I was disappointed with the graphics in that video and am hoping that they're placeholder. When I read the description, I was hoping for something like the starscape nova bomb, which remains one of my favorite game weapons both for effectiveness and looks. Sure it's a bit less practical in the "hay guys! arcane mage over here!" way, but we could use some new flashy spells.

Inserting ABs into the cycle is going to negatively affect your netherwind proc rate, even fully ramped up -- for every AB cast you can get 1.5 missiles off, and that many more opportunities to trigger netherwind. The ratio is even worse if you include ramp up time.

What's worse AB itself is clunky as hell so far as netherwind procs go from a mechanical stanpdoint and if you are spamming it you are possibly going to waste any procs generated from said spam on another AB.

I'm not seeing a future for AB in the brave new world of AM. You might toss a few around off netherwind procs from AM for mana conservation purposes. And you'll spam it with all your cooldowns blown. But otherwise...not so much.

It makes much sense to me for moonkins to get a typical 50% increase, while shamans getting huge mana costs tacked on. As is today, moonkins are suffering from mana issues, as they have little in the way of mana regen. 10% int into mp5 and 9% mana cost reduction are only two talents available to them. (30% mana regen from spirit is in resto tree). Raiding moonkins are dependent on mana pots/innervate just to get then through the fights.

Shamans on the other hand have crit based mana return, and at higher gear levels get enough crit to be able to continue nuking without much mana issues (preety much every spell is discounted by 50% mana after their crit rate hits 33%).

I am not sure what gear will elemental shamans share, but mana cost increases point to blizzard considering their mana gains though talents as able to compensate. Moonkins on the other hand are getting no new mana regen talents in WotLK, and will probably be pigeonholed gear wise with resto druids wearing same resto leather.

Would be interesting to see shadow priest spells to - given as right now they are the true "blue rage bar" caster. Their mana never runs out at Sun well gear levels due to their mana restore abilities.

Thank you Roywyn, that would seem to mean that if ABar were to use volleys, it would be more like Starshards than AM.

Are you basing this just from that video? Or have you/anyone seen information stating it so? I'm not all that familiar with how private servers work for running WoW. I just find it hard to take at face value when during the animation the character is running as fast as the bolt travel speed, or firing it off into air without a target. (ok a target, but I can't shoot spells at myself))

Again, I'm mostly hoping that ABar is given sufficient damage or utility to warrant using it on every cooldown. Weaving it with some rotation of AM/AB/NP proc's. Not just something used while mobile. If not, then a 51 point version of Fireblast seems very lackluster, even at slightly higher damage.

Frozen Rune Weapon (tier 3): Imbues your Rune Weapon with frost. Each hit causes 5.7 to 17.6 additional frost damage, based on the speed of the weapon. Slower weapons cause more frost damage per swing. Also has a chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Frost damage. Lasts 10 minutes.

A new +Frost% target debuff? I may need to do the Dance of Rejoicing.

Also, ISB debuff has been nerfed again; it now affects only non-periodic damage (it used to work this way, long ago).

Improved moonkin aura nerfed to 20% haste, as widely anticipated here. But I still want a moonkin in my group.

Edit: and invis is now on a 3s countdown.

I think you might have it backwards...the ticks from DoTs would actually consume it, so they changed it so DoT ticks wouldn't consume it. "Non-periodic" was added like patch 1.9+. Although I do not think talents are in anyway close to their finalized versions, the changes from patch to patch at least illuminate the thought process of the developers. Mages are gaining synergy with Death Knights, shadow priests/lock synergy is being reduced. I wonder if this change is indicative of shadow priest dps being too much to their liking, because I can't see any reason affliction needs a nerf.

You are correct.

Looking at the changes to Shadow Priests, it looks like they're going to be a lot more self-reliant; it seems their damage will be going up, even with the reduction in synergy.

If those were taken from my text file on the WotLK thread, the cast times are bugged, and abilities for which the costs scale with your base mana are shown as if you are a level 1 warlock. So keep that in mind.

Ah, gotcha. So it may be entirely unchanged. Thanks!

On the DK side of the mage-DK synergy, there was a deep-frost talent that was basically AoE-Ice Lance. Everything in 10 yards takes X damage, triple versus frozen. They also have some abilities to freeze targets as well, so it's a two-sided relationship.
On the other hand, they also get the ability to parry spells.

Thanks for the link, Deltrus.

Arcane barrage must have a ridiculous coefficient. Well in excess of 100%. Very surprising.

Well, for a 3K crit:

3000 / 1.75 / 1.03 ~= 1665

Subtract top-end damage at rank 3 (which is the rank he quoted in his opening text):

1665 - 1145 = 520

Required +Damage:

520 / (1.5 / 3.5) ~= 1214

Normal instant-cast coefficient and normal level 70 +damage gear is sufficient.

I assumed the mage was casting rank1, not rank3. Is the sandbox mode allowing max rank spells?

Frostfire Bolt isn't even available until level 75, so he's definitely not stuck at rank 1. If he's on the F&F server, he'd be stuck at rank 2, but I suspect he's on a private server with access to all ranks.

Ran across another arcane barrage/frostfire bolt vid:

Arcane Barrage WotLK - FileFront.com

Edit: beginning of the video has his spellbook open to what looks like frostfire bolt rank2.

