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
Fracture profonde to amplify
Éclair de givre damage that almost entirely ignores casting
Javelot de glace, including entirely ignoring it when
Doigts de givre is available but
Froid de l'hiver is not active. With this "no
Doigts de givre" variant,
Javelot de glace is only needed to launch
Glaçons into
Froid de l'hiver and most time is spent casting
Éclair de givre and
Rafale. The 2 piece bonus of this new set only increases the damage of
Éclair de givre and
Rafale, which further incentivizes playing the "no
Doigts de givre" 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
Doigts de givre" 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
Doigts de givre" 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 Javelot de glace 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
Pointe glaciaire talent. This talent is weak in part because any time spent casting
Pointe glaciaire is spent not casting
Éclair de givre,
Rafale, and
Javelot de glace; and these three spells are all further amplified by this set bonus.