Frost Mage Leveling Guide from 1 to 80 — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0.1)

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. Ray of Frost
2. Flurry
3. Frozen Orb
4. Ice Lance when there are at least 4 Freezing stacks on the target
5. Ice Lance when there are at least 4 Freezing stacks on the target or you have Fingers of Frost
6. 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
4. 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 your main spells will be your primary goal starting out.

Now that you have the majority of your kit, the spec should start to make sense. Consume Freezing with Ice Lance, and utilize your procs as you get them.

From here on out, the talents functionally just improve what you already are doing. If you see something interesting along the way, feel free to detour and grab it! Experiment! This is the best time to tinker and have fun.

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, 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 three talents mentioned, are all possible to play with.

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.
2. Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damage by 10%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor. You lose the ability for it to track your target, but the DPS gain is a worthwhile trade.
3. Snowdrift gives you access to an AoE stun that deals minor damage.

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.