The War Within: Frost Mage Feedback Thread

Classes Mage
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Hello all! This thread is created to provide feedback about changes to Frost Mages in TWW alpha and suggest other changes and improvements (including from people that don’t have access to alpha forums). While similar thread was already created, it is a bit outdated, however link to it would still be in this thread, so that feedback posted there would not be lost too.

I’ll split this post into PVE and PVP subsections for better readability. Here is also a link to lately updated in alpha Frost tree for people who did not see it yet - https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-calc/mage/frost/frostfire

PVE feedback and suggestions
  • Reducing Hailstones (and potentially Splintering Cold) to 1 point is a good change that gives Frost Mages access to more choices and makes tree paths more balanced in their cost. It still could be a bit improved.
    Suggestion: Reduce Deep Shatter to 1 point investment too (with full current effect). This would allow to make tree paths more similar in point cost and allow to make Deep Shatter more competitive without increasing its total power level.
  • New Fractured Frost is decent, but it still has countersynergies like lacking means for shattering cleaved Frostbolts (especially against CC immune targets that cannot be frozen) and potentially pushing Flurry out of rotation (since Flurry hits only 1 target). Both issues could be addressed simultaneously.
    Suggestion: Make Fractured Frost and Death’s Chill also affect Flurry. This would provide means for AoE shatter for cleaved Frostbolts even against CC immune targets, keep Flurry relevant and provide a bit better synergy with Cold Front that follows this node.
  • There is also other issue related to Deathborne playstyle - it does not have much use for Fingers of Frost procs, since Ice Lance is not optimal to use during its window. There are several possible solutions.
    Option 1 - In addition to current effect, Fractured Frost could have an additional effect that makes Frostbolt able to consume Fingers of Frost while Icy Veins are active and deal X% increased damage. This option allows playstyle to get value from FoF procs and keep synergies with Cold Front and Slick Ice.
    Option 2 - In addition to current effect, Fractured Frost could have an additional effect that makes Ice Lance hit 1 additional target for X% damage while Icy Veins are active, turning it into 3 target cleave with Splitting Ice during Icy Veins. This option allows to still use Ice Lances in general during Deathborne playstyle, but reduces synergies with Cold Front and Slick Ice.
  • Snowstorm is still undertuned and underused, has countersynergy with Coldest Snap and could use boosts / changes to make it more competitive and synergistic.
    Suggestion: Increase its proc chance to make it more reliable (for example to 50%), if needed also reduce number of stacks and buff their value (to reduce ramp-up time). To provide synergy with Coldest Snap, Snowstorm could just provide a large damage increase and maybe even range increase to Cone of Cold if Coldest Snap is taken without requiring any stacks, so that Coldest Snap Cone of Cold can be used when you need the CD reset without necessity to wait for stacks, but still with a benefit from Snowstorm. That would make both Snowstorm on its own and its combo with Coldest Snap more competitive.
  • Frozen Orb still has unaddressed placement issues in PVE, where Frost Mages need to stay in pretty much melee range to land it where it is needed. It was called a “skill expression” in earlier interview, but what that actually is just requiring a ranged spec to stay in melee range for AoE, which is counterintuitive. At the same time, Frost Mage lacks both choice nodes in its talent tree and ways to customize its AoE rotation in a manner similar to reworked Fire. All of these issues could be addressed simultaneously.
    Suggestion: Create a new capstone talent to the left of Coldest Snap that is accessible from Freezing Winds that would allow Frost Mages to customize movement / placement of Frozen Orb. For example, it could have 2 such choices:
    Concentrated Coolness - Frozen Orb does X% increased damage and is castable at a target location within 40 yards, but no longer moves (pretty much like PVP talent).
    Drifting Coolness - Frozen Orb now rapidly moves to a selected by player spot and starts its slowed movement forward from it. Additionally, when Frozen Orb expires it explodes, dealing X% of Spell Power Frost damage to enemies in its area.
    Such choice node would allow Frost Mages to pick between immobile, but placeable Frozen Orb and moving, but in a more controlled manner than current option. If some people would not want to change existing movement pattern of it, they can just skip this capstone talent and take other AoE boosting talent instead, so that all 3 forms of Frozen Orb’s movement / placement would be accessible for people that would prefer them and both in PVE and PVP.
