Damage without the stacking should be roughly the same as low frost frostbolts. The comparison is AB .804 coefficient, 6% amplify, 6% crit, 1.75 crit modifier versus FrB at .814 coefficient, 6% amplify, 2.0 crit modifier.

So it would seem the new strat is to stack however much haste from gear you need to sustain an AB+GCD rotation and spam AB->ABr->AB->X where X is Arcane Blast, Fire Blast, Scorch, or Focus Magic as needed. Missile Barrage will drop your AB stack. Sounds fun to me.

Edit: Bah, missed the increased mana cost staying on AB so this probably isn't sustainable.

I'm somewhat disappointed in the direction they're taking with Imp Scorch. I'm not a fan of vulnerabilities since, once DPS output is balanced in the end, they're inevitably factored in (as they should be). A vulnerability bonus is just a time and mana penalty before you can attack at full power, not a "bonus" at all; if Imp Scorch didn't exist, our Fire spells would do 12-13% more damage, to get to the same target DPS. In that sense, I disliked even the original Imp Scorch since it's one of the hardest to put up and the hardest to maintain; it lasts only thirty seconds, you have to use Scorch, and you have to stack it five times.

What they're doing with this new Improved Scorch is preserving the weaknesses of the old one and shackling all three mage trees to it. I can see how Blizzard is attempting to give mages raid synergy, but I don't agree this is the best way to go about it. Whatever spec you are, mages will now need someone in the raid stacking Improved Scorch to be competitive. Especially with it eighteen points deep in fire, it feels like one guy missing a raid will require someone to respec for it; either that, or everyone is firespec anyway, which essentially makes this no change at all.

In short, I don't really see any serious positive gameplay dynamic that arises from this change. We stacked and maintained Scorch before, and we will do it afterward; just that in WotLK, there'll a greater penalty for failing to do it.

Well I just reread through all the changes and the optimist in me says that they cant be done with frost. I'll be leveling frost but I can't imagine raiding with it compared to arcane atm.

I can see what they were trying to do. WE heals. Brain Freeze makes you cast other spells. But seriously? An untalented instacast fireball?

My biggest sign of hope is that empowered fireball is now 3 pts and empowered frostbolt is still 5.

Here's hoping they continue to change things or RIP frost for PvE/raiding.

As it's probably gone missing in my second edit above, as 53/18 I'd definitely take MoE instead of Imp. Scorch if there's another mage in the raid stacking it for you.

Posted by Axantucar in the public discussion WoLK Thread (link):
If mana pots (as suggested here) and mana gems (as mentioned up thread) are both one per encounter, Mage Armor may be the way we have to go. On the other hand, it may open the way for high powered destro pots for short fights.

Yeah, I agree with this. Which is why I think they should bring improved scorch to a lower tier like tier 1 or 2. And make it just need 2 or 3 stacks max will do, 5 is kinda much.

Disregarding mana a little bit here:

10% haste from shaman totem
6% haste from deep arcane talent

At 33% passive spellhaste Arcane Barage + arcane blast becomes sub 3s (the debuff lasts 3s on the new AB)

Assuming shaman totem + arcane talent act as though the haste was on your gear, You would need 17% gear haste (not unrealistic) to be able to maintain an AB stack whilst Barraging.

T=0
Scorch stacking.
Arcane blast (1) --
Arcane Barrage |- Less than 3s elapsed
Arcane blast (2)--
Arcane blast (3)
Arcane Barrage
Arcane blast (3)
Arcane blast (3)
Arcane Barrage
Arcane blast
...
Arcane blast(3)
Scorch
Arcane blast(3)
Arcane barrage
Arcane blast (3)
Arcane blast(3)
Arcane barrage
Arcane blast(3)

I'm not sure on the mechanics of the AM proc, but you may (would?) want to weave that in there to let the stack drop for conserving mana.

The real question is

Arcane Potency - Increases the critical strike chance by 30% when POM or clearcasting is active.

