Thread: Frost Dps Pve(3.3.3 Updated)

Introduction
The bulk of this information was pulled from the Raiding as Frost thread which contained a lot of obsolete information after the 3.08 and 3.12 changes. Patch 3.3 also brought in some significant changes to our Water Elemental (WE) requiring a re-write of the 3.2 thread.

Right off the bat is has to be said that Frost Mage DPS in a raiding environment is pretty poor. Every class (including hybrids) can spec for more dps than deep frost (source). If you want pure DPS as a Mage, Arcane (57/3/11) has been on top for a while. But at least you won’t get instantly kicked out of 5-man heroics anymore just for summoning a water elemental. As of the time of this posting we’re still uncovering more 3.3 gear every week, but using best in slot (BiS) 3.2 gear with the patch 3.3 mechanics puts Deep Frost (20/0/51) ~15.8% behind the top Mage build and ~22.3% behind the top dps class (51/18/2 Rogue).

So why do some of us still raid as frost mages? That’s a difficult to answer question – at least here at EJ. For some of us it isn’t about the absolute min/max of the class, it often has more to do with other intangible benefits or personal interests. So, within that context, this is a place to discuss the min/max within the Frost build itself.

So with that out of the way – how do we work with what we have?


Talent choices
20/0/51 - top “deep frost” DPS spec.

Frost has a set of 42 core dps talents which complement each other, but eventually you are left with a few non-DPS options in both the Frost Tree and a secondary tree. The requirements to be considered a deep frost raid build are:

• 5/5 Improved Frostbolt
• 3/3 Ice Shards
• 3/3 Precision (you may be able to scrape a point off if you end up significantly over the hit cap – but that is due to sub-optimal gearing)
• 3/3 Piercing Ice
• 1/1 Icy Veins
• 3/3 Frost Channeling
• 3/3 Shatter
• 1/1 Cold Snap
• 3/3 Winter’s Chill
• 5/5 Artic Winds
• 2/2 Empowered Frostbolt
• 2/2 Fingers of Frost
• 1/1 Summon Water Elemental
• 1/3 Enduring Winter (The issue with replenishment munching has been fixed, but with the new glyph there’s no reason to take more than 1 point here. Even with 1/3 you will be able to keep replenishment up full time.)
• 5/5 Chilled to the Bone
• 1/1 Deep Freeze

Supplemental Frost Spells:
In addition to the 42 core DPS talents you have to choose at least 9 more (51 total points) to get through Deep Freeze. At least 3 of these points have to spend in the first 5 tiers. Some mix of the following is generally considered the best option.

• 2/3 Icy Floes is only a dps talent in that it reduces the cool down of icy veins. I’d consider these throw away points, but there just aren’t any better options.
• 2/2 Arctic Reach for added range
• 1/1 Ice Barrier is for survival (although it is a DPS/DPM loss to keep it up consistently)
• 1/3 Improved Blizzard provides some snare on your AOE attack for trash control
• 3/3 Brain Freeze is a fairly controversial talent. It provides instant, mana-free fireballs, but these fireballs suffer from a lack of scaling. The talent does provide a very small DPS increase for mages geared at about iLevel 226 and below. Somewhere around average iLevel 232 it becomes DPS neutral and at iLevel 245 and above is a very small DPS loss if cast as part of the standard rotation. But it is also useful for improved DPM and mobility. Even with BiS T9 gear it is only about a 20 DPS loss to cast the mana free, instant fireballs over another frostbole. Once you get 2pc T10 though, it's a nice dps talent again. If there were any better options we could consider dropping the talent, but there aren’t any better options. Whether a player takes BF or not is largely a personal preference.

