I've seen that happen once in about 30 summons last night. It fixed itself when combat ended, probably just another patch bug.

We tried a quick AQ raid today, but after we wiped at skeram with 28 people and healers blaming their broken ui's for tankdeaths we decided to give it a rest. My 2/46/3 seemed to do considerably more damage than the former 17/31/3 variantI had. Can't say about manaefficiency, but atleast I won dps on the 2 tries at skeram with ease and much wider margin than prepatch. It might also be that people are just trying their new talenttrees and I was probably only one from dps with a pure form of pve-spec.

Molten fury is just sweet, managed to get multiple ~3.8k crits when I hardly got over 3k pre-patch. Together with combustion... We'll, huhuran will die superfast this week, assuming our healers manage get their UI's sorted.

Sacrificed some pve-goodness in favor of pvp-utility later in the evening for the frist time in a long while and got a 0/48/3 with Imp. Fireblast and Dragonbreath and dropped 2 points from Playing with Fire. Unless I'm running to huge mana or aggro-issues, I'm probably going to stick with this till TBC comes. Considering that I hardly used manapotions pre-patch and managed to still top dmg-meter frequently, I'd assume that by spending few pots every now and then will keep me at the top of the dps-chain.

Since I already had rank 12 fireball I decided to go with slow instead of pyroblast and thb it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be. Works nicely against non affliction warlocks, shamans, frost mages, rogues and warriors.

I think it's definately better than Pyroblast/Cold Snap but i really doubt I would take it over Blastwave/Ice Block...

As for using arcane missiles as a nuke in pvp? No way in hell that's going to happen. My scorches/fireblasts/fireballs are still hitting just as hard compared to my old fav build of 21/30. Now they crit for more thanks to spellpower and the dmg on everything else I use (coc, ae) has gone up due to mind mastery.

Ignite/Ice Shards are worth the ten points investment but of course another 10/11 points into those trees would be a great help in the expansion... I miss flamethrowing so much.... not for fireball sniping in av... but for fireblasting and scorching in ab/wsg etc. I'm so use to the extra range on those two spells I've been getting a lot of out of range messages :(

One thing that did surprise me was how much value crit retained in fire builds for those 3-5 minute fights in spite of the ignite change. My +damage is pretty pedestrian (like 530 or so) and each crit is worth roughly 15 +damage, primarily due to Master of Elements, and being mana constrained.

Having seen some of the epic socket gems, I wonder about this going forward, though. Judging by those items, +6 damage seems to be worth the same in item budget as +5 crit rating. At max level, that crit rating is worth maybe .25% chance to crit. I can't envision crit scaling so well as to be worth 24 +damage in any talent builds of any class ... even a mage 32/29/0 spellpower + MoE build. But I may just lack imagination.

From what I've seen, the value of crits are pretty diminished for Fire. I think 10 or 11 damage per crit roughly spells out the same dpm, and maybe 50 more mana per minute.


Fire wrecked the charts. Our prepatch Patch had Fury Warriors and Rogues in the top 8-10 with one lucky Ignite mage. Now our top 10 was mostly Mages, Rogues, and dps Warriors, with one Destro Lock down the middle. Without Water Elemental our Frost mage was 11th. Pyro/4 Scorch rotation gave me a pretty healthy mana pool for the 20% Fireball spam. (6 full ticks of Regen per minute = smiles)

The more +%dmg modifiers, the better Fire does. I think it's like +85% damage at 20% when you have Malediction and Misery.

Ignite currently doesn't stack with itself at all. But even then, Lothab last night had 1-5 all fire mages for us.

Sometimes it doesn't seem to realize that there are enemies around. Just tell it to attack, cast waterbolt, or frost nova (or freeze, if you will) and it'll start working again. Anyone who doesn't instantly do this the second they summon the elemental, regardless of this bug, shouldn't really comment on its efficiency.

I find pet control to be an interesting new aspect to the class, and it's hilarious to see how people react when you ice block next to them while low on health and they just sorta stand there while the elemental beats on them. Took an AB node 4v1 because they attacked me when I blocked and the elemental killed two of them in 10 seconds thanks to previous AoE. It's awesome!

