Frost Mage PvE

[philz90 0]

So I crafted the Slick Ice legendary. How does my playstyle change now?

Whenever I pop Icy Veins, is it better to now just keep casting Frost Bolt or do I still follow the usual rotation?

[Kuni 28]

3 hours ago, philz90 said:

So I crafted the Slick Ice legendary. How does my playstyle change now?

Whenever I pop Icy Veins, is it better to now just keep casting Frost Bolt or do I still follow the usual rotation?

Just standard rotation. Nothing changes with it, sadly. 

[Guest Shog]

Why do I have to cast a frostbolt before using flurry, when I already have the proc? 

 

[Kuni 28]

On 12/14/2020 at 12:59 AM, Guest Shog said:

Why do I have to cast a frostbolt before using flurry, when I already have the proc? 

 

It will allow the Frostbolt to Shatter, assuming you're further than about 7-8 yards away from the target.

[Moontessa 0]

I have a question about Glacial Fragments and how the rotation works with it in dungeons. Does one just spam Blizzard + Ice Lance with it on cooldown with rune and orb when available, without regard to FoF, or does one still hardcast Frostbolt and use only FoF procs to trigger the legendary? Also how should Brain Freeze be handled while playing with this legendary in multitarget situation? Thanks!

[Kuni 28]

1 hour ago, Moontessa said:

I have a question about Glacial Fragments and how the rotation works with it in dungeons. Does one just spam Blizzard + Ice Lance with it on cooldown with rune and orb when available, without regard to FoF, or does one still hardcast Frostbolt and use only FoF procs to trigger the legendary? Also how should Brain Freeze be handled while playing with this legendary in multitarget situation? Thanks!

I need to update this, but yeah. We were thinking it'd get nerfed so I hadn't bothered, but here we are. At 3+ Ice Lance just becomes your filler, regardless of proc situation. You still use Brain Freeze as you normally would, at a very high priority, but the lowest priority Frostbolt is replaced.

[Guest Magenoob]

But how do we get Brain Freeze if we only use Ice Lance as Filler? I think the AoE Rotation needs to be adjusted a bit.

[Kuni 28]

10 hours ago, Guest Magenoob said:

But how do we get Brain Freeze if we only use Ice Lance as Filler? I think the AoE Rotation needs to be adjusted a bit.

You don't. It's simply if you have it from prior Frostbolts, such as the pull prior or if you had 2 targets and became 3. Or, as so many mobs in dungeons seem to do, they've jumped around and your Blizzard is on cooldown, so you're reverting to Frostbolt for a few seconds.

[Guest Magenoob]

On 12/23/2020 at 10:08 AM, Kuni said:

You don't. It's simply if you have it from prior Frostbolts, such as the pull prior or if you had 2 targets and became 3. Or, as so many mobs in dungeons seem to do, they've jumped around and your Blizzard is on cooldown, so you're reverting to Frostbolt for a few seconds.

Ah thanks for that!

[Sharamis 0]

Hi there, I've been experimenting with a rotation involving a spell that freezes the target and then two ice lances. I. E. Ice nova then two ice lances, frost nova then two ice lances, freeze then two ice lances with the odd frozen orb tossed in. This turns out to have fairly high DPS for non elite enemies. Is it possible to simulate this or would there be some reason this is non optimal? Eventually you do run out of spells that freeze the target but only if the target has a lot of health.

[Kuni 28]

2 hours ago, Sharamis said:

Hi there, I've been experimenting with a rotation involving a spell that freezes the target and then two ice lances. I. E. Ice nova then two ice lances, frost nova then two ice lances, freeze then two ice lances with the odd frozen orb tossed in. This turns out to have fairly high DPS for non elite enemies. Is it possible to simulate this or would there be some reason this is non optimal? Eventually you do run out of spells that freeze the target but only if the target has a lot of health.

Ice Nova won't last long enough to get 2 spells into it, but that overall is the idea of playing with Grisly Icicle. It's incredibly strong out in the world, and solo Torghast.

If you were super into simulating against targets that can be frozen, you'd have to rewrite the APL, but add target_level=60 to the file. That'll allow targets to be frozen.

[Guest Eluaria]

On 12/18/2020 at 5:08 PM, Kuni said:

I need to update this, but yeah. We were thinking it'd get nerfed so I hadn't bothered, but here we are. At 3+ Ice Lance just becomes your filler, regardless of proc situation. You still use Brain Freeze as you normally would, at a very high priority, but the lowest priority Frostbolt is replaced.

