I would ask for a DPS boost and a CoE nerf. Rather than keeping your requirement for CoE, why not just buff overall mage DPS, while lowering the boost CoE gives. Instead of having a (completely made up numbers) 600 DPS difference between a mage with CoE and a mage without it, you would see more of a 100-200 DPS difference. So rather than keeping your insane reliance on CoE, CoE just confers a smaller DPS boost while unbuffed mage DPS is higher. Something like that.

CoR has a negative side effect, CoE/CoS do not. I would bet that is the logic keeping them from merging all of the magic DPS classes curses separate.

Correct me if I'm blatantly wrong about anything, this is just the solution I thought of when reading over your problems.

Well, the idea is to make it such that mages get CoE as often as possible. I sure would love a DPS boost, because even with CoE on every single target, mage dps still falls badly behind warlocks. Anyway, merging CoE with CoS is one of the viable solution. Another solution can be adding nature damage to CoE, which is another popular suggestion.

I personally prefer CoE to just be merged into CoS so that we won't face issues with lack of CoE when there aren't enough warlocks in the raid.

We are getting a DPS boost in 2.3.2!

CoR does have a downside but it is extremely minor for existing fights. That doesn't mean there will not be more fights down the road where it has multiplicative effects but for the existing raid content I cannot think of anything where it is not a straight buff, much in the vein of Amping a tank only more so.

By the way, I don't agree that with CoE Mage damage is falling badly behind Warlocks. It's actually pretty close and with IV will probably be on par really. I don't know that we are on par in total in terms of survivability, drain on raid resources, raid utility contribution, personal DPS and RDPS and so on but for simple marginal rdps we are still a decent choice if CoE will be up.

Any of you guys running the numbers done any calculations on the new Icey veins ability?

Well, "worst case scenario" it's (20/180) * 20% haste, which is 2.2% haste or about 34.54 haste rating. Of course, its real value is another haste effect to stack with Bloodlust and our other activatable abilities, which would take considerably more complex math to figure out the value of, and it's also completely ridiculous for burst dps.

Cold Snap on a lowered cooldown gives frostmages a real dps boost in my mind. We don't know what exactly the cooldown will be, but this gives us the possibilty to take out the water-elemental more often.
Icy Veins as a 2-3% dps boost in addition is really nice.

A new mana-gem which gives us nearly 100% more mana than the mana emerald is in addition really huge. Nice buffs for frostmages I think.

I believe the Mana Gems are just getting buffed, not a new rank as the new news post on mmo-champion appears to say.

Can't confirm anything until the ptr comes up....let the waiting game continue!

Its nice buffs for all mages, and unless coldsnap has a really short cooldown i would say a bigger buff for fire mages than frost mages... more mana from gems, survivability increase for non-frost mages thru iceblock (a clutch yes but such a nice clutch on illidan's dark barrage, archimonde's doomfire, IC's envenom-blizzard-flamestrike combos etc) and then to top things off, a nice dps increase with icy veins...

I look foward 2.3.2 and the stacking of bloodlust, icy veins, skull, icon/hex, molten fury, destro pot and flamecap =)



Details on the mana gem :
The new Mana Emerald is an upgrade of the Rank 5, not a new rank. Changed from 1136 - 1364 mana to 1800 - 3000 mana.
-according to mmo-champion, couldnt find the source

We are sort two crucial elements of information as to what mage dps come 2.3.2 will be. First of all, is IV affected by Ice Floes. My feeling is that it isn't, but if it was, then that gives Frost Mages a leg up on Fire mages since they will have 20/144 uptime instead of 20/180 uptime for the IV buff without even considering Cold Snap and the duration of the fight.

And, the second question is, what is Cold Snap's new cooldown anyway? Somehow, I doubt it'll be 5 minutes, although that would be any Frost Mage's wet dream, but it will be less than 10 minutes now.

I'm kinda more excited about the mana-gems than icy veins, means I have to convince my guild to go back to morogrim for trinket as well. In the last two raidnights (learning and killing ROS + going hyjal, clearing and learning Kaz'rogal and getting that down) i spent 72 super mana pots and gems on every cooldown and evocation. Manapots go for 15g a stack on my shiteous server so I might actually see myself not going broke in the future!

1- firespec with no coe beats arcane spec with 13% COS. Arcane spec is that bad.

2- arcane mages contribute 0% to faster hyjal clears because the waves of mobs come at fixed intervals.

Rank5 mana gem can also be re used 3 times.

Another question might be if Cold Snap resetts the cooldown of Icey Veins?

The calculations I have seen so far on this site states Fire and Frost to be about equal with a slight advantage towards fire. My big question is what numbers we will see after this mini-patch

As a arcane mage I spend about 30 super mana pots per 4h raid. First time in Hyjal I kept spending that amount as a fire mage. However if your guild do the trash in a more mana efficient way you really dont use that many pots. We started of with simple doing AoE 24/7 wich ofcoursed cost alot of pots. But then we started single point dps Necromancers first, then banshees before starting AoE (if no banshees or necros we go with 3 single point dps targets). This worked great for our raid, the increase in control also gave us more time between trash waves and more time to rest.

1) If it only affects frost, frost will almost surely outdamage fire
2) If it affects all spells, things wont change much, fire will still have an advantage
3) If it affects all spells and Icy Floes and Cold Snap give Frost the option to put it out more often, then things get interesting. Both speccs should could out very close to each other.

For now, the thottbot test site agues for the second version, but then again we will not know until tesetservers are up and/or blizz finalizes the patch for launch.

