That dagger is of item level 200 - the same as heroic blues and PvP honour items.

You can get Kirin Tor revered the day after you hit 80. Complete some 78+ instances while you level and 5-8 heroics at 80 and you should be there.
It should be your first reputation and pursued until revered for [Arcanum of Burning Mysteries] anyway.

Here's a list of all level 80 caster one-handers for mages:
Weapons - Items - World of Warcraft
The PvP blue requires Arena Points (which get erased at 71, so you need 2 Arena resets for it unless you get a good rating in 1 week), the Netherbreath Spellblade drops from Herioc Utgarde Pinnacle (Skadi).
No clue about the Cursed Lich Blade, the Jeweled Coronation Sword is from Normal Mode Utgarde Pinnacle and lower level.
All the lsited epics are from raids, the are no epic herioc mage one-handers from end bosses. A mace from Nexus and a staff from Oculus though.

So, the Kirin Tor sword is one of the first things you'll get after you 80. The haste cloak at honoured is good too.
Other long-lasting drops are [Forge Ember] from Herioc Halls of Stone or [Tome of Arcane Phenomena] from Normal Oculus.
So watch for these instances in particular when getting the Kirin Tor reputation via Tabard Championing.

Don't think this has been mentioned before, but if a frostbolt procs a FoF refresh and is also consuming the 2nd charge of a FoF, then the FoF refresh will be consumed immediately.

Something like this:

You cast Frostbolt
You gain FoF
You cast Frostbolt1
You cast Frostbolt2
FoF is refreshed on you
FoF fades from you

This problem does not occur if Frostbolt1 refreshes FoF, presumably because it will not call for the expiration of the original FoF (consumes 1st charge), only a FoF refresh from Frostbolt2 causes this.
Frost's very own version of ignite munching?

I can confirm this was hapenning to me today. I was watching things trying to work out what youve stated between frostbolt1 and frostbolt2, because I was having a little trouble keeping count of how many FoF charges I had.

I can be quite frustrating - and is most easily noticed when you frostbolt someone, proccing frostbite, but are left with no FoF charges to play with.

Of note to PvP mages, on live today (build 9056) I observed a spell miss in a duel with 8.88% +hit

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...s/misswhaa.jpg

I wasn't /combatlogging at the time, so I cant confirm that it was actually a miss miss from the arguments to the log, but the combat log filter on screen said it was a miss, not a resist. Have we confirmed recently that the 1% miss chance is still gone? and or, did we ever actually confirm it was gone from PvP?

Edit: Upon further reflection, maybe Blastwave has the same double-resist issue that Frostbolt was observed to have?

Can't tell from your screenshot and my lac kof druid items' apperance, but if that's a moonkin it could've been the extra 4% miss from Balance of Power that made it happen - it'd be a [5% base +4% -8.88%]= 0.12% chance* if I'm not mistaken, but that's how the RNG works.

God knows, I've had tons of misses in PvP in my PvE/PvP gear with 7.65% hit, even when not counting stuff like imp. blink or cloak of shadows.

On the note of AoE, I am still irritated that even with fully talented blizzard hitting every single hittable mob during the MH waves yesterday, doing 6.6k DPs with ease, I was still being outdmaged by the likes of destruction warlocks just spamming totally untalanted seeds of corruption. I was far ahead of our fire mage since he couldn't hit all the mobs, but the warlocks just stood there chaincasting SoC outdamaging his many, many talent points invested into purely buffing his AoEs.

*[e] The base resit is 4% not 5%, sorry.

Balance of Power - Spell - World of Warcraft can be 4% miss for a Balance Druid. Only gets you to 8% miss though, not past 8.88%.
The double penalty for former binary spells might be a reason, Mark of the Wild is up in the screeny.

If Mark of the Wild causes actualy misses (full resists), those resistance-induced missed cannot be removed by spell hit, only by spell penetration. As far as I know.


Stupid Things to do with Focus Magic

Normally, you cast FM on a party player, they crit with a heal or offensive spell, and you get a 10s buff for 3% crit.

