no, its a freeze. Please read the tallent tooltip, it has been re-posted in this thread many times;

'Target is considered frozen'

I am curious as to weather the "considered Frozen" debuff holds true even after the Ice breaks. If it does remain as a debuff, we could be looking at 20s+ of Ice Lance Spam with 80+% chance to crit. It seems unlikely, but if there are 2 Frost Deathknights in a raid, WG may not even be a desirable talent if the 2 DKs can keep up Hungering Cold for 40s of every minute. A Deep Fire/Shatter build using FFB could be outrageous if this is true.

3 Frost DKs could theoretically keep up a "frozen" debuff at all times, making a 0/50/21 FFB build pretty much insane. This seems very unlikely, but we can dream.

I've actually been thinking about the de-linking of Arcane Concentration being a hard requirement of Arcane potency and I have concluded that it is a GREAT change. Here is why.

Now, we can get the Arcane potency buff to Clearcasting without having to place 5 points in clearcasting. Now some of you may be saying "wtf?" but hear me out.

There are many builds, especially in pvp, that can make use of clearcasting, but do not need to make use of all 5/5 clearcasting. Now, in pvp, the difference between something like 8% chance to clearcast vs 10% chance to clearcast does not really manifest itself like it does in raids. Therefore, for a arcane pvp mage, having the spare points to put into something else while keeping a reasonable % chance to clearcast is absolutely wonderful, ESPECIALLy since he can STILL maintain the sweet buff from Arcane Potency, hence making Arcane Potency one of those super nice bonus things that an arcane pvp mage can have.

Here is one of these potential builds:
Kel's WoTLk *new* 2.5 min mage build :P
(nb I threw this together real quick)
Its great, since now i can dump points into the arcane +range talent and shave off some points from Clearcasting, but still, if I get the proc, it will still make my next spell have a 30%+ chance to crit.

Now before someone here goes "lolololol 4% chance to clearcast and 30% chance to crit means u only get 1.2% chance to crit (0.04 * 0.3). lololol u taek 5pts for 1% chance to crit lolol" I will straight up say THIS CHANGE IS NOT FOR RAIDERS.
In raiding a calculation such as the one above is useful since in raiding a talents performance is measured over a period of time. In pvp this is most certainly not the case. In pvp, I am not getting a 1% chance to crit, in pvp I am getting a 30% chance to crit with a 4% chance to proc. I hope someone understands the nuance here.

Now naturally, you can say "oh but what if the mage takes 0/5 Clearcasting and 3/3 Arcane Potency?"
I say "Dumb mage"

We shouldn't need to have hard fast rules preventing us making mistakes that are so clearly avoidable.


**just a quick edit: I forgot to mention that for the hard fast raiding mage, this delinking will make no difference, since the arcane raiding build will always include 5/5 Clearcast and 3/3 Potency, further pushing the idea that this delinking of the two is more to help pvp mages who don't necessarily need/rely on clearcast, but could make good use of it and make it be a great "bonus" to them (think of it being analogous to a warriors stun proc, in which the warrior does not RELY on the stun proc to pvp effectively, but when it happens it is a great bonus for the warrior)


edit 2: linked the wrong spec earlier :P

In terms of the "dynamic nature" of mage raiding play I think the latest arcane changes give us a hint as to what is coming for fire and frost.

Arcane: ABr/FB rotation, AB when time to dump mana/trinkets active, AM on barrage procs
Frost: FB "rotation", FB/IL finishers when WG procs, IL on the move
Fire: Scorch till debuff, Fireball x8, scorch x1

The arcane tree is now very reactive. Frost is OK. Fire is boring. At this point I'd totally expect them to do something like the following to fire. Move Burnout down a tier and tweak it so it is OK for that level. Add a tier 10 talent that has a proc on fireball cast to get the next pyroblast to be instant. Makes pyro used in raids, interesting in PvP, and most importantly makes fire reactive. Of course that change is just speculation--but _something_ reactive is much more likely now, IMO.

For frost, I think we are about there. WG procs and you keep casting FB until the debuff is about to wear off and then you sneak in an IL. Just like you can wait to cast AM after a barrage proc, you wait to cast IL after a WG proc.

Arcane definitely wins on the dynamic front for two reasons: AB and adding in an offtree spell in the basic rotation. I'd wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard thought they had changed this. That is they think arcane would be: ABr, ABr, ABr, *proc*, AM. Just like frost is: FB, FB, FB, *proc*, FB, FB, IL. Honestly, any mage that doesn't theorycraft would likely stick with arcane spells if they are playing an "arcane" mage. Only theorycraftng (or reading the TC of others) shows why you want to sneak in a FB there.