What I do is immediately switch the water elemental to aggressive, the attack and frostbolt commands can be sketchy. You'll occassionally need to tell it to attack when you're frostbolting from max range but thats about it.

I macro'd /petattack in with both Summon Water Elemental and Frostbolt, makes things more convenient.

Does anybody else think that currently your mage is just too one-dimensional in a purely PvP view?? I've now used all 3 41 point talent specs (41/10/0 - 10/41/0 - 0/10/41) and it just seems like we are just such a one trick pony without the extra 10 points to round out our class. Full fire seems to suffer from that the least, but full arcane and full frost really seem gimp in my mind when AP or WE is on cooldown. I'll probably stick with full Arcane for now as I really like Slow, have yet to see it even get dispelled as most people probably aren't even aware of it for the most part. Anyway, just some thoughts.

Really? I'm finding my mage lots of fun with 51 frost. I don't understand why you went 10fire 41 frost, I took a look at arcane and decided clearcasting wasn't worth the 10 points for pvp. Went back and grabbed shatter and elemental precision.

My elemental is almost always there when I need it thanks to coldsnap

Frost was an especially viable pvp build before we had access to the Water Elemental. That's just a bonus for the tree.

And my views could also be slanting by the ass reaming I get from almost every hunter and warlock in PvP right now. As far as frost goes, when my W/E is on cooldown the best that I can say is I'm the last to die. I just think that having the 10 more points to say get Imp. CS would just make for more options and in some ways just leaves me frustrated with the state of the class currently. Maybe I"m just burnt out though, who knows.....

Frost is really the only way to survive in PvP right now, unless you run away the isntant somebody targets you. Affliction warlocks just casually run past you while instant-casting DoTs, priests do the same thing, and hunters - well... silence, and scattershot, and inc-combat trap, and "spammable" feign death, and the new arcane shot makes for a very hard time.

With emp. frostbolt mine (medicore gear) now land for average 1100 at 21% critrate, 31% with winter's chill maxed, not to forget frostbite and shatter proccs. It hurts quite alot for anything that lets me attack it. Add that to the 550 waterbolts and I can honestly say I've not lost a single 1v1 fight yet, and I usually don't have to use the elemental. Haven't fought any good warlocks yet, though.

On a happyer note, the counterspell change has brought me lots of joy these past couple of days. The silly arcane mages that always opened with it to poly still do, but now I can counterspell it before they finish casting if I auto-attack or wand them once. No need to have my PvP trinket equipped ever again!

A lot of classes are having that problem pre 70.

Personally i'm enjoying pvp as full fire.

im not sure about that, ive been playing as 17/31/3 for months and switching to 0/48/3 was just natural progression that only gave me more tools (DB, BZS, impact) and more damage

PVPing... if you have a decent healer around its fine... i dont have the immunity of iceblock but i can get out with a nice DB and BZS is godly versus melee...

The burst damage of a fireball > DB > scorch > fireblast > blastwave is pretty crazy as well :)

I don't have access to a mage at the moment, all I have is a druid which im playing while waiting for TBC so I can roll draenei mage.

I never really understood what happened to ignite recently ( http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/9...iremagexy1.jpg ) with this non-stacking stuff. Is it operating correctly or is it bugged? Some people are saying its stacking but not showing as a stacking debuff, some say its flat out bugged.

Can someone clarify exactly how ignite is currently working?

That's how it works on live atm, don't have any screenshots or anything to prove it, but it's what all the fire mages report in my guild.

It's adding 40% to every crit like it should and won't stack with other mages ignites. Only problem with it is when you crit twice before the first tick you lose damage (bug).

My reactions now with all three 41 point talents since i have used them:

Arcane:

41/0/10

Was meant to be a comedy LOL build, for the 4600 Crits I could get with AP and Zerking. But after using this build in actual pvp I found it can be very viable.

The Missles are absolutely sick now. they do about 460 dmg non AP and 600 with AP. They can crit for well over a thousand. I have clips of me critting with each missle for 1500 damage with Zerking and AP. AOE also is extremley fun with the Spell Power buff. Nothing like running in and hitting ppl for 800 damage crits and about 1000 damage with AP up.

Slow on the other hand is very hit and miss. Its nice to run away with, and to stop ppl from running away on mounts, but when you actually fight someone one on on its means little unless you are fighting a rogue or warrior it seems. There are occasional moments where it warants use on other classes.

