We've mainly been discussing this in the big Frost 3.3 thread here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20432626969&sid=1

But I wanted to bring it up outside that thread because it's kind of an odd issue, and I'm hoping perhaps some other classes can shed some light on it.


The Problem

Fingers of Frost is a talent that (at 2/2 points) has a 15% chance to proc a buff on the Mage that allows him to treat his target as if it were Frozen. In a raid environment (which is what we're talking about here), this currently simply means that his next two Frostbolt casts have a +50% chance to crit.

In 3.3, however, it becomes more important, because the proc allows us to cast Deep Freeze on the boss for a large chunk of damage.

The proc is linked to Frostbite -- they share a roll. For example, if you had 2/3 Frostbite and 2/2 Fingers of Frost, you would have a 10% chance for both to proc and a 5% chance for only Fingers of Frost to proc. If you had 3/3 Frostbite and 2/2 Fingers of Frost, they would always proc together. This is sensible for balance, I mention it only to clarify part of the problem I describe below.

Fingers of Frost has a couple of odd behaviors:

1) No charge count is displayed. I would expect it to behave like (for example) Lock and Load: when it procs, it displays two charges, your next cast reduces it to one charge, your next removes the buff.

2) Its proc time is inconsistent. If you are specced for Frostbite, and Frostbite procs, then Fingers of Frost procs on cast. If you are specced for 3/3 Frostbite, Fingers of Frost will always proc on cast, because it will always proc with Frostbite. However, if you are not specced for Frostbite, or if you're partially-specced for Frostbite and Frostbite doesn't proc but Fingers of Frost does, then Frostbite will instead proc on spell hit.

Besides being kind of weird, this second oddity causes a problem with the new Deep Freeze change. You see, Frostbolt's cast time is so short that it is not uncommon for it to be shorter than the spell's flight time -- especially when you take precasting (usually with Quartz) into account.

My own cast time in a raid, for example, is generally around 1.85 seconds. I can generally start precasting about 0.2 seconds before the cast ends, meaning my window from actual cast time start to next button push is about 1.65 seconds. Frostbolt's travel speed is about 21 yards/sec. At max range, that results in a travel time of about 1.71 seconds.

The result (verified on the PTR) is that we often wind up with a situation where we have already begun casting the Frostbolt that will consume the second Fingers of Frost charge when we are notified of the buff. This means we either need to cancel the cast, or we miss out on the Deep Freeze cast.

The problem is of course exacerbated when we have active haste buffs up.

Fingers of Frost was changed in an earlier PTR build to always proc on cast, to address this problem. Unfortunately, this introduced another problem, which we had experienced until Patch 3.1(?): proc-munching. In either of these scenarios:

Cast 1: FoF procs
Cast 2: FoF procs

Cast 1: FoF procs
Cast 2
Cast 3: FoF procs

...the second proc is lost, rather than refreshing the charge count. Since there's a 27.75% chance that FoF will proc on either cast 2 or cast 3, that's a non-trivial problem in terms of lost buff uptime.

(Correction: proc-munching can happen with or without Frostbite.)

In the latest PTR build, that change has been reverted, which puts us back where we started in terms of lost Deep Freeze cast opportunities.

So what I'm curious about is whether there are other procs with similar problems:

- Are there any other self-buff charged procs that don't display a charge count?
- Are there any other self-buff charged procs without an internal cooldown?
- If so, do any of those procs proc on cast?
- If so, do any of them suffer from similar proc-munching problems?

I'm hoping that if similar talents can be identified and parallels drawn, maybe it'll help illuminate whatever's going wrong with Fingers of Frost in this respect.

Great post.

I can't think of any other procs that work like FoF off the top of my head. One thing to remeber, though, is that FoF originally had only a single charge and the two charge thing was a band aid fix to problems people were having with not being able to get shatter combos off with it at the time. It seems we're at a situation where we're putting a band aid on a band aid, and it's just causing problems.

Well, I don't know that I'd call it a band-aid, at least not conceptually. I don't know the code, so I can't comment on the actual implementation other than to say it's not working real well on the PTR. Up until now, it hasn't really mattered how FoF worked because we just kept spamming Frostbolts, but now that we want to react to the proc, it matters a lot more.

Fingers of Frost, like so many Frost things, lies in an uneasy world between PvE and PvP. For PvE purposes, it'd really be better if it were timed (4-6 seconds) rather than charged, eliminating the current problems and allowing for somewhat more interesting and "real-shatter-combo-like" use of the proc. But PvPers really like having the extra time to make use of the second charge.

