[Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion
 

The thread WoLK Stuff has recently linked to several post at World of Raids and World of Ming that list out the new abilities / spells that have been data mined from the recent F&A patch that was up on the community site for a few hours. It seems that most people believe these are real, but the chance of fake info being slipped in is there. I would like to discuss specifically the mage parts and the hopefully change of the way the class is played and viewed.

We all know that the vast majority of the new talents / spells will change, but I still find it amazing to look at whats possible.

Here is what is being reported / found / faked? so far for mages:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Arcane Barrage - "Launches several missiles at the enemy target, causing $s1 Arcane damage."
* Burnout - Increases your spell critical damage bonus with all Fire spells by $s1% but every time you critical with a Fire spell you lose an additional $44450s1% of your total mana.
* Living Bomb - The caster becomes a living bomb, causing $44459s1 Fire damage to all enemies within $44459a1 yards every $44457t1 sec. After $44457t2 sec, a fiery explosion occurs causing an additional $44461s1 Fire damage to all enemies within $44461a1 yards.
* Chilled to the Bone - Increases the damage caused by your Frostbolt and Ice Lance spells by $s1% and reduces the movement speed of all chilled targets by an additional $s2%.
* Deep Freeze - Stuns the target for $d. Only usable on Frozen targets.
* New food = sweet potato pie and strudles
* Explosive Fireball - "Breathes a ball of fire at an enemy, dealing $s1 Fire damage. The ball explodes on impact, sending burning fragments at enemies within $50235a1 yards of the target. Each fragment deals $50235s1 Fire damage."
* Frostfire Bolt - "Launches a bolt of frostfire at the enemy, causing $s2 Fire damage, slowing movement speed by $s1% and causing an additional $o3 Fire damage over $d. If the target is more vulnerable to Frost damage, this spell will cause Frost instead of Fire damage. Movement slowed by $s1%. $s3 Fire damage every $t3 sec."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's extremely hard to tell the real value of most of these abilities because of the code in place. From a top level view, I'm extremely excited about these. Arcane Barrage could be the fix to Arcane missiles that arcane mages have wanted forever. Burnout would the mana dump that fire mages have wanted. Living bomb looks like a cast and forget AoE spell that looks fun as hell to boot. Explosive Fireball yet another bump to our AoE. And Frostfire bolt could ease the problematic nature of resist / immune fights that mages have had to deal with. Deep freeze looks like a great pvp addition.

If this post is not allowed, or just not needed, feel free to delete :)


Edit/ Update with Lhivera pile of info (source post: post784316: )

D&D anyone?

Too many of these talents feel like they were implemented to improve the non-Frost PVP aspect of the mage. Burnout looks good at first, but the % of the mana lost will make or break this talent. Even at 1%, this will be excessive. Fire mages may not have mana problems, but that isn't to say we are flooding with it (I am assuming Shadow Priest, Elemental Shammy, and no Innervate, as this is my common setup). If it is 1%, I am gone 35-45% of my mana pool in a fight.

Now, granted these would be for lvl 80ish players, but if these talents are opened up before the release of WotLK (as they were in TBC), taking this talent would mean sacrificing dps consumables for more mana regen. I would definitely be OOM with 40% of my mana lost. One could say that the extra damage being done will make up for this, but without knowing the exact values, I guess we can only speculate.

Also, these are in the Alpha stage, so we should take them with a grain of salt. God knows what mages would be like if the early mage of WoW remained today.

edit: of course, with a well-timed Evocate, my mana pool would be okay, but again, the crit damage increase will determine whether or not the sacrifice of dps consumables and Evocate time makes it a dps increase.

When I heard about burnout, my first thought was maybe its a sutble nudge to give us a desire to want and actually appreciate spirit on our gear. We're going to want that talent that increases our crits - of course we will - and what will we need to help counter it? Spirit = extra regen. I wouldnt pass final judgement on this talent until we see any finalised details on 'the new spirit' mechanics that have been promised for so long..

Without substantial in-combat regen (from something other than arcane) I doubt that'll happen. At best it'll just mean more mages using gems/pots/evo rather than flame caps/destro/no-evo again, if the balance is just right. Which I'm fine with, to be honest.

But that seems to be edging us back towards the train of thought that spirit regen is 'essential' for a mage. Yes I know it is for arcane mages and I am not disputing the fact that it is a welcome addition, but if fire mages were to -NEED- spirit as well, that would mean that we would be almost forced to use our mage armor/arcane meditation again, to me that looks like we would just be pigeonholed into only a few viable specs and nothing else. Right now its nice because we've got a few viable specs for PvE, 2/48/11, 40/0/21, 0/40/21 and the list goes on. If we were to NEED 18 points in arcane to get up to the arcane meditation to stay competitive, well that would cut down on a few of the options to say the least.

