Monday, June 21, 2010

Frost is the New Black!

I'm still constantly amazed by how absolutely unstoppable my frost mage is when it comes to leveling. Especially with the water elemental glyphed to make it permanent. Not only is the frost spec very mana efficient, but the slowing and freezing effects of the frostbolts make it so that about 70% of the time, the mobs are dead before they get anywhere near me, and for the ones that do get anywhere near me, my Ice Barrier makes me pretty much impregnable and I'll have two instant casts available to take them the rest of the way down in Fire Blast and Cone of Cold. More than enough to take them out.

I did pick up Arcane Barrage at level 64 and tried it out on a few mobs to see how it would do. Obviously I'm not spec'd into Arcane, so it's not at its full potential, but it seemed to be a lot less mana efficient, and wasn't doing noticeably more damage than my Frostbolt crits.

So now I'm putting the mage back on the shelf for a little while and will be going back to my enhancement shaman. I've still been thinking about switching from enhancement to elemental now that I'm higher level. I'm just a bit more of a caster at heart, but we'll see. It's still fun unleashing the ghost wolves on everyone and watching them create mass chaos.

So, the Frost Mage is currently sitting at 64, and the shammy got to 63 last night. Still targeting late August to have these last four toons to 80!

2 comments:

  1. Hey, just wanted to say I really enjoy reading your blog. I'm an altoholic (I have 29 characters) and so find a lot of similarity with myself in your posts. I've struggled with the mage for a long time. The highest I've gotten is level 28 as a Frost mage. When does the Frost Mage really hit his stride? I've noted that some classes don't really get good until somewhere between levels 40-50. Is that true of the frost mage? For now, it's pretty hard for me to handle anything more than one green level mob at a time, and I have full heirloom gear. Just wondering what your opinion is.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Jerry - I would say in the late 20's / early 30's is when the spec really starts to come into its own for leveling and like many classes, it doesn't start to feel really fluid until the 40-50 range. There are a couple of abilities that you pick up in the late 20's and early 30's that certainly help a lot though:

    Cone of Cold (lvl 26) - giving you one more instant cast hit for when the mobs get really close.
    Ice Armor (lvl 30) - One more opportunity to slow the mobs down every time they hit you.
    Ice Barrier (talent - lvl 40) - this one was pretty key for me in terms of giving the mage essentially a permanent bubble and making you esentially unhittable even once the mobs did reach you.
    Water Elemental (talent - lvl 50) - having a permanent pet assuming it's glyphed gives you a substantial dps boost and really helps make sure those mobs are all down before they even have the chance to reach you.

    At lower levels, in cases where I was pulling multiple mobs, I would usually try to Frost Nova them all in place, sheep one to put them out of commission for a while and then take them down one at a time. I also found that I could occasionally Frost Nova them all in place, blink a bit away and then blizzard them all down.

    But like you said - it gets a lot easier in the 40-50 range.

    ReplyDelete

Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online Updates

I continue to balance my playing time between Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2.  I finished running my Reaper through the new Guild War...