OMG New Post…that is a rant…

Wheeeeeeeeeee back for one of my sporadic posts (soon to hopefully be less sporadic). Outside of grad school kicking my ass, harder and harder each and every day, I was finally able to come back form my WoW hiatus this past break and have tried to accomplish as much as possible. Admittedly, with 3.3 and the availability of T9 to…well, everyone, it wasn’t very difficult. I appreciate them making it more available, but I think this time they went overboard. Killing Heroic bosses in 30 seconds or less just…isn’t fun. Trash pulls that once required at least SOME care can now be AoE’ed down with ADDITIONAL trash without difficulty…overall kind of lame, in my opinion. It’s not really Blizzard’s fault (in a roundabout way it is, I suppose) but in general they have been making the game a bit too easy, lately, especially PvE-wise. PvP will always be somewhat challenging and dynamic, as real humans are fairly less predictable (in many cases) than a computer program, but PvE…ugh.

To be fair, I can’t tell you how many people STILL stand in the bad stuff (aka fire) in raids. STILL. It’s hard to pressure them to create new mechanics when half of their player base can’t handle the oldest one in the game. When you see a giant pillar of flame erupt at your feet, and you start taking damage, you should move. Period. I don’t really know why they would ever think otherwise. Even if you think the mage in your party/raid cast it for AoE, why not be safe and alive rather than sorry and dead? If green gas is being emitted around you, what makes you think standing there and breathing it in is going to help your dps?

ANYway, what I will say is that with the new system, it’s been even harder to maintain two characters, especially with one having dual spec, while leveling 2 alts. I know, I know, some people manage it just fine. I guarantee their /played is higher than mine. And now the expectation is for everyone to be in full T9, and since most people are, it’s very difficult being in a group that is not, especially as a tank. I don’t think I’m a bad tank, but a dps in almost all 232 gear plus a few 245/251 pieces is going to be able to pull aggro from a tank in mostly 200 to 219 gear. And it’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing—I was able to successfully off-tank the first wing of ICC 10-man, and tank heal it in my healing set (which has 4 pieces of T9, though not many more 232 pieces beyond that), but…in heroics, people just get impatient and reckless.

Dear Warlock/Priest—if you pull a mob and put 4 DoTs on it because I’m “going too slow” and you expect me to save your ass, think again. I probably didn’t pull because I probably didn’t have enough CDs ready. They are short CDs, so if you’d waited 5 more seconds, I would have been good to go. Alternatively, I might have been trying to get mana, because a mana-less paladin tank cannot tank.

It’s funny, because I usually go pretty fast, so when someone complains, I just roll my eyes.

I am a bit frustrated, though. My defense rating is 633, which is almost 100 points too high. Yet, I’m not enchanted or socketed for def rating at all—the only thing I have is the helm enchant, and I got it for the +30 stam. Everything else is stam or avoidance. I’m hoping to get some gear that prioritizes other stats soon, because being that far over cap is just annoying. What I’ve noticed is that the newer gear actually decreases stam a LOT in favor of not quite as much avoidance, so it seems as if they are actually making paladin tanks a little worse…I can’t be sure though. So far, it’s been mostly heroics which are EZ-mode, and in ICC since dodge is reduced by 20% avoidance is low anyway, and it’s really up to heals to keep the tank up (thanks, Blizzard, cause we didn’t have a hard enough job already…QQ).

But now for my fun-fun frost spec. Bottom line? I love it. So much fun. Second bottom line? Not reliable enough. It’s also nearly impossible to test. Let me handle reliability first, as it’s really a quite simple problem: Fingers of Frost just doesn’t proc when I need it to, and doesn’t proc often enough.

Now let me back-track and compare all three specs briefly, so people can see where I’m coming from.

DPS can prioritize one of two stats to their choosing (or do nothing in particular with either and let the gear scale itself naturally). One is crit, the other is haste. In a nutshell, hit harder, or hit faster. We all know this. Here’s the problem:

Fire doesn’t really gain much from haste. It gains a LOT from crit. Bigger Ignite damage, Hot Streak, you name it, it needs crit. Arcane gains some from crit, seeing as AB increases damage by a percent, so crits can get bigger. Additionally, the Arcane tree grants a 10% bonus to spirit, so coupling that with the Molten Armor glyph and T9 set bonus, it’s easy to get higher crit going into the arcane tree (and indeed, many fire mages choose to take that talent, and for good reason.) However, it gains a lot more from haste. A 1.8 second AB is pretty damn fast, but when you get the AM proc (which procs 40% of the time when using AB), missiles are firing 3-4 times a second. There are 5 missiles total. You get the idea. Imagine stacked with Icy Veins and Bloodlust…yummy.

