Frost Mage Guide + Pro Tips (WoTLK) PVP

Frost Mage Guide + Pro Tips (WoTLK)

1. Making your mage
2. Tips and Tricks
3. Disc/Mage tips
4. Macros
5. AddOns
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Making your mage :

Stat priority : 4% spell hit > 126-130 spell pen(get it from gems and cloak enchant) > haste > spell power > mp5 > crit

Gear : (outdated)
- Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff with mp5 gems and enchant to swap to when u need extra mana regen.
- Wand of Ruby Claret
- Marrowgar's Frigid Eye
- Valanar's Other Signet Ring
- Lich Wrappings
- Solace trinket or Bauble of True Blood if no one has it on your team, Dislodged Foreign Object is not worth using imo.
- Meteor Chaser's Raiment or Shoulders of Mercy Killings or Shoulder of Ruinous Senility (use Titan-Forged shoulder, T9 helm/shoulder or T10 chest if you cant get 2k in 3s). The chest and shoulder pve pieces with 2k requirement in 3s are the only one with an extra socket over the pvp counterpart. The chest give you more haste than the shoulders, crit and a blue socket for the spell pen. The shoulders give less haste, hit, less loss of resil so you can drop Lich Wrappings for the PvP cloak and get even more resil because you'll be above the 4% hit. Any hit over that is wasted item budget imo so I use the chest.
- Rest is all pvp gear (dont drop below 900 resilience.)

Spec :
Improved Counterspell : 20-0-51
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage#_C ... UOeR,12213
For 2s, you can choose to swap 1 pt off Piercing Ice into Improved Blizzard. This means that your blizzard can now snare people, proc frostbite, fingers of frost, brain freeze and most importantly winter’s chill. Its best use is vs Rogue/Priest that choose to train your healer. Blizzard will keep on reapplying a snare on the rogue, will stack winter chill for dispel protection and will stop the rogue from using vanish until he is out of the blizzard. Its much more effective than spamming r1 frostbolt, both for peeling utility and to get a finger of frost to deep/sheep the priest. However, this spell cost a lot of mana and so its not really a talent worth picking up vs any other comps.

Burning Determination : 13-7-51
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage#BT ... UOeR,12213
With this spec you trade imp cs for burning determination. BD is an aura mastery buff that proc after you get interrupted, that last 20s and that cant be dispelled. Very useful against teams with a lot of interrupts (fuck wind shear…). You should only use this in 3s though, imp cs is much better for 2s.

Major glyph : Polymorph, Ice Barrier, Mana Gem and Evocation
If you play with a healer then get mana gem instead of evocation. If you play double dps with something that’s most likely going to be trained instead of you(lock, spriest, etc) then drop barrier for evo. Yes youre going to run out of mana very quickly without the mana gem glyph even if you use double solace and that’s because you need to spell steal a shit ton, especially vs healer/dps.

Minor glyph : Slow fall, Frost Ward and Fire Ward.

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Tips and tricks :

Shattering :
Finger of Frost give you the shatter effect talent(50% more chance to crit) on your next 2 spells. Note that shatter only increase the damage of ice lance, everything else hit for the same when it crit with or without a finger. Also fingers can be used on everything that deals damage. This include arcane explosion and fire blast, so try not to waste it on those spells.

If your target is high on health you should be spamming frostbolt for as long as possible, even if it means possibly missing out on a brain freeze proc, especially true if your target is a healer or receiving heals. Brain freeze is best used when your target is low on health or frozen, if not you can use it with a finger for a big burst. However keep in mind that in this patch resilience reduce your target's chance to be crit so finger/novas doesn't guarantee that it will crit. Also you should always follow fbolt with IL or instant FFire when your target is frozen, unless its in a deep freeze in which case you can cast 2 fbolt and then ice lance before the deep freeze fade if you have enough haste and your target doesn't have a stun reduction talent.

