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Q u o t e:
But your logic behind letting it proc FFB being bad was because it would give frost another instant snare. Then you didn't like the idea of a snare-less FFB proc just to be antagonistic it appears.

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No, I'm not being antagonistic at all. I just think that it's a really bad idea.

There are only two problems with putting FFB on Brain Freeze.

1) The average damage Fireball and Frostfire would output would be similar. Frostfire would crit harder, but Fireball has a higher co-ef so in the end, it'd balance out.

2) FFB's snare could theoretically let it proc off itself, resulting in a series of instant FFBs.

Damage-wise, there's virtually no advantage to FFB proccing on BF. If the snare were removed and the range reduced, you'd barely be able to tell the difference.

Aesthetically, though, it sure is less icky.

Is it really a DPS loss? I mean Frostfire does take advantage of all the frost talents, so you can't compare an untalented Frostfire Bolt with an untalented Fireball.

It'd be more like an untalented fireball vs Frostfire Bolt with 100% extra crit damage, 16% more damage with the ability to proc itself and FoF. That makes Frostfire Bolt a FAR better contender for Brain Freeze than Fireball. Considering how far frost is behind every other spec in PvE it'd really help to improve it's position in regards to everything else. The only issue is how to prevent it from over-powering PvP.

It also ties in with Frozen Core where Blizzard is pushing to have Frostfire used there as well. Seems kind of odd in my opinion that Blizzard is trying to force so many extra spells into the frost tree. Seems really clunky. Not only do we have frostbolts, but also fireballs and frostfire bolts. That's the primary nuke of 3 different specs in 1 play-style. What next? A way to tie in Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast into frost as well? Went off on a tangent there but my point is that it'd be nice if Blizzard focus'd on bringing a single extra nuke (either fireball or frostfire bolt) into conjunction with the frost rotation, not multiple.

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Q u o t e:
Is it really a DPS loss?

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FFB is a tiny DPS gain over Fireball. Really tiny, like 1%. You can actually try it out yourself in SimulationCraft; it permits you to set up FFBs on Brain Freeze procs for theorycrafting purposes. The DPS increase is really miniscule. Not nonexistent, but not really worth talking about.

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Q u o t e:
FFB is a tiny DPS gain over Fireball. Really tiny, like 1%. You can actually try it out yourself in SimulationCraft; it permits you to set up FFBs on Brain Freeze procs for theorycrafting purposes. The DPS increase is really miniscule. Not nonexistent, but not really worth talking about.

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I haven't seen anywhere this may have been mentioned but did you realize Frostfire Bolt can proc Fingers of Frost? Has that been calculated into the DPS difference between Fireball and Frostfire Bolt?

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Q u o t e:
I haven't seen anywhere this may have been mentioned but did you realize Frostfire Bolt can proc Fingers of Frost? Has that been calculated into the DPS difference between Fireball and Frostfire Bolt?

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The fact that FFB can proc FoF is one of the reasons why FFB will never be on Brain Freeze. :p

I'm not sure what the fixation is on having Brain Freeze proc Frostfire Bolt instead of Fireball. I guess because people want FFB to have a use (and believe me, I adore FFB as a visual and a premise, so I can understand that).

Without Fire Power, Empowered Fire and Ignite, Frostfire Bolt isn't that much more damage than a Fireball, though. At least, not enough damage to come even near closing the remaining gap between Frost and Fire or Arcane in terms of PVE DPS.

I'm not saying I'd be against Brain Freeze causing a free FFB rather than a free Fireball, but it's just not really solving much to make that change.

Heck, if we're going to go as far as FFB, why not just have it proc a Frostbolt instead? I do not believe even having Brain Freeze proc a free Frostbolt would make up for the DPS gap. Feel free to theorycraft that if you'd like, but I'm pretty sure just doing napkin math in my head on it.

In my opinion, Frost needs a third spell that isn't Ice Lance. An easy choice would be a Penetrating Cold type ability that's basically a DOT. Force a choice between the DOT and Deep Freeze and you'd avoid PVP consequences. Or just make that the PVE function of Deep Freeze itself.

I LOVE YOU LHIVERA!!!

Egad, it is Komhaz, another former Raven.

OK, on the FFB vs Fireball thing. Looks like the Brain Freeze FFB thing was taken out of SimulationCraft at some point, so I've put it back into the copy I keep for testing things like this out. I set up two identical 18/0/53 specs, one using Fireballs and the other using FFB's. The result is similar to what I said above:

8727 18/0/53 w/FFB's on BF
8610 18/0/53 w/Fireballs on BF

The difference is 1.36%. This does account for FFB being able to proc FoF.

FFB's average damage per execute is 9850, vs 8563 for Fireball, about 15% higher. Seems pretty significant, but when it only makes up 6-7% of your casts, it just doesn't add up to much.

