Frost vs Fire mages

[Garm]

Hey gang, got a quick lil question for your consideration:

Part of my army is a 4xgroup of 37-38 mages, 3 fire and 1 frost. The mana efficiency of frost is tempting me to go 4xfrost, though I know the burst dmg would suffer. My main focus is leveling (of course) and would like to hear your opinions on the matter !!!

[xum]

if you can get the controls down... you could do some serious AoE farming

[opt]

Set 1 to imp scortch set 3 to fireball and spam away, whats not effecient in that?
Although frost with that imba talent where you get +10% crit stacked 3 times would be fat

[Zseth]

All I am going to say is look at my signature



NUFF SAID

[opt]

ohh my goodness i cant remember the following sentence to that lyric im having a simpson blank..very rare for me

[opt]

and throw the can away!
nvm me :S

[Ughmahedhurtz]

On PVE servers, frost can be a fascinating tool. I leveled my first 4-mage team to 50ish as frost, then switched to fire. What I noticed was that frost is fine but it doesn't help you when you're up against things that can't be frozen/slowed. In those cases, fire is better to burn it down before it can kill you. I found more cases where the slowing/freezing effects of frost were useless than I did where the uber DPS of fire was a problem. I ended up going split arcane/fire at 70 and never regretted the switch.

[laeelin]

My group is Paladin + Mage + Mage + Mage + Priest

At first I was frost for AEing... Pulling 2 rooms in Stockades at a time and AEing them down was a lot of fun.... Then I tried Arcane....

40% aggro reduction from talents is just sick... Add in Salvation and keeping aggro on the paladin when AEing is simple...

Now I'm doing the GY in SM...

Standard run is like this... (level 32 btw)

Buff + Summon Food/Water.

1) Shield Paladin, Run till shield wears off, duck arround a corner to break LOS.
2) Consecration + Start First heal.
3) Wait 1.5 seconds, then Chain cast Arcane Explosion.
4) Add Holy Nova to the Arcane Explosion spam after first heal lands.
5) Add in Frost Nova just before they start running.
6) When all mobs are dead, Hit the eat/drink hotkey for mages + priest , Loot with Paladin.


Repeat 1 - 6 till you reach a boss, Kill boss then back to repeating 1 - 6 till all mobs are dead.

Zone out, reset, zone in, start over.

My normal pull is 2 - 4 groups (depending on how safe i want to be [not very normally - when doing 4 groups I die a good bit, 2 groups I almost never die])

Edit: I dont care about mana efficency because they are back to full mana by the time I finish looting anyway.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

For a bit of frame of reference, when you're doing quest mobs such as Gorefiend's armor or the Forge Camp:Hate/Fear boss elites, the extra damage mitigation you gain from frost barrier will pale beside the extra DPS output of fire/arcane. Frost is awesome DPS for soloers that can freeze the target and make use of the Shatter talent. Fire/arcane just dumps the DPS on 'em regardless. Also, fire/arcane DPS will be MUCH more likely to keep aggro on the mages when you start having to spam heals on them than a frost build would.

[xum]

i was thinking about this last night... how does scorch stack?

I mean, if you have 3 mages, and each cast scorch one time, is that full debuff or three 1/3rd debuffs?
In either case, you either have full benefit (25% more damage with Fire Power) in 3 seconds, or you will have 75% more damage in 7.5 seconds.

Either way it's a win.