I think Invis is awesome. Threat sensitive fight? 6 seconds of invis at 70-80% and going all out for the rest of the fight is a dps improvement. It's a tool we didn't have before, and it feels good to have it.

That and avoiding wipes in 5mans and feeling like a hunter or rogue is awesome, and getting your Steam Vaults 2nd key fragment without killing a single mob is pretty nifty as well.

The problem is there aren't very many Molten Chore style fights any more, where you fight big dudes that your little tank stands in front of while 39 other people either heal the tank or kill the boss. Now, I LOVE invisibility, but you have to use it properly. As was previously stated: Use it around 60%, then go completely balls-out the rest of the fight. This fits in very well with previous comments regarding the Arcane specs -- it's very easy to convert your mana to damage quickly, especially when you have much less to worry about in terms of threat.

Threat sensitive encounters with AOE makes invis a much less valuable addition to mages.

Invis is an great spell, and you can invis, ice block, remove block 1 second before invis to safetly get a threat wipe.

How can you get the the Karazhan key fragment without killing a mob? Sure you can invis/stealth pot to the water to get to the fragment chest, but since 2.0.7 a 20,000 health guardian comes out (and you have to kill it to get the fragment).

Whilst I appreciate being told where my posts belong, just because someone calls an ability severely under-powered does not mean their post is automatically rubbish...

Invisibility *is* an extremely poor ability. Once you start raiding, I can think of no reason beyond the fail rate on Soulshatter where I would prefer invisibility over it. the fact that a segment of mages, if they time it right, can iceblock and invis for a full threat wipe doesn't solve the problem with invisibility - it just re-iterates how great a talent Iceblock is.

-50% threat once per boss fight is more than enough threat mitigation for any raiding mage. I honestly cannot think of any fight where I could overaggro after using that ability. Even old school firemaw. Therefore, the added advantages of invisibilities full threat wipe don't seem important, and given that you can't do any of the other cool tricks with a fade like hunters can (swap trinkets, eat / drink), and the extremely dis-advantageous fading effects and speed of invisibility makes me again say that this spell needs a further pass over it to be useful. It shouldn't be an instant, automatic get out of jail card, but neither should it be one which is completely useless as a reactive tool and severely limited on most fights as a pro-active tool.

(And if it isn't intended to be used reactively when you get aggro - why does it have the - to threat component on the fade ability at all? Clearly, this is suppossed to have *some* effect otherwise it wouldn't be there, and at the moment it just seems like the numbers assigned to the spell are too low. Bump those up and you'd solve a lot of complaints. Fading for 5 seconds shouldn't just give you -40% threat).

I suppose that we will just have to accept that the mage class is not supposed to have a Feign Death-alike reactive threat drop; mages always had to be careful about threat management, and we will continue to have to do so. As it stands, Invisibility is mostly a utility spell with limited usefulness, but every class has a few of those kind of spells. Nothing too worrisome, in my opinion.

On an entirely different subject: Is anyone else a little annoyed at the fact that the Arcane Blast debuff is considered a magical effect, and therefore is cleansable?

Personally, I can't think of a situation where I'd want the debuff cleansed, or when the mana used to cleanse it would be well-spent. I think that this is a somewhat serious design oversight, because right now, it increases the chance of dispelling the wrong malevolent magical effect off a mage for dispelling classes quite alot.

In my opinion, the Arcane Blast debuff should only serve as an indicator of how many stacks of Arcane Blast have been built up, what the current mana cost and casting time is, but not have a (very) possible deadly effect of not being cleansed of a magical debuff in time.

I did not know that. Well you used to be able to use it for that

Invis is a neat spell when used proactively, and there's no point in comparing it to soul shatter because they're used differently. Just because they both do damage doesn't mean I can compare evis and fireball. And not all classes need a reactive threat wipe. Where are the shamans/moonkins threat wipe? Invis is a tool we have. Try not to get into the grass is greener mentality.

That's there so that if it gets interrupted by an AoE effect you still get <i>some</i> benefit from it rather than wasting the cooldown for nothing. It looks like the numbers have been carefully tuned to make sure you get a useful amount of threat reduction while not being able to use it as a reactive ability after you pull aggro.

I don't know any fight that has AoE ticks more often than every two seconds - so you're looking at a minimum 10-20% aggro reduction unless you just get unlucky. Now, since aggro reduction translates *directly* into being able to do that much more damage over the fight without pulling aggro (assuming you're limited on threat rather than your potential damage output), that's enough to give you 10%-20% more damage over the course of the fight. That's the difference between 5th on the damage meters and first.

Hmm. I made my Spellfire Belt and decided to try out a 40/21 build, and found it rather... underwhelming. Certainly more DPS than my previous 10/0/51, but a combination of my 400-500 latency (+human delay) and a general dislike of Fire specs made it just not very fun. I've since changed to 40/0/21, and I'm really enjoying it... though I think I'll drop Piercing Ice and get 1 Imp Blizzard and 2 Arctic Reach.

And a question. Do any of the spreadsheets floating around allow you to input your latency for spell cycles? I'm interested in generating numbers and a simple graph

Could try what I do. Get an addon to show the precise casting time of spells.

macro:
/stopcasting
/cast Fireball(Rank 13)

With .6-.5sec left on fireball I press that and the result is 3-3.3sec fireballs with 400ish ping. Been doing it for years now, works great.

The game really needs some type of one spell deep queue system.

The only time I've been able to reproduce what you've stated here is if I had some minor lag spike while running away to fade out and "still be moving" when I use Invisibility. It cancels the fade immediatly for seemingly no reason.