What follows is a complete analysis to all of the talents in the frost tree. Each talent will be discussed from a Raiding (PvE), Leveling, and PvP standpoint, and finally, given a rating on the following scale:
- Must have
- Solid
- Okay
- Poor
- Skip it
All talent descriptions are assuming you have the maximized talent.
Frost
Tier 1
Frostbite – Gives your Chill effects a 15% chance to freeze the target for 5 sec.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Works exactly as advertised. 15% chance on spells like frostbolt and cone of cold to root the target in place, allowing for extra breathing room, or as a set up for a shatter. Note that this is an uncontrolled proc, and as such does not share DR with Frost Nova or your pet’s Nova.
This can bugger you up if you are AoE leveling via Blizzard. If you do not have both Chilled to the Bone and Permafrost, it’s entirely possible that if Frostbite procs during a Blizzard, the pack will separate. If you do have both of those, however, the movement reduction is enough that mobs will not get “left behind”. And you get a bunch of crits to boot.
Frostbite and Fingers of Frost are linked procs, in that they always proc together. I can guarantee this will feel stupid when the two keep proccing together, seemingly defeating the purpose of having both of them, but this is the way it’s supposed to be.
Note: You need to have at least one point in Frostbite for Blizzard to proc Fingers of Frost. It’s an odd bug, but there you go.
Improved Frostbolt – Reduces the casting time of your Frostbolt spell by 0.5 sec.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Frostbolt is the core nuke for the entire frost tree, no matter what activity you end up doing. It’s a large DPS increase if you’re chain casting, and helps you to stay a little more mobile in PvP. That, and even with the downranking nerf, a 0.8 second rank 1 Frostbolt is still a valid PvP tool, if far more situational now because of it’s restrictive mana cost.
Ice Floes – Reduces the cooldown of your Frost Nova, Cone of Cold, Ice Block and Icy Veins spells by 20%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Solid
PvP: Must have
Excellent talent for any frost mage and any mage taking Icy Veins. The Frost Nova reduction is also very useful for non-frost PvP or leveling mages.
Tier 2
Ice Shards – Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Frost spells by 100%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
One of the most important talents in the entire tree. You’d do well to have this talent, regardless of what it is you plan to do with your frost mage.
This is also a must have talent for frostfire mages.
Frost Warding – Increases the armor and resistances given by your Frost Armor and Ice Armor spells by 50%. In addition, gives your Frost Ward and Fire Ward a 30% chance to negate the warded damage spell and restore mana equal to the damage caused.
Raiding: Solid
Solo: Skip it
PvP: Poor
Frost/Ice Armor don’t see much use these days outside of very quick bouts in PvP, and even then, it’s not used for the armor or the resistances. Both Fire/Frost Ward are notoriously situational; you aren’t missing anything by skipping them.
However, it is very powerful in those situations. While you won’t be getting much mileage out of, say, Naxx with this, you can use this to great effect in Ulduar and beyond. Especially powerful for arcane builds.
Precision – Reduces the mana cost and increases your chance to hit with spells by 3%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Okay
PvP: Okay
Excellent talent for all mages for end game content.
Note: this stacks with Arcane Focus, so arcane mages can get 6% hit from talents.
The reduction in mana cost isn’t really noticeable in shorter fights.
The extra hit chance is typically not needed for PvP or leveling, as that hit is either… well, not needed, or can be easily made up in gear elsewhere. In addition, for PvP, there are a lot of other incredibly vital talents that carry more importance than some extra hit chance, such as…
Permafrost – Increases the duration of your Chill effects by 3 secs and reduces the target’s speed by an additional 10% and reduces the targets healing received by 20%.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Solid
PvP: Must have
Most notable about Permafrost is that it stacks with Chilled to the Bone, giving you, dearest frost mage, very powerful snaring abilities. The mortal strike effect is just gravy.
Tier 3
Piercing Ice – Increases the damage done by your Frost spells by 6%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Solid
PvP: Must have
A base line frost ability that should be considered core for any frost build. Ranked down a little for low leveling purposes, as things like Imp. Frostbolt and Frostbite take precedence over a small increase in damage. When leveling at higher levels, the point is moot, as you’ll have more than enough talent points to go around. And, of course, a 2% increase of a 3k damage spell makes more of a difference thant a 2% increase on a 200 damage spell.
Icy Veins – Hastens your spellcasting, increasing spell casting speed by 20% and reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting by 100%. Lasts 20 sec.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
An excellent ability for any part of the game. A DPS increase for raiding, a serious boon to avoiding pushback in PvP, and allows you to solo elites you might be otherwise unable to (i.e. ones that are immune to roots, you can just nuke them down).
