Going by this picture of trainable spells here, Flamestrike is getting a fairly large increase to its base damage compared to the ranks of Blizz/AE, almost double it's current values. Granted, our current rank is 6 levels old already.

Rank 7 (lvl 64): 471 to 575 dmg, additional 424 Fire damage over 8 sec. (current)
Rank 8 (lvl 72): 688 to 842 dmg, additional 620 damage over 8 sec.
Rank 9 (lvl 79): 873 to 1067 dmg , additional 780 damage over 8 sec.

Blizzard
Rank 7 (lvl 68) - 1472 over 8sec. (current)
Rank 8 (lvl 74) - 1680 over 8sec.
Rank 9 (lvl 80) - 2032 over 8sec.

Arcane Explosion
Rank 8 (lvl 70) - 377 to 407 dmg (current)
Rank 9 (lvl 76) - 481 to 519 dmg
Rank 10 (lvl 80) - 528 to 582 dmg

Edit: Links to other trees
Arcane
Frost

Some musings on the current 40/0/21 build being taken further in WotLK...

-This spec relies on a deep frost mage present to beef up crit chance
-Deep frost mage will be able to put a 'freeze' effect on bosses in WotLK (uptime unknown)
-This spec can easilly invest in shatter with the extra tallent points available.

But then, Arcane barrage seems, to me a least, to have a lot of PvE potential due o the short cooldown.

So what I would be interested in seeing is the comparisons of cold snap effect on straight nuking DPS, versus Arcane Barrage effect on overall damage done in a boss fight which requires lots of mobility.

I know currently if I had something like arcane barrage on certain bosses I could churn out much nicer damage simply because I can throw it in while i'm 'getting out of the fire' as it were.

Obviously, its rather situational and cold snap would be better on something like brutalus... but I would be interested in seeing the TC behind these 2 setups.

I'm currently leaning towards 60/0/11, purely because I will be focusing on 10-man content and therefor can comfortably forego deeper frost since WC and WG won't be around. But 51/0/20 or 50/0/21 or 45/0/27 could all be very competative variants of the current arcane/frost build come WotLK.

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Of course, theres always the option for a raid guild to stack frost mages for 100% WG up time and 85%+ crit chance passively for all the frosties. Not to mention the hordes of WEs beating on the bosses for 75seconds out of 180each.

My calculations indicated that arcane barrage has too poor mana efficiency and dps to be viable for an arcane spec. Presuming Netherwind Presence can proc off any missile cast, that significantly buffs the AM spell. However, arcane barrage currently has a bugged coefficient (I believe I heard 300% on the alpha servers), so it's conceivable it will have a coefficient different from the standard 1.5/3.5. If this is the case, I will reevaluate the spell.

That's a pity. Still, a three-second CD direct-damage spell with a 36 yard range (No Arcane Mage will pass up the range extension) is potentially the finest PvP addition a deep Arcane Mage could want, so it won't go the way of Slow, at least.

About Arcane Barrage. First of all I hate the name - 2 spells called AB is bound to cause confusion. Another thing - the description say "Launches several missiles at the enemy target, causing 936-1144(?) Arcane damage." Is this pr missiles or just total damage? As I imagine the use of this spell it is an instant spell (hence will scale worse than both AM and AB for PvE), and the mana cost probably is going to be high - I believe it is supposed to be the arcane filler instead of scorch or frostbolts and that it is supposed to be used as often as fire mages use fireblast. If it is supposed to be the 3rd main arcane nuke nothing in that school makes sense. About the 2xtier5 bonus I expect that to be nerfed as well just as they nerfed the ZG class-trinkets, since if they don't I expect 2xtier5 to be the way to go for a very long time for arcane, this would require a huge flat boost to basic AB damage as someone here suggested seems to be the plan.

But the core problem with arcane seems to be the overall rotation plan. Currently on live-realms it isn't even worth using AM as arcane spec, but rather AB spam with added frostbolts when mana becomes an issue. I doubt that is the intension. What is the plan? And why the netherwind proc? With AB already being 1,5 sec not counting haste buffs and it not working on any other arcane spells it doesn't really makes sense. If it gave a buff closer to the old MSD (reduce the casting time by x% of next spell) it would actually make more sense in this talent tree.

The reduced fade on invis in arcane tree would be a nice talent had it been in firetree (or really low arcane talent). Current position just make it a (weak?) PvP talent in an otherwise horrible non-PvP tree.

