Ah yes, thank you for mentioning that. I forgot to put it in the post and will update it accordingly now.

This has to be a mistake. Currently an AB with no charges is one of the cheapest spells a mage can cast. An AB with no charges should be less expensive to cast than a frostbolt or a fireball. The 75% mana increase when charged is more than enough to prevent AB spam being mindlessly used. Having a base cost that high is borderline ridiculous.

Just out of interest can someone post how much a fully stacked AB will cost please.

As for Torment the Weak I'm not sold yet. To make it self-sufficient arcane mages would need a longer cast Slow the could cast on bosses (since the debuff does get placed on the boss). Something in the region of at least 30 seconds. The problem is that every time an arcane mage casts Slow, or Focus Magic, they lose their AB stack.

I'm hoping for an AB glyph that increases the duration of the stack debuff. It's practically needed to make arcane viable right now.

Well, considering 95% of all bossfights consist of some warrior casting thunderclap, you should be fairly set anyways on the slow debuff and gain those 6% damage, and it is a decent boost do damage for 3 points that low in the tree.

Edit: I stand corrected, my bad.

The new wording is "ensnared" and Thunderclap doesn't do that. Just Attack Speed.

I'm not going to change the spec DPS TC post for this mini-patch yet, unless there are more hidden changes.
It's still easy to catch in my signature.

PoM-Abuse with Barrage-Missile spam/rotation is a tiny bit better than non-exploiting Barrage rotations and about 8% behind Living Bomb specs


Basically what changes with the current patch:

1) 3000 mana for Arcane is like neither intended nor sustainable.

2) Fingers of Frost - I'd guess a ~1% boost for Frostbolts with high haste, otherwise a ~1-2% loss.

* If you spam Frostbolts and can get 25% haste, you get 2 Shattered Frostbolts and 1 Shattered Deep Freeze or Ice Lance.
* Ice Lance isn't so hot, it's less than half the DPS boost that Deep Freeze on Shatter does.
So Frostbolt 0/18/53 with haste gets a slight boost (it used 2 Shattered Frostbolts before).

* If you spam FFB, you need 50% haste to get 2 of them Shattered. Not likely outside of cooldowns.
Also, FFB specs won't have Deep Freeze, so Finger's of Frost is quite limited for them.
Still a good talent, but requires cooldowns or high haste to work.
I'll see how it looks with Ice Lance shatters and such when more things need to get changed.

3) If anyone can find out whether Torment of the Weak actually works, whether it's personal or raid-wide and whether it works in bosses (Dr. Boom would be information enough), feel free to share.

4) Fire DPS is very dependent on Living Bomb's coefficients.
Right now, its DoT scales like a non-AoE DoT and it's Explosion is nearly like a non-AoE instant.
Keep in mind that you can't Tab-Spam it and that is has effectively a 12s cooldown and is a 51-point talent, and it's probably fair.

But it can change from one day to another if people deem it unfair. Just keep that in mind.



[Edit]: The use of Fingers of Frost now depends on its exact timing mechanics.
If you the 4s buff duration starts when your frost spell hits the target, you have quite some leeway.
If the buff starts counting when your spell leaves your hands however, it's much tighter.

Spammed Ice Lance is now back up to ~50% mobile DPS with the occasional Deep Freeze.

I do not have a beta key so I can not reply to your specific question.

However, Blizzard has started making lower ranked spells much more expensive in order to eliminate the downranking practice that is pretty much used by all healers in all existing raid scenarios. The blue post that said this was being done warned of potential errors or bugs as this is being fleshed out.

Perhaps there is a higher rank of AB, at 78, 79 or 80, that has the new reduced mana cost for the rank that you should be seeing at 77, despite it not being attainable at 77.

Just a thought. Perhaps this is one such case?

I think that the AB mana cost was an error, it was probably meant to be what scander wrote, but someone screwed up.

I think Torment of the Weak can be regarded as a PvP talent. I did some napkin math: when your GCD is lower than .85 seconds(77% total haste), it is worth casting in a pure DPS standpoint. But I suppose it still causes quite a big loss in DPM.

It would still permit the use of Ice Lance and Deep Freeze on the target. But more importantly, Shatter without FoF does give benefit, just not in a raid boss context. Some people think that only the raid boss context matters, so they consider Shatter useless without FoF; I don't really think this is fair, myself, but there's disagreement on this point, which is why I said 2-7 points.


