Aeryn

I like it for the simple reason that it's arcane. Frost mages got Ice Lance as an instant cast in BC, which was also I nice addition. I like specializing, and when all my talents amplify say, arcane damage, I normally don't want to use fire or frost spells, which aren't improved by talents at all.

Would be interesting to see if Arcane Barrage could replace scorch in AB rotations. Speaking of which, Netherwind Presence could help ramp up the AB debuff, so in overlap rotations it seems helpful. Then again it wouldn't work with pure AB spam at all. I'm strongly hoping the new ranks of AB will scale similarly to the way the T5 bonus works now.

What irks me the most, actually, as someone who likes to put all point in one tree, is that there's too many talents available in each tree, i.e. they use up more than 71 points. Filler talents aside, usually that means you'll have to sacrifice survivability, and I've come to like improved blink, improved mana shield etc. Sure, having to make choices is fun, but also very agonizing.

 

Alvira

The % proc rate of netherwind presence is too low to be reliable in helping to ramp up the AB debuff. Its more likely it will proc while spamming AB and end up largely wasted rather than anything else. If anything, they should take out AB from the spells that can be made instant cast from Netherwind presence, and put in pyroblast.

That way, you won't have a netherwind proc while spamming AB throwing you off, while if you do have one proc, since AB is not a spell you can use it for, you can finish your nexxt cast AB (which you would most likely already be in the middle of casting when it procs), and then throw out an instant cast pyroblast, which will benefit from NP.

So, if they remove AB as one of the spells that can be made instant using NP, it would actually benefit arcane more. At laest the AB spam style of arcane.

 

radikal

From the wording on frostfire bolt, it seems like either-or for Ignite/Shatter depending on which type of dmg it deals. It does seem to likely benefit from both Impact and Frostbite however.

Anyone have any guesses on what happens if you invis between dot ticks? =p (With the coming 1 sec version)

 

Pintofbrew

After a good nights sleep and some weird dreams about water elementals (go figure) I woke this morning to the following mechanics realizations:

Firstly, with respect to haste.

Frost is the only tree with a proc which has a TIME duration, but is applied per CAST. This makes Frost innately more dependant on Haste. Simply put, Winter's Grasp lasts for 4 sec and has a 20% per frost spell to be applied. Thus, the more hits over time you get from frost, the more uptime you'll be granting melee. (I am assuming the spell's debuff is a physical damage debuff). This also means Winter's Chill is up faster, thus enabling early WE and IV to benefit fully.

Contrarily, fire has a CAST-activated mechanic that affects the manapool. Thus, the more fireballs you cast that crit, the more times you lose 1% mana from Burnout. Take only DPS into account: Assume two specs, one at 500dmg and 0 haste and one at 380dmg and 100haste, assume they have identical DPS. The latter one will lose mana faster to casting more spells (as per any spec) but lose significantly more due to the spellcrits costing a donkey-load of mana. I'm kinda stating the obvious here, but Fire was always worse-off than frost in mana terms and it seems like it's getting worse, thus making Haste a bad choice for it. And that's before we look at the Priest trees, where VT is being reduced from 5% mana return to 2%. Ouch.

The multitude of people quoting me also made me realize how silly I was in my assumption of Arcane Barrage (hereafter referred to as "Barrage"). It's 3sec CD doesn't mandate two ABs, because instants take another 1.5sec off the timer as their CD starts when you cast them. Effectively Barrage means you can weave AB-Barrage on a 1-1 basis fully stacked (and while ramping, for that matter) and totally do away with the oddness of the AB-ramp bug.

Again, however, this heralds a problem with Haste. Assume any haste over 0: with a GCD less than 1.5sec and a fully-ramped AB of less than 1.5, what is one to do waiting for Barrage's 3s CD?

Lastly, having gone over the warlock talent trees, I think it's safe to assume there's some kind of reworking going to come about with the way spirit works. Even deep demo tree talents have "increases spirit". For what exact reason, I do not know, but it may indeed be that locks will gain an alternate regen source. Perhaps we will reap fruits of this labour too?

