Has frost really been nerfed as bad as they say?Follow

Hey guys,

As you can tell from my sig, I play a level 36 mage. I'm completely specced into frost right now--infact an AoE build to be more precise--and I can grind, run instances, etc, just fine.

I had somebody tell me you can't kite mobs when frost specced, because of the nerf. I kite just fine though. I mean, I don't even get hit, and often times am able to kill 8-12 mobs without downtime.

So, that leads me to ask, is frost really that bad? Perhaps 36 it's still good, but down the road it gets worse?

I don't know, I'm just curious to see why frost is so "bad" and "nerfed" as so many mages on my server say.

>Enigmen

it's been nerfed. it's been nerfed as bad as the ubiquitous, unanimous anonymous says

-- yes.

as bad as it is, it could have been worse and it's not game-breaking.

well. it's not game breaking in purely mechanical terms...



tell me. do you know what the warlock spell "soul fire" is? or, for that matter, any other spell casters' main nuke. 4.5k isn't eye-popping and neither is the mana-efficiency. why was ice lance unfair, again? especially since, even BEFORE the nerf, it was extremely uncommon to have freeze last through one or even two crits let alone allow a third. freeze has always had a large chance to break on damage, the more damage the greater the chance is how it's always seemed to me, but i haven't found anyone to give definative answers.



frost is not only about surviveability. mages have no purpose other than to deal damage. worst yet, mages are, more than any class in the game, restricted and controlled by their talents. whatever the situation is, a mage's only choice is between two or three barely distinct spells. what this says about the class, the game, the developers i don't really think i should try to say.

mages were nerfed. it's as bad as you think. but it wasn't all just because of the nova nerf. mages have been nerfed continuously for a while now. in regards to specific OP concerns:



somebody lied. you can kite mobs with just frostbolt. the freeze effects performs its function fine if you don't try to abuse it for damage.



it doesn't get worse, it gets better. mages just don't get better at the rate that every other class does.



you would be able to with absolutely no talent points spent. at least, until around level 55 or so...

just takes forever :P

Comparing mages to locks again? Not good if you wanna keep your blood pressure at normal rates..


You have to admit that frost is controlled damage (survivability) while fire is pure damage dealing. Arcane is a support tree.
I did not say ice had no pourpose but to keep the mage alive. But it does make it different than fire through the fact that it DOES keep the mage alive longer.


I just quit pvp since these nerfs. Been doing GRREAT.

Frost was never meant to be the Damage build and the fact that Ice critted so damn much was purely for the 2nd talent's into Frostbolt

as for Nerfing.. yes you'll see FN break more but really as an Ice mage what does it matter... you have Ice armor/ Cone of Cold / Frostbolt slow... chilling effects from talents

Firemages would get hit more if they use the frost nova spell then an Ice mage because like stated before

Frost = CC/Survivability
Fire - Pure DPS huge damage
Arcane = Support Mana Regen and low mana cost

I'm sticking to my Deep Frost I can still take 7-8 mobs back to back no problem with it and farm like there's no tommorrow using the build

I've never used the Blizzard grinding spec... I don't like to spend so much mana to kite mobs when 2-3 frostbolts can kill quite a few mobs effectively

I just hit 37 on my mage, and re-specced for like the 5th time, (love experimenting) :D.

I love the simplicity and ease of AoE grinding, not to mention the exp.

not to mention that questing in outland is faster, more reliable and more profitable. I could AoE every now and then but I am hard pressed to find a decent place to do so in outland. mobs have too many special abilities that make AoE less effective compared to Azeroth. Ogres know how to charge in combat, can stun with their kicks, know how to pummel. mobs have strong range abilities and a lot of camps with roaming casters. even the simplest of Naga has a heroic strike skill (grrrrrrrrr)

I did manage to save enough to buy a flying mount the moment I dinged 70. Now to find a way to complete that Teron Gorefiend quest.....

well, you're just gonna have to deal with it. it's an absolutely correct statement. sheep doesn't kill mobs, and mages don't heal OR tank (outside a very specific case which was designed that way, and i wouldn't call it technically tanking anyway). guess what that leaves?