Does this mean activating POM and proceed to only cast AM and instant cast will give me a permanent +30% crit to all my spells ? That means you could do simply :

POM, focus magic
arcane barrage, AM (this is your rotation, with a perma +30% crit, and possible +90% crit triple dip)

As a side note, focus magic works on every AM tick.

You could also interrupt Arcane Missiles after the GCD/3rd Missile is over and continue with your rotation, that would boost your DPS but cost quite some mana.

OK, my comments. I'll expand on this for the review I'm keeping on my site.


Arcane

General comments: Raid synergy added, major improvements to defensive/utility talents, very powerful tree. Loss in toned-down Missile Barrage more than compensated for by +10% damage from Improved Scorch.

Arcane Blast change: DPM improvement, DPS increase based on damage now instead of cast time reduction. Spell has just been completely retooled from a mana dump (though it's still that to some degree) into a perfect filler for an Arcane Barrage rotation, and the Arcane tree has been retooled away from prismatic casting. Deedre, I didn't make a specific bet on this, but if you're ever in Seattle, I owe you a beer.

Arcane Subtlety, Arcane Fortitude, Magic Absorption, Arcane Shielding, Improved Blink, Prismatic Cloak, Arcane Empowerment: Sensible improvements to all these talents. Invisibility can now be talented to be completely instant. All good stuff.

Focus Magic: This raises the potential problem of being a required talent, in the very same slot where Blizzard deliberately removed Evocation to prevent it from being a required talent. Really nice utility, but providing 50 spells with 150 extra spell power is so far beyond the other 11-pointers it's not even funny.

Arcane Potency: Now you can put +30% crit on that POM Pyro! That's gonna upset some people.

Arcane Flows: Minimum AP DPS increase goes from 2.5% to 3.75%. Plus, you know, that POM crit Pyroblast or whatever you want to throw out is now available more often. Kinda makes Ice Floes smell a little stale...

Missile Barrage: Haste reduced from 233% to 100%, and now procs on Arcane Blast instead of Arcane Barrage. Your question now is: Do I burn mana with Arcane Blast spam and AM on procs, or do I go for mana efficiency by alternating Blast with Barrage?


Fire

General Comments: Well, they improved a lot of weak talents, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, Fire's single-target DPS is now even worse than it was in the previous iteration of the talents! Burnout is now cheaper, in terms of mana, but no better in terms of DPS, which means you're still better off with an Arcane/Fire hybrid build...and to top it off, it just lost 5% DPS from the Improved Scorch change, while Arcane and Frost gained 10%. Unless WotLK raids are stuffed to the damned gills with AOE, a deep Fire build is now less viable for raiding than it has been since Molten Core. PvP-wise, though, it sure seems to be a hell of a lot better.

Improved Fire Blast, Incineration, Pyroblast, Blast Wave, Empowered Fireball: Good changes to talents that could use improvement. Incineration badly needs a new name.

Burning Determination: Seems good. I think. I don't PvP.

World In Flames: A more sensible version of this talent. Not spectacular, but doesn't need to be.

Impact: Neutral change, I think. More useful to have Incineration accessible than Impact.

Improved Scorch: If this were a deep talent, we could say that Fire is taking on a role as a debuffing/AOE tree. Since it's shallow enough for hybrid and elementalist builds to grab it, it's kind of a kick in the family jewels for Fire, as it loses 15% damage relative to Arcane and Frost (it goes down 5, they go up 10). Including this change and Earth & Moon, Arcane gains 16.6% damage in debuffs it didn't have before. Including this change, CttB, and Frozen Rune Weapon, Frost gains 27.05% in multipliers it didn't have before. On the subject of Frozen Rune Weapon, its value to DK builds just went up 10% from this change as well.

Fiery Payback: I like this one. I like it a lot. I mean, I'm not a PvPer, but still, with 70% interrupt protection, a 1.5 second Pyroblast without a cooldown, and with Living Bomb ticking away in the meantime, is going to make people hurt. Problem? Ripe for abuse in PvE, if you can get your health down below the threshold.

