Frost Mage DPS Mythic+ Tips — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.3

Frost Mage is highly valued in Mythic+. It's one of the better 2 target cleave specs, and has formidable AoE damage. In terms of utility it brings Arcane Intellect for your casters and healers, Remove Curse as minor utility, and the best AoE slows in the game.

If you are unfamiliar with Mythic+ and its associated general mechanics, you can read more about it on our dedicated Mythic+ page below.

Both the single target and multi-target rotations do not change in Mythic+ content. For more information about the Frost Mage DPS rotations, refer back to the Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities page.

AoEing effectively is key to most of your damage in Mythic+. Most of your AoE is going to be concentrated into Frozen Orb, so understanding how it behaves versus a pack of trash is important. It will slow down on impact with the first target in its radius, so it is usually somewhat beneficial to be almost in melee range to ensure that it is ticking on the whole pack, rather than just the edge of the pack. In addition, Frozen Orb has a fairly high spell power coefficient, so do not feel bad popping cooldowns or trinket such as Worldvein Resonance or Balefire Branch to vastly increase the damage of Frozen Orb.

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.
• Arcane Intellect grants your party 10% 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.

Most talents are viable in Mythic+. Depending on your specific group make up, you may choose to focus heavier on single target rather than AoE, or perhaps more on short term burst over longer duration stability. For the most part, anything you would pick for raiding will carry over easily enough.

Rune of Power is actually rather interesting in Mythic+ given almost all of our AoE burst is within 10 seconds. It is definitely fun in lower keystones, but Incanter's Flow will be better in most higher keys due to length of encounters, and the need to move out of mechanics that will actually kill you.

The vast majority of the time you will be changing the level 90 talent. The rest of your build will carry over from raiding. Comet Storm offers AoE burst, where Splitting Ice is preferred for its single target performance. Freezing Rain is viable if you are pulling large amounts of trash at once and need the sustained AoE. The choice will depend on key level, how large your tank intends to pull, your teammates, and what dungeon it is.

A good general use is Splitting Ice. This should cover most pick-up-group scenarios, and just about all keys ten and below.

Almost all the Frost Mage traits are linked to single target spells. While some are fine to use in general, there are a couple of outliers:

• Flash Freeze is obviously a useful trait, just like everywhere else in the game, as your AoE toolkit is entirely cooldown based, so you will be throwing Glacial Spike around, even on trash.
• Packed Ice and Flash Freeze are both quite strong in general, depending on your chosen build. Given that dungeon trash mobs will give you plenty of Frozen Orb resets, Packed Ice gains significantly in comparison to most scenarios.
• Whiteout is not a bad trait if you're running Splitting Ice, for the extra Ice Lance damage. The Frozen Orb cooldown reduction is minor compared to Blizzard tick cooldown reduction.
• Tunnel of Ice should be avoided if possible for Mythic+. It is single target, attached to a hard cast, and the buff resets on hitting a new target ensuring you'll never get much benefit from it in this situation.

This will mostly carry over from other places in the game, with one interesting exception.

Glimpse of Clarity is actually a significant gain in Mythic+, as it will reduce your Blizzard cooldown by 3 seconds when cast while it is active. Blizzard can have multiple instances active and ticking at the same time, and in the same location without any issues. Glimpse of Clarity is only consumed when a spell with a cooldown is cast, and it can stack up to 3, so it is very rare that it is completely wasted.

The only part of this affix that really applies to Mages, is Voidweaver Mal'thir. Mal'thir spawns when you activate the Cursed Spire of Ny'alotha — or when the last boss is pulled without activating that spire — and proceeds to cast both Crippling Pestilence and Lingering Doubt. Lingering Doubt leaves a curse on the target that reduces casting speed by 70% for 8 seconds. It is up to you to Remove Curse if that should land on a caster.

Beyond that, treat them as you would any other trash mobs. They need to die, and if engaged by their spire, so do their adds.