Frost, on the other hand, is a huge problem. Frost gains no stacking damage like AB does, and has a lower overall damage output than fire. While it has a slightly higher base damage output than AB, Arcane mages scale intel and spellpower, so it cancels out fairly quickly. As in by level 80. Fire and frost mages both get an elemental debuff that increases their crit on a boss, but fire gets the extra ignite with the heightened crit. And has talents to increase crit, whereas frost just increases damage from crits. In terms of haste, well, as mentioned before, Arcane just does better, and has a talent increasing haste by 6%. Frost does have talents to reduce the cast time of frostbolt by a total of .7 seconds, but that’s just frostbolt. We’ve no other spells really, unless we want to cast frostfire bolt (which has a higher crit modifier).

If I didn’t articulate it clearly, this is what I’m getting at. If you have gear stacked with crit, fire is the way to go. If you have gear stacked with haste, arcane is the way to go. If you are in the middle, you could pick either of those, because it outperforms Frost, as frost has no abilities that utilize them as greatly as the others. Fingers of Frost has a 15% proc chance, which is abysmally low. Thankfully, blizzard gave us Deep Freeze, but the damage is still not quite high enough. In my mostly 232 gear I can get crits for around 14k-15k with Arcane Blast at 3 or 4 stacks. Deep Freeze usually crits for 18k. Deep Freeze can only be used once every 30 seconds AT MOST. And herein lies the problem. The damage isn’t high enough, and combined with the CD, it’s just too long inbetween casts to be a reliable source of damage. It will end up being the 4th highest source of damage, sometimes third if I’ve been unlucky with FoF and haven’t gotten many ignites up. But it still only amounts to 10% of my damage.

Now, I understand Blizzard’s position. We have 2 specs that are both viable for raiding and one that is viable for both leveling and PvP. What more do we want? There are other classes that need work, right?

Yeah, uh, wrong. Hybrid classes all seem fine, some even almost too good (druids wut? Good in all four specs? Paladins? PvP like crazy). And pure dps classes (the only “pure” anything class (we don’t have a class dedicated to ONLY healing or ONLY tanking…)) I know, I know, I’m still QQing over it…all I’m saying is, Blizzard is quick to shut down arguments saying that things already work (and the mage class does work, I won’t deny it.) But right now it’s also fairly boring in PvE. Especially Arcane. Frost can be the most boring, because you just spam frostbolt, unless you get a FoF and then you cast Deep Freeze if it’s up, or you cast a fireball if Brain Freeze pops up. Fire is at least marginally interesting…but overall, like everything else in the game, it’s getting to be too easy. Arcane is about mana management for longer fights, and could use a new spell or two that could help pump out DPS at the cost of a bigger chunk of mana (besides just continuously using AB past 4 stacks or using Arcane Power, which isn’t a huge liability) to make it slightly more interesting. And AB could have different damage scaling, maybe.

But what could we possibly do with frost? What mechanic could Blizzard possibly put into place? Well, remember that one time that a Paladin’s Exorcism changed functions depending on whether or not the target was a player or non-player enemy? I propose we bring that back. For example, if they have Brain Freeze make Fireball treat the target as if they were frozen (if they are a non-player target) and not consume a charge of FoF, then you’d probably see more mages using that talent. Additionally, they should increase the damage bonus from Deep Freeze, and maybe have it so that, upon consumption, if Deep Freeze deals damage to a target, spell haste and crit are increased by 10% for 15 seconds. That’d be very nice indeed, since it’d be a short but effective buff. I know mages have the 12% haste buff on the T10 2-piece set, but again, it benefits both arcane and fire FAR more than it does frost, especially since Missile Barrage and Hot Streak proc FAR more often. Having a buff that is unique to frost would be awesome.

