Frost - Great Opener But Then DPS Goes to Poop. Help please!

[Magesquad 0]

So.. I have been middle to low end of the DPS pretty much the entire xpac.  I have examined every possible facet to my rotation and have read every resource available on the internet and for the life of me, I can't put my finger on wtf I am doing wrong.

For the first 10 seconds of the fight, I am usually first as all my initial procs hit but then slip further and further down the DPS list. 

I have kept crit at 33% without trying. I removed the crit gems and enchants etc, but still at 33% with my current gear. 

Here is a heroic log using frost.  I am 3/11 mythic, but not enough mythic kills being comfortable with the fight to really use them as an example.  I also have moved to fire for Eonar but thats an entirely different conversation.  I like fire, but frost seems to be the single target favorite.  

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/y8qRpFPzQTNkDBcC#fight=5&type=damage-done

Talents are as follows:

 

Armory:  https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/malganis/magesquad

Any advice would be great and really appreciated.  

Magesquad

Edited March 5, 2018 by Magesquad
Added Armory

[Valks 2,373]

On 3/3/2018 at 7:07 PM, Magesquad said:

Here is a heroic log using frost.  I am 3/11 mythic, but not enough mythic kills being comfortable with the fight to really use them as an example.  I also have moved to fire for Eonar but thats an entirely different conversation.  I like fire, but frost seems to be the single target favorite.  

I would strongly recommend using WowAnalyzer to check your easy-to-track errors. I ran your report through it, which you can see here:

https://wowanalyzer.com/report/y8qRpFPzQTNkDBcC/5-Heroic+Garothi+Worldbreaker+-+Kill+(3:43)/18-Magesquad

Make sure to enable Minor Suggestions, since you've got a few. The most important ones are you overwriting BF procs, missing Shatters and moving too much. Use Shimmer more.

[Magesquad 0]

No offense, but wow analyzer is garbage for the most part.  If you actually look at my logs, and watch the video (the wow logs replay) most of the suggestions are not accurate. 

Granted it is helpful, but it is missing things like pre pull casts etc.  And as I look at your link, it says nothing was missed.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 11, 2018 by Magesquad

[Malinaz 1]

First second hero use. IT should be lined up with IV and frozen orb and second pot  when ever possible. 

IV should be paired with frozen orb when possible. 

no second pot on some fights or bad timing burning half the pot. 

You should be running 2p t20 4 p t21  I know it sucks but the buff is huge .

 

[Valks 2,373]

On 3/11/2018 at 5:21 PM, Magesquad said:

No offense, but wow analyzer is garbage for the most part.  If you actually look at my logs, and watch the video (the wow logs replay) most of the suggestions are not accurate. 

Granted it is helpful, but it is missing things like pre pull casts etc.  And as I look at your link, it says nothing was missed.

As I said to you, enable minor suggestions.

But, as you said, the site is garbage and none of the suggestions are correct if I actually look at your logs. So:

• Your downtime can be improved. 11.6% downtime vs. the recommended 5% for Garothi. Let's review:
  • At 55 seconds, you don't budget for turret phase and have to cancel your Frostbolt rather than Ice Lancing with no buff, meaning you waste around a second more then you should doing no damage. (1)
  • Why do you Ice Block the first slam? You are a ranged, meaning you can be at max range and take minimal damage that would be healed anyway by your raid's healers who are, other than the Paladin, incredibly strong AoE healers. The healing to you had you not Ice Blocked would have been irrelevant to the healer's mana pools. You missed ~3 global cooldowns here. (4)
  • Did the same thing at second turret phase as you did on first, cancelling and wasting the GCD. (1)
  • You Ice Block the slam yet again, exactly the same thing as before. (6)
  • 208.5 - 211, you cancel a Frostbolt here but have triggered GCD, so nothing being cast. (2)
  • Total "time wasted" would be 1+4+1+6+2 = 14 seconds. I've excluded the required time that you have to be doing nothing, like during transitions (other than when you have wasted a spell). Total fight length is 223 seconds. 14/223 = 6.28% of the fight doing nothing caused by nothing other than your misuse of spells. Throw in the 0.32% that is missing from general lag, etc. and you'll find yourself (when adding on the 5% of unavoidable downtime) that you have exactly what WoWAnalyzer gives you.
• You cast Ice Lance 6 times without Shatter. Was it right to do so and WA is wrong or have you made mistakes? Let's review:
  • You have 24 counts of Fingers of Frost during the fight.
  • You have 25 casts of Flurry during the fight.
  • You missed 2 Ice Lances into WC, which means we should only count 23 casts of Flurry. 
  • 23 + 24 = 47 opportunities to cast IL.
  • This would be perfect, since you have 47 IL casts during the fight, except you miss 6 times, meaning 3 of those opportunities overlapped (FoF with Flurry shatter).
  • I'm not going to go through and find the exact second every unbuffed Ice Lance occured, but there's two at 115 seconds for no reason that I can see. You just Ice Lance twice after cancelling a Frostbolt. At that point, you have no Brain Freeze up to combo it with, so there's no shatter debuff on the boss and you have no Fingers of Frost, as seen below:

