WotLK Beta Frost Mage Talents

by Tachyon on Thu. 24. July 2008, 23:38

Filed under: wotlk, mage, talents, beta

Now that the NDA on the WotLK alpha/beta has been lifted, we're able to get a first impression of the new frost mage talents as they are currently in the beta. Blizzard is still tuning and tweaking talents (as they just did with the new arcane talents), and this is beta anyway, so don't take anything as granted, as it may be changed anytime before release.

A list of the new talents (also the fire and arcane ones) can be found in the Mage section of the WotLK Wiki. Here's my first review of the new frost talents, in respect to Raid PvE and PvP:

Winter's Grasp
(2 Ranks, tier 8 Talent, requires 35 points in the Frost tree)
Gives your Frost damage spells a 5/10% chance to apply the Winter's Grasp effect, which increases the chance all attacks will hit the target by 2% and the target is considered Frozen for 5 sec.
PvE Rating:
PvP Rating:

Have you noticed it? CONSIDERED FROZEN! Yay! This must be like the biggest change WotLK is about to offer to us frost mages. It mainly means that targets can be frozen in a non-crowd control way. A 'normal' freeze roots the target to the ground, and the 'frozen' status is directly related to this CC (crowd control) effect. Meaning that if the target gets hit too hard, the CC effect will break. Bosses also are immune to CC effects, meaning that we currently can't freeze a boss, hence there will be no shatter crits. For the non-mages: Shatter is a talent which increases the chance to critically hit a frozen target by 50%.

So this talent introduces a 'considered frozen' effect applicable to bosses, and I'd almost bet that in contradiction to the 'normal' freeze it won't break immaturely.
Basically this means that shatter is now useful in a raiding spec, so during those 5sec every spell will have a highly increased crit chance. With a little spell haste, it's possible to squeeze two Frostbolts and a consecutive Ice Lance into this 5sec frame.

And: the more frost mages you pack in the raid, the more they will profit from each other, crit galore incoming! This talent is such an enormous boost to frost mage DPS, that I doubt it will make it into release in this form.

The second effect on this talent is to increase the hit chance by 2%. I assume that this only affects the meele hit chance, which wouldn't be bad, as casters already committed to reach the hit cap with talents and equip. So this is some raid synergy we bring for the meele classes in the raid, which increases our raid slot value.

For PvP, this talent is next to useless, as we already have Frostbite (15% freeze proc) and Frostnova (self and Water Elemental's) for our shatter crits. It's not bad, as it will increase your crit chance a little, and it's unlikely to be disspelled, but it adds more to the average DPS than to the burst damage.

Brain Freeze
(3 Ranks, tier 9 Talent, requires 40 points in the Frost tree)
Your Frost Nova and Frostbite effects also reduce the target's chance to hit with all attacks by 5/10/15%.
PvE Rating:
PvP Rating:

Useless for PvE. Completely useless for bosses, as Frost Nova/Frostbite can't be applied. Useless against meele PvE targets, as mages don't stand in meele range, especially not when the target is rooted by the freeze and this situation can be used to gain some distance. Also next to useless against casters, as the -15% hit chance doesn't make much of a difference, as we've also got counterspell to make sure we won't get hit. Hell, event if we get hit, with Ice Barrier and Ice Block we're the best survivalists among all casters, so we won't care.

For PvP, this can be nice in some situations, for example when you get jumped at by a Rogue which tries to stunlock the living daylights out of you, gets frozen by a Frostbite proc off your Frost Armor, and then is 15% less likely to hit.
Also you could root a caster with frost nova, and reduce his hit chance a little.
Anyway, the 15% is next to nothing, so I wouldn't really bother to take this talent.

Improved Water Elemental
(3 Ranks, tier 9 Talent, requires 40 points in the Frost tree)
Increases the duration of your Summon Water Elemental spell by 5/10/15 sec and increases the total health and mana of your water elemental by 10/20/30%.
PvE Rating:
PvP Rating:

Currently, the Water Elemental lasts 45 sec, which in relation to the cooldown of 3 min means an uptime of 25%. If you use coldsnap, the average uptime will reach 2x0:45/4:00 = 37.5%.
Increasing the uptime by 15 sec results in 1 min / 3 min uptime (33%), or 50% on a long time average with coldsnap.

The Water Elemental contributes a significant part to the mage raid DPS, so taking this talent is highly recommended. It still currently suffers from a weak hit chance (gains no +hit from the caster), and only crits for 150%, but at least it gets a share (40%) of the mage's spelldamage, and also profits from the up to +10% crit from the Winter's Chill debuff. I'd recommend the Improved Water Elemental talent for PvE, but wouldn't care to take it for PvP, as chances are still high it will get killed before it expires. Its mana pool still won't last for the full duration, so make sure to have some sort of mana source in your group (shadow priest, mana totem).

In PvP, the +30% HP increases the survivablitily of the elemental a little, which is nice.

Chilled to the Bone
(5 Ranks, tier 10 Talent, requires 45 points in the Frost tree)
Increases the damage caused by your Frostbolt and Ice Lance spells by 1/2/3/4/5% and reduces the movement speed of all chilled targets by an additional 2/4/6/8/10%.
PvE Rating:
PvP Rating:

Frostbolt and Ice Lance are our bread and butter (solo, in PvP and thanks to Winter's Grasp now also in PvE), so this talents means 5% more DPS in all situations. Nice, wtb!
The additional movement speed reduction makes us more of a snare machine; combined with Permafrost we can now chill down our targets to 40% (Frostbolt), 30% (Cone of Cold) and 15% (Improved Blizzard).
Must-have talent for deep frost mages!

Deep Freeze
(1 Rank, 1.5 sec, 30 sec Cooldown, tier 11 Talent, requires 50 points in the Frost tree)
Stuns the target for 5 sec. Only usable on Frozen targets.
PvE Rating:
PvP Rating:

This one's interesting. I consider mages, and especially frost mages, to be the strongest CC-class ingame, that's why I rolled this class! Yet we alsmost completely lack the strongest of all CC-categories: stuns. The only mage stun is to be found in the fire tree: Impact, giving fire spells a 10% chance to stun the target for 2sec.
Other CC-categories are Mezz (rendering the target incapable to do anything, but breaks on damage. e.g. Polymorph), Root (rooting the target to the ground, e.g. Frostnova, Frostbite) and Snare (that's our speciality).

Now we get a stun effect which holds for 5sec. During those 5sec, you can do anything to the target, decorate it with flowers or paint a moustache on it, or use the time to unleash some significant burst damage -> Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Frostbolt.
PvE-wise unnecessary, but in PvP one of the upcoming killer abilities of our class.

In WTF-situations, it can be used as an escape mechanism: Frostnova, Deep Freeze, and you have enough time to face into invisibility without being interrupted.


Feel free to post your 2 cents on those talents, I'd like to read your opinion when I come back from vacation!

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