Sweet mage changes on PTR.Follow

Trees:

Fire

* Improved Scorch now increases spell critical strike chance against the target by 5% but no longer stacks. (Up from 1%, Stacks up to 5)

Ice

* Frozen Core now also causes your Ice Lance criticals to reduce the cast time of your next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 sec.

Glyphs:

* Glyph of Improved Scorch is now named Glyph of Scorch and Increases the damage of your Scorch spell by 20%.
* Glyph of Eternal Water - Your Summon Water Elemental now lasts indefinitely, but your Water Elemental can no longer cast Freeze.



Early TCing says that this will make frost actually PvE viable!

Oh, and thank God to the changes for scorch.

The Scorch thing I'm definitely happy about.

How is making the water elemental permanent going to make Frost PvE viable though?

I'm happy about these changes, but I'm wondering what the cool down is on summoning the elemental after death? Most of raiding requires you to "move out of the fire" and right now the elemental isn't so good at that.

Finally mages can get a full-time minion. I always wondered what the big deal was with giving us one.

I believe as of the current patchh it already has full AoE avoidance, if not all pets will have it by 3.3

Yeah, I'd have no clue what the proper raid/heroic spec for frost would be right off hand. Leveling is a whole different ball game than raiding. I'm sure I could figure it out though if I read through the sticky with our analysis on all the different points.

*cracks knuckles*
It's about damn time! I think maybe I'll spend some time number crafting to work Frozen Core into my spec (I would at the expense of Brain Freeze but that would suck once you hit 2PC T10).

You can look at my mage, Versi, on Sisters of Elune, for the current best frost spec.

It looks like Blizzard is making Ghosted Ice Lances part of the normal rotation. When fingers of frost procs, you can cast 2 frostbolts, then at the VERY end of the second frost bolt cast, you can cast either Ice Lance or Brain Freeze. According to the PTR notes and T10 info, this will depend on if you have a Brain Freeze proc available, and we may still end up ignoring Brain Freezes with this change.
The 2 Piece bonus is that if Brain Freeze proc is used, it grants you 12% haste for 5 seconds. That's 12% haste for around 3 frost bolts ignoring other haste procs.
Taking 1 second off of Frostbolt IS more important, as that brings a frostbolt down to around .8 seconds. This, however, bumps against the GCD of 1 second (at the amount of haste it requires to get a 1.8 second frostbolt.) .216
12% haste will make it around a 1.6 second cast (1.584), but that won't bump the GCD.

Very interesting, and much to test out.

The Water Elemental change, however, is a raw DPS increase. The Elemental does a good amount of my DPS (10%?) and he's only up for around 1 minute out of a 5 minute fight. If my DPS is 5K, he did 500 DPS. If he's doing that, times 4, he's doing around 2K DPS (Oh I feel like I'm doing that wrong, please correct me if I am). THEN you factor in the fact that in a fight where he's out for one minute, he's wasted two global cooldowns. My GCD is at around 1.5 seconds, which is almost an entire frostbolt.

Since he gains stats dynamically already, buffing him isn't an issue, and he gets all of my buffs added to his damage. It's also worthy to note that he's almost immune against AoEs, so he's ALWAYS doing damage, sort of like a very powerful DOT.

Testing to follow.

The W/E glyph is a wasted glyph these days. It's Frostbolt, Molten Armor, and Ice Lance.

A little testing on the PTR has provided a small amount of data.
Ghosting Icelance with a poor spec (I'll fix it later on), without the new W/E glyph, I'm looking at a 300-400 DPS increase at current gear levels. It seems as if frost mages may have to sacrifice a tiny bit of haste for crit, as around 1/10 icelances did NOT crit, so they did NOT haste Frostbolt.
On live, on the target dummy, which is terrible for Frost DPS (frost raiding specs rely on other classes to slow the mob, and for FM), I did 2700. On PTR I did 3100. This is before the W/E glyph is factored in. As I see it, a 10% increase is no joke.
The W/E should give another 10% on top of that....
Not NEARLY what we needed, but a step in the correct direction. I WILL note that the increase from ice lance will decrease, as I do use the Ice Lance glyph.
Overall, probably around a 17% increase, give or take.

2k dps would not happen...just because the WE is in the fight longer doesnt mean his deeps will increase. his 500dps will just be there the entire fight.....your taking total dmg and damage per second as the same thing.

The Deep Freeze change is very significant!
A deep freeze hit (heroic bosses, as the target dummy is not stun immune) goes for around 4300 at my current gear level. Deep freeze has a 30 second cooldown. 8600 dpm, aka 860 DPS?!
On Cyanigosa on the PTR, between the Deep Freeze and Frozen Core changes, I'm doing 4800 DPS with Focus Magic and my own buffs. I out DPSed a live-copy Fire Mage with the scorch changes by around 300. This is probably due to luck with blizzards (I didn't have to move out of one).
It could be higher on a raw DPS fight such as Patchwerk, as blink was NOT functioning and I was sitting there drooling for around 20 seconds when she ported us to her bellay.
If I could find a way to get the permanent W/E glyph, I can see frost as not only being viable, but being right up butting against fire and arcane with this latest change.
It's possible that the Deep Freeze change is going live instead of the W/E change, which I would understand. Either way, I'm more excited than you guys could possibly understand.

It's just a cooldown watch to replace the W/E's cooldown watch, I believe, but the spell is instant and -off the gcd.- Currently, and I'm unsure if it's a bug or working as intended, but Deep Freeze is unaffected by talents that add crit. This would mean we're stacking crit for just one spell now, if it's intended.
I'm going to put in more testing in the next few days, but, I don't see frost being laughed at any more. Happy dance, happy dance.

What I'm NOT looking forward to is all of the new chud frosties picking it up because it's the flavour of the month and not understanding a damn thing about ghosting charges or the proper use of Deep Freeze, or cooldown juggling. The average frost player is STILL going to be terribad.
I tried a run where I was consuming Ice Lance on the second FoF charge instead of ghosting it, and that change alone brought DPS down by 340 over a five minute target dummy fight (wasn't able to test DF, obviously).
On a sour note, the build I have to get Deep Freeze and Frozen Core excludes Brain Freeze, which I haven't done since before 3.2.