What am I not understanding about Hot Streak? From the wording, it says once you crit 3 times consecutively, you'll crit every spell until you have a 10 second pause.

The cost for lower ranks of spells isn't the same -- it's actually higher. Seems like the talents that lower the mana cost of spells are only working on the top rank(s).

Blizzard - Ranks 1-6: 1759 mana
Blizzard - Rank 7: 1462 mana

Frostbolt - Ranks 1-12: 355 mana
Frostbolt - Ranks 13-14: 296 mana

It only affects the next spell you cast.

Yes. You click a little box to only show max ranks.

I am curious how much this is going to impact mage pvp.

What prevents it from reproccing when your next spell crits is that it resets the counter. Your guaranteed crit counts as the first crit in a new set of three.

Did they just nerf LB? 612 dmg over 12 secs now instead of 1300 odd?

I believe you're looking at rank 1, rank 3 should still be ~1300.

612 sounds like Rank 1. Be wary of trusting talent calculators for max rank abilities. Max rank stills seem to be 1380.

Yeah, these things are in flux I guess. Last time I looked a the MMO talent calc it must have had rank 3 dmg displayed because i distinctly remember the higher number.

Torment: Its now a decent pvp talent. Considering that most pvp deep frost mages were already going 17 into arcane, its just 3 more points for 6% damage. Getting it requires giving up 3 points in frost, which would probably be arctic winds, permafrost, chilled to the bone, or brain freeze.

The specifics will probably depend on endgame pvp balance. What do we need to win our toughest fights: better snares, more proccy burst damage and mana efficiency, or more raw damage? In practice, raw damage is always good, so I would bet money on most mages who want IC going 20 deep for Torment, with a bit of variation in what they give up to get it.

The mana change doesn't affect PVE much. I almost never downrank unless low on mana due to something like a battle rez. But in pvp it is potentially big. Things like downranked AI and dampen magic are dispel fodder, and we can do without them. full rank nova costs a bit more mana but its chump change. However, rank 1 AE is a key destealthing tool against classes where we often lose if they get the opener. And r1 frostbolt is still a great fast ranged snare, slowing down a flag runner, or making it harder for your opponent to kite your melee buddy. And a high mana cost makes focus mind useless for pvp.

I think its impossible to say what the impact will be on mage pvp viability, but Blizzard needs to balance around it, assuming that rogues will almost always get the opener and that it will be easier for certain classes to kite a mage.

These latest '% of base mana' changes makes me wonder why they don't simply implement a system of damage scaling with level much like Age of Conan did where there are no need for multiple ranks of spells, since base damage would scale with level.

(Age of Conan however did have multiple ranks because they didn't have scaling mana costs, quite the opposite)

It would quelch any of the concerns for Mages regarding the level of the main nuke spell, like Mages have in TBC with Fireball's last rank coming at level 66 with a seemingly lower damage level than a level 68 or 70 nuke would.

I was wondering why they leave the lower ranked spells available to us at all if they don't want us to necessarily use them. Why not just remove them from our spellbooks entirely just as they do with, say, rogues. When they learn a new ability, the old one is replaced by the newest ability.

Didn't the very first blizzcast (or was it a blizzcon panel? -- possibly the first blizzcon mage panel) they said specifically that using rank 1 arcane explosion to detect rogue was specifically unintended ? I'm pretty 100% sure they said that.

I believe that they conceded that there was no real fix to prevent it, and added a talent buff to Sap's range as a means of compensation. Not to mention Shadowstep.

The mana change hurts a lot more than AoEing to destealth rogues. Frost nova, mana shield, damp/amp magic, frost armor (not relevant anymore), polymorph, blizzard, cone of cold, flamestrike, frostbolt, fireball, scorch (mostly PvE); all used at rank 1 relatively frequently, will now cost an excessively higher amount of mana to use intelligently in PvE rendering them nearly unusable. The nerf to AE unstealthing rogues was the tip of the iceberg.

