Welcome, fellow players! Allow me to present a guide on Frost Mage raid DPS in WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3. The Frost Mage has undergone a significant transformation, developing from one of the least effective DPS specs for raiding to a pivotal role in your raid, particularly if you have multiple Mages. At the highest level, Frost Mage performance is currently highly competitive.
Frost Mage Explained
Frost Mage is now using Frostfire Bolt for its main rotation. Frostfire Bolt is scaling insanely hard, and it gains 100% bonus from your spell power. As the name suggests, Frostfire Bolt is both Frost and Fire damage. This means it benefits from both Winter's Chill and Improved Scorch. Your Frostfire Bolt will benefit from the 10% increased critical strike chance from Winter's Chill and the 15% increased fire damage from Improved Scorch.
The cool thing about Frostfire Bolt is it will stack Winter's Chill for you. So, unlike with Fire, where you have to maintain Scorch stacks, Frost can face roll Frostfire Bolt. If you have 2 or more Mages in your raid, it is better overall raid DPS for you to have 1 Fire Mage and 1 Frost Mage to maintain these debuffs.
Talents & Runes
Let's then talk about the talents. The main debate here is whether you take the Ice Barrier or not. I found the Ice Barrier very helpful in Sunken Temple. Though there are many bosses that do AOE damage that will cause pushback, pre-casting Ice Barrier on pull was preventing that pushback quite a lot and helping the DPS.
If you do not want to play Ice Barrier, you can put a point in Flame Throwing for the 3 extra yards on your Fire spell, or maybe Burning Souls for the reduced threat. To aid you more when encounter the bosses, take some WoW SOD Gold along with you is essential.
For runes, we are using Living Bomb, Molten Armor, Spell Power, Icy Veins, Frostfire Bolt, Fingers of Frost, and Deep Freeze. There can be an argument to run Burnout and just ignore Fingers of Frost and Deep Freeze, since there's a lot of RNG around Fingers of Frost proc.
World Buffs & Consumables
For consumables, you want the following buffs: the Sunken Temple World Buff, Darkmoon Faire buffs, Songflower Serenade Buff, and Atal'ai Mojo of Forbidden Magic. Keep in mind that these do not stack with Blasted Lands Flask, so I will not be listing Blasted Lands Flask.
Additionally, you'll need Lesser Wizard Oil, Superior Mana Potions, Greater Arcane Elixir, Nightfin Soup, Dragonbreath Chili (which scales with spell damage), Elixir of Firepower, and Elixir of Frost Power.
To clarify how Frostfire Bolt works with spell damage scaling: it will only scale off of the highest of the 2 spell damages. So, if you have 13 fire damage and 42 Frost damage, Frostfire Bolt will only gain the +42 Frost damage. It doesn’t double dip into both Fire and the Frost damage. The only reason we are running Elixir of Firepower is because it buffs our Living Bomb.
Read More: These Consumables For Alchemy You Can't Miss During WOW Season Of Discovery Phase 3
Professions
For professions, I recommend you take 2 of the following 4 professions: Tailoring, Engineering, Enchanting, or Alchemy. All of them have amazing things that provide us with great raid buffs. The 2 I recommend most is the Tailoring and Engineering, but that is a personal choice. Pick any of the 2 you prefer.
Tips And Tricks
Cold Snap does so well for a number of reasons. One, it refreshes the cooldown on Icy Veins, so on fights you have Cold Snap up for, you can use 2 Icy Veins. You can save Cold Snap for Avatar of Hakkar, not because of Icy Veins, but because of Ice Block.
You can Ice Block off the blood effect, and it won't transfer to your raid, which is a massive uptime increase if you happen to get blood twice. Having Cold Snap for this fight will allow you to Ice Block twice. Many bosses do random AOE damage. Pre-cast Ice Barrier on yourself before the pull, and if you're in a fight where loads of extra damage are going out, don't be afraid to recast it during the fight.