Regarding this specifically: Shouldn't in the case that Glacial Fragments is being used the Priority of Ice Lance be above Arcane Explosion? Also, is it really a good idea to start the AoE rotation with 5+ targets rather than below that? I noticed with the use of Glacial Fragments, my Damage is generally higher using the AoE rotation on 3+ targets than it is using the single Target one.

[Kuni 28]

On 12/28/2020 at 5:01 PM, Guest Eluaria said:

Regarding this specifically: Shouldn't in the case that Glacial Fragments is being used the Priority of Ice Lance be above Arcane Explosion? Also, is it really a good idea to start the AoE rotation with 5+ targets rather than below that? I noticed with the use of Glacial Fragments, my Damage is generally higher using the AoE rotation on 3+ targets than it is using the single Target one.

Actually, yeah. Good catch on AE.

Re: layouts, I'm trying to not just have a ton of lists for various target points. I've got a note under the prio on AoE for Glacial Fragments usage at 3t. Given Blizzard comes into play at 2t, it functionally comes down to just Orb/Blizz/Lance spam on 3+. You're right though, I could probably make this more clear, so I'll see how I can fix that up.

[Eluaria 0]

14 hours ago, Kuni said:

Actually, yeah. Good catch on AE.

Re: layouts, I'm trying to not just have a ton of lists for various target points. I've got a note under the prio on AoE for Glacial Fragments usage at 3t. Given Blizzard comes into play at 2t, it functionally comes down to just Orb/Blizz/Lance spam on 3+. You're right though, I could probably make this more clear, so I'll see how I can fix that up.

Thank you, this really cleared some things up for me. Been getting into Mythic+ Recently and been split on what to do with my Rotation when it comes to trash packs, so it's reassuring to have these things be more clear for me.

[Guest TY for stat cap!!!]

To the author that put the cap to stack crit to, thank you! I wish all authors did that. I've been trying to find a site that listed all the stat caps but no joy 😞

[Kuni 28]

10 hours ago, Guest TY for stat cap!!! said:

To the author that put the cap to stack crit to, thank you! I wish all authors did that. I've been trying to find a site that listed all the stat caps but no joy 😞

You... don't hard stack crit. That's just the point crit becomes crap.

Do I need this in big red letters? Is this the cause of all the questions we get in discord?

[Rudy199 8]

Man..That feeling when the Freezing Rain talent, my favorite talent in World of Warcraft..is marked with an X 😞

[Kuni 28]

1 hour ago, Rudy199 said:

Man..That feeling when the Freezing Rain talent, my favorite talent in World of Warcraft..is marked with an X 😞

Me and GS man. I feel you.

Sadly, Freezing Rain would have been great if they didn't nerf Grisly Icicle to break on party damage.

[Guest Aguafina]

On the Shadowlands DPS ranking page, it is noted that Cold Front is the best legendary for frost mages, but I don't see it listed on the separate frost mage legendary guide.  What am I missing?

[Kuni 28]

12 hours ago, Guest Aguafina said:

On the Shadowlands DPS ranking page, it is noted that Cold Front is the best legendary for frost mages, but I don't see it listed on the separate frost mage legendary guide.  What am I missing?

It means a certain author has old info. My guide is more up to date.

[Guest Aguafina]

22 hours ago, Kuni said:

It means a certain author has old info. My guide is more up to date.

Thank you - that page was updated 24 December, so I just wanted to double check. I figured the actual mage guide was more accurate. 

[Kuni 28]

50 minutes ago, Guest Aguafina said:

Thank you - that page was updated 24 December, so I just wanted to double check. I figured the actual mage guide was more accurate. 

No problem.

I don't like tier lists as a rule, but that's just my singular opinion. There was viewer demand for them, so it now exists. Shame it's not kept updated as well as it could be.

[Guest Breaktheice]

Hey, 

Just some comments on the guide. 

