The death of frost raiding?

by Tachyon on Thu. 04. December 2008, 21:41

Filed under: frostbolt, glyph, raiding, frostfire, qq

I'm more or less one level away from hitting lvl 80, and the more I approach the level cap the more I'm concerned about my choice of frost for raiding.

The big frost killer comes in the form of a glyph:


It adds 5% to the frostbolt damage, but takes away the snare component.
From a boss fight perspective, this is purely good, as bosses can't be snared anyway.
But at the same time it renders frostbolt completely useless in PvP and solo play, I mean seriously, who would use frostbolt anymore outside an instance if it wouldn't have the slowing effect anymore? Even for 5 men instances, it's a bad choice.

Deep Frost was my spec of choice for its superb versatility. I could use the spec for raiding and it was also good for PvP, not the best in both cases but certainly the second best option and therefore the best compromise. Of course one could decide to just not take the glyph, and deal without the 5% damage increase, but no sane raiding guild would accept such a choice from a mage. Oh, and there's of course no alternative frostbolt glyph, either take it and have a raid-only mage spec that's sub par to both Fire and Frostfire or leave it and be benched forever.

No compensation for Ghost Hit and partial resists

In The Burning Crusade, Frost was viable for raiding throughout all raid instances and could compete nicely with fire (which still did 5% more DPS, but's that was acceptable).

Then the 3.0 patch came, and fixed the Ghost Hit bug (Frostbolt gained 6% instead of 3% +hit out of 3/3 Elemental Precision) and also fixed the binary effect of Frostbolt, so it will now also be affected by partial resists (it's about 4% less damage on bosses due to level based resistance). It's good that the bugs were fixed, but if frost was balanced around the previous performance (with the bugs) and now doesn't have any compensation, this only means that we now do significant less damage that with a fire spec.

The snare tax

Frostbolt scales badly anyway, as it get's a 5% penalty on +spellpower because it has a snare effect. This snare tax also applied when the target was immune to the snare effect (bosses for example), and I assume that it will still apply when we would use the Frostbolt glyph. I assume Blizzard forgot about this, since as far as I know we don't have such a snare tax on the new Frostfire Bolt spell.
Taxing for an effect that isn't even applied is wrong on many levels.

Comparison with other glyphs

As a comparison, let's look at what glyphs are available for Fireball and Frostfire Bolt:

• Glyph of Fireball - Increases the critical strike chance of Fireball by 5%, but removes the damage over time effect.
  5% more crit together with Burnout and Ignite results in about 5% more damage (depends on your current crit chance, if you have less than 30% crit on fireball it's even more). The damage loss by the removed DoT is negligible, and the increased crit change even increases the mana return from Master of Elements
• Glyph of Frostfire - Increases the initial damage dealt by Frostfire Bolt by 2% and its critical strike by 2%.
  A superb glyph which boosts the base damage and the crit chance, and we all know how well this spell scales with crit.

These two glyphs are extremely nice, and none of them breaks the gameplay for the according specs. One could argue that the 5% more damage fo the frostbolt glyph boosts frost mages more than 5% crit or 2% crit/damage, but keep in mind that frostbolt spam is only the larger of two slices of a frost mage's DPS. The other, smaller slice is the DPS provided by the water elemental, for that we need a second glyph.

Working around the problem

• For PvE, either spec Fire or better Frostfire. There's currently no reason to spec frost apart from the excellent mana efficiency and the low crit chance on the beginner's gear at lvl 80.
• For PvP, stay frost, and don't get the glyph. Live with the fact that there's no valid glyph for your bread-and-butter nuke.
• For PvE/PvE: Spec frost, take the glyph in order to not to be completely screwed in DPS terms, and use Frostfire Bolt as an opener in PvP. This is very risky, as this exposes both the frost and fire tree to a counterspell. Reapplying the snare is also problematic, as soon as your opponent uses the insignia when you're already started casting a Frostbolt.

We can only wait and hope that the dual-spec feature will come more sooner than later (hopefully with patch 3.1, but that will still take some months), and that we will have two sets of glyphs then, one for each spec.

Even then, I'm afraid Frost is dead for raiding.

Are there any frost raiders left out there?
Are you PvPing and raiding with the same spec?
Do you use the Frostbolt glyph, and how much does it impact your gameplay?

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Frostfire Bolt tested

by Tachyon on Thu. 27. November 2008, 00:47

Filed under: frostfire bolt, elemental, spec, talents, leveling, frostbolt, glyph

I recently dinged level 75, and decided to give the new Frostfire Bolt (FFB) a try. The build I chose is basically a fire build without Improved Fireball, and 18 points in frost to get the full advantage of Shatter: 0/48/18 Frostfire spec.



