I personally think Frost and Arcane are due for a complete rework. It may come in 10.0 but who knows?
- AOE rotation -
Frost has the potential to be SO fun in aoe with just a few changes to the way we work. Think of how intuitive Hunters’ AOE rotation is atm, multishot enables AOE. Same for Warrior and certain enhance shaman cleave.
My thought process brought me to cone of cold. Make it big and meaty, hell even a cast time, but make it so everything caught in the cone of cold gets Winter’s Chill. Yup. Now we’re talking gameplay. Now rework Winter’s Chill to only have a duration and not consume stacks. Frost Mage now has an on demand way to begin AOE and hitting everything as if they were frozen.
Now comes 10.0, what if Cone of Cold gave us a pseudo Death Borne proc, where our frost bolts and ice lances now hit up to 4 targets during the duration of the snare/Winter’s chill.
Even Jaina in Heroes of the Storm has more intuitive gameplay than frost mage in WOW. The entire key to her kit is Cone of Cold and Blizzard. If the next expansion is indeed Dragon themed as the leaks insist on it being, then you could even flavor up Cone of Cold to being Breath of Teracgosa, (not to rip on frost DKs… but theirs is way cooler and they’re a melee)
- Single target -
The single target for frost mage at this very moment is pretty fun, but I fear for 10.0 it will be completely broken. No cooldown reduction for Icy-veins, a mediocre cooldown that is only amazing because of the high uptime you can get on it, but that all goes away in 10.0 as it’s borrowed power.
Make the CDR baseline or just rework our kit entirely or no one will touch frost mage AGAIN until you add yet another borrowed power system to adjust for the poor design.
It feels really good to cast ice lance, but why are there degenerate builds where you don’t even cast a single ice lance? This happened in BFA and it was trash. It happens now with Death’s Fathom in AOE. Our biggest cleave is worthless when there’s multiple targets AND we have it specced to cleave. Just doesn’t make sense.
I think we need to steal from other classes with tried and true design, bring in Destro Warlocks.
So we are stuck being a turret casting frost bolts, then we start getting procs, but brain freeze procced and now we don’t even care for our Fingers of Frost. The only thing that matters is how many brain freezes we can get off to reduce the cooldown of Icy-veins.
What if our single target, we turret frost bolts and when fingers of frost procs, we get an icicle stack, it goes to five, because there’s five fingers why not. Our brain freeze gameplay stays the same and that’s when we cast our ice lances is after brain freezes.
Meanwhile we’re building fingers of frost to five stacks and at five stacks that’s when our frost bolts have reduced cooldown (legendary ability) and we can cast glacial spikes but with each glacial spike, it increases our cast time and consumes a stack. So there’s a gameplay loop where you build up FoF, faster casts on frostbolts, more brain freezes, more icy veins. We get the stars to align and we hit with a massive glacial spike flurry combo, and in case it’s AOE/cleave we now have our Cone of Cold to make it hit multiple targets AND be shattered.