  • Even with suggested changes to Frozen Orb, Frost would still lack ways to customize its AoE rotation and have an unaddressed issue of limited scaling after 2 targets, as Ice Lances can’t hit more and deal same damage no matter the target count. That could be addressed.
    Suggestion: Make Splitting Ice a choice node with Glacial Fragments, which would make Icicles, Glacial Spike and Ice Lance explode for X% of their damage to enemies nearby if target is standing in a Blizzard. It is a decent compromise - it would allow Frost to pick between 2 and 3+ target cleave options, would not require to balance having them both simultaneously and chain reaction situations caused by that and also provide more choices in the tree.
  • Frost Mages still have issue of having output difference between enemies that can and cannot be frozen, which can make them too strong against enemies that can be frozen, too weak against CC immune enemies or even both simultaneously. There is a solution for that.
    Suggestion: Make Subzero in addition to its current effect cause Ice Nova and Glacial Spike to apply X / Y seconds of Winter’s Chill (1 stack) to enemies that are immune to CC effects. That would both address mentioned issue without making Frost Mages stronger against freezable targets (since they would just get frozen instead like currently) and make Subzero useful against CC immune targets (against whom it currently provides no value). This suggestion intentionally excludes Water Elemental’s Freeze, Frost Nova, Frostbite and Cold of Cone roots, so that they would remain as CC options and are not required for damage rotations.
  • Glacial Spike is decent, but not all people like to play with it. As such, it could use an alternative for people who want to play without it and not suffer a massive dps loss because of that.
    Suggestion: Make Glacial Spike a choice node with talent that would simply increase damage of both Frost(fire) Bolt and Ice Lance by X%. This option could provide close level of dps increase to using Glacial Spike, but slightly lower, so that playing an active ability over passive increase is justified, but playing the passive option is competitive too (like was written in TWW Mage goals post).
  • Splintering Ray is not competitive enough and cold use a damage and / or target count boost.
PVP feedback and suggestions
  • With the addition of Gravity Lapse for Sunfury, it is definitely time to return Deep Freeze for Frost Mages, otherwise the spec would be much inferior to 2 other Mage specs in PVP. While Snowdrift it something, requiring to get and stay in melee range for a ranged spec and a trigger delay make it not reliable enough, so it is not a viable enough replacement. Since Gravity Lapse is usable in PVE, Deep Freeze might be accessible there too.
    Suggestion: Return Deep Freeze and make it a choice node with Frostbite or a choice node / shared cooldown with Snowdrift in Frost talent tree. That could be a decent compromise - Frost would get a more reliable stun, but would still have to sacrifice 1 other CC option to take it in a similar manner to how Sunfury sacrifices Blast Wave to get Gravity Lapse.
  • Frost Mages still have plenty of PVP nerf modifiers that could be looked at in The War Within. Please take a look at PVP modifiers of Piercing Cold (50% PVP reduction that might no longer be justified, especially for Frostbolt), Winter’s Blessing (50% PVP nerf that might no longer be justified, since TWW Season 1 will have much less secondary stats than currently), Glacial Assault (50% nerf for a 6% damage boost with limited uptime might be not needed), Frigid Empowerment (33% nerfed in PVP, while its value is not large to begin with), Freezing Winds (67% period increase in PVP might be too large, every 4 seconds is more reasonable and does not reduce Frozen Orb’s synergy with upgrade talents like Everlasting Frost) and Glacial Spike (11% nerfed in PVP and its Icicles nerfed by 40% - might no longer need such big reduction in TWW with its massive health pools).
  • Frost Mages have several PVP talents that are too niche / underutilized and could be looked at:
    Ice Form - while it could have synergy with new Deathborne builds, it is still too niche and being dispellable makes it very easy to negate.
    Suggestion: Make it increase all Frost damage (if needed, with lower value) and not dispellable, but remove stun immunity to compensate. That would make it more generally useful and reliable and a decent 1 min CD window alternative to 2 min CD Icy Veins.
    Icy Feet - very niche and is easy to negate, since even if Mage would get the snare immunity, he / she still can be rooted or crowd controlled. Making it provide immunity to more crowd control effects could be risky to balance, so maybe it just needs a redesign.
    Suggestion: Revert it to a talent that makes freeze effects deal damage when broken / expired with increased damage when dispelled, but significally increase backlash damage and make it affect all freeze effects. This would turn it into a good dispel protection tool and a way to get some value from freeze effects even if enemy immediately removed them.

