Frost mage is a spec with many problems, and it appears as though Blizzard has no intentions of answering any of them. With the release of The War Within talent trees, I saw the groundwork of the same mistakes made in Battle for Azeroth, where frost was arguably the worst designed spec in the history of the game–the no ice lance era. This issue is just a symptom of the core flaws with the design of the spec that have existed since Legion.
The Flaws:
- Too much access to shatter–this may be the most controversial of my points, but just hear me out. Ice lance is cast way too often. Ice lance on an average fight will be upwards of 40% of global cooldowns spent. As a result, ice lance cannot do meaningful damage. The reason there are too many ice lances is the winter’s chill mechanic providing two ice lance casts per flurry cast. This is on top of generated fingers of frost through frostbolt, procs from frozen orb ticks and additional brain freeze procs giving additional flurries. Not to mention guaranteed procs through freezing winds and water jet cast by the water elemental summoned with icy veins. While this has addressed the famine issue of days past where you could go 8-15 frostbolts deep without a proc, it has gone too far in the other direction. We are absolutely flooded with ice lance casts, which again, means that ice lance cannot do meaningful damage or the spec becomes too strong.
- Problematic mastery–Since the introduction of icicles, mastery scaling has become a bit of a pain point for frost mage. Icicles incentivizes casting frostbolt, the filler spell, which is not problematic in and of itself except the issue is compounded by poorly designed talents. More recently they have added mastery scaling into other parts of the kit resulting in one of the most complicated mastery effects in the game with four separate lines of text that again compounds with poorly designed talents.
- Anti-synergistic talents–this is where the issues with frost are most exacerbated. There are too many talents that either buff the wrong parts of the kit (slick ice, fractured frost, death’s chill, deep shatter, piercing cold), cannibalize the rotation (glacial spike), or are simply bad talents that conflict with the design of the spec (ray of frost, cold front).
- Damage profile and uptime–frost mage is a spec with a sustained damage profile that is highly dependent on uptime. This means extra penalties for movement and phases where the boss is unattackable.
- Min/max range interactions–these issues arise entirely from the winter’s chill mechanic and are a large part of why this mechanic should be removed.
- Proc Munching–flurry currently invalidates fingers of frost. This is bad design.
The Solutions:
We’ve talked a great deal about the problems with the spec, so now I would like to go over some of the solutions. Please take all of these changes in the context of all of them being active at the same time. The goal of these changes is to allow procs to do meaningful damage while facilitating sustained damage through medium-duration cooldowns that line up to provide power spikes when these smaller cooldowns line up.
- The first is to remove winter’s chill from flurry. This serves to reduce the total number of ice lances cast during an encounter as well as resolving range issues that stem from flurry travel time at minimum and maximum range. Reducing the number of ice lances cast means that ice lance can be tuned to do meaningful damage. We’re also going to make brain freeze cause flurry to act as if the target was frozen.
- The second change is to remove many of the damage modifiers from frostbolt. The spell is a builder, used to generate procs. If it does too much damage it becomes the focus of the rotation which compounds the uptime and mobility issues. We hit Piercing cold as well as deep shatter.
a. Piercing Cold → Improved Shatter [shatter now multiplies your critical strike chance against frozen targets by 2 and then adds 50% additional chance
b. Deep shatter-> Ice lance does X% more damage if not cast following another ice lance - The third change is to remove glacial spike, ray of frost and cold front. These abilities are going to be replaced with spells that are easier to tune and become a seamless addition to the frost mage kit as well as adding in some of that fun factor of large critical strikes. We would be replacing glacial spike with an old fan favorite: deep freeze, and ray of frost with frost bomb. Deep freeze would work a little differently than in the past by empowering flurry every 40 seconds and always acting as if the target is frozen. It would have a choice node following it with two options: [splitting ice now also affects deep freeze empowered flurry casts], and [deep freeze now stuns the target for 5 seconds. If the target is permanently immune to stuns instead increase deep freeze’s damage by X%]. This adds a consistent source of predictable damage that can be planned around. It has functionality in both AoE and Single target thanks to the choice node. Now we can move onto frost bomb. Frost bomb will be a 15 second cooldown, 1.3 second cast spell that places a frost bomb on the target for 3 seconds. After 3 seconds the bomb detonates dealing substantial damage to the target. This talent would be followed by 2 parallel nodes, one that gives it an aoe splash for a percentage of the damage and another that makes the frost bomb detonation grant brain freeze. This again serves to add predictable damage on a short cooldown while providing aoe and single target throughput. The cooldown is intentionally desynced from deep freeze as a PvP concern, while remaining synced with icy veins and frozen orb to add reliable burst damage once a minute.
- We are also going to reduce button bloat by tying comet storm to ice lance, where every 30 seconds your next ice lance against a frozen target will call down a comet storm. Note that this will not disrupt coldest snap, as frozen orb will still generate a fingers of frost allowing for an instant cast of ice lance against a frozen target. This is again intentionally desynced from deep freeze as a nod to pvp, but synced with icy veins for clean cooldown sequences.
- Now we need to address The fractured frost, deaths chill and cold front vacancies. First we shift freezing rain to where fractured frost currently exists. We then add additional blizzard customization to these nodes by splitting the damage component of freezing rain into a permanent instant cast blizzard and a talent for increased damage following frozen orb. We will further add a parallel node that adds flat blizzard damage.
- Now we can address the mastery scaling by reverting it to Mastery: Frostburn. Frostburn increases damage dealt to frozen targets by a flat percent. This simplifies mastery while improving scaling and clearing visual clutter as icicles are no longer necessary to facilitate glacial spike.
