If some of the new data mining is to be believed, the burnout looks like an on use mana dump for deep fire. Which I personally would love.

Name: Burnout (5 ranks, listing highest)
Description: Increases your spell critical damage bonus with all Fire spells by 25% but every time you critical with a Fire spell you lose an additional $44450s1% of your total mana.

Mix that in with Molten Fury and the 20% down on a boss would be nuts.


Other spells dug up:
http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/talentlist.php

Name: Fiery Payback (2 ranks)
Description: Increases damage caused by Molten Armor by 20% and whenever you resist a spell the caster takes 50% of any instant damage that would have been caused. Damage caused by Fiery Payback will not exceed 50% of the caster's health.

Name: World in Flames (3 ranks, listing highest)
Description: If a Fire spell you cast hits 3 or more targets, the spell causes an additional 15% damage.

Name: Hot Streak (3 ranks, listing highest)
Description: Any time you score 3 spell criticals in a row, you have a $m1% chance the next spell will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit.

The mining sites are showing it as a relatively cheap, high damage instant with a 3s cooldown.

Random musings

1- the hot streak talent.
-> Does this means I can flamestrike (assume here I get 3+ crits) and then have the buff up almost garanteed ?

-> Does this means that with 50% base crit I can sustain a 100% crit rate after I get 3 consecutive crits ? Surely, this talent must have a cooldown on it or reset the counter after it gets a proc. It all depends on how its coded. Does the +100% crit spell can count towards the 3 crit? This will make a huge difference in the worthyness of the talent.

-> The other downside is that depending on how this works you have the problem that it scales exponentially the more crit you have. Going from 40% crit into 50% crit will give very very significantly different results.

2- frostfire bolt.
-> I admit, it seems innocuous at first. However, since we are devoid of information, the mind can only wander and think of the possibilities. This is where I concluded this could not be. Let me elaborate.

Imagine a tri-spec with Spell Power, Ignite and Ice Shards. And [Design: Chaotic Skyfire Diamond] while were at it.
I am not sure if those multiply together. I assume they do.

100 (base damage)
50 (base crit) * 1.25 * 1.50 * 1.03 = 96.5625
196.5625 base crit on frostfire. Then ignite applies, so 40% off that (78.625), giving a total of 275.1875% on frostfire crits.

Hm.

Then you also get frostbite, and shatter. I guess other people see where I'm going with this.

3- moonkin talents
-> this needs a nerf. It is too good. Maybe make it self-buff, but lets face it - this is a caster-version of windfury.

4- burnout.
-> this spell is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. It fits well the overall design of the fire spec. The real question is whether or not it is 245% fire crits or 227.5%, but my bets are on 227.5%. 1% of total mana lost seems like a fair deal; it is enough to affect our play and not necessarily go for all out consumables, but its also not enough to screw firespec completely out of whack.

5- mage armor.
-> finally, something usable. I know it was for arcane spec thanks to mana regen, but fact is for all other spec this was used only for the 18 resistance and nothing else. I can definately see a few cases where debuffs lasting half the time would come in handy. Things like kaz'rogal mana drain come to mind. I am sure a number of other cases will crop.

6- netherwind presence.
-> I know this is a silly question, but can every AM cast proc this, like a good reminiscent of AM SPAM spec ?

x- Overall note about all mage changes.
-> I think all of them fit well what I had in mind and go to where they should be going. Frost goes more towards control, which essentially is why you go frost in the first place. Its nice to have some damage increase talents in all tree, but unless your tree is only damage you want to use sparingly damage increasing talents. I personally believe arcane should have more burst options (deep in the tree though, not in the form of a talent accessible by all specs), and better threat mitigation.

It's an instant cast, not channeled. So its' more like uber hasted arcane missiles

Truthfully though, why shouldn't Warriors get something to match Polymorph?

The reason casters have not and will not get a "caster windfury" should be obvious when you compare the damage output of say, a fireball, to that of a melee auto-attack.

It's not a full "caster windfury" in the sense that one fireball doesn't cause me to cast two more instant fireballs at significantly higher damage. You can't compare the two directly as it's apples to oranges - my point was, why should we not be given a buff that actually scales with gear, rather than everything currently that is just flat increases irrespective of gear.

Coming from what i've seen so far there is not much stuff pvp wise and thats my biggest concern.

Brain freeze in deep frost seems a joke for arena. If something is under frostnova effect he is really unlikely to hit you or party members anyway. In case maybe a little peel off from a focused target.

Imp. Water elemental is another joke... Elemental is running oom without it after few seconds and this talent won't change anything. If its true blizzard wants us to be a robots in arena managing counterspelling , snaring , kiting , sheeping, watching focus and staying alive and maybe managing water elemental mana now? I am already tired of playing hardest class in arena especially considering that i have to lead the games most of the time too.

