Was able to waste some time with a dummy on the PTR with a frost build.
Replenishment is nice, but it’s suffering from a fairly huge bug right now. The same bug, actually, that plagued Shadow Priests back in LK beta.
Replenishment, as you know, ticks every second. But it doesn’t tick immediately, it ticks the following second.
With three points in Enduring Winter, every single frostbolt is going to refresh Replenishment.
Replenishment normally looks like this:
0.00 – You gain Replenishment
1.00 – Replenishment ticks
2.00 – Replenishment tocks
3.00 – Replenishment ticks
And so forth, ticking or tocking every second. But what happens when you refresh it right away?
Let’s say you’re sporting enough haste on your gear to bring Frostbolt down to a 1.8 second cast time. Replenishment starts/refreshes as soon as that frostbolt hits a given target.
0.00 – You gain Replenishment
1.00 – Replenishment ticks
1.80 – Frostbolt hits, refreshing Replenishment
2.80 – Replenishment ticks
See what happened there? Replenishment should’ve ticked at 2.00, but it didn’t because frostbolt refreshed it too early. So now I’m sitting three seconds in, and have only seen two Replenishment ticks when there should’ve been three.
When Shadow Priests encountered this issue, Blizzard simply changed their Replenishment mechanic to proc off of Mind Blast, therefore largely eliminating this clipping problem.
It remains to be seen whether it will be possible to have a similar fix for frost mages, or whether the coding will be improved to eliminate the possibility of this clipping.
Second order of business.
Glyph of Ice Lance is, indeed, a DPS boost. I’ve only tested it so far for the second charge of FoF (currently lag is rendering it impossible to test it for the “third” charge).
Glyph of Ice Lance replaced Glyph of Molten Armor, and so far it seems to be about a 4% damage increase (1500 spellpower) as compared to just frostbolting straight through FoF.
Will test more later, the servers seem to have crashed. Again.
Could you kindly do a quick run down on which new glyphs turned out to be majors and which are minors?
These are the ones I saw on MMO Champ:
Glyph of Deep Freeze *new*
Glyph of Living Bomb *new*
Glyph of Arcane Barrage *new*
Glyph of Mirror Image *new*
Glyph of Ice Barrier *new*
It does strike me as a little thoughtless to just tag replenishment onto frostbolt. Even ret pallies have a cooldown, and I thought *that* was too easy. What if it was tied to ice lance? Would FoF be up enough to make that work?
Glyph of Deep Freeze *new*
Glyph of Living Bomb *new*
Glyph of Arcane Barrage *new*
Glyph of Mirror Image *new*
Glyph of Ice Barrier *new*
Unfortunately, I see all those being majors.
@Merlot: Ice lance is an interesting possibility, though you would probably need to increase the duration of the replenishment proc in order to make it viable. I would also love to see it move to ice lance because then it would be available to deep frost frostfire specs.
[…] more here: Preliminary Frost Testing Share and […]
None of the new glyphs have been implemented yet, so it’s impossible to test.
Old ones that had the effect changed (like Ice Lance) were changed, but other than that… don’t know.
I’ve always been a big fan of Frost and the thought of making Ice Lance a viable spell on anything but trash is increasing my interest in leveling my Mage up to play around with.