All in all, I must admit I'm slightly underwhelmed. My biggest query was "will fire talents be better than the sickeningly powerful 33/38/0 hybrid?" and the answer was "no, the deep-fire talent IS practically, the one thing that made that spec work, plus a little more". Burnout is just Spell Power on crack, and it remains to be seen whether "get yer critz heer" Hot Streak, elemental precision, Icy Veins & 2/5 emp. fireball is superior to Arcane Power, Arcane Instability, Clearcasting, 2/3 Arcane Potency and a PoM-Pyro as soon as Molten Fury is up.

Edit:

Soul: You are correct, I didn't notice it was 3/3 points. I assumed it was 2 points. a 30sec increase is quite phenomenal... This brings it up to 1:15 out of 3:00 ambience. That's 5/12 uptime, 42% of the time. And that's not taking into account Cold Snap.

 

Medusa

Thats exactly what i am thinking. In later instances Mages becomes more and more dependent on support and are not bringing any (or just minor) support to other Players. Even WL's are better supporter with COE and COS, and that line will be continued. ok, fine, Blizz just will throw us more Mobs to CC, but that is just ridiculos. Look at the Balance Druid new Stuff, Warlocks Demon form for Tanking. And mages would be one more time wannabe DPS. Just try a raid without any Support, you will fall way behind most other classes.

And that is the mournful truth about the comming role as a mage in PVE.

 

maxi

Hmm Fire basically becomes the new AB spam spec. High dps, high mana consumption. If the ignite mechanics do not change, we will potentially see mad MAD ignite ticks. If the community manages to find any way to roll ignites in WotLK, we will all suddenly be faced with necessity to manage a 4 sec debuff

Getting a chance to fire off shatter combos in raids looks interesting. The more durable and more enduring elemental also sounds like a sweet deal.

Arcane i never understood or liked, and this revision of talents doesn't change anything.

 

Pintofbrew

Medusa, take instance design date as an indication of developer maturation. As BC instances were increasing, so was the understanding of how players wanted instances.

From Kara (nothing) to Gruul (spellsteal) to T5 content (some poly, some AoE) to MH (plenty of AoE, some poly, some decursing) to BT (Spellsteal on RoS and Council, AoE snare on Illidan) to Sunwell (Plenty of Poly, some AoE, some decursing) All I see is a shift from "why bring a mage when you can bring any other ranged dps?" to "we need mages for this encounter". You only count raid synergy in terms of "raid/group buffing". You fail to count utility, which ultimately is what we offer.

As time has progressed, more and more aoe, poly and decurse has been required in instances. I'm plenty satisfied and happy with that role. I did not and still do not expect some kind of raid-buff to be generated by mages in the future, in deed, I've been hoping that warlocks get their raid-buffs reduced from CoS and CoE to a single magic-debuff curse. It's not a case of "I don't want to improve, I want the others to worsen" it's a case of I truly don't think more utility is what we need, or indeed, what any DPS class should offer. Rogues don't offer any, why should mages?

 

maxi

One thing to add to "raid synergy" argument is that mages are one of the best recipients of synergetic effects in the game. Both current fire and arcane mage playstyles are basically built around receiving raid support and building up on it.

There are buffers, and there are buff soakers. Mages - being a pure dps class - are buff soakers.

---

Regarding Fire's mana consuption with the new talents - in all the excitement i forgot the Master of Elements talent.
If we'll be critting so much, then we'll get so mucn more mana back, right? Maybe the burnout mana drain is there to make sure MoE doesn't go out of hand with all the crittin.

EDIT: Current Fire mages have ~10k mana, give or take. 1% mana is then 100 mana, which is 1/4 of fireball's mana cost. 25% extra damage on crit means you are doing 1/6th more damage per crit. For lvl70 numbers, the burnout doesn't seem to hurt dpm all THAT much. Rather, it brings firemage mana consumption more in line to the kind of mana regen firemages usually receive from shadowpriests. Ofc lvl80 numbers can change everything.

EDIT2: Frostfire bolt has a very unexciting base dps, even for 2.5 sec cast.

 

• Alcyon

Frost Nova - Thottbot: World of Warcraft

I noticed on Thottbot's WotlK changes page that frost nova now has a third effect - it seems to reduce the chance to hit of those afflicted by it. By how much I can't find.

