My two cents on Frost Mage PvE

Hello, my name is Camy. I currently raid as a Mage in “untitled spreadsheet” on Eredar-EU.


I started playing World of Warcraft in Legion and have achieved Cutting Edge in every Tier since Helya and I am here today to talk about my perspective on the current iteration of “Frost Mage” in PvE! I believe PvP has different issues and should be addressed separately.


First I would like to talk about the “No Icelance” build. (noIL)

With the release of patch 8.1 our trait “Winter’s reach” was replaced with a new trait called “Flash Freeze” (FF). FF turned out to be very strong for Single Target (and Cleave with Splitting Ice) by giving us a significant boost to Glacial Spike damage. The secondary effect of FF is completely useless because of the way we use Glacial Spike optimally and you want to stack this trait for raiding even if you don’t play “noIL”.

Using multiple FF traits and/or stacking mastery and not having azerite traits directly interacting with Ice Lance will change your playstyle to the point of never using Ice Lance unless moving. You ignore the later half of the Winter’s Chill debuff applied by Brain Freeze empowered Flurry casts and you ignore any Fingers of Frost procs.

I personally think this playstyle is unhealthy and unintuitive. It makes no sense and It should not be this way. I would be curious to hear what the game design team thinks about this. The gain in output this build offers is also non-trivial because it offers better dps even without optimizing for it, and leaves your Fingers of Frost procs always available to be used while moving.

Note: The loss of multiple Ice Lance empowering artifact traits from Legion already ended up leaving Ice Lance very weak.


Secondary Stats

With the way items and scaling work in BfA a lot of classes lost a huge portion of their secondary stats. Most of them ended up being Haste starved - just take a look at the price of Haste gems compared to other stats. I understand that the changes that were made were made to make sure items will more often end up being an upgrade even if the secondary stats on it are worse if the itemlevel is just higher.

We look past the fact that this does not matter for Rings and a socket on Rings is worth a solid 25 itemlevels and the fact that Versatility and Mastery are both very dull and uninteresting stats.

Instead I want to focus on the impact the loss of secondary stats has on Gameplay and Enjoyment. Frost has always been about properly shattering your abilities to secure a critical strike. The Shatter passive has been changed and adapted multiple times over the course of many expansions but to my knowledge BfA is the first expansion where obtaining enough Critical Strike rating to have your shattered abilities always crit is just not realistic - and with the scaling in place that will not change.

It feels absolutely horrible to be casting 10 or more Frostbolts in a row just to get a Brain Freeze proc to use on your Glacial Spike and not having the Glacial Spike crit. It is still optimal gameplay to do so, but every single time makes me just wonder - “Why?”.

On the topic of Haste: Yes I want more haste for my Frost Mage. I basically want more haste for all of my characters. I’m pretty sure even the casuals that have no idea what the best stat for their character is lean heavily towards haste to make their character feel better. Just look at the gem prices again like previously mentioned. Simulationcraft offers us the Ability to look at the average Actions per Minute you take in a raid environment whilst doing your Rotation. Frost is currently sitting at 45 (using Ice Lance) or even less when Not using Ice Lance. I personally think that is unacceptable. It is boring to play, slow, tedious. Not challenging in the slightest. And the worst part is - we are not even the slowest class out there. May god have mercy on the souls of Frost Death Knights pressing roughly one button every 2 seconds.

Perhaps leaving the scaling on secondary stats as it is right now is the right decision long term to make sure items end up being upgrades, but I do think you should either increase secondary stats across the board for everyone to make the game more fun to play (baseline) and leave the scaling as is (or slightly adjust it). And if you only want to do that with haste (worst offender) then at least adjust the shatter passive to make using Glacial Spike less frustrating.


Talents

In this section I would like to take a look at the talents a Frost Mage can use.

Level 15

We are offered the choice between Bone Chilling and Lonely Winter. Ice Nova is basically a PvP ability at this point - it offers no significant output compared to the other options in PvE and might as well be a PvP talent or needs a major rework. The Balance between Bone Chilling and Lonely Winter is just about right for single target. Curious as to why Lonely Winter does not do anything on AoE (Frozen orb/Blizzard) and Bone Chilling does. Or are the two meant to be AoE and Single Target counterparts?

I’m not sure what a good talent would be to replace Ice Nova with - but I am sure there are lots of ideas in the community as what would be fun. A stacking buff that increases the damage on your neck cone of cold perhaps similar to the legendary item “Cold Heart” Death Knights had in legion might be one of those creative ideas.