Ex: Youre not in a position to cast frostbolt, you want to deal damage and you have 1 finger and a brain freeze proc. Which do you cast first, FFire or IL? well lets take a look at what can happen :

FoF IL > FFire
1 FoF IL crit (4k) + 1 FFire crit (8k) = 4k after 1 gcd, 12k after 2
1 FoF IL non crit (2k) + 1 FFire crit (8k) = 2k after 1 gcd, 10k after 2
1 FoF IL crit (4k) + 1 FFire non crit (4k) = 4k after 1 gcd, 8k after 2
1 FoF IL non crit (2k) + 1 FFire non crit (4k) = 2k after 1 gcd, 6k after 2
Max = 12k, Low = 6k, Most likely = 8k

FoF FFire > normal IL
1 FFire crit (8k) + 1 normal IL crit (600) = 8k after 1 gcd, 8.6k after 2
1 FFire crit (8k) + 1 normal IL non crit (200) = 8k after 1 gcd, 8.2k after 2
1 FFire non crit (4k) + 1 normal IL crit (600) = 4k after 1 gcd, 4.6k after 2
1 FFire non crit (4k) + 1 normal IL crit (200) = 4k after 1 gcd, 4.2k after 2
Max = 8.6k, Low = 4.2k, Most likely = 8.2k

Conclusion : As you can see, both options will most likely deal the same amount of damage in the space of 2 gcd, but that the max possible damage that you can get comes from FoF IL crit > FFire crit. However the damage from a non FoF/shattered ice lance is negligible so you could use the 2nd gcd to steal, polymorph, etc. And if getting a FFire crit can mean getting the kill then you should use your finger on it. Also from an utility point of view, FFire also snare your target, so if your target isn't snared or is going to get dispeld then you should use FFire first even it doesn't mean that youre going to get the kill with it. A target that's not in your line of sight or that is constantly on you because youre not able to keep him snared is a target that you can't effectively dps. Those are the kind of call that you constantly need to make as a mage in WotLK.

Stacking Winter chill :
If the damage of your spell is fully absorbed then winter chill wont be applied. So make sure to dispel any absorb effect buff (power word shield, sacred shield, etc) when you want to stack winter chill to protect your important debuffs such as your polymorph, novas, etc. Once the shield is off then you can spam r1 fbolt and ice lance to stack it up. Note that you dont have to go to 5 stack to effectively protect your debuff but its obviously ideal. Theres a lot of rng involved in the mechanic of dispels in WotLK. I've had target that are in nova with cone of cold, fbolt and 5 stack of winter chill get the dispel on my poly on the 1st try.

Jumping stuff :
Try to predict when you’re going to get hit by a stun and then try to “jump it”. This means that you’re jumping as you get stun and so you end up landing on the ground further away. Try to use this to get behind line of sight to avoid following CC or damage (ex: shadowfury+fear combo). Getting good at this will mitigate a lot of damage and you might be able to save your blink cooldown.

Fake casting(juking) and interrupting :
Most good players will try to interrupt you asap because they think that they’re reaction time is better than yours. This is mostly true for rogues because they’re usually a bunch of assholes trying to prove that they’re better than everyone else. So those guys often try to be neilyo and try to “pre kick” a lot which means using your interrupt when you think that your enemy is going to start his cast and not when you actually realise that he is casting something. To be fair though, it is true that the only way to kill some healer is to pre kick otherwise he'll just keep on trying to juke your kick and so if you dont interrupt him then his instant cast heals are going to come back off cooldown and he'll be able to slowly get back to full health. A good tip to pre kick is to watch for when your target stops moving because usually you never stop moving unless its to hard cast something. So knowing that your enemy knows this fact, you can try to abuse it by delaying your cast just a little bit when you stop moving and “pre juke” as I like to call it which is interrupting your cast as soon as it starts. Or you can try to not juke at all and use a fire spell like scorch and maybe hell kick that. When youre able to juke pre kicks that’s when you won the mind fucking game because your enemy will start to hesitate a lot in how and when he should use his interrupts. Then you change your playstyle over and over and you become very hard to predict.

If you want to play safe then its best to wait until the very end of the cast because if you do get juked then the time it took for your enemy to get to the end of his cast before juking is sort of like an extra free “stun” on him.

Also, a good trick to make your enemy use spells like grounding totem or spell reflection is to turn around at the very end of the cast so that you’re no longer facing him when your cast ends and so your cast bar goes all the way up but your spell doesn’t go off.

