Frost Mage DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Shadowlands 9.2.5

It is difficult to define a best in slot list for Frost, as it is heavily dependent on progression level and gear available to you. You cannot simply use the lower tier gear of any given best in slot list, as stat weights will then shift and you will likely be missing certain breakpoints.

Feel free to check SimulationCraft's Frost profile for a maxed out Mythic best in slot list, but be warned that unless you have access to all of those pieces, this is not the best you, personally, can get.

Patch 9.0.5 has brought the return of Valor. This can be used to increase the item level of any gear that drops from Mythic+ dungeons or the dungeon reward from the weekly chest up to 278, if you have cleared all dungeons at +15 in time. This can be quite a boon as there are a number of dungeon trinkets that out-DPS non-Mythic raid trinkets.

Domination Shards have been disabled in relevant content as of 9.2. They exist only for the Maw, Korthia, and Torghast. The power gains from other pieces of gear will likely outshine most of them except for the highest reaches of Torghast, but it remains up to you if you wish to keep a piece of gear for such trivial content.

Tier sets have returned. Frost Mage 2-Piece is the relatively important one from a mechanics standpoint, while Frost Mage 4-Piece is a nice power boost but is entirely passive.

Frost Mage 2-Piece drops Comet Storm on your current target, same as if you had cast it, delay and all. Given the above change, this means that we will be firing off random Comet Storm casts, and trying to make sure that as much of it is Shattered as possible. What this ends up doing to our rotation is making sure you pay attention to your character's animation, looking for the blue circular aura of it being cast, and adjusting your Shatter combo cast order to make sure the comets hit inside the window.

If this effect happens while Winter's Chill is on the target, you need to not double cast Ice Lance into it, you need to instead Ice Lance > Frostbolt > Ice Lance, giving the second Ice Lance enough of a delay via the Frostbolt cast for the comets to finish landing on the target. Ice Lance is still faster than Frostbolt, and should impact before it.

There is no way to actually track this effect, however. The trigger doesn't show up in the Combat Log, and auras will not be able to accurately track this. Gaming this effect for extra Shatters will be about a 3% increase, so it is worth doing, but it will demand a fair bit of attention for a player-based animation.

Blizzard has let us craft any piece of gear into the corresponding slot's Tier piece. This is done via Creation Catalyst. This will allow non-Mythic raiders to get Tier pieces at higher item levels if they convert their weekly Mythic+ pieces. It also acts as a failsafe for incredible bad luck.

Upgrading in this way maintains any additions the piece may have. It will maintain Tertiary stats, sockets, and upgradability via Conquest or Valor.

The easiest way, and also the method we suggest, to compare multiple items is to use Raidbots' Top Gear. Here you can input an export from the Simcraft AddOn, select the items to compare, and it will find out which of the items are best.

Due to the prevalence of high item level trinkets from various sources, it is always best to use Raidbots Top Gear to determine what your optimal trinkets are.