So considering how much they might need to mess with the spell to prevent this from being overpowered in PvP, it seems like a pretty poor return on the investment of developer time to implement it.


Here's what I'm leaning toward at the moment:

1) Have Frozen Core reduce the GCD of your next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt spell by 1 second. Yes, this violates the 1.0-second GCD floor, but it's the only way to guarantee that the talent works with haste (currently, you're below the GCD even with 0 haste). This results in the following cast times:

- Without Frozen Core: 1.0 seconds or more, as the GCD is unchanged.
- Frozen Core and 30% haste: 1.0 seconds.
- Frozen core, 30% haste and Icy Veins: 0.8333 seconds.
- Frozen Core, 30% haste and Heroism: 0.769 seconds.
- Frozen Core, 30% haste, Heroism and Icy Veins: 0.6541 seconds.

This change permits perfectly-executed Shatter Combos to increase DPS by about 2.5%, with no lost procs forced by haste. (I know I've been saying 2.9% above, but when you include the Water Elemental damage that isn't affected by the change, it's about 2.5% of the total damage).

2) Make 3/3 Enduring Winter effectively give the Water Elemental a 30% "empowered" Waterbolt. This increases DPS by about 2.9% over the current 3.3 design.

The combination of these two changes with the 3.3 changes already on the PTR should push Frost up to about 89.6% of Arcane DPS. The addition of pet crit/haste scaling should push it up over 90%.

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Q u o t e:


8727 18/0/53 w/FFB's on BF
8610 18/0/53 w/Fireballs on BF

The difference is 1.36%. This does account for FFB being able to proc FoF.

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I've always thought Empowered Frostbolt should be changed to Empowered Frost and affect FFB like a previous post mentions. What would the difference be if this were the case?

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Q u o t e:
This has been a great thread, and I'm going to risk derailing it by posting here (which is often why I don't respond to some of the better threads).

We're not 100% sure we're going to go forward with the Frozen Core change. It isn't a major PvE damage buff and has some problems with haste. While it does, perhaps, get Ice Lance into PvE, it might encourage some builds that don't feel all that frosty. It also doesn't add much of a dynamic to PvP really, so all in all we're not sure the change is worth it.

We still want to do some Frost changes for 3.3 though. The Elemental glyph will probably stay and we're messing with a role for Deep Freeze for PvE. Putting FFB on Brain Freeze is something that gets suggested a lot.

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Hi GC, would you consider boosting the Frostbolt glyph (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42742) to make up for the lackluster dps of frost?

IE: Making it do 10%* more damage to higher level targets.... *whatever amount deemed necessary.

This change would be simple and similar to the Ice Lance Glyph: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42745

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Q u o t e:

We still want to do some Frost changes for 3.3 though. The Elemental glyph will probably stay and we're messing with a role for Deep Freeze for PvE. Putting FFB on Brain Freeze is something that gets suggested a lot.

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So would FFB have a chance to proc frostbite but not brain freeze? I figured the reason brain freeze gives a free fireball is to avoid the instant chain procing anything like frostbolt could.

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Q u o t e:

We still want to do some Frost changes for 3.3 though. The Elemental glyph will probably stay and we're messing with a role for Deep Freeze for PvE. Putting FFB on Brain Freeze is something that gets suggested a lot.

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Yeah that's something that's always confused me, why Brain Freeze works for Fireball and not FFB.

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Q u o t e:
Hi GC, would you consider boosting the Frostbolt glyph (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42742) to make up for the lackluster dps of frost?

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To be honest, the major problem with the Frostbolt Glyph is it takes away something that is more valuable to a Frost mage when they are not raiding than the corresponding Fireball Glyph (and of course the Glyph of Frostfire is no tradeoff at all). The snare loss really seems to just be a hold over, similar to the old snare removal from the old Glyph of Mindflay.

Rather than doing the +10% for +3 levels thing, the snare penalty on Frostbolt's coefficient should be removed (or potentially buffed by the glyph if they would rather do it that way, which would justify removing the snare I think).

Thanks for the update, GC!

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Q u o t e:
We're not 100% sure we're going to go forward with the Frozen Core change. It isn't a major PvE damage buff and has some problems with haste. While it does, perhaps, get Ice Lance into PvE, it might encourage some builds that don't feel all that frosty. It also doesn't add much of a dynamic to PvP really, so all in all we're not sure the change is worth it.

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I think there are things that can be done to make it work (and of course we've talked about some of them here), but I really can't see a way to make it more than marginally good. If you have other things on the burner, I think it could be really interesting to taste them and see how they compare.

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Q u o t e:
We still want to do some Frost changes for 3.3 though. The Elemental glyph will probably stay and we're messing with a role for Deep Freeze for PvE. Putting FFB on Brain Freeze is something that gets suggested a lot.