Living bomb seems seems nifty considering the burst potential but lets not forget the power of DISPELL...

Fiery payback how often you resist spells in pvp or pve...

Chilled to the bone i think we don't need any more snare % with all the mobility, counters other classes have or can provide during the arena games making it really not so usefull.

I'll repost my theorycraft analysis of the new stuffs here.

MAGES

Ho ho ho, it's Christmas time motherfuckers! Look just what blew in from the frozen north!

ARCANE

If you're looking to raid dps, don't even bother. This tree got a few minor buffs but it's YEARS behind fire and frost now. Interestingly enough it's looking like a completely baller pvp tree, what with an instant cast base nuke and damage procs. So yeah.

FIRE
Exponential scalars off the port bow, captain! Yaaar! Have you tried getting to 40% crit raid buffed? Because this is the point where Hot Streak quickly becomes an out of control talent and crit rating starts to outscale spell damage. Yes, crit outscaling spell damage. Combined with burnout and we're looking at high, streaky damage, heavily crit dependent, and some mana issues to boot. Interesting. Also major aoe buffs here, and if you don't want to living bomb people in battlegrounds at least once, you're not human.

FROST
Frost, your day has come. You can finally, finally, FINALLY apply freeze effects to non-freezable targets! HOLY FUCKING SHIT ON A CHRIST CRACKER. I mean that's what the words said! You can shatter raid bosses now. Not based on the usual procs, but with a new debuff with 20% proc rate on any frost spell. Winter's Grasp is THE clutch talent for ice mages, and it's a big one. I modeled a new scenario which involves busting an ice lance after the frostbolt after the proc, shattering both these is a serious dps boost. We also got a straight 5% buff to both those abilities further down, and a better, longer water elemental. Oh and did I mention Winter's Grasp has a raid debuff as well? 4% +hit to all attacks. It's big. I'm gonna call it WRG now, if that's cool.

Raid dps ahoy: fire does outscale ice at high levels of crit rating, and quickly becomes so absurd it has to be a mistake. 3000 dps in Manly's gear by stacking moonkin, totem of wrath and judgement of the crusader. I don't think it's intended to work quite like that. Ice is looking extremely solid though, with a new raid debuff, better synergy and much better damage, as well as some reactive playstyle mechanics, ice is looking like a ton of fun.

P.S. I hadn't considered Manly's proposal that arcane missiles may proc Netherwind on a per missile basis. I'll investigate this.

One thing to note here, as Vontre hinted in IRC; Burnout means you need to be careful with scorch proccing burnout. This means trash will be significantly more annoying. Also, possibly have to recheck and consider the option to have just 1 mage refresh scorch in a raid -- so as to avoid mages losing mana on scorch. I don't normally advocate having just 1 scorcher, but this could become quite annoying.

What are the changes to mage armor? I didn't see that in the list anywhere

I'm seriously considering moonkin in the expansion, so much synergy. It may depend on the mage arcane tree viability though

Notes on the Frost Tree:

0. General notes - More or less a PvP tree, but could be a viable PvE tree with some small changes.

1. Improved Water Elemental - strictly a PvE talent unless they alter the way the Water Elemental scales. Currently, without support your water elemental goes OOM in about 35 seconds... a 30% increase in WE mana doesn't quite cover the increase in duration (which is 66%).

2. Brain Freeze - this talent would make more sense if it applied to frozen targets instead of just those debuffed with Frostbite and Frost Nova. This would allow it to synergize with Winter's Grasp and, with a somewhat iffy 2+% damage reduction from melee attacks basically give enough raid synergy to make a Deep Frost spec raid viable.

3. Deep Freeze - At level 70, this spell would cost 450 mana or so for a 4 second stun on a frozen target. Unless it worked on raid bosses, I'm thinking that this talent is underpowered on the same scale that Slow was.

Other comments

Burnout - I suspect this talent is about as underpowered as the old Playing with Fire or Pyromaniac used to be.

Hot Streak - I predict that this talent will be a nightmare to debug because it will suffer from the same type of effects that currently plague Ignite. As mentioned above, how will it interact with AoE?

Raid synergy - Where is the raid synergy provided by mages?

Cross-tree synergy - Is anyone else surprised they don't have more elemental cross-tree synergy? Something along the lines of "Steam - when a fire spell hits a frozen target, the frozen debuff is removed and the target is surrounded by a swirling mist that lowers its chance to hit by x% for y seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every z seconds" or "Quench - Removes all fire-based DoTs on a target. For each fire-based DoT thus removed, target's attack speed is slowed by x% for y seconds (z minute cooldown)". It strikes me as odd that TBC did some work to try and introduce elemental synergies, but they have more or less abandoned the idea of elemental synergies in WotLK.