Link to old thread for additional / previous feedback - Frost Mage In War Within: Suggestions Thread

Add your own feedback about Frost Mage in The War Within if you want and thank you for reading!

2 Likes
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Am i reading correctly that the talents being added/changed are being tied to iv? Do we really want this class to feel absolutely awful whenever our dps cd is on cooldown? I don’t think iv uptime is 50% so even with the talent reduction on fractured frost it looks like a solid nerf with it being tied to iv.

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I’ll repost what I said in the previous thread in hopes of increasing the visibility.

I have concerns about the base viability of Frost Mage in The War Within in both Mythic+ and PvP content. I don’t have the Alpha so I’ll voice my concerns here.

In Dragonflight, the utility between each Mage spec is roughly equivalent. The largest gap in utility is Arcane lacking one additional major defensive CD compared to Fire (Cauterize) and Frost (Cold Snap), and Frost having random roots with the Frostbite talent. This generally means that whichever spec deals the most damage in a certain type of content is the preferred spec for that content.

In The War Within, the Sunfury hero talent tree includes the Gravity Lapse spell, an instant, 3-second duration, AoE stun. To my understanding, this ability does replace Blast Wave, meaning that the amount of utility remains the same. However, it’s well-accepted that a stun ability is significantly stronger than a knockback ability. Frost will continue to have no access to a stun outside of PvP content, where Snowdrift is still rarely taken due to its extreme unreliability.

This change in the parity of utility between the Mage specs may cause Frost to lose favor, particularly compared to Fire, unless Frost is the highest damage-dealing spec at any given time. This leaves Frost’s viability over the other specs more up to its current damage tuning rather than its design.

In order to keep the utility parity similar, I suggest giving Frost access to an on-demand stun. There are many ways to go about this, but in the interest of having as little impact as possible, I recommend the following:

Replace the Frostbite talent node in the Frost tree with a new choice talent node:
– Frostbite
– Deep Freeze
The properties of Deep Freeze are as follows:
– Instant
– Stuns one target
– 3-4 second duration
– 45 second cooldown
– Triggers the GCD
– Does not break on damage

This should keep the utility between each spec fairly even, by giving Frost access to a single-target stun in replacement for the utility of Frostbite, but not giving Frost too much power due to having both a stun and knockback effect (Blast Wave) at the same time.

1 Like
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Yeah, I’m concerned about this as well. Frost feels best when it’s more focused on sustained damage. Introducing another talent to buff Icy Veins further, in addition to changing Fractured Frost to work specifically during Icy Veins, makes me think too much power is being put into it. This is one of the issues the Dragonflight rework was trying to avoid.

Realistically, though, as long as other builds are also just as viable, then it should be fine.

4 Likes
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I suppose their decision has both pros and cons - pros of giving access to reliable 3 target cleave uptime (as they definitely would not allow it to have 100% reliable uptime - constant effect would have been either proc chance based like before or stacking based) and cons of it being tied to a major CD. That still allowed them to prevent a lot of button / talent bloat, since they managed to avoid adding one more button (Deathborne like CD) and excess talents of separately extending it like the old conduit provided - they did not need to, since IV already has them.

So I agree - as long as the build is competitive and most of its issues are addressed ( like limited amount of shatters for cleaved Frostbolts, especially against CC immune targets and that could be addressed by making Flurry cleave too / currently no usage for Fingers of Frost procs in it etc) - it should be fine.

