Frost Mage DPS Guide — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Pre-patch is here, and Frost has been revamped from the ground up. Throw out anything you know about the spec, this is the single largest change this spec has seen in the history of the game.

The primary component is Shatter being changed from a Crit bonus to a stacking debuff on the enemy, consumed by Ice Lance. Functionally the same idea, where Shatter is a buff to your spells, but split out into its own damage segment. Because of this, the freezing state no longer matters to our DPS.

Spellslinger has had Splinters reduced to impact damage only, with the old Storm mechanic changed into a random proc, since they are no longer a stacking debuff on target. Changes to the passive buffs of the tree have integrated it with the Shatter mechanic. Spellfrost Teachings remains nerfed, and with the loss of the Season 3 tier bonus, Frozen Orb refreshes have become significantly more rare.

Frostfire loses the Excess Fire and Excess Frost buffs in exchange for focusing more on core spell buffs. Notably Flurry becomes Frostfire with a new animation, Glacial Spike explodes on impact, and the current tier bonuses become new Hero Talents.

The general idea of the new spec is to build Shatter on the target using Frostbolt and Flurry, and consume them with Ice Lance. This is complicated by random procs adding more stacks, and wanting to keep the stacks below a certain threshold. In theory.

While Spellslinger seems to stick to the intended playstyle, Frostfire has devolved, yet again, into a no- Ice Lance setup neutering any real interesting parts of the rotation. This can be fixed with simple tuning, and likely will shortly after launch.

Glacial Spike and Comet Storm have been removed as stand-alone spells, and instead transform your Frostbolt and Ray of Frost respectively, when they are available.

Icy Veins has been removed, and our main cooldown is now Ray of Frost.

With the loss of Ice Floes, and Ray of Frost going on cooldown at the beginning of the cast, this is an extremely fragile cast. Any form of knockback, interrupt, or even dropping fire under your feet will mean the loss of your only cooldown. While Shimmer still exists, its cooldown has been increased and will only deal with one of those situations. Thus Ray of Frost is going to require you pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of every mob you are in combat with, lest you lose the cast.

The cooldown reduction on Frozen Orb, from Blizzard, has sadly been removed. This does mean that we can no longer rely on instant cast Blizzards at all times during AoE, and will instead have to hard cast it. It also means that Frozen Orb is not something that will be available on every pull.

Comet Storm is now also double the cooldown, as it is now linked to casting Ray of Frost.

Coldest Snap has been removed as well, removing our AoE burst potential. In its stead, Cone of Frost, but as of current tuning and inability to take advantage of multi-target Freezing stacks, it is unlikely that it will be selected in any situation.

Instead, Frostbite adds an AoE component to Shatter, and Winter's End deals that same damage when a mob with Shatter stacks dies early. This means that our AoE is functionally our single target rotation, with an added Blizzard cast on cooldown. Comet Storm now Shatters stacks per comet impact, leading at least Frostfire to try and stack as much passive AoE Freezing stacks as possible between Comet Storms. Spellslinger has hooks attached to Ice Lance and will try and Shatter as much as possible in between them, however.

The removals and tweaks to existing spells are behind the click-through:

Temporal Realignment has been added, which will whenever Alter Time is not on cooldown when you hit 24% health, instantly heal you for 50% of your max health. This is extremely strong, but does take away actually using Alter Time. For the average player, this is the better option, as it will always get better than average use out of Alter Time.

Glacial Bulwark is a choice node against Cold Snap. Giving us a second charge of our only real active defensive spells is very powerful. While Cold Snap will have niche uses, as the cooldown is ticking concurrently to our other spells, there is a psychological aspect of not wanting to "waste" Cold Snap on just Ice Barrier. Glacial Bulwark instead sidesteps that, in exchange for sequential cooldown timers. This is likely the go-to for everyone.

We lost a good deal of utility and movement. The highlights are as such:

Hopefully this summary gives you the general idea of what has changed. Midnight will launch on March 2nd, or February 27th with Early Access. Should you want to optimize levelling, the following pages will have a few items to stock up on or pick up prior to that may assist if you are not already max item level for The War Within.