Frost Mage Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation

As far as frost goes, the spec hasn’t changed much going from Shadowlands to Dragonflight.

1. A.B.C - Always be Casting.
2. Cast everything on CD (unless holding for a specific scenario).
3. Use Procs accordingly - with Fingers of Frost first before Flurry, unless you are at risk of munching Flurry Proc.
4. Remember the Flurry Shatter rule - Frostbolt > Flurry > 2x Ice Lance.

Opener

Single Target:

1. Prepot
2. Frostbolt + Flurry + 1x Ice lance (Shatter Combo)
3. Icy Veins + Racials + Trinkets
4. Comet Storm 
5. Ray of Frost (since we its buffed by 80% from Icy Veins + consume the 2nd stack of winter’s chill)
6. Frozen Orb
7. Glacial Spike whenever you are at 5 Icicles (see Glacial Spike Shattering in the section below)
8. Continue by reacting to procs accordingly

Multi Target:

1. Prepot
2. Icy Veins + Racial + Trinkets that you have
3. Frozen Orb
4. Blizzard (with Freezing Rain)
5. Comet Storm (to proc Glacial Assault talent)
6. Cone of Cold (with Coldest Snap) to apply winter’s chill on all targets and repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 again since coldest snap resets Frozen Orb and Comet Storm CD)
7. Ice Lance (to build icicles)
8. Frostbolt if you have no Ice Lance available for Glacial Spike
9. Glacial Spike + Shatter combo (see the section above)
10. React to procs accordingly
11. Don’t overcap Icicles for Glacial Spike

Glacial Spike Shattering

There is an old, but useful, technique as Frost Mage that we used to do with glacial spike and flurry. We used to shatter our Glacial Spike, followed by Flurry whilst inside the Winter’s Chill window; similar to what we do with the Shatter combo with Frostbolt, flurry and 2x ice lance.

How we want to do that is to try to have Flurry ready when we are close to or at 5 Icicles, then cast Glacial Spike and immediately follow up with Flurry to make our Glacial spike benefit from Winter’s Chill.

We achieve that benefit because Glacial Spike has a sort of “formed“ animation, plus Flurry projectiles are very fast compared to Glacial Spike, so with this technique Glacial Spike benefits from our Flurry’s Winter’s chill window, which increase Glacial Spike damage by a lot It’s extremely crucial to master this technique.

Assuming you have played Frost Mage before and performed that combo with Flurry, you just replace Frostbolt with Glacial Spike > Flurry > Ice Lance.

If you don't have a Flurry proc ready, you can freeze mobs (more M+ focused) with Frost Nova in order to achieve something similar; you need to be close to the pack and press Frost Nova as soon as you release your Glacial Spike keybind. You can also use Pet Freeze, but it only works when you have Icy Veins available.

With that being said, we NEVER hold glacial spike for a Flurry Proc, glacial spike damage is so big that we want to send it as soon as we have 5 Icicles. Holding glacial spike and continuing to cap icicles with frostbolt will delay us for our next Glacial Spike window, which is something we want to avoid at all cost.

Defensives & Playstyle

As mentioned above, frost has excellent survivability and good Mobility with Mirror Images, Alter Time, 2x Shimmer, 2x Ice Blocks (with cold snap), Greater Invis (which also increases our movement speed if talented), and Ice Barrier.

Rotating our defensives properly can significantly increase our chance to live high sources of incoming damage!

Note - Don’t be afraid to be aggressive with defensive CD since shifting power reduce all our CDs by 10 Seconds, while on 1 minute CD.

For example, using Ice block, then shifting power on CD every time it’s available will bring Ice Block to roughly a 3 minutes CD instead of 4 minutes.