I’ve been preaching the awesomeness of frost around here like some sort of gospel. It’s time I change that.
Today, I’m going to complain endlessly about frost. This has nothing to do with my hatred of winter and the fact that it just snowed up here. Nothing at all.
First things first. Fingers of Frost. Blizzard (or Ghostcrawler, if you will) has stated on numerous occasions that the intention was to give frost mages the ability to use “shatter” in a raid environment, in a similar to fashion to how it’s used in PvP.
So far, FoF has failed utterly at this. As it works now, providing charges of shatter, it only succeeds in being a flat increase to DPS, requiring no input whatsoever from the mage. Really, the only active participation is making sure you don’t cast a fireball while FoF is up.
In the early stages of raiding, it used to be viable to use an ice lance for the second charge. The inability for ice lance to further proc FoF was offset by the fact that it was instant. However, ice lance does not scale, and so at about 1700 spell damage, was no longer worth the GCD it spent.
And now, with ice lance not proccing brain freeze, it isn’t even useful for entry level raiding. (more…)