Another thing: In the past, two spell damage Trinkets were able to be activated at the same time, but now they put a small CD on each other as we all know. Since BC introduced haste effects (and Serpent Coil can be used together with Hex Shrunken) mages are now once more able to increase theeir spelldamage two fold.
Icy Veigns with Arcane Power (and possibly a haste and a spell damage trinket) will make other classes cry for a nerf and I will not be surprised when Blizzard decides to have AP and IV cancel each other (like AP and the Priest spell) or have them put a CD on each other (as with simple trinkets).

1. Thats incorrect and inaccurate. If you have 4p T6 its true, but if you don't then arcane is very much competitive and even better on some bosses, as specified earlier (If you lack CoE but have CoS). The turning point is when you lose your 2p T5, which makes arcane inferior and not able to compete at all. However, with CoE I agree, fire would outdps arcane on most fights for a non 4p T6 mage as well. Keep in mind that you can AB spam for 70-80% on many fights.

2. Yes and no. There are intervals but they are not fixed as far as i know. Meaning that if you kill the last mob on the current wave, the next wave is automatically triggered.

We have one shadowpriest, it goes to our healers. Hopefully one of the other shadowpriests are back in action now. Doesn't matter though, as 10/48/3 mage with SP chaincasting gems/evocation I still had to use a manapot every 2 minutes on all fights in SSC/TK. Haven't tried hyjal with SP yet, doubt it'll change.

Are you sure about this? The difference for me with and without a shadow priest is massive. If I don't have 1 I'm chain potting every fight and still going OOM before the end quite often. If I have got a shadow priest I only use mana pots on certain fights (Morogrim and Solarion chain chugging due to AoE, 1-2 Kael'thas, 0-1 Vashj).

That all depends on how good your Spriest is gear and skill wise of course though.
I remember in SSC having to pot a lot too even with a shadowpriest, but as they got better gear and skilled i now dont have to pot at all pretty much.

It sounds like your shadow priests aren't putting out much damage - there's no way that 10/48/3 should have to chain pot. I don't pot at all on Illidan or Council with a shadow priest as 10/48/3, nor do I use mana gems. Evocation is sufficient. On all the other fights, I don't even use Evocation anymore because the dps loss of doing nothing isn't worth it.

Not necessarily true - it might make them even, but you have to consider that at the base level, Icy Veins is worse for Frost than Fire for the simple reason that a large percentage of Frost's dps is the Water Elemental, and Icy Veins has no effect on the Water Elemental. It affects 100% of Fire's damage, on the other hand.

However, the Cold Snap buff may improve the Water Elemental's uptime and this might help Frost out some more, but Icy Veins itself is actually a better dps boost for Fire(ignoring Cold Snap).

No, but neither are you are the only one who did not see:

Trinket-AP-Icy Veins-Fball spam with POM-Pyro at the end.

while as manly rightly put it "craptastic" 33.28.0 and 40.18.3 are getting nothing out of this, the even worse 40.0.21 is in fact getting a substantial buff.

As for the gentlemen who are modeling the new IV spam, assuming Cold Snap adds one to the mix is a fallacy: Firstly, given a fight over 9m (granted, T6 content might not be, but SSC/TK certainly is) you can deffinitely get a useful two Cold Snaps in. Secondly, it was also announced that Cold Snap's CD would be reduced. Could it be we're looking at 10m into 5m perhaps? As far as I remember, three is nothing with less than 10m CD that isn't either 3m, 2m, or 1m, so 5m should be a reasonable bet. Given Ice Floes that'll go down to 4m, so we suddenly see that theres an awful load more elementals and Icy Veins in there...

Mysterious how Icy Veins has exactly 20sec duration and 2m cooldown... Exactly the same as Icon and Hex-shrunken. What remains to be seen is can 3/47/11 using IV surpass cold-snap spamming frost with multiple pets and more IV than they get?

Did anyone else notice how much more powerful Serpent-Coil Braid - Items - World of Warcraft became with the manastone changes? Given we're now eating 3x new 2400 average mana gems before we move on to the new piddly ones, the manareturn is much more signifficant. And it's on (drum roll) 2m CD! God speed Vontre and the other simulation-scripters, this is turning into a simulation nightmare but I'll be damned if it isn't the best news since Ice Lance.

I tried kael after nerf and didnt even use my evocation, only used about 2-3 pots and 2 gems for the entire fight. Have a SP in my group and Im 10/48/3.

Depending on how much you AoE duing the trash mobs you shouldnt have to use that many pots. I usally use about 2-3 pots during the 8 trash wawes and maybe 1-2 gems. I do have a SP in my group.

I tried both with mage armor and with molten armor and from my experience (haven't caluculated it) i gain alot more mana from the 3% extra crit refund then i do from Mage armor. Someone with a better math head that calculated this?

Also as I stated before I think some guilds do the misstake of simpley doing AoE for all the trash and not doing any single point dps. Ofcourse 20 minutes of AoE drains your mana pool.... How does your guild work the trash?

I have only done 4 raids in MH, it took us 3 raids to get to 3/5 bosses down. After killing Kaz'ragol the second time yesterday I cant really see how it costs you that many mana pots. The boss goes down pretty fast and since the CD of the mana pots wont tick down fast enough I would only be able to use a maximum of 2 pots per Kaz'ragol fight. If you are having mana problems this fight you should do your best to boost your shadow resistance

In my oponion it seems a bit strange that you give your Shadow priest to your healers, they shouldnt really need it. On Mount Hyjal trash AoE should get the SP, mages over warlocks cause of life tap.