Sorry if its been shown anywhere, but what exactly points toward the WG buff being shared between mages?
Obviously it wont go live in that form ever.

Cant it just be a self-buff only? Which still would be quite powerful.

I have a deadening feeling WG will offer 4% hit to the raid, but will only offer "pretend it's frozen" to the caster. It's looking quite bleak modelling multiple frost mages. Quite alarmingly, it makes for an interesting case where mages spam Icelance instead of FrBolt. Perish the thought, gnomes must be giddy at the very notion...

As for what you said earlier, Bulgarth, re. frost scaling, note that (1) frost gains 5% extra damage (2) a 2/3 increase in WE dps, which currently accounts for 11% of one's damage, meaning an overall of 7%ish. This is before accounting what WG will do, which will be plenty before one assumes Bolt-Lancing or Bolt-Lance-Lancing on a WG proc.

Pintofbrew, this also depends on whether or not Burnout will scale like the 3% meta gem or not. Also good news that I just found out, 5/5 Burnout stays at 1% mana reduction per crit, and not 5% at 5/5 as I previously thought.

The mana loss from Burnout is less than the gain from MoE. So crit still increase your mana efficiency.

Edit: Also with shatter, fire mages hit hard enough that there is some leeway in group comp. 2 frost 1 fire is probably optimal, unless pet death and pushback are a problem.

I don't see the value of adding 4% hit to the raid if uptime isn't 100%. If the goal of that aspect of the talent is to increase raid damage/utility, it could add to crit, armor penetration, or simply overload the Winter's Chill debuff with the hit increase. Can anyone with more experience than me help me see the value of temporary 4% hit?

While I didn't think it was necessary to make Shatter viable on bosses, it's nice to give us Frosties something to cast besides Frostbolt. Ok it's just Ice Lance, but it's something. Also depending on how Frostfire Bolt inherits talent bonuses, there may be an interesting Elementalist spec with shatter in there somewhere. 200% crits with Ignite on top at 90% crit when WG procs... I am salivating now.

Edit: Two posts appeared! Quoted Pintofbrew for context.

The wording does not indicate it's spell hit, it's most likely melee hit. This will by-and-large make only a difference to hunter pets, fury warriors and rogues, who'se hitcap is something retarded like 360 and they never reach it anyway. Unlike casters, who commonly run around utterly hitcapped, this buff is substantial, even if it is partial.

I came up with an interesting Ice lance spam spec if stacking mages in a raid for WG becomes a reality:

32/0/39:
War Tools :: Talent tree WotLK FF Alpha Mage Talents - Updated

This spec, with let's say, 25% base crit not counting talents, leaves you at 90% crit while WG is procced on the target counting the talents, with the 1 point in Arcane potency capping your crit at 100% if Clear casting procs.

Alternatively, you can exchange 1 point in Empowered Frosbolt for Arcane Power which seems like something better at the lose of 1% crit obviously. That will depend on what your untalented crit lies at though whether or not you want to give up 100% crit while clear casting or not, but it seems like a fair trade-off.

Thank you both for your quick replies. I scratched my head a bit when I saw how bloated the Frost tree is, then read Pintofbrew's complaints. But if Frost is interesting to play and viable, even competitive in raids, why does it matter that you need 56 points in the same tree?

Frostfire Bolt - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Looks like Frostfire Bolt is supposed to be 3.0 secs and 722 to 838 fire/frost dmg at lvl 80
if "more vulnerable" means if the target is frozen and you are specced for shatter, then this might be very useful. Elementalist?

As for Netherwind Presence, i remember pvping in a pom-pyro spec pre-BC with full t2. The implications for pvp could be amazing although not as much for pve. Imagine the burst potential from a pom-pyro and an instant fireball (netherwind proccing from Arcane Barrage, an instant). With a mage speccing Arcane Barrage(imp blink, prismatic cloak)/Molten Shield for pvp, the survivability and burst potential of an arcane mage goes way up for pvp.

It seems to me or it's realy that burnout is << that simple spell power ? 50% vs 25% + manawaste ?
What do you think about anticaster pvp combo magic absorbtion + magic armor (120 resit) + fiery payback ? Any idia how it will reflect (will ?) dot damage ?

How is this any different than pointing out that not all talent are created equal?

You take that talent simply because you can't take spell power. Thats pretty much all there is to it.

It's not very relevant for PvE but fiery payback is kinda self-contradicting in a sense. It adds 20% damage to your molten armor, but the second portion of the talent revolves around resisting spells. And if you want to resist spells you put on mage armor, so bye Molten armor = first part ofthe talent is useless.

