Frost Mage DPS Mythic+ Tips — Dragonflight 10.0.7
In this guide, you will find tips and advice to tackle Mythic+ dungeons with your Frost Mage in World of Warcraft — Dragonflight 10.0.7.
Frost Mage in Mythic+
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.
Frost Mage Mythic+ Rotation
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 Utility
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.
Mythic+ Talents for Frost Mages
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.
Dragonflight Season 1 Affix: Thundering
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:
Mythic+ Tier List
For an opinion list of how Frost fares against other DPS specs in Mythic+, please see our Tier List page:
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Changed the default talent tree.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 22 Dec. 2022: Changed default build to Lonely Winter due to hotfix buffs.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Added a note about Lonely Winter/Water Elemental decision.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Mage Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Kuni, one of the best Frost Mages in the world, who raids in Mortal Desire.
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