Controlling which of your tree gets interrupted :
If you are in a situation in which you simply cant get away or cant afford to waste time fake casting then you should try to cast a spell in the tree that you don’t care about if it gets locked. Ex: if a rogue is riding me and I want to get a sheep on his teamate. Instead of trying to juke his kick I might decide to start spamming frostbolt in his face and make him use his kick on my frost tree so that I can freely cast my polymorph and then if he wants to stop that hell have to use a stun or gouge. You can easily avoid the gouge by spinning really fast while you cast or simply nova him for 1 sec and not face him as you cast or maybe hell use kidney shot or vanish/dance cheap shot/garrote, either way no matter what he chooses to use, its me that’s forcing him to use it at a not so desirable time for him and so it’s a win/win for me. And if they don’t interrupt you on your frostbolt spam then you’ll actually start to do more pressure than them damage wise. This tactic work very well in 2s but not so much in 3s because theres more interrupts and the pressure on you is usually higher and so you don’t want to take the risk to get locked on your frost tree and then die because you can’t block. Another example is if youre left in the open to free cast and your goal is to ditch out a lot damage by spamming frostbolt and you know that spell lock or counterspell is up then you can cast polymorph so that they lock your arcane tree and not your frost tree. I use this tactic in mage duel too but no other mage understand it which combined with spell steal game means that i will most likely win everytime. So then theyre like mages ''shouldnt spell steal in duel'' but thats just BS for bad mages cause then youre forced to trinket the first sheep and to block as soon as your arcane tree is locked. And if your first CS is juked and you dont juke his then its pretty much auto lose. So yeah they can think theyre god mage in duel but in arena if you use my tactic youll own them.

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Disc/Mage tips :

Dealing with Resto Shaman/Warlock :
Id say this is a counter, but its possible to win even against the best sham/lock out there. The mistake I see almost everyone do is to try to burn a resto shaman oom. It just doesnt work. You need to burst him down. So sheep him with water shield, clean him up, kill his tremor totem, fear lock/pet, then shatter into deep freeze. A good lock will micro manage his pet away from him so that they dont get double fear (but its really annoying for the lock to do this cause you dont have the click to move option for pets in wotlk and so hell put the felhunter on stay or on the mage away from the priest), if he does that then fear the lock and line of sight/nova the felhunter cause if you fear felhunter instead of lock then you need to poly lock and then shaman will be free to swap to earth shield, use tremor totem for the felhunter and grounding for your deep. Also when the felhunter is on stay, its easy to line of sight him and then if the lock press spell lock, the felhunter is going to start running towards you and autocast it as soon as youre in his line of sight, and so its really use to juke it. Don’t use CS after deep, you need to interrupt him on his tree so that he doesnt get himself back to full before you can fear and deep him again and then hopefully finish him off. With warlock's peels and the mvp felhunter its insanely hard to eventually manage to do this right. But because they know that youre going for the burst game, they actually get scared cause they know that its the only way that they can lose to disc mage so they will be quick to use cooldowns defensively which helps you a lot. Burning when the shaman is low on health after the burst is good though cause hell have to worry about avoiding burn and keeping himself alive. Also your priest need to be constantly aware that a good lock can easily 100-0 him with fear spam/death coil/spelllock. When the lock goes ham the shaman will try really hard to hex you, ground your CS when lock goes for the chaost bolt, and stop your sheep on lock. If your arcane tree gets locked or your cs is grounded and you dont have time to sheep then dont be afraid to use nova/deep on the lock. Expect those games to go for the 45 mins mark.

Dealing with Holy paladin/X :
Holy paladin teams are really easy to deal with once you know how. I see a lot of people trying to spam sheep and burn at the same time so that you can get around 3-4 burns. But if you do that then he might be able to hammer of justice your priest in between sheeps and then he is free to spam dispel his teamate which will rape you and peel you so that he can run off and divine plea/drink safely to full mana. The trick is to sheep the pally, your priest can then slowly walk to the pally for a double fear, if the dps isnt dumb then hell try to avoid it or immune it with bladestorm/anti-magic shell but that dont really matter, just fear pal by himself and then sheep dps, your priest should be rdy to dispel you if you get reflected. Then deep into cs the pal. Its important that the dps is sheepd before you deep the pal otherwise he can freedom him out of novas. Also fear last 7s, you have plenty of time to do all of the above, just dont break it early with damage or burn. Once this is over and the pally is able to run off, dont try to keep the pressure rolling. Sheep the paladin again so that he cant run away and help his teamate build momemtum, then nova the dps if the pressure is too high, otherwise spam r1 frostbolt for frostbite procs. This will also buy time to reset the cooldown on fear and dr on the dps for the polymorph. Just repeat that till hes fully oom then finish him. Doing this means that your priest will rarely be in a dangerous situation because you're always in control of both opponents. If youre in a YOLO mood then you can tell your priest to burst instead of burning and score an early kill, but if the pally gets lucky with sacred cleansing resist and dispels then your burst might fail and your priest will eventually fall behind on mana. Basicly if your burst and CC rotation is perfect then you only need 4 deep to kill the pal. 1st for divine shield, 2nd for pal's trinket, 3rd for warrior's trinket and the 4th one gets the kill. The thing though is they will pop those cooldown no matter what you choose to do during the deep (burn or burst). Also if you go for burst then your priest open his holy tree and so if the war and pal still have cooldowns then they can interrupt his holy tree and rape your priest in a couple of seconds. So i find it better to burn until both trinket and divine shield are down so that youre sure that your burst cant get fucked.

