Depletion would admittedly fit better. 10 people in the raid lose .25% mana per sec, while the Warlock gets all the mana drained.

I suppose I could see an Improved Drain Mana Talent that caused replenishment, but otherwise, just no.

Not as stupid as Destruction Warlocks getting replenishment. If anything flies in the face of lore, that’s probably it. I love it from a utility perspective, but Warlocks are about as selfish a class as you can imagine, what with demonic collusion, pacts for power, and palling around with succubi. If warlocks in general are nihilistic and anti-social, the destruction variety are bat-shit insane on top of all that.

So…we let them effectively share mana with the raid? lolwut?

It would have made more sense to give Destruction an anti-replenishment, Depletion. It lifetaps your entire raid for 30% of their HP, giving the desto-lock temporary mana and boosting damage and haste by 70%. You also automatically use the /cackle emote. At the very least, receiving mana from a warlock should come with some kind of a debuff. Just for spite.

Frost mages are the only ones really left behind, raid wise. Everyone else has stuff to manage in the short term and long term.

But like most fake patch note spoilers… LOL.

Sure, it’d be hard to determine the bad frost players from the good on fights like patchwerk where there aren’t any restrictions, but bring the same players to a grobbulus fight and see who can keep their squirtle out of the fart.

Reducing the uptime sorta hurts that, and more than I’d like to admit (and other frosties as well), I like to think that Frost is an analogue in playstyle to Beastmaster. Just think about it. Pet management? Check. Spam one spell while your pet does your thing? Check.

Replenishment? Sure sign me up, but isn’t that supposed to be a Survival thing?

I think it would be great to create a new shatter combo which is viable for raiding – this is what Blizzard have said they would like to do. I think it should involve the hitherto (relatively) useless-in-PvE 51-point talent Deep Freeze.

Bear with me.

It is currently possible to perform what I call an extended shatter combo by casting deep freeze just prior to the end of frostbolt at a frozen target (or second frostbolt in FoF procs). This gives time for a traditional shatter combo (frostbolt/ice lance) on the deep frozen target.

Great.

Except that just about everything in PvE with sufficient health to require the kind of damage (ie bosses) that this combination results in is immune to deep freeze. So, useful for soloing stun-vulnerable elites, but not much else.

We know that frostbolt can affect bosses – it just has an effective snare of 0%, allowing ToTW to work. OK, why not allow Deep Freeze to _also_ affect bosses in the same manner, i.e. not impairing movement but applying a debuff which makes the target count as frozen ( or DEEP frozen – see later) for the purposes of spells.

Thus far we have a situation in which, when FoF procs, a frost mage with sufficiently good timing can cast Deep Freeze on the tail of their second frostbolt, incurring the 1.5 sec global cooldown, but gaining a +50% chance to crit on the next frostbolt and allowing an ice lance to be tagged onto _that_ frostbolt.

But wait, you say, Ice Lance is a DPS loss – we need keep spamming frostbolt. Very perceptive, and this brings me to the second point. We change Ice Lance so that it benefits from Empowered Frostbolt (maybe we can call it Empowered Frost instead) and scales with SP like frostbolt _against deep frozen targets only_.

Now Frost magi have to watch for a FoF proc, get the timing on their Deep Freeze right, then get the timing on their deep-frozen-shatter combo right in order to maximize DPS. It gets even more complex if there are two frost magi in a raid because suddenly there is a symbiosis, provided they can communicate effectively to each other the timing of their deep freezes. Potential for lots of damage, but alos the potential to significantly reduce dps if you get the timing wrong. Suddenly an element of skill, and possibly close teamwork, is required.

I acknowledge that this would be a PvP buff for frost mages. This doesn’t concern me too much, for two reasons;

1) if a player is caught in deep freeze with their trinket on cooldown and no allies to help them by dispelling the stun or killing the mage, then they are in incredibly deep trouble already, and increasing the burst damage the unfortunate suffers by a fraction won’t make much difference (perhaps our Improved Frost talent should only benefit Ice Lance by a reduced amount of the SP increase to Frostbolt, say 50%) and;

2) I’m a frost mage, and am therefore able to say, without hyperbole, that we absolutely, completely, totally, and without a shadow of doubt NEED PvP buffs. Lots of them.

C’mon, Blizz, you did it for Arcane. Now buff Frost!!