Frost mage talents and rotation shadowlands

Classes Mage
21

Out of curiosity did you ever compare it to 40% haste and expedient with some strike through corruptions and different azerite?

And if so, was the difference across all types of sims such as aoe, single, hectic etc always at least 5k in favor of GS?

Because that’s the part people don’t always get to see for themselves.

My experience is right now there are multiple versions of frost that play very well and are within close margins of one another depending on encounter.

I’m sure the same will be the case in shadowlands if people are willing to build towards how they want to play.

And for the majority of players it won’t even be close to mattering.

Even now, if you play fire in keys 15 and under with other people equally skilled and geared, you are probably going to think it sucks compared to any version of frost. But in higher keys, it’s A massive difference in aoe potential.

So it all depends on which kind of deviation we’re talking about. Do we mean 100k more on a trash pack or 5-10k? Hopefully the latter, so it won’t really matter to the vast majority of players.

22

For Kyrian Frost Mage LW/TV

Cast Frozen Orb
Cast Icy Veins
Cast Frostbolt 5x
Cast Radiant Spark
Cast Flurry
Cast your Ice Lances/Dump your procs. Make sure you Lance twice to finish proc Winter’s Chill twice

On movement/fight transition:

Find room to cast Frostbolts where you can, if you proc Brain Freeze:

Cast Radiant Spark
Cast Flurry
Dump those lances

Cast Orb on CD
Cast Icy Veins if you have stabilized

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23

Wouldn’t you cast radiant spark then frostbolt+flurry combo and then icelancex2 to use the 2 charges?

24

no because the radiant spark debuff will fall off in the matter of time to complete your full combo

25

You can’t preach taste though so the whole ‘boring’ argument boiling in this thread is pointless

26

If you weren’t simulating with a custom apl of rotation=no_ice_lance it would never sim higher/ correctly. Sure fire can burst like crazy, but they cant do it all the time, and it tapers off on boss fights. I’ve been in very few m+ groups that I’ve been outdone by a fire mage End of dungeon overall. Granted I don’t like to push keys over 17 because I don’t enjoy m+ that much. Cool name btw

2 Likes
27

Personally I find the thermal void build to be a spammy potato talent, but unfortunately glacial spike is out. It might be okay until we get our legendaries and conduits, but after that the gap is only going to widen. None of the legendaries or conduits are going to buff glacial spike, but they do enhance thermal void rotation

This is going to be cut and dry without much explaining why.

Stats (I’m sure some people are not going to like this , but trust me)

Maintain haste at least 10% or 15% if your higher than 15 you don’t need to be, and if you are lower than 15 you should be at 10.
Maintain Crit about 15%
Sink everything else into vers
Mastery=dumpster

Leveling build Crit and haste first then move to vers. Mastery is still a pile of trash.

Talents
Lonely winter

Shimmer

Incanters flow dungeon/ rune of power Raid

Chain reaction. // frozen touch if main target(s) are not living longer than 30 seconds

5th row doesn’t matter

Splitting ice

Thermal void. (ray of frost for leveling)

Soulbinds
Kyrian
Pelegos-follow potency route
Ice bite
Unrelenting cold
Icy propulsion

Legendary
Freezing winds of it doesn’t get nerfed, maybe cold front if it gets a buff

Aside from those 2 if they get never into the ground the next best are slick ice ST, glacial fragments aoe

Radiant spark always cast when you have a brain freeze proc. Will always look like this
Radiant spark, flurry, ice lance, ice lance

Blizzard use on 4 or more targets

Mirror image is a defensive spell, it only does about 30 dps while it’s active so in a 2 minute fight it adds 10 dps.

General rotation tips

Cast frostbolt until you get brain freeze or fingers of frost procs. use fingers of frost procs first With ice lance then brain freeze proc With flurry, then keep frostbolting. Cancel frostbolt if brain freeze proc, if you get a fof that you munch it would have done 7x damage as the frostbolt

When you brainfreeze flurry a target it will put 2 stacks of winters chill on the target consume both theses with ice lance. Do not consume 1 with ice lance and the other with frost bolt, shattered ice lance does about 4x damage as shattered frostbolt.

