The new frost spec?

I'm just interested in other people's thoughts on the mage talent preview
( http://pc.ign.com/articles/704/704665p3.html ) regarding the new frost
tree

Among other things, I notice that shatter only goes up to 10% vs. frozen
targets (previously could be up to 50%). However, there's the new winter's
chill debuff which increases crit chance of frost spells by (if I understand
correctly) 5%. I'm a little curious how that spell works, it says the
debuff lasts 15 seconds, does that mean you have 15 seconds from the first
hit to stack 5 of them, or does the duration get reset each time it gets
applied? If it gets reset, what happens when it's "maxed", can you still
increase the duration by applying more spells, or will it wear off after 15s
and you have to start over?


From my (limited) experience, losing the +50% crit on shatter makes grinding
normal mobs harder. Sure, you usually only get 1, maybe 2 frostbolts on a
frozen target, but most of the time they would crit, and the fight would be
that much shorter. However, I'm thinking the new winter's chill debuff
sounds like it would be extremely useful against elites/bosses, where you
plan to be shooting a lot more than a few frostbolts, and you're not likely
to be able to keep them frozen for any appreciably large percentage of the
fight. So getting +5% crit on every spell against a tough enemy does sound
a lot better than +50% for one spell that you hit with.

So I'm wondering, is there an equilivent debuff already in the game? (to me
this sounds an awful lot like the imp scorch debuff, or shadow vulnerability
that priests get). I have no experience with either of those debuffs
though, so if someone could answer my questions about duration and stacking,
it'd be much appreciated.


Overall, my mage is very excited about 1.11 based on this talent preview,
I'll be getting several points back from arcane so I can concentrate more on
frost

Prelgor wrote:
>> I'm just interested in other people's thoughts on the mage talent
>> preview ( http://pc.ign.com/articles/704/704665p3.html ) regarding
>> the new frost tree
>>
>> Among other things, I notice that shatter only goes up to 10% vs.
>> frozen targets (previously could be up to 50%).
>
> I saw the same thing you did. I just checked, and now it has 5 ranks
> again. My assumption right now is that IGN made a typo by omitting
> the higher ranks earlier.
>

Wow, so we can have it all? I'm so happy now. Of course, this means I have
fewer points to play with. But still, having a total of 55+% chance to crit
on a frozen, fully debuffed target. Wow.


Now I'm really looking forward to the patch