Signature Abilities
Mages get two signature abilities for specializing in the frost tree.
Summon Water Elemental: Summon a Water Elemental to fight for the caster.
Frost Specialization : Increases the damage of your Frost spells by 25%.
One of the big changes in Cata is that pet scaling is suppose to be fixed, meaning that pets scale as equally as possible with buffs and don’t double dip. For the most part this is implemented. Current scaling on the water elemental in the beta has been reported as follows.
* Health and Mana: 50%
* Armor: 0%
* Spell Power: 40% but this may be academic. Waterbolt may get 1/3 of the mage’s spell power and the spell power of the elemental itself is ignored.
* Hit, Crit, Haste: 100%
* Mastery: 0% but Ghostcrawler is indicated that mastery will “scale” as pure damage for trees where sharing the actual mastery would be complicated / illogical.
* Cit damage: 150% This could cause scaling issues if caster pets don’t have 200% crit damage like all specs.
Other than scaling the elemental has changed significantly in other ways. It is now a permanent pet without any glyphs and retains the ability to cast Freeze. Furthermore, casting Freeze in a raiding environment is now part of the basic rotation because of this talent:
Improved Freeze : Gives your Water Elemental's Freeze spell a 100% chance to grant 2 charges of Fingers of Frost.
Mastery
The frost mastery is termed Frostburn.
Frostburn : All your spells deal 20% increased damage against Frozen targets. Each point of Mastery increases damage by an additional 2.5%.
It should be noted that Frostburn has been changed from previous beta builds. It is no longer a debuff applied by frostbolt. It is a straight-up damage multiplier to frozen targets. As expected In this case, targets are considered frozen for the standard list of affected spells when Fingers of Frost is active.
New Spells
Mages get three new spells at levels 81, 83, and 85. Frost is in the enviable position that it is able to take full advantage of all three of the new spells (when the appropriate talent points are chosen.)
Flame Orb [Level 81] : Launches a Flame Orb forward from the Mage's position, dealing 228 Fire damage every second to the closest enemy target for 15 secs.
A Tier 6 talent turns Flame Orb into Frostfire Orb. This had a number of repercussions. One, Frostfire Orb (FFO) benefits from the Frost Specialization, so damage increases by 25%. Two, the orb attack chills and the snare is very strong. Three, this chill can proc Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze. Four, the cooldown on FFO is reset by the Cold Snap talent. All in all, FFO is a useful spell with good synergy with other frost talents. It becomes a "regular" part of the raiding rotation (see below).
Ring of Frost [Level 83] : Summons a Ring of Frost, taking 3 sec to coalesce. Enemies entering the fully-formed ring will become frozen for 10 sec. Lasts 12 sec. 10 yd radius.
This spell has changed repeatedly during the course of the beta but has ended up in as a pretty unique and effective utility spell. The targets frozen by the ring are indeed considered frozen for talents such as Shatter and Deep Freeze and the freeze effect breaks on damage much like all such effects. The ring will reapply the freeze if the target crosses the ring a second time, but the pulse between freezes is slow enough that this shouldn't be considered overpowered. The spell has obvious uses in PvP and while soloing. PvE uses are probably less frequent but the spell has the potential to be very effective in the right situations in 5-man and raiding environments as well.
Timestop [Level 85] : Warp the flow of time, increasing melee, ranged, and spell casting speed by 30% for all party and raid members. Lasts 40 sec. Allies receiving this effect will become unstuck in time, and be unable to benefit from Bloodlust, Heroism, or Time Warp again for 10 min.
Yes, mages get heroism. There has been a lot of whining on the forums on both sides about Time Warp. Other classes thing isn't fair that mages get it. Mages complain that the spell is just a repeat of what shamans can do (and special hunter pets) and that we were robbed of a new, unique level 85 ability. Both of these arguments are rather weak.
The fact remains that 10-man raiding, if it doesn't eclipse 25-man raiding in popularity, will still be much more common and much more important in Cataclysm. It is not reasonable to build 10-man raids and always have a shaman present. With 10-man content tuned to be as challenging as 25-man content, it isn't acceptable to have groups without access to heroism. Mages won the lottery of which other class gets to bring heroism to the party.
It should be noted that having heroism also will affect arena teams (RMP gets heroism), 5-man dungeons (good for those achievements that require burst), and soloing. That last area should not be discounted--having heroism available should allow a mage to solo some pulls while questing that would otherwise require the help of a group.
Talents
Frost talents (as with all trees in Cata) have changed dramatically. The talent calculator can be found at wowhead or mmo-champion. Each talent will not be linked and discussed in detail, but notable changes and new talents are as follows.
Fingers of Frost : FoF now procs with a single charge but the proc rate has been doubled to 30%. This is almost universally seen as an improvement. It makes the rotation feel more like real shatter combos, removes many instances of double instants in a rotation which felt awkward and procs happen quite frequently. The last point is important in that one of the complaints about frost in LK was that you could go forever without a proc.
Frostfire Orb : With one point, this talent changes the new Flame Orb spell and turns it into a Frostfire Orb. This allows the Frost Specialization of +25% damage to take effect. This is a big enough boost to make it a required talent and to make Frostfire Orb part of the “rotation”, being cast whenever the 1 min cooldown is up. The second point adds a chill effect to FFO and this chill effect can proc both Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze. This can represent a significant (4%+) increase in damage assuming one can react to all the FoF/BF charges. Both points in this talent are now therefore required of any serious raiding build.
Brain Freeze : The notable change here is that instant cast FFBs under Brain Freeze now benefit from Fingers of Frost.
