One of the Frost Mages’ greatest weapon. It is the Frost Mage’s ability to do massive amounts of burst damage to an enemy target, leaving them with little to no time to react. Burst damage on par (if not better) than an AP + PoM -> Pyro Mage- without being a “3 Minute Mage”.

Now, I have been getting a couple of emails and in-game messages about “Shatter Combo” they keep hearing about, and the steps involved with achieving it. What is it? Why is it good? How do I do this? Then I figured I would try to make a video to show you what it is and try to help show you how to do it.

What is it? It is a Frost Mage combo, based on the Shatter Talent in the Frost Tree, which increases your Critical Strike Chance of all your spells against frozen targets by 50%. The original Shatter Combo pre-BC was to Frost Nova a target, step back a few steps, then fire off a Frostbolt and Cone of Cold right after so that the Cone of Cold and Frostbolt would hit the frozen target at the same time (due to the travel time of Frostbolt) and both benefit from the Shatter bonus, making both of the spells crit the target. Now with the addition of the Water Elemental and Ice Lance, there has been different variations of this combo.

Why is it good? It does extremely high burst damage to the target. In PvE and in PvP, it can be used to quickly take a target’s health down superfast, or to just kill them if they are below 50% health.

How do I do it? The new version of the combo replaces Cone of Cold with Ice Lance. In PvE, you can simply Frost Nova a target, stand anywhere away from the target, fire off a Frostbolt and Ice Lance immediately after Frostbolt is done casting. Ice Lance has a faster travel time than Frostbolt, so they will both hit the target at roughly the same time, with both benefiting from the Shatter bonus. Now for PvP, you have to be more tricky with your spells.

In PvP it is a little bit different. If you Frost Nova a player in PvP combat, chances are they are not gonna sit there frozen and eat the Frostbolt and Ice Lance to the face. Most players will use their PvP Trinket to get out, or use one of their escape abilities according to their class.

So how do you get them to stay frozen while you are charging up a Frostbolt? With your Water Elemental! Your pet has a neat spell called Freeze, which is basically a ranged Frost Nova which can be cast by the pet while you are casting Frostbolt. This will give your target little to no chance to trinket out or dispell or even react to the Freeze before your Frostbolt and Ice Lance hits them. You can see it in action in this little video I made. Also note that this is my first time making a video so don’t expect any fancy effects or any editing at all

Basically you want to cast Frostbolt, and right before Frostbolt finishes casting, you use the pet’s Freeze on the target, then cast Ice Lance right after Frostbolt finishes casting. That is about 6k+ damage for a mage with about 800-900 spell damage, plus the damage of the Waterbolt you pet does, plus you still have your own Frost Nova, Cone of Cold and Fireblast to add to the damage.

The video is kinda blurry watching it in the Youtube video so I will also try to upload a version of the video for you to download. The video should be about 15mb or less in size so it won’t take too long to download. You can download it HERE from RapidShare.com.

Related Posts:

• Guide to Frost PvE: Talents
• Frost Mage PvP: 101
• Frost Mage PvE: Lady Deathwhisper
• Guide to Frost PvE: Glyphs
• Frost Mage PvE: Lord Marrowgar