Mythic+ Dungeons As Frost

[Granis 12]

How is frost for mythic+ ? I thought about making the switch to frost from fire since I noticed it seems frost is performing really well in raids, however I have no idea about mythic+ dungeons.

[Tarazet 144]

Fire has been the 'preferred' spec for dungeons so you will find most of the best M+ Mages playing it; however, Frost has a lot more useful CC abilities compared with Fire and that shouldn't be discounted. The old freeze and shatter mechanic still works as it always has, and there are plenty of dungeons where it is useful to be able to snare and root enemies - Vault of the Wardens, Arcway, and Court of Stars come to mind. If you get good AoE legendaries like Zann'esu Journey or Ice Time, that would definitely help you to push the envelope farther.

[Granis 12]

Alright, thank you for the answer. However I guess I should mention that I tend to do both raiding and mythic+ as well as some pvp. What I should have asked is can I swap to frost without it hurting mythic+ performance a lot? Because if it is still pretty decent at mythic+ then it seems that frost is a good all rounder of a spec.

[Tarazet 144]

Frost is still good enough for use in Mythic+ dungeons, but it is missing the burst AoE damage of Fire, which is why that spec is usually favored despite having poor utility and so-so single target damage. Frost is actually a great spec for raiding because it has good, consistent single-target and sustained cleave, and it is less at home with the downtime and burst windows you get in 5 mans.

[Duren 0]

On 2/25/2017 at 7:20 AM, Tarazet said:

Frost is still good enough for use in Mythic+ dungeons, but it is missing the burst AoE damage of Fire, which is why that spec is usually favored despite having poor utility and so-so single target damage. Frost is actually a great spec for raiding because it has good, consistent single-target and sustained cleave, and it is less at home with the downtime and burst windows you get in 5 mans.

Sorry but this is wrong wrong wrong. Frost does not lack burst aoe damage it just has to be specced correctly.

There are a few talents which just need to be adjusted for aoe and it does insane burst aoe damage and even better single target with ray of frost. I did a mythic+ dungeon yesterday and was able to keep up and even beat sometimes the fire mage who was 20 ilvls average higher than me.

 

Ice Nova, Comet Storm, artic gale and frigid winds.

Linkage here for talent choice

I actually did a lengthy post on the frost mage discussion thread which even included my keybinds and reasoning behind my choices. 

My post

Edited March 2, 2017 by Duren

[Tehril 12]

Frost is pretty good for M+, I generally end a decent dungeon upwards of 800k dps in the overall, but both specs have their individual strengths and weaknesses. Frost can never be as good for the raw AoE, despite the cries that comet storm is somehow going to beat even a halfway geared mage dropping Living Bomb on 10+ targets. Yes, Comet Storm hits hard. Great. Now do it again. Nevermind, 30 second CD. Ice Nova also does some serious damage. But again, 25 second cooldown which may as well be 30 since you only ever sync it up with Comet Storm to shatter the comets.  

No, I prefer to stick to what we're good at, 2 target cleaving to godlike levels. If you bring Splitting Ice you make all of your Ice Lances cleave, and generally if you're in a M+, there's usually something nearby to cleave onto.  And if you bring Glacial Spike out (Which I also recommend) that cleaves too! This all aligns to give some amazing burst when you truly need it, the usual frost mage constant slow effect (Tanks will love you in necrotic week), and all your damage isn't front loaded in the opening 3 seconds of a trash pack and leaves you high and dry with no heavy hitting spells to finish mobs when raging kicks in and starts beating your tank into the dirt. The only real weakness we have is that we're a bit too good at killing 2 targets, causing Bolstering to bring up issues if we aren't target swapping to highest health mobs.

 

Thermal Void is also a good choice, however I'm not as much of a fan of it on non Tyrannical weeks, since bosses tend not to live as long, limiting the usefulness of the talent, and Glacial is the gift that keeps on giving, for bosses or trash. However if you are using the Shard of the Exodar like myself, with even halfway decent procs you can keep Icy Veins rolling for the entirety of every Time Warp, and for a decent bit past it if you get great procs, making you near unrivaled for sustained burst, sometimes for the entirety of a boss fight (Only ones who can really compete are DH and FDKs).

 

But I digress. Yes frost is good for M+, especially once you get your 2pc and 4pc which help alleviate FoF generating issues you may run into, especially when running Lonely Winter. It brings good cleave, great boss damage, and a near permanent 65% slow, which is more utility than most classes can give passively.

 

I don't have any M+ logs to show, but to see where I'm coming from here

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/8DVqXZ7bTrRJwGKg#fight=18&type=damage-done&source=11

 Over half of my damage done there has the possibility of hitting 2 targets, and in a M+ that would mean a lot of extra damage output, especially on the trash where there's 2 nastier than usual mobs (Bears in DHT, Vrykul Kings in HoV).

[Tarazet 144]

15 hours ago, Duren said:

Sorry but this is wrong wrong wrong. Frost does not lack burst aoe damage it just has to be specced correctly.

There are a few talents which just need to be adjusted for aoe and it does insane burst aoe damage and even better single target with ray of frost. I did a mythic+ dungeon yesterday and was able to keep up and even beat sometimes the fire mage who was 20 ilvls average higher than me.

 

Ice Nova, Comet Storm, artic gale and frigid winds.

Linkage here for talent choice

I actually did a lengthy post on the frost mage discussion thread which even included my keybinds and reasoning behind my choices. 

My post

I haven't played with a build like this, but I can see where you're coming from. It gives up Frost's sustained damage in favor of cycling through big cooldowns. That's fine if you're blowing through at a decent clip but isn't really helpful if you are pushing the limits of your gear and taking a long time to kill stuff. Fire doesn't have to make that tradeoff. But I can see a build like that working in Vault of the Wardens or Maw of Souls.

Challenging content is where you really want sustained damage, and Frost's standard build does that quite well, but it does it well on single targets or two targets where one is vastly more important. You basically want Frost for the same kind of content that you would want a Destro Lock.

Edited March 3, 2017 by Tarazet

[Duren 0]

2 hours ago, Tarazet said:

I haven't played with a build like this, but I can see where you're coming from. It gives up Frost's sustained damage in favor of cycling through big cooldowns. That's fine if you're blowing through at a decent clip but isn't really helpful if you are pushing the limits of your gear and taking a long time to kill stuff. Fire doesn't have to make that tradeoff. But I can see a build like that working in Vault of the Wardens or Maw of Souls.

Challenging content is where you really want sustained damage, and Frost's standard build does that quite well, but it does it well on single targets or two targets where one is vastly more important. You basically want Frost for the same kind of content that you would want a Destro Lock.

It is mostly purely situational but it was just that most say that frost doesn't have good aoe damage when it clearly can have, albeit not as good as fire as most will say but it still is a good contender. In between your comet storms and ice novas you are casting blizzard as well every 6 seconds which lowers your frozen orb cooldown which again is more aoe.

I've recently got my 2nd legendary for frost (but can't use it yet) which increases the damage of blizzard by another 35% when flurry hits and stacks up to 5 times. Zann'esu Journey. I can see me changing to flurry instead of frost bolt in most situations when there are additional mobs or during big pulls as I already have +35% damage with artic gale but adding up to an additional +175% on the blizzard will be a huge damage boost.

My issue is that I can't easily just switch specs right now to do my own testing on other specs and compare until I've had the time to grind up all the AP for each spec. Currently I'm sitting with +7% damage and thats a fair bit really so changing specs would reduce my output right now. I don't see me being able to do testing on all specs for a few weeks, though I'll happily report back when I do.