Is Frostscythe ded? :(

[riparooni 0]

I've recently gotten back into wow after a short-ish break.  Is Frostscythe officially dead now? It looks like even machinegun builds use obliterate. 

[Vacivity 0]

With the current tier piece procing rime of obliterates quite frequently and most people stacking HB relics + mastery gear, howling blast and remorless winter buildup with gathering storm just does so much aoe dmg spamming frostscythe just can't compete with it. And as far as i know machinegun build was never about froscythe? 

[Browed 19]

6 hours ago, riparooni said:

I've recently gotten back into wow after a short-ish break.  Is Frostscythe officially dead now? It looks like even machinegun builds use obliterate. 

There is some hope yet, patch 7.2.5 has important changes for Frostscythe, although subject to revision, that could impact it's usage in future.

It procs Rime. This is a massive change and likely to balance out as a dps increase on virtually any multi target scenario provided the player has the new legendary talent ring (and legendary item cap is increased to 3 *speculation*).

The new legendary ring gives the wearer free Gathering Storm talent, which leaves the option of Frostscythe available to increase AoE abilities.

The changes make zero difference to the accepted optimal single target rotation but nonetheless, Frostscythe is certainly not dead or going away any time soon.

Edited May 25, 2017 by Browed

[riparooni 0]

8 hours ago, Browed said:

It procs Rime. This is a massive change and likely to balance out as a dps increase on virtually any multi target scenario provided the player has the new legendary talent ring (and legendary item cap is increased to 3 *speculation*).

The new legendary ring gives the wearer free Gathering Storm talent, which leaves the option of Frostscythe available to increase AoE abilities.

Neat! Maybe I should end up keeping my mastery gear (~50% mastery) 

[demonardvark 556]

Just to follow up on what browed said, in addition the upcoming changes to FsC it will also have a chance to proc thronebreaker as well. Its yet to be known if it can proc individually on each target hit or just "the main one". With the new legendary ring and FsC changes it certainly does appear that a FsC build will return specifically more for mythic + than anything. The issue is while its getting proc abilities, BoS values are unchanged (atm) and the legendary items for frost still have heavy synergy with BoS. So, the general supposition moving foward (atm of course) is likely

Raid- BoS

Mythic plus - Machinegun esque FsC build

PvP- ?????

also just to comment on the whole concept of machinegun and to respond to vac. it originated in 7.0 legion because frost honestly had terrible tuning issues and other various ability damage number issues. The argument came around to if you use frostscythe or not and there was a lot of conflicting information basically because of sampling. The tldr was at higher gear levels FsC was stronger than obliterate and obliterate had its normal scaling issues. Come 7.1 Obliterate got huge buffs and aside from heavy heavy cleave in general over powered FsC. With using obliterate and parts of machinegun it behooved one to instead take runic attenuation. hence, the phrase OBRA appeared (obliterate with runic attenuation) to differentiate from machinegun which was typically heavily favoring FsC. Now some used the naming some didn't, call a potato a reconstructed french fry its still a potato, so many still just called it machinegun. This lasted until BoS became dominant.

Even then calling it machinegun was a group think choice with questionable accuracy. It was actually a name used for a previous rotation IC6 that was basically masterfrost that didn't use obliterate at all. Which when using FsC machinegun there was debate for a long time as if you should cast obliterate at all (this was pre obliterate buff). 

So yeah there's a bit of history with legion and frost and naming rotations and what they actually did. Part of that two was frozen pulse OG needed all runes to be spent, so the mindset was bash buttons as fast as possible/roll face on keyboard, hence machine gun, high apm rotation. Once frozen pulse was changed you still had to burn runes quickly just not as frantically.