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And they should add a small area of the talent tree= that supports and bring back the perma water-elemental.
So even pet-lovers would have an option to play with it but nobody HAS to :slight_smile: <3

Furthermore:

Fractured Frost should be always active even outside of IV and FB/FFB should hit 5-8 targets.
So that it would become a viable new aoe-gameplay option.
You would use orb, blizz, some lances and than MASSIVE spam FBs/FFBs to create a new way of AOE which is less hectic but still enjoyable.

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In the df beta feedback I was not the only mage who called out the imbalance between welly and Lw, specifically calling out that lw had some aoe scaling while the others didn’t and i believe I mentioned the dps difference as well on single target. What our dev told Ion and did instead should tell you everything in that context. If you’re interested in playing something based in lore, try playing something else. If you enjoy mage, keep running with it. At the end of the day our dev does what they want. Alot of people were disastisfied with spellslinger (not just the pet crowd), but it’s largely unchanged. I fully support what you’re asking for, you’re probably just wasting your breath until our current dev(s) quit or take over other classes.

1 Like
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Dude, we are getting like 3 changes. Sad to see but I don’t think Frost will be shown any love.

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Let us hope there’s more stuff coming during the Beta at least if that’s where they’re gonna stop in the Alpha. There are plenty of talents that need attention like:

  • Lonely Winter doesn’t make sense in a world without the pet anymore
  • Wintertide didn’t really fix the proc munching problem and it costs 2 points
  • Snowstorm was a cool idea with bad implementation and now is practically useless with Coldest Snap in play and it also costs 2 points
  • I doubt Deep Shatter would be worth it even in a world where the Frostbolt cleave talents are the play
  • Subzero was too polarizing before when fighting freezable mobs and was nerfed because of it, which now makes it almost useless
  • Bonechilling is super boring. It’s just 5% more damage even if the text tries embellishing it a lot

Outside of that, I’m very conflicted with the return of Deathborne playstyle. I might be wrong since I haven’t done any math but I don’t think we have a competitive build without Glacial Spike and I don’t believe it works that well with Frostbolt spam. Our current AoE rotation is sufficient and I would only really miss the Glacial Spike cleave from the tier set.

Not to mention we now have access to a lot more Ice Lance and Flurry generation, meaning less globals spent casting Frostbolt unless we’re supposed to ignore procs again. It definitely look cool to be launching 3 Frostfire Bolts at the same time but I don’t think this play style really works anymore, also including Cold Front.

1 Like
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It is nice that they are trying to add a Deathborne like Frost(fire) Bolt oriented build for Frost, but implemented changes are not enough, more are needed:

  • Deathborne playstyle should be compatible with Fingers of Frost (which it would generate a lot from Frost(fire) Bolt and potentially Cold Front Frozen Orbs) and have means of shatter for cleaved Frost(fire) Bolts against CC immune targets.
    Solutions:
  1. Fractured Frost could allow Frost(fire) Bolt to consume Fingers of Frost procs during Icy Veins only (to prevent emergence of no-Ice Lance builds) and get shattered and / or bonus damage to get value from FoF without conflicting with Fractured Frost / Slick Ice / Death Chill like Ice Lance would do.
  2. Fractured Frost and maybe Death Chill could include Flurry, so that it would provide shatter for cleaved Frost(fire) Bolts even against CC immune targets and be beneficial to use during “Deathborne phase”.
  • Even with these changes, Frostbolt build would still not be competitive enough with Glacial Spike build outside of Icy Veins, so could use additional boosts.
    Solutions:
  1. Reduce Deep Shatter to 1 point investment with full current value to give it more points to spare.
  2. Make Glacial Spike a choice node with passive talent that would boost damage of Frost(fire) Bolt and Ice Lance by X% to bring Glacial Spike and non-Glacial Spike builds more in line.

As a result and with some proper tuning, we could get 2 builds with different pros and cons:

  • Frost(fire) Bolt build with ramp-up burst and cleave phase during Icy Veins and downtime outside of it - better for cases like bosses with vulnerability phases or with necessity to quickly kill additional enemies.
  • Sustained damage Glacial Spike build with more smooth dps profile and access to cleave even outside of Icy Veins, but less powerful during them - more fitting for fights where adds spawn periodically or in spread periods or with immunity phases that could affect Icy Veins burst windows.
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I really wish they’d remove or rework Death’s Chill. Frost being a ramp spec doesn’t appeal to me at all, especially how it depends on Frostbolt casts.

