Anyone else surprised that they didn’t give mages any more options against demo locks? After all they buffed deathcoil to make warlocks vs. rogues not as one sided (well, some rogues might not agree :P). Might happen in a future patch though (deathcoil buff came 2 patch after the warlock review).

I’m also a bit disappointed that they didn’t really change the functionality of AP, 30% still scales too damn fast imho.

They did. -10 to target resistances.

Still think my best option with demo locks is /afk.

(Aside from that though, I can't wait to try to shatter a fireball/scorch/fireblast with ignite :)).

Wait... Warlocks got a review? Oh, you mean the one tree changes + getting conflag to be instant? I guess a review just means our talent points got refunded :(

Haha. This is such characterisitic Ming that it's funny.

Much worse would have been entirely possible.

Please come back :(

Adding a smidge of usefulness to an otherwise PvE oriented talent. It would be like rogues have Improved Feint and getting 3/7/10 points of agility with it.

I guess it makes sense when you look at it that way, I was under the impression that 10 spell penetration will end up doing more damage than 10 agility.

Well, against many targets it won't do anything.

Against someone with exactly 10 resist, that person will take (averaged over time and many casts) 2.5% less damage from spells of that element. With the penetration talent bonus, that -2.5% resist modifier would go away. It's a nice little bonus that primarily will help mitigate splash resists on player armor in PvP.

Managing threat is and will always be a part of our class. It's our challenge in PvE, and I dont mind it at all. Overall I'm very satisfied with our changes.

I can't wait to go 20/31/0 for Naxxramas, with less threat on my scorch crits and with the illumination wannabe talent in the fire tree. Combine that with JoW and I'll have... unlimited mana withotu using evoc and gem?

For PvP, elementalist build will certainly reign supreme as expected. Although, I can't really believe they will make shatter work with all spells.

The new fire ward also seems very interesting for PvP.

Awesome changes, though most people are complaining as always.

Yeah, for most players this is a clear win with no downsides. I think most people will see that. Unless you do raid PvE and relied on the old Arcane Subtlety extensively, this is a straight buff across the board.

Too bad Combustion and Ice Barrier are still boxed out by PoM, because both got huge buffs.

The front half of the Frost tree is a real powerhouse now, with Frostbite squeezed in there. Winter's Chill seems very weak (only one of the new talents that's like this), so will further reduce the utility of the new Ice Barrier.

All the freed up talent points in Fire are exactly what it needed. Previously, the improvents in telanted Fire spells over untalented Fire spells was just too small, and now you can get much more bang for your buck.

Raid Mages now get even more utility out of 10 points into Arcance (sorry Horde). I can see giving up IAM easily and hanging at 10. I'm not convinced on Arcane Resilience at all. In general, it's gotten a lot tougher to justifty deep Arcane. The tree is strong, but it's now completely stratified into: (10 pts for basics) + (11pts for PoM) + (10pts for AP). The new attractive options in the other trees might compete very nicely with the 11 and 10-point chunks.

The Subtlety change has some interesting effects. Now that I'll be using Frostbolt again in fights where I used to use Missiles, the mana limitations of Mages will be much lighter (incidentally, part of the comparative advantage of JoW goes away).

General Thoughts: I like the changes that were made. I wish there had been more have them. This is not to say I wanted buffs, just that I wanted changes in the overall layout of our trees. The lack of major changes to our 21 and 31-pointers means that things are largely as they were before. We don't get to have as much fun as the Priests did, for example, with new talent options.

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A quick first attempt at what I might run for raiding (this isn't too well thought-out yet, though.):
3/3 Arcane Subtlety
2/5 Arcane Focus
5/5 Arcane Concentration
2/2 Magic Attunement

5/5 Imp. Fireball
5/5 Ignite
2/2 Flame Throwing
2/2 Incinerate

2/2 Imp. Frost Nova
5/5 Imp. Frostbolt
5/5 Ice Shards
3/3 Frostbite
3/3 Piercing Ice
1/1 Cold Snap
3/3 Imp. Blizzard
2/2 Arctic Reach
1/1 Ice Block

Basically, I've always wanted to tri-spec and a have both a Frostbolt and a Fireball/Scorch that were buffed-up for raids. I'm willing to give up Missiles in favor of the other nukes now. The point-spending redundancy in improving both Fire and Frost nukes is somewhat mitigated somewhat by the new Arcane Subtlety (which also makes crits something to go for a bit more). So this is basically a normal current raid build, where you drop some Arcane for some versatility.

