Frost Mage PvP Talents and Builds — The War Within (11.1.5)

While the above table provides a generally accurate overview of the viability of talents, some finer points are discussed in the sections that follow, and we recommend you read those for a deeper understanding.

• Dragon's Breath: One of the strongest offensive Crowd Control abilities in the game, all specializations of Mage have access to this talent. You can easily chain Dragon's Breath to Polymorph.
• Blast Wave: This gives an explosion effect around the caster and slowing enemies after. This is extremely strong to use when enemies are using heavy offensive cooldowns.
• Freezing Cold: Applies a 5-second snare when enemies are hit by Cone of Cold, allowing for more kiting potential.
• Greater Invisibility often breaks quite rapidly; however, it provides a 60% damage reduction for 3 seconds after Invisibility; use this before heavy incoming damage to negate the effect.
• Time Anomaly: Another new talent, allowing for either Time Warp for 6 seconds, Icy Veins for 8 seconds or a Fingers of Frost proc. This talent is quite strong due to how much Mage benefits from Haste.

• Perpetual Winter: Flurry now has two charges, allowing faster instant damage and more Shatters with Winter's Chill.
• Wintertide: Increasing Frostbolt damage and also increases damage dealt by Fingers of Frost procs.
• Ray of Frost: A castable ray that deals damage over time and applies a very significant slow to the enemy.
• Thermal Void: Increases Icy Veins baseline duration, as well as increasing the duration based on how many Ice Lances against frozen targets are used.
• Freezing Winds: Another returning legendary allowing for spammable Fingers of Frost Ice Lances in rapid succession
• Slick Ice: A ramping damage and haste modifier to Frostbolt that allows you to cast faster and deal more significant damage with each Frostbolt.

Ice Wall is a talent that allows you to place a wall of ice in a specific area for 15 seconds with 40% of your maximum health. This wall obstructs the line-of-sight and can be used to block enemies from running away or block a line of sight from a healer to a damage class. This could be good in Arena or Rated Battlegrounds. This ability has a lot of creativity, and you can use it in many different ways.

Ring of Fire is an important spell to use for multiple reasons. The main reason is this gives you a spell on a different casting school than Arcane or Frost. If you get kicked on Polymorph, you can then cast Ring of Fire. It also does a lot of damage, especially in games where the enemy team is stacked. It also disorients enemies that run into it, giving you an additional way to control the enemy team. Note: This does replace Ring of Frost.

Master Shepherd is a new talent allowing Polymorph to no longer heal enemies, as well as grant Versatility and Speed bonuses. This talent will highly be opted for, making Polymorph not heal your enemies to full health , as well as giving you a sizeable versatility buff.

Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damage and is now castable at a location with a 40-yard range but no longer moves. This talent will make your sustained damage lower but increases your burst damage significantly.

Overpowered Barrier increases the absorb of your barriers by 100% and have an additional effect, but last 5 seconds. If Ice Barrier is fully absorbed, you deal damage to enemies within 10 yards of you and slow them for by 70% fo 4 seconds. This is great for giving you another slow to help get away from enemy players.

Snowdrift gives a castable blizzard effect around you for 6 seconds, which slows enemies heavily, and if enemies are caught within the effect for 3 seconds, they are stunned for 4 seconds. This talent has yet to have been tested thoroughly and is quite volatile if it will be often used or not. With the changes to this talent becoming instant cast, it will likely be strong.

Frost Bomb applies a bomb effect to a target, dealing damage to the current target and AoE damage surrounding it. This applies a very significant slow and seems quite strong for burst damage and kiting potential.

Ice Form replaces Icy Veins, making you immune to all stuns and knockbacks while also giving you 30% increased Frostbolt damage. This talent is great situationally against compositions that have a lot of stuns or if you are looking to find value from Deep Shatter Frostbolts with some additional damage modifiers. It also has a 1-minute cooldown in comparison to Icy Veins being a 3-minute cooldown. With the change to Ice Form coming off the Global cooldown: this talent has a lot of viability now.

Improved Mass Invisibility allows you to utilize Mass Invisibility in combat and reduce the cooldown significantly. This talent is absolutely mandatory if you wish to take Mass Invisibility in any PvP Scenario, or else it will be borderline useless. This talent is a hard choice to take, as you often want the three talents listed above.