Class Talents
Worthy mentions: Freezing Rain, Slick Ice, Chain Reaction, Splitting Ice, Thermal Void together as talents that were previously either choices or legendaries.
On top of that, we gained a powerful defensive cooldown that was strictly for arcane mages, Greater Invisibility; a 60% Damage Reduction on a 2 minutes cooldown.
Shifting power - is making a return, without the conduit, sadly, but still very beneficial.
Blast Wave - a returning spell, a knockback on 30 sec CD, extremely useful for Mythic+.
Temporal Warp - the famous double bloodlust ring from Legion. Essentially granting you the ability to blood lust twice for yourself.
Dragon’s Breath - the good old Dragon’s Breath that was for fire spec only, now available for all mage specs. Essentially an uncapped AoE Disorient, on a 45 sec CD now. It is extremely strong in Mythic+ and some Raid encounters that adds needs to be controlled.
Talent Builds
Single Target
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This is the build I recommend to any pure single-target fight with a focus on good survivability on the class tree.
Focus points within the tree: Thermal Void, Hailstones, Frozen Touch, Slick Ice, Glacial Spike, Ray of Frost, Comet Storm. All of these talents, when combined, will benefit our Single Target. Consider this as your typical Patchwork boss encounter.
We drop chain reaction for Glacial Spike, obviously we're not going to ice lance a lot on this build and for that reason we want to go down the Splitting Ice and Hailstone path.
Temporal Warp vs Time Anomaly - Generally, my advice for new players is to play Time Anomaly, as it will help you with Icy Veins uptime and the CDR you gain from the random proc helps a lot. However, with more gear and better uptime, then double bloodlust does pull ahead with Temporal Warp.
Mythic+ and AoE
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This would be my Mythic+ and AoE build.
Focus points within the Spec Tree: Everlasting Frost, Lonely Winter, Ice Caller, Splitting Ice, Freezing Rain, Hailstones, Glacial Spike, Ray of Frost, Comet Storm.
More AoE Focused
If you feel like you need a tiny bit more burst AoE, or you’re in an environment where adds are dying quickly (like low Mythic+ Keys) and you want to benefit from the AoE burst, you can swap Frozen Touch for Coldest Snap.
If you prefer more of the “old Ice Lance Frost“ AoE gameplay, you can swap glacial spike for Splintering Ray to make your Ray of Frost cleave, or Wintertide for Snowstorm. All of these builds are very close to each other and are preference for the player, in terms of which damage profile you prefer more.