I'm giving up on mana efficiency talents for now (Arcane Mind, Frost Channeling, Master of Elements, under the assumption that it never matters). Clearcasting is always nice, due to the possibility in many situations to heave down something huge like a Blizzard when you proc it.

I know Frostbite without Shatter is neither here nor there. If things like Magic Attunement turn out to be useless (it would be nice if it didn't), I'd probably just dig up the points for Shatter. There are situations like Nef p1 where Frostbite would absolutely rule anyway, especially in conjunction with Blizzard.

Anyone know how Improved Fire Ward will work? Reflective abilities tend not to work with AoE's, which would make this kind of suck for raiding.

However, if against, say, Vael, 20% of the ticks just vanished and didn't consume my existing FW, it would be really nice.

Honestly, the thought of ditching PoM doesn't bother me. However, the thought of losing Arcane Concentration, Arcane Instability and Imp. Counterspell is the only thing keeping me from making an Elemental spec.

Playing around with a fire/arcane build on the updated wowhead calculator is amusing. It remains to be seen how necessary iceblock in Nax remains given no FR on mobs and the synergy between crit augmentation and crit threat reduction.

Frost and fire wards reflecting certain raid mob abilities may also have profound consequences as well given the "spells and effects" ambiguity, though that's probably too much to hope.

Edit: Again with the pre-emptive ideas. Damn you hamlet.

Does anyone have that link to a calculator?

I can't work things out on pen or paer at all tonight, clearing MC always leaves me brain dead... :)

Yeah, there are basically similar to the lines along which I was thinking.

In all honesty, Magic Attunement will go out the window for me. Even if it does turn out to be good, I am really bad about buffing (as other mages in my guild could attest), so I wouldn't really be the one to snag these anyway.

I find it surprising that they didn't do anything to make casting arcane missiles worthwhile, and removed the biggest benefit it had previously which was low threat.

They could easily replace wand spec with a 5 point talent that increased the damage of arcane missiles by 5/10/15/20/25% and it wouldn't be overpowered.

Also improved arcane explosion is now fucking terrible. 5% crit on a single spell that only gets 50% bonus on crits. That's a .5% improvement to the spell per talent point. Generally when you look at DPS talents, you want to get about a 1% increase per point. Getting half that and having it only affect a single spell is just amazingly bad.

I was expecting a crit talent for Arcane explosion all along, because crit boosts the damage more than +dmg. And if I'm not mistaken, we´ve been promised a look at how our spells scale with +dmg gear, so a decent buff to the contribution from +dmg gear to AE and those crit talents quickly become more valuable.

It's disappointing that they chose to let wand spec stay, no mage with self respect will ever put talents in that above clearcast or Subtlety/Focus.

WTS Antipodean Rod

I too was thinking the same thing. I dont see myself putting more then 9 points total in the arcane tree with the changes as they are now. I will have to say that there are a few possible "elemental" builds out there that would be pretty decent but I'm still not a fan of the trash points.

So far each build I have worked up on the talent calculator I am left torn as to where I should allocate more points. I have been frost ever since hitting 60 and becoming a raider. I respecc'd to fire recently and wasn't very happy with it and quickly returned to frost. I will miss the +dmg bonus of AP but as many have stated I just do not see myself spending that many points that far into arcane.

I am anxious however to test these new changes and builds out on the test server to get a better feel of how each spec will turn out.

I like that wowhead.com has the new talents up. I wonder where they got the icon for Master of the Elements? Regardless, very useful.


I like that there are choices, and a tri-spec build likes like it may work out well for raiders. PvPers have more choices as well.