Frost Mage Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Shadowlands 9.0.2
Legendary Powers are targetable, unique effects that you can imbue certain base items with through the Runecarving system. In Shadowlands, these enable you to customize your Frost Mage, drastically improving your performance, and are arguably the most important aspect of your gear.
The purpose of this page is to help you pick the right legendary powers (and item slots for them) for your character, depending on the content you are interested in.
Introduction: Legendaries in Shadowlands
By doing Torghast, you will obtain Soul Ash, which can
be combined with crafted base items and Runecarving to produce a
legendary item of your choosing. Due to the time-gated nature of Soul Ash, and
the limit of one equipped legendary, you should know which to craft for your
chosen content. For more information about the systems involved, please refer
to the Runecarving and Legendary Powers pages:
Best Legendaries for Frost Mage
Focus | Legendary | Slots | Source |
---|---|---|---|
Single Target | ![]() |
Waist or Legs | Torghast, Mort'regar, layer 3 or higher |
Multi-target | ![]() |
Legs or Back | Torghast, Coldheart Interstitia, layer 3 or higher. |
Solo | ![]() |
Shoulder or Head | Honor PvP Vendor |
The reason this table is split like this, and not by Raiding
and Mythic+, is that Glacial Fragments is so ridiculously
good on any form of multi-target, while basically being as though you are not
even wearing a legendary while on single target. Likewise,
Slick Ice
is entirely useless on multi-target. Your decisions will be related to what type
of content you are doing, and in the case of M+, what type of damage your group
needs more of.
Best Single Target Legendaries for Frost Mage
Slick Ice is the best raw single target legendary. Contrary to the
tooltip, this increases
Frostbolt's damage by 3% per stack, and has a
hidden effect of reducing Frostbolt's global cooldown by the same amount of
cast speed increase. This allows for it to not hit the GCD hard cap while
under other effects, such as
Time Warp.
While Slick Ice is the best in pure single target, very few fights
are purely single target. It may be advisable to instead craft
Freezing Winds, which is a fair drop on single target, for a sizable
2-target gain.
Temporal Warp is another option, although it skews more
towards single target performance than cleave.
Best Multi-Target Legendaries for Frost Mage
Glacial Fragments is the best on any form of multi-target, at the
cost of being functionally useless on single target. This AoE burst cannot
Shatter, and
Splitting Ice will trigger it off both targets.
Like single target, Freezing Winds is not a terrible option for
multi-target. However,
Glacial Fragments will pull drastically ahead as
you add targets, up to 5. Your decision between them all is a matter of
trade-offs, and personal decisions as to what sort of content you wish to be
proficient at quickest.
Best Torghast Legendaries for Frost Mage
Any of the above will be suitable for Torghast if you are only
able to craft one legendary. However, Grisly Icicle is very likely
one of the best due to the fact that it grants you unbreakable
Frost Nova for 10 full seconds of
Shatter on entire packs of
mobs. This can be broken by party members, so is best used while solo only. It
can mean that with
Ice Ward or
Tundrid Phial, you can hold
down an absurd amount of mobs for an extremely long time, or even indefinitely
should you have enough stacks of Tundrid Phial, however.
What Slot Should Legendaries by Crafted For?
Each equipment slot has a stat budget, relative to its item level. Chest pieces have full budget, whereas Wrist pieces have 56% of the stats, at equal item level. This means you should craft legendary items in this order, from best to worst:
- Helm, Chest, Legs
- Gloves, Belt, Boots, Shoulders
- Cloak, Bracers
- Neck, Rings
Those who are raiding Castle Nathria should know that the final two bosses drop higher item level pieces of gear. Optimizing item level gains will mean you will want to avoid crafting pieces in those slots. These slots for Mages are:
- Back
- Chest
- Shoulder
Changelog
- 03 Dec. 2020: Grisly Ice has been hotfixed to break on other people's damage.
- 21 Nov. 2020: Page added.
More Mage Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Kuni, one of the best Frost Mages in the world, who raids in Mortal Desire.
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