Frost Mage: Midnight Expansion Preview

Welcome to our Midnight expansion guide for Frost Mage. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Frost Mage spec in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit Midnight test realms. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Frost Mage, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on the test realms, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

It is important to keep in mind that we are still months away from Midnight launching in its entirety, so many of the changes and issues listed are likely to be fixed before the expansion launches.

Primarily, this means that our defensive kit has been streamlined. Greater Invisibility and Mirror Image have lost their defensive benefits, and we lost Mass Barrier. In exchange, Ice Barrier has been buffed both in absorb amount and in gaining a physical damage reduction while active.

Mirror Image has been reduced to a mere Fade-style effect, despite the patch notes and tooltip change. If you have used it solo questing before, it behaves exactly as it did in the past. Sadly, it has been reduced to a 15 second duration, although you can talent for it down to 1 minute cooldown. As of current, it feels like the Mirror Image nodes will be skipped entirely. Either tanks can manage threat, or we are doing significantly higher burst than other classes. As far as a threat solution, dropping it entirely rather than temporarily would be the better option, especially when both are on the same cooldown length. Thus Greater Invisibility is the better of the two utility pieces in most group content.

Greater Invisibility also lost the damage reduction component, but it gained a shorter cooldown, and the ability to actually be used as a sprint through Incantation of Swiftness without feeling like wasting a defensive. It still remains a fantastic threat drop and target drop, and now it is available more often!

Ice Block and Ice Cold, thankfully escape unscathed. A small but welcome addition is the ability to drop the cooldown to 2.5 minutes from the usual 4, an extra 30 second drop from Live. You can also spec for a shorter Hypothermia duration, although this only really impacts Frost, so it feels like a bit of a talent tax. Thankfully we have no shortage of points to spend.

Ice Barrier emerges with a 1% higher max health absorb in exchange for a 5 second longer cooldown, and a 0.75 second global cooldown. This means the penalty for casting it has been about halved. Additionally, it gained Improved Ice Barrier, bringing the total health absorb up to 30% of your max health, and a 10% physical damage reduction. While this reduction pales in comparison to Arcane's Prismatic Barrier magic reduction, it will be very nice if we continue to see random target archers in Mythic+.

The most interesting change is the addition of the talent Temporal Realignment. How it specifically works is if you are hit below 25% health (and not outright killed), and Alter Time is off cooldown, blow the cooldown and gain 50% of your health instantly. That is to say, if you hit 24%, you are suddenly at 74% health and Alter Time is now on cooldown. This maintains your ability to utilize Alter Time for mechanical and movement cheese things, but will minimize the random deaths that Mages are so well known for. This is probably one of the strongest changes in our defensive kit, as Mage has historically been missing the passive tankiness of other classes, leading to Mage being one of the most commonly killed classes on progression.

Mobility-wise, we have increased cooldowns on both Blink (20s) and Shimmer (30s), and we lost Ice Floes. You can talent Blink back to 15 seconds, although Shimmer can only get to 27. The second charge of Shimmer has instead been made a capstone talent available to both spells.

A number of conditional effect talents such as Quick Witted and Time Manipulation have instead been moved to just a baseline cooldown reduction effect. This makes whiffing a Counterspell significantly less punishing, and equalizes the value of Time Manipulation between the three specs.

Contrary to the patch notes, Supernova is still around, still sharing the node with Dragon's Breath. We did lose Blast Wave, so we are down one pseudo-interrupt effect, and one of our two Fire spells that Frostfire's cooldown reduction touches. More on that later.

While I see the design goal brought forward here, and the potential for this to become true, the current state of Alpha Frost does not meet these expectations currently. Specifically, it does not "reinforce rotational clarity and priorities". However, they are not far off the mark, and this could very easily be rectified with a small amount of work. Despite the apparent negativity in the following paragraphs, I remain fairly hopeful. There is a good core of a spec in here, it just needs a bit more work.