fact is, mages are a damage class, and if we aren't the best, then we have absolutely no secondary abilities to make us worth a group slot. i've already spent plenty of time explaining why i believe mages have very weak crowd control abilities; suffice to say that sheep is beyond doubt one of the worst examples of "crowd control" i've ever seen in a game. but since when has blizzard paid lore any respect? as far as improved blizzard is concerned... that's a TALENT. not all mages have it, it's not useful for precise crowd control and let's not forget: it doesn't actually stop mobs from hurting anyone. swarm kiting is more like an extreme case of temporary relief than anything that could or should be classified as control.

by the way. AoEs were nerfed. which harder on frost mages than fire or arcane.



controlled damage is not surviveability, it's controlled damage. the distinction is that control allows a [smart] mage to prevent predictable types of damage (melee). surviveability mitigates un-preventable incomming damage. the frost tree provides both. this is why i said



but i did clarify this statement by making a reminder about the ultimate goal and purpose of mages:



on with the show.



yes. i can compare it. if a target is FROZEN, you don't need to move. because of the global cooldown it still takes you an amount of time to cast however many ice lances. you can't deal the total 4.5k (or whatever number you want) damage instantly no matter what you do. there is always a cost in time. what you should have pointed out, instead of mobility concerns, is a concern for silence effects. unlike stuns or other effects that interrupt your casting, counter spell (or shield bash, kick, or earth shock for example) requires that it hit you while you are casting or channeling a spell. however. since priests' silence, silence shot, and improved counter spell can all prevent any casting for a period of time it's a little bit of a gamble to cast anything at any time.

i worry that a new breed of mages is growing: the sort who wish they had rolled druids. i see a disgusting amount of ice lance spam in the manner of oomkins' moonfire and, frankly, it's enough to make me both laugh and remove the "spell" from my bar.



the statement you refer to is the one where i said "... mages have no purpose other than ... " blah blah blah. i already defended my statement, and it still holds despite whatever whining or petty animosity anyone may hold against me personally. you can't argue with truth. it would be better to understand what class you are playing, understand what your tools do and understand what you are doing than you complain that you think the class is something it simply is not.

retribution paladins be damned; they aren't damage and even they know it. i could say strawberries are oranges all day long, and wish as much as i may, it just isn't gonna be so. consider. what are the functions of a group? to kill mobs with the greatest economy. through the game mechanics provided, this requires a few certain roles that a balanced group needs. damage mitigation, health recovery, and damage output. of those three roles, mages only perform one. damage output. in the special case of what we politely refer to as "crowd control", mobs are effectively removed from combat such that they are no longer a source of incomming damage. you could perhaps conceive of this as being a kind of "damage mitigation", but i would say that it's just an irrelevant act because (in world of warcraft) there's no way for anyone to hurt a target that has been sheeped. at least, not without unsheeping it.

and here's the fun part. crowd control is completely unnecessary. yeah you heard me, keep your panties on. the simple fact is: incomming damage is compensated for by both damage mitigation and health recovery. with an off tank or an extra half healer, you don't need to sheep anything. crowd control is to provide flexibility in the group's make up (after all, pugs do suck). a group with a weak or stupid tank has more pressing concerns than keeping a single mob under control out of four or six. similarly, a group with a weak healer could make up for it with adequately increased damage output. after all, if mobs die faster, you take less damage.

question: is your job best performed by ignoring the sheep button and just concentrating on damage?

no. sheep takes a mere 1.5 seconds to cast and will remove a beast or humanoid from combat for a minute more or less. the tradeoff in time and mana is well worth it and that's why i use the polymorph spell. it's not my main job. how dare anyone suggest that it is. if you think fights are so tough that you need me personally to use my button, then you aren't hauling your weight.

furthermore. i contend your idea that crowd control is more needed than ever. i would have said exactly the opposite. i've never seen more poorly designed dungeons in any game. fights go faster, are easier to pull and requires less strategy than ever before -- pugs are getting dumber, maybe, but the instances are getting shorter, faster and easier to compensate for it.