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I'd be very interested to see what you've come up with, and very impressed and pleased if it works. It's always a letdown to reach your final talent and realize it's not particularly useful for what you want to do. But I can imagine that making it work in PvE must be very challenging, given the constraints imposed by the GCD.

Regarding FFB, and to answer Lilspark:

I really don't think it's a good idea to do that, for a couple reasons:

First, PvP, obviously. Brain Freeze is already pretty nice burst in PvP. Simply switching to FFB tacks another 15% onto that burst, and I think Blizzard's likely to be pretty iffy on that proposition. Adding it to Empowered Frost exacerbates the problem.

Now, if FFB were added to Empowered Frost, but not to Brain Freeze, that may open up some interesting possibilities for wrangling Frozen Core into shape by building it around FFB instead of Frostbolt without overpowering Frostfire spec. I'll try to whip up some numbers for that tonight.

Second, and this is personal preference, I would rather see them angle for a half-Fire/half-Frost Frostfire build in Cataclysm, which could actually work somewhat differently from either Fire or Frost, than have them try to build up Frostfire Bolt as an alternate Frost spec nuke.

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Q u o t e:
This has been a great thread, and I'm going to risk derailing it by posting here (which is often why I don't respond to some of the better threads).

We're not 100% sure we're going to go forward with the Frozen Core change. It isn't a major PvE damage buff and has some problems with haste. While it does, perhaps, get Ice Lance into PvE, it might encourage some builds that don't feel all that frosty. It also doesn't add much of a dynamic to PvP really, so all in all we're not sure the change is worth it.

We still want to do some Frost changes for 3.3 though. The Elemental glyph will probably stay and we're messing with a role for Deep Freeze for PvE. Putting FFB on Brain Freeze is something that gets suggested a lot.

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I'm not sure if you still consider Frost PvP as needing more damage, but I certainly do. The Frozen Core change, however, doesn't seem like an acceptable solution to me. It doesn't appreciately increase either our burst damage, or our ability to get off our burst. A ~1.1 second frostbolt is very interruptable.

FFB Brain Freeze would be interesting but I really think a damage increase needs to be more directly linked to Frostbolt shatters.

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Q u o t e:
I'd be very interested to see what you've come up with, and very impressed and pleased if it works. It's always a letdown to reach your final talent and realize it's not particularly useful for what you want to do. But I can imagine that making it work in PvE must be very challenging, given the constraints imposed by the GCD.

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...which would be fixed by the suggestion I've made in the past: Make Deep Freeze affected by the GCD, but not trigger it. It will also solve the problem of classes with stacked stun resistance (Priests with the stun meta, for example) reducing Deep Freeze's duration by so much that you can't even get off an unhasted Frostbolt+Ice Lance.

Add in some cute PvE effect and call it a day.

Oregontrail:

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Q u o t e:
Hi GC, would you consider boosting the Frostbolt glyph (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42742) to make up for the lackluster dps of frost?

IE: Making it do 10%* more damage to higher level targets.... *whatever amount deemed necessary.

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It's a quick and dirty fix, and it could work, but personally I'm more interested in long-view fixes that will improve playstyle and performance.

The Water Elemental glyph improves playstyle: managing a permanent pet requires a bit more work and attention than managing the temporary version.

Getting another spell into rotation (Ice Lance via Frozen Core, or Deep Freeze via Mystery Hinted-At Concept) also improves playstyle, as long as it also produces a useful performance improvement.

Simply buffing Frostbolt damage doesn't improve playstyle. Worse, it makes it that much harder to get another spell into rotation, because every cast we make competes with a Frostbolt.

So while it would work, I would prefer something different, even if it takes longer.

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Q u o t e:
Rather than doing the +10% for +3 levels thing, the snare penalty on Frostbolt's coefficient should be removed (or potentially buffed by the glyph if they would rather do it that way, which would justify removing the snare I think).

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I do truly despise the Frostbolt glyph; I actually bought dual specs just so I could toggle the glyph on and off. (My two specs have identical talents; the glyph is the only difference.)

That said, remember that removing the penalty means increasing Frostbolt damage by 5% in PvP without any corresponding improvement to PvE. Even if that 5% isn't game-breaking in PvP, it may make it more difficult to justify other improvements to PvE that could bleed over into PvP to any degree at all.


Affixqc writes:

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Q u o t e:
Make Deep Freeze affected by the GCD, but not trigger it. It will also solve the problem of classes with stacked stun resistance (Priests with the stun meta, for example) reducing Deep Freeze's duration by so much that you can't even get off an unhasted Frostbolt+Ice Lance.

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I think the problem with that solution is that it doesn't actually change up the PvE rotation at all; we'd simply macro Deep Freeze onto Frostbolt so that it fires whenever an FoF charge is available. That's assuming it simply delivers some kind of damage, of course; if they're doing something much more creative, then it may not be an issue (but then, the GCD may also not be an issue in that case).