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That sounds not bad but i have to agree with @Ravenfell.

The Deathborn playstyle is not rly fun in my opinion. It was not in Shadowlands and will be not in TWW.
A choice node to boost FB and Icelance dmg @ glacial note would be good, yes.

Lets hope they invest MORE time into frost.

1 Like
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Feedback about latest changes from Frost Mage POV:

  • Choice node between Ice Nova and Ring of Frost is very bad. It does not affect Fire and Arcane much, since they can easily skip either of those, but both abilities are crucial for Frost. Ice Nova is used for AoE shatters of spells like Comet Storm and picking up pretty much a rotational tool should not force you out of a main utility spell and vice versa.
    Suggestion: Split Ice Nova from Ring of Frost and either make Ring of Frost replace one of Frost Nova talents below current node or a choice node with Mass Polymorph, which is pretty much its analogue from different school and with different pros and cons. Mass Polymorph should also get 45 seconds base CD and 30 yds range too as it is already underplayed and too niche (both currently and in TWW).
  • Buff to Ice Barrier is nice. Could it also get a new animation, since it uses a very outdated model?

Possible improvements:

  • It very likely seems that new design intention for spec trees is making all nodes 1 point investment - first Windwalker Monk, then Demonology Warlock and now also Destruction Warlock follow this trend. If so, Frost Mage could follow the trend too. It both has several nodes that are too expensive for their effect and several design issues that could be addressed with adding new talents that would also compensate for making several old talents cheaper. Here is an example:
  • Reduce Deep Shatter, Splintering Cold, Wintertide, Subzero and Snowstorm to 1 point investment with full current effect. All of them provide too low value for 2 point investment and gatekeep useful talents with too high investment cost.
  • These 5 talent points gained in the tree could provide choice between talents like:
  1. Frozen Orb customization choice node like was suggested in initial post - something like a choice node between Concentrated Coolness and Ravager like effect or just possibilty to pick the slowed movement starting point for Frozen Orb manually. If Shadow Priests now can get a choice node between target centered Shadow Crash and manually targeted Shadow Crash, Frost could get similar treatment.
  2. Possibility to adjust AoE profile like redesigned Fire spec can. That could be provided by talents like Glacial Fragments from Shadowlands.
  3. More support for Frostbolt / Deathborne playstyles to make them competitive enough. They could get talents that allow Frostbolt to consume Fingers of Frost during Deathborne phase, access to Flurry cleave that would allow to get shatters for cleaved Frostbolts, a choice node that buffs Frostbolt / Ice Lance as a choice with Glacial Spike and other new talents.
  4. A choice node between Snowdrift and Deep Freeze. Since both Arcane and Fire would have access to instant AoE ranged stun in TWW that is also usable in PVE, there is no particular reason to gatekeep Frost’s stun in PVP only. Even then Snowdrift is too niche and unreliable, so making it a choice node with ranged and more reliable, but single-target stun could be decent. If needed for balance, this choice node could replace Frostbite or be a choice node with Frostbite (then Deep Freeze should be preferred as the second option).
  5. A talent that would replace all Frost’s snares with small damage reduction effect instead. That could have been a niche talent to use in cases where uncontrolled snares (which Frost has plenty of) are harmful like Sanguine affix in Mythic+.
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Change that made Time Anomaly provide Brain Freeze instead of Fingers of Frost was a good change, but now there could be other problem - random procs of Brain Freeze from Time Anomaly can overlap with random procs from Frostbolt and triggered procs from Water Jet or Excess Fire, making the damage increase effect wasted. To address that, consider allowing Brain Freeze to stack up to 2 times (just like Flurry itself has 2 charges), so that you won’t lose your Brain Freeze stack / Time Anomaly effect if they accidentally overlap.

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If you take the talent that grants you two flurry charges, you won’t munch that bad if you keep both consumed. You will lose some brain freeze damage on your 2nd flurry itself but you’ll be able to immediately follow with 2 shattered ice lances (as long as flurry still grants winter’s chill).