Improved Blizzard – Adds a chill effect to your Blizzard spell. This effect lowers the target’s movement speed by 65%. Lasts 1.5 sec.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Okay
PvP: Solid
A strong AoE spell, this talent adds a whole new facet to the spell, that of controlling a mass of… stuff. It can be used with terrifying effect at choke points in battlegrounds, slowing the enemy to a crawl while dealing heavy damage to them.
It can also be used when leveling as a way of killing a lot of mobs efficiently (called AoE grinding). However, AoE leveling isn’t nearly as useful as it used to be, with the speedier leveling now present.
Note: You need to have at least one point in Frostbite for Blizzard to proc Fingers of Frost. It’s an odd bug, but there you go.
Tier 4
Arctic Reach – Increases the range of your Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Deep Freeze and Blizzard spells and the radius of your Frost Nova and Cone of Cold spells by 20%.
Raiding: Solid
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
As with Flame Throwing, increased range on spells really only provides a security blanket for raiding purposes. There is little tangible use to it. However, this talent is very strong in both solo play and PvP. Greater range on your primary nukes gives you more breathing room when killing monsters and more efficient kiting prowess in PvP.
The extra radius is largely a frivolous effect. An extra 2 yards on Frost Nova really doesn’t do anything (thanks to latency), and an extra 20% radius on Cone of Cold just makes it slightly easier to use properly.
Frost Channeling – Reduces the mana cost of all spells by 10% and reduces the threat caused by your Frost spells by 10%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Solid
PvP: Solid
A must for frost mages, and excellent for any raiding mage, is it reduces the mana cost of any spell. A good fit for any build that goes this far into the frost tree. However, it is a good place to remove points from if you want them elsewhere for additional survivability in PvP.
Shatter – Increases the critical strike chance of all your spells against frozen targets by 50%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
This is one of those talents where if you don’t have it, you aren’t considered a frost mage. An must for any frost mage, regardless of what they do. Synergizes very well with Fingers of Frost for powerful burst any time, anywhere.
Arcane PvP mages can also take advantage of this.
Tier 5
Cold Snap – When activated, this spell finishes the cooldown on all Frost spells you recently cast.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Solid
PvP: Must have
Very important ability for end game content of any sort. Instantly resetting the cooldown of Ice Block, Water Elemental, Icy Veins, etc, is invaluable to a deep frost mage. Allows you to have back to back Elementals and Icy Veins.
The “recently cast” clause seems to be misleading, in that it doesn’t seem to care about what the word “recent” means. I have, for instance, used Ice Block, waited until it’s normal cooldown only had 20 seconds left, and then hit Cold Snap. It reset Ice Block just fine.
Not really needed for leveling, but good to have in case you accidentally pull, I dunno, 30 bears with drunk Russian mages riding on them or something.
Improved Cone of Cold – Increases the damage dealt by your Cone of Cold spell by 35%.
Raiding: Poor
Solo: Okay
PvP: Okay
The strength of this talent depends heavily on how often you actually use it. It is a rather poor AoE spell, only able to hit “good” if everything it hits are rooted. There is a myriad of better options for AoE in a PvE environment. In PvP, it’s used far more for it’s snaring ability than it’s ability to deal damage. That said, it can be a good clutch spell for throwing another instant when trying to take someone down quickly.
Frozen Core – Reduces the damage taken from all spells by 6%.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Skip it
PvP: Poor
While a step up from it’s predecessor, Frozen Core still has the misfortune to be the worst talent in the frost tree. It might find a home somewhere in a PvP build; sadly, there are many superior talents to this in every tree when it comes to survivability.
Tier 6
Cold as Ice – Reduces the cooldown of your Cold Snap, Ice Barrier, Deep Freeze and Summon Water Elemental spells by 20%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Okay
Another excellent talent for end game content. With this, it is now possible to get the Water Elemental down to a 2 minute cooldown with the summon itself lasting 1 minute. 50% WE uptime sound good to anyone else? The reduction in cooldown for Ice Barrier and Deep Freeze are very useful for PvP encounters. 6 seconds shaved off each of those matter a great deal, especially in arenas,
Winter’s Chill – Gives your Frost damage spells a 100% chance to apply the Winter’s Chill effect, which increases the chance spells will critically hit the target by 1% for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Poor
PvP: Must have
Fantastic talent for raiding mages. Like the Scorch debuff, this gives every offensive caster in the raid an extra 5% critical strike chance; Winter’s Chill, however, is better. Fire mages need to go out of their way, and suffer a major setback in DPS to stack and keep the Scorch debuff running. WInter’s Chill does it’s job automatically. Not worth the talents for solo play; the vast majority of mobs will be dead long before you gain any tangible benefit.
A very good talent for PvP, as it provides dispel protection for your offensive effects, like Polymorph or various roots. Throwing up some Winter’s Chill adds a buffer effect that has a good chance of being dispelled instead, thus keeping the target trapped for longer.
