I love how people come out of the woodwork simply to be emo whenever patch notes are released.

Don't flame me for this - but if you ask me it's correct by Blizzard to change/fix the MSD. A meta gem shouldn't make a certain spec viable.

With that being said, they should still 'fix' the Arcane tree. They've said AM would be a mage's highest DPS spell, although that's only true with the meta-gem.

It's a pretty major hit for arcane, though.

Is there any good from this? Is the increase to proc decent?

As far as AM spec is concerned, if the cooldown is 10s or less, it doesn't affect much the build. Anything above it pretty much destroys it. All it does really is making firespec even better, since the increased MSD procrate means firespec will just win further.

I don't know of anyone with a character copy yet, so it's likely too early to say. Speaking from a s.priest perspective I like the "more procs, cooldown" approach, but I can see how it would hurt Arcane mages. That being said, if a Meta empowers a single spec that much it problem needs tweaked anyhow.

Rule of thumb (somebody said before) says it'll rest at a 30 second cooldown: this'll be a massive loss for the spec.

I think this will push fire DPS (even with scorch considered) over arcane however i'd like to see results when characters are copied to the test realms.

I'd call it a better than even shot that the cooldown will be greater than 10 seconds. This change is squarely aimed at Arcane builds. That said, I'm not entirely sure that a longer internal cooldown will kill it, necessarily, if the increased proc rate is high enough. They aren't changing the proc-on-every-missile mechanic, so I think it's a reasonable assumption that an AM build will be triggering the proc fairly soon after the cooldown comes up.

Can't wait to get on PTR and test it.

The server is too busy at the moment, I'll copy as soon as I can to test the MSD.

But I gotta hand it to blizzard. They break something thats good and give us back something they took away so it seems like we've been buff. :P

Mark of Defiance is around 15 seconds.

:/ Looks like a very specific AM nerf. My source is 1 for 1 though. His other little fairy told him that the sunwell mage set is the best set hands down at least

Edit: For those curious, he also says that the devs are indeed focusing on ways to replace the dependance on 2 peice t5.

Right about now, we should make a new thread, dedicated to discussing possible specs in 2.3 (otherwise, this thread will become really messy!)!

I don't know about anyone else but I am very unexcited about the possibility of having to spec 10/48/3 all over again.

There is a new meta gem coming out that increases spell crit and spell crit bonus. It's to early to say but it might be better for Deep Fire than the MSD.

It's weird how Blizzard changes the behaviour of metagems over and over again. I.e. making RED working for casters, then again for melees only. Making MSD work so ridiculously well together with Arcane Missiles this patch, now trying to tune it down again a notch. Why is that? Can't they foresee what's happening when they introduce certain changes? While it is a welcome variety to respec and regem every patch to get the best damage possible it's also getting a little costy to switch your gear, gems, etc. and it really makes me wonder what the intention behind this is.

And yes, Logun, that gem definitely sounds like the new meta to go for while the MSD will be shelved just like the Thundering Skyfire Diamond was for melees after the introduction of RED.

Good point. I am pretty dam sure +3%crit dmg and +12crit rating (no internal cooldown) beats the hell out of 5-10% procrate +50% cast speed on a cooldown.

Now the problem will be regemming my stuff again (assuming the new RED / 12crit +3%crit requirements are the same). And finding some way to reach the hit cap again. I don't care as much about having to respec back to fire, then arcane for illidan; what really irks me is that now I get to try and come up with a way to reach the hit cap. I'll need to win like skull/ring of captured storm to make up for the lack of hit on zhar'doom.

I hope the socket requirements won't require much regemming.

Yeah, I'm looking at the same thing right now. I've geared specifically for the last while seeking no hit on items and suddenly will need to make up 7% somewhere, although thankfully our elemental shaman will help out there most of the time. I'm certainly not looking forwards to doing so but this change does seem like a pretty clear shot across the bow for deep arcane AM spam specs and I'm not going to continue down this road when I can more easily gear for fire/frost as the encounter dictates.

It would have been nice if there was a little communication from the outset but I'll adapt; although I'll have to revert to some outdated gear in a lot of cases. Again I'm hoping the new meta gem isn't terribly expensive in terms of requirements.

Yeah, I'm reserving judgement on this too, preparing for the worst though, it's going to be so awful having to specialize back in fire with 4 months of gearing for arcane. Ah well.

I've created a new thread:
[Mage] TC after 2.3

Totally forgot that this ring exists. Actually, for us, it does not
Captured Storms/Ancient Knowledge and Blasting/Noose are both "stats" vs. "hit" choices, depending on gear.

From what I remember, the MSD was better than the old RED in terms of pure damage, even when RED gave more crit damage increase than it should. It messed up your timing, killed AB rotations and had a silly gem requirement which made people not use though.

We'll just have to wait and see how the changes will be.

Edit; Link to the gear/DPS/weighting post
http://elitistjerks.com/506021-post2099.html

Edit II: Didn't want to start an argument about the meta gems, just brought up how they were before. in order to gauge how they might be in 2.3. It's just wait and see really

Yes, but I also made a quick n dirty excel spreadsheet back in the day to view just how better RED is to MSD and vice versa, but the most telling argument was that MSD was basically 2.5% DPS increase based on the fact it had no cooldown. For RED to beat it, depending on specs (and thus, crit multiplier) you needed some really really absurd crit rate (read: 70%+) to have them equal as far as fire spec goes. If I remember correctly RED was basically 1.75-1.90%% more damage under 'regular-ish' fire crit rates compared to 2.50% from MSD.

Now if you take into account that MSD has a cooldown, that means instead of having 5% / 2 -> 2.50%, we get 10% / 2 -> 5%, assuming a 10% procrate on MSD. Sure 5% seems nice, but now you need to take into account the cooldown. Of course, depending on cooldown and depending on procrate I do see your point that it could be considerably above the previous 2.50%. I guess I'll just wait and see tomorrow about the cooldown and procrate and go from there, but those were the numbers we had pre patch.

Except they're also increasing the proc rate, if you have a 5% proc MSD with no cooldown, you get 1 proc every *60 seconds* with Fireball spam on average.

If it has a 10% proc with 30s cooldown, then on average it will be exactly the same, since it will take 10 casts to proc, and be inactive for 10 casts worth of time.

Unless they are putting some very harsh cooldown/not increasing the proc rate much on MSD then it's unlikely it'll be nerfed at all.

The crit gem, on the other hand, is horribly nerfed compared to the old RED, because the old RED used to be more like 6-8% increased crit damage, but they fixed that bug, so it will just be 3%, which means that you'll gain 0.(critrate) * 3% increased damage, which could very well be quite pathetic.

Wow, putting a CD on MSD is absolutely crushing. I haven't had more fun playing mage than I've had in the last few months of being arcane.

Don't forget though, not everything on the PTR makes it to live. Remember the big windfury nerf a few PTRs ago that didn't make it to live?