Hello fellow Mages,
I am a Venthyr Frost Mage. My guild and I are wiping on heroic Sludgefist and I was looking at my DPS numbers. I realized something was wrong but couldn’t really find out what exactly. Then I checked out how Mirrors of Torment worked during the encounter and I found out that they are terribly flawed. I was wondering if this whole thing is intended to be this way or if it’s just an honest mistake in the design of the spell. So here is the deal:
Mirrors of Torment is an incredibly powerful ability for Frost Mages, especially if you need to burst, because it does damage and causes Brain Freeze procs each time it ticks and those trigger Flurry so you can shatter your Ice Lances twice, which results in 2 almost certain instant crits. So on a fight like Sludgefist, which is a DPS-race, this skill should be superb because you can use it as soon he is done with his Heedless Charge because he is stunned and damage done to Sludgefist is increased by 100% for the duration of stun, 12 seconds (the debuff is called Destructive Impact). In that phase, you use all your DPS cooldowns, do that a couple of times and the fight is GG if you are not screwing up your movement.
However, that is not working at all because of how Mirrors of Torment work. So you see, they only do damage and you only get those procs “…Whenever the target attacks, casts a spell, or uses an ability…” (direct quote from the tooltip).
For this particular fight this is kind of bad because in that burst phase where the boss takes 100% increased damage for 12 seconds after Heedless Charge (Destructive Impact) Sludgefist is stunned and doesn’t do anything, so the Mirrors of Torment don’t proc, meaning you lose a considerable amount of burst damage due to not getting Brain Freezes = Instant Flurry = 2 Shatter Ice Lances that almost certainly crit.
All in all this is not a huge deal but still a deal nonetheless and, please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying my guild wipes because of this, but I still wonder if this is intended to be the case or just an honest mistake by the developers. There are two reasons why I think this is not intended to be working like this:
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Shadowlands as a whole expansion revolves around the covenant system. Each covenant has a particular background, special quests, a different lore and unique abilities. It is kind of strange to see one of those signature abilities not working at all the way it is intended to work in a certain raid encounter in this expansion. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if it’s the boss you need to kill 4 times to be able to skip parts of the raid.
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Sludgefist is a DPS fight that revolves around doing burst damage during 12 second windows. The whole idea, and correct me if I am wrong, is to save your major CDs for those phases where the boss has this Destructive Impact debuff that increases damage done to him by 100% for 12 seconds. If the boss is stunned and Mirrors of Torment don’t proc, you get 0 brain freezes from it and the skill does 0 damage in a phase where you are supposed to do 100% more damage. The same is also true for all Fire and Arcane Mages that use Mirrors of Torment. Of course you could argue to just do Mirrors of Torment before or after those phases, but that just beats the whole point of the fight in my opinion.
The way Mirrors of Torment work does not synergize at all with the way this boss is supposed to be played. This leads me to the conclusion that either the boss encounter is wrong (which I don’t think is the case) or there is an honest mistake in the way Mirrors of Torment work.
So what is the deal with all this? A solution would be a change to how the mirrors work without making them OP or useless and also there I have thought of something.
The effect of Mirrors or Torment “…cannot be triggered more often than once per 6 sec.” Why not keep this exactly as it is but add that the effect must proc after some more seconds if nothing else happens? Alternatively, you could make the 3 mirrors proc combined if the target is not moving, attacking, casting a spell or whatever after 25 seconds, basically after Mirrors of Torment ran out. In that case you could just cast the mirrors before he is doing the charge to get a least something out of them.
Thanks for reading, I know this is very specific but it bugs the hell out of me.
Best,
Meldariel
