Welcome to patch 2.3.2! I have been so involved in other things with my guild that I haven’t really seen anything saying it was coming out today. That was until the maintenance message yesterday.

As someone that spent most of their time spec’d Frost it was nice to see somethings happen for us to make it more “on par” with other raiding specs.

Cold Snap (Frost) cooldown reduced (6.4 min). It is now in the Ice Block position in the talent tree. This ability will no longer reset the cooldown on Fire Ward.

This is something I use during boss fights mainly. It can help bring that percentage between phases or even do the last 1% of damage as the raid wipes. I have even used it to summon 2 Water Elementals to drop Rokmar the Crackler in Heroic Slave Pens. I was locked in my Ice Block while my pet did the DPS needed to finish the fight. Mage tank FTW.

Conjure Mana Gem (Rank 6 – Emerald) now restores 2340 to 2460 mana and has three charges.

I fell in love with this new chaneg to our high rank mana gem. 3 Charges still a 2 min CD between uses but it really made a difference with the test I did.

*corrected the mana range*

Ice Block (Frost) is now available on the trainer to all mages at level 30.

I was pissed that they handed out Ice Block to everyone, that was something that made Frost Mages unique. Well that and the Water Elemental, if they spent the points for it.

Icy Veins (NEW Frost Talent) decreases casting time of all spells by 20% and increases the chance your chilling effects will freeze the target by 25%. Lasts 20 sec. 3 min cooldown. It is now in the Cold Snap position in the talent tree.

I like this addition to the frost spec. The spell has no Global Cooldown (GCD) that I could see. I actually added it to my Frostbolt macro and it activated when I should have and I continued to cast my spell. I don’t know if it was intended to work that way but I was having about 136ms of latency.

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast Icy Veins
/petattack
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Frostbolt

Icy Veins is really a spell haste effect. Check out the secret from Thottbot. I have a SS from their site below. It adds 20 spell haste and a 25 Flat modifier to your AP. What all that means is a 2.5 second Fireball or Frostbolt not only take 2.0 seconds to cast. In 20 second you could chain cast 10 Fireballs or Frostbolts where before Icy Veins you could only cast 8.