This past week, Blizzard revealed another round of Hero Talent Trees in a Sneak Peek at the upcoming War Within system. Our Frost Mage guide writer, Dorovon, offers an early review of the Frostfire Mage Hero Talents that have an exceptional aesthetic and offer some intriguing gameplay changes but pose some concerns for AoE.
Blizzard recently revealed several new Hero Talent Tree previews, which includes the Frostfire tree that will be shared by Fire and Frost Mages in The War Within. While this initial Frostfire tree is not perfect, overall I have a positive view of it, especially in terms of how it will thematically feel to play as a Frostfire Mage.
The core gameplay created by the Frostfire tree is focused around the tree's keystone: Frostfire Mastery. Frostfire Mastery provides powerful stacking stat bonuses as you cast Fire and Frost spells. Additionally, Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion provide an extra incentive to reliably reach maximum stacks of both elements every 12-second cycle of the buff. For Frost Mages, stacks should generally be easy to obtain because almost any damaging spell you can cast will provide a stack. Conversely, most of the spells a Frost Mage casts do not generate and most of those stacks will come from Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion procs.
While the stat bonuses from Frostfire Mastery are nice, they shouldn't noticeably affect gameplay very much. The main aspect of Frostfire Mastery that will affect gameplay are Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion. Frostfire Bolt triggering Brain Freeze in particular is very strong and puts a lot of emphasis on consistently reaching maximum stacks of Frostfire Mastery during every 12-second cycle of the buff. This is likely to have three main effects:
The first two effects sound fine to me, but the third effect is concerning. Frost Mage has frequently had seasons where Ice Lance was just ignored in favor of casting more Frostbolts to get more Icicles. In The War Within, this was resolved through the Hailstone talent and by tuning Mastery: Icicles and Frostbolt to ensure that casting Ice Lance was always beneficial. Now with the Frostfire tree, Frostfire Bolt is replacing Frostbolt and gaining many new benefits, which could outweigh what was done for Ice Lance in The War Within.
Additionally, it is important to note that Frost normally does not cast Frostbolt much in the AoE rotation. While Frostfire Bolt means that there will be additional opportunities to cast Frostbolt in AoE encounters, the number of stacks a Frost Mage is generating will still be far below reaching maximum stacks each cycle unless the proc rate of Frostfire Bolt is very high. It is unfortunate that Frost will not be triggering much damage on AoE because Living Bomb is more of an AoE effect than single target.
The last concern I have with this keystone is the potential that it could be beneficial to use /cancelaura to remove the buffs in some cases. Because Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion trigger when reaching maximum stacks, any Frost or Fire spells cast at maximum stacks are not contributing to additional procs. This means that canceling Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion early after they reach maximum stacks would cause Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion to trigger more often. Whether this is worthwhile remains to be seen, but it is probably a good idea to simply remove the ability to cancel those buffs to prevent this gameplay from ever coming up during The War Within.
The capstone of the Frostfire tree is Flash Freezeburn. The best part about this capstone is that you will always have the full 12 seconds of the maximum benefit from Frostfire Mastery when activating Icy Veins. This preempts most potential optimizations that could happen around the best time to use Icy Veins relative to Frostfire Mastery. It does still encourage delaying Icy Veins slightly by waiting for low stacks of one or both of Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion first to maximize the overall number of Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion procs, but this is at least a straightforward optimization.
At level 80, we will have access to all nodes in the Frostfire tree. This means that the main decisions we will have to make are focused around the choice nodes.
Imbued Warding provides a reduced effectiveness of Blazing Barrier when casting Ice Barrier, similar to the Triune Ward effect from Shadowlands. This is thematically very cool and is one of the visual designs I was really hoping to see from the Frostfire tree. Numerically, 25% of Blazing Barrier is a very significant defensive boost and helps to erase one of the weaknesses that Frost Mages had when compared to Arcane Mages where Prismatic Barrier was just generally better than Ice Barrier thanks to its magic damage reduction.