Some other changes I noticed:

• Polymorph and Slowfall have both been changed to a percentage of your base mana.
• Invisibility has been reduced from a 5 second timer to a 4 second timer. With prismatic cloak it becomes instant.
• As previously mentioned, mage armour has an added bonus which reduces the length of all harmful magic effects caused to you by 50%. Good for PVP, sure, but we still have no dispel protection...

 

Sleepingspud

I was glancing through the wikidot site again today and I noticed a slight update:

"Shatter Shield (1200 mana, instant, 30sec cd, Level 80) - "Instantly shields you, absorbing 2000 Physical damage. Lasts 1 min. When the shield is destroyed, all enemies within 10 yards are frozen for 8 sec.""

Seems like an all-around great spell for self-protection on aoe pulls, as well as an excellent escape spell for pvp. It would also serve as a great alternative to mana shield for non-frost specs.

 

kadgar

Frost talents
I'm thinking the same, but it's already extremely overpowered for frost mages.
20% proc chance -> proccs every 5 casts. * 2,5 sec / Frostbolt = proccs every 12,5 sec.
Duration is 4 sec, so with 3 frostmages and a little bit haste the debuff is up all the time. (yes the debuffs may overlapp, so take 4 mages)
Together with shatter, winter's chill and imp. frostbolt, thats 65% crit from talents alone. Add molten Armor and you just need 32% crit from int, items and group buffs to reach 100% crit chance. And that's not a short duration, that's the whole fight on every boss ...
I'm sure that will get nerfed, perhas shatter will add much less % crit to Winter's Grasp-forzen targets.

I also don't get the reason for the +hit effect on Winter's Grasp. It says "increases the chance all attacks will hit the target by 4%". So this would mean spell and physical hit. But unless you don't have 4 frost mages in the raid, who plans his equipment for a procc buff that is active on the target 30% of the time? Most people will equipp full hit gear when possible and so this component is useless.

Another talent I can't belive will make it into the game is Chilled to Bone. 10% additional movement speed reduction is nice for frostbolt (outside of raiding) and it would be interesting to know if it works with frostfire bolt.
But Imp. Blizzard + Permafrost is quite overpowered already. That's 75% movement speed reduction - 4 times slower (and useable aoe wise, with big range, no cooldown, nearly instant and nearly no mana cost - lvl1).
Now add the additional 10% from Chilled to Bone and you get 85% slow - 6,6 times slower. Sure, it's very situational, but when you use it, the target just doesn't move at all anymore. We used rank 1 fully talented blizzard on Vashj Striders made them very easy to kite.
Note that Blizzard ticks every second and that every tick can procc forstbite - and now also Winters Grasp.

The WE's uptime increases from 1/4 to 1/3 (without cold snap). But the main problems are not solved - it doesn't gain anything from the mages spell hit, crit, haste or manareg. And it would need all of them. I hope that blizzard adds something like that, perhaps as a talent replacing the total crappy Brain Freeze.

And of course the BIG Question - will they ever fix Elemental Presicion?


Arcane Talents
I like the changes to the existing talents - Arcane Focus and Magic Attunement. Makes arcane speccing in that region a bit better.

However Arcane Impact should be updated for Am and Barrage, and
- HELL Blizzard how many ages do we have to wait for a replacement for the most useless talent in the Game -

The new Prismatic Cloak scares me of an incoming Subtelty change ... . Besides that, it's nice, but ... well ... useless.

The spirit changes in the arcane tree and more mana needed for fire tree make (some) sense, but actually there is no use for spirit in the frost tree so there is still a need for different itemization, which does not make sens if you look at the Arcane Focus change e.g. .
Why not share the WE's manapool with the mages ones - let the WE use the mages mana if its own is empty (and that can happen quite fast e.g. during bloodlust). Or move Potent Spirit to the frost tree.

Incanter's Absorbtion - does it work with manashield only, or also with priest shield, fire ward, protection potions? At least if you activate these before the fight that might be interesting.

AB rotations are nearly impossible with Netherwind Presence and external haste buffs, AB spam could be interesting if they include the 2p T5 Bonus into the new WotLK rank.

Netherwind Presence - this one is only useful if it proccs on every missle (AM). For AB spam it's completely waste and if you have 50 points in arcane, you won't spam fire or frostbolts.

