Frost Mage Dragonflight Leveling Guide From 1 to 70 (Dragonflight 10.0.7)
On this page, you will find our Level by Level Frost Mage leveling guide for Dragonflight Make sure to use the slider to make the guide adapt to your level. For more general leveling information, please refer to our Mage leveling guide.
Gear Options
When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level.
Level by Level Rotation and Talents
Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!
Talents to Level Up with as a Frost Mage
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 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.
Rotation to Level Up as a Frost Mage
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 pulling one mob at a time safely. 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,
Ebonbolt, 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 and
Snowstorm on the right side of
Cold Snap is a valid option if you find yourself AoEing significantly
more than this guide was anticipating. Frost's AoE revolves around
Frozen Orb, resetting Frozen Orb with Ice Caller, and large
Snowstorm-buffed
Cone of Colds that you
Shatter on an entire
group by gathering a group and
Frost Novaing them in place before
casting Cone of Cold.
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 22% 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/
Rune of Power,
which were the first two 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 four 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 entirely.
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.
Frost Mage War Mode Talents for Levelling
In this section we will rank the PvP talents best for levelling and doing solo / small group PvE content.
Frost Bomb is likely the best DPS talent of the War Mode talents. It is slightly buggy and does not interact fully with certain pieces of our kit, but it can be
Shattered.
Ice Form changes your
Icy Veins into a 1-minute cooldown that only improves your
Frostbolt damage. If specced into
Rune of Power, this will significantly increase Rune of Power's uptime.
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.
Concentrated Coolness increases
Frozen Orb's damage by 10%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor. This is bugged when talented into
Everlasting Frost, becoming a DPS loss.
Chilled to the Bone,
Precognition,
Netherwind Armor and
Prismatic Cloak 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.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on reaching Level 70! Now that you have hit Level 70 we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
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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