• You overwrote Brain Freeze procs. This one, completely avoidable. If you are overwriting procs, you are casting things you shouldn't. Nonetheless, maybe WA is wrong. Let's take a look:
  • WA says that 3.85% of your Brain Freeze procs were overwritten. Given that you gained 26 over the course of the fight, that would mean you overwrote 1 Brain Freeze proc. That's not the end of the world, but that's why it's in the minor problems section. It's still a problem nonetheless, since it's completely avoidable.
  • If we look at the events, we can clearly see which Brain Freeze was the culprit, as well as what you cast around it. You ended up casting Ebonbolt but not shattering it after your Frostbolt gave a proc and then hard-casted a Frostbolt after the Ebonbolt. If you had performed a normal shatter, you would have been completely fine and shattered your Ebonbolt before casting another Frostbolt after.

I'm not going to bother going into further detail on the other points because I have made my point. To call a tool garbage without properly using it is, with lack of a better word, ridiculous. You could not even read far enough into my post to turn on minor suggestions and instead discarded the hard work of others as nothing but trash. To then go on to say that it is inaccurate is, as you see above, not only not true, but just lazy. You could have done exactly what I did had you felt that the tool was wrong and you couldn't be making these faults, but it's clear that you are.

WoWAnalyzer is an excellent tool for fixing basic problems. Granted, it will not get you to an orange parse, but using WA and some of my own knowledge, players have gone from grey parses to purple. You still have basic problems you need to fix and I would suggest using WoWAnalyzer to make sure you know what they are and can work on them. If you are still missing shatters, using Ice Lances unbuffed for no reason and overwriting procs, then moving past WA into the extreme-fine tuning of perfecting IV uptime extension, precasting adds and so on, is not feasible.

Please don't take my post as any kind of attack, I just wanted to make my point - it's completely unfair to label one of the best maintained specs on an amazingly useful tool for many people as "garbage" and "not accurate". The above analysis has completely proven otherwise. WoWAnalyzer is brilliant and I applaud Sharrq and sref for the Frost module. Other classes can only hope to have one of this precision and usefulness.

Work on the errors, get rid of those minor ones until they actually make sense (use Ice Lance unbuffed when you can't complete a cast on a dying add, for example) and then look into fine-tuning your logs for orange performance.

[Magesquad 0]

@Blainie Good stuff my friend!!  This is the type of feedback I was hoping for. Sorry if it came off poorly, I just get frustrated by the stock answers when I spend hours trying to work my mage craftery.  Super appreciate you taking the time you did and will come back to this after raid tonight.  I skimmed, but what you said made sense.  I look forward to deep diving into it later tonight.

MageSquad

 

PS - I ice block because I ALWAYS die from the blast. Even with my shield up (or at least I have been max range and my health goes to zero).  I will talk to the healers.  

[Valks 2,373]

18 hours ago, Magesquad said:

@Blainie Good stuff my friend!!  This is the type of feedback I was hoping for. Sorry if it came off poorly, I just get frustrated by the stock answers when I spend hours trying to work my mage craftery.  Super appreciate you taking the time you did and will come back to this after raid tonight.  I skimmed, but what you said made sense.  I look forward to deep diving into it later tonight.

