http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...p=1#post933694

Changes again

Arcane Subtlety - Ranks 2 - Reduces your target's resistance to all your spells by 5/10 and all of your Arcane spells cause 20/40% less threat edit Reduced ranks, aggro reduce effects arcane only

Wand Specialization - Ranks 2 - Requires 5 points in Arcane Talents - Increases your damage with Wands by 13/25% edit reduced to 2 ranks

Magic Absorption - Ranks 5 - When you resist a spell, you regain 1/2/3/4/5% of your max. mana and increases all resistances by 2/4/6/8/10 edit New ability

Improved Arcane Explosion - Ranks 3 - Requires 10 points in Arcane Talents - Increases the critical strike chance of your Arcane Explosion spell by an additional 2/4/6% edit reduced to 3 ranks, max crit % increased.

Burning Soul - Ranks 2 - Requires 10 points in Fire Talents - Gives your fire spells a 35/70% chance to not lose casting time when you take damage and reduces threat by 15/30%. edit added threat reduction

Improved Scorch - Ranks 3 - Requires 15 points in Fire Talents - Your Scorch spells have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Fire damage. This vulnerability increase the Fire damage dealt to your target by 3% and lasts 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times. edit increased vulnerability effect to 3%

etc

Quoting this.

Arcane Subtlety - Ranks 2 - Reduces your target's resistance to all your spells by 5/10 and all of your Arcane spells cause 20/40% less threat edit Reduced ranks, aggro reduce effects arcane only

Wand Specialization - Ranks 2 - Requires 5 points in Arcane Talents - Increases your damage with Wands by 13/25% edit reduced to 2 ranks

Magic Absorption - Ranks 5 - When you resist a spell, you regain 1/2/3/4/5% of your max. mana and increases all resistances by 2/4/6/8/10 edit New ability (tier2 arcane)

Improved Arcane Explosion - Ranks 3 - Requires 10 points in Arcane Talents - Increases the critical strike chance of your Arcane Explosion spell by an additional 2/4/6% edit reduced to 3 ranks, max crit % increased.

Burning Soul - Ranks 2 - Requires 10 points in Fire Talents - Gives your fire spells a 35/70% chance to not lose casting time when you take damage and reduces threat by 15/30%. edit added threat reduction

Improved Scorch - Ranks 3 - Requires 15 points in Fire Talents - Your Scorch spells have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Fire damage. This vulnerability increase the Fire damage dealt to your target by 3% and lasts 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times. edit increased vulnerability effect to 3%

Frost Warding - Ranks 2 - Requires 5 points in Frost Talents - Increases the armor and resistances given by your Frost Armor and Ice Armor spells by 15/30%. In addition, gives your Frost Ward a 10% chance to reflect Frost spells and effects while active. edit moved tiers: up 1 slot, left 1 slot

Elemental Focus - Ranks 3 - Increases chance to hit with Fire and Frost spells by 2/4/6% edit new ability in place of Permafrost(moved)

Frostbite - Rank 3 - Requires 5 points in Frost Talents - Gives your Chill effects a 5/10/15% chance to freeze the target for 5 sec. edit moved tiers: right 1 slot (to replace forst warding)

Improved Frost Nova - Ranks 2 - Reduces the cooldown of your Frost Nova spell by 2/4 sec. edit moved tiers: down 1 slot, right 2

Permafrost - Ranks 3 - Requires 5 points in Frost - Increases the duration of your Chill effects by 1 sec and reduces the target's speed by an additional 4/7/10%. edit moved tiers: down 1 slot, right 1 (under Imp. Bliz.)

Frost Channeling - Ranks 3 - Requires 15 points in Frost Talents - Reduces the mana cost of your frost spells by 5/10/15% and reduces threat caused by Frost spells by 10/20/30%. edit added aggro reduction

Winter's Chill - Ranks 5 - Requires 25 points in Frost Talents - Frost spells cause a debuff that increases chance to crit with frost effects by 2%, which stacks up to 5 times edit New functionality

Ice Barrier - Ranks 1 - Requires 30 points in Frost Talents and 1 point in Ice Block 305 mana/instant/30 sec cooldown - Instantly shields you, absorbing 454 damage. Lasts 1 min. While the shield holds, spells will not be interrupted. Now stacks with PW: Shield and gains 10% of +Frost dmg gear. Absorb effects now prioritized over Mana Shield. edit added functionality

taken from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...e&T=918906&P=1

Interesting. I kind of liked the crit-based mechanic, but this is simpler. Well, now this really is a straight across-the-board buff, with no downsides or tradeoffs, for the class. Even if you don't change your build much, you still get points freed up, and increased effectiveness on existing talents.

Summary:
Arcane: Subtlety is now two ranks, -20%/-40% arcane threat
Fire: Burning Soul reduces threat by -15%/-30% for fire spells
Frost: Frost Channeling reduces frost spell threat by -10%/-20%/-30%

Also, all sorts of additional buffs, and an all new ability.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...e&T=918906&P=1

Check out the buffs to the frost tree, and buff to imp scorch.