Blizzard has completely torn down the spec and rebuilt it from scratch. You will see spell names that are familiar, but their role in the gameplay has changed, sometimes drastically. The spec no longer interacts with the rooted effect known as frozen. Instead, some spells apply a "Freezing" debuff, which are then "Shattered" by others. Shatter no longer exists as it has for the past 20 years, replaced by Shatter.

Icy Veins has been removed as our major cooldown, and is replaced by a massively buffed Ray of Frost. Sadly this does nothing to our AoE damage unless you talent for it, although since the choice node is functionally mandatory, and the choices are 30% damage to primary target, or 30% damage spraying to 5 nearby targets, this seems like a fair deal. Additionally, Splintering Ray does apply the Freezing stacks to targets it is cleaving to, making this an extremely powerful talent in keys.

Cold Snap can be traded for Glacial Bulwark, which gives us a second charge of Ice Barrier and Ice Block, which in most cases will be preferred.

Mastery: Icicles has been replaced with Mastery: Freeze and Shatter. This is functionally a flat bonus to the spells that either Freeze or Shatter respectively. Tuning is currently a little off, with both sides of the effect providing the same bonus. Expect this to get tuned, likely in the direction that Freezing will be higher than Shattering.

The Mastery change is somewhat disheartening. While it fits thematically, it does leave a few holes in the kit not covered by Mastery, which devaules it as a stat.

The Water Elemental returns as its own permanent pet talent, but with it having no AoE component, no Mastery value, no Brain Freeze generation, and with how crowded the Frost talent tree is in general, I fear it may just be a dead node entirely, unless it receives further adjustments. The one saving grace is that it does generate Splinters for Spellslinger, which means that no matter how bad its damage, it will be taken by at least Spellslinger.

Glacial Spike has been re-imagined into a Frostbolt replacement on a timer through Icicles, rather than its own spell. This presents a few mechanical issues, such as Frostfire Empowerment, expanded on later.

Comet Storm has likewise been re-imagined as a Ray of Frost replacement after casting Ray of Frost. This allows for a quick consumption of all the Freezing stacks that Ray drops on targets, although it does not interact with mechanics that touch Shatter via Ice Lance.

Coldest Snap has been removed in favour of Cone of Frost. This is generally speaking a good change for consistency, giving us a reliable short CD AoE generator. Additionally, Ice Nova can be talented as a Cone of Cold replacement from range.

The Ice Caller AoE engine has been removed entirely, meaning that our AoE revolves around Blizzard and Cone of Frost with Ice Lance Shattering on multiple targets through Fractured Frost.

Fingers of Frost has been redesigned to fit into the new mechanics, which allows your next Ice Lance to not consume any Freezing stacks, and deal damage as if the target has the maximum amount of Freezing that Ice Lance can consume. The downside is that this actually requires at least 1 Freezing on any given target to deal damage like that. One would hope this gets addressed. Additionally, you now have to talent for extra stacks, meaning that Fingers of Frost has (yet again) been split out over multiple talent points.

While this is a good end goal, the problem is that this has been done haphazardly. Previous iterations had Shatter at upwards of 80% of our damage contribution, but the current iteration now has Shatter so low in damage that Ice Lance is not worth pressing in almost all situations.

One oddity is that there is now no longer a consistent AoE target limit on Frost. Blizzard and Frozen Orb soft target cap at 8, Cone of Frost hard at 5, Splintering Ray at 6, and Fractured Frost at 3. I would really like to see us re-standardize on 8 like most casters have historically been since the AoE cap change went through all those years ago.

In its current, very early, iteration, the gameplay predominantly revolves around Freezing and Shattering (at least in a world where Ice Lance is worth hitting). Both Hero Talents feel like they play decently well, although not without small issues here and there. Frostfire in particular is strapped for third gate talent nodes, since it needs to talent for both Comet Storm in all scenarios.

