Frost Mage Leveling Guide from 1 to 80 — The War Within (11.1.7)

Frost Mage, being able to kite almost everything, can effectively kite and kill large swaths of mobs at once. Even if you wish to take it slowly and target one mob at a time, the fact that we have passive slows on almost everything we have means that we will be nearly untouched in outdoor content.

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level.

It is possible to follow Blizzard's "Starter Build", as it seems to be a fairly decent talent tree with a healthy mix of open-world damage and some AoE. The order in which it presents talents to you can be questionable, however. This guide will follow a slightly different path, but feel free to experiment. You can change talents at any time outside of combat, as long as you are not trying to talent out of something that is currently on cooldown. You can always return to the guided Starter Build at any time by selecting it from your build dropdown menu on the talent UI.

Talents unlock at level 10, with you getting your first spec-specific point at level 11.

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1. Icy Veins
2. Flurry
3. Frozen Orb
4. Ice Lance when Fingers of Frost is active, or after a Flurry to consume Winter's Chill stacks
5. Frostbolt

1. Cry, and try to tab Frostbolts between everything you have pulled so you can try to maintain distance. Generally a bad idea to try and AoE before level 6.
2. Frozen Orb
3. Blizzard on cooldown to help reset Frozen Orb
4. Ice Nova
5. Shifting Power
6. Arcane Explosion

There are two schools of thought to playing Frost at a low level. The first is playing it safe, Frostbolt provides a heavy slow to any target you hit with it. You will rarely take damage, although you are limited to safely pulling one mob at a time. The second throws caution to the wind and spams Arcane Explosion, as it deals the same damage as a Frostbolt, but without the cast time and in AoE. The downside is you will take damage due to the close-range nature of this ability, but you will kill significantly quicker if you pull multiple at once. You will also have to regenerate Mana, as Arcane Explosion costs 10% of your total Mana per cast. This is more usable with heirlooms, as you have significantly more Intellect versus the gear you would have from standard levelling quests.

As indicated in the talents above, getting Flurry will be your primary goal starting out. It is an extremely potent spell that applies a debuff to the target that considers them "frozen." for the next two spell impacts. Most of the spec revolves around managing this frozen state. You will notice that Ice Lance triples damage against frozen targets, so casting two of them after a Flurry will buff them significantly. You will also quickly get Shatter, adding Critical Strike chance against frozen targets. This is the primary theory behind the spec and the reason Flurry is so important.

Now that you have the majority of your kit, the spec should start to make sense. Flurry's debuff behaves in some interesting ways. You can have a spell benefit from it if it was cast before the Flurry if the original cast has a cast time. These cast time spells that can benefit from Flurry are Frostbolt and Glacial Spike. It is also not consumed by certain late-game spells, usually to guarantee that they work with the debuff properly due to their nature. Spells that do not consume charges are all AoE spells, and Ray of Frost.

Frostbolt into Flurry into two Ice Lances is the bread and butter of this spec. If you have this, you have the entire spec down on single target.

There are now enough talent points to take a detour if you wish. Pulling points out of Wintertide and instead going down Ice Caller on the right side of Winter's Blessing is a valid option if you find yourself AoEing significantly more than this guide was anticipating. Frost's AoE revolves around Frozen Orb, and resetting Frozen Orb with Ice Caller.

If you start AoEing in this fashion, your defensive cooldowns will very likely come into play a lot more than they have been to this point. Ice Barrier is worth 24% of your max Health and also slows anything hitting you. This should be up when soloing almost all the time. Mirror Image can take some damage off of you for a short time and is also a damage reduction while they exist. Alter Time can act as a full heal if cast at full Health and recast before you die; abuse this thing to get functionally 2 Health bars.

It should also be noted that the class talents are also extremely flexible. The only actual DPS abilities in the first 20 points are Overflowing Energy, Incanter's Flow, and Shifting Power, which were among the first few you should have taken, and then the two stat boosts Tome of Rhonin and Tome of Antonidas. Everything else can be adjusted as you see fit or as your playstyle dictates. Maybe if you wish to have some more defensive power and fewer utility picks, go wild. The first 20 points, aside from those five talents mentioned, are all possible to play with.

This talent set has been picked to provide a bit more AoE ability through Freezing Rain, rather than maximum single target damage. Hailstones is deceptively strong, one of the strongest talents in the lower half of the tree, so try and avoid speccing out of it.

The remaining talents simply even out the last of the toolkit, with a focus on a more general cleave build rather than the pure single target build.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for levelling and doing solo / small group PvE content.

1. Frost Bomb is likely the best DPS talent of the War Mode talents. It can be Shattered.
2. Ice Form changes your Icy Veins into a 1-minute cooldown that only improves your Frostbolt damage.
3. Ring of Fire is not a bad pick but does cap out at your own Health's value against elite mobs, so this is not as useful as it may seem at first glance. Strong enough to be a solid pick, however.
4. Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damage by 10%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor.
5. Snowdrift gives you access to a stun that doubles as a freeze, so you could spam Ice Lance into the mobs.

The rest have limited use in PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open-world, but they can be situationally useful if you wish for defensive bonuses.