Frost Mage Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Dragonflight 10.2.5
Legendary Powers are targetable, unique effects that you can imbue certain base items with through the Runecarving system. In Shadowlands, these enable you to customize your Frost Mage, drastically improving your performance, and are arguably the most important aspect of your gear.
The purpose of this page is to help you pick the right legendary powers (and item slots for them) for your character, depending on the content you are interested in.
Introduction: Legendaries in Shadowlands
By doing Torghast, you will obtain Soul Ash, which can
be combined with crafted base items and Runecarving to produce a
legendary item of your choosing. Due to the time-gated nature of Soul Ash, and
the limit of one equipped legendary, you should know which to craft for your
chosen content. For more information about the systems involved, please refer
to the Runecarving and Legendary Powers pages:
Unity
Unity is unlocked during the 9.2 storyline. This grants you access
to your Covenant's legendary power, and is equippable with a normal legendary.
Wearing a piece with Unity on it will grant you
Sinful Delight,
Heart of the Fae,
Harmonic Echo, or
Death's Fathom
depending on what Covenant you currently belong to, and will update as you
swap between them. A piece with Unity on it should be equipped at all times.
To wear two legendaries, you must specifically wear Unity, and not
the Covenant power legendary.
Best Legendaries for Frost Mage
Focus | Legendary | Slots | Source |
---|---|---|---|
Single Target | ![]() |
Waist or Legs | Torghast, Mort'regar, layer 3 or higher |
Multi-target | ![]() |
Legs or Back | Torghast, Coldheart Interstitia, layer 3 or higher. |
Mythic+ as Necrolord | ![]() |
Chest or Cloak | Nalthor the Rimebinder |
Cleave, Burst, or Funnel Damage | ![]() |
Head or Hands | Sire Denathrius |
Solo | ![]() |
Shoulder, Head, or Neck | Honor PvP Vendor |
The reason this table is split like this, and not by Raiding
and Mythic+, is that Glacial Fragments is so ridiculously
good on any form of multi-target, while basically being as though you are not
even wearing a legendary while on single target. Likewise,
Slick Ice
is entirely useless on multi-target. Your decisions will be related to what type
of content you are doing, and in the case of M+, what type of damage your group
needs more of, and what Covenant you are.
Best Single Target Legendaries for Frost Mage
Slick Ice is the best raw single target legendary. Contrary to the
tooltip, this increases
Frostbolt's damage by 3% per stack, and has a
hidden effect of reducing Frostbolt's global cooldown by the same amount of
cast speed increase. This allows for it to not hit the GCD hard cap while
under other effects, such as
Time Warp.
While Slick Ice is the best in pure single target, very few fights
are purely single target. It may be advisable to instead craft
Freezing Winds, which is a fair drop on single target, for a sizable
2-target gain.
Temporal Warp is another option, although it skews more
towards single target performance than cleave.
Best Multi-Target Legendaries for Frost Mage
Glacial Fragments is the best on any form of multi-target, at the
cost of being functionally useless on single target. This AoE burst cannot
Shatter, and
Splitting Ice will trigger it off both targets.
Like single target, Freezing Winds is not a terrible option for
multi-target. However,
Glacial Fragments will pull drastically ahead as
you add targets. Your decision between them all is a matter of
trade-offs, and personal decisions as to what sort of content you wish to be
proficient at.
For Necrolord specifically, Cold Front pulls ahead in
Mythic+ due to the fact that
Deathborne allows your
Frostbolt
to cleave 3 targets, and apply 3 stacks of Cold Front. This will get you a
Frozen Orb every ten Frostbolts into an AoE pack, which is a sizable
AoE increase while Deathborne is active.
Best Torghast Legendaries for Frost Mage
Any of the above will be suitable for Torghast if you are only
able to craft one legendary. However, Grisly Icicle is very likely
one of the best due to the fact that it grants you unbreakable
Frost Nova for 10 full seconds of
Shatter on entire packs of
mobs. This can be broken by party members, so is best used while solo only. It
can mean that with
Ice Ward or
Tundrid Phial, you can hold
down an absurd amount of mobs for an extremely long time, or even indefinitely
should you have enough stacks of Tundrid Phial, however.
What Slot Should Legendaries by Crafted For?
- Head, chest, legs are the highest stat budget slots.
- Shoulders, feet, hands, and waist are also identical, although lower budget items.
- Cloak and wrists should never be made.
- Jewelry has a unique stat budget, as it has no primary stat and is hard to slot into this chart.
Season 4 has the interesting property that your legendary pieces will actually be your lowest item level pieces, so you should craft them on the lowest item budget slots possible, preferably one with a socket. However, given that Season 4 is not a serious progression season, it is likely fine that you keep your Season 3 slots, and not worry about the cost of rebuying your legendaries.
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 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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