Arcane Barrage - well not too bad for pvp, with the low cd you can Barrage - Fireblast - Barrage while running.
And to go further: Fireblast - Barrage - Sheep - Barrage - Nova - Fireblast - Barrage - Blink - Barrage - ...

For all arcane dmg spells, keep in mind this druid talent with the 6% more arcane dmg debuff


Fire Talents
No way Hot Streak will go live in this version, tho we don't know how it works exactly.

Burnout - I've seen 1% manacost, 5% and 10% in this thread. I believe it's 5% but anyway. % based (on total mana) costs are stupid. Blizzard already tried that with warlocks, now we get this stupid mechanic. The more int you have, the higher the costs of this talent are. - Go collecting gear with high spirit values an no / as few as possible int ... just stupid.
I would accept that fire crits cost the double ammount of mana if you have the talent, but not %.
However is this a passive talent, or do you have to activate it, cd?

Living Bomb - Can the final tick crit?
Icy Veins, Combustion, Flamestrike, AE spam, Blastwave, Iceblock, final tick = Fun!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Overall?
Besides Living Bomb which is situational there is nothing really new, while the other classes all get exciting new abilities. Everyone seems to have AoEs now so we'll see more AE packs in WotLK - I hope.
Arcane can only be interesting if the base values of the new ranks are really high but even then, the scaling seems not good for arcane, even considering a druids debuff.
Fire and frost have too many talents which are unclear and / or will definitively not go live in their current form.

Until now, rather boreing / unclear talents and spells, none of the mage problems are solved, unclear manareg and frost tree combination, no curse of spell dmg, no group synergy, we're still glass cannon while warlocks get deamons, ...

 

Pintofbrew

Burnout's problem isn't the %, it's that it's disjointed from the spell being cast. Even at 1% it's dramatically costly. It displays negative synergy with Incinerate (why the HELL would I want 4% higher chance to gain a negligible dps buff at the cost of the spell becoming over 3x it's base cost?) and it makes absolutely no sense.

I fully expect Burnout to be changed into something either entirely different or "burns n% of the spell's base cost if you crit". Though basically an anti-master-of-elements, this makes woefully more sense than does any fixed cost.

Winter's Grasp makes perfect viability at 4sec. It's exactly the duration you need to get off a Bolt+Lance and guarantee they both hit with the debuff. This is because, essentially, you only need between 2.5 and 3ish seconds even at high lag, to get them both in time as the later one is instant. Unfortunately, this also means that with a small amount of haste, you'll be able to FrBolt-Ilance-Ilance, thus making 50 or so haste inflate in value.

Another example of where mage mechanics are borked with haste is Barrage; as it is now it looks like a perfect way to ramp-up AB: Witness, AB-Barr cycle will always come up perfectly, even fully debuffed, EXCEPT if you have any haste, in which you'll either have to WAIT for the CD to come up or inject another spell (AB-AB-Barr?) which clearly is not the win.

It gets me depressed when I think of the wonderful job they did on all priest trees, the druid trees, and half the warlock trees. Instead we get bullshit in the arcane tree (what's the bloody point of Netherwind when AB IS PRACTICALLY 1.5SEC ANYWAY?) badly-thoguht out punishing mechanics in the Fire tree, and what is essentially a re-work of Lhivera's talent suggestion back from when IV was being worked on with a tacked-on improved faerie fire. Practically the only one tallent that has me giddy is Magic Attunement, which combined with the new Mage Armor now makes mages truly resistant to magic. Though some Dispell Protection would still be nice.

Come on Blizzard... Get serious.

 

aikiwoce

Firstly I'm maintaining the mage talent tree @ War Tools :: Talent tree WotLK FF Alpha Mage Talents - Updated

Some of the numbers are pure speculation/guesses at this point. Namely Prismatic Cloak(invis part), Living Bomb.

Fixes - Arctic Winds, Improved WE, Student of the Mind, Burnout, and Winter's Grasp is a 5s debuff.

I'll try to keep it updated with the latest changes.

Other Mage tidbits:

Mage Armor(Rank 6) - "Increases your resistance to all magic by 40 and allows 30% of your mana regeneration to continue while casting. In addition, the duration of all harmful Magic effects used against you is reduced by 50%."

