How is the spec doing right now without the 4 set? I’m on fresh frost mage around 245 item level and I can’t help feel like I’m tickling my enemies. I drop my ring of power, blizzard, frozen orb, comet storm, and then spam ice lance. After that I just keep dropping blizzard and hitting ice lance but the damage doesn’t feel great.
On bosses, I’m doing the same thing except instead of ice lance I use frost bolt and glacial spike. I can’t time even a +2 doing only 3k DPS total. Should I switch to fire if I don’t have the 4 set tier?
I’m not an expert on frost mages. Hopefully others with more experience will speak up.
However, I do use frost spec for world quests and dailies. It just works better for that than the other specs.
Some thoughts:
For AOE, I’m not sure you should be casting ice lance into Blizzard unless you have a proc or are using the legendary that causes every ice lance cast into Blizzard to pulse AOE.
While keeping Blizzard and Orb on cooldown, it’s probably better to spam frostbolt fishing for procs, or maybe go close and cast a few arcane explosions.
If you’re using the AOE legendary, then yes, spamming ice lance into Blizzard is what you should be doing. While keeping Icy Veins and Orb on cooldown.
I found it helpful to use TimerBars to see the status of Blizzard. That way I know exactly when to stop spamming ice lance to recast Blizzard without overlap or gaps when it is down. You can probably do the same thing Weakauras.
What stats are you prioritising? Crit cap for us is 33%, any more than that and it starts to become less beneficial. This is followed by haste, then vers and finally mastery.
As for the legendary, I’d recommend freezing winds. It’s a lot more effective overall. Using glacial fragments is very reliant on enemies remaining in the blizzard, and essentially useless in single target.
I’d also get rid of the glacial spike talent and select thermal void instead.
Venthyr and Necrolord are the recommended covenants for frost also. Make sure you have the most suitable soulbind and conduits as well.
P.S, I forgot to mention night fae is strong in mythic plus. I personally haven’t used it and seem to get along just fine with necro/venthyr.
Another thing you could do is install simulationcraft. It is an add on that allows you to compare your gear you have equipped along with anything in your bags. You can select multiple combinations and raid bots will let you know the best items to equip to get the most dps.
If you are only doing 3k dps in a dungeon, your rotation and spec is way off. But in addition you don’t understand the spec - it revolves 100% around our icy veins cooldown, and constantly reducing it’s cooldown through the icy propulsion conduit. With that conduit, every time you critical hit it reduces the cooldown of icy veins. That’s the source of our dps power.
Instead what is likely happening is you pop icy veins, and you aren’t using thermal void talent, and you have all this cooldown downtime in between, which is a mega damage lull.
My recommendation - go to wowhead and icy veins, and read the guides there. Then, watch some recent youtube vids on frost mage guide. Really understand the rotation and your goal when you dps. Then, practice on target dummies, and do it over the course of say trying to get icy veins back 3x in one session. And practice on both a single target dummy and aoe dummy. I’d even watch pov of frost mages in dungeons and raids and see exactly how they do things.
Then, go practice it in dungeons, and go easy on yourself - it’ll take time to improve. Start with low stress things like LFR or heroic dungeons. Places where you will feel free to experiment and practice your rotation and dps goals without the fear of ruining the dungeon for the group.
Do that and you’ll see big improvements in your overall dps. It’s a lot of work, but that’s how you improve.
That lego is quite the bait because it does absolutely no priority damage and is like not wearing a lego on ST. Also with that lego, you shouldn’t be running Comet Storm. Splitting Ice would default to your pick that row as it will offer twice the explosions.
3k damage at 245 is very low though, and without seeing your logs nobody can tell exactly where you’re screwing up, but I would recommend reading some of the pinned guides on the mage discord. Frost’s rotation is rather straightforward and really well explained there, and that should help fix major misplays.
Ok. That helps a bit in understanding what to aim for.
