Frost Mage GuideMidnight Overview
A Major Rework in Midnight
Frost Mage has received a full rework in the Midnight Alpha! The longstanding gameplay loop of managing Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze procs to optimize Shatter has been replaced with a new one revolving around generating Freezing stacks through spells like Frostbolt, Glacial Spike, and Frozen Orb; and then Shattering them with Ice Lance. Freezing and Shatter shouldn't cause as many situations where it's hard to rely on intuition to decide what is best to do next; although, Freezing having a short duration of 8 seconds will result in difficulty target swapping without losing a lot of stacks in some cases.
Another major component of the rework is the removal of Icy Veins and the new role of Ray of Frost as the primary offensive cooldown. This is a surprising change, but it actually works reasonably well. Ray of Frost deals a ton of damage on its own while generating a lot of guaranteed Freezing stacks. One aspect of having this as the new cooldown is that the Splintering Ray/Frigid Focus choice node is very impactful, but also means that you have to choose whether your major cooldown does any AoE damage at all.
As we are only at the beginning of a long Alpha and Beta cycle, some final aspects of this new design are still a work in progress. However, in general I think these changes result in a vast improvement for the specialization already and am looking forward to seeing it develop over coming months and to playing it when Midnight releases.
Talent Trees
Mage Tree
While not as huge as the rework to Frost Mage, there are still some significant changes in the general Mage class tree. In particular, a lot of defensive cooldowns and some utility have been removed, while the new arrangement of nodes and additional points at level 90 make everything else more accessible. While it's a little sad to lose so many spells here, Mages did have far more damage reducing cooldowns compared to most other classes, so it is a healthy direction for the game as a whole. Unfortunately, this does mean that Mages will struggle even more when it comes to taking sustained unavoidable damage, especially since some of the defensive options that were removed were also the ones best for dealing with sustained damage. Despite that, there are some great changes and additions in this new tree, some of which are discussed below.
The new Time Walk/Temporal Realignment choice node is very interesting. While Temporal Realignment is usually worse than using Alter Time optimally yourself, its automated nature makes it highly useful. Restoring 50% of your health is quite a lot and it's very easy to forget to use Alter Time before you've already dropped to low health and without external help, Mages do not have a lot of other options for healing themselves back up.
Frost Conditioning is easy to have a point available to put in and can make a huge difference in rare situations where you need to use Ice Cold or Ice Block twice in a relatively short window. One of the utility advantages Frost has had over Arcane and Fire is the chance to use Ice Block as an immunity twice in a row to trivialize certain raid mechanics, and now the number of situations where that is possible is increasing.
Unfortunately, Ice Floes has been removed from the Mage talent tree. According to the first set of development notes, this might be moving to the Frost tree as a reworked passive talent.
Spatial Manipulation allows having two charges of Blink. Historically, multiple charges was simply one of the advantages of Shimmer, but now it's available when you choose Blink for the shorter cooldown or to get out of roots and stuns. Note that for Frost Mage in particular, opting out of Shimmer can be risky because it is somewhat catastrophic if you have to cancel a Ray of Frost channel in Midnight.
With the removal of the damage reduction portion of Greater Invisibility, Master of Escape is a nice new addition to keep Greater Invisibility feeling worthwhile. With a cooldown of only a minute, this makes Greater Invisibility more relevant as a movement cooldown with Incantation of Swiftness, which was always one of the more fun ways to use the spell. In addition, this is great for open world content where just being able to get out of combat and mount can save you a lot of time.
Frost Tree
This tree is completely different from the Frost trees in Dragonflight and The War Within. Some big highlights include:
Ray of Frost is available early in the tree as the new primary cooldown with the removal of Icy Veins. It is positioned such that it is unavoidable and is then immediately upgraded by either Splintering Ray or Frigid Focus. This choice is somewhat problematic because of how impactful each is for AoE and single target, respectively. While some players may be disappointed to see this long channel as a required spell going forward, it does a lot of damage and sets up plenty of Freezing stacks, which makes it pretty fun to press. Lastly, there will be a major damage loss if Ray of Frost is canceled early. This vulnerability to movement and crowd control could conflict with the goal to make Frost an approachable specialization.
Summon Water Elemental is back for players that want to have the permanent pet! This pet still has Waterbolt, Freeze, and Water Jet, although Water Jet no longer grants Brain Freeze. This talent is not positioned in the tree such that it will be required, but it's also in a place where it will only ever be a 1 point investment to get it, since all viable builds will have at least one of the talents required to unlock it. Freeze is no longer a significant damage increase due to the Shatter rework, but it still provides a lot of free crowd control.
