Results tagged “Frostfire bolt”

Having hit 75 on Friday, Andro gained access to one of her few new spells of the expansion -  Frostfire Bolt. It's an interesting spell, regarded as belonging to both the frost and fire schools and thus benefitting from the talents of both. As a standalone its weaker than its kin, the fireball and frostbolt, but the talent-stacking of an elemental build should make it quite a mean little spell.

In the interests of discovery, Andro respecced from deep arcane (big fan of Arcane Barrage!) to a fire-frost hybrid build.The price of this is a reduced mana pool (down 1000 points or so) and spelldamage (down 100 points or so) both due to reduced int (no 15% bonus here) and the loss of various damage boost/insta-cast/mana-boost talents. However,generally cheaper elemental spell costs and talent buffs seem to have offset that and my damage output from a new spec designed for Arcane Barage/Arcane Blast/Arcane Missile spam (with Arcane Power/trinkets) is broadly comparable with vanilla nuking with frostfire bolts and the occasional (when Hot Streak is up) Pyroblasts (with Combustion/trinkets). I realized after the fact I'd neglected my scorching of the targets, so the FF/Pyro looks like it'll have the edge.

 Some number crunching:

The old spec really mainly helps Arcane: -40% threat, 3% to-hit,  9% damage bonus, though it provides a general low-level buff: 3% damage, 3% crit chance and +50% crit damage.

The new spec is more varied: -10% threat on Fire spells, a 3% hit bonus on frost spells, a damage bonus of 2% (arcane), 8 % on frost and 12% on fire (18% on Frostfire), a 6% crit chance bonus on arcane and frost (but 15% on fire), and no enhancement to arcane crit damage, a 50% boost to fire crits, a 100% boost to frost crits (and, by my maths, a 150% crit boost for frostfire).

Now, that seems to solidly favour the new spec, but there are a number of intangibles to consider: the int boost of the old spec, as well as boosting mana, enhanced crit and general spelldamage (15% of int) and there were additional SDG boosts to Arcane blast (9% of SDG) and Arcane missile (45% of SDG); the arcane spec had an on-demand instacast (Presence of Mind) whereas the only one in fire is a proc (for Pyro), while the one-shot Arcane Power gave a 30% damage bonus (while arcane potency gave a 30% crit-chance bonus while active). These last two are countered to a degree by the scorch debuff (2% crit chance, stacking up to x5 for a total of 10%, while applied) and Combustion (10% crit bonus that lasts for 3 crits)

The real proof will be in the live application of the spells - which is my plan for tonight and tomorrow in advance of Thursday's instance runs.