Feedback on Mages 5.3 + 5.4 PTR

Frost Mage Mastery: Frostburn - A plea for a redesign for an upcoming expansion
In response to 5.4 PTR changes
21.06.2013

-- Introduction
Hello Holinka. My name is Nikolas and I'm a multi gladiator mage. This is my shot at constructive feedback for the Mage class and the upcoming 5.4 PTR Mastery change.  In this document I will air some thoughts around the current Mage class with it's Mastery design. Although it is a bit long, I hope that you take your time and read it all.

-- General problem with WoW Arena
Very little sustain damage and alot of classes have access to "on demand damage" cooldowns that are very hard for the opponent to stop, and usually very easy to execute. This results in a very stale 2v2 bracket and a very "rushdown" focused 3v3 bracket where it's all about using cooldowns early for initial momentum.

-- Problem with Mage class
Mages have never scaled worse with being able to free cast than with the current design. All of your damage is centered around Frozen Orb and instant procs. Mage has never been more dull to play because of this.

-- Problem with the current Frost Mastery
It's way too lucrative in PvP and only affects Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost in PvE.

-- The issue with having Frost as a viable PvE spec:
In order to have a real "rotation" there needs to be abilities more worthwhile to cast than Frostbolt. At the moment we have Frozen Orb, Mage Bombs, Brain Freeze and Fingers of Frost that spices up the rotation. Unfortunately they are all instants, except for Frost Bomb, and you have so many ways of getting procs outside of casting Frostbolt.

Lets take a trip down memory lane, Holinka.

So, one might think that we already have a problem here. If you were to have a healthy PvP game that promotes casting you can already see that these instant procs are causing issues. With the introduction of the Mastery stat you had a chance to add a mechanic that shifted damage over from these instant procs to Frostbolt, or vice versa. In early Cataclysm Alpha the Frost Mage mastery was "Whenever you cast Frostbolt you increase the damage of your other spells by X%". If my memory serves well this mastery stacked up, and by chain casting Frostbolt you automatically created a more worthwhile spell to cast - but the importaint thing to remember is that this damage came from initial casting. However, this mastery got scrapped and replaced with the current "Deals increased damage to frozen targets".

Let's recap for abit here. You have a PvE rotation. You need harder hitting spells than Frostbolt. These spells needs to be a result of casting Frostbolt. Otherwise everyone would run around spamming instant casts, and that would lead to some very unenticing gameplay.

What the new mastery does however is the exact opposite of what it originally did. For starters the mastery scales way better in PvP than in PvE, which is obviously not what you want when you're dealing with a Specialization that is notorious for being stronger in PvP. The second problem is that you can benefit from this mastery regardless if you haven't casted a single Frostbolt in the past two expansions.

Now you have this new mastery stat. But at the current time (Development from WotLK to Cata) Frostbolt was still better to cast than Ice Lance because it still benefited from Fingers of Frost. As a reminder, in Wrath of the Lich King Frostbolt roughly did twice the damage of Ice Lance, rendering Ice Lance almost useless in PvE except for shattering of the last Finger of Frost charge or for mobility. So what did you do? You removed Frostbolt from Fingers of Frost. Your PvE rotation is starting to take shape, but in the process you drastically reduce the skill cap of Frost in PvP, heavily nerfing casting Frostbolt. Your PvE rotation wasn't done however. With the introduction of Frostfire Orb (Later Frozen Orb) you added a new instant DPS cooldown, which could also proc more instant casts. Going into Mist of Pandaria you also made Brain Freeze not consume Fingers of Frost, but instead always benefit from the Shatter effect.

You also added the Mage Bombs. Two are instant casts and randomly give Brain Freeze, where as one has a cast time, but causes delayed damage and guarantees a Brain Freeze proc. Living Bomb and Nether Tempest drastically changed Mages and how they can play. You can play the role of a Warlock, multi dotting targets and completely relying on instant procs (Something not much discussed about LB and NT is that they benefit from Frost Mastery and Shatter crit for the entire duration if the target is frozen when the spell is applied), or you can opt to go for the delay damage, causing absurd spike damage when setup correctly.

-- What being a viable PvE Specialization has done to Frost
It has shifted alot of damage from Frostbolt towards instant procs. This is the result of the design philosophy used when designing the Frost PvE rotation with the instant procs and the current Frost Mastery. Also the ways of achieving said instant procs does mostly revolve around Frozen Orb, Pet Nova and Mage Bombs in PvP.