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Q u o t e:
1) I support this, no big deal, its just 2 charges, at least for me, i don't get lost counting to 2 lol.

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I mention it not because of the difficulty of counting to two, but because it implies something different going on under the hood which may explain what's going on with the spell. It seems to be tracking its charges differently from other charged effects. Does this have anything to do with the fact that it can't refresh itself?

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Q u o t e:
About the rest, answer is simple, that would made Frost PvP overpowered.

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Er...what? None of this affects PvP in any way. PvP specs have Frostbite, so the proc happens on cast for them anyway (and proc-munching does not happen when it procs on cast along with Frostbite). This is only an issue in PvE.

Thanks for the reply, GC.

If technical limitations make this an either/or fix, I think (but will need to do some work to figure out for sure) that proc-munching is less detrimental than proc-on-hit causing missed Deep Freezes or Frostbolt interrupts. Need to determine whether the reduced average crit rate from reduced uptime outweighs the gain from being able to use Deep Freeze reliably.

I wonder... bcz I've actually never specced into FoF without having specced into frostbite as well... if the proc occurs when ur spell hits, which as u describe, hits after u've already launched a second frostbolt.... Which of the casts actually consumes the FoF charge... As in, let's say:

Frostbolt 1: launches ........ will proc FoF when it hits boss
Frostbolt 2: launches before #1 hits boss, bcz of travel time.
Frostbolt 3: already ~0.1 seconds into the cast time when FoF procs.

Which of these frostbolts will actually consume the first (and conversely, which one would consume the second) charge.

What I'm trying to get at is that by understanding how the charges themselves are consumed, wouldn't u be able to manipulate the system to get the benefits of a "Shatter Combo" but with deep freeze? seeing as how deep freeze is an instant cast. (i.e. manipulating the "ghost charge" of FoF)

Yes, if you can reliably exploit the ghost charge, this isn't really a problem for you. But the graceful functionality of an ability shouldn't depend on your ability to take advantage of latency.

Make it not affect frostbolt so frostbolt doesn't eat it? Or make both talents the same talent, Frostbite, but when the target is immune to freeze it can give you a FoF buff or the target a "Pretend Frozen" debuff.

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Q u o t e:
The Fingers of Frost issue is really challenging to solve. It it procs on hit then the procs don't get eaten but you may have to interrupt a Frostbolt. If it procs on cast, the procs can get eaten. Those are really the only ways it can proc though. Mixing travel-time spells and instant spells can muddy things up. Things also get more complicated when you have silly amounts of haste, which through no fault of their own, many mages do.

Fingers of Frost seems to work fine so long as you have Frostbite, but due to some technical limitations, the two talents don't play well apart. A long-term solution might be to make Frostbite a prereq for FoF or just merge the two talents together.

Letting Fingers of Frost display its charges is a good idea. We might not be able to get that in for 3.3 but we'll put it on "the list."

Our thanks to Lhivera and others among you who have explored these issues so throughly.

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My answer to this is simple. Get rid of FoF, and give us instead, the "Ice Ball" from Diablo.

Instant cast, applies all tallents as a chilling/freezable spell. And has, specifically, a 50 yard range, spitting ice lances out in a AoE to at least 10 yard radious as it flies down towards one enemies.

But, that may be too much fun for blz to handle.

What about chaning fingers of frost to stack, so that instead of overwriting it would stack up charges and extend the time they are availble for?

i know this could lead to deep freeze spam, give it a short cooldown to compensate

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Q u o t e:
A long-term solution might be to make Frostbite a prereq for FoF or just merge the two talents together.

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Something that has been suggested by players since the day we realized that they shared proc rates, merging the two talents together isn't some kind of a new idea. It's been suggested by many players since WotLK release.
It will also help Frost with it's bloat in PvP - As much as Mages would love to get their hands on the PvP-based talent Arctic Winds, we simply don't have enough points to spare. It's a PvP talent, we can't max it out in PvP, you have a problem there.
Merge Frostbite and FoF =)

Now I'm pretty noob as far as mages go (my mage is my least played 80) but don't you normally spam the instant spell you want to go off at the end of the second frostbolt cast or have they changed that?

I mean, don't you get 3 charges off FoF, frostbolt then frostbolt + instant, like a shatter combo works? Or did they make it so you can't do that?

