Frost Mage Leveling Guide from 1 to 90 — 12.0.5

Frost Mage, being able to kite almost everything, can effectively kite and kill large swaths of mobs at once. Even if you wish to take it slowly and target one mob at a time, the fact that we have passive slows on almost everything we have means that we will be nearly untouched in outdoor content.

If you are feeling foolhardy, Frost has an excellent toolkit to pull multiple mobs and survive unscathed relatively early. Always have Ice Barrier active if you are going to pull something that will not die quickly. Remember that you do have Invisibility at level 1, as a quick escape if you have gotten in over your head.

There are two schools of thought to playing Frost at a low level. The first is playing it safe, Frostbolt provides a heavy slow to any target you hit with it. You will rarely take damage, although you are limited to safely pulling one mob at a time. The second throws caution to the wind and spams Arcane Explosion, as it deals the same damage as a Frostbolt, but without the cast time and in AoE. The downside is you will take damage due to the close-range nature of this ability, but you will kill significantly quicker if you pull multiple at once. You will also have to regenerate Mana, as Arcane Explosion costs 10% of your total Mana per cast. This is more usable with heirlooms, as you have significantly more Intellect versus the gear you would have from standard levelling quests.

Leveling Information

Beginner Leveling Guides

If this is your first character, or want to know more about the leveling process in Midnight, we've got you covered with these two guides!

Basic LevelingMidnight Leveling

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level.

When using Heirloom items, the recommendation will change slightly depending on if you have some older exclusive items or not. If you are lucky enough to have Hellscream's War Staff, that stat combination is the best potential you could get. Otherwise, Dignified Headmaster's Charge is suitable. Try and focus on pieces that have Mastery or Crit, but do not worry too much about being "optimal" while levelling.

Itemization

Leveling Heirlooms

Learn how to use Heirloom gear to level your characters as fast as possible!

Heirlooms Guide

Speed is almost always the most useful consumable stat to get while out in the world. Getting point to point is always going to be the bulk of your time spent, and that goes double for time spent on the ground looting mobs.

Gunshoes are functionally a run speed potion that propel you forwards at great speed. These are fantastic to have a stock of, as they have no level requirement and can get you across a quest area incredibly quickly. You can also Invisibility afterwards, and drop all aggro you might have pulled along the way.

Goblin Glider Kits are a nice thing to have for jumping around cliffs, especially in areas you cannot mount in, such as a cave interior.

Exquisitely Eviscerated Muscle, or the equivalent lower level speed food is a nice bonus, although lost on death, and fairly minor.

Charged Phial of Alacrity is a Speed flask to go with the above food, again this is simply a nice bonus to have at higher levels when speed flasks actually become a thing.

Realistically if you have a decent stock of Gunshoes, that is about all you should really care about if you truly wish to optimize time spent levelling.

It is possible to follow Blizzard's "Starter Build", as it seems to be a fairly decent talent tree with a healthy mix of open-world damage and some AoE. The order in which it presents talents to you can be questionable, however. This guide will follow a slightly different path, but feel free to experiment. You can change talents at any time outside of combat, as long as you are not trying to talent out of something that is currently on cooldown. You can always return to the guided Starter Build at any time by selecting it from your build dropdown menu on the talent UI.

If you are just starting your journey into Midnight, we have a Level 80 import string for you. You can follow the point-by-point allocation of the below tree once you start gaining levels in Midnight.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content.

1. Frost Bomb is likely the best DPS talent of the War Mode talents.
2. Concentrated Coolness increases Frozen Orb's damage by 10%, and allows it to be placed on the cursor. You lose the ability for it to track your target, but the DPS gain is a worthwhile trade.
3. Snowdrift gives you access to an AoE stun that deals minor damage.

The rest have limited use in PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open-world, but they can be situationally useful if you wish for defensive bonuses.

To help with understanding what changes for your spec as you level up and progress through the talent tree, use the slider below to select your current level. Each time you level up, move it along, and the section will level up with you!

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

1. Ray of Frost
2. Flurry
3. Frozen Orb
4. Ice Lance when there are at least 4 Freezing stacks on the target
5. Ice Lance when there are at least 4 Freezing stacks on the target or you have Fingers of Frost
6. Frostbolt

1. Cry, and try to tab Frostbolts between everything you have pulled so you can try to maintain distance. Generally a bad idea to try and AoE before level 6.
2. Frozen Orb
3. Blizzard
4. Arcane Explosion

Class Guides

Mage Class Guides

Finished leveling your character? Check out our max level guides!

All Mage Guides

Kuni

Guide Author

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This guide has been written by Kuni, one of the best Frost Mages in the world, who raids in Mortal Desire.