Ding! 75! Congrats, now you get a new main nuke, and unlike Arcane Blast, it doesn’t suck!
So then. What is frostfire?
No, not THAT frostfire!
Frostfire bolt is unique in that it isn’t unique.
Frostfire bolt counts as both a frost spell and a fire spell at the exact same time. This means that any talent that specifies “frost spell” and any talent that specifies “fire spell” effect frostfire, and all at the same time.
For instance, Piercing Ice (increases damage dealt by your frost spells by 6%) and Fire Power (increases damage dealt by your fire spells by 10%) stack when you use frostfire. If you have both of these, that gives frostfire bolt a 16% increase to damage.
This is true for all talents.
“So wait a minute” I can hear you say, “does this mean that if I get Ice Shards (100% boost to bonus crit damage) AND ignite, I can get frostfire to crit for a bajillion?”
Yes! That is exactly it!
“And… if I go deep into the fire tree, get Burnout, that would give me a 225% crit damage, and ignite stacked on top of that?!”
YES! YESSS!
“OH MAN I GOTTA TRY THAT!”
DAMN RIGHT YOU DO!
*ahem*
Pardon me, I seem to have gotten a little carried away there.
Frostfire benefits from pretty much everything in both the fire tree and the frost tree. Be warned that this means, in order to keep it balanced, the spell itself is weaker than both frostbolt and fireball. It needs the talents in order to come up to par with those two nukes.
Otherwise it’s just a weaker spell that looks fancy.
This isn’t so true if you’re fire spec, but it is if you fancy yourself a frost mage.
To put it bluntly, the frost tree does not offer a lot to frostfire bolt on the high end. If you do go deep frost, frostfire bolt will be a spell that costs more mana than frostbolt, has a longer cast time, and deals less damage.
Does that sound good to you?
In order to make the most out of frostfire bolt, you must go deep into the fire tree. There are three key talents in the fire tree that simply make it better. Namely, Fire Power, Empowered Fire, and Burnout.
This isn’t to say the frost tree is useless. Oh no, frostfire needs Ice Shards at least, and there is a whole bunch of neat stuff in the early tree that can make leveling with this brand new spell a thing of absolute beauty.
The following is a common misconception, that probably originated with Blizzard’s description of the spell.
Frostfire bolt does not deal fire damage or frost damage, depending on the target. Frostfire bolt deals frostfire damage. This means that it damages fire elementals and water elementals equally. There is no immunity to the damage from frostfire.
Fire resistance? pfeh, it’s frostfire damage, baby! That stuff is useless!
Flat spell resistance still dampens it, just specific school resistances no longer apply.
Sadly, the ignite portion of the spell when you crit is still treated as fire damage, so you cannot ignite fire elementals.
However, you can snare water elementals with frostfire bolt. It won’t proc frostbite, but the snare itself still functions, and benefits from any improved snare talents from the frost tree.
The DoT effect and the snare effect on frostfire bolt are treated as the same effect. This means, most of the time, that both effects work regardless of the mob type you hit it with.
Snare-immune elites are still immune, sadly, though the DoT effect still works. From what I can tell, the mechanics of the game simply set the snare effect to 0%.
However, this does mean that the entire effect can be removed if an ability that would ordinarily only remove one of them is used. For instance, a paladin using Hand of Freedom to dispel the snare effect will dispel the DoT as well.
In addition, if frostfire bolt gets interrupted, that will lock out both your fire and frost schools for the duration of the interrupt. Thankfully, most mobs don’t have any interrupts, and the ones that do last only a couple seconds. There are very rare instances where mobs have longer lockouts. In those cases… meh, blink or something. Mobs aren’t very smart, I’m sure you’ll be fine.
With frostfire, I heartily encourage you to goof around with different specs, and see which one works best for you. Again, for leveling purposes, I recommend using a deep fire build with support from the frost tree.
Even some of you frost-only mages should hang out with frostfire for a while. Who knows? You might like it, and you still get to do things like Shatter combos and abuse frostbite procs. No squirtle, though. That might be a deal breaker for some of you.
Anywho, an example of a solid frostfire leveling spec. Notice one talent point is leftout of the final build, as this is a leveling spec, not an end game spec.
You can choose basically whatever glyphs you want. It doesn’t really matter too much, other than Glyph of Evocation kicks ass.
Impact and Frostbite stack?! Why yes, yes they do.
A couple other tips.
I recommend filling in the frost tree stuff first for a build like this. Shatter provides a go-to crit ability that you really should have from the very beginning before filling in the high end fire talents.