I’d also like to see an increase in the proc of FoF, but I’m not sure how OP that would make mages in arenas. Anyone here know how useful it is in Arenas? I’d imagine people don’t count on it because it’s so random and doesn’t proc all that often, but when it does happen, does it make frost mages unfairly strong? I don’t arena and rarely PvP, though I do plan on getting back into it at some point…

And I still like my “chains of ice” or whatever spell. I think it would be awesome and would allow frost mages to stack either crit or haste, and would be awesome for raid bosses and arena. For those of you that missed it, here’s the skinny from an earlier post.

1.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time a spell you cast critically hits, it adds a “chain” to the target. When the spell fades or is dispelled (so there is SOME PvP application), it takes the total damage that was the EXTRA CRIT damage, and applies it to the target, possibly as a DoT effect, equal to the number of chains on the target x 2. Along with that possibility, it might be necessary to take the extra crit damage and half it, so as not to be over powered.

By extra crit damage, I mean that if your frostbolt normally hits for 3k, and it crits for 5.5k, the damage stored is 2.5k (and the original 5.5k damage is still dealt to the target.)
So lets say you get in 3 crits with frostbolt and 1 crit with Ice Lance. That’s 4 chains on the target. Take the damage done that was the added critical damage, half it, and apply that damage each second for 8 seconds, as the “chains melt away.”

2.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time you cast a spell that normally has a cast time (not an instant like Ice Lance, not channeled like Blizzard or Arcane Missiles), a “chain” is applied. At the end of the spell’s duration/it is dispelled, it applies a fixed amount of damage per “chain” as a DoT effect equal to the number of chains x 2. If a spell crits, the DoT effect for it’s particular chain gets 50% of bonus damage applied as did the original spell.

For instance, let’s say a Frostbolt hits for 3k and crits for 6k, and each chain does a base of 100 damage per second per chain. If you land 3 and crit one Frostbolt, you’ve done 15k damage, and gotten 4 chains on the target, for an additional 400 damage per second over 8 seconds. However, because one of them crit, that one chain will get an additional 50 damage (because 50% of 100 is 50, and it was a 100% damage bonus to the original cast (3k+3k=6k)), so the spell will now do 450 damage per second over 8 seconds.

This will not affect your instant Fireball (should you have specced into it), so if that procs you do still get a chain added because it originally has a cast time.

Alright. That’s that for now. Now that it’s winter break, I’ll *actually* be able to post more. And I’m already planning another one for tomorrow or so. About me being an alt-o-holic. It was recently brought to my attention because I tend to yell excitedly in trade when I see people I know, then clarify and say “Ten’nen” so they don’t think some rando is saying “hi” to them. One of my friends went. “Ten’nen. Just how many alts do you have?!?” So that’s for next time. Until then!

Replacing Yourself

I love random hiatuses. I find that they often occur when life starts by just throwing lemons on you, then starts to rain on your parade, and then shatters everything you hold dear. That may or may not be slightly melodramatic, but you get the idea. Starting grad school, working 2 part-time jobs, working an almost full time job, and holding down an internship left me no time for WoW. I’ll say that I’m glad I’m one of those individuals who can actually bear to separate from the game (as I’m sure we all know people who can’t) but it does leave me sad when I come back to the game and I get tells being like “Hiatus again?!?” or “Oh, we thought you were dead, because, you know, you didn’t tell us you were leaving for a while” or whatever. Sorry everyone!

Anywhozzile, I’ve been popping on and off a tad bit recently, just to run a couple heroics, have a failed ToC raid, kill the first few bosses of an Ulduar run, you know, the usual. When I first came back, it was on a Saturday when my guild (of which I’m a co-leader…*cough cough*) had a Naxx run. I logged onto my main (or what I consider my main) and the raid leader immediately asked me if I could get on my Paladin since we needed another tank. I was a little taken aback, as my tanking gear was just enough to go through any of the heroics, but not necessarily Naxx 10 (or so I thought). Granted, Naxx is child’s play these days, but remember I hadn’t been on for a long time, so I hadn’t been running tons of heroics and what badges I had been getting, I’d been using on my holy gear since healing was what I wanted to do most on my paladin.