Now, cast FM on someone and duel them:
The proc is a 10s Magic DEBUFF now on the hostile player.
If you have 71+ Mage Armour on, it will only last 5 seconds.

The hell?


Mage Armour

Doesn't reduce channeling time or ticks of Mind Flay nor Drain Soul.
It does reduce the channeling time of Drain Life and Drain Mana though, so they have to be caste every 2 instead of 5 seconds.

It reduces Holy Fire from 7 to 4 ticks though, pretty odd. Vampiric Touch/Immolate goes from 5 to 2, rounded down since the 3rd tick would be after 9s, but the DoT expires after 7.5.


What was your Blizzard crit rate?
Seed doesn't have good talents boosting it, it also is an affliction spell. It does however have absurdly high base damage.

I can't really see it outdamage fully specced Blizzard unless you come out below 70% Blizzrd crit or so.

6.6K seems low. I'm seeing more like 8-12K DPS with fully-talented improved blizzard during MH trash waves depending on which haste buffs are active on me. Warlocks and fire mages were a distant second. I did have to use glyphed mage armor otherwise I was running OOM all the time. Things will be different at level 80, I'm sure. I just hope they don't nerf improved blizzard, because it's ridiculously good fun to see your screen filled with a sea of big yellow numbers.

6.6k is very low. I'm routinely hitting 10k dps spamming blizzard on Hyjal trash and threat capped at that point from doing more. Seed is well behind that...oddly enough, it's the hunters who are placing second in aoe dps in my guild, they can hit 8kish dps on Hyjal trash.

You have to sink a lot of talent points into frost to get the most out of blizzard, but the payoff is definitely there.

I've seen quite a few "Miss" messages in PvP, even the combat log was saying "Miss" and I had PvE gear on me with around 16% hit, this was against a warrior and a paladin. I've read a bit and some places say that a full resist will yield a Miss message. I haven't tested this extensively, but it should be easy enough to check.

My blizzard critrate was around the 70%+ mark, yes. Well, atleast it was on the 4 target dummies in orgrimmar, I didn't actually look at it during the raid, but I can only assume it was higher due to buffs etc. It was hit- err, I mean critting for around 1100, and 1250+ with trinkets etc active. I did have some problems with threat from the casters however, since we had no prot paladins tanking, but nothing more than a few seconds of lost DPS.

Blizzard obviously provides several huge benefits over SoC - like 10% spellcrit to all mobs hit if they're being hit for more than 5 seconds and a 85% slow fully talented which means that snarable melee attackers pose no threat at all, but I am still irritated since those benefits come with sacrifices as well.

How on earth did you pull that off? Even with icy veins on the first puny waves, opening after the tanks had only a couple of seconds to just gather the mobs, I couldn't get near that. On the waves following those I would get casting interruptions from the shadow guys throwing spells at me, and spiders with their little bugs.

I did Hyjal as 53/8 (no Blast Wave, which needs a glyph stupidly bad) and was solidly behind a marks hunter in AoE DPS. Supposedly moonkins do even more. Mages are fun.

And yeah, despite the claims of removing RNG from pvp, there's still a number of random resist% talents that will produce spell misses. I see them with relative frequency.

I believe the exact values were 185 Frost resist for Rage and 213 Fire for Supremus. Blizzard did, in fact, release the exact values. Right around the time Sunwell came out, Brady games put out a "Beastiary" strategy guide for World of Warcarft and it included all Boss HP/resistances in it.

I'm trying to understand the distinction of the "guardian" subset of pets.

As far as I can tell Guardians do not seem to suffer from lag nor do they benefit from auras.

Is the Water Elemental considered a "guardian"? If so, does it follow this same distinction? (ie: lag=o, auras=0)

Guardians are not a subset of Pets, they're a different mechanic. The two defining features of pets is that they have an action bar, and are in your party. Guardians are not in your party, and they have no action bar. They are, in all senses, normal mobs, distinguished only by being on your side, which usually includes walking with you when out of combat.

An easy comparison for 'minion' versus 'guardian':

Roll a deathknight.