You can skip Blastwave, DB, Living Bomb, etc, if you want, I find them extremely useful control abilities that fill in very nicely for stuff you would otherwise get from a deep frost tree build.
Also, in case you hadn’t noticed. Cone of Cold an Dragon’s Breath no longer share a cooldown, so you can feel free to use them in rapid succession for very strong area control.
Try to avoid stacking Combustion and Shatter, if at all possible. You’ll probably be running with at least a 25% crit rate for frostfire, probably higher, so Shatter already nearly guarantees a crit, thus wasting Combustion charges.
Only bother with Molten Shields if you are going to be using Molten Armor. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of two talent points.
You will never be casting fireball as a frostfire build, so don’t bother with Improved Fireball.
Flame Throwing does not affect frostfire bolt, so you can safely ignore it for a frostfire build. It has a base range of 40 yards, so you aren’t missing out on anything anyways.
I found Permafrost a better investment than Elemental Precision, to get the snare on frostfire up to 50%.
And that is that, really.
This is just the leveling portion of the spell. Raiding and so forth will be discussed at a later date. For now, I need to get back to leveling. And so do you!
If you’re already 80, then hurry up and level that alt you always wanted. Or do dailies and send me the gold.
Critical QQ 
Dammit, you’re making me salivate about that fire-mage alt I’ve got sitting in Valiance Keep waiting for me to get back to her…
Sounds like fun!
That’s a pretty exciting build there. Any chance you can give us a comparison of this build vs other ones? Any viability for frostfire in PVP? The double school lockout looks a bit dangerous but there’s plenty of stuff in arcane to tide us over a lockout but hmm… not sure.
Thoughts?
Greetingz, mages!
I’m 74 ATM and I look forward to this spell very much. I’ll certainly goof around with it, and see if it’s useful for leveling. I can also see possibilities in raiding with it, since I’m a huge fan of the old arcane/frost – aka pressing one button continuously, while eating pizza in raids. (You should try it once, serious fun!)
Anyway, I have a few concerns with FFB-leveling. First, I’d lose a huge chunk of survivability as opposed to deep frost. Also, aoe would not be as easily done as it is today. Ice barrier, cold snap, water elemental are very powerful tools for aoe-ing and aoe-ing mobs is an important part of questing. Hunting and gathering quests done in under one minute, anyone?
FFB is definitely great for single-target and the build is still capable of massive aoe dmg, with some skills. (Long-time frostmages have an advantage.) I personally wouldn’t leave Improved Blizzard for the love of god, it’s just huuuge. At the moment the best aoe available ingame, and has nice synergy with World in Flames (+6% crit)
My questions:
1. Should I dress haste or spellcrit for FFB? In T5/ZA/badge epics I have about 230 haste or crit rating. I went with haste so far for leveling, and it was great. However, the FFB-build just cries for as much crit as possible. Still, Shatter provides the crit, but for that Frostbite should proc, which is only 15%. With haste gear though, you can get it proc much more often. I’ve heard before that crit is better for leveling than haste, but my experience showed that haste is better for a deep frost build.
2. What glyph? Evocation is a must, but what else? I say Mage Armor is just awesome, especially glyphed. Even with the FFB-build, I’d probably use it over Molten Armor, unless I have absolutely no mana problems at all. For minors I use Slow Fall and Arcane Int ATM, I just couldn’t find any that are more useful. (Got the turtle from ZG, and wouldn’t change that until the Polymorph: gnome comes out.)
Sorry, if wall of text critted you.
I’d appreciate feedback, especially from my brotha,
Euripides.
“First, Iād lose a huge chunk of survivability as opposed to deep frost. Also, aoe would not be as easily done as it is today.”
No argument there, though FFB survivability is superior to a standard fire build.
For leveling, probably best of gearing for haste. When you only need three or four spell casts to kill a mob, regardless if one crits, crit isn’t really that useful.
Look at it this way. An extra 5% crit won’t provide you with an immediate return on a given mob. I might take you as long as 20, 30 mobs before you see an actual benefit to that extra crit.
Haste, on the other hand, will always benefit you.
And, as you said, more haste = more frostbite = more shatters.
In addition, you can (and should) be using frost nova offensively as a FFB spec. Rather than waiting for the mob to get close to melee range, you can hit them with nova either right away or really early on, and smash them with a shatter combo right then and there.
That’s usually enough right there to kill an equal level mob.
What glyphs you want to use depends a lot on your play style. For instance, I use Molten Armor while leveling, for the ability to proc impact on enemy spellcasters and ranged mobs. I don’t use the mage armor glyph because of that.
Glyphs are a very tricky business. I’m working on a post about them, but it is taking a while. There is much math to be done about some of them, like Glyph of Frost Nova.