Piercing Chill : This is a new talent that has an interesting cleave-like mechanic associated with it. The basic effect is that frostbolt crits spread the chill effect to two nearby targets. But what seems a soloing / pvp utility talent has raiding implications because these chill effects can proc Brain Freeze and/or Fingers of Frost. So in “cleave” situations where there a few adds near the primary target, damage on the primary target is increased due to the increased number of procs. This is a unique and interesting form of cleave damage; damage goes up but only on the primary target--the adds are there to boost damage but are not themselves damaged.
Enduring Winter : This talent now combines the effects of two live talents. It provides a 10% reduction in mana costs to all spells and it adds a replenishment effect to frostbolt. This is a frost mages raid utility talent combined with a selfish benefit. It should be noted that the first point provides the full replenishment effect--the other two points are the selfish bonus only. If the additional mana reduction is not needed or the overall build picks up efficiency talents from the other trees, then Enduring Winter is probably a 1-point talent. There was discussion of frost mages getting 5% crit debuff raid utility but Ghostcrawler has recently indicated that such possible changes are currently not planned.
Raiding Talent Builds
An issue (or an advantage, depending on your point of view) frost currently has with raiding talent builds is that there seem to be very few logical choices for the discretionary points that all specs are suppose to have in Cata. The starting point for almost all builds is represented by the following partial spec.
34-point Base Spec
This spec leaves 7 talent points that seem to be up to user discretion, which would be a fair amount of choice. The problem is that there aren't that many places to spend those points.
Consider the frost tree first. Early Frost has been determined to be a woeful return on investment, so that's not really a choice. Certainly Shattered Barrier is PvP/soloing talent and Reactive Barrier, while an interesting concept, doesn't seem to be worth the points either. Enduring Winter has room for two more points but the final point is of almost no value--two points almost guarantee a 100% replenishment up time and one point may be sufficient. Improved Cone of Cold is definitely cool flavor and could be useful to snare adds in a raid encounter. The conclusion is that there are 2, maybe 3, more reasonable choices remaining in the frost tree.
Off-tree strategies must consider the following issues. One, mages have no inherent pushback protection so if such protection becomes invaluable with Cata raid design, the three points in Burning Soul will be very attractive. Two, Master of Elements has been determined to be a much more effective utility talent than either Enduring Winter or Arcane Concentration. So if mana becomes a concern, MOE is the first choice to put points. Three, frost mages only cast FFB about 2.25 times a minute on average (according to initial simulations) so Ignite is not the must have talent it might appear to be at first glance.
The end result is that are only a few obvious frost mage specs.
1. High replenishment uptime, Improved Cone of Cold
2. Good replenishment uptime, Ignite
3. Ignite, all marginal DPS talents
4. High replenishment uptime, Improved Blink
Option 2 could have a minor adjustment (1 pt from Netherwind Presence or Permafrost to Ignite). Option 3 grabs all dps talents, no matter how small, in leiu of utility/control talents. Option 4 shows what is possible if pushback protection becomes standard or isn't required in raids; one could swap points into Burning Soul instead of efficiency talents if mana isn't a concern. Other than that, Frost doesn't seem to have the hard choices between utility talents that design notes from Blizzard indicated. Whether that is an issue or not is up to individual perception.
Glyphs
Discussion of Glyphs at the moment is sketchy as it is unclear how complete the current set of glyphs is. However initial calculations show that frost mages will use the following three primary glyphs.
Glyph of Molten Armor : Your Molten Armor grants an additional 2% critical strike rating.
Glyph of Frostbolt : Increases the critical strike chance of your Frostbolt spell by 5%.
Glyph of Ice Lance : Increases the damage of your Ice Lance spell by 5%.
Lhivera did some work and tentatively determined that if crit rates rise above ~33% then the Glyph of Molten Armor is replaced by the Glyph of Frostfire.
Glyph of Frostfire : Your Frostfire Bolt now deals 10% additional damage over 9 sec, but no longer reduces the victim's movement speed.
Tier 11 Set Bonuses
The initial set bonuses for Tier 11 have been released. From past experience, Blizzard rarely changes these during the beta process unless there is an obvious and egregious problem with them. The set bonuses for all classes seem to fit the "effective but not inspired" mold, which is what one might expect for the initial tier.
* 2P Bonus : Increases the critical strike chance of Arcane Missiles, Ice Lance, and Pyroblast by 5%. / Instant
* 4P Bonus : Reduces the cast time of Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, and Frostbolt by 10%. / Instant
There is the very minor concern that a +5% bonus on crit could push Ice Lance crits above 33.33%, which would be wasted (since Ice Lance is always cast when Shatter would be active and has x3 crit chance). Given crit levels initially at level 85, this is unlikely to be a problem.
Similarly haste levels are unlikely to be high enough that the 10% reduction in cast time pushes Frostbolt down to GCD levels--though this could be more problematic with Early Frost.
Rotation
Perhaps the biggest news for frost in Cata is that there is an actual rotation to use in raiding and that there are enough levers to adjust that it is to be expected that frost damage should be raid-worthy without being overpowered in pvp. This is a huge change for frost. The current theorycrafted rotation can be expressed as a priority list. You are monitoring various procs and cooldowns and make your decisions based on the following rules.
1. Frostfire Orb, if cooldown is up.
2. Deep Freeze, if cooldown is up and Fingers of Frost is active.
3. Frostfire Bolt, if Brain Freeze is active and Fingers of Frost is active.
4. Ice Lance if Finger of Frost is active.
5. Freeze, if cooldown is up, Deep Freeze cooldown is up, and Finger of Frost is not active.
6. Frostbolt.
This may seem more complicated than it actually is. The basic rule is that you spam frostbolt and interrupt that spam for FFB on BF procs and for DF/IL when FoF procs. It is best to save BF-FFBs for a FoF proc. One can force FoF to proc twice with Freeze and should do so whenever you have DF active to take maximum advantage.
Credits to Zeldyrr: Elitist Jerks