I know you can resist stuff without mage armor but the lack of synergy is just silly.

Also, there is no such thing as resisted crits, thus the damage sent back will always be based on normal hits, limiting it by quite a bit. Did I just rhyme?

I think the idea of that is so that if you go up against a caster you put on mage armor and its more effective and if you go up against melee you put on molten armor and its also more effective.

Big QFT right here.

The Frost tree as it stands is impossibly bloated. Blizzard needs to:

- Remove Elemental precision entirely and wrap it's functionality into Arcane (now Chromatic?) Focus (I mean... two tier one talents that are identical other than which spell schools they affect, what's up with that!?)
- Remove Arctic Winds (+5% dmg. +5% to be missed). Increase Piercing Ice to 5 points ala Fire Power (so -1% damage compared to existing) and buff the new Brain Freeze talent to give you 2% chance to be missed all the time per rank, with the additional frozen miss chance preserved (even then the talent is largely uninspiring).
- Change Improved WE to be just 1 talent point. Also, as aforementioned, all pets need to scale with (spell) hit/(spell) haste and (specifically for WEs) should have sufficient mana to bolt spam for the duration regardless of external mana regen.
- (Optionally) decouple Imp FN and Shatter (given that Shatter now has PvE application but a shorter FN cooldown still won't, 95% of the time).

As it stands, they will really need to increase the base damage of arcane blast and possibly arcane missiles to keep arcane viable. I don't think spamming arcane barrage with 3 second cooldown is what they had in mind for arcane raiding.

Arcane only has spellpower and fewer "increase spell damage by x%" talents than fire or frost. So, scaling issues will always persist for arcane.

They have rounded out just about everything else to make arcane good for raiding. You have instant cast invis (not that you might need it). You have range now (36 yards with talents), you have mana regen and high int and spirit. The only thing now they need to do is to make sure that the raid DPS keeps up and is at least competitive to fire.

I am not so optimistic though, given the lack of scaling talents in arcane tree, even the new one. And netherwind presence, at such a high tier in arcane, is wasted for raiding given that arcane can't use its proc on AM, and its wasted if you are spamming AB at 1.5 seconds anyway. Plus the proc is too low to be of significance. 5 points of 5% is really to low.

It might be semi useful for raiding only if the proc can be used on pyroblast, and if AB is excluded from what the proc can be used on. So, while you are spamming AB and the proc occurs, you have time to finish your next AB cast, then use the proc on pyroblast.

But at 5% even with all 5 points taken up, its just too unreliable. That's like one out of twenty spell casts. Its so low its just not that meaningful. Plus because its a proc, its not controllable, unlike POM.

Brain Freeze may be intended as a utility talent to help keep those Fire Mages with their Living Bombs alive while aoeing large groups of spawns. Not to say it's a good idea, but that may be the idea nonetheless.

With 40 resistance on mage armor and/or 80 resistance from magic absorption, more often than you do now.

The more I look at the trees, the more I am convinced that the developers were thinking about pvp viability when they designed the new talents. Its well known that mages are not that great in 2v2 arena, or even 3v3 arena. They are trying to add in pvp viability to all three of the specs at the higher tier talents.

Lets look at fire first. Fiery payback boosts molten armour = pvp talent. Hot streak looks more like a pvp talent also. Because the highest chance you proc it is when you activate combustion. And it has the highest impact in pvp, becaue if you crit 4 times in a row, yoru opponent would be either dead, or nearly dead either way. And burnout. This is definitley pvp talent. As most of you have said, it makes no sense to take this if you are a raiding mage because the increased damage may not be worth having to chug mana pots instead of destruction pots just to keep casting.

But for pvp, bunout is great. Because fire mages in arena are going to be all about critting their opponents to death as quickly as possible before they die. And so, they don't care if they burn through their mana in less than one minute as long as they are critting harder and more during that time. And living bomb ties in right with that. A bomb that goes off for big damage all round after 15 seconds. And you don't have to channel it.

So, fire mage in arena would cast living bomb and combustion right off the bat, and then just go to town, piling up as much big crits as they can, before the living bomb goes off. They are about taking down as many people as they can before they die. And all the new fire talents are meant to support that. Any increased pve damage gained is incidental. The talents are designed for arena and pvp in mind!

Now take frost, While people are all excited about winter's grasp. And depending on how they code it, there certainly might have pve implcations. But what if bosses are immune to it because bosses are suppsoed to be immune to being frozen? Then it will suddenly have zero pve implcations already. And it would clearly be a pvp talent. Brain freeze and deep freeze are also obviously pvp talents. And chilled to the bone is a lot more of a pvp talent than pve. That 1% bonus damage to frostbolt and ice lance is just a slight pve bonus thrown in. Because the chill boost is totally useless on bosses.