While the run went alright (Sapph didn’t even try to eat me YAY!) it did get me re-analyzing which toons I played. For a while I had been doing a damn good job of leveling my priestess. She’s now 55 and hasn’t moved for over a month. Ten’nen was supposed to always be my main, but my paladin has now seen as much or more content than he has, with twice as much gear to show for it. Ten’nen hasn’t even set foot in ToC yet. I think in terms of gear score, they are about equal for BOTH healing and tanking sets. And I find that often when I log on, I see a request for a tank/healer for a heroic and I whisper the person saying “I’ll get on my paladin” and I’ll hop over and run the heroic, just for something to do.

Yet, it has become frustrating. I really enjoy playing Prialeson, don’t get me wrong, but I feel as if I’m changing who I am in the game. Maybe there is nothing wrong with having two favorite toons, but I think there is something inherently wrong with having two “mains.” It’s also frustrating when people call me “Prial” when I’m on Ten’nen. And by frustrating, I simply mean curious and a teeny bit annoying, because I want people to know that I am Ten’nen first, Prial second. Granted, I’ve probably raided with a larger group of people on my paladin, as decent healers who have a smidgen of intelligence are somewhat harder to find these days, and 3.5k dps means nothing anymore, but…it’s still curious.

A long time ago, Firespirit posed some similar thoughts, but I ask this of you, readers: have you ever felt yourself being “replaced” by a different toon? Did it irk you at first, or was the change smooth? When people don’t know your real name and you’re going by your toon’s name, how does that change who you are? Or who you appear to be? Do you act differently on one toon than another? In game versus how you act in real life?

It’s Just a Patch…

I did have a nice little post nearly ready in my drafts to compare the coming of 3.2 to the coming of Dual Spec, but then…well, 3.2 came before I finished so I couldn’t post it x_x so now I’ll rant about 3.2 a little bit.

First of all, chill the fuck out people. There are ALWAYS problems when a new, pretty major patch comes around. Give the add-ons about a week for their authors to update them (and don’t forget to thank them and give them a little $$ for their time if you can afford it, even just a dollar) and give Blizzard a chance to collect info about how some of the patch changes have messed up graphics, let them clean it up, and we can all move on with our lives. You should be used to this by now, and going on about it in trade, raid, guild, party, whatever chat is just annoying. I’ve got to admit that Blizzard isn’t always the best about updates and cleanliness in terms of bug-free programming, but at the same time, we’ve all had hours upon hours of continuous, uninterrupted play time. There is no way I’m going to expect them to be able to predict what every individual graphics card is on all of their subscribers’ computers and program according to them. I imagine part of this whole new “info collection” thing might be collecting that kind of data. Who knows?

Second of all–the whole having both alliance and horde on PvP servers was really annoying the first day. I think it was just the novelty of it for a lot of people, but trade chat was just…irritating. Whole groups of friends would create toons that all ended the same (for example, we were swarmed with ~panda) and clogged trade chat…I think my ignore list will grow too long soon. Hopefully this will die down soon as well.

A couple of things I am upset about (and by upset I mean I rolled my eyes in the sheer irony of it all) are as follows:

1.) Now I just need to run tons of heroics/naxx 25s to get Emblems of Conquest to upgrade, you know, all of my gear, and I can finally replace the blue helm and offhand I’ve had since…well, since March.

2.) Instead of running heroics on my mage, I saw that people needed a healer and then a tank so I hopped on my Paladin and got a bunch of badges from 3 heroics…

3.) I was tanking with 570 defense rating (how’d that happen? What a waste of gem sockets…) but only 23k health buffed (with Sanctuary and GotW). Humalgreg was an amazing tree healer and I take my hat of to him for keeping me up–I know it wasn’t easy, so if you ever run into him, he’s awesome :-D

4.) The RNG gods apparently see fit to give me almost every green in a heroic run on greed rolls (winning from 39 to 96), yet when I actually roll need on an item I, you know, need, I get a 4.  Then winning roll was a 12.

5.) All of my frost gear (all, you know, 4 pieces I’d managed to gather) that gave me extra crit are now useless, as frost is now more centered around haste than crit…which totally destroys my plan for a slightly more crit heavy Frost/Fire spec that is centered around fast frostbolts and the ignite debuff from my fire spells. I can still do it, of course, but it’ll take some tweaking to get my crit where I want it to be without losing too much haste.

