Deep freeze (PvP point of view on frost mage)

Classes Mage
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Some of us might be so new that they don’t remember the spell “deep freeze”, which was a mage spell (later frost only before being removed) that instantly stunned the target for a few seconds.
Those of us that remember the spell, can probably remember being instantly stunned and nuked to dust. Or being “safe” behind a pillar when a mage blinks to you and instantly deepfroze you, and followed up with a poly cast.

I understand that it was a bit unfair to have an instant ranged stun with the mage mobility and burst. So I understand why blizzard saw the spell as a problem. But I can’t help but feel like frost kind of needs that stun to feel good in PvP, and I think they went the wrong way by just removing the spell from the game.

It just feels like almost all of frost mage’s “reliable” PvP damage comes out of AoE effects like frozen orb and cometstorm, and most enemies are just able to avoid 90% of that damage by using one mobility skill to run out of it. A stun would help by allowing the mage to lock down the opponent for a few seconds so they can secure some damage on the opponent.

To help the unfairness of the instant ranged stun, it could be brought back in a different form. It could be a ranged stun with the same range and cast time as polymorph, with a 30-60sec CD.
This would allow counterplay like kicking the cast, breaking LoS, or even reflecting it back at the mage. Also I wouldn’t mind the stun breaking from icelance, to prevent the cheesing of icelance spam into the stun. If the stun broke from icelance it would force the mage to line up things like frozen orb and cometstorm with the stun.

Frost is advertised as the “control spec” and it currently doesn’t feel like that at all. Fire is dominant with better burst AND cc. Why not give frost a 1.5sec cast time stun to compete with fire’s AoE instant dragon’s breath.
This would restore some of mage’s ability to 1v1 enemies, peel for partners, and set up cc chains.

2 Likes
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Unfortunately the game is trying to balance itself around 3 vs 3, it might be good idea to have deep freeze back for the common player but the pruning and classes homogenization is all done in order to balance things around 3 vs 3 and in order to protect the integrity of Arena Esport scene.

Thats why GCD has been introduced so players wont create a macro that made all of their CDS blast like rocket and one shot someone.

For example, in Wotlk, they removed the ability to cast arcane power, pom and pyroblast macro all at once.

1 Like
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I get that instant deepfreeze would heavily affect the “esport scene”, possibly in a negative way. But I don’t see how the frost spec that hasn’t seen any play in BFA would break the Esports scene if it had a stun with a cast time?
The top tier mage comps already have rogues with their stuns, so it wouldn’t really give them a longer potential cc chain either. Just more options to pull the cc chains off.

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Give us back Deep Freeze and take away some CC from a common Mage partner, like Rogues, god knows they need some balancing.

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Rogues are broken. Always been. Always will be. They have too good tools for PvP. If Blizzard gives other classes more tools then someone is going to whine that classes are too hard to play. Thats why they destroyed WoW after MoP. And it was a scum move ofc. So better take something away from Rogues. Like snares.

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