
Frostbolt feel weak note because of it's damage but because of the way proc are generated, mostly FoF. But changing FoF proc lead to the purpose of Frozen Orb and Water Jet that lead to Mastery that should be working in AoE situation too.

I can resume the situation by sorting all those problems in 3 category :
1) Bug - Water Elemental A.I.
2) Balance problem - L100 isn't powerful enough. L75 is too powerful.
3) Design - Cleave/AoE confusion. Frostbolt/proc. Glyph.

With a cleaner rotation, it will be easier to define how much damage should come from Frostbolt, etc. I find it interesting to see that L75 and L100 talent are more integrated into the rotation than core spec. Outside of Comet Storm, every talent have some sort of interaction. But all those synergies resolve around Fingers of Frost. But these mechanism use it like some sort of resource to manage (generation/use) but it's a proc with added way to generate it.
On the other end, we have a proc that is the most powerful spell of the spec but that have no interaction, except with the very random Unstable Magic talent. These spell has no use in AoE rotation.
The fact that the whole spec resolve around one things is also problematic. The whole spec depend on Frostbolt proc things : Icicle, Bran Freeze with Multistrike, FoF directly, FoF with Water jet, etc.
It feel like the spec is an accumulation of interesting idea (reactive bomb, infinite buff through smart management, etc). It's a little confusing and messy but it work well.

It's too late for mechanism change but some adjustment can be done.
-> make icicle feel interesting. Damage is too delayed.
-> clarify the separation between cleave and AoE. make use of Mastery with AoE spell. It can be done by capping the number of target of level 75 talent and by tuning them down.
-> make L100 interesting, especially Comet Storm.
-> increase UM explosion rate to make it useful every pull.

It should need a specific topic for what we see for the spec in the future.

Finally, I want to tell that my post can feel like the Frost spec is unplayable, or anythings. No, it's quite the contrary. The spec is fun to play but there's some issue that spoil it.

[nathyiel]

I did a few math on Comet Storm versus Prismatic Crystal this afternoon.

I wont compare TV because it's overly complicated compared at what I want : explaining why Comet Storm feel so weak.

CmS dps : in the gear I use (BiS), I end up with 35k damage for 1.1k dps.
PC dps : I calculate damage done by PC and added the cleave effect in single target. I only add AoE effect for 2+ targets. I end up with (st/2+) :

• Fbomb - 2.46k / 1.52k dps
• UM - 2.04k / 1.08k dps
• IN - 2.47k / 1.73k dps

The difference is obvious. PC is 2 times bigger on single target, and only 1.5 times for 2+ targets.

It show a few things :
>> Unstable Magic don't work well with PC. I use average number so my number do account for the fact that it can proc each FFB or never. Maybe, it's under tuned.
>> CmS need a serious buff
>> PC is really a single target spell. the Cleave effect count for 40% of it's damage. Be sure to be able to cleave on the boss when using it.
>> L100 talent count for 6%-8% of total dps. L75 do 8% to 10% (and a lot more with more target).

edit> it's important to note that PC is 1*gcd when CmS use 3*"1s gcd".