About the 3/6 yards on arcane spells, can anyone tell me how that it working with arcane explosion? And does Arcane Explosions radius still vary ~1½ yard whether you are moving or standing still while shooting?

Still some really bad talents in this talent tree (like wand spec), but the main problem to me seems to be the lack of consistency. Is everything in arcane supposed to be very mana inefficient medium/high damage or is one spell supposed to be mana efficient medium damage and another the most mana inefficient highest damage? Why shouldn't I just spam AB on trash and frostbolts/frostfirebolts when having mana problems and never touching AM. Give AM a decent purpose. Remove the extra mana cost, make clearcasting proc pr wave, change the netherwind proc as I suggested above - just do something about it.

Other things related to arcane spells:
Greater Amplify Magic/Greater Dampen Magic - class buffs like the pala-version I miss a lot. Possibly other changes to these two spells as well.

The mage armor change I don't understand. I guess it is supposed to be a PvP buff vs e.g. DoT casters, but both felpuppy locks and shadowpriests can still just dispel the armor. And if you make it too strong noone will use the frost armor. Adding an effect that gave the mage x% mana of any incoming healing spells (something like the passive paladin ability) would make more sense to me. Or make the armor(s) non-dispelable which would make mages less vulnerable to drains. The idea to reduce magic effects seems really really good, I just don't see putting the effect on mage armor as a smart choice - rather as a talent then.

Winter's Grasp. People have talked a lot about this talent here.
- First I really doubt the hit effect stack - improved fairy fire doesn't stack. Why should this? And who would gimp their hit rating on a boss waiting for a proc to off? The moonkin/shaman/draenei hit boosts are worth relying on, but I wouldn't on this proc.
- About the target being considered frozen I have serious doubts whether this will work on frozen immune targets (like raid bosses) - personally I really doubt it.

For these reasons frost for me looked even more PvPish than in TBC. The small PvP buffs to fire and arcane seems so weak compared to frost - I can't see any serious arena team using anything but frost mages (which I'm fine with btw. I'm PvE minded and find the deep frost-style boring - too much like destro-lock 1 button spam). But I could be wrong of cause.

It would still have the hit bonus in PvE and would keep the frozen effect a while in both PvE and PvP when others break your freeze effect through dps before your next frostspell hits. It wouldn't be the supertalent many people have praised it to be, but it would still be strong enough to pick for both PvE and PvP. But many raiding guilds would probably just call it a waste of debuff slot and tell the mage to respec.

Would probably still be worth the debuff slot since it would still give 4% damage to all pets and that could end up being pretty significant if demo locks are raid viable along with BM hunters and the frost mage's own elemental as well.

I hadn't considered that angle, actually. Particularly since Demo Locks already *are* viable, it's just the trouble of maintaining a pet on top of everything else to achieve DPS equal to that of a Destruction Warlock is usually passed over. Additional Hit for the Pet, even now, would be quite the bonus.

My original point for Arcane Barrage PvE usefulness wasn't to do with the mana efficiency or scalling, but more the fact that its instant with a low cooldown and the impact that has on high-mobility fights. If you spend 10 seconds running from 1 end of a boss to another currently, you can get 2 fireblasts on him. If you have arcane barrage, you have 2xfireblasts and 3x barrages. Thats probably over 6k damage you wouldn't otherwise have dealt regardless of spec or cast cycle. My question was; is that worth dropping cold snap for?

As for winter's grasp and whether or not it effects bosses; I'm gonna put my money on 'yes'. The hit is redundant as others have said, since any hit that isn't reliable will be ignored when you're gearing your +hit. The 'target counts as frozen' component doesn't actually freeze (root) the target. The reason bosses are immune to roots is to make them challenging, not specifically to gimp frost mages. This tallent seems to make perfect sense to affect bosses, at least to me.

Last point: The new mage armor in PvP. First of all, I'm not worried about fel hounds eating it. I can rebuff it a lot faster and it only has to be up as the DoT is applied. If i'm fully DoT'ed and THEN it gets removed, those debuffs arn't going to magically gain more duration. Sure, the lock can re-apply them but thats going to eat into his mana and I can re-cast armour to as soon as I see he's re-applying DoTs for a much smaller cost. Considering also that I'll be packing 80 base resistance and another 40 from Mage Armour, my ability to resist binary dispells is going to be quite high. Purge and dispell are likewise affected by resistance, but I honestly don't feel threatened by priests or shamans right now.