if i'd said anything was fact without proof, you could sue me. since i haven't, then you can't. in fact, it's a little silly to accuse anyone of making an unenforced statement. it's insulting to your own intelligence that you would take anything as fact without proof. i've always been taught to assume something is opinion until i've proven it wrong. as an aside, i'll note that you've been introduced to me personally before so i don't see why on earth anything i've said could be taken as anything but my personal opinion. you're free to agree or disagree, but you aren't free to slash my opinion without proof of why.

any perceived difference between the populace of the O-boards and alla should be dropped at the curb for the trash man to collect in the morning. it's conceited to believe in or attempt to perpetuate some kind of deference to the alla boards for no other reason than that they aren't the O-boards. spaniards don't suddenly start speaking french when they take a step across the border.



pulse 120, pressure 130/110... ****, you're right. the internet is bad for my health.

heroics aren't that hard. i don't see why everyone screams and rants about how "dangerous" heroic mode is. call me spoiled, but the people i do heroic with just make it like any old dungeon crawl. the rules are the same, the mobs behave the same, the geometry is the same -- everything is the same. heroic is hardly heroic. it merely requires better gear than mundane instances. i remember when there were rumors on my server that Rags was designed to be unkillable.



incomming damage is always compensated for by mitigation and restoration. if there is a way to kill enemies with absolutely no risk or expenditure, then that method is overpowered. "prevention" via crowd control is an optional or un-guaranteed means to make up for a lack of mitigation and/or healing. it's purely because of the population limit that parties cannot include more tanks or healers. the equation is still absolutely true, when you start adding your own caveats or catches then you have to understand how they impact the damage flow or you do risk a sudden wipe. i don't have to make any excuses for bad players or bad groups or bad gear.

i'll break my own rule and talk about another game on the WoW forums.

it's either just me or WoW is childs' play compared to how i remember EQ1. maybe you'll get 2-shot in "heroic" if you're cloth, but you got one-shot by anything in EQ1 and that game actually was built with crowd control as an important element. and by the way. a mistake in EQ1 cost way more of your time than the piddly-dink 30seconds in WoW. as in. hours or days of your time. interestingly, EQ1 was built so that even crowd control was not enough. unlike WoW, EQ1 built in and required outright melee slow and haste effects and assumed such effects were always in place.

there's an extreme difference between WoW and EQ1 just in the basic strategy of combat alone. in WoW, you prefer to off tank things and kill it all faster at once. this is because player damage output is monstrous and efficiency is almost a meaningless term because downtime is nothing. in Eq1, if anything more than a single mob was awake and active, you were losing efficiency and potentially hours of downtime. and that's just regular groups.

maybe it is time for me to find a new class or move on, but all the things i've seen happen to the mage class these recent months during the release of BC have absolutely convinced me that blizzard couldn't re-balance mages even if they fired the whole development team.

that is why i have several characters. and i can tell you from the experience of a druid: i have no problems healing my tanks and i don't care if the mage pulls aggro and dies -- it doesn't wipe my groups. in pugs, i can see how a mage would be dumb enough to grab aggro on his way to the top of the glorified damage meter. that problem goes away somewhere before heroics. as a mage, i consider it terribly easy to "crowd control" and continue damage because i only have a single measly sheep to keep track of. i look back fondly on the days when i kept ten or fifteen mobs under constant mez and passed them to the group one at a time under slow. see, those were the days where a single class had the task of controlling combat and it was much more involved than wearing down my "1" key. as a tank, i've never had it so easy. you can instantly force the aggro of an entire room with a single button! tanks can create absurd threat in a relatively short amount of time without even using the taunt mechanic. worse yet, warriors are one of the top two damage classes in the game. unbalanced? priests that out damage mages? i may not have believed any game developer would be so stupid if i hadn't been watching my threat and damage meters for these several years of playing WoW.

the only good thing about swearing myself off pvp is that ... oh wait. classes which are unbalanced are still unbalanced and it still shows in pve.

yes it's optional, you have many options for who to invite to your party. no class has crowd control that functions the same way.

yes it's unreliable. if crowd control is ****** up, then everyone is ******* makes you seriously consider if you trust that player to handle the job.



i did not say that crowd control was overpowered. quite the opposite, i thought i made it quite clear that i believe CC in wow is very weak. as for the former half, i did already clarify my use of those terms.



