I was pretty excited to see the frost mage talent trees but man, i am so disappointed by them. I’ll list some positives and negatives i have with the trees. frost mage is my alt and i’ve not done all that much content on my frost mage, so i understand if any of this seems a bit surface level, but compared to my frost death knight trees, this feels really bad.
Positives and Negatives
Positives:
Ice Nine: this is really cool, i enjoy the idea of an icicle machine-gun playstyle.
EDIT: I just found out it’s supposed to be 1 and 2 icicles. I’m disappointed. I think maybe a capstone focused on an icicle machine gun playstyle would be super interesting and would really make mastery worthwhile.
Focused Frost: this is an interesting idea for single target.
Rank 0/2: this is brilliant. i absolutely love this. this is a must pick.
Fractured Frost: sounds like a nice inclusion from deathborne, but i’d love to be able to have deathborne as a glyph for icy veins.
Negatives:
Cold Snap: The Gatekeeper: having this in our talent tree as a necessary requirement for moving down the middle feels absolutely awful. this skill is so niche that it really should just be in the class tree over ice nova as every other spec gains access to all of it’s effects.
Summon Water Elemental and it’s lack of supporting synergy: has no direct synergy with any other talents and isn’t even given some sort of new capstone talent. there’s people that want to use water elemental builds out there. why not give them a unique and powerful super water elemental buff capstone talent and several synergistic talents instead of the boring and bad legendaries from shadowlands?
Snowstorm: this feels really random. cone of cold is awful for damage in general, i really don’t think having a slow talent just to make a baseline skill viable is a good idea. it’d probably be pretty nice if the base skill itself dealt some solid damage, but it doesn’t. it could have been an aoe spammable-type skill where a talent like this would make it feel a lot more powerful.
Improved Icy Veins: 3 seconds of icy veins for 2 talent points is insulting.
General feedback about the tree: it feels like there’s a large amount of rng and small percentile stacking increase bonuses. to me it just feels really placeholder and really clogs up the tree. having too many of these types of talents don’t make me feel like i’m creating a unique build so much as just aimlessly adding raw damage. To be honest it feels like if there’s that many passives out there buffing the damage of stuff by 5-20% then the problem lies within those skills in the first place, Wintertide really seems to be the biggest example of that for me, the first part has literally nothing to do with the second part of that talent. that seems to be holding frost mage back from being able to make really interesting choices in dragonflight.
Distribution: i do like that there’s a clear path that is dedicated towards icicles which is nice, there’s also a part of the tree dedicated towards icy veins which is alright but then the rest of the tree is splattered with random single target and aoe increases, and it’s really worth mentioning that you have to pick up the absolute garbage that is cold snap in order to even gain access to icy veins. it’s very very messy.
Capstone Talents: these new capstones are absolutely atrocious in my opinion. the legendaries for frost mage during shadowlands don’t even seem capstone-worthy in the slightest. cold front is (from the looks of things) supposed to be our aoe capstone, but you can’t even control when you want to use it, it just happens whether you like it or not. slick ice and freezing winds just seem to be there to fill space. these aren’t engaging talents, they’re effectively passive damage increases like thermal void. 3 of the 5 options are primarily single target focused with 1 being seemingly aoe focused and the other 1 being a damage cooldown focus. let me reiterate, why isn’t there a pet-buffing capstone talent or even path in the tree? frost mage is the pet spec for mage and it doesn’t even have a way to legitimately focus on it with these robust trees?
which part of the tree is aoe focused? what is even going on?
They brought back propulsion, THE WORST decision.
Half the tree is around ice lances, but your REQUIRED to up the other tree to go up the ice lance side.
this might be a really radical thing to say but i genuinely think so much work needs to be done with these talent trees that they may as well go back to the drawing board.
On the plus side, they finally figured out a way to fix the ice lance proc munching that has been present since Legion, and it only takes 3 talent points.
There is just so much not right with the frost tree.
Frost ele has needed help for ever. Data mined water jet coming back which might help, but unless Lonely Winter gets nerfed, fat chance that is actually enough.