Other Frost spells considered useful but not taken:

• x/3 Ice Floes is thought of as a DPS talent by decreasing the cool down of your Icy Veins spell. Icy Veins gets a cooldown reduction of just 36 seconds if you spend 3 talent points on it which doesn't really synch with anything especially given variable fight lengths. Generally you will get 2 uses of Icy Veins on very short encounters and 3 uses on longer ones. Decreasing the cool down of Icy Veins further may result in an additional cast that you would not have had without the talent, but only if the fight length hits that 12 second window. But on builds that don’t take Brain Freeze/Spell Impact – you have to spend your points somewhere. This is probably better than not taking anything at all, it's just not worth much (if anything) in terms of dps.
• x/3 Permafrost is generally thought of as a “flavor” spell. It is useful on trash and PvP, but does not impact boss fights or increase DPS. The only reason for a raiding frost mage to take any points here is for specific fights where the mage is responsible to kite a mob (although they have to unglyph their frostbolt to do so), or encounters where the reduced healing may be important.
• x/3 Improved Blizzard – it is useful to take 1 point in the talent to allow Fingers of Frost (FoF) to proc off your AOE’s, increasing your AOE DPS nicely. But taking more than 1 point here only increases the slow effect.

The non-used Frost Spells

• 0/3 Frostbite - it used to be required to take 1 point in the talent to allow Fingers of Frost (FoF) to proc off your Improved Blizzard, but it's not required anymore. There are a few encounters where this could be useful, but it’s generally considered bad manners to unexpectedly root things in a raid. Rooted mobs will attack the player with the highest threat in their range - it seems like more often than not this happens to be some random healer. It's great for PvPish builds, just not universally useful. Use it at your own risk.
• 0/2 Frost Warding – we don’t use Frost/Ice Armor for PvE so no sense improving them. Even in the few encounters where we may cast Frost/Fire Ward (when sitting behind the ice block on Sapphiron and you don’t have anything else to do), we really don’t get any use out of the mana this talent would return.
• 0/3 Improved Cone of Cold is a PvP talent. You will rarely find yourself in range to use this spell when raiding. It is also less DPS than frostbolt spam even when fully talented.
• 0/3 Frozen Core is a pretty useless talent even for PvP. You shouldn’t be taking significant damage when raiding. Even with 3/3 points here you will still get 1 shotted by any boss and most trash.
• 0/2 Cold as Ice was useful pre-3.3 because it reduced the cool down of your WE, but with the new glyph it would only be used to reduce the cool down of your cold snap. Even with 2 points its unlikely that you would be able to cast cold snap twice in an encounter to get the use out of the talent.
• 0/2 Shattered Barrier – PvP again. This one can cause some unexpected rooted mobs again (see frostbite above), and that's not generally a good thing. Consider that you pull agro on some trash. Even with your barrier up you will likely get 1 shotted – shattering your barrier. So if you were standing with other ranged/healers even if they are below the tanks threat, they will get attacked if they are in range of the mob you just rooted. You are better to take 1 death than 2.


For a sub-spec, anything that includes 3/3 Torment the Weak (TTW) and 1/1 Focus Magic will give you the biggest DPS gain – nothing in the first 4 or 5 levels of the fire tree compares and we’ve exhausted all the useful DPS talents in the Frost tree. With the changes made in 3.08, you can generally count on the boss to be permanently slowed by the tank, using things like Thunder Clap or Infected Wounds. So even though Frost Mages cannot slow the boss themselves (although Arcane mage’s “slow” spell does work – they just never cast it in PvE), TTW is invaluable for Frost Mages and will generally be kept up all the time by the main or OT (Source).

