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
Глубокий раскол to amplify
Ледяная стрела damage that almost entirely ignores casting
Ледяное копье, including entirely ignoring it when
Ледяные пальцы is available but
Зимняя стужа is not active. With this "no
Ледяные пальцы" variant,
Ледяное копье is only needed to launch
Кристаллы льда into
Зимняя стужа and most time is spent casting
Ледяная стрела and
Шквал. The 2 piece bonus of this new set only increases the damage of
Ледяная стрела and
Шквал, which further incentivizes playing the "no
Ледяные пальцы" 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
Ледяные пальцы" 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
Ледяные пальцы" 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 Ледяное копье 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
Ледовый шип talent. This talent is weak in part because any time spent casting
Ледовый шип is spent not casting
Ледяная стрела,
Шквал, and
Ледяное копье; and these three spells are all further amplified by this set bonus.