I certainly agree that you'll use Arcane Blast whenever you can -- I simply don't expect that you'll be able to do so full-time. (I am, of course, ignoring trash fights here; they're not really a point of interest when we're predicting/measuring performance.)

I would not expect Blast to be restricted to below X% -- it needs to be useful for burst-on-demand, not just for "execute range." One of the strengths of mages is intended to be their ability to produce burst when and where it's needed, during a vulnerability window in the middle of a fight, for example.

I'm not seeing any situation where you'd want to go with pure AB spam. You'd still toss in some Abarr in there as cooldowns allow. You'd just drop the filler spells from your normal rotation (presumably frostbolt) and replace that with AB.

I’ve been reading through this thread and would like to thank everyone who’s put in the time and effort of actually looking at these pre-talents and discussing them in a civilized way.
Which brings up the reason for this post, as I have few questions for you people.

Comparison between the Arcane, Fire, and Frost Trees.
I’ve seen lots of breakdowns of people discussing these new talents but almost all the discussions seem to be about a hybrid mix of one tree with another. Has there been any comments about comparing a full Arcane vs Fire vs Frost yet?

I, at first, was thinking the Arcane Talents were kind of weak compared to the new fire and frost talents. Then when I started thinking about all the changes the have been hinted at in gear and spirit I’m beginning to wonder if Arcane might actually come out on top as a full talent specced tree.



Netherwind Presence
I am not a big fan of triggered proc spells that effect your next casting. For one big reason, lag. There’s the PC lag and the human lag that make this proc only slightly useful. So while the NP proc might make your next spell instant cast. I see it as taking 0.5 – 1 second dealing with the lag I mentioned, then the 1.5 second of the global cool down.

So this ‘instant’ cast spell actually takes up 2 to 2.5 seconds of your casting time. I can not see wasting the talent points for a talent like NP. As the only benefit I see that it brings is a slight saving of cast time, 1 second off Fireball (untalented), 0.5 seconds off Frostbolt (untalented), Frostfire (unknown), and don’t see any benefit at all with Arcane Blast.

Would like to see someone prove me wrong on this but I remember reading the threads dealing with the mage tier two, eight piece set bonus. Problem is, what I remember has more to do with if the mage should keep the NP proc bonus or break the set for better gear.



Arcane Focus
Do hate what Blizzard has done with the Arcane Focus talent. As the arcane mage takes a big hit in loosing their bonus in not having to slot for the +spell to hit. While the slight reduction in mana cost on arcane spells I’m just not sure is worth what the arcane mage has to give up.
TBC the talent is +10% spell hit bonus. Alpha talents have it as +3% spell hit and saves 3% mana on arcane spells. (Has anyone heard how that works with AB, with the AB stack debuff?)


I know this isn’t a suggestion forum but I just couldn’t help adding this comment.
Since this talent only works with Arcane spells, versus the Elemental Precision which works for both Fire and Frost spells. I would like to see some other added bonus for this talent. Maybe a add on of resisting silence effects for only arcane spells?

Yddes, biggest drawback for arcane is the lack of raid synergy.

I hope fire gets fixed, or we are going to see arcanists get stuck with imp scorch duty in 25 mans. Johhny Monroe's Arc/Fire spec uptopic starts looking more viable in the present circumstances.

As for arcane focus, Blizzard is homogenizing hit talents across the board, and frankly, I applaud this as it simplifies matters. Especially since arcanists are going to be borrowing spells from other schools with great frequency anyways.

I think the only exciting thing so far is the Arcane tree as NWP and ABr will shake up the current state of Arcane. I'm a little disappointed that the TC still doesn't favor AM as a primary nuke though. Maybe that'll change and they'll rework NWP or something in it's favor. Curious to see how Incanter's Absorption works out also.

Please stop with the random conjecture about sweeping changes, the only reasonable basis for argument is how the game works now and has worked before. Reducing the item budget on spirit, seriously? You just pulled that out of your ass, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Same thing with winter's grasp. As far as this thread is concerned, winter's grasp most assuredly works on bosses, because there is nothing in the debuff description that would prevent it from being applied and there is not one single shred of evidence to suggest this will change.

I too think that generalizing +hit talent bonuses similar to the way they generalized cast time reduction talents is a good thing. However, I think that Elemental Precision is out of place, as is Master of Elements. Both need to be moved to Tiers 1 and 2, respectively, of the Arcane tree and effect all spells a Mage uses.

The only reason to use AB when not spammed is in its non-fully-buffed form. There's no reason to try to not let the debuff fall as it would be counterproductive to mana-to-damage conversion.

That makes it a horrible talent. For 35% crit chance, that would be around 4% dps increase, for 5 talent points, with the significant drawback of the reduced mana efficiency. Compare those 25% to the 120% increase for ignite, or the 100% from Ice Shards, without the extra mana cost penalty. You would think that the talents you get from going deep into the talent trees at the least wouldn't be that much worse (I think it would be easy to argue that they should be better, in general), considering that going deep into a tree constrains your choices in other trees more.