Icicles and Glacial Spike have been majorly reworked. Glacial Spike now replaces Frostbolt whenever you have 5 Icicles, and Icicles themselves are now purely generated at a passive constant rate that scales with haste. Glacial Spike also has a short cast time of 1.5 seconds, so now it fits very easily into the rotation (Frostbolt is 2 seconds).
Fractured Frost and Winter's Whisper provide intelligent cleave to Ice Lance and allow efficiently Shattering many targets at once. Thanks to these, you don't even really notice that Splitting Ice no longer affects Ice Lance.
Frozen Orb has been updated such that you now cannot cast it without a target, but it will pursue that target after a few seconds. This addressed one of Frost's longstanding issues, which was the inability to consistently have it hit all of its ticks when doing dungeons.
Cone of Frost turns Cone of Cold/Ice Nova into an AoE Freezing generator. Having this extra button is nice since casting Frostbolt in AoE situations doesn't feel great. Note that the cooldown of Cone of Cold is much shorter than Ice Nova, particularly when Time Manipulation is talented. This means that in dungeons, Frost Mages may either spend a lot of time at close range to cast Cone of Cold or opt into the weaker Ice Nova for easier gameplay.
Cold Snap and Glacial Bulwark make up an unavoidable choice node early in the tree. While Cold Snap is largely unchanged, Glacial Bulwark is looking quite strong since it provides much of the standard benefit of Cold Snap while providing a lot of extra flexibility in when exactly these defensive cooldowns are used. Having two charges of Ice Barrier means that you can get the maximum number of uses without actually having to press it immediately whenever it is available. In addition, you'll be able to more consistently use Ice Barrier right before big damage events, which will significantly decrease your chance of dying to them.
While I'm generally happy with the initial iteration of this tree, there are a few issues with it. First, the second tier of talents (rows 5, 6, and 7) is full of so many required talents, especially in AoE situations, that there isn't going to be a lot of choice and the 2 point nodes at the start of the capstone tier (rows 8, 9 and 10) greatly limit choice there as well. Row 9 and 10 have so many interesting and strong choices that Glacial Attunement and Rimecaster feel particularly bad with how boring and currently weak they are. Deep Shatter at least is very powerful and has a significant effect on your stat priority, so spending 2 points there doesn't feel as bad even if it is mandatory.
Apex Talents
The Apex Talents for Frost Mage in Midnight are called Hand of Frost.
Hand of Frost randomly provides additional passive stacks of Freezing and you consume prior stacks with Shatter.
Hand of Frost is a 2 point passive node that upgrades the effect above while also providing some bonus spell damage.
Hand of Frost is the final node, which provides a massive power boost to Ray of Frost with an extra charge and free Hand of Frost procs. This results in at least 16 stacks of Freezing being provided by each Ray of Frost cast and provides substantial cooldown flexibility with the extra Ray of Frost charge.
I would expect that all Frost Mages are always going to be using all four of these Apex Talents. The last one in particular is extremely powerful and helps to provide Frost with a much more flexible damage profile, since as long as you never have both charges ready, you can adjust where in a raid encounter or dungeon you use them without losing any overall uses.
Hero Talents
Frostfire retains its excellent visual theme, but has had many of the awkward buffs that affected the rotation negatively removed. The new column makes the tier set from The War Within Season 3 evergreen. Thanks to the removal of Winter's Chill, the rotational downside that came with tier set has been removed, as you no longer need to worry about making sure Winter's Chill is on the target before casting Glacial Spike. The other major changes to the tree are meant to interact with several aspects of the rotation:
Frostfire Empowerment also grants its benefits to Glacial Spike, which replaces Frostfire Bolt when you have 5 Icicles. While this is clearly powerful, it remains to be seen how often it will be utilized by Glacial Spike in practice and also how often it will be beneficial to try to save it for Glacial Spike and avoid casting Frostfire Bolt. Depending on how long it is worth saving it for Glacial Spike and how exactly the rotation for saving it plays out, this could either add some fun skill expression or result in problematic periods of using weird filler spells instead of Frostfire Bolt while waiting for Icicles to generate.
