i want to be a frost mage pvp pro but i always like to do things off-meta. Just want your opinion on what works
I love glacial spike and want to make a build with it/ including ice lance spam
for 90 talents i dont know if i should choose freezing rain or splitting ice. ice gives you way more dmg but freezing rain is really good for extra kite, aoe, and instant cast spell.
I also want to have the big crits but i think with shatter, it’ll be more reliable to go other enhancements. I’m leaning towards haste and mastery, mastery for extra frozen orb/ blizzard spell combo and more glacial spike dmg, and haste to reduce global cooldowns and get icicles faster for glacial spike.
Would this build work in pvp/ 2v2 arena?
I used to main a mage and I’m not an expert on pvp or mages. You can take my words or leave them.
GS builds don’t work well in arenas and you’re idea of a GS and Ice Lance build is less than ideal.
A lot of arena pvp is based on either whittling away your opponents defensives and healing or hitting them with a cc train to prevent them from using them, and then bursting. Your team has to be ready to deal the maximum amount damage at any time to your kill target. And your opponents are trying to do the exact same to you.
GS requires you to cast frostbolt, get an icicle, repeat 5x, then you can cast GS. The icicle lasts 60 seconds before expiring. GS is not on demand damage. You simply can’t guarantee it’s availability when your team is ready for bursting.
As anyone also knows that you will have to cast frostbolt a lot for GS and if you have selected az traits and talents that emphasize ice Lance then it hurts your frostbolt damage.
Frost mages tend to be the “control” role with CC’s, slows, etc with damage secondary. Most builds I’ve seen are frostbolt-oriented with Ray of frost as their “big gun”. Haste and Versatility are your two most important stats (true for most classes in pvp). And you have to be careful about not getting interrupted because you have 1 school of magic and you getting kicked/locked in Frost completely kills your abilities.
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this is perfect info and insight.
Thank you very much for the reply!
i’m a sucker for big crits so instead of focusing on ice lance spamming, i should focus strictly on GS.
It’s one thing that i hate about frost mages is that being kicked/ only having 1 school of magic makes me useless for some fights. Im jealous that fire mages can still ice block
in BGs, you can basically just run whatever build you enjoy. Ray of frost is usually the “go to” over Glacial Spike for pvp just because it can go behind the pillar, its a nice slow and is also quite a bit of damage with no ramp time.
I cant really imagine a situation I’d run splitting ice at all in pvp, and for the same reasons, freezing rain is also less than ideal. I’d still prefer freezing rain though if i had to pick one of the two. Especially in battlegrounds, but i usually run comet myself.
With shatter, as long as you do the Flurry cast (i dont know if it even has a name) most things should shatter. Incase you weren’t aware of what this was, it just means you will always cast flurry immediately after a heavy hitting casted spell (like GS) and then follow up the flurry with an ice lance. This all needs to happen in very rapid succession, as in spamming your flurry bind just as you GS is about to finish, then throw an ice lance while flurry is still casting. This is because of the way Brain Freeze works mechanically with Flurry, so as long as your Flurry debuff is on the target, every spell to land will shatter, and most will crit. This is basically mandatory playstyle for the build you’ve described just to make it competitive, but I think its worth a shot.