As a side note; I use roughly 25 seconds to kill someone that is AFK with hardcasting Frostbolts.

The way Frost PvE DPS is structured is something I have low hopes in getting changed, but the current Frost Mastery just unneccesarily promotes instant casts even further. The role of Frostburn is to transfer damage from casting Frostbolt over to other spells, but it does this very poorly. Instead you compensate with making Frostbolt even weaker. If Frostburn kept it's original design from Cataclysm Alpha it would achieve what it was intended to do in a much better way and I'm sure the Mage class would be a lot better designed, from a PvP perspective, to this date.

-- What can be changed?

Again, I want to emphasise the ideal role of Frostburn; increase damage of other spells by casting Frostbolt. I strongly belive there are better ways to design Frostburn so that is doesn't only put damage into instant cast damage and that you actually have to cast Frostbolts to benefit from it.

Examples of Frostburn designs that would be more healthy for the game:

Casting Frostbolt increases the damage caused by "other abilities" (Alpha Cata version)
Casting "other abilities" increases the damage caused by Frostbolt
Increase Frostbolt damage towards players, and increase "other abilities" damage towards monsters.

Compare these to the current Frostburn:

Increase damage of "other abilities", and increases the damage you do towards players when frozen with the rest of your abilities.

-- In response to the 5.4 PTR changes

What the 5.4 PTR change does to Frostburn is to remove everything after the comma in the example above, leaving you with only:

Increase damage of "other abilities".

Why are people upset you may ask? Can't we all agree that getting killed in a Deep Freeze is not fun and shouldn't be possible? To be fair, Mages have a very low representation in the higher rating brackets of arena at the moment, and this is a pretty big nerf. Mages have very little sustain damage, so if they can't spike people down with setup they are left with nothing to keep them competative.

What these changes do for me with my mastery:

34% decrease to Frozen Orb on frozen targets (Huge for setting up with Deep Freeze)
34% decrease to Frostbolt Shatters
34% decrease to non Fingers of Frost Ice lances
13% decrease to frozen Frost Bombs
17% increase to non frozen Frost Bombs

Take into consideration that the 17% damage increase to non frozen Frost Bombs probably won't be the tipping point when it comes to scoring a kill or which team has the most damage momentum in any match.

Alot of people say that Mages will be even more centered around instant casts if these changes go live. You however claim that instant casts aren't changed, and that Frost Bomb is buffed in compensation. I agree that instant damage remains the same, but you forget that relative to casted or non-proc damage, instant damage just became alot stronger.

-- To sum it up

I see you talk all the time about how the Dev team won't be making any hasty decisions, but this is a pretty hefty change for mages.

If you go through with this Mastery change, Mages will most likely get hurt alot more than you think. You need to remember there are alot of thresholds in this game. How much a class can heal, how much a class can deal damage. These indirecly affect how locked down your role is in arena and the more slack you have towards these thresholds the more "free space" you get to play around. This "free space" amplifies how well your class scales with free casting, but that is another story.

Good examples of these thresholds are how Discipline Priests are extremely strong in 2v2. Since around season 6 Dicipline has been very dominant in 2v2 because they are extremely efficient at healing "low" amounts of damage (See Rapture), while at the same time being very hard to burst down through defensive cooldowns. They also scale very well with free casting, before with Mana Burn, now with Dominate Mind.

Another example is how Restoration Shamans went from being a top tier healer in 5.2, but in 5.3 with the resilience change they could no longer get the same resilience values they relied on to be able to keep themselves up when trained (The formula got changed, so I might be mistaken, but that's the impression I'm left with at least). The increase to Battle Fatigue was the nail in the coffin, and Shaman's threshold for how much healing they could output was exceeded, reducing their efficency drastically.

The game needs to be very carefully balanced around these thresholds. So if a Mage could barely kill someone alone in 2v2 before this patch, they will never be able to now. For 3v3 you can of course rely on your teammates to do that extra damage, but that's the same as saying people just need to peel a bit more for their Resto Shaman buddy.

TL;DR: The current Mage Mastery design doesn't serve it's purpose very well and the 5.4 PTR changes are too much of a nerf to a class that has faded away from top rated arenas.

If you got through the whole document I want to thank you for reading and I appreciate your time. I will be eager to read your response.

Salokin-EU Sylvanas

P.S: Ferals don't need more options to peel

P.P.S: You should really make Narrow Escape dispellable