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.

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.

Mastery: Icicles has been replaced with Mastery: Freeze and Shatter, but the mechanics of it are incomplete for now. The tooltip is currently misleading in that it does not apply globally to all freezing/shattering spells.

The Mastery change is particularly disheartening. Taking pieces of our spec's damage off of it means that it gets devalued as more and more of them exist. This should hopefully be a fairly easy fix.

The Water Elemental returns as its own permanent pet talent, but with it having no AoE component, no Mastery value, 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.

Building a coherent AoE spec tree seems nearly impossible at the moment, unless you purposefully drop core components. The second talent gate has too many nodes, and the tree in generally has a few too many 2-pointers, leaving us strapped for talent points. It feels quite bad to drop either important AoE talents or core components of the spec

In its current, very early, iteration, the gameplay predominantly revolves around freezing and shattering. This is reminiscent of the launch of THe War Within, where we ended up spamming Ice Lance at an untenable frequency, with the spell being cost 10x more often than any other, if not more than that. This is an issue that Blizzard needs to address, after figuring out a solution to the problem in the middle of TWW, yet reintroducing it in this first build of the Midnight Alpha.

It is difficult to judge Frostfire due to the lack of mechanical hooks to the core kit. While it did gain the set bonuses from TWW Season 3 as passive talents, it lost the excess buffs, and Comet Storm is a significantly longer cooldown, so it has nothing tying it to the core spec. Until this is addressed, it is very difficult to give an educated guess as to what the intent with it is, outside of a bunch of damage increase passives.

Spellslinger on the other hand came out as a fully functional Hero Talent right out of the gate. Minor tweaks were made to give it interaction with the new kit, and aside from a difficulty in having enough talent points to make coherent builds, the actual ideas behind it are solid. The largest issues with it are the defensive node and utility node have seen some significant nerfs, and should probably be looked at with an eye to defensive parity against other specs.

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 Frosts 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, but a welcome addition.

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.