Frost Mage changes for upcoming expansion

Frost Mage changes to transfer damage from instant cast procs to Frostbolt
23.06.2013

-- Introduction
Hello Holinka, again. Hopefully you read my last tweet. It was my first tweet ever, and I therefore hold it very high. This is the second tweet however. Not quite as impressive as being the first tweet, but in this case it might be just as important as its all about how you can improve the design of Frost Mages, most likely for an upcoming expansion. I thank you for your time and I hope that you appreciate feedback exceeding the 140 character limit of Twitter. I will be commenting most changes using asterisks (*) to mark the beginning and the end.

-- Frost Mage patch notes to improve Frostbolt in PvP

Frostbolt
- Damage increased by 25%
* All these notes are about moving damage from other spells to Frostbolt while maintaining a valid PvE rotation. *

Fire Blast
- Damage increased by 50%
* Instant damage will be nerfed alot. Increasing the damage of a more predictable source of instant damage to compensate. *

Cone of Cold
- Damage increased by 300%
* Glyph should be baseline. The ability has never been weaker than in this expansion. *

Water Elemental: Freeze
- No longer grants Fingers of Frost when successfully hit
* Every game starts with a pet nova and one to two Ice Lances and a Deep Freeze. It feels very wrong casting a Fingers of Frost Ice Lance into a Shatter combo with Freeze already present. *

Frozen Orb
- Damage decreased by 30%
* Nerf to the Frost Mage super shatter. *
- Duration increased to 15 sec, up from 10 sec
* Compensate for the nerf for PvE. *
- Can't proc Fingers of Frost more than once every second
* Hitting multiple enemies shouldn't overwhelm you with procs, but instead make it a more consistent flow. *

Fingers of Frost
- Frostbolt now also benefits from, and consumes, Fingers of Frost
* It is the only way to make a hardcasting Frost Mage scary in PvP. *
- Cone of Cold now has a 15% chance to trigger Fingers of Frost
* Added another source of Fingers of Frost due to Freeze nerf. *
- Frost Armor now has a 5% chance to trigger Fingers of Frost
* Added a anti-train mechanic due to relying more on Frostbolt. *
- Ice Lance no longer gets a 25% damage increase when used with Fingers of Frost
* Merging numbers for the next change. *
- Ice Lance damage versus non-player target is increased by 100% when used with Fingers of Frost
* Making Ice Lance a high priority in PvE while keeping it in line in PvP. *

	"The Fingers of Frost effect causes your next
	Frostbolt, Ice Lance or Deep Freeze to act as if
	your target were frozen, and increase Ice Lance
	damage by 100% versus non-player targets."

Mastery: Frostburn
- Revert 5.4 PTR changes
- Base mastery reduced to 7.5
* Lowering the base percent of Mastery to make the stat more attractive. *
- Now requires 400 rating per point of Mastery, up from 300
* Nerf to compensate for Frostbolt being put back on Fingers of Frost. Ideally, Frostburn values shouldn't go beyond ~30% in PvP to keep the damage normalized outside of procs. *

Frostfire Bolt
- Increase damage by 15%
* Compensate for the Mastery change and it needs to hit between 90%-110% damage of a frozen Frostbolt. *

At this point I think the ratio between Mage's damaging abilities is in a very good place. This will however result in a pretty big PvE buff, regardless of the Mastery nerf. I think that a PvP coefficient on Ice Lance is neccesary to achieve the best possibly PvE and PvP experience aslong as you insist on having Ice Lance in the PvE rotation.
Ways to tune down Frost PvE damage after these changes:

- Cut all damage by X%
- Consider lowering the damage increase on Ice Lance when cast versus non-player targets
- Reduce damage of Mage Bombs, but also remove the player damage coefficients
- Keep Frozen Orb at 10 sec duration
- Consider removing the damage increase on Frostbolt debuff as its no longer needed to keep Ice Lance in check in PvP. Will also nerf Water Elemental damage. Consider increasing all damage up a bit to compensate
- Add another PvP exception, for example to Shatter:

	"Shatter
	Doubles the critical strike chance of all your
	spells against frozen targets plus an additional
	50% versus players."

This will increase the Critical Strike cap of Frost in PvE to 50%, making Crit, Mastery and Haste much more equal secondary stats.

