Just because you personally are happy with each class having exactly one viable spec does not mean most other people are. Hopefully you understand WHY many people desire more than one viable spec--otherwise, what is the point of the talent system in the first place?

There's no reason why frost *must* do less dps than fire. If certain mechanics basically don't exist on bosses, then ways to compensate can be introduced, such as the original intention of the Fingers of Frost talent. Basically, hey, you can't actually freeze the boss in place because that would be OP, but we'll throw you a bone and at least let you Shatter them! The glyph of frostbolt as well, as much as it may miss the point on the bottom line, functionally trades frost's other strengths to pure damage to help situations where the other strengths become less meaningful (or entirely pointless) anyway.

Frost DOES do less dps than Fire right now. No one contests that. What we're contesting is your assertion that it SHOULD, or even that it's okay that way, because "all we need is one spec." Especially if you DO make all the tradeoffs, choose dps talents over survivability ones, choose the glyph of frostbolt to eliminate your snare, and so on, then the dps difference should be made up for, whereas right now even WITH all those caveats, Frost remains about three times further behind Fire than it was at the end of TBC! I'd rather talents mean something, rather than just having "PvE mode" and "PvP mode" and both are set in stone with no real choice in the matter at all. Right now the state of mage talents is, "What type of content are you performing in?" and based on the answer you insert cookie-cutter-spec-n.

However it's extremely difficult to balance a tree with very good PvP functionality to also be just as good as another tree without that functionality for damage. If Fire and Frost were doing the same damage in raids, they will also be doing the same damage in arenas whereas frost will also have many added benefits in arenas - so again, imbalance will be created. I myself have zero interest in PvP whatsoever, yet it is important to understand this.

And you can really only fix this issue by inflating the trees, adding many PvE and PvP-oriented talents so that you can freely create pvp or pve builds in either tree. That is not likely to happen.

It's a delicate issue if you ask me. I agree that having frost do slightly less dps than fire and arcane undermines the idea of spec diversity, but having them do equal dps does the same. My point is that if you allow frost to do equal dps you will make the other two specs exctinct as no sane raid leader will ever bring a fire or arcane mage to fights where survivability matters. Just like noone will bring a frostmage to patchwerk if frost always does noticeably less dps.

The only explanation is that the three specs have different advantages on top of doing equal dps, which will help offset the creation of one cookie cutter spec. Arcane, as far as I know, does lots of dps when in motion and has the option of doing very bursty dps. Fire has solid aoe dps, with a few gimmicks to it, while frost has better defense.

If these distinctions inside the trees, while doing the same dps, is the reason for frost being allowed to do the same dps then yeah I agree. If these distinctions are insignificant and not meant to offset spec balance in any way, then I don't agree that frost should be at the same dps level.

I'm looking out for my spec just as much as you do, speccing should not be a given as it's traditionally been.

The problem with this is that fire doesn't currently have superior AoE. Improved Blizzard - now able to crit as well - is massive AoE DPS with a ridiculously powerful snare to boot. Compare to living bomb which will often explode only once per AoE pull; or DB/BW which are really just PvP/defensive abilities and have no real place in raid AoE under ideal situations. I agree with the point of your post - if frost is to have equal DPS than the other specs need a non-DPS niché that is as potent as frost's defensive niché. The problem is that fire isn't even close to this right now. Arcane is close with its extremely stable, reliable DPS under stress (low threat, mobile, ample mana). Fire only has its DPS currently and if thats not unique to fire it effectively has nothing.

To sum up: fire getting a unique identity is equally as important as frost being able to match fire DPS. the concern for the fire mages seems to be that blizzard have shown no interest in giving fire an identity.

With the way fire spec crit is looking currently, was thinking of dusting off my [Ashtongue Talisman of Insight] for a play.
The other thing I am having to bear in mind is that Blizzard have traditionally done a lot of the final DPS balancing well into live, so to a degree it's not so much someone moving the goal posts as potentially putting them on a truck.

Well put Jonnymoe, unique identities are a must if we want specs to be more than just color of the nuke. However, I realized (yes I'm quite slow) after posting that no matter how it's designed there will never be a perfect spec for all encounters. The styles and spells of the different specs are highly dependant on encounter design, not just the talent trees.

To sum up my feelings towards this: Sure, normalize the dps of the trees as much as possible, but make sure every tree has a identy, or niché if you will, which isn't necessarily tied to single target dps. They still need to be careful with the frost tree as it has the potential to be the ideal choice for the vast majority of encounters.

Not when it is 30% less DPS. Thats far from 'delicate' from a frost PvE perspective.

I don't believe there is a strong lack of identity in the trees anymore. Fire has a lot of extremely useful PvP talents - from blazing speed, through to instant flamestrikes and the knock back on blastwave, and instant pyros on the move. Its PvE is unquestionably solid. Arcane is reasonably well defined in its talents too now.

I have unanswered questions that are a little more delicate - such as why empowered frostbolt doesnt effect frostfirebolt, why flamestrike appears to get left in the dirt behind blizzard, and why arcane is still reliant on a secondary tree nuke based almost entirely on the spell impact talent. But one of the not-so-delicate questions is why you cant raid as frost without suffering a huge DPS loss, even without the taking of PvP talents.