Level 30

This choice offers us two different Mobility options. Either we use Shimmer to be able to Blink while casting, allowing us to reposition. Ice Floes has a similar purpose and is used by some. I personally feel like it is a bit weird to use and I would change it but I’m curious how other mages feel about this talent. My change to it would look something like this: “Passive: Frostbolt can be cast while moving. Frostbolts cast while moving deal X% reduced Damage.” The tuning is obviously up to you. I think 10% would be fine. Alternatively it could look like the Marksmanship legendary and grant a 6s buff to be able to cast while moving after casting a frostbolt.

Glacial Insulation has no purpose in PvE in its current form and is basically in the same boat as Ice Nova. Either rework it or move it into a PvP talent (I think it is useful there sometimes).

Just replacing Glacial Insulation with the idea I had for changing Ice Floes and leaving Ice Floes as is might also be a consideration.

Level 45

This tier of talent offers us 3 Abilities that increase our output in different ways.
While Incanter’s Flow and Rune of Power work for Single Target and AoE - Mirror Image does not. If Mirror Image would be able to cast Blizzard or Frozen orb in AoE instead of just using Frostbolt that talent might be more versatile. Even with how bursty the current iteration of frost is with 3x FF Glacial spike Rune of Power is not worth using for Single Target despite being more difficult to use. Perhaps the spell should be balanced differently for each spec as Fire and Arcane do use Rune. It feels weird to have a talent that is flexible in empowering burst is not worth using with Glacial spike. Incanter’s Flow is simple and fine as is. Mirror Image is undertuned and does nothing for AoE.

Level 60

In this row of talents we have 3 different options to increase our output.
Ebonbolt is almost mandatory for the Glacial Spike playstyle as it helps out with getting a Brain Freeze proc when you need one. it also cleaves with Splitting Ice which is great. I’m glad this interaction exists to help keep it on par with the other talents for cleave situations. Chain Reaction is similar to the great legendary item we had in legion, the buff does however not refresh on unshattered Ice Lances. It is an okay talent to use for cleave situations but feels overall lackluster as it does nothing to change your gameplay. Frozen Touch means we are less starved for procs and is fine as is. It could be more interesting if turned into an active ability.

Level 75

3 Utility options, all of them have their place. No issues at all with this row. It should be noted that for dungeon content Ice Ward is the optimal choice because you can shatter your frozen orb and blizzard more often.

Level 90

At this point we get to chose between 3 different talents to change the way our AoE works whilst providing some gain for single target. I am glad that all 3 of these do at least something on single target. They are different in what they do accomplish and are fine as they are in my opinion.

Level 100

In this row we currently only use Glacial Spike for raiding. Thermal Void was briefly seen for Zul but that scenario was very specific. I personally would rework Thermal Void to make it alter the way you play Frost Mage similar to how Glacial Spike does. It is the very last unlock for us after all. I would do this by making it validate Icy Veins as a stronger cooldown as the ability currently does very little.

For example Brain Freeze empowered Flurry could shoot an additional comet, leaving the target debuffed with Winter’s Chill for longer and allowing us to fit in 2 Ice Lance casts to shatter on the proc, further extending the duration of Icy Veins. This ability was changed in Legion because we were getting very high uptime on Icy Veins.

Taking a look at Coordinated Assault by Survival Hunters with a similar talent called Birds of Prey. Their main spender ability increases the duration of their offensive cooldown by 1,5s per use. This ends up leaving them with roughly 40-50% uptime on it.

Perhaps Thermal Void could also Extend our Icy Veins by 1,5s per shattered Ice Lance up to a maximum of 60/75/90s (depending on what kind of uptime on the ability seems reasonable to you)

Note: Using 2 Ice Lances after a Flurry cast - also known as “Double Ice Lance” was common at high levels of play for Frost mage, especially during Nighthold. Blizzard briefly patched this by reducing the travel time of flurry but re-introduced it when they changed our spell animations in Antorus (Ice Lance travel time decreased). It is currently not really worth doing as the gain is very minimal (partly because Ice Lance damage is so terrible).

Glacial Spike is fun, especially with 3xFF. You have very big hits that crit most of the time. I also like that using Glacial Spike makes having lots of Mastery less bad compared to old Thermal Void where you would avoid Mastery like the plague.
It is completely fine functionally but might need to be adjusted if Thermal Void is buffed to make Thermal Void not an auto-pick.

