Frost Mage Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Dragonflight 10.2.5
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:
Unity
Unity is unlocked during the 9.2 storyline. This grants you access to your Covenant's legendary power, and is equippable with a normal legendary. Wearing a piece with Unity on it will grant you Sinful Delight, Heart of the Fae, Harmonic Echo, or Death's Fathom depending on what Covenant you currently belong to, and will update as you swap between them. A piece with Unity on it should be equipped at all times.
To wear two legendaries, you must specifically wear Unity, and not the Covenant power legendary.
Best Legendaries for Frost Mage
Focus | Legendary | Slots | Source |
---|---|---|---|
Single Target | Slick Ice | Waist or Legs | Torghast, Mort'regar, layer 3 or higher |
Multi-target | Glacial Fragments | Legs or Back | Torghast, Coldheart Interstitia, layer 3 or higher. |
Mythic+ as Necrolord | Cold Front | Chest or Cloak | Nalthor the Rimebinder |
Cleave, Burst, or Funnel Damage | Freezing Winds | Head or Hands | Sire Denathrius |
Solo | Grisly Icicle | Shoulder, Head, or Neck | 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, and what Covenant you are.
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. 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.
For Necrolord specifically, Cold Front pulls ahead in Mythic+ due to the fact that Deathborne allows your Frostbolt to cleave 3 targets, and apply 3 stacks of Cold Front. This will get you a Frozen Orb every ten Frostbolts into an AoE pack, which is a sizable AoE increase while Deathborne is active.
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?
- Head, chest, legs are the highest stat budget slots.
- Shoulders, feet, hands, and waist are also identical, although lower budget items.
- Cloak and wrists should never be made.
- Jewelry has a unique stat budget, as it has no primary stat and is hard to slot into this chart.
Season 4 has the interesting property that your legendary pieces will actually be your lowest item level pieces, so you should craft them on the lowest item budget slots possible, preferably one with a socket. However, given that Season 4 is not a serious progression season, it is likely fine that you keep your Season 3 slots, and not worry about the cost of rebuying your legendaries.
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
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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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