Let's be real here: frost staves kinda suck.
The tanking capabilities are underwhelming, the minor brittle buff is a lot of fuss for an unremarkable buff and dps will choose actual daggers over frost staff when given the choice. What to do?
First: remove all the tanking stuff from the passives, and make a new passive: Frozen resolve.
Add all the tanky stuff here: block costing magicka, the dumb little shield, the 25% damage nerf, the minor protection, all that goes here.
Tri-focus is reworked so that lightning staff does splash damage, inferno staff does extra damage, and ice staff procs brittle. No damage nerf!
TADA, ice staff is now a viable option for all 3 specs, and you can more easily choose how to use it.
Next, make frost clench actually useful. . . Turn it into a magicka based pull.
This would BLOW PEOPLES MINDS. Right now the only 2 reliable pulls are silver leash and dk chains. Frozen gate for wardens is buggy as all hell, swarm mother and necro armor rely on blocking and have cooldowns.
Having a reliable, magicka based pull skill would be awesome, and rightly make ice staves a popular tank tool.
Making minor brittle able to be procced with a frost staff on just one bar would also be nice.... but if you made the above changes more dps would actually be inclined to *run* double frost staves, so I think it wouldn't matter as much.
The tanking capabilities are underwhelming, the minor brittle buff is a lot of fuss for an unremarkable buff and dps will choose actual daggers over frost staff when given the choice. What to do?
First: remove all the tanking stuff from the passives, and make a new passive: Frozen resolve.
Add all the tanky stuff here: block costing magicka, the dumb little shield, the 25% damage nerf, the minor protection, all that goes here.
Tri-focus is reworked so that lightning staff does splash damage, inferno staff does extra damage, and ice staff procs brittle. No damage nerf!
TADA, ice staff is now a viable option for all 3 specs, and you can more easily choose how to use it.
Next, make frost clench actually useful. . . Turn it into a magicka based pull.
This would BLOW PEOPLES MINDS. Right now the only 2 reliable pulls are silver leash and dk chains. Frozen gate for wardens is buggy as all hell, swarm mother and necro armor rely on blocking and have cooldowns.
Having a reliable, magicka based pull skill would be awesome, and rightly make ice staves a popular tank tool.
Making minor brittle able to be procced with a frost staff on just one bar would also be nice.... but if you made the above changes more dps would actually be inclined to *run* double frost staves, so I think it wouldn't matter as much.