Dealing with feral druid/disc or resto sham :
This is a very hard comp to face. The druid can shapeshift out of novas and snares and so it doesn't really matter if you stack winter chill or not. Hes gonna be on your ass no matter what you do and you wont ever be able to sheep his healer with him on you. So how good is your own priest is the key to this fight. He needs to dispel the instant clone asap, but if he does get cloned then you need to stop the enemy priest from following it with fear or MC, you can just dispel hex so thats fine. To eventually build pressure everything starts from a fear on the enemy healer. So your priest must go on the offensive and try to fear the healer as often as possible and follow the fear with 2-3 sheep, its much harder vs a shaman obviously so you can try to start with poly instead by using nova on sham then juking grounding/windshear and then poly, at that point hell try to hex you though so line it and then outhaste him with your fast poly. Then you can deep the feral and burst him down. Its also important to not wait at the very last second to fear or resheep cause good player will try to break the CC rotation by interrupting you. The feral can interrupt you with charge/maim/bash and instant clone. Also try to help your priest catch up the healer with r1 frostbolt and kill tremor totem. Your priest should also be trying to push the healer in your own line of sight so that maybe you can start the CC rotation with poly instead of fear. Things to keep in mind : dont give up on kiting, dont show your back to him, keep on stacking winter chill so that his priest cant just dispel everything and it will force him to use global on shapeshifting and lower his uptime and dps on you even if you never actually get away from him. Using novas on the shaman to make him los his druid is actually a really effective CC since they can't dispel. Also if you ever get in trouble, you can deep the feral defensively cause the shaman cant dispel him. Its also important that you go for an early Evocation when the opportunity present itself because if your mana is very low then its very obvious that youre going to go for an evocate soon and theyll be ready for it. And don't spell steal too much. If you get oom, you lose. Basicly never go hard on dps unless the healer is CCed, rest of the time just kite and use as little mana as possible. Burning the enemy priest is a good idea but if your mage is below 70% without shield then you need to heal the shit out of him before he gets one shoted by a random 9k ferocious bite followed by a bunch of clones and fear.

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Some Macros :

Counterspell :
#showtooltip counterspell
/stopcasting [mod:shift]
/cancelaura ice block
/use [@mouseover,exists][mod:shift/ctrl,@focus][@target,exists] counterspell

Polymorph :
#showtooltip polymorph
/stopattack
/petfollow [nomod]
/petpassive [nomod]
/cancelaura ice block
/use [@mouseover,exists][mod:shift/ctrl,@focus][@target,exists] polymorph

Frostbolt :
#showtooltip frostbolt
/cancelaura ice block
/use [mod:shift] frostbolt(Rank 1)
/use [mod:ctrl,@focus] frostbolt(Rank 1)
/use [@mouseover,exists][@target,exists] frostbolt

Spellsteal :
#showtooltip spellsteal
/cancelaura ice block
/cancelaura invisibility
/targetenemyplayer [@target,noexists]
/use [@mouseover,exists][mod:shift/ctrl,@focus][@target,exists] spellsteal
/cancelaura hand of sacrifice
/cancelaura hot streak

Slow Fall :
#showtooltip slow fall
/cancelaura ice block
/use [@mouseover,exists][@target,exists,party,raid][mod:shift,@party1][mod:ctrl,@party2][@player] slow fall

Arena1 :
/cancelaura [nomod] ice block
/cancelaura [mod:alt] ice block
/use [nomod,@arena1] polymorph
/target [mod:shift] arena1
/focus [mod:ctrl] arena1
/use [mod:alt,@arena1] counterspell

Set focus :
/focus [@target,exists]
/focus [@mouseover,exists]
/clearfocus [@focus,dead]

Swap focus/target
/targetenemyplayer [@target,noexists]
/cleartarget [@target,dead]
/clearfocus [@focus,dead]
/target focus
/cleartarget [@focus,noexists]
/targetlasttarget
/focus target
/targetlasttarget