Summary
Frost mage coming out of dragonflight saw its greatest rework to date for its gameplay loop, giving it iconic playstyle such as coldest snap and giving more identity to spells like glacial spike and ray of frost.
Going into war within alpha and beta, much of the development focus within the mage class was given to arcane and fire, as it was stated that you guys were largely happy with the DF gameplay frost had and didnt want to mess with it.
During this however, most classes and specs in the game received a massive overhaul to how talent trees are designed ~ with much choicer and more diverse of talents to choose for a given encounter or dungeon. Frost has been left behind in this regard, having very little agency or real choice on its talent tree. It has, by far, the least number of unique nodes and unique combination of choices in the game (not to mention it doesnt even have a choice node anymore). This wishlist is made in mind for what I believe to be the long term health of frost mage.
Challenges/Wishlist
Because it is currently the only competitive option, this list will be made with mostly Frostfire in mind. I will let someone else add color to the direction that spellslinger should go.
1. Talent Tree
Challenge:
As previously mentioned, frost mage currently has the most archaic tree in the entire game across all classes and specs. It has the least number of nodes, unique nodes, no choice nodes, and least number of unique combinations of nodes by degrees of magnitude. Within the nodes themselves, we have many relatively boring pure stat increases such as freezing winds, wintertide, lonely winter, etc.
Recommendation:
The tree really needs some creative juices put into it and almost a full rework. It has been receiving band-aid touch ups since the season 2 update in DF. The middle tier section needs much more widening and choice, and it would be great to have more inspired/creative talents that give us ways to specialize in ST/Cleave/AoE for a different raid fight, m+ dungeon, and more. Glacial Spike could use capstone talents since it’s been solidified as a core part of frost gameplay (looking at GS explosion tier set from S3/S4 DF).
Finally, frostbolt related talents are largely unwanted as gameplay loops around your filler spell are unsatisfying.
2. Mastery
Challenge:
Frost’s mastery has been through many changes over the last two expansions to make it both strong and feel intuitive to the style and gameplay of the spec. Prior to hero talents, this was largely successful simply adding in our core ST and AoE spells as beneficiaries to the stat line; however, the introduction of hero talents and many different spells that do not benefit from the stat (meteor, frostfire burst, excess fire and frost, etc) have significantly reduced the value of mastery.
Recommendation:
Shor term, being that hero talents are going to be evergreen going forward, we should simply add the new frostfire spells and procs to the list of spells that benefit from mastery.
Long term, frost’s mastery should be looked at in a way that allows for natural scalability and growth into future additions while feeling fun and interesting. At the present and in the short-term solution, mastery just becomes a differently worded Versatility stat. There are considerations to make here, but the old Frostburn mastery would largely fit well into frost’s kit both current state and all future states (may have to keep the lines of buffing our AoE spells to keep this relevant for those spells in this case).
3. Unintuitive Play
Challenge:
Since season 1 of dragonflight, frost has been somewhat plagued by odd and unintuitive playstyles emerging as a result of how fragile the spec’s design is around shatter. That season saw the emergence of frostbolt spam as the defacto way to do high end ST damage. And now in War Within with the introduction of the hero talents we saw a very unintuitive variant come out in S1 with spellslinger and weaving ice lances in between Winter’s Chill applications (needing WA support). With S2 seeing dramatic changes to excess fire and frost that have created more proc and buff tracking, not less. And leading to unintuitive situations where you may double cast flurry to avoid munching a proc/buff.
Recommendation:
This one is tougher and plays into the aforementioned problems with adding undesired playstyle support for frostbolt, and having talents that benefit it on the tree. I would suggest removing these from the tree, and the hero talents need more play testing and proactive feedback in PTR cycles before being deployed. The frostfire changes made in 11.1 either need to be rolled back or given another iteration.
4. Lack of Niche
Challenge:
One of the many aspects that make class and spec identity’s unique is having a niche in encounters. For example, destro warlocks have the niche of 2T damage across distances. Fire mages have spread cleave and execute while training one target, arcane has funnel and execute, others like Boomy and Spriest have amazing spread damage across multiple targets…etc.
Frost lacks this niche. It doesnt have execute like its sister specs, notable interactions like spread cleave or funnel…tt used to be 2T cleave, but other specs have power crept into this arena enough that it is no longer the frost specialty it used to be.
Recommendation:
Here I will lean on you guys the experts to think about this more. I would personally like to see frost re-establish its 2T cleave dominance, this could be done by making splitting ice 100% damage replication (so any shatters on main target get the effect on the other).
AoE burst has become sort of a halfway identity for frost with Coldest Snap, I think this could be leaned into more (probably just by adding meteor to mastery in Frostfire’s case). You could add an execute and make it a mage thing as a whole, or do the reverse of execute and add more damage when a boss is healthy.
Open to where this could go as like I said, frost doesnt and hasnt ever truly had a niche. This is a great opportunity to set a foundation for what that could be. It is worth noting that WoW has changed over time and there are certain arenas where it feels like a spec simply has to be good in that arena to be a competitive selection (ST damage namely, spread cleave is becoming this as well)
Conclusion
Frost is still benefiting from the great rework done in S2 of Dragonflight for its overall gameplay loop; however, the general design and talent tree have been left in the past. Additionally, the introduction of the hero talents have shown how fragile of a spec design frost is mostly tied to the mastery. Any interesting changes or shakeups create unintuitive gameplay loops. Finally, frost is lacking a dedicated niche where it can shine next to its sister specs.
in terms of ST and AOE!