Talents: 
+ It seems most of this page has not been touched up since the prepatch. Fair enough, since the talents didn't really change, but there are some things to note here:
- Incanter's Flow: sims rather competitively with RoP for Frost ever since the RoP nerf from 15 > 12s, and in fact if you look over some of the CN fights, some of the top 100 Frost parses on each fight (Heroic, which is where most people are now) utilize Incanter's Flow. To simply put an "X" over it is misleading, especially for new players. In my opinion it should be a ?. For my mage (214) it sims just 12 DPS behind RoP (assuming perfect RoP use). Now of course the relevant burst potential is Rune is better and Rune scales better with Icy Propulsion provided you can pop another Icy Veins in a fight, but this still doesn't discount the fact that Incancter's Flow isn't entirely useless. 
- Focus Magic: sometimes, there's only 1 Frost mage in a group, so you might want to put up other DPS specs that reliably proc this buff for the Frost mage to pass to. It's wrong to assume that it's best if only given to another Frost mage. For example, on any ST encounter, a Destro Warlock properly using their rotation can very reliably proc this buff. My personal best uptime for this buff was 98.7% on Huntsman, passing to a Destro Warlock. It's also great if passed to an Elemental shammy since they have reliable guaranteed crits in their base rotation, Fire mages, and Resto shammies. Should also point out that DoT crits by your buffed buddy do not proc this buff for the mage, so it's rather weak on casters like Shadow Priests.
- The level 45 talent tree: on ST, these talents sim within 1% of each other and Splitting Ice only wins if you have Mastery rating that allow it to pull ahead by virtue of Icicles. On slightly lower levels of Mastery or disproportionately higher levels of Haste, Freezing Rain wins simply because it pulls down the cooldown of Orb, which in turn procs extra Ice Lances for you. The same low Mastery argument applies for Comet Storm, however Comet Storm should be used with extreme caution if tanks are frequently repositioning a boss as it might entirely whiff. The best advice for this talent tree for ST would be to: not worry if you're a casual, or sim yourself if you're unsure. On heavy AoE however, Splitting Ice will win with Glacial Fragments over Freezing Rain nearly anytime in any relevant Shadowlands content (up to 10 targets) simply because each Ice Lance will trigger the explosions, allowing for the twice the explosions per GCD spent. 

On the legendary page, there needs to be a slight correction for this part: 
"Like single target,  Freezing Winds is not a terrible option for multi-target. However,  Glacial Fragments will pull drastically ahead as you add targets, up to 5 "

Again its cap is actually up to 10, since Splitting Ice can result in 10 explosions via Glacial Fragments.

[Kuni 28]

Incanter's Flow is heavily gear dependent in a method we're unsure of. With both profiles we had set up, it's been behind RoP to the point I'd recommend not taking it. But yes, with certain (unknown) gearsets, it can rise to nearly on par. I intend to change this to ? with a note to sim it when I finish my updates sometime this week.

Focus Magic is flat out bad if you're not trading it. While it is possible that there could be a potential benefit from giving it to someone else in terms of total raid DPS, this has had literally 0 research into it. This is partially due to simulation module quality differences, and partially out of very few people are going to want to give up personal DPS for raid DPS outside of the extreme top end, who aren't running Frost as-is. The benefit to Frost isn't the uptime, it's the functionally 10% Crit on a trade that will shove the spec up against Shatter cap. A single Focus Magic is anywhere from a 3 to 6% loss to the Frost Mage, depending on the profile given. That's a tall order for 5% Crit given to another class to make up for in terms of raid DPS. And that's under the assumption of 100% uptime.

L45, I'm really unsure where you're coming from. Every profile we've made has had the minimal of Mastery, to the point of even having 0 of it on the pre-raid. Splitting Ice is still top for all of them, by nearly double the margin than RoP vs IF is. SI's benefit is that it's multiplicative Lance damage with both Lonely Winter and Chain Reaction. The mythic profile runs 99 Mastery and 918 Haste, and FR is the lowest of the three. I don't think your theory holds water here.

Glacial Fragments is 5. While you could make the argument for 10, that's being disingenuous at best. Splitting Ice will cleave to the nearest target, and both will burst to the nearest 4 others (plus initial target). That will almost always be the same 5 targets on both explosions. There's no method in which you can cleave targets so far apart that you're getting two entirely different Fragment target sets.

[Guest Breaktheice]

Hey thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I've just re-simmed myself and I'm still perplexed about the level 45 row, because now I am simming exactly as you predicted. I sort of remembering Freezing Rain catching up well when they buffed it to 60% (similar to the "Orb" build in BFA) but it's just not holding up anymore. Thank you again, I must've ran the incorrect talent combinations earlier. 

Just wanted some clarification if you know: on 2 target cleave, would Freezing Winds outperform Glacial Fragments? I'm not sure if the guaranteed proc generation of Fingers in conjunction with Icy Propulsion and Thermal Void provides Freezing Winds an edge on such a setup. 

 

5 hours ago, Kuni said:

That will almost always be the same 5 targets on both explosions.

But wouldn't they explode twice? As in, if I have 5 targets under my Blizzard and cast a SI-Ice Lance:
> 2 of the 5 targets would get hit with the Lances. Each Lance explodes onto 4 targets near it, totaling 8 explosions, right? Or am I misunderstanding something?