Sure, frost has the snares and the defensive abilities - but as is posted earlier.. that shouldnt prohibit it from having a viable raid spec. I'm just holding a candle to lhivera's belief that internally somewhere, frost is doing 4500dps alongside fire (or is within a few %). It does however come with some difficulty, if anyone remembers the infamous 'zomg damage' Tigole mage post.

As much as I'd like to go on and on about these points - at some stage the discussion becomes moot alongside the introduction of the duel-spec system. The ground upon which you stand asking for 'multiple' raidworthy talent builds becomes very small. The duel-spec system is a great way of solving the problem of somehow trying to balance all parts of the game at once - and still keeping people reasonably happy.

Which is easier? Balancing multiple specs to be equal amongst the myriad variables, or simply giving people easy access to a raid-spec alongside something they'd prefer to play for the non-progression time in their game?

My desire is for specs not to just have 'identity' but.. for all specs to have an interesting playstyle. No spec should be 'single button', and at the moment frost vs a raid boss is almost exactly that - but I dont think anyone would argue that frost lacks 'identity'.

The people defending frost's right to do equal dps to fire are saying that if you sacrifice every survivability/defense talent for damage as a frost specced mage you should be able to do equal dps to a fire mage. Those contending that frost should not do equal dps because it has said survivability are ignoring the sacrifice.

However, there is no sacrifice when you can get every relevant single target dps talent in a frost spec with only 53 points. A frost mage 18 points to max out his survivability, go into another tree, or do both, and there are no meaningful talents in the other trees to make that choice a difficult one. If a fire mage wants to max out his aoe talents he has to choose between doing that and maxing out his mana regen and damage. If an arcane mage wants to max out his utility talents, he chooses between that and his filler's damage and mana efficiency. Frost takes no major benefit from the lower tier talents in either remaining tree.

A major contributor to this situation is the fact that we are in the same place with mana as we've been all through TBC: it's non-limiting. ESPECIALLY for frost (and now arcane with the ab nerfs), which lacks any way to get rid of the inevitable excess mana. Naturally, of the 18 leftover points a frost mage can spend, 11/18 arcane talents a min/maxer would take are mana cost reduction or regen talents with no damage alternative. Of the 35 points in the 4 lowest tiers of fire, only 5 would be even remotely useful to a min/max'ing frost mage, and only then if he uses Frostfire Bolts on Fingers of Frost procs. And 3 more points of mana cost reduction.

Contrast that with fire min/maxer who is practically forced to go into Arcane or frost for damage increases. Or the arcane mage who is literally forced to go into frost or fire for damage increases. Or the frostfire mage who is forced to go into frost for huge damage increases.

Because the mana issue is consistently ignored, frost is able to have its cake and eat it too, and indeed has no viable pie alternative. I hate to come full circle to an age-old discussion, but mana really is a broken system. They've known about it for as long as ignite, and ignite is still broken. Does not bode well.

Edited for length, clarity, and coherence.

The problem with all of those fire abilities you've listed is that they're pretty much PvP only. Blazing speed isn't going to save any lives in PvE, whereas a shorter cooldown ice block alongside coldsnap as well certainly can save lives, and often. Frost's snares and stuns are invaluable on difficult trash, whilst blastwave just makes tanking harder. Instant flamestrikes proc off abilities that you really shouldn't be using in an ideal PvE situation.

I really like where frost and arcane are right now in terms of identity. I agree entirely that frost needs to be able to DPS on par with arcane and fire, but people arguing for more frost DPS right now are skirting the issue of fire's non-DPS functionality being far worse than either of the other trees (by more than 30%, I might add).

Oh, and I agree that frostbolt spam is boring. Arcane rotations are great fun right now by comparison even if they are bugged and costing arcane 3% of its potential crit chance.

Not sure if this is the right place but with people having tested stuff (light the cloak thread) could anyone comment on what the best professions will now be for a mage in terms of maximising dmg? Enchanting/Tailoring/Inscription?

There's very little difference between them (with the exception of tailoring which is looking disappointingly bad). I'm sticking to Jewelcrafting myself.

I may have missed something but can find no confirmation yet as to any reduction/ changes to mana cost of spells posted by Ghostcrawler:

source: Upcoming Mage changes

In fact a quick look on the same thread appears to indicate an increase in fireball mana cost not a reduction? (post 172) Maybe a higher level of rank Fireball?. This was from WotLK Beta Mage Forum so perhaps only relates to this, but seemed to imply change would come with 3.0.x. Could someone please confirm mana costs of spells in 3.0.2 on live. Thanks (not live yet here in Europe)

There are more patches coming. The build you'll see when you logon tonight is lacking alot of stuff "promised" to many classes. And I'm pretty sure that the mana cost reduction hasn't made it in either.

Ghostcrawler talked about dual-specs extensively in this General Forums topic, but this particular bit caught my attention: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> The restrictions "dual-spec" needs to succeed

Does this perhaps explain what he said earlier about dual-specs' utility for pure DPS classes?