Don't look at it as a Frost talent, look at it as an Arcane/Frost hybrid talent intended to help compensate for the Spell Power move. That's how I look at it, anyway. It's positioned just deep enough to make it clear that it's not really intended for a deep Frost Mage who has his traditional in-tree multipliers.


I really wouldn't take those numbers to heart. This is the very first patch featuring a fairly massive project of converting mana costs to a % base system; it seems very likely to me that on this first pass, they're pretty much just plugging in percentage numbers almost at random. There's probably very little relation between what you're seeing now and what the final costs will be.


The change should pretty much never result in lower damage than the two-charge version, as long as you're at max range from the target and have more than 0 Haste. Previous version would allow for Frostbolt + Deep Freeze (at < 3000 damage) or Frostbolt + Frostbolt (at or above 3000 damage). New version should allow for 2x Frostbolt + Deep Freeze (if DF is up) or 2x Frostbolt + Ice Lance (if DF is cooling down). To reiterate the timeline:

-1.0 secs: Cast Frostbolt 0, Start Frostbolt 1
0.0 secs: Frostbolt 0 hits, FoF procs
+1.5 secs: Frostbolt 1 cast (gets Shatter bonus), start Frostbolt 2
+4.0 secs: Frostbolt 2 cast (gets Shatter bonus), cast Deep Freeze or Ice Lance

So even with zero haste, assuming a 1 second flight time, you can theoretically pull this off, which is an improvement over the two-charge version, not a loss. With nonzero haste of any reasonable value, you should be guaranteed to pull this off.

I thought the GCD can't go below 1second.

For an Arcane build you're going to be throwing slow on mobs anyway since there's no reason not to get it on the way to Arcane Barrage, so it's basically 6% damage while solo and in pvp, perhaps 5/10 mans to a limited degree. I don't expect it to be a raid dps talent.

Also, it's very clear what abilities it works off of now simply because on beta you get a large "Ensnared!" message on any kind of root or snare.

Keep in mind that for Shatter to be useful in a raid context without FoF (Just trash, mostly) you typically need Frostbite as well, and Frostbite can actually manage to be a detrimental talent to have in some cases. On live you typically didn't get Frostbite or Shatter due to the point costs. 10 points for Improved Nova, Shatter and Frostbite that did nothing to help your boss dps in a spec that already was behind in boss dps isn't easy to swallow. The tree structure and point cost changing in Wrath has addressed this somewhat.

It doesn't matter who ensnares it, you still get the bonus.

Might be interesting to see how it fits in a PvP frost build though.

Silly question. What am I missing that's making the tooltip say "Instant Cast" in this screenshot?

http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/3...8215750za9.jpg

All the ranks on MMO-Champion still have the 2.5 second time listed.

It's still a 2.5 second base on beta for me. It says instant cast because he has Presence of Mind up to abuse the Arcane Potency crit stacking.

Presence of mind?

It fits deep frost but very hardly, since you want to 2/2 Imp. CS once you've spent 18 points on Arcane.
Thats a 20-0-51 build. You have to sacrifice Ice Floes or Brain Freeze. But I think an almost passive 6% damage worth is.

Sample build (for 2v2 arena): http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

Yes, but as I said, Shatter has value outside a raid boss context, and most people (including Blizzard) don't consider the raid boss context to be the only one that matters. Therefore, the way I (and I suspect Blizzard) would look at it is: 5 points gets you value outside the raid boss context, and 2 points gets you value inside the raid boss context.

I was thinking of sacrificing brain freeze. Our burst comes during freezes, which this would help. The real trade off I was thinking of was Torment, or Arctic Winds. 6% damage vs 4% damage and 4% physical mitigation.

Also implied is that even with zero passive haste you can get a great benefit from FoF in your Icy Veins + Trinket cooldown orgy. Drums and/or Bloodlust and you're seeing 2x Frostbolt 1x Deep Freeze at least.

Personal question: if we weren't meant to downrank, why are the lower ranks still in our spell book?

I'm pretty sure I heard somewhere that they're going to give you the option to not even show lower ranks in your spell book anymore.

As some people have already stated, while rank 1 frostbolt's mana is now as high as top rank, it still has a talented cast of 1 sec, which means faster snares.

After a few casts of a short snare for ~450 mana and ~20 damage people will stop using it.