Players argue over whether Improved Blizzard still does its job for Frost Mages on small pulls

At 21:11 UTC on 7 November, a Mage player opened a thread on the EU forums with a blunt title: "Mage aoe is absolute crap". The opener began "Yes, I know you nerfed it", then said that out of "like 20 pulls" they had succeeded with none. Their complaint was about Improved Blizzard, the Frost talent they take for the slow on Blizzard: "EVERY SINGLE TIME there are mobs not getting slowed", even though they pull small packs of three or four. They saw "NO REASON to spec into improved blizzard this way", and pointed out that every area had Paladins, Warriors and Shamans AoE farming. "You break one class, and then keep/buff it for 3 others," they wrote.

When we read it on 12 November, the thread had eight posts, the last from the morning of 8 November, and no reply from anyone at Blizzard. This is what those players said.

"Practice" against "nothing to do with practice"

The first reply came two minutes later. It said Mages "are best for aoe farming in the game" and that practice would make the opener better. The opener answered that it had "Nothing to do with practice". They said they had mained a Mage in every expansion they had played and had leveled "like 10" with AoE, and that practice "does not change the fact Improved Blizzard doesn't properly do the job".

"A group of mages AOE farming"

Another reply called the opener a troll, saying the first level 60 had been "a group of mages AOE farming". We haven't checked who reached level 60 first, or how. A third player answered that this group "were not relying on blizzard slow" because "They had a paladin who tanked all the mobs". The next morning, the opener made the same point, sarcastically asking whether you need a slow when a Paladin is tanking.

For those two posters, that was the point: a Mage group farming behind a Paladin tank says nothing about a Mage who needs the slow to hold a pull.

"The whole purpose of frost is control"

Two later posts took the opener's side and made it about control. One asked for the Blizzard spec to be "reverted to what it was". They said Mages had farmed with Improved Blizzard since vanilla and that it "only became an issue because of boosting and people farming solo dungeons with it". In their view boosting could be fixed another way, for example by giving no experience when a higher-level party member kills grey mobs, solo dungeon farming had already been dealt with, and there was "no need to destroy a complete spec". They wrote that "The whole purpose of frost is control, but right now you cant control anything with blizzard", added that mobs can quickly interrupt it because Blizzard is a channeled spell, and called Frost "very unfun".

Another said Mages had been gutted "for no reason", and that unlike other casters and classes they "don't have self heal or pets to tank for them". If the reason was boosting, they wrote, "Just fix that instead of gutting a whole class."

What this thread doesn't show

This is a handful of players describing their own experience. The opener doesn't say what level they were or where they pulled, and nobody in the thread says what changed in Improved Blizzard or when. The boosting and dungeon farming explanation for it is one player's view. Nobody reproduced the missed slows, and we haven't tested Improved Blizzard in the game, so we can't say whether some mobs escape the slow, how often, or whether it's a bug. The claim about the first level 60 is unverified, and nothing in the thread shows Blizzard plans to change the talent. It isn't the first Frost complaint this month: some Frost players also felt a button short when Ice Lance began sharing a cooldown with Fire Blast.