Shatter Shield(1200 mana, instant, 30sec cd, Level 80) - "Instantly shields you, absorbing 2000 Physical damage. Lasts 1 min. When the shield is destroyed, all enemies within 10 yards are frozen for 8 sec."

Frostfire Bolt(Rank 2, 530 mana, Level 80, 3s cast) - "Launches a bolt of frostfire at the enemy, causing 722-838 Fire damage, slowing movement speed by 40% and causing an additional 90 Fire damage over 9 sec. If the target is more vulnerable to Frost damage, this spell will cause Frost instead of Fire damage."

EDIT: Well Thottbot says my speculation on numbers for prismatic cloak, and living bomb was way off. Oh well updated to reflect the new information.

 

◊ manly

Haha this is all kind of unexpected, random and awesome.
10/10.

"Did the last bastion of arcane hope give up to the FFB gods ?"

please fix rolling deep wounds.

 

Wizeowel

Aikiwoce - note about Burnout - more or less repeating what Cryic and Manly said on page 1. As you can see from the Thottbot datamining, it has an activated instant-cast component not just a talent. It'll be a mana-dump style damage boost during molten fury.

Personally I think you should refrain from posting links to your own guess at what the talent tree might look like. You aren't an alpha-tester, you don't know for sure. If Pint can fall for it being accurate, how many others?

 

aikiwoce

I've seen the same information, and I'm of the opinion that it's a talent, not an activated ability.

Also I posted the tree before thottbot had the information available. My goal was to release the info I had in the best way possible.

EDIT: Oh, and

http://img164.imageshack.us/img164/7783/requestzb9.png
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/5...earcaneda8.png
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/2247/80lh5.png
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/3691/frostfn1.png

 

• Cryic

In regards to party / raid synergies and the need / lack of for mages:

Our raid leader is pretty flexible about who goes where, and it changes up pretty much from boss to boss, and sometimes even for trash. I dont know about you guys, but it gets old hearing about how your current group would rather have <insert class/ spec here> then you in their group. Yes, it's in a joking manner etc, but it rings a bit of truth. From BM hunters and their 3% more damage, to spriest/ shamans / boomkins etc.

I was really hoping that one of two things where / still are going to happen in 3.0:
-- Mages DPS scales above others (cept rogues who are in the same boat) when grouped with other "supporting" members, making it a no brainer to bring the class and support it
-- Or: We bring something to party dynamic via a "brilliance aura for crit", small buff when we do something etc.

Either one will be better then our current situation: A DPS class that needs a good bit of group support to keep up, yet brings nothing to the group (in terms of raid dps).

 

arch

Burnout must be a talent. It has several ranks(incremental increases), lacks mana cost and is completly compareable to say Fire power, which is also instant cast according to thottbot.

 

diskape

Was playing a bit with War Tools :: Talent tree Mage WotLK Leaked Talents and I can't decide which route to take, 18/53/0 with Clearcast/Arcane Meditation (mana regen for Burnout) or standard x/53/11+ (Vontre or some other smart person please do the magic )

As for the new talents and spells.. I don't know. I'm a little bit disappointed to be honest. Other classes are getting really cool stuff while the only new thing we get is Living Bomb which IMO isn't that cool after all. I mean, it will be fun to blow up someone... ONCE ^^ After that I see little to no use for it - especially if we get rumored Explosive Fireball. Well, we'll see it's still long way to go

 

Allanonn

Did you happen to catch Rapture in the Priest Disc tree?

Causes your party members to gain mana equal to 1% of the healing done by your Greater Heal, Flash Heal and Penance spells.


Even after the spirit changes, my guild often groups our shadow priests with healers. Hopefully this will end that nonsense.

 

◊ manly

I don't think the people realise the net impact of being able to make a boss considered frozen. It means you would spec deep fire + shatter (and might as well get coldsnap too). Or even trispec with spellpower, ignite, and shatter (245% crits + free shatter yay). To me it makes absolutely no sense. However, if the 'frozen target' debuff would be self-only, then I'm all for it.

"Did the last bastion of arcane hope give up to the FFB gods ?"

please fix rolling deep wounds.

 

Joq

That's how I read it too, since there's no duration or cooldown like IV or combustion either. Looks like something you would spec into once your regen was high enough.