As to whether this is dynamic enough, I can't imagine getting more. Hunter changes are almost always "a new bow shot" of some sort or something defensive. Rogue changes are always some new swing, crazy swing, super crazy swing. Resto druid changes are always, well, some sort of heal with interaction between HOTs and insta-casts. WoW itself is not a game where the mage says, "enough of this bolting from a distance stuff, I'm going to enchant my sword, run in, and start wacking stuff". Reactive spell rotations is about as dynamic as it is going to get. If that isn't enough for you, I don't know what else to tell you.

Yea this is very sex. I have been thinking about it as well. From the looks of it, I think it will hold the missile barrage buff all the way until you cast the AM (since the tooltip has no duration part), thus really letting you work the proc quite well. At least I hope that is how it will work. Furthermore it adds a nice twist in complexity where you have to constantly try and figure out whether to blow your barrage buffed AM now and just sync you next barrage buff to a clearcast (since 15% chance to proc is not bad at all imo), or to try and sync now. Either way, its an interesting proc dynamic.

Either way, as soon as some nice beta mage can test this out for us let us know, I for one, am very interested!

And you still picked 5/5 clearcasting to prove what? I don't get it. Seems like you linked to a 33 yard PvE build instead of what you talked about.

It doesn't make much sense the way things stand for arcane potency. I would expect the talent to change to something that works with POM or to fix the prereq back to clearcasting.

Is that your decree?
Perhaps you can take a look at my post a few posts up. I think I have made a valid argument for why the delinking of arcane potency DOES indeed make sense and is in fact very useful. Whether or not it should be linked to POM, I'm not sure, but I'm sure that linking it to POM is not nonsensical at all since almost all arcane mages, pvp, pve, raids, etc etc, take pom.

Has anyone tested to see if arcane barrage's cooldown is reduced by haste? I know it's not likely, but its frontloading coef already indicates this spell doesn't follow the normal rules.

We've gone over this upthread, but the short version for those who don't want to read back over 100 pages:

- Bosses are immune to impairment effects
- Diminishing Returns in PvP are attached to impairment effects
- Winter's Grasp has no impairment effect
- Therefore, Winter's Grasp works on bosses and has no diminishing returns in PvP
- If either part of this conclusion turns out to be incorrect, I will buy a pint of beer for anyone in this thread who cares to meet me at the Big Time Brewery and Alehouse in Seattle


That wasn't me, though I don't recall who it was offhand. I'm getting credited for a lot of other people's ideas lately, which I'd be happy about if the credit came with large cash prizes, but since it doesn't, it just makes me feel guilty! Anyway, casting Mana Shield eats GCD's. Even if you're only doing it twice a minute, that's a 5% reduction in the time you can spend casting DPS spells. I very much doubt that's going to prove to be a win in a DPS rotation.


This is simply not true. 5 points to get the Improved talent is enough to make Frostbolt or Fireball an adequate filler spell in an Arcane rotation that will produce DPS competitive with deep Frost and superior to deep Fire. The tree really does do a good job of buffing Fire and Frost spells -- not to the point where you want to use them exclusively, but easily to the point where you can use them as fillers in a rotation without gimping your DPS. Remember, the DPS of each individual spell isn't what you're ultimately looking at -- the DPS of your total rotation is the important thing.

Shift-reload, or whatever it is your browser needs you to do to ignore cached data and force a complete reload.

As for the loss of Potent Spirit, I suspect there were two reasons:

1) They wanted to keep Netherwind Presence in the tree, even with a completely different effect. So they needed someplace to put it, and its DPS value is high enough that they didn't feel the crit from Potent Spirit was required (or even desirable).

2) They wanted to make Student of the Mind more accessible to Fire and Frost Mages, and didn't want to add a long, long dependency arrow from Tier 3 to Tier 8-9.

The latter reason suggests that Blizzard is expecting us all to use Mage Armor, and may give us a (very vague) clue as to our expected endurance in endgame fights.


I didn't think of that, and it's an excellent point. The change makes good sense to me now.


I don't think this is a win, because you'd actually have a greater chance of getting another MB proc (wasting the first) before you got a Clearcast proc.

The logical change by your reasoning is to make it require 1 point in clearcasting instead of 5. I still see no logical reason to completely de-link them. You say stupid mage for taking the skill. I would say stupid Blizzard for allowing it to happen.

Maybe I missed something, but why is frostbolt always used as the filler in examples I read on heavy arcane/frost (51 points or more in arcane) builds?

Wouldn't FFB, also benefit from elemental precision, ice shards and piercing ice?
Wouldn't also FFB be more practical with haste affected rotations so we don't waist time because of cooldowns?

How do Frostbolt vs. Ice Lance Scale? Is it really that good to toss in that Ice Lance?
You'd lose if one of the FrB right before the IL procced WG. And it become worse to time/predict when you have 2 or 3 mages.

