Frost Mage Leveling Guide from 1 to 80 - The War Within (11.0.2) (2024)

Last updated on Aug 21, 2024 at 18:20by Kuni113 comments

On this page, you will find our Level by Level Frost Mage leveling guide for The War Within.Make sure to use the slider to make the guide adapt to your level.For more general leveling information, please refer to ourMage leveling guide.

Frost Mage, being able to kite almost everything, caneffectively kite and kill large swaths of mobs at once. Even if you wish totake it slowly and target one mob at a time, the fact that we have passiveslows on almost everything we have means that we will be nearly untouched inoutdoor content.

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with thehighest item level.

It is possible to follow Blizzard's "StarterBuild", as it seems to be a fairly decent talent tree with a healthy mix ofopen-world damage and some AoE. The order in which it presents talents to you can bequestionable, however. This guide will follow a slightly different path, butfeel free to experiment. You can change talents at any time outside of combat,as long as you are not trying to talent out of something that is currently oncooldown. You can always return to the guided Starter Build at any time byselecting it from your build dropdown menu on the talent UI.

Talents unlock at level 10, with you gettingyour first spec-specific point at level 11.

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

Level: 70

1. Icy Veins
2. Flurry
3. Frozen Orb
4. Ice Lance when Fingers of Frost is active, or after a Flurry to consume Winter's Chill stacks
5. Frostbolt

1. Cry, and try to tab Frostbolts betweeneverything you have pulled so you can try to maintain distance. Generally abad idea to try and AoE before level 6.
2. Frozen Orb
3. Blizzard on cooldown to help reset Frozen Orb
4. Ice Nova
5. Shifting Power
6. Arcane Explosion

There are two schools of thought to playing Frostat a low level. The first is playing it safe, Frostbolt provides aheavy slow to any target you hit with it. You will rarely take damage, althoughyou are limited to safely pulling one mob at a time. The second throws cautionto the wind and spams Arcane Explosion, as it deals the same damage asa Frostbolt, but without the cast time and in AoE. The downside is you willtake damage due to the close-range nature of this ability, but you will killsignificantly quicker if you pull multiple at once. You will also have toregenerate Mana, as Arcane Explosion costs 10% of your total Mana per cast.This is more usable with heirlooms, as you have significantly more Intellectversus the gear you would have from standard levelling quests.

As indicated in the talents above, getting Flurry will be your primary goal starting out. It is an extremelypotent spell that applies a debuff to the target that considers them "frozen."for the next two spell impacts. Most of the spec revolves around managing thisfrozen state. You will notice that Ice Lance triples damage againstfrozen targets, so casting two of them after a Flurry will buff themsignificantly. You will also quickly get Shatter, adding CriticalStrike chance against frozen targets. This is the primary theory behind thespec and the reason Flurry is so important.

Now that you have the majority of your kit, the specshould start to make sense. Flurry's debuff behaves in someinteresting ways. You can have a spell benefit from it if it was cast beforethe Flurry if the original cast has a cast time. These cast time spells thatcan benefit from Flurry are Frostbolt and Glacial Spike. It is also not consumed by certain late-game spells,usually to guarantee that they work with the debuff properly due to theirnature. Spells that do not consume charges are all AoE spells, and Ray of Frost.

Frostbolt into Flurry into two Ice Lances is the bread and butter of this spec. If you have this, youhave the entire spec down on single target.

There are now enough talent points to take a detourif you wish. Pulling points out of Wintertide and instead going down Ice Caller on the right side of Winter's Blessing is a valid option if you find yourself AoEing significantlymore than this guide was anticipating. Frost's AoE revolves around Frozen Orb, and resetting Frozen Orb with Ice Caller.

If you start AoEing in this fashion, your defensivecooldowns will very likely come into play a lot more than they have been tothis point. Ice Barrier is worth 22% of your max Health and also slowsanything hitting you. This should be up when soloing almost all the time. Mirror Image can take some damage off of you for a short time and isalso a damage reduction while they exist. Alter Time can act as a fullheal if cast at full Health and recast before you die; abuse this thing to getfunctionally 2 Health bars.

It should also be noted that the class talents arealso extremely flexible. The only actual DPS abilities in the first 20 pointsare Overflowing Energy, Incanter's Flow, and Shifting Power,which were among the first few you should have taken, and then the two stat boosts Tome of Rhonin and Tome of Antonidas. Everything else can beadjusted as you see fit or as your playstyle dictates. Maybe if you wish tohavesome more defensive power and fewer utility picks, go wild. The first 20 points, aside from those five talents mentioned, are all possible to play with.

This talent set has been picked to provide a bit moreAoE ability through Freezing Rain, rather than maximum single targetdamage. Hailstones is deceptively strong, one of the strongest talentsin the lower half of the tree, so try and avoid speccing out of it entirely.

The remaining talents simply even out the last of thetoolkit, with a focus on a more general cleave build rather than the puresingle target build.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best forlevelling and doing solo / small group PvE content.

1. Frost Bomb is likely the best DPS talent of the War Mode talents.It is slightly buggy and does not interact fully with certain pieces of ourkit, but it can be Shattered.
2. Ice Form changes your Icy Veins into a 1-minutecooldown that only improves your Frostbolt damage.
3. Ring of Fire is not a bad pick but does cap out at your ownHealth's value against elite mobs, so this is not as useful as it may seem atfirst glance. Strong enough to be a solid pick, however.
4. Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damageby 10%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor.
5. Snowdrift gives you access to a stun that doubles as a freeze, soyou could spam Ice Lance into the mobs.

The rest have limited use in PvEcontent in terms ofincreasing your damage in the open-world, but they can be situationallyuseful if you wish for defensive bonuses.

Congratulations on reaching level 80! Now that youhavehit Level 70, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn howto play at max level.