The thing is, nowadays, WoWAnalyzer can do almost everything that I can in terms of looking at your logs, give or take a few in-depth things where it doesn't see it as a "problem", or classing good things as a problem falsely. In reality, it's far faster for it, since it uses pre-existing conditions to check where problems are rather than me manually looking at the log. 

The reality of Legion is basically that (ONLY FOR SOME SPECS), WoWAnalyzer is the way forward for logs. Frost Mage is arguably the best spec right now on WA and its module is really good. For something like Enhancement Shaman, it's a very, very different story, where their module isn't maintained beyond absolute basics.

 

18 hours ago, Magesquad said:

PS - I ice block because I ALWAYS die from the blast. Even with my shield up (or at least I have been max range and my health goes to zero).  I will talk to the healers.  

Try using Barrier before slam rather than Block. Does that prevent it? You really shouldn't need to block it. If it's an absolute, complete must, you need to practise using and cancelling block so that you time it to be cancelled immediately after the slam hits.

[Magesquad 0]

The one thing that might be keeping me a bit perturbed about WA is the 'active time'.  I talked to the boys running Warcraftlogs and they confirmed that the active % is accurate on their logs.  The WA site though has a much lower active time compared to Warcraftlogs (I got called out for not having good active time when I know for a fact I am casting as much as physically possible bar needed movement).

We (for the last week) have been hitting mythic progression pretty damn hard this past week.  Hope to get back into heroic so I can test the barrier theory. 

 

@Blainie  - Really cant for the life of me think why I let a BF proc go.  That being said, I am keenly watching my buffs and it seems to be improving my parses.  The biggest thing I need to improve (and all mages for that matter) is controlling movement.  The minute I move, DPS drops.  Timing on blink / shimmer is really key.  Knowing where to and not to blink is key.   Thanks again for your help.  

Lastly, (this could probably be a separate discussion I am sure) what is your guys thoughts on the push to versatility ?  The BiS items on the guide do not focus (it seems) on versatility being viable.  But it ties (just barely) with haste ?  I noticed a jump in damage done when I picked up Vitality Resonator trinket.  Thoughts ? 

[Valks 2,373]

On 21.3.2018 at 1:09 AM, Magesquad said:

The one thing that might be keeping me a bit perturbed about WA is the 'active time'.  I talked to the boys running Warcraftlogs and they confirmed that the active % is accurate on their logs.  The WA site though has a much lower active time compared to Warcraftlogs (I got called out for not having good active time when I know for a fact I am casting as much as physically possible bar needed movement). We (for the last week) have been hitting mythic progression pretty damn hard this past week.  Hope to get back into heroic so I can test the barrier theory. 

Warcraft Logs considers cancelling a cast as being active, for example, since you are "technically" doing something. WA looks at a failed cast as doing nothing, since you spent time but achieved nothing, if that makes sense.

On 21.3.2018 at 1:09 AM, Magesquad said:

@Blainie  - Really cant for the life of me think why I let a BF proc go.  That being said, I am keenly watching my buffs and it seems to be improving my parses.  The biggest thing I need to improve (and all mages for that matter) is controlling movement.  The minute I move, DPS drops.  Timing on blink / shimmer is really key.  Knowing where to and not to blink is key.   Thanks again for your help. 

Yep. From almost every single log I review here, not using Shimmer properly is in almost all of them. Think of it as a cooldown - even if you have to move slightly to avoid something you're on the edge of, just Shimmer it. It seems like nothing to just move, but when you're mid-cast, it can add up pretty quickly.

On 21.3.2018 at 1:09 AM, Magesquad said:

Lastly, (this could probably be a separate discussion I am sure) what is your guys thoughts on the push to versatility ?  The BiS items on the guide do not focus (it seems) on versatility being viable.  But it ties (just barely) with haste ?  I noticed a jump in damage done when I picked up Vitality Resonator trinket.  Thoughts ? 

At the moment, I'm pretty happy with it. I use 2 of my gem slots on Crit, but I'm otherwise gemming and enchanting Vers. It's pretty far ahead for me in terms of weights and as I'm simming upgrades, Vers normally does win out. 

Also, VR is an interesting trinket. It's insanely good if you can get that max bonus constantly, like on Garothi where you can proc it on Garothi at 100%, then on the cannon at 100% as well. If your team has good focus, you could even get it on second cannon at above 80%.