6.) All my haste gems that used to match any color socket from the Dragon’s Eyes (JC specialty!) now actually have color assignments. Meaning I lost out on some intellect from socket bonuses. Which was sad because as an arcane mage, every little bit helps. Bye bye 120 mana…

7.) Yet I was unable to test out how effective all this haste was on my mage in Frost spec because, since the patch just came out, so many add-ons were messing up, including recount. So I have to wait and see if perhaps this haste bonus really was enough to make Frost slightly more viable than arcane. I tried it before the patch and was about 400 or so dps behind on a boss…maybe I’ll be able to make up for that? Can’t wait to find out…

I really wish I had 3 other things to make a nice, round list of 10, but I just haven’t had much playing time. Anyone else have any stories of interest, frustration, fun times?

Utility, Utility, Utility…

Yep, I’m back to discussing class utility. However, this time it’s in a response to Firespirit’s post discussing the failure of the hybrid tax, specifically in the case of the paladin, as well as reiterating some previous thoughts from my last post where I discussed the mantra “bring the player not the class”, and finally more concrete ideas as to class mechanics. I suggest taking a look to read over Lightfury’s post, as I’ll be referencing some of the excellent, well thought out points he made.

I’m not going to try to summarize his post, but suffice it to say that Firespirit rather successfully argues that the 5% dps tax that is applied to hybrid classes (to make up for the fact that they can do other things outside of dps) simply isn’t effective or working at all. He cites the fact that for a paladin, his dps will be better on fights that don’t require as much movement, but also have multiple targets to hit with his AoE spells (very similar to a DK, in fact). However, other fights, such as Patchwerk, will see him behind other casters for dps, as they can finally stand still and don’t have to avoid circles of doom or fire raining from the sky.

This is where I originally came in and stated that it would be nice if they gave hybrid classes more utility. It’s VERY rare to ever see a druid have to pop out of cat form to heal. Occassionally they’ll use a battle rez should something happen, but when was the last time you saw one help heal? When was the last time a shaman stopped dpsing and tossed out some heals? Or see a warrior switch stances to have to tank? It’s happened, yes, but quite rarely. Not even once per Naxx run, which means you can easily go 20, 30 bosses between different raids and never have to have that happen. So just because they CAN do something doesn’t mean that they will.

My initial response was actually going to be to point out that Retadins can put up the Heart of the Crusader debuff on bosses to increase damage dealt by 3%. Then I realized that all 3 kinds of paladins tend to have it, and use it often. Tanks often spec into the ret tree for extra damage (afterall, extra damage increases threat), and healadins often spec into it for extra crit (we looooooooove our crit!) and it occurred to me that, once again, because it is so early in the tree, Retadins lose out on a mechanic that can be quite valuable to raids.

And that’s when I realized that one of the things Blizzard could do for all classes is to take a page out of Warhammer’s book and make each class quite unique by coming up with mechanisms that aren’t shared as easily as Mortal Strike or Replenishment. I say it over and over again, but Shadow Priests were in such a good place during BC. If their health/mana regen benefit mechanic had been kept more or less in tact into WotLK, then with the buffs that Discipline got (finally), Priests would have been an amazingly balanced class. Each tree is different and unique enough in play style and utility to make them desireable in raids and Arenas, and not that boring to play.

I will make one amendment to my earlier post. While I think it would be a positive benefit to all raiders to have raids that require specific abilities, perhaps what would be even better would be to allow certain mechanics to work on raid bosses that don’t currently always work. For instance, having them makes the fight simpler (not a ton, but a little bit) and makes it worthwhile to have a certain class/ability in the raid, but doesn’t make it essential. For example, Tranquilizing Shot wasn’t necessary in ZA, but it did make the Lynx boss easier. Whereas Instructor Rasuvius requires a Priest, perhaps the fight should have been designed to be very difficult without a Priest, but not impossible.

In addition, I think it would be very helpful if many classes got different kinds of abilities to make them useful in a raid (or arena) environment. For instance, I still don’t understand why Survival Hunters have a replenishment…it doesn’t make any logical sense. Hunter’s suddenly have super magical abilities that mirror what Shadow Priests used to do? How does that even make sense? Mages I can understand–lorewise, mages have very tight connections to the arcane. Paladins were a stretch, but tolerable. But Hunters? Really? If, say, replenishment were buffed up (remind me why it’s getting nerfed again…?) and removed from Hunters and probably Paladins (hold on a second Retadins) and kept to just Mages and Priests, then it would make it NICE to have them in the raid, but not necessary.