• 5/5 ??? Nothing on the first tier of Arcane is useful for Frost mages, but you have to put 5 points here somewhere, pick anything.
• 3/5 to 5/5 Arcane Concentration provides a lot of additional mana efficiency – but that is generally only needed on extended trash pulls with lots of AoE. If you don’t take Magic Absorbtion below then you’ll likely put 5 points here.
• 2/2 Magic Absorption is a great survival talent and at the moment I'd say you should prefer 2 points in this to 5/5 Arcane Concentration because the extra mana just isn’t useful, but that may depend your own gearing as much as anything.
• 1/1 Focus Magic is a nice dps increase for yourself and could be even better to other classes (especially Fire/FrostFire Mages). It’s also generally expected that all Mages (except FrostFire) will spec for this talent to help out Raid utility for someone else.
• 1/3 - 3/3 Student of the Mind – now that additional Sprit = Crit, this is actually a DPS talent. It can be very slightly better than Spell Impact depending on your exact gear and other talents & glyphs – but the difference is small – like 1 or 2 DPS total. I recommend 3/3 SotM for DPS reasons, but the gain is quite small. If you want to free up 2 talent points to get some more snares/roots from the frost tree go ahead, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
• 1/3 – 3/3 Spell Impact is incredibly poor for damage, per point it's worth maybe 3-5 dps (same as Student of the Mind). But you have to spend a total of 15 points somewhere to get to the next level in the Arcane Tree. Some DPS (no matter how small) is probably better than none.
• 0/2 Magic Attunement grants, on Amplify Magic friendly fights at least, an extra +127 healing for the raid. But this is generally better to be provided by Arcane mages who take the talent for extended range anyway. Still if you want to take this over Spell Impact or SotM then go ahead.
• 3/3 Torment the Weak (TTW), finally a great spell. This is a solid 12% boost to our main nuke, and it even applies to any fireballs we may be casting from Brain Freeze too. This is the whole reason to drop 18+ points into the Arcane tree.
• 0/2 Improved Counterspell is great for PvP and even useful in niche encounters like the faction champions in ToC. Raiding Frost Mages generally don’t take it, or get any use out of it, but you could move 2 of those points from SotM or Spell Impact down to here if you really wanted to.

You effectively have 2 talent points to play with somewhere in your build. Although the DPS gains are small, Maxing Ice Floes, Spell Impact and SotM are generally your best bets dps wise. Many people play frost mages because they enjoy more of the snares and roots that Frost Mages provide. If you want to spend 2 points on something like permafrost, more imp blizzard, shattered barrier, or frostbite you won’t really notice any dps change by sliding 2 points out of the arcane tree.


Glyphs
Glyph of Frostbolt is your first choice. Yes you lose your snare so you maybe have some adjustments to make in your grinding and pvp behavior (i.e. begin with a FrostFire bolt when soloing). Keep in mind that this does effectively kill your ability to be a designated kiter on raids. I keep a few of these in my backpack in case I need to cancel it mid-raid and apply it again later.

Glyph of Molten Armor is your second choice. When raid buffed you are unlikely to be wanting for mana, and even if you're forced to use Mage Armor for the added spell resistance in certain situations, there won't be any additional benefit in glyphing it.

Glyph of Eternal Water is your third choice for maximum DPS. Yes the loss of a ranged AOE root can hurt, but a permanent WE can do more than 1000dps now that they scale with their masters stats.

Glyph of Ice Lance may be valuable as well. But the analysis has shown that even with the glyph, casting an Ice Lance is still a DPS loss when compared to pure Frostbolt spam. (Source) But in cases where you may cancel your Glyph of Frostbolt to do some dedicated kiting (Blood Beasts on Saurafang) then this would be your next best option.

Just for the sake of completeness -
Glyph of Fireball was taken by some Frost Mages in place of the WE glyph back in 3.0 days. But with the 3.08 changes to TTW, frost builds that attempt to spec into the Fire tree for Ignite are far behind Frost/TTW builds.


Rotation
I wouldn’t insult you by calling it a “rotation”. Frost Mages just spam Frostbolts without much regard to anything else. Deep Freeze is the main exception – cast deep freeze every time its up. The only other exception is Brain Freeze Fireballs - they are very minor gain or loss early in your life as a level 80, but once you get 2pc T10, they are totally worth it again - cast these every time they're up too.

