Been out of this thread for a few days, so here's a few thoughts.

First, in regards to FFB - if it turns out to be our best DPS nuke (for fire/frost), fantastic, but do you really want to play a spec where you literally only press one button? I can't possibly imagine a more boring way to play WoW.

Second, in regards to the Arcane changes - I like what they've started, but Arcane Flows needs further buffing and Incanter's Absorption is still completely out in left field. Missile Barrage is a little odd, I'm not really sure what to say about it right now, except that you're going to be forced into putting at least 15-20 points into Fire/Frost to make it work. A base PvE Arcane build right now to me looks like 57+ points, which means you're going to be sacrificing somewhere to make Missile Barrage viable.

On the whole Arcane still looks like a PvP tree, I'll be interested to see what refinements they make. I guess it's a step in the right direction, but I'll reserve final judgment until we see the Fire and Frost revisions.

I am not even sure if arcane barrage is meant to be used as a spam nuke spell in pve. It doesn't scale well since its instant cast, and it has no ranks (other spells with ranks are listed on the talent tooltip like ice barrior or pyroblast). Its base damage is rather underwhelming compared to other spells.

To be honest, if we try and force it into a rotation, we are gimping our damage. If we have enough haste, frostbolt spam might actually come pretty close to a frostbolt/arcane barrage rotation for procing missile barrage and it should be higher DPS too.

Its better for its pvp applications and burst applications. And in situations where you need to DPS on the move. Blizzard really does seem to be moving arcane specs away from using pure arcane spells for DPS. And one more thing, it would be an extreme challenge for deep arcane specs to get any use out of frostfire bolt, which is one of the few new spells that mages got in WOTLK, which is a bit of a letdown.

I've done over 10k non crit with just instances, AP -> pom-frostbolt -> AB -> fireblast -> AB.

AB really feels like a main nuke with no casting bar. It took me a while to get use to it at first. The gameplay with AB is basically: spell -> AB -> spell -> AB -> spell -> AB etc. And most of the time those spells are instances.

if arcane missiles are only used after a proc from missile barrage, is there a need to spec 5/5 in imp arcane missiles?

*edit* in a deep arcane tree

Arcane barrage has .85 coefficient making it our highest dps spell. Also the talent is rank one; the max rank does something around 1100 damage. (roughly same coefficient and base damage as fireball)

According to Wowhead there are 3 ranks of it, the top rank having damage ranges nearly comparable to that of Fireball.

This isn't entirely true. As part of the Months Behind crowd, I actually got the 2t5 bonus after the 2.4 patch when we were about halfway through t5. At that gear level, arc is completely dominant. The problem is that the scaling for AB simply is not there, so in t6 (where most people were in 2.4) it goes to barely on par.

This is my main concern for Arc in LK. Having another ~.8 coefficient main nuke with low coefficient filler suggests that scaling will lead to non-viability again if the trees are balanced at release. I was really hoping for a chromatic coefficient boost somewhere deep in the tree. I came back to the class (from Ret, abandoned due to the 2.3 MSD nerf) to play Arc and don't really have an interest in fixed rotations from ranged classes. As such, the current tree looks great to me as long as it keeps up with the other specs. I'd hate to abandon my mage again out of lack of enjoyment from playing the class.

Also, Arcane Flows doesn't really strike me as a great talent. It still doesn't align with trinkets so the main bonus is getting an extra AP if and only if a fight is within a fixed range. If the LK fights are mostly 7-10+ minutes, it's a good value, but if they're in the same range as BC, it won't really affect the majority of the fights.

I think someone said this a few pages back and I forgot to mention it in my last post - but Magic Attunement has a range increase for Arcane spells now. Arcane won't be capped at 30yds anymore. In regards to Imp Arcane Missiles, I guess you can skip it. Still, I put together a 57 point Arcane Build that skipped Magic Attunement, Magic Absorption, Incanter's Absorption and didn't get any toys like Prismatic Cloak or Imp Blink. You could easily put 65 points in the tree without taking any real fluff.

[e] Read more, please.

Hmm...
So missile barrage eh?

But first question...

If missile barrage procs, hence reducing your AM to 1.5 secs, does it get reduced further due to haste? So will it actually get down to 1.4ish secs with the new Netherwind presence? Its seems to me like its essentially the old school MSD, on crack. (and by old school, i mean REALLY old school, back before the internal cooldown jargon, when it was 50% cast time).

That being said, I'm not totally sold on the removal of Arcane Blast from that list of Missile barrage procers, and I am not as yet subscribing to its removal as one of the main arcane nukes. Yes, I understand that it was/could/maybe/perhaps have been initially designed as a situational 'mana dump' nuke. But lets not forget that it WAS part of the original netherwind presence (when it had a POM proc). IMHO, being a long time arcane mage, part of the fun of raiding and using arcane blast as a pseudo-primary nuke was the fun I had in juggling the debuff and managing my mana and weaving its usage with filler nukes.
If it is, in fact, just a "hey, the fight is gonna finish in 1-2 mins and u still have an entire mana bar left so get rid of ur mana asap by spamming" spell, then the whole DPS/DPM throttling aspect of the spell is superfluous. It could just as well be a 1.5 sec cast with high DPS low DPM and the end result would be the same.

Therefore, I would have to say no. We cannot remove AB as ONE of the main nukes in an AB rotation, and neither can we accept such a decision, since by doing so you will be removing one of the most interesting spells to play with in a raid. One of the core things that made raiding as an arcane mage interesting was/is the fact that it is more than mindless spamming. We still need to make AB have a place in the common everyday arcane mage rotation. Now true, maybe we need to curb its use as the ONLY arcane nuke, but completely sidelining it as a situational one is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go.

There is no law or edict that forbids the use of more than 2 spells in a rotation. There is no reason why we cannot have Arcane blast, Arcane barrage AND a tertiary filler nuke from one of the other schools make a solid and acceptable Arcane spec rotation. It seems like blizzard is open to ideas on this, so I hope they take the importance of fun into consideration.

Hmmm, ok I stand corrected.

I guess Blizzard hasn't added into their talent calculator yet. Because other talent spells that has more than 1 rank have all their ranks listed in the talent calculator.

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried a deep arcane frostfire bolt build? Like 51 pts in arcane, 10 in fire and 10 in frost to get ignite and ice shards. Then just use frostfire as a main nuke with procs on AM.

WIth spellpower, ignite and ice shards, frostfire bolt will crit extremely hard. With a 15% chance of missile barrage procing to boot.

I still wish we did not have the defacto 30 yard range to deal with though, that is what soils things. Though I suppose one could just use the AB/arcane blastx2 rotation until things got too low, then have to get close.


So depending how decent mana is on a fight, you may be able to get by without having to go for 30 yards. But ideally arcane missiles should be buffed just enough to compensate for it being used as the filler instead of frostbolt. Even if the missile proc was rebalanced to up it to 2s instead of 1.5s to compensate. Or perhaps instead of having all selected spells have a 15% chance to proc the missile barrage buff, add arcane missiles to the list but at 5% or 10% or what am I saying, if it only had a chance to proc on the initial cast, and with the lower damage output of the spell as is, it might need a 25% chance to proc instead, but it could be tweaked to balance around using arcane missiles.

AB as a primary nuke causes some significant problems. If it's balanced around the idea that you can't stack enough regen in your group to spam it, then when you can stack enough regen in your group to spam it, it delivers significantly more damage than intended. If it's balanced around the idea that you can stack enough regen to spam it, then when you can't, it's terribly underpowered. Quite simply, having group composition produce such huge variability in performance is bad; it either locks you into using certain group combos because the spec is too valuable to leave out, or it locks you out of a spec because the only way to make it useful is to use an unreasonable amount of the group's resources. Life Tap presented similar problems: Warlock DPS was balanced around having to life tap periodically, and raid compositions that eliminated that requirement produced much higher Warlock DPS than intended.

The way to solve this problem is to smooth out the difference in performance that happens with different raid compositions, by reducing the impact of external regen on the spec. In the case of Warlocks, this means giving them spirit regen so that the addition of external regen doesn't change the frequency of life taps by nearly as great a degree. In the case of Arcane Mages, this means providing spells that result in a rotation that is not dependent upon external regen. Mixing in Arcane Blast does produce higher DPS, thus making it useful for mana burn situations, but not so much higher that it's worth stacking a crazy regen group for the sole purpose of gaining that extra DPS full time.

It appears to me that Blizzard has succeeded in achieving this.


As others have pointed out, it would be entirely reasonable to drop Imp. AM and put 3 points into some combination of Ice Shards and Piercing Ice, with the last two into Arctic Reach. That evens out the range at 36 yards for both schools, and improves DPS a bit to boot.


Well, it also serves as a low-DPS, high-efficiency, low-threat spell when used with zero stacks. But those are its two purposes: mana dump, and "I gotta be real careful" spell. This has nothing to do with the change to these talents; as discussed many pages back, this is completely clear from the spell's tooltip, the 2xT5 bonus (which is far, far too strong for a spell intended as a primary nuke, but perfectly rational for a spell that would see only situational use), and the fact that not a single change to support Arcane Blast is being introduced in the WotLK talents. Blizzard's done everything short of sending the Goodyear Blimp around to major cities with a large flashing sign reading, "ARCANE BLAST IS NOT A PRIMARY NUKE." The Mage community managed to figure out a way to pound nails with a screwdriver, that's all. No point in debating this further; if you still disagree, then I can't convince you, and we'll just have to agree to disagree, so that'll be my last word on that.

My Arcane Mage is an alt, with some 10-man experience, no more (as with all my characters, her primary tree has not changed since level 10 -- I actually leveled her all the way up as deep Arcane, which was an entertaining change in playstyle). I have raided alongside an Arcane Mage throughout T5 and T6 content (we had a nice three-mage Arcane, Fire and Frost team going, it was pretty fun).

Unfortunately I do not think there is any breathing room to do so, Especially since people will want their filler to have all the buffs it can, though perhaps there is a happy medium.

Split the difference:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator


one in arctic reach at the expense of 1 in magic attunement.

I understand this argument, however, there is an alternate solution to the problem. That being, to smooth out the dps of the "filler" nukes so as to have the delta between a pure AB spam build and a AB + filler nuke build be reduced. What this does at the end of the day is reduce the feeling of it being "worthless" when you aren't stacked for an AB spam. This smoothing out of filler nukes is what, imho, Arcane barrage does almost flawlessly. It allows Arcane mages to not suffer at the hands of a wrecked group composition.

That being said, most of the numbers brought out by a pure AB spam build are anomalies, since the mage would have to have an almost insane level of group stacking to achieve it. But then again, that would be the case for almost any class. You can easily stack a raid to increase the dps of just one raider and produce anomalous results. I know for a fact that it has already been done for warlocks and warriors with some success.

Well... you've basically described normal play for two of the three current mage specs. Fire: Scorch every 30s and otherwise fireball. Frost: Frostbolt (a lot). Arcane is some combination of AB/filler but it is more of a challenge due to mana management rather than the number of buttons.

An elementalist spec will work more or less identically to a fire spec (I'm assuming it stacks Winters chill on its own; if not then it will in fact be considerably more complicated as you will need to weave scorch, frostbolt and FFB, and allow for the different debuff lengths). So at a minimum you will be pressing two buttons rather than one.

None of the mage specs utilise complex ability combinations (especially since the death of AB rotations) - if that's what you're looking for then affliction locks or shadow priests are probably a better choice.

AP used randomly randomly is ~2.2%.
However AP paired with [Shifting Naaru Sliver], Icy Veins - Spell - World of Warcraft, [Recipe: Haste Potion] on the other hand is what it's really at

At level 75, the level 69 and 70 Arcane Missiles both receive only 80% of what they should.
This can either be due to scaling, or due to very odd downranking mechanics. 5 and 6 level old spells would then get a significant penalty (-20%) and it's the same penalty for both.

From what I saw with paladin testing I'm now more lending towards the second choice, with it based on "level that the spell improved last" to even make remotely sense.


But I need some testing on a level 70 mage with rank 10 and 11 Arcane Missiles.
Without that data we cannot tell anything at all.


[Edit]: Also for the 1.5s Arcane Missiles. Every second spell you cast is Arcane Barrage.
You'd have some filler (Frostbolt? FFB?), and your cast sequence looks like:
ABarr - FB - ABar - FB !Proc! - ABarr - AMiss - And then?
We can wait to cast ABar, or cast FB and then continue with ABar.

Of course you just use ABar in a 0%-haste-situation, you can cast the ABar without waiting.
But in a raid you'll have 10% haste from totem, 3% from aura, 6% from your talent, some passive haste, some procs, some abilities.

The answer will of course depend on your current haste and especially on the power of the spells, and can be highly non-trivial in certain situations.

I also think we have to always double-check how a Blast heavy cycle performs. Something like:
- ABar - ABla0/3* - ABar - ABla1 - ABar - ABla2 - ABar - FB/FB/FFB - (ABar - FB/FB/FFB) -
Yes, there are less AM proc chances, but the shortening of the cycles with sub-2.5s spells results in quite some more Arcane Barrages. I think it can be closer than we think.

Don't simply say "Won't work!", Arcane has fooled us before, and it's a highly volatile thing to master.

Also, the new "Spell Impact" looks a bit ... random, I'm confused what it's for.
Give PvPers something for their 17 points to get Improved Counterspell?


Current mechanics are confusing enough and there are many many things that are likely to get a retuning.
28% from Maledicted CoE? Yes please, but don't think the designers wanted that.

Also, the new "Spell Impact" looks a bit ... random.


[Edit II]: Update on the Elemental Shaman party crit buff works.
Elemental Oath Elemental Oath - Spell - World of Warcraft use the same mechanics as the CSD meta, just with 6% instead of 3%.
I.e. regular crits become 159%, Spell Power crits become 189.5%, Ice Shards crits become 218%
It stacks additively with CSD, so you use the same algorithm to determine crit damage, just with 9%.
"EO = 2*CSD, EO + CSD = 3*CSD" in terms of crits.
With both, regular crits become 163.5%, Spell Power crits become 195.25%, Ice Shards crits become 227%. Ignite is a 1.4 multiplier on top of that.

I might be missing something here, but with Arcane Barrage, you only get a window of 1.5sec to cast a spell, since the global eats up 1.5sec out of the 3sec cooldown. So... how do we get Abarr/AB/AB cycles? Shouldn't it be Abarr/AB cycles, maintaining the AB debuff at max? And when Missile Barrage procs, we get ABarr/AM?

The 2 most commonly linked FFB builds have either Molten Fury or Water Elemental. If you go with MF the playstyle should be very similar to current fire (except maybe Ice ance on Winter's Grasp procs if it turns out to be beneficial). If you take WE it should instead play like current frost with the added scorching. Can't really see how this is dumbing down of anything compared to today.


If you add any haste at all to this you will have more than 1.5 seconds after the ABarr to fill which makes a single fully stacked AB not an option. With the current Netherwind Presence this will be the case for all arcane mages regardless of group/raid and gear.

From the TC that myself and the other mages on the WoW forums have been doing, we've come up with a basic 1:1 Frostbolt/Abar rotation which seems to make the best use of Abar, since it's only going 1 sec longer than the CD... unless you wanna do some bizarre Abar/Scorch spec that'd be rather underpowered it seems...

1.5 sec GCD (Abar) + 2.5 sec cast (Frostbolt) = 4 sec rotation.

when you get a MB proc, it turns into a 7 sec rotation for the period... such as follows...

*PROC* 1.5 sec GCD (Abar) + 1.5 sec cast (AM) + 1.5 sec GCD (Abar) + 2.5 sec cast (Frostbolt) = 7 sec rotation.

it appears as though the MB buff lasts until you use it on your AM, so you have a bit of flexibility in there. the Abar->AM->Abar quick-proc-rotation looks really good to me though.




I'm attempting to do a timeline of this type of rotation to check for base damage dps and DPM/mana used for a 6 min fight... but i've never really been good with advanced math and statistics... this new talent being a 15% proc is also throwing me for a loop... so far i've come up with this...



2 casts every 4 seconds. scaling 2 with 30% (15% per cast) you get about 150% at 20 seconds.

god, i'm probably doing this wrong... but i'm seeing 1 proc every 20 seconds... or 3 ppm. turning the 20 seconds into a 23 second long-term rotation. 23 sec x 26 complete rotations = 598 seconds (just shy of 6 minutes)

it's really hard for me to figure out the proc basis and you cant really account for dry periods and heavy periods where you'll get multiple procs... this is really driving me insane... i'm damn sure i'm wrong about the % and ppm rate... im just posting what i have already in hopes i can get some help.

i'm going to reread the tooltips for mongoose and executioner... hopefully i can get a new understanding of the ppm system...

bare with me here, i didnt take statistics in highschool lol... or college.

Wanted to comment on this, in combo with 30 sec cooldown reduction talent.

Basically, the only time we will see any sort of increased dps from this talent, is when the reduced cooldown allows us to squeeze in more AP uses in a given fight.

This talent is extremely well-suited to 300-to-360 seconds tank'n'spank smackdowns, where it allows 3 AP activations instead of 2. If the fight in question is over 330 seconds long, you will even get to stack AP with all three activations of your 2 min cds. For similar reasons, this talent works well with the range of 150 to 180 seconds.

It is worthless outside of these key ranges though.

Treating it like a flat % dps modifier is largely misleading.

Actually, i have been wondering about the interaction of haste with arcane.

It feels to me that arcane-haste interaction will be mostly about looking for a sweet spot, where you are as close to 3 sec casting cycle on either ABarr->bolt or ABarr/Blast/Blast as possible, but still not at high enough haste to go under GCD during heroism cd stacking.

However, heroism combined with IV already bring a mage to 1.0 sec GCD. Combined with 6% haste, as well as various other group haste buffs, this feels like arcane mages might - at the very least - lose the ability to stack IV with Heroism.

P.S: Actually, i'm not entirely clear on whether moonkin auras and the like will stack with heroism as well.

ok i think i figured out the proc system...

assuming there are 5 casts each of Frostbolt and Abar in a 20 second period and there are 60 seconds in a minute... 5 x 2 = 10 x 3 (3 sets of 20 seconds) = 30 casts per minute.

30 cpm x .15 = 4.5 ppm

rounded down to 4ppm (to make math a whole hell of a lot easier), we get a 15 second rotation.

FB -> ABar -> FB -> ABar -> FB -> ABar -> AM -> ABar -> Repeat

15 x 4 x 6 = 24 procs over a 6 min boss fight...

Sooo, it appears with basic TC that i hope i got right, that you'll be seeing 24 AM casts at 1.5 sec casting time over a Brutalus style fight. Since this is a proc'd ability it makes it hard to give accurate data such as this, meaning there will be dry periods (no proc) and heavy periods (multiple procs) without warning... this is merely a basic sketch of how much Missile Barrage should be activated...

looking at my math again, i realize that changing from a 20 second rotation to a now 15 second rotation, and the fact that AM has no chance to proc MB at all will mess up the math entirely... then again, this may account for when i took that .5ppm off of the total/minute to make math easier... doubtful, but again, it's really hard to figure this out since we cant exactly weave things like this inbetween spells, like melee can with their auto attacks or hunters can with auto-shot...


Either way now it's time to do math for damage and Mana consumption (AM will cost a scary 1167 mana after arcane focus and Emp AM, that's a lot even if we'll have around 16-17k mana...)

Then you and I disagree. I was hoping for something new and different - some way to alter the Fire/Frost trees to add some variety. Instead of a new idea, I got the same old concepts that have been around since Molten Core combined into one spell and wrapped in shiny new packaging with "Frost+Fire" damage. Now you don't even have to decide whether you want to be a fire or frost mage, you pick both and use one spell.

I dunno, like I said I'm sincerely hoping they do something spectacular with the new revisions. But all I see in FFB is an old idea with a new label.