Flash Freezeburn immediately provides Frostfire Empowerment when using Ray of Frost, which is great especially when combined with Glaciate since it grants guaranteed opportunities to use Glacial Spike with Frostfire Empowerment. This talent also reduces the cooldown of Ray of Frost, which means that Frostfire and Spellslinger will have different cooldown timings to take advantage of. This can provide a reason to switch between both hero talents instead of only playing the one that is tuned higher for the patch, which is something Frost has been missing throughout The War Within.
Isothermic Core is the new capstone talent of the Frostfire tree. While this is a great talent thematically, the old small downside of requiring Comet Storm to be talented is now much more significant because Comet Storm itself is a capstone in the Frost tree and some of its strength was removed since Coldest Snap is no longer in the Frost tree.
Spellslinger on the other hand has been upgraded to have excellent synergy with the new Freezing and Shatter system. The new column contains Infused Splinters and Polished Focus to achieve this, but despite the additional stack Shattered by Ice Lance, Infused Splinters combined with Frost Splinter generation and Splinterstorm can result in some staggeringly quick Freezing stack generation, which can easily result in reaching the maximum 20 stacks on your target. This is especially common during Time Warp after casting Ray of Frost, when you won't be consuming any stacks until the channel finishes. This gameplay is problematic enough with sequences of 8 or more Ice Lances in a row being common that I expect we will probably see changes somewhere to limit this. That said, having a lot of interaction with the new core mechanics happening in this tree is a good thing.
Sequences of many consecutive Ice Lance casts can occur after Ray of Frost.
Significant Bugs and Potential Issues
While the general design of new Frost Mage is a huge step up from where it was, there are some issues with the specialization that I'd like to highlight here. We've already seen some fixes to issues between the first and second Alpha builds, so I look forward to seeing more of these addressed in the coming months.
The choice node with Splintering Ray and Frigid Focus is a little frustrating. On one hand, Splintering Ray is a lot of fun in AoE situations and the extreme damage of Frigid Focus is satisfying when fighting one target. On the other hand, Ray of Frost is the main damage cooldown for Frost in Midnight and it does nothing to help AoE baseline. While it is interesting to have some talent variation between single target and AoE encounters, I think this goes a little too far when it's often the case that both types of damage are extremely important, especially when there are plenty of other talents that affect Blizzard, Frozen Orb, and the number of targets Ice Lance can hit to encourage build diversity.
Mastery: Freeze and Shatter currently doesn't scale with the Mastery stat at all. This makes testing Frost a little weird right now, because any item with Mastery on it is very weak.
Overflowing Energy is currently triggered by Ice Lance instead of Frostbolt/Glacial Spike, but it still grants the critical strike chance to Frostbolt and Glacial Spike. While this is unlikely to break the rotation in any way with current tuning, you can end up in situations where you have 10 stacks and every Frostbolt and Glacial Spike will critically strike until you get an Ice Lance crit.
In some cases, it is still possible to miss Frozen Orb because it doesn't start fixating your target until 3 seconds after you cast it. The current behavior is probably sufficient to fix a lot of Frost's AoE issues, but it's just strange that it now requires it a target to cast and doesn't fixate them from the start.
Flash Freeze grants 3 stacks of Fingers of Frost when casting Glacial Spike. While you could interpret this as intended from how the talent reads, it seems much too strong given how good Fingers of Frost can be in Midnight.
Target swapping may be problematic due to the 8 second duration of Freezing stacks. While this duration resets when you apply new stacks or trigger Shatter on the target, the stacks quickly expire when you leave the targets alone, which will significantly reduce Frost's ability to target swap. Given that Frost has historically struggled to find its place in raids, I worry that this only gives people another reason to play Arcane or Fire instead.
Fingers of Frost only does anything if Freezing stacks are already present on the targets, in which case it will deal damage as if you Shattered those stacks. I don't think this is necessary a problem that needs to be fixed, but it does add some constraints to the rotation where (1) you may sit on Fingers of Frost procs sometimes while generating Freezing stacks instead of using them immediately and (2) where you may save Freezing stacks for Fingers of Frost instead of using them right away.
Stat Scaling
While it is hard to sure of stat scaling this early before a lot of rigorous research has been done to optimize the specialization, there are enough clear interactions with the different secondary stats that some discussion of relative secondary stat values is already possible.
