Frost Mage Trick – Get Extra Crit Procs

When you’re playing a frost mage you have a a slight dependency on your ability to critically strike your enemies. Since you don’t have the “burst” amount of damage that the other specs gives a mage, most of your damage comes from “bonus critical strike damage”. So it pays really well to critically strike your enemy. The frost spec has multiple abilities that give you the chance to increase your critical strike chance:

Shatter – Tier 4 Talent – Increases the critical strike chance of all your spells against frozen targets by 50%.

Your Ice Lance spell, also deals TRIPLE damage while the target is frozen.

With this talent (assuming your enemy is frozen) you have roughly a 75%+ to crit your enemy. So getting off as many spells as possible while they are frozen is crucial. The only problem that occurs that your damaging spells usually break the frozen ability that is placed on the enemy. Allowing you only 1 critical strike (two if you are lucky). Until now!

By using the mechanics to your advantage you can get off additional spells to have the increased critical strike chance.

Here’s how you do it.

When something is frozen, I usually hit them with an Ice Lance first (It deals triple damage, I can use it while strafing to create a little more distance, and if it crits it deals just as much damage as a frost bolt). Also if it DOES crit, it will not break the frozen state the enemy is in.

Once I create the distance I cast my Frostbolt, and while it’s casting I get ready to hit Ice Lance again. When the frost bolt is about 60-80% of the way through casting I start spamming my hotkey for the Ice Lance ability.

What happens is while your Frostbolt is in the air (no damage has been calculated) you casted a Ice Lance, so the triple damage and crit chance are still awarded to the Ice lance.

This gives you the ability to easily crit the enemy 3 times with just one frozen ability. Otherwise your second frostbolt or Ice Lance would break the frozen spell.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. FROM MY TESTING, this also works with Fingers of Frost. When Fingers of Frost procs, you are awarded two spells, that act as if the target is frozen. So I use the same spell order. Ice Lance, Frostbolt (while frostbolt is casting spam:) Ice Lance. It still awards the bonus damage and crit chance to the third Ice Lance.

Now This is a pretty fun mechanic to use when your soloing, or pvping.

Discuss your Frost mage below by posting a comment! Discuss this strategy and how it works in your situations. Did you like this post? Let us know!

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Tags: fingers of frost, frost mage, Frostbolt, ice lance