The Frost Mage Season 2 tier set bonuses largely reinforce the talents and playstyles that are already the best and most popular by amplifying the spells that these playstyles most rely on. Particularly, there is a strong variant of Frost that focuses on talents like
Tiefe Zertrümmerung to amplify
Frostblitz damage that almost entirely ignores casting
Eislanze, including entirely ignoring it when
Eisige Finger is available but
Winterkälte is not active. With this "no
Eisige Finger" variant,
Eislanze is only needed to launch
Eiszapfen into
Winterkälte and most time is spent casting
Frostblitz and
Hagel. The 2 piece bonus of this new set only increases the damage of
Frostblitz and
Hagel, which further incentivizes playing the "no
Eisige Finger" variant. The 4 piece bonus does help to offset this a little, but it is not strong enough to make the variant worse than more conventional playstyles and it is only available once you get 4 set pieces. This means the variant is far stronger when only the 2 pieces have been collected early on in the season.
In single target situations, early simulations show that the 2-piece bonus can be expected to increase damage by around 5% for the standard Frost playstyle and around 7% for the "no
Eisige Finger" variant. The 4-piece bonus can be expected to increase damage for the two playstyles by a further 2.7% and 1.1%, respectively. In total, this is around 8% damage for the standard Frost playstyle and 8.5% for the "no
Eisige Finger" variant. This is generally comparable to the value gained from the Season 1 set. Unfortunately, this is not the case in AoE. Against five targets, the Season 2 bonuses increase damage by only around 4.6% (2 piece) and 2.9% (4 piece) compared to 5.5% (2 piece) and 7.5% (4 piece) for the Season 1 set. In total, this is an increase of 7.7% for the Season 2 set compared to 13.4% for the Season 1 set. This gap is significant enough that at least early on, some players may opt to use the Season 1 set in Mythic+ and on AoE raid encounters instead of the Season 2 set.
Overall, this new set bonus appears to be a step down from the Season 1 tier set bonus thanks to three major issues that can hopefully be addressed before the release of 10.1.
- The 2-piece bonus incentivizes dropping Eislanze from the rotation.
- The 4-piece bonus is weak in general due to its low proc chance and can mostly be ignored.
- Both bonuses are relatively weak in AoE situations.
Lastly, once again this bonus further incentivizes not playing the already weak
Gletscherstachel talent. This talent is weak in part because any time spent casting
Gletscherstachel is spent not casting
Frostblitz,
Hagel, and
Eislanze; and these three spells are all further amplified by this set bonus.