Is it only me who sees this idle speculation about "four mages spamming icelance" a liiiittle bit BS? Honestly, during Alpha it's our duty to not try and find specific silly caveats but to distinguish what the Devs -intended- the talents to do.

Obviously, it was never intended that a cheap instant spam would be the highest PvE DPS, so consider WG a very likely candidate to change wording from "frost spells proc" to "spells that could chill, despite immunity, behave as though frozen 20% of the time" or some other bull, making it Frostbolt only.

I also see it distinctly possible duration is mowed down to 3sec, making for plenty of time to get one bolt and a lance in. 5 Is simply retarded. Lhivera correctly pointed that it's start of application will include travel time, thus making it Bolt-Lance-Lance-Lance with 0 haste. This looks plain retarded. I'll download an addon to make my sprite into a gnome if this goes ahead.

Finally, I wouldn't be surprised if the "treat as frozen" is for the caster only, despite the % to hit remaining global. 100% Uptime is rather quite maddening, unless it breaks with a shatter in which case it's Mage-ISB-lite, with one charge and improved-fairy-fire tacked on. Which brings us back to my original post:

Where's all the creativity gone to?

Burnout is play-with-fire glued to spellpower-lite

Living Flame is just a re-hash of the Affli 51 talent, only you have to STAY in melee for it to work

WG is a copy-paste of a suggestion ages ago

Improved WE is just "kk, herez moar"

Hot Streak is just a perpetual Combustion with an odd self-buffing conditional

Netherwind is oddly, an old set bonus which is now useless (by the way, someone said "I pyroed when it procced". Notice the wording "next Fireball, Frostbolt, Frostfire bolt or Arcane Blast")

Student of the Mind and Potent Spirit are duct-taped Arcane Mind and Mind Mastery with spirit instead

Brain Freeze is the most ill-conceived PvE talent I've ever seen... If you NOVA in AoE, whoever is next to a mob which can't hit THE TANK becomes the TARGET. Ever nova at MH? No, because YOU die first. Tacking on 15% dodge to it does not help it become an evasive tool, as 6/10 times it's the source of the problem to start with. "I nova'd to give the lock15% dodge, but got two rogues killed instead" doesn't really cut it.

Chilled to the Bone. Jesus on the donkey! a 45 talent with 1% as the Penultimate Talent? Could you be any more boring?

Deep Freeze. I'm truly puzzled by this. Either I'm missing something, or I'm thick. a 1.5sec cast Stun... This is quite possibly, the only stun with a cast-time, barring that retarded incapacitate dranei racial fear-ward replacement. And that was -meant- to be underpowered. OK, so it's a Conditional stun, with a Cast Time... Not exactly a "mighty" weapon in one's arsenal, yet I'll reserve judgement because (I Hope) I'm missing something fantastic here.

Frostfire Bolt Some are pleased with this. To me it smacks of a 13-yearold's wish-list when seeing some elemental mage video. "but what if it was A FROSTBOLT that did IGNITE TOOOOO!" is all I see when I look at it. However, I may be proven wrong and it is indeed, the best thing since Vurtne's 2nd elemental video in Silithus.

What's with all the weird talents too? Incanter's Absorbtion... If you're this deep in the tree, only Frost or Fire ward and Mana Shield are there to absorb anything. Unless we're looking at a PvP-only talent, I sure as hell won't mana-shield any incoming damage, I don't care how much buff I'll gain. Assume we have such spellpower that with imp. Mana Shield, we're on a 1:1 damage:mana ratio (unlikely high). To gain one trinket's-worth of effect from this talent (+200dmg), i need to be targetted and lose 1350 mana from incoming damage, plus a GCD to cast the shield. Would you ditch 1350 mana for another activation of your HsH as arcane? Didn't think so.

The only thing I'm truly happy about, and about long fucking last, is the change to Magic Absorbtion and to Mage armor, and by that I mean both the "half duration debuffs" and the increase to 40all rez rather than the pathetic almost-irrelevant 18. World in Flames is also a solid talent, from where I'm standing, though one which will do precious little to sway my opinion that mage trees were hastily-made, just like warrior ones.

