Greetings, Mage forum! Hope you’re all having a kick-rear-end day. Forgive me for the length of this post and for posting on my Druid.
I’ve only recently gotten into the M+ dungeon scene and I have a real hankering to play my Mage. I’m pretty familiar with how the class works as a whole, just a few things I was wondering before I really delve into it…
To start, is race selection a huge deal for Mages in M+? I play Alliance and my Mage is currently a Void Elf for pretty obvious reasons; their racials are very caster focused. My favorite race is Night Elf, and I wanted to race change to one. I know shadowmeld can be useful in M+, but their other racials? They just don’t seem to stack up to Void Elves’. I’m not looking to be ultra competitive, just curious what you guys think.
I took a look around the icyveins frost guide and it wasn’t really straightforward, at least when it came to the rotation. It seems there is a standard talent build for dungeons, but apparently you never use ice lance? But you’ll start in 8.3? Just curious what your frost rotation looks like and what the deal is with ice lance.
Any help you’d be willing to offer would be greatly appreciated. I’ve discovered I really enjoy M+ and would like to mess around in them as one of my favorite classes.
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Hello new mage! I swapped to mage in 8.2, as well, after literal years of wanting to be one, so welcome to the club.
First order of business: how high of keys do you plan to go? Unless you’re pushing above 15s, Frost can get you by just fine and racials aren’t game changing. Shadowmeld is super useful, but you also have two Iceblocks (with Cold Snap) and Invisibility as Frost, bear in mind.
Frost for M+ is awesome! I mained hunter/resto druid for Season 1 and 2, then swapped to mage in Season 3 before I took a break for Classic, so I have relatively limited experience, but enjoyed every bit of it. Frost has so many roots and their slows are still powerful, even with the nerf we got a while back. You can help your tank kite very efficiently on weeks like Necrotic and Raging, though Sanguine makes me twitch a bit.
Honestly, I tend to cross-reference guides with each other, usually the Wowhead and Icy Veins guides to get a complete picture and see how they differ. On paper, Ice Lance can be a dps loss because using a global for it, even with the fingers proc and after a Brain Freeze, would have been better spent on casting another Frostbolt. That’s the cold, analytical number crunching of the spec, which gave rise to the No Ice Lance build you’ve probably seen mentioned. I’m a filthy casual, so I take Splitting Ice and throw my proc Ice Lances while mobs eat my Blizzard and Frozen Orb and get by just fine.
Frost has a lot of set-it-forget-it AoE. Place your Blizzard, throw out your Frozen Orb, work your way up to a Glacial Spike that you shatter with either a Brain Freeze proc or your water elemental’s freeze. With Splitting Ice, you’re hitting two targets with that spike for a very satisfying two-target cleave crit. So that’s kind of what my rotation looks like for M+ trash. I believe every time Blizzard deals damage, it reduces the CD of Frozen Orb, so you want to maintain it’s uptime to maximize how many balls of frozen wrath you can hurl into your enemies.
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Thanks for the reply! This is my mage!
I’d like to go at least as far as +10 and above. On my druid I’ve been doing +10s consistently, so I’d at least like to get to that point.
Good to hear about the ice lance proc. I’m running splitting ice as well so good to hear I can be somewhat casual and do all right. Especially since they’re apparently buffing ice lance in 8.3 anyway.
The trash rotation seems pretty straightforward, anything special about single target? Just frostbolt your way to victory, essentially?
Definitely should read up on it. Frostbolt is your filler ability, when there isn’t anything left to cast from procs or CDs.
Also depends if you’re going no ice lance build, which should go away and not useful for mythic plus anyways.
Frostbolt is basically fishing for procs. You can shatter a frostbolt if you get a Brain Freeze with less than 2-3 icicles (spam flurry as you’re finishing your frostbolt cast, as flurry hits the target right before your bolt will to crit). Otherwise you’re fishing for 5 icicles to turn into a Glacial Spike, then fishing for another Brain Freeze proc to shatter that if you don’t have Ebonbolt up to get a Brain Freeze. Never waste time casting Glacial Spike without Brain Freeze, you’re missing out on a giant crit.
There’s nothing worse than sitting on a GS wait for BF to proc. I hate GS.
All right folks, did a couple +0s last night. Was able to pull above 20k dps consistently, even hit 30k at one point. I’m not sure what’s standard or anything but for 402ilvl I didn’t think that was so bad.
I think I’ve gotten the rotation down somewhat. Wasn’t sure what to do with brain freeze procs when I didn’t have 5 icicles, glad to know I can use them in that case. Other than that things are going well. Thanks for all the help guys! Gonna try a few low keys and see how things go.