The WotLK profession thread

Has anyone had a chance to test our the new pushback mechanics. I notice a good 90% of the 3.02 fire specs (11/50, 10/51, 50/11) all skip out on 2/2 Burning Soul. However when reading a couple pages back Manly stated he wouldnt be caught raiding without it. So has anyone tried both 0/2 and 2/2 BS and noticed a difference?

I have noticed a few things in playing around with the new version of Rawr.mage that I think bear mentioning.

First, people are talking about how good blizzard is now, saying that it blows flamestrike out of the water, even for a deep fire mage. Don't get me wrong, I love the new blizzard, and will probably use it as my primary AoE spell due to its amazing mana efficiency (less than half the mps of the alternatives) and much-better-than-before damage. However, according to Rawr, using my current gear (BT/SWP) and an 11/50/0 spec, spammed flamestrike is still doing something like 40% higher DPS than blizzard. That is assuming that both spells are hitting the same number of targets, which I know can be problematic with flamestrike. I fail to see how blizzard is now blowing flamestrike out of the water for a deep fire mage.

Second, in Rawr's details of the DPS done by each spell, it lists an Amplify factor. Then I noticed that Roy used Amplify Magic in his water elemental tests. Is Amplify Magic now a raid debuff that increases magical damage taken by a hostile target? The tooltip wording has not changed, implying that it is a buff for friendly players, although I know tooltips can be very inaccurate. If it is now a debuff, when did that change?

edit: On the subject of AoE spells, does anyone know how the DPS from weaving flamestrike and blizzard would compare with spammed flamestrike? Again, assuming that the mobs are bunched tight enough for flamestrike to hit them all.

Yes there is. Theres more to the game than single-target boss dps. Do you believe the sole use for a car is to go as high as possible in a straight line ? (and alternatively, how fast you can do 0-60 and 0-100 will come into play in some contexts.) My definition of using a car very much includes stuff outside of that. Being able to handle well curves, having a good transmission will come into play at some point.

You want to tell me that if frost had absolutely no survivability talent that it should have similar dps ? Well, sure. But thats just half the picture. You have to draw a scenario. Problem is, even if it has all dps talents, the fact is mana consumption will differ, as well as burst dps. Nothing beats deep frost dps with 100% WE uptime.

As I said earlier, frost does less only in long fights. As you conveniently forgot, the 30% hp redux (in addition to new talents) should make the fights very considerably faster (my own estimate is near half the kill time), this should give a strong lead to frost spec as the best spec for most of sunwell. Except in fights where the elemental dies of course. Point being, all other things being equal, if you make frost single target dps equal to fire then you in fact just make frost the only viable spec since it better handles 'short' duration fights (read: 3 min or less in particular). Of course, I'm ignoring here the mana regen utility.

[edit: I just confirmed, much like my expectation, kill times for sunwell has been more than reduced in half for competent guilds. We're talking 2min brut kills. That makes frost a lot better than anything else]

First, 30% is heavily dependant upon context. For the most part I'd call bullshit. But anyway;

History has taught us that they don't 'fix' broken spells, instead they replace them. I was never really expecting blizzard to make flamestrike good much in the same way that blizzard never made rain of fire the defacto warlock aoe spell, or tried to fix hellfire to make it good; instead they made seed of corruption. I think Living Bomb was originally designed for that reason, but it fell rather flat down the line.

Sorry to take this out of context, but has the hypothesis that "Torment of the Weak applies to bosses afflicted with slow" been substantiated or debunked in 3.0.2?

If Torment applies to bosses, then any spec lacking Torment of the Weak is inferior to some other spec that takes it (i.e., all PVE raiding specs have a minimum of 18 points in arcane).

I'm seriously hoping (along with many mages) for "debunked", and I apologize if I've missed it in this thread.

While I was testing (58/3/0) last night I was pulling anywhere from 1200 - 1400+ with the arcane spec which was sorta what I expected with the lag. Once that lag monster comes under control and people get used to pushing more than one button for the spec, Arcane will start to fall back in line. No I am not saying it will be the best or anything like that but it will be competitive. I think Quartz or some casting bar will be a must for Arcane to keep rotations in line. That fire OOM thing was shocking to me while I cast with some fire mages to see them sit and drink before me....must say that was a first.

Manly what spec are you using? I notice it says 0/0/0 on your armory.

The 3.0.2 install decided to nuke my wow install. I had to reinstall wow entirely. Took several hours. By the time it got finished in the wee hours of the morning, I loaded it up and then all my mods decided to make my life hard. End result, I couldn't see any chat, EBB is non functional (ugh seriously, I used that mod so much), bartender blew up, and countless other stuff. I didn't get to play at all.

I was planning on 11/50/0, but mostly as a byproduct of my gear; I'm at like 230 hit rating using my best set (I'd never use that, but if there was no hit cap thats the gear I'd use). Nothing really special about it, except maybe that I disagree with the rationale that world in flames should be prioritized over burning soul, flame throwing, dragon's breath or blastwave. I do value the utility of those talents, and I think the dps returns of WIF do not justify losing utility for such a meager increase. But in any case, if you wanted top dps, I'd propose anyone to go frost.