Currently, i feel like it has no rhythm. Live Frost gets very rhythmic with the cycling of 3-5 spells into Glacial Spike, or the cycling of Blizzard and Frozen Orb on AoE. Especially on Spellslinger, it feels very much like I (theoretically) have to stare down a debuff on a target and hit Ice Lance as soon as it gets higher than 5-6, which happens very quickly.

Additionally, it feels as if the AoE rotation has nothing going on. Blizzard is cast in single target, so there is absolutely no change or interaction to our AoE. Additionally Ice Lance's cleave target handling is done by GUID, which means that it will always target the same 2 mobs to cleave to, rather than the highest stacks in range. Combined with how low a target cap on Ice Lance's cleave, this means that it does basically nothing in AoE, on top of already being tuned extremely poorly.

Frostfire feels like the basic Frost. Losing the Excess Fire and Excess Frost buffs is a good direction. Blizzard has listened and fixed all the issues with Flash Freezeburn, making Glacial Spike always explode.

Frostfire never seems to feel overwhelmed with Freezing stacks, nor does it really have too many instances of spamming nothing but Ice Lance for ages on end. It does not really provide Blizz's stated "visual spectacle and exciting moment in gameplay" when Comet Storm has been reduced in frequency to about a quarter of what it was on Live, however. Likewise, Frostfire Empowerment is not "punchy" nor is it a large amount of damage.

Spellslinger has come out as a fully functional Hero Talent, and recent tuning has addressed how Lance-spammy it feels. Additionally, changes to Spellslinger's talent nodes have removed a great deal of nodes that felt like filler.

The core gameplay of Spellslinger outside of a Ray of Frost window feels fairly tame. If you are familiar with Live Spellslinger, it feels very much the same, although shorter Augury Abounds windows. Spellfrost Teachings got halved from Live, but you also generate a good deal more Splinters, so the functional CDR is about the same. Just after Ray of Frost, however, you tend to get inundated with Freezing stacks. Depending on a few factors that will depend on tuning and simulations, this could feel a bit spammy, although not too much worse than Live.

Both Hero Talents are now seeing some odd issues with either their defensive or utility nodes. Frostfire's defensive is solid, adding another ~21% shielding on your Ice Barrier. However, its utility node entirely relates to Fire-school spells, of which we lost one and usually take the other talent choice on the other.

Spellslinger's defensive node got nerfed with the loss of Mirror Image as a defensive cooldown, and a reduction of Reactive Barrier's health floor and total absorb benefit. Weirdly, at its best, it is basically as strong as Frostfire's baseline ability. Look Again has somehow managed to become even worse than it was on Live, which is truly a feat. It spawns a single Mirror Image with none of the threat modifier.

Frost's Apex Talents seem to be fairly well integrated into the spec. The core mechanic is tied to Shatter, and the final node massively buffs Ray of Frost's numbers, while also giving it a second charge.

Hand of Frost is a simple damage passive attached to Shatter that also adds freezing stacks to the target. Nothing special.

Hand of Frost adds a stacking damage buff when a Hand of Frost is triggered, and increases the proc rate based on how many stacks of Freezing you consume. Again, simple.

Hand of Frost grants Ray of Frost a 25% damage buff, causes it to fire 4 Hands of Frost at the target, and gives Ray a second charge. Giving us the flexibility of a second charge on our main DPS cooldown is one of the best quality of life changes we could possibly want in a cooldown.

Mage Frost 12.0 Class Set 2pc is truly the showcase of being out of touch with how a spec works. Frostbolt and Flurry, even post-buff, are sub-3% damage components in the spec on single target, and significantly lower on AoE. Adding 8% to that is next to nothing. This is going to be a continual pain point for the spec going forward with this design. Any damage buffs attached to the core rotational spells is going to need absurd percentage increases to meet the standard 5% damage buff for a set bonus.

Mage Frost 12.0 Class Set 4pc on the other hand is a nice theoretical buff, although given Ice Lance's current tuning, still not going to add any DPS. Fingers of Frost needs some extra punch to it, and this fits the theme quite nicely.