Ray of Frost is, well, much like Ice Nova and Glacial Insulation a PvP Ability. Sure it is used for Leveling and World Quests too, but it feels out of place to me anyway. I too would move it to the PvP talents and replace it like the others, but am curious how others feel about the spell. I would probably replace Ray of Frost with a combination of the Legion Artifact traits “Frozen Veins” and “Chilled to the core”. Frozen Veins reduced the cooldown of Icy Veins on every Frostbolt critical strike, for me it usually ended up making Icy Veins roughly 2 minutes in CD instead of 3 minutes which would be somewhat nice to adapt to a specific fight where it is needed. Chilled to the core just increased our frost damage during the first 20 seconds of Icy Veins by a flat amount.

I would put that in the level 100 row because combining Frozen Veins and my reworked Thermal Void would be too good together making you have to chose between the two.


Overall Balance

In this segment I would like to talk about how I feel about Frost mage in terms of power level.

Frost is currently “Okay” in terms of output in raiding. Just about at the top of the lower third of all classes in BoD (Warcraftlogs, 95th percentile. Just about where I want to be.)
When it comes to mythic plus we are in a good spot. We are “meta” at least somewhat and I would try to keep the changes suggested somewhat power neutral for mythic plus, perhaps by adjusting Blizzard/Frozen Orb.
Like I said earlier, I do not really want to comment on PvP balance, simply because I do not know enough about PvP to have an informed opinion when it comes to balance.

Flash Freeze or FF however does need a nerf. Just like Wildfire it needs a 33% slap on the wrist or other Frost specific traits need to be buffed. In the case of a nerf to FF Frost does need a baseline buff to keep up with other classes. (This should have happened with Fire!). If we compare Scaling - looking further into the expansion - Frost does not look great. Our scaling on Secondary Stats and Intellect are very weak. For example my Priest alt currently gains 50 dps more per socket than my mage does despite being 10 itemlevels lower. This might be a problem with how powerful Priests are at the moment but I do not want to cry for a priest nerf.


I do understand that this post was very long and I am sure that there might be questions that you have. Feel free to ask away.

Thank you for reading.

14 Likes

Hey! No nerfs to frost mage, instead just buff ice lance by 50%. Problem solved.

Good post, pretty much describes the state of frost perfectly.

Nighthold frost (the 100% IV uptime game) was a build that many loved because it increased the skill ceiling a lot with mechanics like double lancing. I would love to see this return to make thermal void viable again!

I have to say I also enjoy the current Glacial spike build, but as this post mentioned having your glacial spike not crit even though you are playing the mechanics correctly feels very bad. I would suggest blizzard to just tune shatter every single raid tier to accommodate to the stat budget (unless they have a better solution).

So having shatter grant you 60% instead of 50% crit on top of the multiplier would make it so that your shattercap would be at 23.34%, which is achievable with current gear. Shatter as a mechanic is too crucial to frost to be subject to RNG. When the next tier comes you can just tune this down again to 55/50% depending on stat budget.

I feel this is a bandaid solution but it is what is best for the spec imo.

edit: The noIL build would stop existing if they made ice lance deal quadruple damage versus frozen targets instead of triple.

1 Like

Congeal and Ancalon. I love both of your posts, which I think contains exactly the kind of feedback game designers love.

Perhaps a die hard fire/arcane mage will write a similar piece. One can hope.

Spot on OP, spot on

There are a few skills that “always critical hit”. That way you could remove shatter passive, reduce baseline power a bit and shift it into scaling instead.

I personally think the best solution would be to make spells against frozen targets always crit and have their critical damage increased based on crit chance (as to not make critical strike a lot worse for the spec)

Congeal and Ancalon. I love both of your posts, which I think contains exactly the kind of feedback game designers love.

@Hellzia Would be amazing if someone at Blizzard is actually reading this. We all just want our class to be fun and decent. Neither of which is currently the case.

Perhaps a die hard fire/arcane mage will write a similar piece. One can hope.

I do play Fire and Arcane too, but I would be lying if I could easily make a post like this one for the other specs too. I don’t think I’ve played either of them in dungeons in at least a year or so.

Having skills always critical hit would make crit a borderline worthless stat for us sadly :confused:

one can only hope blizzard reads these posts (I’ve never been under the impression they read much of the EU class forums).

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