Depending on your gear, Brain Freeze fireballs may be a very small DPS gain or a very small DPS loss at very high gear levels. At very low gear levels (Pre-Naxx gear) you might will also want to use Ice Lance on the second charge of Fingers of Frost instead of another Frostbolt, but at higher gear levels (average gear above iLevel 200) it will be more dps to just keep spamming Frostbolt. Many Frost Mages who aren't into T10 level gear yet will largely ignore the Fireball proc’s and save them in case the encounter forces them to move. The 2pc T10 set bonus is just plain ***y though. "Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 5 sec when the effect of the talent is consumed."

On trash, Blizzard will result in higher overall dps than pure Frostbolt spam on as few as 3 targets while spreading threat more evenly. Due to the interaction between FoF and Imp Blizzard you'll see a very high number of crits. Blizzard is also the quickest way to apply 5 stacks of Winter's Chill, and of course it applies to every target hit.


Use of cooldowns
The most important part is to use your cool downs in coordination with Blood Lust/Heroism. Many guilds will use Blood Lust near the opening of a fight in order to allow all the DPS to time their cool downs around it easily. If you know that your guild will be using Blood Lust at some later in the fight, be sure to use your cold snap to synchronize your cool downs later in the fight.

Summon Water Elemental starts a global cooldown, and the pet itself can gain stats dynamically. This means that you'll want to summon it and buff it before the pull and then make it attack your target immediately (see macro below).

The First thing to do after the pull is to get a stack of 5 Winter's Chill on the boss; I'm personally using Blizzard for this and cutting it short after 5 hits. Then follow with your Icy Veins/Consumable/Trinket macro. Mirror Images are best to stack with a clicky spellpower trinket since that is the only stat they scale with. You may want to cast them just before the pull to save the Global Cooldown (GCD) though. The dps they gave you is pretty minor - they are used as more of a way to normalize your threat early in the encounter where a miss by the tank may allow you to pull threat. If you have a second clicky trinket use it immediately after the first trinket is done.

I generally cold snap immediately after using my macro (haven’t gotten it to work as the last item in my macro for some reason) so that I can cast icy veins again soon.

Of course, bosses with phases, portals and so on might need a different approach. Make sure before a boss pull that you understand what length timers each boss ability is on, then you can plan your cooldowns around these.


Gear and stat weighting
In T6/Sunwell gear, using an 18-0-53 spec, Rawr showed the following stat values on a raid buffed 5 minute fight (3.08 numbers).
1 hit rating = 1.11 dps (until capped*)
1 spell power = 0.99 dps
1 haste rating = 0.64 dps
1 crit rating = 0.36 dps
1 intellect = 0.11 dps
*note that spirit was not a DPS stat until 3.1

For 3.1.3 gear and mechanics the best DPS deep frost build with 1/3 Enduring Winter is 20/0/51
When equipped with the best Naxx-25 gear (T7.5, including hardmodes), the best DPS those values changed to.
1 hit rating = 1.68 dps (until capped*)
1 spell power = 1.30 dps
1 haste rating = 1.18 dps
1 crit rating = 0.66 dps
1 spirit = 0.40 dps
1 intellect = 0.18 dps

When equipped with the best Ulduar-25 (T8.5, including hardmodes)
1 hit rating = 2.25dps (until capped*)
1 spell power = 1.32 dps
1 haste rating = 1.32 dps
1 crit rating = 0.72 dps
1 spirit = 0.48 dps
1 intellect = 0.22 dps

For 3.3 with BiS ToGC (T9.5) gear (not all ICC gear is known as of the time this is posted)
1 hit rating = 3.19dps (until capped*)
1 spell power = 1.73 dps
1 haste rating = 1.61 dps
1 crit rating = 0.80 dps
1 spirit = 0.78 dps (slightly inflated because of the T9 bonus to molten armor)
1 intellect = 0.27 dps


* - Presuming you take elemental precision and there are shadow priests / boomkins in the raid, you'll need 11% hit to cap (289 rating), or 10% (263 rating) if you are a draenei or are partied with one.

