We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Frost Mage in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Frost Mage!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Mage Tier Set
Why You Should Play Frost Mage in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Overall, Frost Mage is mostly unchanged from Season 1 of Dragonflight to Season 2. If you liked Frost Mage in Season 1, you will probably continue to enjoy it in Season 2, but many of the issues with the specialization have not been addressed. The new Frost Mage set bonus helps to address some of Frost’s rotational concerns, but they are not completely resolved and talent diversity is still quite limited. Despite this, Frost Mages still excel at battlefield control and two-target cleave.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Frost Mage in Dragonflight Season 2
Frost Mage Utility
Frost Mages continue to bring desirable utility to their group in Dragonflight Season 2. This includes helpful crowd control, important throughput buffs (Arcane Intellect and Time Warp), situational spells like Remove Curse, and out of combat utility such as Conjure Refreshment, Teleport spells, and Portal spells.
Frost Mages have some of the best battlefield control in the game. The Frost Mage AoE rotation involves nearly 100% uptime of both Blizzard and Frozen Orb, both of which continuously slow all targets they hit. Additionally, several situationally strong active crowd control abilities such as Blast Wave, Ring of Frost, and Dragon’s Breath are also available that can be used to stop casts or keep targets where you want them.
While Frost Mages continue to struggle with sustaining themselves against consistent damage sources, they are still exceptionally good at surviving against brief instances of high damage with defensive cooldowns such as Ice Block (twice with Cold Snap), Greater Invisibility, Alter Time, Mirror Image, and Ice Barrier.
Finally, Mages continue to have exceptional mobility from many sources including Blink/Shimmer, Ice Floes, Alter Time, Displacement, and Incantation of Swiftness.
Simple Rotation and Strong Two-Target Damage
While the rotation can be punishing, Frost Mage is relatively easy to play. As long as you understand that it is important to make good use of Shatter, avoid downtime, and utilize your procs effectively, Frost Mage can perform relatively well. Frost Mages also excel against two-targets thanks to Splitting Ice without really having to sacrifice anything for it.
Using Fingers of Frost in the Rotation
While it’s surprising to have to list this as a reason to play Frost Mage in Dragonflight Season 2, the specialization has recently been plagued by rotations that ignore Fingers of Frost completely and only use Ice Lance after Flurry. The new set bonuses Mage Frost 10.1 Class Set 2pc and Mage Frost 10.1 Class Set 4pc appear to have been specifically designed to discourage this type of rotation. While they don’t fully kill the “No Fingers of Frost” rotations, it appears that it will at least be competitive to play the specialization normally and use Fingers of Frost procs liberally.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Frost Mage in Dragonflight Season 2
Lack of Changes
While this might be appealing to some players, I think it is hugely problematic that Frost Mages continue to see no significant changes since the talent trees were finalized during the Dragonflight beta. The specialization does not really function on any encounter with downtime, struggles to maintain uptime with its AoE abilities in dungeons, and has little variety in talent choices. The lack of attention that the specialization has gotten from the development team is the biggest reason not to play Frost Mage right now.
Being Punished by Downtime
One of the biggest weaknesses Frost has had for many years is its flat damage profile and reliance on Icy Veins uptime to be competitive with other specializations. Any mistakes in the rotation will result in lower Icy Veins uptime due to Thermal Void and Icy Propulsion. While mistakes causing this to occur isn’t necessarily a problem, the more significant issue is that movement or other forced downtime will often cause Icy Veins to expire early without the Frost Mage being able to do anything about it. It is relatively common for bosses in raids to have intermissions or short periods when the boss cannot be targeted at all that will disproportionally punish Frost Mages and cause the spec to perform poorly.
Problems with AoE
Frost Mages rely on continuously hitting all enemy targets with Blizzard and Frozen Orb to deal effective AoE damage. While ground-based abilities like this are not uncommon in World of Warcraft, Frost Mages take it to another level because Frozen Orb continuously moves and slows down in an awkward way. Because of this, it is very common that targets will move in a way that each Frozen Orb gets far fewer than the maximum 20 ticks per target. This is problematic because Frost Mages are not so strong at AoE that they will still compete with other classes while losing ticks like this. Additionally, it results in a wildly inconsistent experience when playing with different tanks because how the tank positions enemies has a huge impact on how many ticks of these AoE abilities you will lose.
Additionally, in Season 2 the new Frost Mage set bonus is substantially worse for AoE, since the only AoE benefit it provides is the new Shattered Ice explosion that triggers when casting Flurry. This does not do enough damage to keep up with the old set bonus, Mage Frost Class Set 4pc, which provided consistent damage in both single target and AoE.
Talent Options that cannot Compete
Like in Season 1, Frost Mages continue to have many iconic talents that are so numerically weak that they are not really options worth considering in most cases. Some of the biggest examples are Incanter’s Flow, Glacial Spike, and Ray of Frost.
Rune of Power
Rune of Power has always been a divisive talent for Mages and historically, many Mages preferred to play Frost partially because Incanter’s Flow was better than Rune of Power. Since Shadowlands, the change to Rune of Power to activate for free when Icy Veins is cast combined with sources of cooldown reduction such as Icy Propulsion and Shifting Power have all but deleted Incanter’s Flow as a talent because of how high Rune of Power uptime has gotten. For players that do not want to use Rune of Power, it seems that Frost Mage will continue to be an unappealing choice in Season 2.
Glacial Spike
As I discussed last time in November, Glacial Spike is an iconic talent for Frost Mages that continues to not be an option. I’m not going to go into the same deep level of detail about this problem again (the explanation is the same as the last post), but the core issues remain:
- Without Glacial Spike talented, casting Flurry and then Ice Lance will cause all stored Icicles to benefit from Shatter thanks to Winter’s Chill. With Glacial Spike, any extra Icicles that are launched will typically not benefit from Shatter.
- Casting Glacial Spike takes time, which is time spent not generating important resources such as Icicles and Brain Freeze procs.
- Icicles in Dragonflight are abundant, which makes it difficult to have a charge of Flurry available right away for every Glacial Spike cast.
For these reasons, if you want to play with Glacial Spike, Frost Mage continues to be an unattractive option in Dragonflight Season 2. Hopefully down the road, something can be done to save this iconic Frost Mage spell.
“No Fingers of Frost” Rotations are not Quite Dead
Despite the design of the new set bonuses Mage Frost 10.1 Class Set 2pc and Mage Frost 10.1 Class Set 4pc, it can still be slightly better to completely ignore Fingers of Frost procs and only use one or two casts of Ice Lance after Flurry to ensure that Icicles will still benefit from Shatter. This is mostly a problem because Frostbolt damage has become too high relative to Ice Lance, especially thanks to the existence of talents like Deep Shatter. Rotations that ignore a core proc that is highlighted by the Blizzard UI and has been an important part of the specialization for 15 years are not intuitive and shouldn’t be optimal.
About the Author
Dorovon is a Mage theorycrafter in the Altered Time Discord and a SimulationCraft developer. Additionally, he is a current analyst and former raider for BDG‘s raid progression team and has played all three Mage specializations in the Race to World First.
For more information on playing Frost Mage, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Frost Mage Guide