In all honesty, all I can do is look at the Brilliance, the Creativity and Sparkle of the priest make-over team, the excellence of the warlock team (even though affli is a -little- bland) and the go-to-town Overpoweredness of moonkins (jeez, what happened to feral? it got practically two talents, one of which is boring and one of which is boring-er) and think to my self, did they -really- think about the mage trees?

Just as an FYI, and to offer those so inclined a good chuckle, someone at Blizzard decided that by theorycrafting a possible Arcane DPS rotation making use of Arcane Barrage, I had stepped over a line, and I have thus earned a permaban at the official forum. There are worse things that could happen to me than reducing my time spent on the forums, and I suppose I was kind of thumbing my nose at their rules even if not actually under NDA myself, so I'm not terribly broken up about it.

I'll continue work on the TCoM, but of course I'll be unable to announce updates there.

Unreleased content must not be discussed on the official forums - it's a very old rule and yes, they will remove your posting privileges there.

Aye, it is a very old, oft-broken, erratically-enforced rule. But, yes, I was particularly flagrant about breaking it this time around.

Aye, I can't really complain. I mention it only in case anyone here was wondering where all my FAQ threads and the like had gone; I'm seeing if I can arrange with Zaldinar to repost a couple of those. And I'll make note of any major TCoM changes here, although they're few and far between these days. Moving on now!

Sorry to hear this happen Lhivera. That permaban was simply a bad business decision by Blizzard seeing as many new mages follow your TC to try and make their characters better and in the process keep paying their $14.99 to Blizzard.

Your not alone Lhiv,

I, as well as many other members of the mage community, were also perma-banned for discussing the "leaked" talents.
I got it for the "I just want you guys to really see this..." thread, where I outlined why I can perceive a distinct lack of effort on blizzards part concerning the mage talents. (I assure you, it was very non-trollish)
I didn't, of course, link any external website in my post, but got crit by the banstick anyway.
Blizzard has been on a banning rampage lately.

If nothing else, we can perhaps look at the recent bannage as an opportunity? Maybe to start up a mage only forum for focused discussion? Something akin to EJ but targeted specifically at mages (and/or other casters in general). If you have any plans for such a thing Lhiv, let us know. I'm sure the rest of the mages would rally behind you for such a thing.

A couple thoughts on Frostfire bolt that haven't been mentioned yet:

1: The slowing effect means it will be a binary spell. We'll lose 5% of the benefit from +damage gear, but we'll also gain about 5% to the spell's total damage on bosses because it won't suffer from the partial resist bug/effect.

2: Assuming Frostbolt's binary nature is a factor into the ghost hit it gets from Elemental Precision, it could be possible to see Frostfire bolt getting 6% returns from elemental precision (assuming that EP doesn't get fixed in the expansion).

Well, the real debate is what the implementation will be. I mean, does it mean that if I tri-spec, that if the target is frozen then shatter will apply, otherwise fire will? Even with this 'limitation' it could be quite absurd.

Believe me I have no disillusions as to what the arcane tree is now and, from the looks of it, is going to be.

I really don't think we will see a switch back to talent points being spent in Arcane for Arcane Concentration for mana regen and for these reasons:

1) Icy Veins is too much of a dps increase for how low it is in the Frost tree to let go

2)Even though VT was nerfed, shadow priests will see a dps increase, most likely balancing out the mana regen to, at least, a more realistic value. I don't know about you, but it is very hard for me to spend most of my mana with a shadow priest in my group.

3)There is also the interesting talent of the Discipline Priest Tree doing much the same thing as VT and what it's values will be. Their Greater Heals, Flash Heals, and (some new heal spel) generates mana for your party. Though I assume this may be intended more for the healer group than a dps group, I don't see many healers needing mana regen now with the new SPI/INT interaction. They could definitely be a SP replacement, or if you only have 1 SP, could be used for a 2nd dps caster group.

Point 3, along with the so oft rumored spirit mechanic change for WotLK for dps caster (at least hopefully if they really intend that warlocks are going to be using spirit as well) tells me that mana regen won't be a huge problem.

Lhiv, I was disgusted with your ban and have decided to permanently relocate here to discuss Mage matters. Plainly nothing interesting or useful can be discussed on the official forums. It has become a wasteland for trolls.

Onwards.

Query: is there any good reason based on the leaked talents for a fire mage to go past empowered fireball? So far as I can tell, 33/38 is the fire spec of choice.