Firestarter: They're really laying the AOE role on super-thick here. But, it works, it makes Flamestrike a bit more useful. Any Blast Wave/Dragon's Breath combo has almost a 70% chance to get a Flamestrike follow-up, and with Hot Streak, it's not unlikely to crit all targets in that situation.

Burnout: Sorry, folks, nothing to see here. At this point, with the lost damage from Improved Scorch, this talent really needs to give at least 75% crit damage bonus increase to make Fire even remotely competitive, and I'm not sure without doing the numbers that even that'll do the trick.

Living Bomb: If you didn't have to get past Burnout to get it, this would now be pretty cool. The mana burn boosts its damage nicely and adds some anti-caster utility.


Frost

General Comments: Fewer changes, including some expected. However, the Frost tree, which previously seemed so cleanly focused, now feels rather confused. On the upside, Frost gains another 10% DPS from Improved Scorch.

Frozen Core: WTF? Seriously, WTF? Look at Prismatic Cloak! Look at Survival Instincts!

Shattered Barrier: Is this in addition to Shatter Shield? Or does it replace it? Either way, it presents a problem: unlike Shatter Shield's freeze effect, your Frost Nova deals damage. You don't always want to be dealing AOE damage when your shield breaks.

Fingers of Frost: First, this talent will make every man over 40 remember his last prostate exam. Very unfortunate. We all knew a Winter's Grasp nerf was coming. We also knew that an intermittent +2% melee/ranged hit proc was not useful; they'd need to cap their hit anyway. The $64,000 question on this is: can we cheat the way we do with normal Freezes, and get a Frostbolt/Ice Lance Shatter combo off on the target? Or will it actually consume the effect on the Frostbolt? If the latter happens to be the case, then Frost has gained exactly zero interactivity in its DPS process compared with TBC.

Brain Freeze: Again, WTF? When do I ever, in my entire life as a deep Frost Mage, want to cast a Fireball, even if it's free? I don't need a free Fireball, I have arguably the most efficient caster spec in the game! If I wanted to cast a Fireball, which I don't, I could afford to cast a Fireball! It's like I'm driving a Lexus, and they said, "Hey, you can borrow my '89 Le Sabre this weekend if you want, and I'll pay for the gas!" Thank you, my beater-driving friend, but no.

Improved Water Elemental: OK, people are upset at the lost extra health/mana. I get that. But, look at the change to Fel Synergy, at the talents pushing Imp/Felhunter use in deep Destro/Affliction specs, and what I think we're getting is some base AOE damage avoidance a la Hunter pets, some base resistance with level, built-in survivability stuff like that. So maybe the extra health is superfluous. Mana...well, we'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully they'll improve mana scaling. Or maybe the Stats-o-Rama gear we're seeing from the beta is the solution, and the current 30% intellect it inherits from us will be enough because we'll have a royal boatload of Intellect. The replacement effect regenerates 36% of the entire raid's health over 60 seconds. It's a potentially massive and incredibly cheap HOT...and completely superfluous. Utility, yes. This utility, no.

Chilled to the Bone: Seriously, if I'm this deep in Frost, I'm not casting Frostfire Bolt. I'm just not. Still, thanks for the bone, it'll come in a tiny bit handy on immunity fights.

Deep Freeze: Well, now, this is an interesting buff. Or is it? Let's look at something here. Pretend I have 1800 damage and am specced deep Frost:

Frostbolt 16: 2599.5 avg dmg / 2.5 sec = 1039.8
Deep Freeze 4: 2196 avg dmg / 1.5 sec = 1464

That's counting Empowered Frostbolt and Chilled to the Bone, the only two damage-increasing effects that will affect Frostbolt and not Chilled to the Bone.

The problem? If my target is Frozen, then one of three things has happened:

1) I've nova'd the target. Deep Freeze is actually useful in this case.

2) Frostbite proc. My next Frostbolt is 1.5 seconds away from casting. No sense interrupting that cast unless the target can take a serious pounding; otherwise, my planned Shatter Combo is likely to finish it off.