What I like about this build and Frostfire bolt in general:

• The spec has almost all the talents that make the FFB go *boom* (2 points in Burnout are missing, need lvl 77 to get the full potential of FFB)
• Hot Streak is seksy! This allows to throw out an instant Pyroblast on any two subsequent FFB (or Scorch, Fireblast or Fireball) hits.
• The build still has the full damage potential of Blizzard, thanks to Shatter, Frostbite and Improved Blizzard.
• The maximal range of FFB is larger (40y) than that of Frostbolt (30y, 36y with Arctic Reach), which makes it the perfect spell for pulling (distance + snare = even more distance)
• New fun shatter combo: Frostnova, FFB + Fireblast -> good chance that both crit and thus proc Hot Streak -> say hello to instant Pyro!
• The FFB Glyph actually makes sense (2% more base damage, +2% crit)

What I miss or don't like about it:

• I seriously miss Ice Barrier. Running around without it is like going shopping naked, and generally a bad idea on a PvP server. Ice Barrier gives you the same announcement effect as the blue colored poison dart frogs have: don't mess with the blue dude!
  Of course you don't really need Ice Barrier to survive while levelling, but it usually absorbs enought damage for you to never get hurt. Without it, I constantly lose some HP and have to regenerate more after a few fights, as I get a bad feeling starting a pull with only half of my HP left.
  Ice Barrier is also essential in PvP. As a rule of thumb you can count twice its absorb amout as virtual HP, and with Shattered Barrier you gain essential utility against meele attackers (especially in AoE situations)
• I miss the Water Elemental a little, but just a little. It has undisputed value and contributes a lot to DPS and utility, but hey I could live without it if I get its DPS from elsewhere. I still hate it for not scaling well (it just gets 40% of my Spellpower, but no hot/crit/haste at all) and forget to bring it out regularly (though most of the time I don't need it just for killing 1-3 mobs and then travelling again), but in the end I miss its ranged nova and separate threat pool in instances.
• I loved Deep Freeze for its croud control and mobile burst capabilities (FoF->DF->move and icelance), so I miss it now already.
• The mana consumption is way higher with a FFB or fire build than with frost. If MMOs were a little more realistic, I would pee an ocean every five minutes, I'm reallly just drinking all the time. Hot Streak with an instant Pyro waiting and no mana left = no fun.
• Blastwave is nice, but I can't seem to fall in love with Dragon's Breath. Cone of Cold feels so much better than this 'zomg look I ate chilli!" spell. For AoE I wouldn't use it anyway, for that we have Blizzard now.
• I think I hate Ignite. Sure my FFB and fire spells crit all the time, but the Ignite dot is usually just wasted as mobs tend to die before it starts ticking. When my FFB or Pyro crits and the target has 2k HP left, I could just stand there and wait 4 sec for it to die, but that's so silly and I don't have the nerves to wait, so in the end I put an end to the tragedy with a quick Fireblast before it drives me crazy. Better waste mana and ignite ticks than my sanity.
  Frost is so much more honest, if you crit a nice big number responds to your action, that's instant reward and not the DoT fluff of a critting fire spell where tiny 'me too!' numbers plop up some seconds later.

All in all the FFB spec is not bad, and I'd consider it the preferred spec for instance/raid runs if your mana pool allows it. Former fire mages should love it, pulling with a snare can be so much more fun, but for frost mages it just hasn't the versatility we need.


I'm yet unsure whether I will be raiding with Frost (0/10/61) or Frostfire (0/50/21) once I reach level 80.
If only we could have the promised dual spec right away, then I'd take Frostfire for instances and raiding, and Frost for PvP, but we probably will have to wait for the 3.1 patch before we can have two specs with hopefully also two sets of Glyphs.

My biggest concern for frost is the Frostbolt Glyph. Adding 5% damage is nice for sure, but removing the snare component completely spoils frost for me. I'm playing frost since the vanilla beta, but I can't think of any issue that bothered me as much as the Frostbolt Glyph is now. If I want to be raiding, the +5% damage is a must, but then my Frostbolt is completely screwed for solo and PvP. Seriously, I just won't use that glyph, and no sane frost mage should be forced to use it.

There's only one thing you can do with the Frostbolt Glyph: put it back into the original packaging, return it to Blizzard and claim refunds because it's KAPUT.

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