Frost Mage DPS Mythic+ Tips — Dragonflight 10.2

Frost Mage is highly valued in Mythic+. It is one of the better 2-target cleave specs and has amazing burst AoE damage. In terms of utility, it brings Arcane Intellect for your casters and healers, Remove Curse and Spellsteal as dispels, a powerful knockback, an AoE disorient, mass crowd control both hard and soft, a party-wide 22% health barrier, and even the potential to let the group skip trash packs. It also has the best AoE slows in the game.

The single target rotations do not change in Mythic+ content, compared to raid content. For more information about the Frost Mage DPS rotation, refer back to the Rotation page, found here:

The main AoE rotation for Frost is fairly simple. Firstly, you have your Frozen Orb and Blizzard machine. Ice Caller reduces the cooldown of Frozen Orb for each mob that Blizzard damages on each damage wave. Given that Frozen Orb is one of your most powerful spells for the entire run, this is extremely important. On the flip side, having enough targets to reset Frozen Orb reliably means that you should have very close to 100% uptime on Freezing Rain, which will improve your Blizzard damage and make it instant. This is the primary part of Frost's AoE.

The next part is related to Coldest Snap. Functionally you want to walk up to a pack, throw Frozen Orb, Blizzard, Comet Storm, Cone of Cold, Frozen Orb, Comet Storm, Blizzard, and then Shifting Power. The idea is that Cone of Cold resets Comet Storm and Frozen Orb both and applies Winter's Chill to the entire pack hit. The delay on Comet Storm means that both Comet Storm sets should land within Winter's Chill and gain the benefit of Shatter.

Between these, you would ideally want to cast Glacial Spike between all of this and land Ice Nova or Frost Nova directly after casting it to let it benefit from Shatter and Subzero if talented into it.

Frost Mage provides support for the party through excellent cleave damage, raid buffs, and other additional effects such as mob management and immunity cheesing of mechanics.

• Ice Block can be used to soak mechanics that would otherwise inconvenience or kill other party members.
• Remove Curse allows you to remove curses, a fairly rare power limited to Druids and Restoration Shaman.
• Spellsteal grants you an offensive magic dispel, another fairly rare power.
• Arcane Intellect grants your party 5% Intellect, a sizable throughput benefit to your casters and healer.
• Time Warp gives your group that extra DPS push.
• With Frigid Winds, you have access to the best AoE slow in the game through Cone of Cold, and one of the top single target slows attached to your primary spell.
• Polymorph, Frost Nova, Ring of Frost, and Freeze all give you varying types of crowd control.
• Blast Wave can knock mobs out of Sanguine or be used as an AoE pseudo-interrupt.
• Dragon's Breath can similarly be used as an AoE pseudo-interrupt.
• Alter Time, as elsewhere in the game, has the potential to cheese multiple positional mechanics, or take pressure off your healers.
• Mass Barrier applies your Ice Barrier to the entire group.
• Mass Invisibility lets you take the place of a Rogue and grant your group a trash skip.

As stated on the Talent page, almost none of the class tree is set in stone, and you can change talents around as you see fit and depending on what your group needs.

This talent build is a generalist build. If you do not need the trash skip talents, or Remove Curse, or even Spellsteal, feel free to move things around and grab other defensive points you may like.

In theory Ice Ward is a slight DPS gain for more Shatters, but you would lose either Greater Invisibility, Dragon's Breath, or Mass Barrier/ Mass Invisibility. If you feel safe in dropping the defensive, AoE stop, or group utility, you could pick it up. Freezing Cold is a slightly better pick, as it lets a chunk of your Coldest Snap burst benefit from Shatter.

Snowstorm is a great talent in theory but has practical issues in most groups. The buff is timed, despite not showing a timer. This makes it impossible to take a partial stack from before a boss to the trash pack after the boss. Adding in that most groups are conservative in how much they pull, the stacking is likely not maximized per tick, making it fall behind even further. These must be addressed before Snowstorm is a good pick unless you are in a group you know will maximize large pulls.

Energized Barriers, like in the raid, is incredibly useful in removing certain debuffs. It should be noted that this does not apply to teammates with Mass Barrier, but it will trigger on yourself again.

Energized Barriers can snap Entangling without moving.

Incorporeal can be Polymorphed, but not Mass Polymorphed. Since Polymorph has no cooldown, you can re-target if a teammate overlaps on the same target.

Afflicted is countered by Remove Curse.

For an opinion list of how Frost fares against other DPS specs in Mythic+, please see our Tier List page: