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.

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

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.

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.

Even though they are using doesn't means arcane is any better. Hell, I specced Arcane and just spammed AB on Dr. Boom and got similar results of just going good ole' 2/48/11, and I have 2 pieces of T5 (Use for 4 piece T5 though). If I have to spam that mana-mongering spell to keep up with my fire damage even with 2 piece T5, that obviously means that a proper arcane rotation would be blown out of the water by fire, bar none.

For example: If I have 1500 spell damage in Wotlk with 2 piece T5 for AB and dps next to another mage who has 1550 spell damage and uses all the new Wotlk (and maybe some T6 just to accommodate your statement) and is Fire specced, Mr. Fire Mage will still beat me on overall raid dps.

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

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.