Summon a ghoul. Note 'Guardian' - no action bar; autonomous.

Spec unholy for permanent ghouls. - Note 'minion' - Action bars and no duration.

If theres any differences you need to test between the two types, that's the easiest way I've found to do it. Although spending 10minutes playing between the 2 on the beta, I've not seen any noticeable difference in tings like scaling or performance.

Ah.... So..... not being in the party/raid is why they do not benefit from auras.

I've seen reports of Water Elemental chain casts resulting in an average cast time greater than the standard cast time for Water Bolt.

However.... Mirror Image always cast exactly 4x(1xFireBlast,2xFrostBolt). So are they lasting longer than 30sec or are they nailing their cast times exactly?

Isn't frostbite rather hazardous for innocent bystanders? For example, a mage making do with arcane explosion? I understand that Vashj's striders now strictly follow their aggro list rather than attacking closest target when frozen, but wasn't that a specific change rather than general mob behaviour?

Having frostbite will allow other mages' blizzard to have increased crit too, if they didn't proc FoF but have shatter. Raid wise, I do not see the point in having more than 1/3 Blizzard. I could be wrong. As for frostbite procs, It shouldn't be a problem unless there is no tank in melee range of the mob, or the AE mage is higher in aggro which is unlikely.

From what I noticed our last SW raid regarding Torment the Weak:

Slow is castable on e.g Twins, Entropius and Kil'Jaeden but not Brutallus. Could it be that it only is castable on bosses that are using spells with a castbar? Seems a bit weird that it only work on some bosses at least - should be all or none. Torment the Weak just seems wrong regarding PvE and for PvP they already said that they will nerf arcane damage. I hope they just remove this talent to be honest and never really got why they made it anyway - arcane already got 7-8 more talent points than both fire and frost anyway. Based on their comments, however, they are more likely to nerf Slow and Arcane Barrage than removing Torment the Weak
Regarding: Slow - Reducing the PvP duration to 10 seconds

Frostbite in certain areas can be dangerous. I was chastised last week for killing some raid members on Felmyst when I began to Blizzard the skeletons and people cried out about being killed by "frost nova". I promptly went and did a respec, but losing Frostbite really kills Blizzard since it won't proc FoF without it (at least that's what I am experiencing).

I am also seeing loads of misses in PvP, particularly against Paladins. This is while wearing full +17% hit gear. I don't understand the formulas to the tee, but I am guessing their talents that reduce chances to be hit by spells is not a flat increase because I should still be able to overcome the 4% that Paladins get from Divine Purpose by a large margin. I can also only recall ever seeing one full "Resist", and it was in PvP.

On Arcane: The coefficient of Barrage definitely needs to be reduced. I'd much rather see that happen than a longer cooldown. The rotation is pretty nice with Arcane Blast/Barrage and a longer cooldown would ruin it. I had a 6051 crit in AV the other day, that is kind of absurd for an instant cast spell...on a 3 second cooldown. Torment of the Weak can be a lame duck at times if you encounter a boss immune to slow, that is a large chunk of your damage you'd be missing out on. I did my only raid as Arcane since the patch tonight, just a fast Kara, and I believe Aran and one other boss in there were immune, let alone Curator.

Right now, Blizzard is bugged (at least, I doubt it's intended) to not proc Fingers of Frost unless you also have Frostbite. Additionally, Striders will still take a swipe at anything in melee range while frozen, unless it's specifically a 3.0.2 change--I ran afoul of this late in 2.4.2 when I was helping some people pick up their last minute Hand of A'dal titles; I would frost nova the strider and some poor hapless person nearby, who hadn't even dpsed the strider at all, would get one-shot (for those unfamiliar with the encounter, their hitboxes--and thus melee range--are gigantic).

Brutallus uses a cast bar as well for some of his abilities - Meteor Slash is a 1 second cast, for example.

At this point, it seems like the Slow / Torment the Weak issue is just a bug that they will fix before Wrath raiding starts properly, but right now it's not high on their list of concerns. (Unsurprisingly).