Mists of Pandaria Classic Frost Mage Stat Priority

The stat priority for Frost Mage is as follows:

1. Intellect
2. Hit Rating = Expertise Rating (15% Hit Cap!)
3. Haste Rating
4. Mastery Rating
5. Critical Strike Rating

Intellect is your best stat by far, you can never have enough of it, the more the better. It provides Spell Power, Crit and a Mana pool increase.

Hit is our second best stat until you reach the cap of 15% Hit (5,100 Hit rating for non-Draenei, for Draenei 4,760). Once you reach 15% hit chance, any further Hit Rating becomes redundant. You can gain Hit rating from enchants, gear, reforging and gems. Expertise also gives Hit in Mists of Pandaria.

Haste Rating affects the casting speed of your spells. By increasing your Haste, you reduce the time spent channeling Evocation, allowing you to gain more uptime on the 15 percent damage bonus provided by Invocation. Haste also boosts the damage output of your Water Elemental. Additionally, it increases the frequency of Brain Freeze activations by accelerating the tick rate of damage-over-time spells like Living Bomb and Nether Tempest. It also shortens both the cast time and cooldown of Frost Bomb. For single-target damage, the ideal stat balance prioritizes Haste Rating up to 50 percent Haste when fully raid-buffed. For non-Goblin races, this requires approximately 14,242 Haste Rating.

Mastery Rating boosts the damage dealt by your Water Elemental, as well as the damage of your Frostbolt and Frostfire Bolt spells. This is achieved through Icicles, which store a portion of the damage and release it when you cast Ice Lance.

Critical Strike Rating increases your chance to land critical hits. Keep in mind that Ice Lance (used with Fingers of Frost) and Frostfire Bolt (used with Brain Freeze) benefit from the Shatter passive ability, unique to the Frost specialisation, which significantly boosts their critical strike chance. However, since raid bosses are three levels higher than your character, a mechanic known as Critical Strike Depression reduces your chance to critically hit them by 3 percent before Shatter is applied. As a result, you need at least 28 percent Critical Strike chance for Shatter to reliably produce guaranteed critical hits.