Frost Mage DPS Mythic+ Tips — Dragonflight 10.0.7

Frost Mage is highly valued in Mythic+. It is one of the better 2-target cleave specs, and has incredible AoE damage. In terms of utility it brings Arcane Intellect for your casters and healers, Remove Curse and Spellsteal as dispel, a powerful knockback, an AoE disorient, mass crowd control both hard and soft, 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 your most powerful spell 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.

Ice Nova should be cast on cooldown on 4+ targets.

At some point during all of this, find the time to cast Shifting Power, it is a decent amount of AoE damage itself if used on cooldown.

Arcane Explosion can be a great boon for AoE damage on 7+ targets, but you must be able to conserve Mana, lest you be unable to continue even the base single target rotation. Additionally, if Spellsteal is needed, that adds an even greater constraint on your Mana usage of Arcane Explosion.

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 Polymorph can be used as a trash pack skip mechanic, although somewhat limited to humanoids and beasts.

That last note is of particular interest for groups that run without a Rogue. It is a bit difficult to manage, but the safest method appears to be to cast Ring of Frost in a way that captures the closest targets, or the casters in the pack and to aggro the rest in a way they run into the Ring. Once frozen, cast Mass Polymorph on them. If done properly, such that your healer is not in combat, your group can walk right past them. Polymorphed targets will only aggro on the closest, first thing, that they encounter, so the group passing them by should be safe, and you should be the only one in combat. Simply use either Invisibility spell to drop combat, and join your group past them.

Positioning ranged mobs can be assisted with Blast Wave empowered by Volatile Detonation. Blast Wave's baseline kick is fairly small, usually placing mobs just slightly outside of melee range, but Volatile Detonation turns it into a 20-yard knockback. Between the displacement and the 70% slow on them when they land from it, you should have plenty of room to manage the sheep skip combo.

This is significantly harder to do than using a Rogue, or an invisibility potion, but it may be worth it if your group is missing a Rogue or maybe you are running back from a wipe that put you behind what you have previously skipped. Mage's ability to do this is on a one-minute cooldown, and potentially even shorter given that both spells benefit from Time Manipulation's cooldown reductions. Compared to the 5-minute potion cooldown, and Shroud of Concealment's 6-minute cooldown is extremely short and can pay off by not having to worry about breaking invisibility or being detected in Shroud.

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.

If your group does not need a disorient, drop Dragon's Breath for Time Manipulation. Although most groups should keep Dragon's Breath for the emergency cast stop, it is a fair damage bonus.

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.

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. Of particular note, Arcane Lockdown can be removed without jumping in Court of Stars by simply casting Ice Barrier.

Occasionally you will get buffed for 30% damage for 15 seconds. You need to run into someone with the opposite polarity buff that you have before those 15 seconds are up or else you will get stunned. For a Mage, this is fairly trivial as you can Blink to an opposite polarity player. You can also Ice Block the stun if you fail. Try to be considerate to your teammates and end the buff safely. See our detailed explanation here:

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