Frost Mage DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

At its most basic, the premise of Frost Mage is to spam Frostbolt to stack Freezing or until you gain a proc. Fingers of Frost allows you to cast Ice Lance and gain the benefits of a full stack of Freezing. Brain Freeze resets the cooldown of Flurry.

Adding talents to the mix, Comet Storm adds a second use after each Ray of Frost that consumes Freezing stacks on any targets hit in addition to hitting hard itself. Cone of Frost changes your Cone of Cold (or Ice Nova if talented for it instead) add multiple stacks of Freezing in an AoE. Thermal Void changes how you play around with Ice Lance slightly.

Frostfire changes this slightly, in that it does not currently care about Ice Lance on single target. Given this is contrary to the design of the spec, I would heavily expect this to change as the spec is tuned going forwards. For now, most mentions of Ice Lance or Fingers of Frost can be ignored if you have decided to play Frostfire.

The functional endpoint is you play around whatever your potential maximum Freezing stack consumption can be. If you are playing Spellslinger with Thermal Void, for example, you would then play around 12 stacks of Freezing on the target, only ever casting Ice Lance without Fingers of Frost at or above 12 stacks.

Use Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze as they come.

Fingers of Frost makes your Ice Lance deal damage as if it consumed the maximum amount of Freezing off any given target, including a target with none on it at all.

Brain Freeze can, if talented into Thermal Void, double the amount of your next Ice Lance's (within 8 seconds) Freezing stack consumption. This does work with Fingers of Frost as well, allowing you to Shatter up to 12 stacks worth of damage without consuming any Freezing.

Ultimately, Frost Mage is primarily about abusing your casts in a way that is suitable to the situation. There are an enormous amount of possibilities, synergies, and overlaps that will provide an advantageous result. It is important, therefore, that you, as a player, think carefully about how you can use your spells in a way that makes sense. Try to avoid using your major abilities haphazardly or without thinking, as this will invariably result in you losing a lot of damage. When your Frozen Orb is about to come off cooldown, for example, start thinking about the ways you are going to cleave with it or if the boss is going to be moved. Check your boss's timers to see how you can line it up for a phase with increased damage dealt or AoE. A lot of this might seem like common sense, but you would be surprised how uncommon that is!

Freezing is a debuff stacked on the target by most of your spells. This can be triggered by Ice Lance, Comet Storm, and Glacial Spike when talented into Glacial Shatter. This will trigger Shatter, dealing damage to the target and a lesser amount to targets nearby based on how many stacks were consumed by the spell. Additionally, this AoE component will fire if the target dies, via Winter's End, dealing the same damage in AoE that it would have normally triggered for that many stacks.

While the general idea is that we interact with this mechanic as our primary gameplay loop, Frostfire ignores it, and both Hero Talents will routinely over-cap the stack cap of 20. This is, sadly, unavoidable.

Ray of Frost is our "main" cooldown, available every minute. It causes you to channel for 4 seconds, dealing significant damage to the target, and stacking Freezing every tick.

It has two improvement talents directly under it in the talent tree, Frigid Focus and Splintering Ray. Frigid Focus is self explanitory, but Splintering Ray will pick the nearest 5 targets to your Ray target, and deal a portion of the damage each tick to those.

While talented into Comet Storm, the button transforms into Comet Storm after a cast.

Frozen Orb is our secondary cooldown. This deals AoE damage every half second for 15 seconds.

On cast, it will fly outwards rapidly until it hits a target, at which point it will slow drastically. After 3 seconds, it will start to slowly track the mob you originally had targetted when you cast it.