The new Moonkin buff makes Arcane a little better, but not quite. Arcane has never been a high damage PvE spec except for the supposed gimmick of TLC with Arcane Missiles. What Blizzard has continuously done with the Arcane tree is to try and define it as the "High burst PvP spec" but has somehow squeezed out some PvE juice for it but has stumbled on several issues in of itself. These problems are just the fine abnormal tunings to your gear that are required to make the spec work. I think Blizzard may have FINALLY isolated Arcane as a pure PvP spec.

In summary, even with the 6% damage increase of Arcane with a boomkin present, the new talents for arcane are pale in comparison to the frost and fire talents as far as raid damage goes, finally making arcane *the* PvP spec.

Yeah but PVP runs contrary to what they wanted arcane to be, THE PVE mage spec for raiding. I forget the exact blue post, but that was their goal with arcane, with fire to be the burst spec. I may be completely misremembering things, but I'm pretty sure.

It's quite unfortunate now isn't it? I do not recall a post of that sort, but the proof is in the pudding, Blizzards wants Arcane to be PvP. Despite what a blue may or may not have said, when has Blizzard not hesitated to be sporadic in their decisions?

Oh no doubt, one of the downfalls to having THREE dps centered talent trees. They've never quite known what to do with Arcane: support, dps, or pvp. With the gutting of the tree and giving us the talents as base spells, they've completely removed the need to even spec into arcane with its complete reliant on 2 piece T5 and the implementation of sought after early talents in Frost.

Almost makes you wonder how they're going to nerf 2 piece T5 so arcane mages aren't using them in WotLK.

Edit: Don't want to make a new post when no one has made a post after mine.

Apparently there is new leaked/"fake" info on Living Bomb

"The caster becomes a living bomb, causing 76 fire damage to all enemies within 10 yards every 2 seconds. After 10 seconds, a fiery explosion occurs causing an addition 152 fire damage to all enemies within 10 yards."

That would be the lvl 60 version since it is the 51 point talent. There will be at least 2 other ranks, but it still seems pretty crappy. This, coupled with Burnout, would be a huge mana drain critting on each small explosion. The only way I can see this being useful at all, is if you can continue to use AE, Blastwave, and Dragon's breath while this is continually blowing the mobs up.

The new gear in Wotlk will blow away any reason to keep 2 piece T5. the 20% extra damage on AB is nearly negligible when scaled towards say, 150 more spell damage as a full fire spec. It's similar characteristics of finally getting rid of 4 piece T5. I love the 70 spell damage that's almost up 80-90% of the time, but it becomes outweighed by pure spell damage bonuses on higher tier levels of gear after a certain point. Same thing will apply with Arcane and the 2 piece T5, in which even now, is still crap compared to just being fire even if you have 2 piece T5.

I wouldn't be so sure. Blizzard has said the gear stratification wouldn't be as noticeable in the expansion and that T6+ would last into the first 25 man raid or so. Arcane mages are *still* using 2 piece T5 with the T6 gear. Though I agree they probably should have gone to fire by then anyway.

Blizzard has said previously that they wanted arcane to be the raiding tree. So, its wierd that they haven't addressed its scaling issues when they have done things like give arcane 36 yard range, and even more mana regen.

One explanation could be that they are changing spirit quite drastically in WOTLK such that it will have new mechanics to it. This is partly why even warlocks got WOTLK talents that are affected by spirit, when spirit is a stat which up till now is useless to locks.

So, given that arcane specs are likely to have the highest spirit, it could make a difference. All this is again conjucture at this point though. :X

This is always a distinct possibility. Thus super surprise they have for spirit, if lived up to the hype they have been giving it, may make arcane the PvE spec they supposedly want. All we can do now sit and wait until someone spills the beans.

I still stand on testing out 4 frost mages with WG at a 33/0/38 spec, spamming ice lance, to see the possibility of reaching 100% crit in raid. That will be interesting to see how that plays out.

That's provided three things happen

1) Winter's grasp can be applied to bosses

2) That other frost mages will be able to proc shatter off the first mage's winter grasp's frozen proc.

3) They don't nerf it again or put some cooldown to it, once they find that stacking frost mages on raid bosses will create such a high crit situation.

Is it only me who sees this idle speculation about "four mages spamming icelance" a liiiittle bit BS? Honestly, during Alpha it's our duty to not try and find specific silly caveats but to distinguish what the Devs -intended- the talents to do.