Tier 7
Shattered Barrier – Gives your Ice Barrier spell a 100% chance to freeze all enemies within 10 yds for 8 sec when it is destroyed.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Solid
PvP: Must have
Currently, this effect goes off if Ice Barrier is dispelled. While this may change, as it stands, it’s very strong in PvP. In addition, because it doesn’t deal any damage, it does not break any crowd control effects. Very effective overall. Can be very useful for leveling, as you can throw up Ice Barrier and intentionally get smacked around to proc this, if Frost Nova is on cooldown.
Ice Barrier – Instantly shields you, absorbing damage. Lasts 1 min. While the shield holds, spells will not be interrupted.
Raiding: Okay
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Excellent for PvP, protecting a fairly significant amount of damage from being dealt to you, and an excellent spell for avoiding death or spell pushback for solo stuff. Decent in raids; it’ll help your healer’s mana pool a little for fights where a lot of AoE damage is being thrown around, but it isn’t really necessary. Fights, and thus healers, are balanced around people taking that damage.
Arctic Winds – Increases all Frost damage you cause by 5% and reduces the chance melee and ranged attacks will hit you by 5%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Okay
PvP: Must have
Percentile increases to damage dealt are a must for raiding mages. Without them they won’t scale properly. An excellent talent for PvP survivability as well, though there are better talents, and you might not have the room. Not really necessary for leveling; the percentile gain is small enough to be insignificant for really short PvE encounters. That said, a good place to dump points when in the higher levels.
Tier 8
Empowered Frostbolt – Increases the damage of your Frostbolt spell by an amount equal to 10% of your spell power and reduces the cast time by 0.2 seconds.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Okay
A solid DPS boost, the true joy here is the reduced cast time. A max rank frostbolt will have a cast time of 2.3 seconds, and a rank 1 of 0.8 seconds. I’m sure you can see why this is so very powerful.
Fingers of Frost – Gives your Chill effects a 15% chance to grant you the Fingers of Frost effect, which treats your next 2 spells cast as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 15 sec.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
The newest revolution in frost: the ability to use Shatter on anything, anywhere. Incredibly powerful in PvP, provides a significant boost to DPS, and, despite that it and Frostbite proc at the same time, still highly useful for leveling purposes. An excellent use to this is to use one damaging spell, then Deep Freeze. Deep Freeze is considered a frozen effect, so you can go straight into a shatter combo from there.
Tier 9
Brain Freeze – Your Frost damage spells have a 15% chance to cause your next Fireball spell to be instant cast and cost no mana.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Despite the contradiction between it’s name and effect, this is still a very powerful talent for any non-raiding frost mage. An efficient damage boost and, most importantly, instant cast, it’s very valuable for PvP builds.
Useless for raider mages. Fireball doesn’t scale at all with a frost build, so it isn’t worth the GCD to cast in the first place.
Summon Water Elemental – Summon a Water Elemental to fight for the caster for 45 sec.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Arguably the best thing to happen to frost mages ever. Substantial boost in damage no matter what your hobby is, and allows for powerful shatters in PvP. Sadly, most players know the power of the elemental, and will either kill it or otherwise control it to reduce your damage output. Don’t expect to get more than one Shatter off the elemental.
Improved Water Elemental – Increases the duration of your Summon Water Elemental spell by 15 sec and your Frostbolt spell has a 100% chacne to grant the Replenishment effect to nearby raid members, restoring an amount equal to 0.25% of their total mana every second for 15 secs.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Solid
PvP: Poor
The Replenishment effect, here for frosties. As always, a must have for any raid, and provides a goodly amount of mana to any frost mage. Not as necessary for PvP or solo mages, but still very strong. The elemental duration extension is also very powerful.
Tier 10
Chilled to the Bone – Increases the damage caused by your Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt and Ice Lance spells by 5% and reduces the movement speed of all chilled targets by an additional 10%.
Raiding: Must have
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
Attractive in raiding due to the extra DPS, but far more loved elsewhere for the more powerful snare. As mentioned above, this stacked with permafrost puts the power of frost’ snares into the area of ridiculous.
Tier 11
Deep Freeze – Stuns the target for 5 sec. Only usable on Frozen targets.
Raiding: Skip it
Solo: Must have
PvP: Must have
While utterly useless for raiding content, it is nonetheless incredibly powerful for both PvP and solo play. As the Deep Freeze effect counts as a Frozen effect, you can use this as a way to unleash hell on people you couldn’t before, most notably druids. Can’t shapeshift out of stuns, can you? Not so hot now, are ya? ARE YA?! HAHAHA EAT FROZEN LEAD YA DAMN PILLAR HUMPER!
You might want to add an anotation to your eval of frostbite.