3) Prostate Exa- I mean, Fingers of Frost proc. Same deal -- I'm about to release a Frostbolt, and even if I can sneak in a second Frost spell on the proc, I can only do it with Frostbolt, not with a 1.5 sec cast.

They almost gave us an alternate nuke to use on a Freeze proc, but it just doesn't work (unless, of course, it has a ridiculously high coefficient).

Regarding a post on Deep Freeze:

The tooltip text never specified that the target was frozen, but it still behaved as a freeze. So there's no particular reason to expect, until testing tells us otherwise, that the freeze effect is gone.

Is there some sort of CD on focus magic. If so that would only really be a personal buff, as all 50 charges would get eaten up by the raid regardless.

Mana gems are still three charges, at least with the level 70 version, and are not one per encounter currently (i.e. not acquiring a "potion sickness" debuff.)

I'm not seeing the true power of fiery payback. DB and Blastwave are on long cooldowns (20, 30).
So every 20 to 30 seconds when I'm AoEing I will have a chance to get a instant flamestrike? (and no not 90% chance if you use both)
Has the coeffecient changed on flamestrike, its radius, or the damage cap gone up?

3 points seems a bit steep for what I see as a small potential boost in AoE damage. (PvP talent?)

Exactly how far is fire behind now in terms of Single Target DPS?

With the recent talent changes, has Arcane/Fire managed to pull comfortably ahead of Frost? Does FFB still stand as the premier dps spec for single target damage?

Guess I'm asking for people who have ran numbers recently to update those numbers with the changes.

Fire's single target dps looks so so disappointing, but its AoE potential is becoming ridiculous

Currently it's definitely something you don't really want to put your points into, changing it to a 100% chance and additionally a 15% chance on every Fireball to cause your next Pyroblast to be instant cast would be appropriate. (And would buff Fire single target DPS which is really needed)

Just for clarification, fingers of frost grants a 10% change to apply the fingers of frost effect... It still sounds like a debuff to me, not an only on the next cast frostbolt.


If it is what I think it is and just worded sloppily it is a personal debuff (YOUR next frost spell(s)) that allows frost spells cast within the next 10s to behave as if the target is frozen. If this is the case then it lost the exponential scaling for stacking the debuff of winters grasp, but gained 5s... along with 10% base frost damage increases. Let us hope that (s) is a reality.


If the latter is the case then its a reasonable tweak I think, it still allows frost to icelance and use combos when you get the potential buff, but does not allow stacking abuses.


I sincerely hope it is not like what some think it is, just allowing the next frost spell cast to act like a frozen target and nothing more. I do not think this is the case since it has a 10s window for some buff/debuff and nothing was said about anything being consumed.

Anyway, can someone with access to the beta test this out and tell us exactly how it behaves?

Does Focus Magic have no cooldown right now?

Currently Fingers of Frost seems bugged, unless I tested incorrectly (not as used to playing mage.)

I got a 10 second buff that lasted 10 seconds (and could be renewed, which just reset the 10 second countdown), but my ice lances are hitting for what they do on an unfrozen target. Frostbolt didn't "consume" the buff either. (can't tell without more testing whether it considered the target frozen.)

How did the old Frostfire set bonus function? I always assumed it acted like regular spell power, but never really examined it closely.

Sec, testing going on. No cooldown on focus magic.

The wording definitely implies that ONLY the next (frost) cast you make will behave as if the target were frozen. The 10 seconds refers to the time the buff will remain if not used up. So if you had Brain Freeze, and it procced at the same time as Fingers, then you could cast an instant fireball (without consuming or being affected by the Fingers buff, it not being a frost spell) and then frostbolt, which would consume the buff and have +50% crit chance.

Whether this is actually the case, I can't say, but there is no doubt in my mind that the wording means your next frost spell only.

Jynxx get on vent so I can bug you about mage things!

[e] So this post isn't a complete waste - does anyone else find it slightly ironic that right now they're just completely swapping the roles of Fire and Arcane. Right now Fire is the highest single-target tree, while Arcane has weaker single-target but much better AoE. Rather than give each tree a clear purpose, they seem to be just swapping those roles.