That being said, it could go the other way and this would be another way of opening up yet another way to spec that is competitive with everything else, if its balanced right and speccing 18/51/2 (random numbers Im throwing in showing what might become a popular spec) is pretty much on par in many scenarios with 2/58/11 and so on, I think it would be nice having a few options to choose from for each of our playstyles. I guess in my opinion, it would depend on how balanced the new talents are I guess, hopefully blizzard sees how tricky of a balancing act this could be, making burnout
a good but not overpowered talent in its own right and then make the other talent trees balanced as well so that we dont have our hands forced in any direction.

The problem I see with burnout is that it might become a joke talent that doesn't scale with gear.
A flat % gain in crit chance is hardly worth a flat % decrease in mana every time you crit. They should just change it to a flat mana cost.

I put together a mage WotLK talent tree based on the available info - WotLK FF Alpha Mage Talents

Sources:
Wotlk Wiki Leaks
http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/talentlist.php
WotLK FF Alpha spell.dbc file - Don't have a link as they get removed frequently.

I hope to be updating this frequently.

NOTE: Changes to Arcane Focus, Magic attunement, and Prismatic cloak. Some values are best guess, as I don't have much experience reading dbc files.

Well, it says that it's an increase in your crit bonus--that is, you deal more damage on a crit.

It's nice to speculate, but we can imagine all of these abilities undergoing major tweaks--if not outright removal--before the expansion actually goes live.

I think it's almost certain mages will want and appreciate spirit on gear, from more than just this "little nudge" (compensating for Burnout). The most shocking talent description in these leaked lists, from a current (2.4.2) caster standpoint, is the warlock talent increasing spirit. This would be widely derided in game right now, and I'm sure it will be useful in 3.0.

Interesting moonkin changes:

Improved Moonkin Aura(3/3) - Your Moonkin Aura also causes affected targets to have a 100% chance to gain $50172s1% spell haste when they critically hit with spells for $48394d. This effect cannot occur more than once every few seconds.

Improved Faerie Fire(3/3) - Your Faerie Fire spell also increases the chance the target will be hit by melee, ranged and spell attacks by 1/2/3%.

Nature's Fury(5/5) - Converts 20% of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Wrath and Starfire spells have a $h% 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 2/4/6/8/10%. Lasts $48509d. Stacks up to 3 times.

Now you'll have to take a boomkin to a raid. :)

Goedel, I take your point to mean that spirit on a warlock, of all classes, is finally worthwhile. Granting that, I'll note that shadow priests also get Dark Spirit - straight up "spirit = damage" boost. I'm sure I saw at least one other spirit-damage talent in one of the trees. (Arcane mages also can spec for more spirit.)

Spirit in general seems to be getting heaps of new attention.

The talents from the link above show it as 4/8/12/16/20% healing->damage and a flat 2% on the damage buff, both of which make a lot more sense.

Frostfire Bolt scares me a little bit. The proper fix to this business of fire and frost immune mobs is to stop making them that way. If Frostfire Bolt isn't intended to be a primary nuke, then the question becomes will it be an excuse for lots of new immunities in boss fights, based on the premise "Well you have this Frostfire spell you can cast, you'll be ok!"

Of course, the fact that fire and frost immune mobs screw over large sections of the mage class has never stopped Blizzard from putting in those mobs anyway, so whatever.

I like the group synergies they're building on, especially with moonkins, so I'm really hoping they pull out a few mage ones to give us a reason to have our group spots. I'd take a rogue-like bump up in dps above other casters, but that's a bit boring.

On the mage talents, I'm confused at the addition to Prismatic Cloak in reducing invis time to 1 sec (fully talented). If anything this should be a deep fire talent, since that's the only spec that can honestly claim to have threat issues, or maybe it should be an EP-like valuable low tier talent. 27 points into arcane doesn't make any sense, unless they were just looking for a place to stick it in. That's a big change to arcane focus too, given the current divergence of gear we're seeing at the moment between deep fire/frost and arc/frost. Requiring spell hit like elemental builds pushes them together again. Maybe with the intention of making it easier to design tier sets that suit everyone?

My initial thought on Burnout was ooh, another cooldown to use, but it kind of sucks as a talent. It clashes with MoE for a start, and is there any other talent that adds a negative effect on to crit? Unless it's intended to be a haste-like way of forcing you to spend more mana as your gear improves. Tied in with imp moonkin aura haste effect this could be a big drain on mana.

Hot Streak seems very RNG dependent, in a bad way. The night you get that lucky 45% crit rate the effects will be amplified and the night you get that horrible 20% you'll have wasted a few talent points.

I'm not going to worry too much yet until these get confirmed properly though. Long time to wait still.