And finally arcane. Here, student of the mind and potent spirit are both more of pve boosts. arena gear has so little spirit it is unlikely you will benefit much from these two talents. But Incantor's absorption, and in particular netherwind presence and definitely more pvp talents rather than pve. If anything, taking netherwind presence is a minus to pure arcane raiding, if it is still about spamming ABs.

And arcane barrage is just one more instant cast spell. Again a far bigger boost to pvp than pve. I mean, since when was trying to spam fireblast at each cooldown ever considered great for fire raidng?

And consider the new shatter shield. 2000 damage mitigation plus when it breaks, it freezes people around you.

All in all, they are designing all the top talents and even new spells with the entire purpose of making mages viable in arena and pvp again. Any boost to raiding damage is really incidental and just a side bonus, that's all.

Doesn't it seem as if the whole point of making a talent that treats a target as frozen for the purposes of Shatter and Ice Lance damage, without actually freezing the target in place, would be for it to affect targets that are immune to being frozen in place? And what would be the point of the +hit% debuff if it's not intended to affect bosses, which are the only targets that require a substantial quantity of +hit?

This is not necessarily true. MoE returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell you cast while Burnout costs 1% of your total mana. If:

.01*totalMP > .3*SpellCost

Then crit reduces mana efficiency.

One thing I'm interested in is if Living Bomb is channeled or just a buff. It says it does 9xx damage every 3 seconds, then after 15 seconds explodes and does massive damage. But before those 15 seconds, can we be running around using AE, Blastwave, or Dragon's Breath?

Edit: Also, I'm interested in the wording of Frostfire bolt. Does the "more vulnerable" mean that if you will do more frost damage it will do frost damage, and vice versa if you will do more fire damage it will do fire. I guess what I mean is that the wording, if it takes on this definition, could definitely take talents into account. So it applies both frost and fire talents to frostfire and then determines what type of damage it will do depending on if it did frost or fire damage. If it was immune to fire, it would obviously do frost damage.

Either that or, is this maybe a return to elemental vulnerabilities a la negative resistances (probably not a return of negative resistances, but maybe a different mechanic or a possible use of spell penetration)

It could just as easily be for arena instead. A frost mage can spam icelance on the run, and with or without the target being frost novaed, shatter can still occur if winter's grasp is up allowing ice lance to still do x3 its damage and crit for x6. And for arena, you can ice lance while running away from the target, and if WG procs, you can immediately cast deep freeze and stun the target for 5 seconds.

The +hit% debuff is only marginally useful in pve context simply because its not a gauranteed buff. You have to proc WG and its only a 10% chance of a proc. Nobody in raid is going to intentionally gear themselves down by 4% hit for such an unreliable proc based buff. What if there are no frost frost mages in raid with WG talent that day? PVE wise, everyone will still strive to reach hit cap without necessarily relying on other classes to supply further +hit.

In contrast, most pvpers do not gear up for +hit, and there is very little of it on arena gear. Yet, against even level players, there is still a inherent 4% chance to miss if you have zero hit rating.

Everything is still conjuncture at this stage, but I can think of definite uses for WG in pvp and arena, while I am less sure of how they would make this work for pve. Because it might be abused by having enough frost mages such that it is up close to 100% of the time if it works on bosses.

I've been reading a lot of replies stating that Arcane is still not going to be a viable raiding tree because it doesnt have any scalars. But i think you're missing one obvious one. Probably because it's not in any Mage talent tree :

From the new Moonkin tree : "Nature's Fury - "Converts 2/4/6/8/10% of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Wrath and Starfire spells have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance of applying the Nature's Fury debuff on the target. The Nature's Fury debuff increases Nature and Arcane damage done to the target by 2%. Lasts 10 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.""

So in short, if you have a Moonkin in your raid, you get a x1.06 multiplier to Arcane spells. I dont know if that makes Arcane competitive yet, but at least it is a scaling modifier.

Moonkins are actually looking ridiculously overpowered in the current alpha, for example the following talent :

"Improved Moonkin Form - "Your Moonkin Aura also causes affected targets to have a 33/66/100% chance to gain 100% spell haste when they critically hit with spells for 6 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every few seconds."

Moonkin Aura : The new Windfury!

Sorry if the last part is a sidetrack, but at least the first point of the two is relevant to the discussion in hand