For leveling purposes, once it can be supported by talents/gear, AOE is amazingly effective. If your AOE leveling as frost, then frostbite is one of the worse talents to have. It throws a bit of unpredictability into a sequence that is supposed to be practiced and exact.
other than that, very good post, this is one of the first mage blogs i’ve found that I enjoy.
dosent deep freeze do high damage to bosses now that are permentally immune to stuns? Is it really worth skipping?
Excellent review, love it 🙂
Arctic Reach should get a ‘must have’ for raiding though, proper positioning is crucial to most boss fights. 20% more distance means 44% more area to position yourself, and trust me, you need it.
Depending on the raiding progress and the number of AoE encounters (especially in Hyjal), Improved Blizzard together with Frostbite can be excellent for raiding, Blizzard is such a killer now that it can crit.
Ah the Frost tree review! I’ve been waiting for this since I saw you put up the Arcane tree review. Larisa and Gnomer take note: this is an example of what we call ‘saving the best for last’! 😉
It almost goes without saying, but that would be unfair so I’ll say it anyway – another excellent review. 🙂
I would change a couple of points though:
Arctic Reach: upgrade to ‘solid/must have’ for raiding. Tachyon mentioned why above, but also consider that the range of Frostbolt is 30 yards, which is co-incidentally the range most boss aoe abilities (in TBC at least) also have.
Ice Barrier: Downgrade to ‘ok’ for raiding. Although it can offer a little bit of protection aginst hp/casting time loss, it will eat a GCD to do so which could be better spent casting your next real spell 🙂
Brain Freeze: Downgrade to ‘poor’ for raiding. Casting a free fireball sounds nice in theory, but it will most likely be completely devoid of any damage boosting talents and I’d therefore argue that using a GCD on it could be better spent elsewhere.
@ Sunwrath: Frostbite is now pretty cool for AOE levelling. Since your Blizzard will have an 85% slowing effect, rooting random mobs will no longer cause them to seperate out from the rest of the pack. Factor in also that Blizzard can now crit (and therefore take advantage of shatter) and you can see that Frostbite is certainly no longer “one of the worse talents to have” for AOE levelling. 🙂
Anyway, these are just my opinions and I’m sure many others would argue the other way! 🙂
@Cassani: I disagree with you regarding Brain Freeze. Free, instant-cast spells are always good for raiding DPM as well as DPS. While it is true that the free fireball won’t be as empowered as its icy kin, it still deals a noticeable amount of damage for a GCD. Certainly better than Fire Blast or Ice Lance. With proper timing the use of your Brain Freeze charge, Ice mages can use a respectable cooldown while on the move.
It is my opinion that ‘levelling’ needs to be more generalized into solo play, since Frost is the best tree to farm and grind rep with when you reach the level cap.
Is it just me, or was there a little bit more… love… fer the frost tree article?
Ima not callin you prejudiced. Just wondering.
I still can’t make the call between frost and arcane. Its killin me.
Frost is all you need my friend. Frost is not a spec, it’s a way of life!!!
Rixxy
Version 1.1
Downgraded Ice Barrier to “Okay” for raiding. Pretty sure that was a typo, I cannot find any justification to put it at Solid.
Upgraded Arctic Reach to Solid, because the sentence “A solid arctic reach around” is funny.
Kidding, of course. Flame Throwing is ranked at Solid, this should be the same. Probably a typo.
Either way, fixed.
Changed “Leveling” to read “Solo”
As a raiding mage, I look on Fingers of Frost as the raid version of Frostbite – that will also apply to AOE grinding mages. Frostbite can split up mob groups or cause frozen mobs to hit healers in melee range, so the Shatter mechanic was often left of of a raider’s repertoire completely. Now we can use it freely along with Fingers of Frost instead of Frostbite. Non raiders can stick with Frostbite instead.
I quite like Ice Barrier for raiding – not all rais have perfect healers and a mage who is hard to kill is a pretty useful benefit in those circumstances!
@Rixxy: Very true for me too! Was complete frost about 2-3 years ago with my mage and tried something else now and then.. now been fire and arcane. When I respecced now some days ago for almost BG only mage the feeling was like coming back to home. 105 honored kills on AV, 3 deaths. Ah, 783 honor gained.
Version 1.2
Updated introduction.
Added bug notation to Frostbite and Blizzard (same note).
Changed Elemental Precision to Precision, and updated accordingly.
Slightly changed Cold Snap description.
Changed Improved Water Elemental description.
[…] my detailed guides to specific talent trees for further information to choose your […]
I actually just picked up frost as a “I’m too lazy to really be an effective raid member so carry me” move, and I actually found it enjoyable.
As for the wonderful guides, which I love reading since they’re far more down to earth and easier to follow than EJ, I’ve had FoF proc off without needing any points in Frostbite. It may have been recently hotfixed (I don’t read mage patch notes), but just a heads up.