I actually have several versions of the "Official Talent Calculator's" data file backed up, and I can say with confidence that this isn't a change at all. In fact, it's simple the result of human error. Let's take a look:

Official Calculator Revisions:
Torment of the Weak v1 - All damage done to slowed targets is increased by 1/2/3%.
Torment of the Weak v2 - All damage done to Ensared targets is increased by 2/4/6%. (Note: the misspelling)

Beta Build Revisions
Torment of the Weak b8714/b8719 - All damage done to slowed targets is increased by 1/2/3%. (Never seen ingame, just in patch notes)
Torment of the Weak b8770 - All damage done to slowed targets is increased by 2/4/6%.
Torment the Weak b8788 - All damage you cause to Ensared targets is increased by 2/4/6%.

So, most likely the person managing the calculator is in way too much of rush, as usual, and forgot to change "done" to "you cause." I hope this puts this to rest.

Yeah manly, found the link for ya

BlizzCon: Interview With WoW Lead Designer Jeffrey “Tigole” Kaplan : The MMO Gamer

Depending how TtW works, it may still affect bosses. If it just checks for an 'ensnare' class debuff, then theres plenty of those that can sit on a boss to no affect. If, however, it requires the snare to actually AFFECT the target then its mostly useless.

Yep, but after 4 years of use in pvp, its pretty much built into in-game balance. Mages destroyed rogues pre-BC partially for this reason, so in BC rogues were substantially buffed, to make them far more formidable opponents.

Given all of the other changes occurring to classes, its impossible to single out one specific detrimental change as "unfair", but developers at least need to have their eyes open that this change hurts mages more than other dps classes. Locks will probably complain about being forced to use max rank drain soul, but that is minor.

I think it hurts healers worse, however. Damage is something you rarely *don't* want to scale. But healing over the amount need to top off your target is just a waste. My hunch is that the healers will do our whining for us on this one...

Thinking a bit more about Torment in pvp.

Brain Freeze and Finger of Frost allow for a very different type of frost mage playstyle - entirely mobile. A level 70 lock with those talents can do over 800 dps while running constantly and not casting any spell more expensive than ice lance or deep freeze. Not even counting uses of nova to set up shatters. You simply spam lance, and profit during FoF and brain freeze procs. That is a substantial increase in mobile mage dps, which is currently closer to 300 dps from lance spam. Fireblast can up that a ways but burns through mana.

But that playstyle results in no chill effects, except on melee opponents who proc your ice armor. Effective use of torment requires either a melee opponent, or heavy use of frostbolt or cone of cold. I can see such a mage preferring to max out arctic winds, or else going for improved cone of cold instead to use that to get the chills. The spec will already be very mana efficient.

I agree that it may effect bosses. 6% damage increase does seem a bit high for raid bosses so low in a tree though, so it is likely that it will change somehow before release.

The initial wording I read was "..Slowed targets". I like this a lot and think they should move it down in the arcane tree and have it mean just that, ANY target that has the slow debuff on it receives 6% additional damage. It would give Mages a huge buff for PvE usefulness.

Personally, I think that is a pretty small iceberg. I have rank 1 AE and rank 1 Frostbolt on my bar for PvP, but for PvE in particular, when do you use rank 1 of anything? What are you casting a rank 1 fireball at? And you're not casting rank 1 scorch in a cast rotation on a boss and on trash who really cares?

Not being able to down-rank is not a big deal. Even for unstealthing, smart rogues always got around it.

This is true. Infected Wounds is an excellent example. Another is dazes that apply to bosses, such as that from shield slam.

A good point about our mobility coming at the expense of snares (which is proper game design imo). The most popular mage combo currently is a rogue, who will of course be keeping crippling up as much as possible. In almost every comp a mage will be benefited substantially by keeping their target slowed as much as possible. This is doubly true since our snares become 10% deeper in WotLK, making them even more attractive to use -- with a permafrost/chilled to the bone CoC, for example, no other snare in the game can operate as a peel alone. Additionally, incidental contact proccing frost armor is fairly common even if you aren't focused in the slightest.

So I don't think targets will be free of snares in most realistic comps for the majority of the match.

That would be a pretty crappy design decision imo.

Do you want to spend a GCD refreshing slow every 12 seconds?
That's 1.5 seconds out of every 12 (12.5%) of your dps time spent refreshing a buff (before haste, of course - 33% haste knocks that down to around 9.4% of your dps time).

Is that really what you wanted to do when you rolled mage? Crap dps while actively tending to short-duration utility debuffs for your raid?