But wait…what if the mechanisms were different? What if Shadow Priests had their old mechanism back, but Frost Mages had the ability to,  I dunno, “freeze” the usage of mana? Bear with me now–suppose that they were able to apply a raid-wide buff that, instead of giving back a certain crappy percentage of mana regen (I shouldn’t say it’s crappy, it’s helpful on longer fights…right?) but instead, reduced the mana/energy/rage/runic energy cost of abilities, or made every Xth ability used have its mana/energy cost reduced by 50%, or something like that? The abilities are inherently similar in that they help with mana/energy conservation and allow for more heals, but functionally quite different.

What if Heart of the Crusader were moved down the tree so that Tankadins and Healadins didn’t have full access to it, so that a Retadin was actually more unique when it brought it to the raid? Or better, still, have a talent deeper in the tree (maybe tag it on to another talent, say Swift Retribution) that increases the effectiveness of Heart of the Crusader by 33/66/100% and increases critical strike damage bonuses to party members by 1/2/3%. That’d be awesome for everyone, tanks and DPSers included. Maybe it doesn’t help healers that much, but Heart of the Crusaders never really helped them that much anyway.

There are so many mechanics that can still be toyed with. Certain silence mechanics, for example, that work in heroics but not in raids. What if a boss has a spell that is a 2 second cast that he casts 5 times in rapid succession (as soon as one finishes casting, the other one starts) that does lots of AoE damage/single target damage to one target of his/her/its choosing and needs multiple different interrupts (KT doesn’t count) to prevent lots of damage/death? And what if it becomes immune to a certain classes interrupt after it had been used for 60 seconds? All of a sudden you have a use for multiple classes to use their interrupts. Even if the silencing effect doesn’t work, the interrupt does.

And I’m not just talking about PvE stuff here either. In PvP, why can’t the force taunts for tanks be on a seperate, longer CD when used on other players and have it change the target player’s target to them? Or give the tanking specced classes an ability deep enough in the tree that another tree can’t go down 3 tiers and still have it. And so many PvE abilities can come into play in a PvP environment, especially when “Replenishment” means different things depending on the class, so it changes up the makeup of your team. Have 3 casters in addition to the healer? Maybe a mana replenishment might be more useful. Got a warrior and a rogue on your team? Maybe you want your abilities to cost less so you can use more of them faster.

And all of this can be achieved as the compromise for a “hybrid tax” or used on specs where DPS is lower and Blizzard doesn’t want to fix it.

The point being, if Blizzard were to pull back from number charts and comparing DPS/HPS/TPS from one class to another on different boss fights, and thought more creatively about how to implement different skills a class could use that would change the way a boss fight works, then maybe more players would feel more useful to a raid without any raids ever feeling like they HAVE to have a certain class.

Frost PvE Additions

Because of the release of the Harry Potter movie last night, I didn’t really play much and have nothing to really share of interest. However, below you will find a copy of a post I made to Blizzard regarding Frost PvE, and an additional spell they could add to our arsenal to make us PvE viable again. Please post any comments you have–I’d love to hear your thoughts/criticisms/suggestions on the idea! It’s a little long, but very thorough (I hope). Enjoy!

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I was recently thinking about ways to make Frost more viable in PvE without over buffing them for PvP. It wasn’t until I was running Dead Mines for the first time on my Priest (or at least, the first time in a long time. I didn’t even remember the instance layout at all–I’ve probably only done it twice) that I got an idea when a caster in there used Chains of Ice on me, that then grew when I was doing my daily quests for in the Storm Peaks for SoH rep.

For purposes of this argument, we are going to call the spell Chains of Ice, though another name should probably be selected. However, the name will probably help with the explanation of the spell. Here we go.

On the 8th tier down (or maybe 7th–deep enough that you can’t spec into it too early), have a spell called “Chains of Ice” that takes one talent point to learn. It should have the same application as Vampiric Touch by Shadow Priests, an instant cast. However, it should only last for 10-15 seconds and have a 25-30 second cool down. I have two ideas on what happens after it is applied.