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Q u o t e:
What about chaning fingers of frost to stack, so that instead of overwriting it would stack up charges and extend the time they are availble for?

i know this could lead to deep freeze spam, give it a short cooldown to compensate

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Deep Freeze already has a 30-second cooldown, actually. However, there could be PvP concerns about allowing the +50% crit chance to have more uptime.

I'm not sure, though, why the game has difficulty in tracking what seems like a simple "set to 2 charges on proc, decrement by 1 charge on cast" operation. I expect it must have something to do with client/server interaction.

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Q u o t e:
Something that has been suggested by players since the day we realized that they shared proc rates, merging the two talents together isn't some kind of a new idea. It's been suggested by many players since WotLK release.

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It's not an approach without pitfalls, though -- Frostbite is considered a downright dangerous talent in a raid environment, where melee DPS can easily get splattered by inadvertently-rooted mobs.

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Q u o t e:
Now I'm pretty noob as far as mages go (my mage is my least played 80) but don't you normally spam the instant spell you want to go off at the end of the second frostbolt cast or have they changed that?

I mean, don't you get 3 charges off FoF, frostbolt then frostbolt + instant, like a shatter combo works? Or did they make it so you can't do that?

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That's what we refer to as the Ghost Charge. Yes, it works, but it's not the intended functionality. A small minority of players frequent these and other forums; knowledge of this bug cannot be presumed to be widespread, and even those of us who do know about it can't always pull it off reliably depending on how stable our latency is.

The ability needs to be gracefully usable as described in the tooltip, whether or not a small subset of players gets around the issue by exploiting ghost charges.

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Q u o t e:
Yes, if you can reliably exploit the ghost charge, this isn't really a problem for you. But the graceful functionality of an ability shouldn't depend on your ability to take advantage of latency.

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I am personally aware that u don't specifically like the "ghost charge" functionality of shatter... I have in fact read many posts where u don't approve of it. Whether it is moral or immoral to use said functionality to ur advantage is quite pointless tho, bcz at this point in the game Blizzard has acknowledged the existence of the functionality, and somewhat approved of it as an "acceptable side effect".

After all, the ghost charge is the same concept as the first shatter combos that existed even back in vanilla, where u could double frostbolt shatter (second with PoM) or a frostbolt + CoC shatter. The mechanics have been in the game for far too long, and with every expansion we see even more tools being added to the game to support said mechanics (Ice lance with TBC, Deep freeze with wotlk) that I firmly believe it has now slipped into the realm of "Working as Intended" and possibly even a "an acceptable, and sometimes encouraged, design flaw".

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Q u o t e:

Something that has been suggested by players since the day we realized that they shared proc rates, merging the two talents together isn't some kind of a new idea. It's been suggested by many players since WotLK release.
It will also help Frost with it's bloat in PvP - As much as Mages would love to get their hands on the PvP-based talent Arctic Winds, we simply don't have enough points to spare. It's a PvP talent, we can't max it out in PvP, you have a problem there.
Merge Frostbite and FoF =)

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Yep, from day 1, we all saw the fine print. Well, some of us did.

Get rid of it. Give frost a new ranged aoe spell instead. Give us Diablo's Ice Ball.

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Q u o t e:
The mechanics have been in the game for far too long, and with every expansion we see even more tools being added to the game to support said mechanics (Ice lance with TBC, Deep freeze with wotlk) that I firmly believe it has now slipped into the realm of "Working as Intended" and possibly even a "an acceptable, and sometimes encouraged, design flaw".

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Shatter combos are without a doubt the "Flavor" of the frost mage's playstyle. FoF's ghost charge is a technical issue that blizzard struggles to resolve, The way I understand it, it's a very similar problem to the infamous vanish bug. It's silly to consider it "working as intended."

As far as i remember by reading these forums, i have heard this:

Mages: Frost is horrible at raiding because our strength, Shatter, cannot be used on bosses
Blizzard: Yeah, we're thinking about making a raid-version of a shatter combo in the game.
-- Blizzard gives Finger of Frost which can grants shatter combos --
Mages: lol blizz r nubs, its not a shatter combo if it haz charges

A Shatter Combo is, by definition, tricking the server into squeezing 2 crits in something that should only be taking one?

Doesnt this Ghost charge of FoF - which grants shatter combo functionality - be the intended mechanics behind what they said when they wanted to introduce Shatter combos on raid bosses?

Thanks Lhivera for all your hard work. I also think they should merge the talents...