Glyph of Evocate and Glyph of Slow Fall both kick ass, the rest is really up to you.
As to Captain, PvP and raid viability stuff is fodder for another post. These things are way to wall-of-texty already, adding another thousand words would probably result in people clawing their eyes out. And that is no good. No really.
i have no plan to use the glyph evocation
Glyphs:
Mage Armor
Arcane Explosion
and I am looking at Frostfire one
the five percent bonus damage to fire ball didnt excite me, and usually i duel box so i dont have stuns in my group to say yes to fireblast.. actually i dont even use it. I am deep fire who spams fireball š is frostfire good for me? maybe i have the talents for it, would rock to stop using frost bolt on those fire immune mobs. i might try it out tonight but i dont think i can afford the one gold respec fee
“No argument there, though FFB survivability is superior to a standard fire build.”
Who would level with fire spec anyway? Oh wait, you do. š (I really can’t see why anyone would do that, but there’s no point in arguing over tastes. :P)
Impact: is a 2-sec stun THAT good for leveling? For PvP definitely, but why do you take it in PvE?
Mage vs. molten armor: you don’t run out of mana too often? I hardly ever need to drink with my mage, and it really is a must, if you aoe often.
Aimix: you have much better options for fire aoe nowadays, than arcane explosion AFAIK. I haven’t played deep fire in a while, but the new talents supposedly helped a lot for you fire-guys.
Euripedes my old friend it’s good to know that you are still posting, it’s been a while since I took a look at your blog.
Just by looking at my name I would assume that you know who I am… A friend back from your old Basil Cosmos days.
I sent you an email through your Critical QQ mail, read it and send me back a reply….also I would recommend heeding my warning… I would have come up with a better way to cause you harm but I was a little distracted when I wrote it so I wasn’t able to be too creative.
Talk to you soon friend, the old O.Z.S. crew really wants to rock out with you again.
Two words on this post, ripper…
Mage Pr0n.
I got Melvin reading you some of the time… higher praise I cannot lavish on a mage blof… (tho I think it has to do with the pretty pictures)
On glyphs… yep. Evocate and slow fall are must haves for pve and pvp. I knew evoke would rock when I first saw it. Sadly, pretty little Maj is stuck in Org makin me insane bank right now.
Sign of the apocalypse… Unbound wtfpwned an arcane mage the other day… fool was only usin three spells… blink, barrage, and counter spell. AND he was feelin frisky (i.e. he started it)
Will arcane mages go the path of ret pallies and locks as the choice of ass hats the world around? I fear for our class…
You are the expert on all things mage, but… but…
Mage Armor for leveling, right? You said so yourself!
I was actually palling on building a Deep Frost/Frostfire build.
I have done all the math and in fact the only disadvantage that using Frostfire Bolt over Frostbolt has in a deep-frost build is that you lose casting time. According to my math, this is more or less made up for with Ignite bonus damage and the ability to get Impact. Basically, I skipped any Frost talents that were Frostbolt-only.
Frostfire bolt using this build has about 96% of Frostbolt’s DPS with a regular deep-frost build, and considerably more DPM (14% base mana for Frostfire vs. 16% for Frostbolt).
Add in that you have threat reduction from Burning Soul and Frost Channeling, and Ignite can proc on everything (Yes, I like Ignite. I always laugh at rogues who gank me and get screwed over by it.) It seems to outstrip Deep Frost/Frostbolt.
I’m not saying its as good as deep fire for raw DPS, but I think it could be a better leveling/world PvP spec.
Oh, one more thing…Frostfire Bolt actually outstrips Frostbolt’s DPS once you have over 1,500 spell damage, or over 1,000 spell damage and 25% crit. According to my math.
Any deep fire build can make use of FFB, not as well as one that tosses points into frost (for at least Ice Shards), but it will perform better than frostbolt.
Again, glyphs are a very personal subject, as they affect very precise spells and strategies that some people will use, and some won’t.
Evocate, for instance, is fantastic for PvP, all solo content, and can be incredibly useful for group play depending how much pressure your healers are under.
The armors themselves, too, depend somewhat on personal play style, talent point acquisition, and gear. For instance, as a deep frost leveling build with Clearcast, I would use Mage Armor for the superior regeneration.
Combine that with constant Elemental summons and regular evocate use, and mana is near infinite at that point.
However, as, say, a leveling fire build taking Impact and Molten Armor, the ability to stun anything when you get hit is superior to the benefits I would gain from more mana regeneration.
And gear changes things, too. If you’re leveling with mostly PvP gear, there isn’t enough spirit there to warrant using Mage Armor at all.
