Once again at the absolute bottom. Why not delete frost mage?

Last patch it took 6 weeks to get a buff which brought us to the middle of the pack for a while. What does devs have against frost mages?
No more, i had it!
(wowhead- analysis of shadowlands dps 17 aug 2021)

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Frost numbers are good on paper. The issue it’s the damage profile of frost is just not good for raiding.
There are no stacked cleave fights aside from eye and start of the nine.
All other adds get blown up by cooldown specs.
Also lot of downtime that makes you lose uptime on Icy veins.

The consistent damage profile just doesn’t work in raiding. Still good in m+ till you get to high keys when aoe cds become more important.

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Because it’s the baby spec. It can rotate extremely easily even if the entire screen shakes and you have the worst peripherals. Even fire mage is harder to rotate even though that’s also “pre-adult”.

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I wonder who´s the baby here , you dont even the guts to comment your “expert opinion” on main character. Mature lvl 11 (age 11?) guy.

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Why do you need a “pro” player to have an opinion of your own? It’s pretty clear frost is the easiest to play followed by fire followed by arcane (when mechanics are spammed on the ground at least).

In fact: a “pro " player will likely tell you” I can play ANYTHING easily" which is a moot point for normal people.

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Fire is easier, even more so when there’s mechanics involved because of the simple fact that fire can deal damage with instant casts+on the move while frost need to hard cast frost bolts.

The frost rotation is simple but so is fire.

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I know, but the spells are more and more complex. In practice I find frost simpler and easier unless maybe something major changed this expac because I haven’t mained those specs in a while (I hated especially fire when it was forced to be played since it was both easier to rotate and higher single target).

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Fire’s only mobile sub-30% boss HP and during combustion. Outside of that? Their mobility is comparable to what frost gets out of gcd-stepping on fingers of frost and brain freeze procs.

Also, the new SKB+pyroclasm fire (which is by far the strongest variation of fire spec on ST) needs to rely on hard casts a lot more. Long hard casts, at that. How could it be easier with a more complex rotation and comparable/greater need for movement?

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Meanwhile, half the MDI teams are running frost mages

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They do that because of the slow and because Frost is great at funneling.

Basically the more mobs you play together the more ST Frost will do while doing tons of aoe as well.

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They aren’t playing the normal frost build, they use a full aoe build. NF’s shifting power + blizzard is uncapped aoe. Thats why they use the blizzard conduit aswell.

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Does that actually do more damage than fire mage’s flamestrikes?

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it’s just a different damage profile, the build frost mages use in MDI is very sustained dmg + ST funnel, where fire is more burst aoe.

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Oooh. What made the MDI meta shift from wanting burst AoE to somehing more sustain-oriented? Haven’t watched any of it this season, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me.

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I was wondering the same tbh, I guess it works if you have a sub rogue for ST funnel + frost mage for ST funnel and sustained aoe + a full on aoe dmg spec (which they use a shadow priest for weirdly enough :P),
Thats the comp Echo is currently running in their practice sessions.

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The constant blizzard aoe slow is very useful for kiting.

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I’d say that this is probably somewhat accurate for more advanced players, but for newer players frost is infinitely easier, since the rotation can be summed down to “press shiny button”. Fire on the other hand is incredibly easy to mess up bad, which is why you might see horrendous fire mages when pugging. Frost is a very safe choice in that it’s incredibly difficult to majorly screw up. When it comes down to the fine tuning the specs are similar in “difficulty”.

PS: frost is still performing decently even in mythic raids. I’m not at the bottom of the meters despite what the statistics might suggest. On pure single target you’ll obviously lose to stuff like rogues though, my 95 mythic guardian parse was beaten by a green rogue parse.

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You are confusing, difficulty with complexity and forgiveness.

None of the specs are difficult to play. It may require a bit more time to get used to a spec rather than the other but it comes down to personal preference.

All specs has some complexity. Arcane has mana managment, Frost has proc managment, and Fire has burn phase managment.

Frost is much more forgivable than the other 2 specs. Simply because its a proc managment spec. You mess up a proc, you lose dps of that proc (simply stated). But you need to keep up with every single boss mechanic. You need to manage your procs in such way so you can have procs when you need to move, burn down a mob etc.
Arcane is not that forgivable, but wont make you lose tons of dps. You need to manage your mana to maximize your burn phase dps output. You also need to keep track of your procs to have instants when you need to move etc.
Fire is unforgivable. If you mess things up during your combustion, you will lose TONS of dps and you will have to wait the next combustion window to do some damage, simply because fire mages does extremely low damage outside of combustion. In the end of the day they only difficult thing about fire is to not mess up your burn phase.

So you may state that Frost is much more forgivable than the other 2 specs, but in terms of difficulty, I’d say Fire is the easiest. You pretty much only need muscle memory to really master the spec.

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Even before fires new leggo thats not true, even before the leggo before it thats not true, at least in raid. Frost’s whole rotation is hit cds and hit procs, the toughest part is not queuing an IL you don’t want. At least with fire you have to pool resources and manage IC stacks. The new leggo makes it more complex, activating combustions inside combustions, its like firey inception.

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I love getting 8 stacks of SKB and a pyroclasm mid-combust. Best feeling ever.

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