So far i have been playing a hunter and DK ever since my 1-2 year break from WoW. Hunters are insane when it comes to soloing any type of content and the DK lore is just amazing. was thinking of make a Frost Mage as i’m still trying to find my “main class” and was wondering about the solo aspect. i looked thru the forums and the last thing i saw was something back in Jan talking about it and it was mainly Arcane mage. i want to stick with frost but just wondering how does it fair again elites/rare when leveling and at end game. i even tried to find some videos on youtube but it was mainly PVP and mytics type things.
are they good at soloing like a hunter is or is there a lot more work to where you have to kite. any information is very much appreciated and thank you.
arcane mages are better leveling , since mana is barely an issue and the burst is amazing , frost is the safe option tho , mobs die fast no need to kite and at most u have frost nova (x2 ) and blink , there is no need to kite while leveling , u have a shield to take a hit if needed.
for elites / rare piece of cake , it the mob can be snare a frost mage can solo it !
Hunters is always gonna be the easy mode tho nothing come close.
Frost is a bit safer but slower at soloing. We don’t nuke as hard against single targets and our AoE is cooldown-based and does good damage but in short windows.
There are different builds for Frost but I’d say the primary build, No Ice Lance (Glacial Spike) is somewhat tedious for soloing low HP stuff but great at higher HP stuff. It’s a high DPS build but requires targets to hit for a while. We want a target that we can hit with 5 Frostbolts for little damage then unload a huge Glacial Spike on. If the target doesn’t have a lot of HP then we’re wasting a lot of that Glacial Spike. Kiting isn’t generally necessary because most mobs won’t really get to you with all the freezes/slows, but sometimes you kite. A huge weakness is trying to solo bosses that can’t be frozen or slowed (e.g., Thrall) since we need separation or freezes to get off big Glacials, and are rather squishy when getting whacked by melee mobs. Rexxar for example is rough because not only does he do a lot of melee damage while whacking us, but he spawns boars based on missing health, and we basically have two modes: 1) Do almost no damage with Frostbolt, or 2) Do massive damage with Glacial Spike. So you can either do almost no damage and let Rexxar beat you to death, or you unload a Glacial and risk multiple boars charging you. There are some middleground options, though (see below).
For end-game questing and Visions, pair Frozen Orb with Meme Beam and you can take out packs of almost any non-elite mobs, but then you have to wait for those to get off cooldown.
If you want to stick with NoIL one trick for dealing with a bunch of lower HP mobs is to not use Glacial Spike at all but just launch Frostbolts at them while staying at 5 Icicles. Makes each Frostbolt do really big cleave damage. Also an option for bosses like Rexxar in Visions or Maut during stone phase, as you’re changing your damage profile to deal decent (though not great) sustained damage instead of poor damage for 5-10 sec then massive damage.
Another trick is to build Icicles by casting Frostbolt on weaker mobs then opening with Glacial Spike on an elite. Works great in Visions because you can one-shot bosses in the tainted zones in lower masked runs, and take out a huge chunk of HP in 4/5 mask runs.
Other Frost builds are better and smoother for soloing, I’d imagine (I have limited experience with them but know how they work), but NoIL is the best for most raid encounters due to pure DPS.
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frost is bad until 48. i play frost and i solo just about everything no problem. 5 masks, world quests, world bosses, assaults, etc.
Frost right now is not a spec I can recommend for leveling. Switching to it to kill rares/elites is a good idea, but you’ll defeat enemies much faster as arcane or fire. Frost (once again) only starts feeling good once you have borrowed power added on, and it still feels slow if you don’t have good luck at RNG.
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thank you all for the information. would you say a frost mage is very viable end game (mythic plus, raids)?
If you can get the right Azerites and Essences. I am not optimized, but I’m doing alright. Once I get more and better gear, I should have an easier time of things.
I hold my own, I’ll never burst as high as a “good” fire mage, but I feel more consistent. Anything with cleave is great for us, if you play the no ice lance build, it can feel a bit dry during times of no brain freeze procs, but I enjoy it much more in M+ and the few fights we’ve pushed into mythic Nya.
With as close as the pre patch is, I’m assuming Sept probably and corruptions going away in that pre patch, I’m not sure if I’m going to really farm anymore echoes and just use the corruptions I have. And just keep bringing my cloak down.
Off-topic but you have the most messed-up looking character I’ve ever seen. Bravo!
As Arcane, you can basically arcane missile your way to level 90. 1-2 casts of arcane missiles kills everything. At 120, it’s not quite as easy to mow things down, but I noticed that with 4 charged arcane blast, my mage was nuking everything much faster than any of my melee classes with 30+ ilvls on my mage.
How end-game? You’ll never see a Frost Mage in the MDI, Fire outperforms Frost in most Mythic fights, high keys, and PvP. But it’s certainly still viable for +15-20 keys and Heroic, even Mythic, raiding. I’d also say Frost is better for mid-level content because Fire is so gear dependent, harder to master, and in keys you need a tank that knows how to pull around your Combust to maximize DPS.
The 3 specs vary, but they’re all pretty good so I would just worry about which one you like playing the most. Mage as a class in general has very powerful tools regardless of which spec you’re on.
Hunter and DK are easily some of the 2 best solo PvE classes in the game, so you might find it a little harder to kill elites that are immune to roots and slows (etc) but that’s really one of the only areas where mages aren’t great. I wouldn’t get too worried about that though since they’re still fine and are very good in all other aspects of the game.