Don't do this.

The new fel armor presumably gives Blizz some breathing room to make adjustments on lifetapping, please note.

I would refrain from the "grass is greener on the other side" mentality for now. Mages are oohing and aweing at some lock talents, but the math proves it is unwarranted. There are nerfs for warlocks. I'd rather the +healing on my fel armor. ISB is now 15% instead of 20%. Soul link is more attainable, but 15% instead of 20% and has no +damage component.

I'm concerned with the change to 2% VT when patch goes to 3.0 before the expansion, mages are going to go OOM. Locks regen from fel armor is going to be laughable because we have no spirit gear (and our spells costs are ridiculous, we have no mana return/free spell talents like shamans/mages), so a change to life tap will really, really hurt. CoH has an 8 second cooldown? I think ranged dps and other classes will be absolutely crippled in that window from 3.0 to expansion...level 80 raids really.

While in discussion with a few Mages I know, an idea came up in response to the stacking Ice Mages tactic discussed earlier. Someone talked about a 4 Arcane 1 Boomkin group setup.

Assuming that Improved Moonkin Aura and Nature's Fury go live in a form even moderately similar to current, the cast sequence for Arcane Mages could very well be 1:1 weave of AM-Barrage and tossing Arcane Blast on the Netherwind procs. The timing would work out nearly perfect for it. This has advantage of being a single-school sequence of casts, allowing very dedicated specs (60/0/11 was theorized).

The only real disadvantage we saw would be mana consumption issues (up for debate until Spirit mechanics are revealed), and if the Blue Dragonflight happens to be arcane-resistant. Then again, we could be missing something fairly obvious, so don't be afraid to call us all idiots and tell us where we're wrong.

I'm talking about the time period from patch 3.0 to the time level 80 raids begin, just like we saw patch 2.0 come out in early December and the expansion Jan 17th. I don't think locks will be dumping T6, we still have life tap.

Even so..don't assume locks will be stacking spirit. Kindling Soul may not be attainable in a raiding build to maximize dps, we will still rely on life tap. They are just making spirit "do" something for warlocks now. Before it did almost nothing, like agility. Doesn't mean spirit is replacing int/stam in a list of desired lock stats.

If I remember correctly I have like 300-350 mp5 ooc with all the spirit/int raid buffs so at 39% regen so warlocks with a spriest are going to have about the same or more regen. I don't really see what mages have to complain about though, 2 warlock trees receive significant nerfs, and your new talents are better than our's imo, at least for long term scaling. Early in the expansion I definitely see affliction locks being overpowered though.

I don't see locks stacking spirit; I see them behaving much as non arcane mages do now, getting spirit along with their ordinary gear. They will get spirit incidentally.

Warlocks may well be forced to replace their t6 with level 78+ blues, and that's annoying, I fully admit this.

Edit: depending on how badly set bonuses get nerfed, this may also be true for mages, or any other class with a percentage based set bonus. Blizz has never liked these sorts of things carrying over in the past. I'm morally certain the 2 pc t5 mage arcane bonus is gone, and wouldn't be shocked if the 4 pc t6 bonus also goes away. Both being replaced with flat damage bonuses, presumably. So those level 78+ blues will start looking pretty good for everybody.

Christ I hope not. Everybody knows that if you can do max damage by using Motlen Armor and Deep Fire spec people are going to do it, and be 100% reliant on JoW / SP / Shamans etc to do that. And then we get donkey slapped every time we get our tier gear and its loaded up with Spirit.

Even a base change such as All classes will regen 10% Health / Mana in combat would be nice.

Well, the part that youre missing here is that fire mages don't use mage armor, they use molten armor (3% more crit, yay). In other words, our MP5 is limited to what BOW gives, and that is it. If we use mage armor, then we get mana regen, which is nice, but at the cost of losing 3% crit too.

If we had 100 (or 130 even) dmg armor and 30% mana regen at the same time, or even 3% crit and 30% regen, you can bet your ass it would be a ludicrous boost.

And for the new mage talents, they are very good, I am not denying it. However, they have a major loophole in them. You have the choice between 2 specs. That means you have some points in 2 trees in both cases, so you need to make a choice between giving 10 points to tree A, and 10 points to tree B. Would you really get burnout/hot streak at the cost of arcane instability (+3% crit +3% dmg), arcane power (+30% dmg for 15s / 3min), spell power (+25% crit dmg), presence of mind ?

And keep in mind, arcane power is flat out 100% better than burnout. That leaves only hot streak (which is pretty bad lets be honest here) vs everything else.

The new talents might be very good, but the way our trees are made were choosing between high-end fire talents that are worth tier-1 talents vs tier-4+ talents...

I don't know where you are getting that number. I just looked, I'm 138 MP5 with no buffs, I can't see with raid buffs getting to 300! I'll have to look next time I'm raid buffed. Some of that 300-350 may come for BoW, which isn't spirit based and not effected by new Fel Armor. I'm only seeing maybe 250 MP5 in my gear now raid buffed.

Don't forget VT is 2% in alpha build, not 5%. SP DPS got a boost, but it isn't going up 300% to compensate. A 1200 dps SP is worth 300 MP5. At 2% VT, a 1500 DPS SP is worth 150 MP5.

Current.
Fel Armor mana regen + VT = 0 + 300 = 300

Alpha

30%*(250) + 150 = 225

Mages have substantially more spirit on their gear. Arcane mediation/mage armor may become mandatory with the VT nerf. 3% crit from molten armor really isn't a big dps boost, especially since you may still go OOM with a SP.

No, I fully agree with you. I am all for it. I like the entire philosophy behind the build. But won't you agree with me that the new talents feel like tier-1 level talents, and that something should be done about it ?

Keep in mind that, while we may have more spirit, and besides arcane meditation, we get nothing out of our spirit, as fire spec, for as long as we use molten armor, which generally we do.