if it has health, it can be healed. the only damage i am aware of that cannot be mitigated through armor or resistance is very special effects like bleed or other "red" debuffs which bypass defenses.



don't make the mistake of thinking that WoW exists in a bubble. there have been many games before and will be many games since WoW. neither is the idea of a population limit (maximum party size, max raid size, etc etc) exclusive to WoW -- it's an easy and effective means for the developers to limit players' power and thereby be able to more accurately balance an encounter's difficulty. by the way. molten core IS insignificant now. and it doesn't take even thirty people to make it so. for that matter, have you seen the five-man onyxia video? that was done long before BC.



i'd correct you. it's not a matter of gear yet, and those packs cannot be cleared without crowd control or without many more players than is allowed in the instance. it really is obvious that there's quite a few variables which could easily change the difficulty of these encounters. it's silly to rant about your own incredulity just because no one's done it yet.



question. has your group gotten past these mobs? is it not merely the first two guards?

parties can and do regularly move past this encounter. by whatever means necessary, it's been proven that players are more than a match for this encounter. so what? by whatever means necessary, a group performs in its best interest. this includes crowd control.

calm down and stop acting like i just preached an hour long sermon about how crowd control is the worst thing you could possibly do. i don't like scorch. but i still use it. when i need to. i do like polymorph, but i'm extremely aware of it limitations and am conscious of the fact that it is not the best CC in the game.

i hate hunters. i have refused to group with any hunter for almost a full year now. i've never regretted it.

back to the topic of the OP.

frost remains as nerfed as i've said. i've merely clarified why i believe so by explaining a few points about why the entire mage class remains in a chronic state of nerf. of any class i've played to this level, none disappoint me more than the mage.

A quote from Franz Kafka comes to mind :P

P.S. We did clear all the terrokar instances yesterday, only wiped once in auchenai crypts 1st boss and shadow lab 3rd boss, not once in packs, 11 badges and 22 spirit shards plus 6 void crystals is not bad at all.

As a Mage that was around before the patch, and using my full Frost tree still, not much has changed, i still see a lot of Crits, and in PVP i don't suffer at all from being frost.

1. Frost Nova (based on what i play with and see), its always been iffy it breaks even from a frost bolt after you send it flying sometimes, thats the way its always been, its a 25% chance it will break before you get a spell cast off, its a 50% chance it will break from a fire spell... duh fire melts ice >.>, if you cast another frost spell at it it has the same now i think as a fire spell to break but hey its time to be more creative, and i still pull like 8-12 creatures and blow them up using the kite tactic over and over, its still the same maybe occasionally you have to do a little more work but thats normal.

2. it hasn't been nerfed to the point that i should delete my mage, so don't do that... unless you are not so good and give mages a bad name ... be my guest then, but all kidding aside, its not a major nerf just a little tweak to make us less a damage machine. i mean.. in pvp when i still do 2k of damage up... without frost damage up gear... its a really wonderful thing to see, with damage gear speced to frost its still around 3-5k of damage.. so i don't see a difference

3. that is just my opinion others may have their own, but flame me if you want who cares.. i sure don't

happy gaming to all!

the thing that bugs me is that they not only made it so nova breaks on OUR crits but they made it so nova breaks ON ANYONES CRITS you party with a rogue bam their goes your nova and they are on you i mean really and it breaks on even 1 frostbolt now and days it bugs the crap out of me i mean it was already fragile i regret going from fire back to frost again i did it for the aoe grinding but still i want to at least be able to somewhat keep them frozen i mean back when it broke on fire spells i could understand but its just rediculus they nerf one of the very few spells that mages absolutely need to survive and the one tool that a frost mage used better than any other spec its just sorta sticking it to the frost mage i mean if they were going to nerf something nerf ice lance to do 2 times more damage on frozen targets instead of 3 or something like that if ice lance really is the problem but dont nerf the spell that formally ice mages relied on for dps frost nova is essential to the mage before BC they wouldnt even dream of nerfing it now they just decide o come on lets stick it to the mages we will get to the thousands of requests to nerf fear later.