Icicles are cool, but now would be the best time to bring back Frostburn as the Mastery instead of talent(Frigid Shattering), and make Icicles the talent choice, especially with all the cool looking talents that are now in the tree stemming from it as a playstyle choice.
Winter chill is a talent. Who green lit this? Clearly not someone who play frost.
Frozen touch is still there. If that’s ever a choice, there is something wrong with the proc chance of for FoF and BF.
As for the capstone. Really feels like there should be 3 spells to build playstyles around: Frozen Orb, Icy Veins, Icicles/Glacial Spike. you can take most of the Icy Veins nodes and double them up or make choice talents. take Freezing Winds out of that section. Make it Slick Ice vs Thermal Void(not that this is an actual choice). Merge Imp IV and Snap Freeze.
Currently feels… a little like the left side is supposed to be a bit more aoe with Frozen orb. Having the 2 charges of Flurry on that side really only makes sense if there’s more use of flurry in aoe scenarios. Maybe bring back Frost Bomb triggering when damage is done to frozen targets? Maybe bring back Glacial Fragments in some form, again, when dealing damage to frozen targets to tie Flurry in.
Ray is still there. I like the spell, but, imo, it needs an overhaul. It needs to be fun to press again. It has the ramping damage aspect to it and that feels like where the identity of the spell should be, how many ticks can I get in the cast, like it was in Legion. With it being on the more Icicle side, maybe it have generate Icicles per tick as well or in place of the FoF charges? Have it work with Ice Nine?
Wintertide is their way to address proc munching. Proc munching is when you cast Frostbolt with a brain freeze proc then ice lance ice lance. If that frost bolt generates a Finger or Frost. You just munch the proc because the winter chill already treats the target as frozen.
wasting procs due to poor design. Frost mage and MM hunter probably the only two specs with this issue. Frost gets it constantly, MM gets it during Trueshot.
This was my impression as well. Nothing really feels like an interesting choice for making your character more powerful or synergizing with other skills to make interesting builds, its all just stuff that seems like it makes the class playable.
Too many interdependent skills baked into the tree that should be baseline.
After playing with the tree for an hour I couldn’t find something that would be a good build, just something that made the class playable.
Feels really awful.
Ice nine tooltip is wrong it 15% chance to get 2 icicles and 30% chance
Rank 0/2 is improve barrier for frost. just like how it is on fire tree on the far right side
wow and anything i liked for the tree is gone. maybe there should be a new capstone based around generating so many icicles that it becomes a rapid machine gun
I suspect that this was 99% mis-interpretation from Blizzard. They either saw the data and said “oh, but 97.6% of people take IP so they must like it” or they heard someone mention that Frost finally feels not completely trash to play when IV uptime is high (which is more around Frost needing massive Haste to be any fun than IP/IV/TV being good).
Absolutely. As has been said in numerous threads, on several class forums, these trees don’t bring anything to the game. It’s rehashed existing talents, little bits and bobs that should really just happen (really who cares if you go 5 levels without having a point to put into something?) and 95% of it should be baseline.
Make the spec talents baseline, and then give us a handful of the more impactful talents from the general tree every 10-15 levels. You know, the utility stuff like having a choice between DB, Deep freeze and an Arcane stun/interrupt. Real choices!
More importantly, none of these trees impact on the current playstyle enough to be worth the effort they seem to be putting into them. The biggest complaint about BfA and SL is that the specs don’t feel good to play. You can add as many little trees and 2% haste buffs as you like, but if none of it changes how the specs feel to play then the players are going to give up after a month. Instead of making “new” talent trees, the specs needed to be broken down and rebuilt. Maybe 12.0 will do that for us.
Yeah. Finally. Players have only been making that exact suggestion since Legion too. “Hey guys we’re listening to feedback” 6 years later.
“Flurry Flurry - Unleash a flurry of ice, striking the target 3 times for a total of [ 104.3% of Spell Power ] Frost damage. [Each hit applies Winter’s Chill to the target] and reduces the target’s movement speed by 70% for 1 sec. [Winter’s Chill causes the target to take damage from your spells as if it were frozen.”]
[ ] ← removed
Well they pretty much destroyed frost with this change.