The Defining thing of this tree is Empowered AM's With AP. Slow is very nice to have but meh.

Fire:

0/51/0

This build is fantastic. I went an entire PVP build this time around with fire. Dragons Breath Rocks it allows for what I could almost consider a POM on a 30s cooldown. One cool thing about this build is blazing speed. I find it to be useful about 50% of the time it procs. Half the time it procs i get another debuff on me to slow me down again. Keeping my PVP trinket available fixes that. Otherwise Im puprosely right atop of the target blasting him. If you get the first cast as a fire mage with him in a sheep or whatever, there is no reason why you should ever lose to your opponent. You can do a sick combo of Fireball -> Scorch -> fireblast -> Dragons Breath -> scorch -> Blast Wave -> fireblast. Your opponent can get off 2 instant cast spells in the series of those spells being cast. It is absolutely sick. Unfortunatley its always hard to get the first spell on every class ideally. Survivavlity is brutal though with fire if I am not paying attention. You can easily be killed by hunters, they are the most annoying thing now. Although I can take them down easily in duels, im usually at 300 HP at the end of it. Warlocks the other problem, but strangely I dont think they are any harder then they used to be before. I really don't have the issues everyone else is having against them. I still fear Demonology felguards more then doomguards though. Because of the immense populrity of the doomguard I need to get about another 50ish -resistance gear now. Warriors are even more of a joke now then before. See combo above. Sheeping them is always a synch.

Hightlight: Firemage is the mage that dosen't have the rely on 3 min+ cooldowns, but extremley low survivability.


Frost:

9/0/52 I thought I had 10 more talent points :-/ and kinda messed up.

Water Elemental is awesome. Getting the damn thing to work right though is another problem. I finally figured out the macro to get him to attack things and haven't had a problem really since, but im still losing potential damage with him due to not use to controlling a pet.
Ice Block + Water Elemental is pure LOL. Guys will look at you while your WE is beating on them for 1/2 their HP, then you easily burn them down. A bug I noticed with WE is casting WE, Cold Snap, then WE again right away. This mages the WE's Par grey and unresponsive. Course you would never do this practically.

Frost is really the only way to go to stay alive now in PVP unless you are good at burning everyone down in 3 seconds. Damage in 2.0 is sick and won't be corrected until we get the satm buff from Expansion.

I would like to correct myself here. After testing it tonight, I've found that it, in fact, sometimes just... doesn't do anything. At times when I summon it, it just refuses to obey any commands at all, exept for using its frost nova. At first I though it was just my various macros that didn't work, but after having it fail to do anything even after heavy manual spam of the attack, waterbolt and aggressive stance buttons (with no mods installed) it kinda dawned on me that Tweak's right. Even in aggressive stance it just stands there doing nothing, in combat it stops following me unless I move 15 - 20 yards away from it.

Had it happen 7 - 8 times (out of maybe 20) while soloing my way through BRM for kicks, and it is extremely annoying. Sometimes it would snap out of it after I had it cast the nova, other times it would just stand there looking stupid untill it expired.

I just tried summoning it a bunch of times in a row, and telling it to attack things in the distance. Most of the time it obeys, other times it doesn't react at all - and if I then go into combat it doesn't do anything.

EDIT: Heh, just discovered that if you cold snap to summon it a second time while it's still alive and is incapacitated, you can't command the new one :S

on PTR I had it completely bugged out trying to do a frostnova and it got banished, resulted in me not being able to do ANYTHING but move around. I wonder if that bug is still in.

Edit in response to the fire mage not relying on 3 min cooldown: I agree that it doesn't rely on timers obviously, but I really don't think arcane relys on pom ap etc anymore. It packs a mean fucking punch already w/o it, my normal AM waves crits for 1k fireball crits for 2700 and frostbolt hits for 1200, granted they dont get speed decreasers with my spec, but it hasnt been a problem so far - not to forget that scorch crits for 1k+. I really don't find slow that bad, its amazing for catching runners, fucking up shamans and warlocks and the -> slow -> poly someone mounted combo is really nice.

Oh and, 6 and 8 set FF procs from each wave ;)