Fire could do a "Fireball + Fire Blast" combo when they get their guaranteed crit from Hot Streak, so that they'd have 2 crits for a next possible Hot Streak crit.
That's speculation and relies on Ignite not bugging, and the whole thing is in a gray area between legit and bug exploiting.

What all mage specs do have is proper cooldown management.
Arcane definately more possible rotations, dynamics and reaction, no one doubts that.
I wouldn't claim that frost is that much more interactive than fire, but opinions may vary.


What I'm more interested is whether Arcane can beat Fire/Frost/FFB specs.
Arcane Barrage is great, but only 35-40% of your cast time. The 1-GCD-AM is great burst, but your other filler spell sucks.

FFB only becomes good (and potentially way too good) when you add in fire and frost talents. In a 50+ arcane build, you can still get improved frostbolt, which speeds up frostbolt cast time but not FFB. This is enough to make FB better than FFB.

Am I the only Mage whose not excited about the buffs to Arcane and the lack of attention to Fire? I've loved raiding as a Fire mage in TBC as 10/48/3... I quit the game for a year and am currently re-leveling a new mage with 2/48/11 as my planned spec.

I love the huge crits and the relative simplicity of playing a fire mage.... Maintain scorch and just watch the massive hits from fireball.

However, I'm also a max dps type player... so I'll definitely spec to do max dps, even if that requires Arcane. I just hope this won't be the case. I much prefer Fire, and I hope they rework Fire to make it the max raiding DPS (or at least equivalent to Arcane) at the sacrifice of survivability and utility.

Imo the most important thing with the changes to arcane is that Blizzard has shown that their "polish" can change quite much. We've seen new, removed talents and totally changed talents. This gives at least me a little hope that the fire and frost tree can see some rather big changes that is needed to make them feel interesting and to make fire a competitive single target dps tree.

The math is way way up-thread and I don't have the time to dig it out. My recollection is that IL spam was worse than FB spam during the 5 seconds of a WG proc, but not by an insane amount.

Depending on bolt travel times, it could be interesting:

1st FB launches, next 2nd FB cast starts, 1st FB hits & procs WG with 5 second timer, 2nd FB cast finishes & gets WG benefits, cast 3rd FB, cast 4th FB, cast IL.

With a little haste, everything past the first FB should take advantage of the WG proc.

That gives 3 FB's that might "reproc" WG before you hit IL. But you will know if the 2nd one has reprocced it, so we are down to 2 casts. At a 10% proc chance, I'd think it would be worth the risk to cast the IL, but I haven't done the math on it yet. Open question: can WG proc when WG is up? Is there a further cooldown on the number of WG procs?

Now, this situation changes if there are multiple frost mages/death knights keeping up WG in the typical doomsday scenario. Then you can expect WG to last and IL casts are lower DPS. Except didn't someone do the theory on 4 mages JUST slinging ice lance? It kept WG up all the time, making IL > FB in this case.

I won't claim it is as dynamic and complicated as the arcane tree is now, but it certainly is more interesting than: FB, FB, FB, ....., FB, trinket, elemental, IV, FB, FB, FB, for hours on end. I'm only sad because I can't see how they are going to fix the broken WG scaling without taking away some of this fun/complexity.

Sinless, out of curiosity, is frost nova lasting the entire duration, or breaking at much higher levels of damage?

Basically, you can always end with an Ice Lance simply because you can release the last Frostbolt that'll fit within the timer and a follow-up Ice Lance simultaneously. So there's never really any reason not to include one Ice Lance in the spell group cast during a freeze proc.

That's a PvE POV, for PvP, you either need Shatter or Ignite+Ice Shards or Imp. Scorch, otherwise the build is crippled. Fire and Frost are also a bit handicapped with only 51 points invested, but you don't need to spend 20 on another tree.

The recent NWP --> MB change made FFB/Frostbolt/Fireball less important I admit, still, AB as a support nuke between ABar casts is not the best one.

Hmmm, well that was my thought too. But I think the post, above, that I was replying to suggested that if WG reprocs, you don't want to have casted an IL and kicked the GCD timer into action for 1.5 seconds. If WG stays up it is better to have started the next FB cast.

Which is why I said I haven't done the math but I think the IL damage is close enough to FB damage (given casting speed/GCD difference) that it is always better to cast the IL as if the WG proc will end in 5 seconds.

I guess to turn your comment into a question: Yes, one should cast IL as a simultaneous follow up to the last FB cast that will fit within the WG timer--but if WG can be refreshed, how do you know when that is?

At least that is what I think the original post was trying to ask.

It got touched on about 15 pages upthread, but I didn't ever see a confirmation. Does Living Bomb have a knockback effect, is it an inscription or is it just vaporware? There are all kinds of rumors flying around about it.