This is how the PvE rotation will look like:

Frozen Orb > Frost Bomb > Shatter Ice Lances after Frostbolts with Fingers of Frost > Casting Brain Freeze > Frostbolt

Having Frostbolt on Fingers of Frost will allow you cast "old school" Shatters as a part of your rotation, increasing the fun factor and the skill cap.


-- Mage patch notes to improve gameplay in PvP

Frost Armor
- Cast time removed, down from 3 sec
- Slow increased to 40%, up from 30%

Mage Armor
- Cast time removed, down from 3 sec
- Duration of harmful magic effects reduced by 20%, down from 25%

Molten Armor
- Cast time removed, down from 3 sec
- Attacks against you applies the Weakening Blows debuff (10% less physical damage done)

Glyph of Armors
- Mage Armor: Duration of harmful magic effects reduced by an additional 10%
- Molten Armor: Increase armor by an additional 50%
- Frost Armor: The Frost Armor debuff will now stack up to 10 times (Maximum one stack per sec). On the 10th application the target will be frozen for 4 sec.

* The Frost Armor change will introduce a "Controlled" Frostbite. One dispel will remove all stacks. Either shares diminishing returns with Ice Ward or on it's own, preferably on it's own. These changes to Armors and the glyph will add alot more dept to the the Mage class. It will reintroduce Armor toggeling, especially with Weakening Blows on Molten Armor, and make the Glyph of Armors less mandatory. Personally I've always thought it was abit weird that it just increased whatever the Armor did by 10 percent points. *

Invisibility
- You can no longer see enemies while invisible

Glyph of Invisibility
- No longer increase movement speed while invisible
- You can now see nearby enemies while invisible
* Mages will have to commit a glyph slot if they want to go for the cookie cutter opener. The invis Shatter happens to be alot stronger in the lower brackets of Arena because people don't use Arena123 Counterspell macros. This will in a sense "free up" a glyph slot for high rated Mages that opts to not go for that play style. *

Glyph of Blink
- No longer increase range traveled when casting Blink
- Removes movement slowing effects when casting Blink

Glyph of Cone of Cold
- Replaced with Glyph of Alter Time

NEW Glyph of Alter Time
- All health healed when Alter Time is active will be added to your saved health value when the spell resolves
* Using Alter Time defensively at the moment is little used because you can't play too much around it versus dispellers, therefore making it alot better to abuse with instant procs instead. The Glyph will not be "core" so it will be an active decision to pick it up. *

Glyph of Frost Nova
- No longer reduce the cooldown of Frost Nova
- Increase all damage dealt by 20% to targets affected by your Frost Nova
* The old version is just horrible because how diminishing returns work. The new one will create scenarios where you are more likely to go for a Frost Nova Shatter instead of just casting Frostbolts. *

Glyph of Ice Block
- No longer triggers a free Frost Nova or makes you immune to spells
- When attacked by a spell while in Ice Block, you have a 100% chance to reflect it back at the attacker.
* Just a fun tool to have access to. In my opinion way more in line than the Hunter's "Glyph of Mirrored Blades" because Ice Block is a much bigger commitment. *

Glyph of Remove Curse
- Revert 5.4 PTR changes
* This glyph really didn't need buffing in the first place. By making Glyph of Armors less mandatory, and as Hunters representation in Arena goes down, this glyph with automatically start to pop up here and there. Remember there is only one class in the game that consistently puts up curses. *

Glyph of Counterspell
- No longer increase cooldown of Counterspell
* The drawback is too big for it to be ever considered in Arena especially seeing that you rarely cast, and Counterspell is mostly used as a blanket silence on healers. *

Presence of Mind
- Cooldown increased to 2 min, up from 1.5 min
* Needs nerfed, preferably even higher cooldown than 2 min, replaced with a new talent or have certain spells like Polymorph removed from being used with it. *

Ice Floes
- Cooldown reduced to 20 sec
- Reduced to one charge
* Most of the time you only need to get that one cast off. This will buff it in PvP while as in PvE it will remain relatively the same. *

-- Misc changes

Weakened Blows
- Duration reduced to 20 sec, down from 30 sec.
* It is abit long, don't you think? *


-- Final words

On a side note I must say I got positively surprised when reading the Hunter changes and the Tie Breaker change to Arena. Remember for next expansion to keep what you have been trying to balance during entire Mists of Pandaria, and not completely flip - turn upside down the game. Before you stop reading I would like you to take a moment, so just sit right there, and I will tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.


Salokin-EU Sylvanas