Frost Mage Overview
Some of our class writers have written up their first impressions of the 12.1 class changes and tier set reviews. We've listed all of them below.
Some of these articles were released earlier than others, and may be out of date now.
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Protection Warrior
In 12.1, the main change coming for Mages are substantial defensive adjustments. However, for Frost Mage, the changes actually make the specialization weaker defensively. Mages have struggled to survive in Midnight so far, but Frost Mage was in a better spot than Arcane and Fire thanks to having access to two charges of Ice Barrier and Ice Cold. Going forward with the current 12.1 changes, Frost may actually be the squishiest Mage specialization once again.
Class Changes for Frost Mage
Developers' notes: We're making some adjustments to Mage defensives with the goal of improving Mage survivability as a whole and slightly reducing the power of Glacial Bulwark.
Developers' notes: We are continuing to iterate on Mages' defensive capabilities based on PTR playtesting and feedback. We are unifying the functionality of Improved Barrier to give all specs an additional charge of their Barrier spell, plus one "rider" effect that is spec-specific. Additionally, Arcane Mages have a new, unique defensive talent in their Specialization tree called Refractive Images.
New Talent: Improved Warding – Damage taken from area of effect attacks reduced by 4%.
Temporal Realignment has been updated – Now immediately heals 20% of your health and heals an additional 30% over 6 seconds.
Improved Ice Barrier has been redesigned – Ice Barrier gains an additional charge and reduces your physical damage taken by 10%.
In 12.1, Blizzard's stated goal is provide overall defensive buffs to Mage and to correct for the defensive gap that existed between the specializations. Frost has been in the best spot due to Glacial Bulwark granting two charges of Ice Cold and two charges of Ice Barrier, which allowed significant flexibility in the timing of these defensive spells without losing overall usages. Due to this, the developer goals are good and understandable, but sadly the defensive changes in 12.1 are arguably a nerf to Frost specifically. This isn't great because while it was better than Arcane and Fire, even Frost Mages struggled to survive frequently in Season 1 compared to other classes.
Improved Warding is a good addition, as previously the passive effective health of Mages has been quite low. The benefit provided by Avoidance-like effects can be inconsistent because it only works on "AoE" damage, but as long as any scary damage events that risk instantly killing players through Ice Barrier are affected, it will help significantly. As far as the rest of the changes go, things aren't going to be getting better for Frost. The Temporal Realignment change just feels like it will make it less reliable to prevent unexpected deaths, which is the main strength it has over just using Alter Time manually. The only situation where this could possibly be a buff is that it may reduce how much overhealing the Mage receives because there is a chance to take more damage before all of the healing is applied, so I don't really see how this is "improving Mage survivability." I've personally recommended this talent in my guides because I think Alter Time can be difficult to use optimally, but going forward it's going to be hard to continue to recommend it. Lastly, one of the problems Frost is currently facing is that Spellslinger (which is currently Frost's strongest option) has lackluster defensive bonuses compared to Sunfury and Frostfire. In particular, Reactive Barrier is just a worse version of Imbued Warding. The other issue is that Ice Barrier is just worse than the other barriers. It provides a reduction to Physical damage taken when so much of the scary damage in this game is Magic. To make matters worse, Improved Ice Barrier previously gave Ice Barrier a bonus of 5% HP to its absorb that is now being removed. The way things are looking, Frost is just going to continue to struggle to survive in Season 2.
Frost
All damage dealt increased by 4%.
Apex Talent: Hand of Frost (Rank 2) now grants 0.5%/1% increased spell damage (was 1%/2%).
Developers' notes: Hand of Frost in combination with Frost's Hero Talents was providing more burst than we'd like.
While overshadowed by community discussion about the defensive changes, there are some offensive changes coming to Frost Mage in 12.1. I don't love losing some burst damage from the Ray of Frost window, but the design intention here is understandable: Ray of Frost being a charged cooldown has given Frost a lot of flexibility and burst and it has certainly contributed to Frost being better than Arcane and Fire in Season 1. However, it is disappointing to not see some other changes to Frost as I have seen a lot of discussion about people in the community finding the rotation a bit boring, particularly because the rotation doesn't change much when fighting one target or multiple targets. In both cases you're mostly just managing Freezing stacks, which isn't that popular of a mechanic due to the difficulty of tracking debuff stacks on multiple targets. In particular, if you want to be fully optimal, the Freezing mechanic requires swapping targets continuously to make sure no stacks are being wasted. This includes constantly watching the stacks and durations of the debuff on all enemy nameplates and that just isn't gameplay that some long-time Frost Mages are fond of. Thankfully, the rotation in Season 2 will be a little more dynamic with the new tier set that is being added for Season 2.
Tier Set
As of the updates in the July 8th PTR build, the Frost Mage Season 2 set bonuses are:
2 Set Bonus - Each stack of Freezing Shattered has a 5% chance to generate an Icicle. Glacial Spike damage increased by 25%.
4 Set Bonus - Casting Glacial Spike has a chance to rapidly generate 5 Icicles over 1 sec. Shatter damage increased by 10%.
The Season 2 tier set for Frost Mage will be focused around Glacial Spike. At their core, these bonuses will mainly be felt through the increased frequency of Glacial Spike casts. Because the Frostbolt button is simply replaced with Glacial Spike when it's available, there will be times where this effect doesn't feel very noticeable rotationally, but it is certainly going to be providing more gameplay variation than a lot of the recent passive tier sets Frost Mages have had. Against weaker enemies such as in solo content, this is probably going to feel great since the difference in damage between a Glacial Spike and a Frostbolt is extremely noticeable there.
The biggest negative with the design of this set is that the procs are infrequent and feel very inconsistent. A reason for this is because it procs at 2 RPPM when the RPPM system does not interact well with infrequent trigger attempts; that system is designed to normalize the proc rate when dealing with effects that trigger from almost any cast or damage event the player does. To expand a little on what this actually means, the trigger from consuming a Glacial Spike has 2 RPPM, but due to how the RPPM system interacts with infrequent trigger attempts, it could lead to unintuitive behavior. Without going into the actual math behind RPPM, the following are true when this is analyzed.
When you get a free Glacial Spike from this effect, waiting a couple of spells before casting it will result in a higher chance to get another proc on the free cast (especially if you have a lot of Haste). It may or may not be significant enough have an impact on the optimal rotation, but it will feel a little bad knowing that casting a sequence like Glacial Spike > Ice Lance > Glacial Spike is being wasteful in terms of this set bonus.
The actual number of triggers will be significantly lower than 2 procs per minute. This isn't a huge problem because the 2 RPPM number isn't shown in game, but it could lead to some confusion when players see the number listed when reading the spell tooltip on a website like this one.
RPPM does include a bad luck protection system, but that system won't kick in until around 13 Glacial Spikes have been cast without a proc because there is a cap on how much progress a single cast can make towards activating the system. To put that in perspective, on many raid fights in Season 1 Frost Mages don't even get that many casts in total over the whole fight.