Of course, my experience in PvP goes as far as a few BGs so take that with a grain of salt.

Netherwind Presence is useless. I don't need to go into details on that, it just is. Incanter's absorbtion however could prove VERY potent. It looks poor untill you realise how many shields we're able to stack now. If I've got mana shield + shatter shield, thats 3050 absorbed before scalling, likely nearly 4k after. Lets say an MS crit breaks all that in 1 go; I just got +600 spell damage AND the poor guy is frozen on the spot ready for some ice lances.

I think Barrage will have a place in an Arcane Blast rotation. Its DPSCT will be lower than Blast, yes, but higher than Missiles, while its mana efficiency (at least at any reasonable gear level) will be significantly higher than Blast. It's an alternate filler spell, with the advantage of being castable on the run.

It's unfortunately difficult to do even very rough theorycrafting on it without knowing how much crit/damage/intellect/spirit we can expect to have on gear at level 80. I was kind of considering using 1700 (pre-Mind Master); this is enough for the damage gear bonus to barely exceed the average base damage on Ice Lance, which is about where I am right now at 70 (raid buffed). But that's a pretty arbitrary guess, of course.

Yes, there seems to me to be no reason whatsoever to design a talent that causes Shatter and Ice Lance to treat the target as frozen without actually freezing the target in place unless you're doing it specifically to make that talent and spell useful against bosses.

I really think the change to Magic Absorption combined with the change to Fel Armor is quite elegant, since it builds the dispel resistance people have been asking for right into the spell and a very accessible talent.

On the subject of the wording of Burnout, has anyone yet considered that it refers to your 'mana', and not 'total mana' or 'remaining mana'? It would seem far more balanced if it were indeed remaining mana, since 5% of your total mana could potentially be more than the spell that proc'd it. Not to mention the tallent component could well attempt to cause you to go below 0 mana if its trying to cost you 5% of your total. I'm not sure if blizzard can do something like that from a technical standpoint. Normally if you don't have enough mana for a spell or effect you simply can't use it, but you've already used the effect of this tallent on the crit...

Certainly makes more sense to me to be a cost in remaining mana, encouraging fire mages to blow off mana fast and find a sweet spot where they can cast and regenerate at a fairly similar rate without Burnout costing them too much.

At the very least though, 12k fireballs should be amusing.

Unless, of course, the Dispel is of the "Holy" school, as the Priest's version is. Purge and Devour Magic would be fairly effectively countered by the expected ~120 Resistance (130 vs. Devour if you're a Draenai or Undead, or 125 vs. either if you're a Blood Elf), but Dispel Magic would continue to go unhindered. I'm not sure if Arcane Shot would be affected, either; despite doing Arcane Damage, it can't be mitigated by resistances anyway, as far as I remember; so I don't know if the Dispel component could be resisted, either.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, on the whole; on one hand, 120 all-school resistance will also cut into incoming Magical damage in a way basic Dispel Resistance can't, but on the other hand, Dispel Magic is almost certainly the worst of the four standard Dispels, with Arcane Shot coming in close behind, so even though it sort of approaches the problem, I think it misses the mark. There's also the concern that standard Arena gear comes with about 95 Spell Penetration available in the form of weapon swapouts and a Cloak enchantment already in Season 3; It could even be more in Season 4, and who knows how much Penetration can be stacked in Season 5+?

Personally, I'd prefer to see a focused talent that, rather than offer across-the-board dispel resistance, simply makes all Armor and Shield spells 100% Resistant (i.e., Immune) to Dispel effects, while not affecting any other self-buffs or offensive magical effects; similar in effect to the Paladin Retribution talent making Seals and Seals alone Immune to Dispel.

Are you certain about this? It can be cast while in shadow form, which implies to me it doesn't fall under 'holy'... Its easy enough to test though, just duel a priest, stack some resistance, spam mana shield and have him spam dispell on you. Hopefully, dispell will prove to check its resistance against arcane. I'll see if I can test this with my priest friend after i'm done in MgT.

I believe Shadowform only blocks casting spells that fall under the holy tree, as opposed to those that use the holy school. It's probably a Discipline spell.

Yes, I'm certain. This is a common confusion about Shadowform. Shadowform only locks out spells in the "Holy" tab of the spellbook, not spells of the "Holy" school.

Power Word: Shield, and Dispel are both of the "Holy" school (you can't cast either if Counterspelled while casting Greater Heal or Flash Heal), but they are in the "Discipline" tab of the spellbook, and can be cast in Shadowform.

