[Frost] Lack in DPS

[Assya 0]

Hello!

I've been playing a bunch of mage recently to eventually find myself at 850 ilevel (down to 849 for stat purpose, I swapped an item for more haste and crit instead of mastery). However, since my last raid (yesterday), I feel like I might not be pulling enough damage for my ilevel so I'm looking for advices concerning the spec, rotation or stats. Further down, you're going to find my armory profile but I want to say it right here and now : I am aware that I'm overflowing with Mastery and I am currently working towards lowering that by a lot (if only gear would drop D:).

 

While we're here, I also wanted to hear about your thoughts on specs. I just did a Maw Mythic +4 and some people didn't seem to be happy when they saw that I was frost and told me they should've known before because of some AoE issue and damage in general. Could it be that Frost isn't as good as Simulationcraft says it is ? I roughly hit the 200k DPS mark and I find myself pretty low compared to some people. Maybe Fire is better? Or even Arcane (even though I find it disgusting...). What do y'all think?

 

Cheers!

 

Trial of Valor log, look for Assya : https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/pGd8rVCk1qQPFgKD/#fight=1&type=damage-done

Armory link : http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/zuljin/Assya/advanced

EDIT : In case it shows Felo'melorn, I'll put this image of my actual stats with Frost spec because I tend to try the other specs sometimes...

Edited November 19, 2016 by Assya

[Zadina 923]

Hey.

First of all, your gear is a bit low and you also didn't tell us how much you have progressed your Artifact, so these results are quite natural. Even though you are the lowest in damage done in this log, your performance at your item level (the one on the right) is at 70 which is pretty decent. In fact, you are the third highest in item level performance and you have the lowest item level in your raid, so that's good in my book. For gearing, remember to reach the 33,33% Crit cap first and then go for Haste.

I see you are playing the Ray of Frost build, so I can't help you much with that and if you did your rotation properly because I am not familiar with that build. Bear in mind that the Bone Chilling/Thermal Void build is considered superior than the RoF one. Although maybe it's no use learning it since they are nerfing it in Nighthold from what I've seen in the PTR (although everything is subject to change).

Frost is only good at single target and 1-2 targets cleave so I understand the skepticism of your Mythic+ groups. Personally, with trash being harder and more in numbers than bosses I wouldn't bring Frost in a high Mythic+ dungeon.

Now, if Frost is better than Fire. After the patch 7.1.2, everyone rushed to jump on the Frost hype train quite fast... Even I said in another topic that Frost is probably the best in single target. After playing the spec a bit myself and seeing some logs, I am not too sure about that. Sure it performs better in Sims and in Warcraft Logs, but if you look closely in Warcraft Logs: a) the Frost parses are extremely few in number compared to the Fire ones, b) most of these amazing Frost parses are done by people with equally amazing gear (880+) and c) the average damage for Frost is higher than Fire, but the maximum damage for Frost is lower (sometimes by a large number too) than Fire [this difference has to do with point A]. The same could be argued for Arcane, although I am a bit reserved about this since I haven't touched the spec since Legion launched. Most people started as Fire and worked on their Fire artifact and I am of the opinion that currently they should still stick to it.

The sims are showing Frost (and Arcane) quite high in Nighthold but until Nighthold itself is released, these sims are just estimated guesses and nothing more. From the experiences on the PTR so far, Arcane is looking like it's gaining ground but again nothing is solid yet.

TL;DR: All specs are pretty close to each other at the moment. If you like Frost, you should stick to it and maybe it pays off well for you in the future. However, it still remains a weak aoe/dungeon spec so I would work on one of the other two specs as well.