1.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time a spell you cast critically hits, it adds a “chain” to the target. When the spell fades or is dispelled (so there is SOME PvP application), it takes the total damage that was the EXTRA CRIT damage, and applies it to the target, possibly as a DoT effect, equal to the number of chains on the target x 2. Along with that possibility, it might be necessary to take the extra crit damage and half it, so as not to be over powered.

By extra crit damage, I mean that if your frostbolt normally hits for 3k, and it crits for 5.5k, the damage stored is 2.5k. Unlike Ignite, the damage will stack.

So lets say you get in 3 crits with frostbolt and 1 crit with Ice Lance. That’s 4 chains on the target. Take the damage done that was the added critical damage, half it, and apply that damage each second for 8 seconds, as the “chains melt away.”

Additionally, this makes Ice Lance more useful in raids, as you will be more likely to get crits with Ice Lance after the 5 stacks of winter’s Chill, but it also encourages players not to spam Ice Lance to get tons of “chains” because if they don’t crit, no bonus damage will be applied.

2.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time you cast a spell that normally has a cast time (not an instant like Ice Lance, not channeled like Blizzard or Arcane Missiles), a “chain” is applied. At the end of the spell’s duration/it is dispelled, it applies a fixed amount of damage per “chain” as a DoT effect equal to the number of chains x 2. If a spell crits, the DoT effect for it’s particular chain gets 50% of bonus damage applied as did the original spell.

For instance, let’s say a Frostbolt hits for 3k and crits for 6k, and each chain does a base of 100 damage per second per chain. If you land 3 and crit one Frostbolt, you’ve done 15k damage, and gotten 4 chains on the target, for an additionall 400 damage per second over 8 seconds. However, because one of them crit, that one chain will get an additional 50 damage (because 50% of 100 is 50, and it was a 100% damage bonus to the original cast (3k+3k=6k)), so the spell will now do 450 damage per second over 8 seconds.

This will not affect your instant Fireball (should you have specced into it), so if that procs you do still get a chain added because it originally has a cast time.
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In my opinion, both of these options give benefits to stacking either haste or crit. The first one gives a little more preference to stacking crit, and the second a little more stacking haste, but in both cases, either will help. For instance, in the first, obviously you want as many crits as possible. However, if you have enough haste, you might be able to get in more spells casts and increase your chances of landing a crit if you’ve enough raid buffs. With the second option, crits will up your damage some, but the more spells you can cast, the more chains you will DEFINITELY have.

I would love to hear responses to the idea, though not so much the specifications/numbers. If Blizzard likes the idea, they’ll work that out. Obviously the numbers will have to be crunched a bit, but I feel like this idea would give Frost an extra spell in their rotation that can seriously up their numbers, but wouldn’t be that big of a deal in PvP because it would require the Frost Mage to be standing still for a long time and for the healer to not be dispelling anything. In a 5v5 environment, if they let the frost mage stand there for a solid 15 seconds casting Frostbolt, they deserve to die.

Also, whoever says “Frost spells shouldn’t have DoTs, that’s Fire’s thing” clearly has never done daily quests for Sons of Hodir reputation. There are mobs that apply Frost DoT damage already–why shouldn’t we?

Oh, and like other Frost CDs, it should be affected by Cold Snap. Additionally, to balance out points, take a point out of, say, Shatter, so each point gives 25%/50%. Finally, any damage that is absorbed will not apply a chain. Again, in PvP, not a great spell, but since most bosses don’t have Power Word: Shields over them, it will once again be useful in Heroic and Raid encounters.

Fail Spec…but not really?

I leveled as frost. I loved it. Even though it was basically frostbolt spam, it just meant life was easy for me. I could kite things around in instances, and if a mob got loose from a tank, I could solo it without the tank having to worry about me (love me some blink action…when it’s not broken and I don’t go backwards). When I finally got to level 70 in BC (I started playing just after it came out) and after RPing myself over to arcane (Ravenholdt is an RPPVP server), I found myself…well, wanting to get back to frost. So I RPed myself back to accepting frost (one day I’ll post the entire story) but after a while, really did not enjoy raiding as frost.