3 Likes
28

IF? Why five frostbolts? Generally speaking for IL builds you want to avoid munching procs as much as possible, and with Orb down you’ll probably fill up fairly quickly. Casting exactly five for… I’m guessing the icicles?.. seems less efficient than casting spark when you have at least two procs ready. If I had to eyeball it.

3 Likes
29

I was playing around on the beta last night and this is the exact same rotation that I came up with. It just made sense. Although, I wasn’t using radiant spark nearly as much mainly because I was doing WQs and doing the covenant quests.

On a fresh 60 frost mage I was bursting to 2.5k and maintaining about 2k on a target dummy after about 5 minutes.

1 Like
30

Hell yeah! It sucks they make you do some questing before unlocking conduits, I wanted to save all of that for actual release. there’s a little more finesse to it than what I wrote down but it will get you in a pretty good spot following that. I did a bunch of testing with the pvp gear upgraded to 190, 3 conduits, and the legendary. I would attack for 3 minutes at a time, no hero, and only use icy veins once. I was averaging 3.6k-3.9k On the bastion single target dummy. Then for aoe I was using that cluster of 5 dummy’s in bastion for 35 seconds at a time to try and simulate a dungeon pack, and not using icy veins. The average there was 7.4k-8.6k.

31

I would also like to know the logic behind the 5 frostbolts. I saw you were thinking maybe something to do with icicles, but to my knowledge they don’t matter at all with IL build.

32

What has led you to favor Cold Front over Freezing Winds? Is it just personal preference or has one performed consistently better for you than the other?

33

Cold Front performs the best for any situation.

34

Valdeaux answered it well. Here is why. freezing winds overlaps Fingers of frost procs that you Might be getting anyway, and It will most likely overlap with a bunch of the winters chill you might Get during that time too. Essentially taking away everything it gives you. Then Freezing winds orb reduction gives you less orb uptime than cold fronts orb generation. So less orb dps too. And freezing wind just feels clunky.

Freezing winds might have been good in aoe situations if instead of fingers of frost it applied winters chill every 2.5 seconds to the targets it was hitting so your splitting ice could shatter on the second target.

1 Like
35

I think you got the right idea. SL is forcing us to a Icelance/Frozen Orb damage profile and away from Icicles.

36

Not from any of mine and others testing, where have you seen this? And if so could you provide links.

In all my testing, freezing winds outperformed cold front in single target and in the mythic +. Other mages I’ve talked to have had the same conclusions, although just from our personal tests, nothing analytical.

Not calling you out, I know nerds get defensive on here, just trying to see what you found.

Either way, there close. I’m on my phone, I’m tired and its 3am. I’ll provide a more detailed response next time around with what I’ve seen.

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37

Lol. “I’m not trying get defensive, just calling you a nerd”

Dal, the current sims are pretty clear that cold front is better for both ST and multi-target.

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38

Are the current sims configured for prepatch changes?

39

I wasn’t calling you a nerd, I was saying nerds on here get defensive when people say thing contrary to what they say. I was actively trying to defuse any tention you would get from my comment, but thanks for proving my point.

3 Likes
40

mage discord, at least for now, has u doing a basic frost rotation, with thermal void and ur choice of chain reaction or frozen touch, (one will be better than the other, but its fairly close actually), and using cold front legendary for non aoe, and freezing winds for aoe. good thing too, cause cold front drops from necrotic wake dungeon, but freezing winds reqs a denathrius kill in nathria, so it wont be an option til week 3 at least. ice lance also gets benefits from conduits, whereas there are none for spike. this is hardly surprising, since spike is a talent. if they want to give spike some love, it’d have to go baseline to get any really, cause offering talent specific conduits and buffs from legendaries is just too niche.