For gear stats it's obvious for maximizing dps that you should priorities hit and spellpower over all other stats. Haste becomes equal in valuable to spell power once you have more than 3800 spell power (not currently possible except with multiple “on proc” effects). Crit continues to be about ½ as valuable as haste/spell power. Overall you are still best off taking gear without spirit in favor or more spellpower/hit/haste/crit as it is of little value for Frost Mages.

For gems however the situation is more complex since the item budget favors mixed gem types. Overall, Reckless orange gems (12 haste, 12 spell power) are slightly more valuable then Runed red gems (23 spell power) unless you have very low hit rating, then use Veiled orange gems (spell power and hit). Be wary of course about gemming for hit since it's very easy in raid gear to suddenly get an upgrade which nullifies all those +hit gems. I would therefore suggest that the most flexible approach is just gemming for spellpower and haste, socket bonuses notwithstanding.


Tier Bonuses:
The set bonus from 4T6 is still very good since it's an (additive) 5% dps boost for both Frostbolt and Fireball. Rawr estimates this bonus as around 170 dps. The best items to use are of course the 3 Sunwell T6 pieces, as they offer the least loss compared to T7 level gear. For the 4th piece, you can choose it depending on your hit rating and of course which items you pick up in Naxx. I'd suggest using the Rawr Optimiser to see which combination works out best for you. As far as I can see in Rawr, best-in-slot Naxx-25 gear is only ~100 dps improvement on using 4T6, until you get into the “hard mode” content. So it looks advantageous to save your dkp for The Turning Tide rather than new boots.

Both the 2pc T7/7.5 and 4pc T7/7.5 bonuses are useful. 3 of the 5 T7/7.5 pieces are well itemized for Frost Mages. Neither the Head nor Cheast piece are particularly good in their own right, but the 4pc bonus is more important than the small upgrade's available by choosing a better itemized piece of gear. Given the option, the Chest, Hands, Legs and Shoulders are the 4 best pieces to get allowing you to choose from amoung the multiple head pieces that are better than the tier 7/7.5 head.

For Tier 8/8.5, the 2pc bonus is useful, but there is no DPS increase for the 4pc T8/8.5. As you gear up in Ulduar, you will likely find yourself with 2pc T7.5 and 2pc T8/8.5 for some time. The tier 8.5 hands are very well itemized for frost mages. Combine these with the chest to get the 2pc bonus.

For Tier 9/9.25/9.5 both the 2pc and 4pc bonus are useful.

For Tier 10/10.25/10.5 both the 2pc and 4pc bonus are useful. Once you aquire 2p T10, Brain Freeze becomes a signifigant dps increase again (about 200-300 dps total).


Consumables
Frost spec isn't different from any other dps caster at the moment. Here are the items you'll want to take to raids.
[Flask of the Frost Wyrm] (187 spellpower if you are a mixologist);
[Fish Feast], [Tender Shoveltusk Steak] or [Firecracker Salmon] all provide the biggest DPS buff. If you are more than 40 hit rating under cap however, use
[Potion of Speed] can be worth 25-50dps if stacked with Heroism/Bloodlust and Icy Veins, but the utility of health and mana potions can't be overlooked either.


Professions:
Tailoring is a clear win for Mages and is generally useful outside of its profession specific bonus. Beyond that JC, Alchemy, Enchanting, Inscription and Alchemy all have very similar bonuses and are generally useful professions for mages. Engineering has slightly less value than the professions above and conflicts with the Tailoring cloak enchant. There is no longer any significant DPS reason to take Blacksmithing or Leather Working over other more mage friendly professions.