All spells a Priest has are either Holy-School or Shadow-School; meanwhile, these spells are divided between Holy-Tree, Discipline-Tree and Shadow-Tree. It's actually kind of funny; I was talking to someone just the other day about how the Tree-School name overlap is the only remaining inelegance of the Spell School system, in reference to Frostfire Bolt.

The only issue is that I can't picture too many situations where I wouldn't want to be using Ice Armor. Otherwise the solution is quite elegant as long as they keep spell penetration off of holy/disc priest and resto/enhance shaman gear entirely.

As I said before It could also be 1% of your 'base mana'.

Well, any 2's composition where the primary DPS is a caster paired with a healer, you'll want to use Mage Armor. There aren't many aside from Warlock + Druid, but it happens.

3's compositions that are CC heavy, you're probably going to want to use Mage Armor on, and rely on your teammates to peel melee; running around in an armor that reduces Polymorph, Fear and other magical CC's to 5/2.5/1.25s/Immune is going to make you very, very hard to handle. You could easily eschew your Medallion against a lot of compositions, replacing it with a High-STA or similarly defensively-oriented trinket. Oh, and you're probably going to want to run it against RMP mirrors anyway.

In 5's, I have little experience, but my impression is that Mages aren't often focused on 2345 and Eurocomp setups; if you aren't getting hit, Mage Armor is definitely going to be of greater benefit.

Mage Armor will come into its own as a valid choice for PvP if DPS Caster teams gain greater traction in the Arenas; if casters continue to relegated to Melee DPS support OR Healers, then there won't be nearly as much point to it.

I won't comment on the math of the WotLK Mage talents because that's not my gig. I'm much more of a "how do they shape playstyle and viability?" kind of guy. On that basis, I have to say that I think the new talents suck donkey balls.

First off, there are zero genuinely new mechanics and the design space assigned to Mages remains exactly the same. I'd give rather a lot for the people developing the class to approach the expansion with fresh eyes and a spirit of adventure. Burnout is a perfect example of why they should stop inviting the accountants to the design team. Mage play should consist of something more than Scorchx5, Fireballx9, Scorchx1... until you puke.

Second, they do very little to address the PvP metagame. While I'm pleased we're getting an at-will stun mechanic in Deep Freeze, the combination of the 1.5 second cast time and the need for the target to be frozen (or "considered frozen") makes this a clunky tool. Simply put, we're given a series of passive responses rather than actual counterplays.

Third, many of the talents feel like fixes rather than actual advancements. The Winter's Grasp mechanic should have been added a long time ago.

Oh well. Blizzard keeps telling me to reroll. I guess I should listen.

If you're only using fireballs on netherwind presence procs, it doesn't really matter whether or not fireball is improved. Personally, I don't think NP is a significant enough damage increase to be worth 5 points. As we know from clearcasting, spell procs arn't something you can watch when chain-casting. Its not 'if my arcane blast procs NP i'll hit fireball'; you should have already hit AB again before you see the NP proc... unless its possible to have a mod check for the NP aura and change the spell button to fireball if its active. Basically, in chain-casting situations you won't be able to choose where your NP proc goes unless it procs off arcane missiles, just like you can't choose where clearcasting goes right now (unless you want to wait after each spell to see if its procced, which defeats the whole point). So your instant spell most of the times will end up being an arcane blast that would have been 1.5secs anyway.

the only other way I can see around this is a cycle of AB/ABar/AB/Abar... since both spells could proc NP and ABar doesn't consume it, you might end up being able to add fireballs into the cycle without slowing down (you have GCD after ABar to see if you procced NP on either spell). That, of course, is highly dependant on how ABar works... if the spell has a travel time, if the spell is worth using in the above cycle. Even then, we once again have a spell cycle that gets screwed over as soon as you add haste to the mix, thanks to the 3second c/d on ABar.

Certainly be interesting to get my hands on these spells and test all this.

Remember, though, if you're casting as quickly as you should be, you can often outrun certain effects that should be instant. Arcane Blast is a prime example; you cast at 2.5 secs, you send your next cast request before it goes off, and you get the 2.5 sec cast speed rather than the 1-stack reduced cast speed that you should get.

This may work on our favor with NP; you could have your next AB started before the buff shows up, thus giving you 1.5 secs to decide what to use it on. This doesn't work with Clearcasting because mana consumption happens at the end of the cast, but it could well work with NP since cast time is determined at the beginning of the cast.