Critical Strike Chance
In these first two builds of Alpha, crit has been by far the best stat for Frost Mage. Improved Shatter and Deep Shatter combine to significantly increase its value, especially because Shatter is already doing a large fraction of all damage. This has resulted in looking for crit on every single piece of gear. However, in the second set of development notes, Blizzard announced that Improved Shatter will become a 1 point node that will increase Shatter's critical strike chance by 50%. While we haven't seen this in game yet, if the 50% chance chance is additive then this sounds like a great change, since an additive 50% crit chance provides a more significant damage boost with low gear levels than the doubling of the crit chance did before and it also does not significantly scale up the value of the stat. With this change, crit would still likely be a strong stat, but it would be less likely to completely take over to the point that you stack it at the expense of everything else.
Haste
There are three offensive cooldowns durations for Frost Mage that do not scale with haste. While the haste scaling on some passive effects such as Master Lancer, Hand of Frost, and Winter's Blessing could be enough to keep the stat viable despite that, it's something that will need to be addressed if the stat turns out to be extremely weak because of it, especially because historically a lot of players have not enjoyed how Frost feels to play with low levels of haste.
Ray of Frost: Major damage cooldowns typically aren't affected by haste, but it is the case that this one is a little unusual. Cooldowns like Combustion and Arcane Surge grant more damage when you have more haste because you are able to fit more spells inside of the cooldown. With Ray of Frost, the duration is hasted, but there is no damage buff to take advantage of with more haste. While it makes sense to keep Frost as a 1 minute cooldown spec (50 seconds for Frostfire) so that it's easier to plan around when it will and won't have access to its cooldowns, this could make Haste a little weaker than other stats.
Frozen Orb: Similarly, there is no haste scaling here because Frozen Orb does not gain ticks with more haste. The only haste scaling that indirectly exists here is cooldown reduction from Spellfrost Teachings, but that only applies to Spellslinger. This will significantly reduce the value of haste for Frost Mages, especially in AoE situations and for Frostfire. This difference in haste scaling could even result in a large damage differential between Spellslinger and Frostfire in AoE situations, particularly when Time Warp is active. Note that if Frozen Orb were given its hasted cooldown that was present in the first Alpha build, it would be necessary to also have the cooldown reduction of Spellfrost Teachings and Glaciate be proportional to the hasted cooldown duration instead of a flat number of seconds to prevent Frost's haste scaling from getting out of hand.
Cone of Cold and Ice Nova (with Cone of Frost): While this not scaling with haste will further reduce its value in AoE situations, Cone of Cold's cooldown is only 7 seconds with Time Manipulation, so full haste scaling here could potentially be a little much, especially when it can also apply a root with Freezing Cold.
Mastery
Although Mastery: Freeze and Shatter is currently broken and doesn't scale with the mastery stat at all, we can still see the spells that it currently affects.
Spells that Freeze: Frostbolt/Frostfire Bolt, Flurry, Glacial Spike, and Ray of Frost
Spells that Shatter: Ice Lance, Comet Storm, Meteor, and Shatter itself
While this list is relatively faithful to the tooltip, it is problematic that there is no scaling here for Blizzard, Frozen Orb, and the passive damage from many of the damage effects in the Frostfire and Spellslinger trees. This will cause the stat to be weak in AoE scenarios and could result in vastly different values of mastery between Frostfire and Spellslinger, which was a problem for all of The War Within where one or both of them didn't want the stat at all. Missing spells like Blizzard, Frozen Orb, Cone of Cold, Ice Nova, Hand of Frost, and the other passive effects can all correctly be categorized into being "spells that Freeze" anyway, since they are either caused by other spells on the list or can directly generate stacks of Freezing.
Addons
In Midnight, the significant addon restrictions haven't restricted my ability to play Frost Mage much in the Alpha. The main limitation of the current Blizzard UI that could be problematic is debuff tracking. Specifically, the most important thing to pay attention to rotationally in Midnight is your Freezing stacks. Currently, the only good way to track Freezing, especially in AoE, is by using the debuff icon shown above the nameplates. This has worked well for me during the Alpha so far because there aren't any other debuffs to distract me and I naturally keep my eyes on the nameplates, but in content that is more difficult the lack of customization here could be a problem. A secondary issue is that there are only two built in Fingers of Frost indicators and it stacks up to three times.
Conclusion
Overall, this rework to Frost Mage has finally resolved a lot of Frost's longstanding problems. Blizzard has stated that they want Frost to be an approachable specialization, and this rework certainly helps to achieve that. The new gameplay feels much more simple and intuitive, although there are still opportunities for skill expression, particularly when it comes to dealing with movement while having to channel Ray of Frost and in ensure that no stacks of Freezing are wasted by overcapping them. I look forward to playing Frost Mage in Midnight, especially if some of its remaining issues are resolved.