* Tailoring: +51 spell power equivalent (73.75 spellpower, -23 haste. Assumes 1/4 uptime for lightweave proc, 295 spellpower for 15s out of 60s)
* Jewelcrafting: +48 spellpower (3x 39sp instead of 3x 23sp)
* Alchemy: +47 spellpower (172sp flask w/ mixology vs 125 baseline)
* Blacksmithing: +46 spellpower (2x 23sp epic gems in extra sockets)
* Enchanting: +46 spellpower (23sp x 2 rings)
* Inscription: +46 spellpower (70sp vs 24sp on epic Sons inscription)
* Leatherworking: +46 spellpower (76sp fur lining - 30sp enchant)
* Engineering: +44 spell power equivalent (+45 haste, -1 spellpower [+27sp -23haste on cloak, -28sp +68haste on gloves], also gets a burst of speed basically once per boss fight when using Icewalker instead of runspeed, which could come in minor handy for raiding)
* Skinning: +20 spell power equivalent (+40 crit)
* Mining: +60 stamina (no direct effect on DPS)
* Herbalism: +3600 healing over 5 seconds (no effect on DPS


Macro’s

I generally have one macro to synchronize my trinkets, mirror images and Icy Veins – use this in combination with Blood Lust – just remember to cast your WE first.

/use potion of speed (optional)
/cast icy veins
/use 13
/cast mirror image

I’ve also seen ones like this. Standard frostbolt macro. /petattack makes it so that your frost elemental follows your target.
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","0")
/cast Icy Veins
/use 13
/cast Berserking
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","1")
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Frostbolt
/petattack

Aggro wipe. Hit once to go invisible. Hit again to get back to the fight after aggro has been wiped.
#showtooltip Invisibility
/cancelaura Invisibility
/cast Invisibility

Basically the Warlock forums noted that you gain a dps increase if you macro force your Imp to cast it's Fireball. Lhiv confirmed that this also works with the Water Elemental.



Originally Posted by Lhivera
Trial 1, no /use Waterbolt:
59 casts in 3 minutes, 13 seconds (3.27 seconds per cast)

Trial 2, /use Waterbolt in Frostbolt macro, spammed:
65 casts in 2 minutes, 47 seconds (2.57 seconds per cast)

Water Elemental DPS increase: 27.2%
The DPS gained seems to be sporadic, but it does seem to universally make your WE cast more waterbolts for some reason. The best method is to set up a macro on your Frostbolt

/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt


Bugs, features and other issues
You can see Roywyn's thread for all these issues, here are the ones which might currently apply to a frost mage.

Fingers of Frost
Fingers of Frost and Frostbite will always proc simultaneously if spec’d for both. This is intentional by design. The idea of the talent to make Frostbite useful in raids and some other situation where mobs/players do not stay frozen.

Conclusion:
While lacking overall DPS, Raiding as Frost is possible again, if only in niche encounters.



Frost would be the superior choice in:
- Encounters in which using Ice Barrier is useful enough to reduce DPS by spending GCD's on it.
- Encounters that require a large amount of AOE.
- Encounters in which a 35% AOE snare is useful.
- Encounters that need a dedicated kiter (so long as the frost mage removes the glyph of frostbolt)
- Threat-sensitive encounters (having a percentage of damage come from the pet means around 17% threat reduction vs Fire's 10%).
- Encounters in which active mana regeneration effects don't work.
- Encounters in which having 2 ice blocks in short succession is useful.
- Multi-Boxers who need the simplified shot rotation

Arcane or Fire would be the superior choice in:
- Any encounter that contains movement.
- Any encounter that requires maximum DPS
- Any encounter that kills pets.
- Any encounter in which DPS near the end of the fight is more important than DPS in the rest of the fight.
- Any encounter in which passive pushback protection is useful.

Frost does indeed have Replenishment and marginally more survivability. But it's more than 15% lower than Arcane or 12% belore Fire in a short Patchwerk-style encounter so for the majority of encounters, it remains too low for most people to consider it a viable choice.


Disclaimer: whenever I have mentioned 'dps' increases I'm presuming a properly raid buffed 5 minute boss fight with little or no AoE nor movement. Of course, real raiding isn't all Brutallus and Patchwerk, so your mileage may vary. Use a simulator such as Rawr.mage to get estimates for your particular situation. Or test on a target dummy

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