Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist |
1. |
Add an Option to Hide the Icicles Visual |
2. |
Casting Ray of Frost While Moving |
3. |
Stronger Ice Lance Incentives |
4. |
Weaker Frostbolt Incentives |
5. |
Making Flurry More Interesting |
Ray of Frost as a Primary Cooldown
Overall, I like having
Ray of Frost as the new primary cooldown for Frost Mage, but it leaves the specialization uniquely vulnerable to interrupts and forced movement. This conflicts with the stated design goal of making Frost an approachable specialization. Not even counting the lost damage, losing so many stacks of
Freezing just feels awful. This will cause a lot of players to simply stand in mechanics and take a lot of damage or die just because they really don't want to cancel it, which is just going to be frustrating for everyone. Allowing it to be cast while moving, bringing back
Ice Floes for Frost Mages, or doing something to lessen the punishment if it gets canceled would be greatly appreciated.
Ice Lance is Weak
For the new Frost Mage,
Ice Lance exists as one of the few spells that consume
Freezing stacks. This is the primary incentive to cast it, but right now for Frostfire, you can ignore it because it and
Shatter deal low enough damage that just wasting most of your Freezing stacks is an acceptable rotational decision. Some new incentive needs to be added to Frostfire here even if it's just a buff to Ice Lance and Shatter damage, since being able to ignore the new core mechanic of the specialization is silly. Building on that, part of the problem is that
Frostbolt/
Frostfire Bolt still tend to drive too much on their own. They do things that Ice Lance doesn't like generating
Brain Freeze and
Frostfire Empowerment. While having a filler spell that feels strong can be a good thing, feeling incentive to keep pressing it over spender spells like Ice Lance is a problem. This is especially clear in AoE situations where Frostfire Empowerment and
Glacial Assault apply Freezing stacks to multiple targets at once, which can then be consumed by
Comet Storm removing the need to cast Ice Lance.
Flurry
Prior to the Midnight rework,
Flurry was always a spell that drove the iconic Shatter combos in Frost's rotation. Now after the rework, it largely just feels like a better version of
Frostbolt that you can cast sometimes. It would be nice to see changes to the spell that add more interaction with the spells you cast around it to make it distinct from Frostbolt and to keep that feeling of doing combos with it. I also want to mention that
Brain Freeze empowering Flurry is not necessary. Because Flurry is already a cooldown, the cooldown reset alone is enough to make Brain Freeze work as an impactful proc. Providing extra damage and now also having the new
Thermal Void interaction work only with Brain Freeze just makes the natural casts feel bad. Lastly, it's worth pointing out that while normally the ideal time to use a charged cooldown involves some extra decision making due to their flexibility, this is not the case the Flurry. Because a Brain Freeze proc provides a full charge, there is incentive to cast Flurry immediately when it's available to try to minimize cooldown waste. If there were some windows where you could sit on a Flurry charge with no penalty, the rotation would feel more engaging.