Meltdown, on the other hand, is likely to be much more situational, although that also depends on its tuning. If the movement speed increase over time is significant enough and applies during Ice Cube, then I think Meltdown could see a lot of use just for the movement speed increase. The Blast Wave trigger is an interesting design choice because the knockback will not always be desirable as it can knock enemies that you do not want to move, but in other cases having an extra knockback would be more valuable than the Ice Block/Ice Cube itself.
For Frost Mages, Elemental Affinity is a simple passive reduction to the cooldown of Fire spells. In The War Within, the only Fire spells that a Frost Mage has access to that have cooldowns are Fire Blast, Blast Wave, and Dragon's Breath. While Fire Blast could see some usage to gain stacks of Frostfire Mastery, I think the main spells of interest here are Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath. These crowd control spells are some of the stronger utility available to Mages and being able to use them more often is a nice bonus.
Similar to Elemental Affinity, Flame and Frost is situationally very useful when back-to-back usages of Blast Wave or Dragon's Breath are desirable. In some cases, Elemental Affinity and Flame and Frost could even be combined to allow for three usages of Blast Wave and two usages of Dragon's Breath in quick succession. In raids or dungeons, this could mean stopping the casts of a group of enemies five times in a row with nobody else in the group having to do anything.
This node mostly appears to be a utility choice for Frost Mages. In situations where using one of the Fire spells multiple times in succession is strong, Flame and Frost is the clear winner. Otherwise, Elemental Affinity will provide more usages of those spells on average. It is also important to keep in mind that Cold Snap is usually reserved for Ice Block/Ice Cube, so it will feel kind of bad to use it for Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath unless Ice Block/Ice Cube is already on cooldown.
The best option here will largely depend on the situation. When Frostfire Bolt is being cast a lot, such as in single target encounters, Severe Temperatures looks better because it will help with consistently reaching maximum stacks of Frostfire Mastery. In AoE situations, Thermal Conditioning seems better because Frostfire Bolt will mostly just be cast when Frostfire Bolt is active. The cast time reduction from Thermal Conditioning does nothing in those cases and Frostfire Bolt will likely be at maximum stacks almost every time Frostfire Bolt procs.
How often do Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion proc?
Because Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion put a lot of emphasis on reaching maximum stacks of Frostfire Mastery, the expected proc rate of these effects is going to be very important for the gameplay of Frostfire. If the proc rates are too low, Frost Mages will struggle to reach maximum stacks of Frostfire Mastery consistently (especially in AoE situations), Fire Blast may enter the rotation, and Ice Lance may fall out of the rotation. If the proc rates are too high, then Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion will likely be mostly ignored and Frostfire Mastery will just be a passive buff. Where exactly these proc rates need to be depends a lot on the design intent for Frostfire.
Some of the nodes further lock you into Comet Storm.
Comet Storm does not do anything if the Frost Mage does not have Comet Storm talented and some of the effect from Isothermic Core is lost without it as well. Comet Storm is a fun talent so I don't mind this too much, but it is still a further restriction in a talent tree that already has very little diversity in node selection. Blizzard can lose ticks when the Mage's Haste is dynamically reduced.
Because Blizzard's duration is hasted when the cast finishes while its tick rate adjusts dynamically, whenever Frostfire Armor falls off Blizzard's new reduced tick rate will likely result in at least one lost tick for that cast.
It is a little strange with Elemental Affinity and Flame and Frost that Fire is better than Frost at the shared Frost spells and vice versa.
This feels especially weird as a Frost Mage in situations where Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath are not useful, because this node doesn't really do anything in those cases regardless of which choice you pick. It might be better to have these choices only affect utility spells and give both specs both the Fire and Frost portions.
Hard to control AoE procs like Severe Temperatures and Excess Frost can accidentally break crowd control.
This could be especially problematic in PvP where Mages sometimes try to avoid passive and random cleave specifically for this reason.
Overall, I think the initial design of the Frostfire tree looks pretty good. The general aesthetic of playing a Frostfire Mage is captured well by the design of the tree and there a number of nodes that look quite fun to play with. There are some rotational issues that could come up thanks to the importance of reaching maximum stacks of both Frostfire Bolt and Frostfire Infusion, but if those are addressed the tree seems like it will work well for Frost Mages.
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