The subject of this article was removed from World of Warcraft in patch 4.0.1. This includes items and quests that can no longer be obtained. The in-game information in this article is kept purely for historical purposes and should probably not be under any other categories.

Arctic Winds is a mage talent that increases all Frost damage done and reduces melee and ranged opponent's chance to hit by 1% per rank, up to 5% at rank 5. This talent is popular with frost mages that want to get the most damage out of their frost spells, as it is a direct boost to all Frost damage. The chance to hit reduction effectively reduces hit rating from melee and ranged attackers, reducing damage taken, making this a useful PvP talent as well. Damage from warriors, rogues, hunters, and some shamans, druids and paladins will be affected the most.

This stacks with a similar talent in the Frost tree Piercing Ice, which also increases all Frost damage done by 2% per rank, up to 6%. The damage increase for this talent works the same, by including all spell damage gear the mage is wearing. Since it is a multiplicative increase, the combined effect of the talents combined is an increase of 11.3% to all frost damage (after the addition of +damage from items). With Curse of the Elements applied to the target this gives an effective increase of 22.43% (25.70% with 3/3 Malediction) to all frost damage.

This talent doesn't affect the damage numbers which show in the tooltips of your frost spells.

Rank	Frost damage	Enemy chance to hit
1	+ 1%	- 1%
2	+ 2%	- 2%
3	+ 3%	- 3%
4	+ 4%	- 4%
5	+ 5%	- 5%

The damage multiplier applies to total damage, including the base damage, bonus from spell damage gear, and any other damage multipliers. The following formula gives the total damage of a frost spell, E, where B is the spell's base damage, c is the spell damage coefficient, d is the amount of spell damage the mage has, and Y is the number of points in Arctic Winds. Critical strikes are not considered.

E = (1.0 + 0.01*Y)(B + c*d)

Piercing Ice is a second multiplier applied in a similar way. The following formula includes X, the number of points in Piercing Ice.

E = (1.0 + 0.01*Y)(1.0 + 0.02*X)(B + c*d)

Past changesEdit

This talent was introduced with Patch 2.0. Originally, it only affected enemy chance to hit. With Patch 2.1 the damage increase was added.

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