The So-Called "Retarded" Frost Damage

After reading complaints after complaints about Mage damage in arena, I decided to test the damage out myself.

My stats is: 5935 Spellpower (trinket used: 7455 Spellpower), 9.14 Mastery (22% increased damage against frozen targets).

My first target was a 3014 resilience geared Holy Priest, 3k is an average amount of resilience of most geared players at the moment. My average hits and crits were:

5175 Frostbolt hit (non frozen)

15056 Frostbolt critical strike (frozen)

12194 Icelance critical strike (frozen)

My second target had 3824 resilience, which is probably close to what most people will soon have in full vicious:

13748 Frostbolt critical strike (frozen)

17205 Frostbolt critical strike (trinket and frozen)

10557 Ice Lance critical strike (frozen)

12840 Ice Lance critical strike (trinket and frozen)

I think the “problem with Mage damage” is not the amount of sheer output we have in arena, (it is not even comparable to Death knights, Feral Druids, Warriors etc) but this illusion is rather caused by Ice Lance combined with low resilience geared players in the first few weeks. Ice Lance is the only spammable, instant spell in this game that has such high crit value. This could indeed lead to unpreventable damage from magi when they are left alone.

People who say Ice Lance has dumbed down the Mage class – I initially thought so too at patch 4.0, however as people get more and more geared and obtain more and more resilience, high amounts of Ice Lance damage compensates for many new troubles Mages face in Cataclysm – Now every melee has an interrupt, every healer has a spammable dispel, and our CC/Novas/stuns no longer have any dispel protection (Ice Lance still requires target to be frozen to do considerable damage).

People who think more damage should be shifted towards Frostbolt – I disagree with you. As the king of CC, Mages will be targeted a lot in arena in the near future, especially with the rising of melee/caster/healer teams -much like in TBC. And with that many interrupts and dispels currently in game, if our only source of damage were Frostbolt, we would do pretty much 0 damage when getting trained. Besides, spamming Frostbolts (one button) is technically less skillful than Ice Lancing while position yourself (multiple buttons) anyway.

so, im not crazy when i earlier today though i dident do that much dmg?

No your not. As people get more and more geared and obtain more and more resilience, our damage output doesn't look that ridiculous at all.

Neso wrote:
My first target was a 3014 resilience geared Holy Priest, 3k is an average amount of resilience of most geared players at the moment. My average hits and crits were:

5175 Frostbolt hit (non frozen)

15056 Frostbolt critical strike (frozen)

12194 Icelance critical strike (frozen)

These numbers must have been affected by some of the priest' talents or buffs, they seem way too low. I've been running at 3k resilience for two weeks now, and frost mages with the same level of gear as me (best available so far) were constantly doing 21k+ Ice Lances and 25k+ FB/FFB. At any rate, I'm going to get exact numbers, but so far Frost mage burst seems comparable to s8 Elemental, at least from my PoV.

Neso wrote:Besides, spamming Frostbolts (one button) is technically less skillful than Ice Lancing while position yourself (multiple buttons) anyway.

You could say that, but in WotLK a frost mage had to fake cast a lot (now I can't even interrupt one's burst cause he doesn't need to cast anymore), he had to position himself so that he can't be LoS'd during a FB cast (instead of just running after while spamming Ice Lance), and one more thing I dislike about 4.0 Frost is the amount of novas on different DRs a frost mage can pull off, which is pretty much why he can spam IL so much.

Since I don't have time I'll say this:

I mostly agree and have been saying this for some time. The playstyle is slightly different and I think it's a lot more fast paced than before. Rewarding a proper shatter combo is what frost should be about and we're almost there.

Corp out.

How's the army Corp? They kicking your ass already? ;p.

But yea anyway, I've always prefered frostbolts spamming over ice lance spamming since I enjoy seing myself cast a frostbolt rather then just mindlessly bashing an instant spell. Having to be dependant on a pet 24/7 is also kinda pissing me off a bit and its one of the reasons I don't like frost all that much anymore.

The damage frost can put out is still a lot. Frostfire bolt doing more instant damage then pyroblast, though pyroblast makes up for it by having a very good dot damage that cant be dispelled. But chances are frostfire bolts are going to proc a lot more then hot streaks untill we have a bit more crit. Though that also means frost mages will also have a lot more haste which enables more frostbolt spams which in turn gives more frostfire bolts.
Overall, frost can do a lot more damage since they can stay alive for a lot longer then a fire mage.

Fire used to be able to kill atleast 1 person when jumping in a group of 4-5 since they had so much AoE CC. Even if there was a healer in that group he wouldn't be able to react fast enough. Right now we've lost that CC (Blast wave knockback) and fiery payback which would help us take a lot less damage when we're with very low amounts of Hp, which also unlocked a very fast pyro cast. And you also had combustion which would let you take down your targets a lot faster by not having to rely on our dots to do the damage for us. While right now, if we jump on a group of 4-5 we won't even be able to take down 30% of our primary target's HP simply because our Combustion needs a good pyro crit in order to do maximum damage, whereas frost can just deep freeze and spam ice lance with icy veins. With that they'll be able to do 5x ice lances which would add up to around 50k+ damage if you also have a lot of crit chance even with your target having 3.8k resi, since you yourself said your ice lance did atleast 10k crit. Frost nova from the pet -> shatter burst with early frost + an ice lance and there you have it. A very solid and controlled burst damage.
I myself believe frost mages are the only class that can currently do huge amounts of burst damage that would kill you apart from warriors, ferals( which are getting nerfed I might add while frost might remain pretty much the same) and DKs.

Your damage test could have been incorrect since priests have so many passive damage reduction talents its not even funny. I suggest you try out your damage on someone who doesn't have any damage reduction talents ( or atleast haven't specced any of them). I myself have been able to pull off 17k ice lance crits out of my ass(with 5.9k sp. No other spellpower increasing trinkets etc.) on 3.2k resi.

I played frost while obtaining pvp gear, playing fire now since im fully geared. I have about 23% crit and hot streak seems to be proccing quite alot for me so thats good. In full pvp gear i have around 3k resi and im still getting hit for over 20k by frost mages. I bg as fire but arena as frost due to more control and burst.

Mitz, one week done and next friday first day off. It's definitely not as bad as I thought it would be but I'm not a huge fan of being here either. Today duty is from 4.30 to 21.45.

And you can't laugh and we just rofl on stupid things. Humor is what keeps us going. :)

Go figure.

OT: I've no idea what's the PvP "progression" at the moment so I can't really comment on detail.

Mitz wrote:
I've always prefered frostbolts spamming over ice lance spamming since I enjoy seing myself cast a frostbolt rather then just mindlessly bashing an instant spell.

you and me both, its a reason im still playing a caster ya know