Obviously, it was never intended that a cheap instant spam would be the highest PvE DPS, so consider WG a very likely candidate to change wording from "frost spells proc" to "spells that could chill, despite immunity, behave as though frozen 20% of the time" or some other bull, making it Frostbolt only.

I also see it distinctly possible duration is mowed down to 3sec, making for plenty of time to get one bolt and a lance in. 5 Is simply retarded. Lhivera correctly pointed that it's start of application will include travel time, thus making it Bolt-Lance-Lance-Lance with 0 haste. This looks plain retarded. I'll download an addon to make my sprite into a gnome if this goes ahead.

Finally, I wouldn't be surprised if the "treat as frozen" is for the caster only, despite the % to hit remaining global. 100% Uptime is rather quite maddening, unless it breaks with a shatter in which case it's Mage-ISB-lite, with one charge and improved-fairy-fire tacked on. Which brings us back to my original post:

Where's all the creativity gone to?

Burnout is play-with-fire glued to spellpower-lite

Living Flame is just a re-hash of the Affli 51 talent, only you have to STAY in melee for it to work

WG is a copy-paste of a suggestion ages ago

Improved WE is just "kk, herez moar"

Hot Streak is just a perpetual Combustion with an odd self-buffing conditional

Netherwind is oddly, an old set bonus which is now useless (by the way, someone said "I pyroed when it procced". Notice the wording "next Fireball, Frostbolt, Frostfire bolt or Arcane Blast")

Student of the Mind and Potent Spirit are duct-taped Arcane Mind and Mind Mastery with spirit instead

Brain Freeze is the most ill-conceived PvE talent I've ever seen... If you NOVA in AoE, whoever is next to a mob which can't hit THE TANK becomes the TARGET. Ever nova at MH? No, because YOU die first. Tacking on 15% dodge to it does not help it become an evasive tool, as 6/10 times it's the source of the problem to start with. "I nova'd to give the lock15% dodge, but got two rogues killed instead" doesn't really cut it.

Chilled to the Bone. Jesus on the donkey! a 45 talent with 1% as the Penultimate Talent? Could you be any more boring?

Deep Freeze. I'm truly puzzled by this. Either I'm missing something, or I'm thick. a 1.5sec cast Stun... This is quite possibly, the only stun with a cast-time, barring that retarded incapacitate dranei racial fear-ward replacement. And that was -meant- to be underpowered. OK, so it's a Conditional stun, with a Cast Time... Not exactly a "mighty" weapon in one's arsenal, yet I'll reserve judgement because (I Hope) I'm missing something fantastic here.

Frostfire Bolt Some are pleased with this. To me it smacks of a 13-yearold's wish-list when seeing some elemental mage video. "but what if it was A FROSTBOLT that did IGNITE TOOOOO!" is all I see when I look at it. However, I may be proven wrong and it is indeed, the best thing since Vurtne's 2nd elemental video in Silithus.

What's with all the weird talents too? Incanter's Absorbtion... If you're this deep in the tree, only Frost or Fire ward and Mana Shield are there to absorb anything. Unless we're looking at a PvP-only talent, I sure as hell won't mana-shield any incoming damage, I don't care how much buff I'll gain. Assume we have such spellpower that with imp. Mana Shield, we're on a 1:1 damage:mana ratio (unlikely high). To gain one trinket's-worth of effect from this talent (+200dmg), i need to be targetted and lose 1350 mana from incoming damage, plus a GCD to cast the shield. Would you ditch 1350 mana for another activation of your HsH as arcane? Didn't think so.

The only thing I'm truly happy about, and about long fucking last, is the change to Magic Absorbtion and to Mage armor, and by that I mean both the "half duration debuffs" and the increase to 40all rez rather than the pathetic almost-irrelevant 18. World in Flames is also a solid talent, from where I'm standing, though one which will do precious little to sway my opinion that mage trees were hastily-made, just like warrior ones.

In all honesty, all I can do is look at the Brilliance, the Creativity and Sparkle of the priest make-over team, the excellence of the warlock team (even though affli is a -little- bland) and the go-to-town Overpoweredness of moonkins (jeez, what happened to feral? it got practically two talents, one of which is boring and one of which is boring-er) and think to my self, did they -really- think about the mage trees?