Also, I think most would agree that the mage class needs a boost in relative dps power compared to the other dps classes, as they are now. I can't see that happening with the current talents, certainly not for deep fire, with Burnout being this weak.

Does anyone know if the ticks or detonation of Living Bomb can crit? If they can, Hot Streak will be all that much better.

17/51/3
Yarr! Tools :: Mage 8472

This looks like it might be a pretty decent raiding spec in WotLK.

Also, does anyone have any information on Fiery Payback? It could potentially be a great spell on resist type fights but likely will not effect bosses since many resist/reflect type abilities do not.

Thanks for pointing this out, you are definitely right though. When a Tier 5 talent like Ruin gives 100% with no detriments for 1 point, a Tier 10 talent should not give a mere 25% for 5 pts.

Edit: However, assuming that gear will increase sustantially in WotLK, 50% crit in pve gear should be attainable (it currently already is as Frost with the right group). Its also important to remember that the bonus will stack multiplicatively with Ignite. 1.75 x 0.4 = 2.45, which is .35 better than w/o.

50% crit chance will be a 15%+ damage increase from this talent, which is very significant.

It's not 1.75... it's 25% on the BONUS. It's 1 + .5 * 1.25 = 1.625

Remember that combat ratings scale badly with level increases (from the top of my head, I think what was worth 1% at 60 was worth around 0.6% at 70). You may be able to get 50% crit now, if including group buffs and the like, but you won't be able to get it with the same gear at level 80. I think it's overly optimistic expecting to get significantly higher crit chances at level 80 than now, especially at the beginning of the epxansion cycle. I think that realistically, we will have around the same crit chance upon hitting 80, as we had when hitting 70 in TBC (30-ish with fire spec?), and hitting what is possible now at the end of the WotLK cycle.

Has this been confirmed in Alpha? If so, then yes, this talent is awful.

It seems as if they have made a mistake and it was intended to be 25% additional crit damage, rather than a 25% increase to the 50% bonus.

Thanks for clearing it up.

Well that's been the debate. Spell power (the arcane talent) is worded "Increases critical strike damage bonus of all spells by 50%" (with 2 points in it). Burnout is worded "Increases your critical strike damage bonus of all fire spells by 25%, but each time ..." (with 5 points in it).

Because they are worded similarly, people expect them to behave similarly. Spell Power certainly only affects the 50% crit damage bonus and not the total crit damage. So by that logic, Burnout should too. But then for a while Burnout was "bugged" and it was affecting total crit damage--the same way a Chaotic Skyfire Diamond metagem does.

Now it is no longer "bugged" and acting like Spell Power. Which makes it a horrible talent in comparison. Burnout takes 5 points instead of 2, is higher up on the talent tree, only gives a 25% bonus instead of a 50% bonus, only affects fire spells and has a 1% mana penalty.

I can only hope that the talent trees as they are now are placeholders for the ideas Blizzards wants to see. That is, they like the idea of "considered frozen" with Winter's Grasp. They like the idea of Burnout and big fire crits. They like the idea of insta-cast spells on a proc with arcane and Netherwind Presence. But they haven't "worked the numbers" to see just how bad (or good) some of these talents are. On the other hand "working the numbers" has never been a strong suit of Blizzard.

Realistically in regards to Burnout, I cannot see any fashion on which it could be balanced. Especially if FFB continues to be affected by Ice Shards as well as ignite/burnout. Here's my thinking.

1. You make burnout something t10 talent powerful. Say "increases the damage done by critical strikes with your fire spells by 5/10/15/20/25%", or "increases the critical damage bonus by 20/40/60/80/100%". That's pretty powerful, and definitely deserving of t10. With fireball and ignite alone, that would allow for 2.625 crits with the former and 2.8 crits with the latter. As realistically speaking, with how deep the talent is in the tree and how the talent comes with a drawback, neither of those would be overpowered.

HOWEVER, combine those with frostfire bolt and ice shards. With the former, you're looking at 3.5 crits, and with the latter you're looking at a pretty astonishing 4.2 crits, which could easily make up the difference in worse scaling due to the lack of empowered talents, and would be deep fire abusing a "switch-hitter" type nuke, avoiding damage immunity altogether.

2. You make burnout affect fireball only. A tier 10 talent that only affects one spell AND has a drawback better be so good that afterword it fellates you and gives you a back massage... and as it would be affecting the primary nuke of the tree, it will either make fireball builds absolutely retardedly overpowered, or the talent will be wholly underwhelming for a t10 talent.