At a friends suggestion, I tried raiding as fire, but spamming fireball + the occassional scorch didn’t really do it for me either. So I switched to my 39/11/11 spec, where I had Presence of Mind, Arcane Power, Icy Veins, and Pyroblast. This was at the time where casting Arcane Blast increased its speed each time you cast it, and you could use Arcane Power and PoM at the same time. My rotation was basically to start off popping Icy Veins and Arcane Power, spam AB, popping Arcane Missiles whenever Clearcasting procced (as, at the time, it was the highest damaging spell, just extremely expensive), hitting my instant pyroblast before the timer ran out on Arcane Power, and then falling into a rotation of ABx2, frostbolt, fireball, AB just before the proc disappeared so I’d get the damage bonus without the increased cost, interrupting that cycle whenever Clearcasting procced to get the free extra damage. Whenever PoM popped up, I’d insta-pyro, usually for a nice crit burst of damage combined with AP, which made it worth it to have that spell. Additionally, this was before dual speccing, so when trying to do dailies on the Isle of Quel’Gankus, having that insta-pyro to smack a bitch if they decided to mess with me often left them confused as to how I could glow so many colors and do so much damage.

But that was in the past (but what a beautiful past it was!) and now, I still find the most enjoyment out of my slightly altered arcane spec. However, I recently got very curious about frost raiding (even though looking at the tree, it was obvious it didn’t have much in the way of power for raiding) and, once I could afford dual spec, built my own tree. Why didn’t I go down the Arcane tree for TTW? Because I’d rather have a high-critting fireblast I can pop often with ignite (BURN!), and have a chance for my FFB crits to be huge AND leave a huge DoT (BURN BURN!), and so that I can have my free fireball, when it crits, have a chance to leave an igntie DoT (BURN BURN BURN!). The rotation basically was to wait until FoF procs, then cast Frostbolt, then FFB with an immediate Ice Lance for huge damage and a chance for a big DoT crit. Whenever the insta-fireball procs, I cast it unless FoF is up, and then I’ll wait until I’ve gotten my two spells out and toss it off.  It’s a lot of BOOM BOOM BOOM! And it looks cool because it’s lots of colors. Also, I like having a friend next to me (my Water Elemental).

So I tried this spec out last night in a partial Naxx run. I tested it first on Heigan during the dance. Let me tell you something–Ice Barrier is priceless there. Absorbing the first 3k damage if you fail at dancing is amazing. Also, for some reason or another, if my water elemental is left up, it doesn’t die when standing next to Heigan while he makes us dance. Interesting. I came out second on dps, around 2.1k. It’s Heigan and most of my casts were Ice Lance while dancing, so whatever. Wasn’t the real test, but showed the versatility of frost. So then I tried it on Loatheb. I was used to pulling only around 3k anyway on Loatheb in Arcane, so I figured what the hell, now that spamming frostbolt isn’t the only option, I might do something close to the same. First of all, with Ice Barrier, yet again, the AoE didn’t hurt me nearly as bad as everyone else. Also, I never ran out of mana. Ever. With 30% mana back on all of my crits (which were every other cast) plus the constant mp5 (not much, but it helped) plus the reduced cost of all my spells anyway meant that I was always casting…always. However, the first attempt, we did not have the DPS to down him and we ultimately wiped. I ended up pulling 2.3k. I was a little sad, because I was hoping it’d be at least 2.5 or 2.6 so I could justify keeping it, but alas, that was not to be the case.

But still…I was third on DPS. Beaten by a rogue in almost all T7.5 and better, and some Ret Paladin in about the same level of gear. I’m only rocking 2 pieces of 7.5 and still have 2 blues, one of which is levle 78. I actually think that my dps would be higher if my hit rating was capped as frost. But alas, it is not–I noticed in my recount that I was missing. How I missed a giant fungus standing 10 yards in front of me I’ll never know, but whatever. Point being, I might have pulled a decent amount of dps, and the second attempt, in which I switched back to arcane, I only got 2.8kish anyway, so really, despite all the crap frost gets, it’s actually not as bad as people think…if you know what you’re doing. I’m going to regem my gear to get *over* the hit rating, because right now my gear is haste based. My Frostbolts were 2.09 second casts, which was pretty sweet, but I’ma have to give some of that up to max out my hit rating…or at least, get a few pieces of gear to increase my hit.

Final analysis to be determined, but it’s not as hopeless of a cause as people seem to think. More to come on that one. Until then…later all :-)