More on this later, I feel a separate post here.
FFB actually outstrips ALL other spells mages have once you hit a certain point in gear and raid makeup, trumping even deep fire with the right raid makeup.
And that is without Razorice.
Thank you so much for this post. I’ve been tempted to dump my mage since I haven’t been satisified with a spec since 3.0. Playing with the frostfire bolt and this spec suggestion made it fun again. Thank you!
And how does this portray into raiding?
With the new scale ups to hit rating, you really think ditching Elemental Precision is such a great idea? What about the fact that shatter requires you to have the target remain frozen until the next spell goes off? Lest you have the frozen finger talent, but that might be a little too deep into frost. They don’t remain frozen that long in raids, thus breaking it before your next spell goes off.
The numbers of the build stay roughly the same for raiding.
That is, a frostfire raiding build will look like 0/53/18.
However, the talents are different.
Almost exactly what you said, actually š
Permafrost is ditched in favour of elemental precision, and shatter is abandoned in favour of frost channeling.
And, of course, some stuff changes in the fire tree, too, as things like Impact and Molten Shields serve no purpose in a raiding environment.
I’m sorry, guys… but, I have to disagree with ALL of you! I know that’s really cocky to do, BUT I have one thing to say — Torment The Weak! DUH!!! …instantly adds 12% damage to every spell you cast after your first frostfire bolt (or frostbolt) hits your target and SLOWS THEM! Yes – that’s considered a snare. And Spell Impact! …adds damage to your ice lance AND fire ball spells. The added damage to fire ball will add damage to your frostfire bolt.
Sooo… You can have all your fire talent points… I’ll just spec deep frost (with all the added frost damage which also enhances frostfire damage) and throw 18 points in arcane to get Torment the Weak and Spell impact and get a free 18% damage increase ON TOP of all the deep frost talent tree enhancements.
Come on… Fingers of Frost, Brainfreeze, Icey Veins, Torment the Week, Spell Impact (which increases spell damage of ice lance and fire ball *thus increasing damage of frostfire bolt), AND all the deep frost damage enhancements and some percs like Ice Barrier and Cold Snap? YOU CAN’T BEAT THAT!
Go for it. Nothin’ stopping you from speccing the way you want. Just one thing…
Spell Impact actually does not affect Frostfire Bolt.
Any talent that affects all frost or fire spells works with FFB, but FFB is considered it’s own, separate spell. As Spell Impact does not list FFB, it will not affect it.
the last comment I left was intended for raiding/leveling purposes only…
Note taken about the Spell Impact… However, if you add up all of the frost talent tree bonus damage plus the 12% given by torment the weak, I’m ALMOST positive it would equal more than a 16% increase (16% being the bonus of Piercing Ice and Fire Power). I say “almost positive” b/c I’m at work and can’t check the talent trees. I can only get certain web pages here.
12% from torment, 6% from Piercing Ice, 5% from Arctic Winds, 5% from Chilled to the Bone.
Total 28% modifier.
(Note that the first frostfire bolt cast on a mob will not benefit from torment.)
Goin’ with the fire tree, you still get the 6% from Piercing Ice, 10% from Fire Power, 3% from Playing With Fire.
That’s 19%, or 9% lower than the deep frost with arcane build you’re proposing.
Don’t forget about Empowered Fire, though, that applies an additional 15% of your spellpower to FFB. Obviously, the strength of that differs depending on how much spellpower you have.
Empowered Frostbolt really should do the same thing in the frost tree… it’s strange that it doesn’t.
Remember – It’s not only the 28% versus the 19% damage increase, but frost also comes with huge crit chances (especially with Fingers of Frost), huge defense benefits, and all of the points that slow your targets WAY more than the frostfire bolt coming from a fire mage.
So… 28% damage and all of the other percs of frost (especially survivability) definitely make this build worth trying.
Honestly, a deep frost build with 18 points in arcane for Torment the Weak out dps both fire and frostfire builds.
I might be wrong, but I’m also pretty certain that Frostbolt Snare does not count towards Torment the Weak. I believe the only thing that can trigger the Damage buff from Torment the Weak is Slow.
Grimba,
From what I’ve seen on on Elitist Jerks, that is correct with regards to raid bosses, but not true when it comes to levelling/trash mobs.
You have my thanks for all the useful info, I coulndt wait to try FFB but had no clue how the talents calculate into the spell xD. O and for the coment above of who lvl’s fire <—-, i know frost is proven as an easier lvling spec, but I’ma hardcore dungeon buff with a tad bit ADD. I need the chalenge of fire :} everything else just strikes me as to easy.
~Tn~
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