It was concluded that it was on a private server - do they work reliably (as in - do they know the proper mechanics)? I have no clue about that, thus asking.

Frostfire Bolt has no improved/empowered talents, which increase Fireball/Frostbolt by 27%-35%. That's a huge amount of missing scaling which has to be made up somewhere.

With some swapping, you can grab 3/5 WC, so you provide your own debuffs and are self-sufficient (I don't really believe in the 4-mage-raids you thought of).
(Imp.) WE might actually be better than Comb/MF, the future (sheets) will tell.

Compared to Frostbolt, you lose 5% damage, 5% crit, 10% scaling, 20% haste. From the fire tree, you gain 6% crit, 12% damage and Ignite would add ~25% damage or more at ~50% crit or more. That's in addition to Comb/MF or (Imp.)WE. MoE serves as clearcasting, but the lack of AE threat reduction might hurt.
Looks good so far, but only if Frostfire Bolt continues to get benefit from all talents.


P.S.: I'm dieing to find some info on how Hot Streak works, if it has the potential to be a great talent or of it's hard capped and there just some other minor crit talent.

To clarify, is frostfire bolt affect by talents from both trees and external frost and fire modifiers?
That is, is it affected by imp scorch and winterschill?
How are the range and threat reduction and mana reduction talents affecting it?

This news has me the most excited about wotlk, I'd assumed it was a fire tree spell and would only take fire modifiers.

No idea if it would be good but you could make an insane crit dmg spellpower,ignite,ice shards shatter build if someone else had WG up for you. I'd love a spreadsheet to play around with!

It's difficult to say from those videos which talents it'll really be affected by. We see it proc impact, yes, which tells us it's being considered a Fire spell. But the only Frost talent we see is Frostbite, and Frostbite will proc on any spell with a chill effect. We already know from the description that Frostfire Bolt has a chill effect, so this doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be affected by Piercing Ice, Ice Shards, etc. We can hope, of course, but at present we can't really know.

If you look closely in the video, the last beast he slays in the Frosrfire demonstration before going to Barrage seems to proc a red debuff which is clearly longer than the time it takes for his next bolt to land. Impact is a 2s stun, and it's clock-face shows. The other debuff, we can only assume, is Ignite.

Whether or not it was an Ice-Shards/Ignite we can't say, I don't think. The prospect of 280% crits, however, including WC and Imp. Scorch is quite tantalizing. I'm also rather curious as to whether it's range/threat is altered by either or both frost/fire talents.

This will make for some very interesting specs indeed. I'm quite looking forward to modeling/arguing the minutiae of 33/10/11+17 versus 0/33/38 versus 51/9/11... All exciting stuff.

I already stated that the lack of an improved version might be a problem but I'll argue that what you're giving up by going deeper into either tree probably won't be an issue.

The lack of empowered talents isn't a big issue when considering going deeper into the frost tree since fire power and improved scorch more than makes up for that. A 10% damage pretty much makes up for a 10% coefficient and 5% crit increase. Giving up chilled to the bone is fine I think since you're gaining 10% from imp scorch. I think the elemental would be better than molten fury and combustion as well but it's not just about those 2 talents. You'd also have to give up points in fire power and that won't be acceptable. The synergy between the fire and frost trees from winter's grasp, winter's chill, shatter, ignite, and ice shards can be incredibly sick. So now all that it comes down to is whether that synergy + piercing ice + arctic winds makes up for the lack of an improved talent. This is why I think the lack of an improved version may be an issue but that will remain to be tested.

As for rearranging to pick up 3/5 WC I would suggest highly against that. The whole reason to have 4 mages is to maintain winter's grasp. Since you don't need everyone to be deep frost to maintain it I believe it'll be ok to have the others take advantage of a higher dps spec. It's my understanding that any frost spell can proc it including ice lance so as long as you have two people on main nuke + ice lance duty it should stay up most of the time. I was just thinking they'd want to be deep frost since ice lance won't benefit from the fire talents and they're going to be using that to maintain a lot of their dps. If you're going that deep into frost then you may as well just have them pick up WC instead of the others.

I'd say another problem with speccing around Frostfire is having two debuffs to fully pump you, as it were. We've already seen scorch scales like a bitch, making 5x Scorch a pretty lam-o deal, and then we're looking at a further 30sec of Frostfire Bolt to ramp-up WC... What a bummer. Do we perhaps have the ultimate in bad-quality trash-spec? This is a very good incentive to drop Arctic Winds points for the full-monty 5/5 WC. I'd even argue dropping Ice Floes for it. Given Elemental is so long in duration, you'll only get one Cold-Snap's worth of extra WE anyway.

The whole issue revolves around the cost/agro reducers... Does Frostfire gain one of the tree's mods, both, or either?. If it does benefit from both, this would be my spec-of-choice, currently: War Pirate :: Talent tree Mage

Get range from fire, -agro from both trees, and -cost from Frost. Will Sims show up MF as better than WE? Well then... War Pirate :: Talent tree Mage

On the other hand, Frostfire Bolt may quite possibly (if Piercing Ice and Ignite stack) have the best value for crit-rate in the game. Lack of both time-reducing talents and empower-spellpower talents also mean it will have less value from Spellpower. And the one and only thing that helps with the Ramp-Up issue is... Haste.

Could we be looking at a future of "arcane = stats, Fire = +dmg, Elemental = haste/crit, Frost = +dmg/haste"?