Frostfire

Sometime between 75 and 80 I switched to a Fire-based Frostfire build, the idea being to help us in questing and 2-3 man quests. Frostfire is a fairly interesting spell, which on the surface seems pretty subpar. On the surface, the spell doesn't seem that great--yay, a spell for fire/frost mage to use when their main nuke is worthless. It's in the details where Frostfire starts to get useful and interesting.

The trick with Frostfire is that it benefits from ALL effects that affect Frost AND Fire. So, for example, Frostfire can benefit from both Ice Shards (+100% to base Crit Damage), AND Ignite (40% Crit Damage dot). It can benefit from Frost Slow, and Freezes; AND Fire Stuns. And it benefits from +Hit, +Crit, and +damage bonuses from BOTH categories. This makes the build extremely interesting.

For leveling, I went with a mostly fire build. My Level 80 build looked pretty much like a strait 0/53/18 Fire build, with Ice Shards; and taking all Freezes, Stuns, and slowing effects I could. It was pretty effectively...with this build, if I crit I pretty much could kill the mob with 1-2 spells, long before it reached me. And if I didn't crit, I still had a 10% chance of a freeze, and an ADDITIONAL 10% chance of a stun hitting. In some cases, the mob would die before even managing to move from it's origional position; and the effect carries over fairly well into 5-mans. Plus, you still end up with Combustion, Dragons Breath, and Blast Wave for crowd control which is good enough for questing most of the time.

So far the build has worked pretty well. Frostfire is HEAVILY dependant on crit rate, and that's the main issue I have with it right now. My crit rating has tanked at 80, down 18% almost, and that's mostly just a stat-drop; I haven't made that back anywhere else. Of course, I haven't really gotten much in the way of 80 gear yet so things will only go up from here.

With that in mind, Frostfire has still proven useful and viable. With a crit rate of 25%, I'm hitting on average 2300-2600 on a non-crit; 6.5k on a crit + 40%. In 5-mans I'm generally hitting 7-8k on crits. That's not bad, seeing how right now Fireball's biggest benefit right now would be 500 points more non-crit damage and 2k less crits.

Of course, my Frostfire build is still more for questing than anything else. And I haven't picked up the Glyphs that will help yet--namely Frostfire Glyph, and Molten Armor Glyph. Those 2 will help significantly.

There is another Frostfire build option that I'm considering, one that is more of a true hybrid elemental spec. That has some definite advantages right now--in 5 man it ensures a higher base crit rating, and allows for more crits in general; with the loss of instant-pyroblasts and other useful fire stats. I might be trying that build out soon, and if I do I'll post something about it here.