3. You balance burnout based on frostfire hybrid specs. Give it something like the 25% critical damage bonus that it gives now, because it's pretty damn good for 0/50/21 builds that will primarily use frostfire bolt... however as a fire talent in regards to fireball, scorch, and fireblast, it will be total crap.


Other than massively reorganizing the frost tree to put ice shards as a tier 6 talent, there are no other options... so you'll either have something ridiculously overpowered in terms of frostfire bolt but crap for actual fire spells, or you'll have something ridiculous for fireball that makes frostfire bolt into absolute crap.

Umm... this really doesn't have anything to do with Burnout. It's a summary of why Frostfire bolt is a bad idea for a spell. Either it's so good that people will actually make dps builds around it, which they would only do if it is the highest dps in the game, which makes it replace Fireball, or it isn't as good in which case people only use it when something is Fire-immune.

FFb is simply a bad idea for a spell, Mages don't need another long-cast bolt to desperately attempt to balance against all our other direct damage spells and fail horribly. They already did this with Arcane Blast in TBC, we don't need a repeat of it.

I'd have to respectfully disagree. While there have been notable exceptions, I think Blizzard has done a remarkable job of keeping the classes within a very tight value grouping. Other than the really high end progression raids, nearly every PvE class and spec is a useful addition to a raid (with the exception of some specs that are obviously PvP oriented, such as DPS warriors). Even odd specs like Retadins have value equal to any other class, due to their ability to keep multiple judgements active from normal Prot or Holy paladins.

Even the often maligned Arcane spec mages trail minimally behind Fire... 40/0/21 is barely 5% behind 2/48/11 when both are decked out in the best gear possible. Considering the vastly different ways the two specs scale, and the extremely different playstyles, that's amazing! I'm only intimately familiar with Mages, but from what I've seen this is true for most specs... extremely close damage results when both are played optimally.

Some specs are easier to play, certainly. Some have better raid synergy or utility. But in the end, the total value of every class is amazingly close... there is no class excluded from any level of play. Every class, at every level of play, has a valuable niche to fill... in PvP, grouping, instancing, and raiding up through 3.5 tiers of content. Having played a couple of other MMOs, nobody else even comes close to Blizzard at balancing various classes like this.

And you scoff and say they don't do the math? Pfft.

Or, quite possibly, people will take a pass entirely on deep fire except for the poor sod forced into scorch duty who grabs 10 points in it and takes one for the team -- an arcanist, most likely. Unless this whole ffb business actually leads to a renaissance for elementalists.

So, yeah, let's get this fixed, please.

This is what I was pretty much speculating about upthread, and I actually have to wonder if Blizzard hasn't worked themselves into a corner with the way the Mage trees are currently set up. As it stands right now, yes, any fire mage worth his salt will spec into something like my 34/36 build that I currently plan on using. As it stands this will allow Mages to throw around the biggest crits, and most reliable crits, in the game bar none, and who the hell wouldn't want to marry Arcane Power, Spell Power, Presence, Combustion and Pyroblast together? Players can do that at level 80, and Blizzard has to provide something that can match or beat that. The question is, how do you make it work without completely breaking the damage scaling? Do you make Burnout work like the old version and give mages even bigger crits? Give them more utility somehow? Give them a stun (lol frost?) With so many legacy talents already completely excellent, where exactly is the plateau of the power creep? Or do you do the extreme thing and gut the fuck out of the trees, forcing players to spec deeper into trees for the same level of performance? Do you really want to risk pissing players off that much?

I don't have the answers, but I hope Blizzard can find one.

Actually what I'm interested in seeing is a 0/41/30'ish build that uses FFB as a primary nuke. Based on the fact that FFB is affected by both Ignite and Ice Shards, you can logically deduce that FFB is proactively affected by all frost AND all fire talents, and it's treated simultanously as both a frost spell and a fire spell. What I'm *really* curious with FFB is whether or not Winter's Chill will affect it regardless of what type of damage FFB ends up doing. Also whether it's affected at all by Improved/Empowered frostbolt/fireball... because if it isn't then it just flat out won't be useful enough. More because of the improved talents and not as much because of empowered... but you get the point.

The person who said it earlier hit it right on the nose... frostfire bolt is terrible design because it either completely outclasses fireball/frostbolt, or it's strictly worse than both and only usable against fire/frost immune mobs. The way it's designed so far just feels like it's going to end up outclassing fireball and frostbolt by counting as both a fire and frost spell, and dodging damage immunity.

Given that frostfire bolt is neither a frostbolt nor a fireball, I doubt it will be affected by improved/empowered frostbolt/fireball.

If it is going to be the ultimate nuke (which I agree is a bad idea) it is going to get its scaling advantage through an absolutely absurd crit bonus (ignite + ice shards at a minimum, and maybe add in spellpower too) combined with a mishmash of various +fire and +frost damage increasers (imp. scorch, piercing ice, etc.).