Also, this:
That seems abusable (if you have a low level mob casting spells on you that you resist 90% of the time, you have near-infinite mana?) but we'll see the implementation.

Mother of gods.

They listened and have made changes that are good. Actually... good?

-30% aggro to frost and fire spells?

15% scorch debuff, 10% winters chill? Regain mana on spell resists? Scalable Frost Barrier?

How on earth did this get changed so fast?

Hahaha this is insane. As I already stated, I was so happy with what we first got, and now people have been whining so much, causing them to give even better buffs. Keep the whine coming and make us unbeatable xD

Furthermore, this is the first time I intentionally run into Sartura so I can read forums!

Really good tweaks. Magic Absorption will help to offset the usual loss of mana/+dmg that you get for wearing overboard resist gear, and will make farming low-level casters extremely easy, the rest of the Arcane tree tweaks should make it a little easier to get to PoM without spending bullshit points. 30% threat reduction in the fire and frost trees is great and should alleviate most concerns about touchy aggro. Winter's Chill doubles in effectiveness which is about right, +dmg adding to Frost Barrier is going to make it a very attractive option. Elemental Focus is going to make the Shatter/Combustion build really mean.

Fuck I want a new talent page now because I’ve having a hard time piecing this together in my head right now.

I’ve going to spend so much time on the test server fucking with spec’s, speaking of witch Gurgthock can you loan all the mages like 3k gold or so to let us test specs on test? I know I’m going to blow though a shit ton of gold running back and forth between the mage trainer. ;_;

Umm, wow.

Edit: it seems like a 31frost/20 arc build is now 100% optimal for raiding, unless you can con the other mages into doing that and get arc instability so you get the benefits of both.

How do you justify Ice Barrier over PoM? PoM is so versatile for raiding as well as PvP.

Also, apologies if I missed this earlier in the discussion, but am I right in observing that Pyro doesn't seem to have a cooldown now? For a fire mage with 8/8 NW, tossing pyros on every proc would seem to be pretty nasty.

Wow, those are some awesome changes. Whining ftw!

Ice Barrier maybe is very powerful, depending on how +damage affects it. Hopefully can get more than 10% like PW: Shield got.

I see 31 frost/20 Arcane as the best raiding build.

30s ice barrier with a +dmg coefficient is an additional ~500HP every 30s. That is going to add up a ton over a long fight where you're eating AE damage, especially since while you've got it up you can't be interrupted while casting spells.

I can't really think of any uses of PoM in AQ. Flamestriking in an AE situation gets you killed. There's nothing that has to be instasheeped. I suppose it's useful for burst on viscidus but that's very much a corner case and ice barrier would be better on that fight.

Holy shit, these changes are fantastic.

EDIT: And yeah, someone needs to update a calculator because I have no damn clue how to approach this now. -Threat talents and +hit talents, both in the Frost tree? Sign me the fuck up.

Praetorian, plz join forces with the other shaman and bitch about your class.

No CD. It was changed in the IGN->talent calc transition. It still lacks use outside of poly openers or insta-casts but for 1 point it's not a large deal.

As primarily a druid player, the best part of 1.11 will be everybody turning into hilariously demeaning turtles and bunnies every time mages poly in BGs.

Alright, these are really great changes. I really like the Elemental Focus talent. Finally, Arcane Focus for non-Arcane spells. Very good raiding talent, especially for Frost given the way resist checks are done on binary spells.

And Magic Absorption is far better filler than 5 point Wand spec. I wonder how it works in the specific... does the resist bonus stack to any extent? How long does it last? Does it work with partial resists or just full resists? It's a good start for anti-caster defenses.

I really like the boost to Frostbite... it's much more worthwhile now. Imp. Scorch is very much more powerful too and the school specific aggro-reduction talents are just gravy.

Overall, I'm happy now.

Though I'd still like to see some more anti-caster defenses ;-).

It sort of depends in my mind, if we see more splash damage like we’ve seen in AQ in Naxx then I’d agree with IB over PoM, it’s a matter of taste though really.

From a personal prospective It’s hard to imagine how much more I’d rather have 405+ more soak damage than a 3 min instant, PvP and PvE.

Edit- This also depends on how Ice Barrier scales with new ranks, currently rank 4 is 818 shields for 480 mana (untalented) with a 2 min cool-down.

You of course mean 870ish when you use a higher rank of it.

What does pom do for a frost mage in a raid gurg? Remove -1s from your frostbolt cast time once every 3 minutes? Look at the survivability of Ice Barrier. Jesus the thread moved fast.

I think Tseric quoted the rank 1 version of ice barrier in his post. It's basically turned into self-only pre-1.10 version of pw:s.

I thought max rank ice barrier was like 800 HP before you even factor in +damage?

Either way, I think I will be getting it on my alt, PoM is very nice, but that is a whole lot of added survivability.