Look, I know that Mage isn’t the most liked class among the community for what it can do, however as a die hard Frost player, after the reveal of the latest changes for Mage, I feel extremely disappointed compared to how I felt during the Beta where I felt really excited for the future of frost.
I know Ice Lance was dealing a lot of Damage in PvP and that the nerf from 300% to 200% was warranted, but putting it on an 8 Second cooldown -and- sharing that cooldown with Fireblast just feels really really bad for several reasons.
It completely breaks how Fingers of Frost was meant to be, it’s pretty obvious that Fingers of Frost is supposed to be get a proc, hit two strong ice lances and then back to frostbolt to fish for a proc. What am I supposed to do now if I put two points in fingers, a single ice lance and a slightly stronger frostbolt? And what if Ice Lance is already on cooldown by the time I get a FoF proc? Just do nothing? That doesn’t feel great and feels like a waste of a talent point. It would be better if Fingers either reset the cooldown of Ice Lance on proc, or we had multiple charges of Ice lance with an 8 second recharge if Blizz really want to go down the route of giving it a cooldown restriction.
Since Mages don’t learn Frostfire Bolt until 40 and Cone of Cold only becomes really worth using once you get the new Winters Chill, Frost Mage once again just seems like it’s relegated to a one button Frostbolt machine until near the end of the levelling cycle for me, I was really excited to have more than one button to press on the regular and hit Ice Lances on repeated frostbite procs, but now that’s not possible so at the moment Frost just seems way more boring compared to Arcane or even Fire now.
On the topic of Damage, with Ice Lance in PvE scenario’s specifically I was still getting beat out by Hunters in dungeons with similar gear or even when I had slightly better gear, the obvious problem for Frost Mage was in PvP and I get that, no-one wants to get one tapped from 30 meters. But then why not just reduce the damage Ice Lance Dealt to players isntead of Pve Monsters and keep the no cooldown. Surely that’s a possibility?
Overall, the changes made to Frost mage have left a really bad taste in my mouth, and while I’m going to still play mage to try them, I’m not very optimistic I’ll be sticking with Frost as my mage spec of choice. So I’d really appreciate if Blizz did some changes down the line and made frost feel more than just a one button rotation spec like how it was in Og Classic, like is this not supposed to be Classic +?
You are raging for the most beloved and changed Class by Blizzard.
Icelance getting back 300% dmg increase would be completely fine in terms of damage.
Cone of cold with winter’s chill will be even worse for PVP since one frostbolt cast with icelance and cone of cold will kill a target as well.
Ice barrier got huge dmg increase for frost which you neveer could test as well.
Hunter’s general scaling with str/agi was never fixed in Forever meaning that once a hunter reaches level 40 his DPS will go down until pre-bis/raid gear compared to your level.
Mages aren’t fine, they are god tier. I would have loved another nerf on the Arcane Barrage/Missles stuff since this ability breaks all Classic mentality.. fast, high dmg, no-cost.
Sure those other changes are nice and the fact that we didn’t get to test a few things is why I’m still going to try out Frost completely anyway, but again, they’re all late game stuff. Ice barrier and Winters Chill are at literally the bottom of the talent tree so it’s going to be 40ish levels until you can use them.
I’m more so talking about the levelling journey and the feel of things (Like Fingers of Frost right now not making sense) and since apparently they wanted to put emphasis on the levelling journey in WoW Forever it just feels a little bit unpleasant to be locked into basically just frostbolt for so long with a sprinkle of Ice Lance now and then, damage is mostly irrelevant to me but I made a point of it since I know it was the topic of contention that started the whole “Nerf Ice Lance” situation.
Also I’m not really raging over this, I’m just a little bit disappointed and looking to give my 2 cents/feedback on this since without feedback there isn’t really anything to talk over, I didn’t know about the hunter scaling so maybe that will change things for sure.
Cone of Cold? All the other buttons that Mages used to press before Ice Lance was added? I think that’s the point of this change - to move Frost back to how it used to play a little. Ice Lance was busted even after it got nerfed to do less damage.
The funny part is that Hunters got significantly buffed. IDK what the hell Frost is supposed to do in PVE now. It seems pretty grim.
Exactly. Like I’m not a PvP player, that’s whatever to me, so I’m all Pve, and it feels pretty damn bad to see that Hunters got a big buff when they were already top dogs of DPS in the Beta and then Frost gets such a big early/mid game nerf.
And on your point about the other buttons, sure I get that, but IDK, it just feels really bad/wierd to have Ice Lance on a cooldown when it’s never had one before, and until you unlock Cone of Cold and Fingers of Frost etc it just feels like you don’t have many options until then. And now that it shares a cooldown with Fire Blast you can’t even use that in Frost spec anymore because you want to hold up Ice Lance until you get a Frostbite proc or Fingers of Frost, so Frost mages effectively lost a spell.
In PVE I just cast Frostbolt and then immediately an Ice Lance. It worked fine solo, and I imagine it will still work unless you get back-to-back procs. Then all you can do is Frostbolt and Arcane Explosion or something.
Yeah, see the back-to-back procs I worry about, because those happen a lot more than you’d expect, also in a lot of cases I don’t know if this was intentional in the Beta but if you applied Frostbite your Ice Lance wouldn’t break the Ice sometimes, so in the Beta you could sometimes get a second boosted Ice Lance off which felt quite nice in PvE, now you don’t so I guess that’s off the table.
Either way, I’m not entirely pissed at the changes, I’m just a bit disappointed that frost felt really nice in the Beta and now they’ve made these changes after the beta ended and we don’t get the time to test and properly give feedback before the live launch.