Oh wow. I wasn’t running splitting ice with it. Ok I think I know what to change with my build
Also I don’t want to buy a new legendary since my mage is kind of poor and by her lonesome. If I can stick with my current legendary for mythic+ and maybe get a raiding one later
Long-time frostie here. Right now, without tier gear we are in a rough spot. In the last patch I got thanked for doing a good job and people seemed pleased with how I did. Now, our aoe damage is very low. I just did an HOA 15 and was asked “mage is that really your damage?”, “mage are you even trying?” and I was out-dpsed by the druid tank, and the WW monk, both of whom were doing over 40k damage while I struggled to maintain above 15k in aoe. I didn’t prevent us from timing the key or anything, but it still felt bad. At the end I got a tell saying “you suck”. Now, I’m assuming I didn’t hit my head and forget how to play my mage. I don’t know if the developers have accounted for the fact that tanks aren’t just going to stand still in front of us and make sure everything stays inside our blizzard aoe, because they won’t and they don’t. I don’t think I want to deal with a whole patch of being asked if I bought my character, which I most certainly did not.
edit: I’m using freezing winds btw, the legendary that’s supposed to be best… yikes.
Im not sure if this is a troll because this is literally the WORST and absolute opposite on what you should be doing. Instead of picking the MOST IMPORTANT talent in thermal void you picked on that legit is a dps LOSS in glacial spike. Wrong legendary., wrong talents ( take splitting over comet storm in most situations, ALWAYS take thermal void ) I am going to assume you are playing incorrect covenant and conduits.
Learn how to play the class, fire is more difficult to play.
Although Freezing Winds is still good, I don’t it’s best anymore for anything. It’s the most versatile and easy to use, but Necrolrod with either Slick Ice or Cold Front is showing some decent numbers and Night Fae with Disciplinary Command and Bone Chilling instead of Lonely Winter seems to be doing pretty well on AoE at the cost of some ST damage.
The tier does play a big role in that damage though, since the 2pc alone is responsible for ~13% of my damage in M+ without special attention to shattering every Comet Storm since I’ve been playing NL these past few days. I will give NF Disciplinary Command a shot next reset since it’ll be Fortified week.
Yeah Glacial Spike sucks, so don’t ever pick that. This expansion is all about Icy Veins uptime and cooldown reduction due to Icy Propulsion conduit. Frost is in dire need of a rework for the next expansion or else we risk being hostages of this kind of borrowed power and straight out stop working once it’s taken out.
Just make this simple experiment: sim your character with and without Icy Propulsion. This conduit alone is responsible for ~20% of our damage.
Frost mages are pretty garbage until the 4 piece/dual leggo, tbh. Your better off to play fire until the 2 piece at least.
But where your at, it’s rly not all that difficult. Go vent st / nf for aoe. Don’t go necro until dual leggos. FW leggo is a safe bet for all around use. SI for higher ilvl necro when you get there. Frags leggo for massive aoe m+ pulls on fort week, use it with nf. Cold front takes control once ur using necro at the higher ilvl. CS takes over on ST after the 2 piece but doesn’t really make a difference until the 4 piece.
Frost actually benefits the most from the 2pc while Fire benefits the least with either 2pc or 4pc.
And I can’t say with 100% certainty you should stack some, but after a bit of testing, Mastery for Necrolord Frost is actually pretty good considering how much we want to spam Frostbolt especially on AoE/cleave. Not considering Cold Front legendary that gives Mastery even more value, but Icicles have been doing ~15% of my damage in M+ recently and I have very little of that stat.
I have a general disdain for the versatility stat even on my tanks so I’ll probably get 33% crit, and then focus on haste mostly and mastery after that.
Yeah, Crit and Haste are still the most important for sure. Crit for that 33.34% cap (more Crit beyond that is still is good in AoE because of Icy Propulsion) and more Haste = more Frostbolts, but Mastery isn’t as useless as it used to be. Mastery + Cold Front make Frozen Orbs hit for a lot more and Mastery + Slick Ice make Icicles hit for a decent enough amount.
That’s a good point. I actually hadn’t even considered using Slick Ice in M+, but this week I decided to try it and also I tried Cold Front. I have to say I was not thrilled with Cold Front, it’s a cool idea but it seems undertuned (or perhaps I just didn’t spam frostbolt enough).
However, I did actually find Slick Ice to be decent in M+ which was a pleasant surprise, and the uptime wasn’t bad in Necro. Granted, I pug everything and do not have a coordinated team so all of my testing is based on tanks who are afraid to pull big and healers who faint at 2 packs. Frost is not performing well in these types of groups, so my definition of what’s good is “not completely horrible”.