With Patch 12.1 now live, we asked our Frost Mage writer Kuni to comment on some of the changes Blizzard is making to the spec for Midnight Season 2.
| Balance Change | Writer Commentary |
|---|---|
Developers’ notes: We’ve made some adjustments to Mage defensives with the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole. To accomplish this, we are unifying the functionality of  Improved Ice Barrier to give all specs an additional charge of their Barrier spell, plus one “rider” effect that is spec-specific. | While Fire and Arcane gaining a second charge of Barrier is unquestionably good, nerfing Frost’s Barrier from 35% health to 30% is extremely questionable. The spec already sees the lowest survival rates in Season 1, and I am unsure a 2-minute  Ice Cold is going to make up for that. Nerfing  Temporal Realignment hurts the more casual players who do not know damage patterns and when to defensive. Adding an AoE damage reduction talent is very odd given the state of Blizzard’s inconsistent AoE damage classifications. |
New Talent:  Improved Warding – Damage taken from area of effect attacks reduced by 4%. | Any help is positive, but Blizzard’s classification of what counts as “area of effect attacks” is inconsistent at best. This could, and probably should, have been a flat 4% damage reduction to be both more consistent and provide us with some parity in a game where every other class has some form of base health buff. |
| Improved Ice Barrier has been redesigned – Ice Barrier gains an additional charge and reduces your physical damage taken by 10%. | Frost just lost 5% max health scaling on Ice Barrier in a patch they’ve admitted we have defensive issues. This is honestly baffling. |
| Temporal Realignment has been updated – Now immediately heals 20% of your health and heals an additional 30% over 6 seconds. | Another baffling defensive change. If a Mage is low enough to activate this, it is going to need the healing right now, not over time. Other classes with an effect like this both activate at higher percentages, making them safer from just getting tapped and dying, and do not pop a defensive cooldown for doing so. |
 Glacial Bulwark has been updated – No longer grants an additional charge of Ice Barrier. | They’ve moved the second charge to the Improved Barrier class talent. An unnoted change is that Glacial Bulwark now also reduces the cooldown of Ice Block/Ice Cold by 30 seconds. |
 Splitting Ice has been updated –  Flurry and  Frostbolt effectiveness against the second target reduced to 50% (was 80%). | Not as bad a nerf as it seems on its face, as the Frostbolt damage reduction has literally never worked. This only applies to Flurry and  Glacial Spike. |
 Fractured Frost has been updated –  Ice Lance effectiveness against the second target reduced to 50% (was 100%). | This only applies to Ice Lance’s damage itself, not the resulting Shatter from the second target. Functionally an irrelevant change as Ice Lance itself is almost nothing in terms of damage. |
| All ability and pet damage increased by 7%. | Compensation for the Hand of Frost nerf. |
| Apex Talent: Hand of Frost (Rank 2) now grants 0.5%/1% increased spell damage (was 1%/2%). | This is now weak enough that Frostfire is dropping the Apex talent entirely. I’m not sure what the point of nerfing this was, it’s not like Frost had a bursty profile. |
Frost Mage Writer’s Verdict
Patch 12.1 does not bring much of anything in terms of gameplay changes for Frost. The only real impactful changes were to our defensives and a minor nerf to our cleave:
Temporal Realignment has been adjusted to heal over time, rather than at once.
Ice Barrier has lost ~16% of its strength.
Glacial Bulwark now provides a 30-second cooldown reduction to 
Ice Cold.
Improved Warding is a new class talent that provides us with 4% AoE damage reduction.
Splitting Ice and 
Fractured Frost have been nerfed.
Hand of Frost’s damage buff has been nerfed, in exchange, we have been buffed with global damage.