- But now we’ve created a new problem by invalidating a number of talents that affected icicles and glacial spike, and some that modified frostbolt critical strikes. These are Flash Freeze, Splintering Cold, and Hailstones. So let’s address them while retaining thematic overtures and adding skill expression.
a. Flash Freeze-> increases the mastery benefit of frostburn to ice lance by X%
b. Splintering cold-> Your ice lances have a 15%/30% chance to fire an additional shard of ice dealing X damage (Passive source of damage that does not have to be thought about, but can be tuned to facilitate talents that increase skill expression as the optimal talents)
c. Hailstones-> Removed to make room for deep freeze choice node
So to finish, let’s look at a possible opening rotation:
- Precast frostbolt
- Frost bomb
- Queue icy veins
- Flurry (Triggers deep freeze, refunded by water elemental water jet)
- Flurry (to not overcap)
- Frozen Orb (Grants Fingers of Frost)
- Ice Lance (Triggers comet storm)
- Flurry (With Brain freeze granted by frost bomb)
- Frostbolt
- Ice Lance (Fingers of Frost from Freezing Winds)
- Frostbolt/Ice lance/flurry (Depending on procs until frost bomb is available again)
- Frost Bomb
- Shifting Power (Resets bomb to 3 sec, frost bomb detonates granting brain freeze)
- Ice Lance (Freezing winds)
- Flurry (Consuming Brain Freeze)
- Frost Bomb
- Flurry
Edit:
After some discussions with Manather, there are some proposed changes that warrant additional discussion; I’ll add our conversation here.
Manather
Irritatingly it looks like .5 bricked my account for the forums.
- The primary issue with our current mastery is if they do not add new effects to it (ie all of Frostfires tree) it becomes a very bad stat. Functionally for base frost its fine, but then they do things like make it scale worse than vers for splinters, or just never add frostfire things to it (meteor, ice nova etc). This would be solved with frostburn.
- I’d keep glacial spike and just make it A) replace frostbolt at 5 icicles (see tempest or similar effects) and B) have it benefit from all frostbolt things. That means it has the chance to generate bf/fof, it benefits from slick ice, and cleaves to 3 targets with fractured frost. I know you want most of those removed but having some interaction with your builder is good and your other changes invalidate the friction between frostbolt and ice lance.
- Personally not a fan of your suggested deep shatter change, would make frb - ice lance - frb - ice lance a predominant way to play between fof procs. We’re not WW monks it would just be a little awkward.
In general though I do like a lot of the ideas present. There is the question that if winters chill doesnt exist in any other capacity should it stay on coldest snap? You seem to have some heavy inspiration from wrath, and I think that is a good thing. I think making BF cause the target to be treated as frozen is a bit too much of a step backward since it invalidates base flurry cooldown charges. Also the blizzard suggestions for gate 3 seem like a feels bad situation to take like 4 talents instead of the current 1 just to have some flat damage on blizzard.
Genswift
I do think keeping winters chill on coldest snap is a good thing, though I can see an argument for removing it and buffing the damage of comet storm. I see some potential for changing glacial to replace frostbolt, however I think that deep freeze would be a more engaging interaction rotationally that allows for more skill expression. The big reason I want to remove the frostbolt interactions is that they make tuning a nightmarish dance where a little too much damage on frostbolt cannabilizes the rest of the rotation. I agree that splitting freezing rain would be a little awkward, but i wanted to add in the option to make blizzard permanently instant cast which is a dead talent if Freezing rain remains unchanged and needed an extra point to keep the talent tree from needing a complete overhaul. As far as flurry charges, they could be made to just baseline treat the target as if it were frozen instead of coupling it to brain freeze.
I can see some friction around deep shatter; the inspiration was the archimonde trinket from hellfire citadel but I wanted to make it less restrictive. I think that outside of cooldowns it will feel negligible (because you’re already spellqueuing frostbolts to maintain uptime if you dont have a proc) and inside of cooldowns you have enough buttons to press between frost bomb and the guarenteed brain freezes it gives that you could alternate casts without necessarily relying on frostbolt. I think it opens up some skill expression but I am open to workshopping it or redoing it altogether.
I did want to leave some interactions with filler so I left in slick ice and wintertide so you still have some power being added into frostbolt, just not such an overwhelming amount that you wind up in the BFA or Current state of frost mage where No Ice Lance can be the dominant playstyle.
What is your opinion on adding frost bomb and deep freeze?
Manather
I like deep freeze/frost bomb but I disagree they are more skill expressive than glacial spike given deep freeze as it is written would always shatter. So its just press flurry every 40s and you the have max value.
Genswift
I selected it to always shatter because otherwise it’s not possible to shatter it. I didnt want to add an rng component to it by giving it a chance to shatter.
but I do see your point
part of the issue with keeping glacial is if we change mastery to frostburn and remove winter’s chill from flurry then there is no way to shatter glacial so it loses all mastery scaling and then whats the point
Manather
add just it to fof
or smthing similar
Genswift
I’m a little confused. Are you saying to add GS shatter component to fingers or to make the current mastery scale more with ice lance?
Manather
add gs shatter to fingers
Genswift
that could work, but we would also complicate the design. If we were to make glacial replace frostbolt as before then we would have to sit on a finger’s at all times which wouldn’t feel very intuitive to play and would further punish movement as you wouldn’t be able to reliably hold fingers for movement either
because ti would be auto consumed by glacial
I think we would have to choose between deep freeze and galcial. I would personally prefer deep freeze, but i could see it being a choice node.
Maybe make glacial tie to flurry in a way similar to how deep freeze would operate
but be a little more on demand as instead of a cooldown it would be tied to icicles
so you could have agency as to when to send it
Edit: Added additional talent ideas
- Deep Shatter-Your freeze effects now apply a stack of Winter’s Chill to enemies permanently immune to freezes
- Winter’s Reach- Your frost nova is off the global cooldown, castable while casting and can be cast at a location within 30 yds