I just hope the actualy WotLK talents won't look anything like this, else I'm gonna be pretty damn disappointed.

Unreleased content must not be discussed on the official forums - it's a very old rule and yes, they will remove your posting privileges there.

Aye, it is a very old, oft-broken, erratically-enforced rule. But, yes, I was particularly flagrant about breaking it this time around.

Good for you :P

Bit of a silly rule if you ask me, but whatever, they're in the position of authoity, not us.

Aye, I can't really complain. I mention it only in case anyone here was wondering where all my FAQ threads and the like had gone; I'm seeing if I can arrange with Zaldinar to repost a couple of those. And I'll make note of any major TCoM changes here, although they're few and far between these days. Moving on now!

Sorry to hear this happen Lhivera. That permaban was simply a bad business decision by Blizzard seeing as many new mages follow your TC to try and make their characters better and in the process keep paying their $14.99 to Blizzard.

First, I admit I've never seen blizzard claim arcane intended to be the raiding tree, but in any case its fairly obvious to me that what they mean by that is not that you would spam arcane spells, but rather, go arcane for the sustenance (mana regen). I still support highly my claim that 2pcT5 was never intended to be more than a gimmick and not intended to ever become an integral part of a raiding spec.

Don't take it the bad way, but as far as I'm concerned I would never expect deep arcane to be competitive sustained pve dps in the long term goal of Blizzard. I still view it as a support tree, and the talents seem to go that way too.

I fully expect people to not go straight deep fire and nothing in arcane, given the 2% mana regen from VT in wotlk. In that veins, I fully expect people to be deep fire, ditch icy veins, then pick up 10 or 18 in arcane. The real problem lies within the fact that low-tier arcane talents don't increase dps, which will always pigeon-hole players into either speccing deep arcane or speccing barely arcane.

In any case, if you agree with my definition of 'the pve spec' being more like 'no matter what spec you go and you raid, you want to have some points in arcane for the mana regen', then it doesn't preclude the fact that fire would be the core pve dps spec, since, to me, that can only make sense. Fire makes all the sacrifices to gain a few more dps over the rest, and that should be what makes it the most accepted tree for raiding.

A couple thoughts on Frostfire bolt that haven't been mentioned yet:

1: The slowing effect means it will be a binary spell. We'll lose 5% of the benefit from +damage gear, but we'll also gain about 5% to the spell's total damage on bosses because it won't suffer from the partial resist bug/effect.

2: Assuming Frostbolt's binary nature is a factor into the ghost hit it gets from Elemental Precision, it could be possible to see Frostfire bolt getting 6% returns from elemental precision (assuming that EP doesn't get fixed in the expansion).

Well, the real debate is what the implementation will be. I mean, does it mean that if I tri-spec, that if the target is frozen then shatter will apply, otherwise fire will? Even with this 'limitation' it could be quite absurd.

Believe me I have no disillusions as to what the arcane tree is now and, from the looks of it, is going to be.

I really don't think we will see a switch back to talent points being spent in Arcane for Arcane Concentration for mana regen and for these reasons:

1) Icy Veins is too much of a dps increase for how low it is in the Frost tree to let go

2)Even though VT was nerfed, shadow priests will see a dps increase, most likely balancing out the mana regen to, at least, a more realistic value. I don't know about you, but it is very hard for me to spend most of my mana with a shadow priest in my group.

3)There is also the interesting talent of the Discipline Priest Tree doing much the same thing as VT and what it's values will be. Their Greater Heals, Flash Heals, and (some new heal spel) generates mana for your party. Though I assume this may be intended more for the healer group than a dps group, I don't see many healers needing mana regen now with the new SPI/INT interaction. They could definitely be a SP replacement, or if you only have 1 SP, could be used for a 2nd dps caster group.

Point 3, along with the so oft rumored spirit mechanic change for WotLK for dps caster (at least hopefully if they really intend that warlocks are going to be using spirit as well) tells me that mana regen won't be a huge problem.

Does anyone actually have an idea of what the rumored spirit changes are?

Lhiv, I was disgusted with your ban and have decided to permanently relocate here to discuss Mage matters. Plainly nothing interesting or useful can be discussed on the official forums. It has become a wasteland for trolls.

Onwards.

Query: is there any good reason based on the leaked talents for a fire mage to go past empowered fireball? So far as I can tell, 33/38 is the fire spec of choice.