Well it says 'within 10 seconds' so I presume it's like a nightfall proc for warlocks in that if unused it will expire. It's a nice proc for sure but part of me just wants them to make pyroblast useful as a baseline spell.

The negative synergy between Hot Streak and Fiery Payback might need to be addressed though, realistically, I cna't see the small cooldown having much effect on the availability of Pyroblast to be cast.

The same can be said for arcane missiles, but we can surely agree that having a more dynamic casting process is a step in the right direction.

It's possible to spec Hot Streak without having Pyroblast currently. Granted, there's no reason why you would, but they've usually added explicit dependences when there are implicit ones as well. Personally, the bigass arrow going down the talent pane would be as good a reason as any to make Pyroblast a trainable spell. The alternative is to make it a general or fire-specific PoM, although restricting it to Pyro does mean that you wouldn't waste it on Fireballs.

- Clearcasting / Presence of Mind only gives +30% crit rate on the first spell cast. The spell crit rate increase is lost after the first cast even if Clearcast and Presence of Mind is still active. There's a new buff while CC/PoM is active "Arcane Potency: 30% increased spell criticial strike chance".


Glyphs from build 8885:

Mage (Skills List / Talent Calc. (8885))

* Glyph of Arcane Intellect -- Reduce the mana cost of your Arcane Intellect and Arcane Brilliance spells by 50%.
* Glyph of Slow Fall -- Your Slow Fall spell no longer requires a reagent.
* Glyph of Fire Ward -- You have an additional 5% chance to reflect Fire spells while your Fire Ward is active.
* Glyph of Frost Ward -- You have an additional 5% chance to reflect Frost spells while your Frost Ward is active.
* Glyph of Ice Armor -- Increases the duration of your Frost Armor and Ice Armor spells by 30 min.

To be honest, Deep Fire's casting variety is perhaps getting a little too dynamic. Scorch, Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, Living Bomb, Pyroblast, Focus Magic if you go that route, that's a lot of spells to balance. It's going to be interesting see what rotations will look like. I'm looking forward to it, but it could be messy, as well.

Also, Blizzard certainly seems to be pushing crit as a very valuable stat for fire mages in particular. Is there going to be a paradigm shift away from Haste towards Crit?

Looks like they fixed all the mechanics now.

FoF: Working
Brain Freeze: Working
Shatter Shield: Working

Actually pretty fun running arounf killing stuff as Deep Frost now as there is something up almost every single mob.

Also Leatherworking changes:

* Fur Lining - Stamina - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase stamina by 90. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
* Fur Lining - Spell Damage - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase spell power by 70. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
* Fur Lining - Fire Resist - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase your fire resistance by 60. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
* Fur Lining - Attack Power - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase attack power by 120. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."

Too dynamic? Hell it's good enough to have dynamic as Deep Fire... It's not that Fireball spam wasn't boring. ;-)
I like the Hot Streak change, finally we get some reason to cast Pyros in Raids; it will be much more fun.

That may well be true. This is a case where underpowered is better than overpowered, I think, but it could probably stand to be bumped up. There's plenty of time for that.

A much, much bigger deal to me is the Fingers of Frost reversion. While Fire Mages are juggling Fireball, Scorch, Frostfire Bolt, Living Bomb and Pyroblast, and Arcane Mages are dealing with the haste and mana requirements of their Barrage/Blast/MBAM process, Frost Mages are back to mindlessly spamming Frostbolt with an occasional tap of the Fireball key. It's a great disappointment; the prospect of actually having a reactive process with Shatter combos and selecting between Deep Freeze or Ice Lance based on cooldown had me excited to keep playing Lhivera as my main; without that, frankly, I think she's headed for retirement. Being powerful isn't enough; the fun factor is greatly lacking due to this change, and I have more than half a screen full of other 70's to choose from.

And yet, if you only have one frost mage in the group, it's going to be a dps improvement most likely . . . I can certainly see both sides to this. For one thing, I'm fairly certain 2 guarenteed shattered spells is far better from a PvP point of view
but it does certainly tend to detract from a "fun" aspect and also the "5 frost mages in one raid synnergy" aspect of having it the other way.

Oh, no, I'm not talking about the original debuff version with the crazy stacked frost mage synergy. I'm talking about the most recent version, which was a 4-second personal buff, no charge limit -- enough time to complete your Frostbolt cast, cast a second one, and follow up with an Ice Lance or a deep Freeze, if you had a little haste. Added some interactivity, had to select spells based on haste and cooldown, and it made Deep Freeze part of the DPS process against a boss, just as Living Bomb will be for Fire Mages.

All gone now, I'm afraid.

After logging into Dalaran and seeing trade chat, it appears that Inscription is now active and that Glyphs are on a 1 hour duration. This hopefully lessens the blow from the Frostbolt Glyph. In essence we will treat them similar to weapon oils.

That's very interesting indeed. Thanks for the info.

Doesn't it seem kind of goofy, though, that you'd buy a glyph to put on your Ice Armor to save a single cast?

Glyph lasts 1 hour, glyph makes Ice Armor last 1 hour. Buy a glyph to save 930 mana?

Alright, here's the build I'm coming up with...

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

If mana is an issue, I'm looking at...

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

I really like the change to Hot Streak, and it gives even more usefulness to Pyroblast. When I first saw Hot Streak on wotlkwiki, I was definitely thinking it was lackluster, and apparently Blizzard finally figured that out. It seemed cool in concept, but in practically, unless you're stringing Flamestrikes, I didn't see it as a significant DPS boost.

This change however gives an entire new spell rotation of Fireball / Pyroblast / Living Bomb (if mana permits) and Fire Blast as well could be worked in with the first build.

looking at the numbers for arcane on the current build, it seems haste is certainly a nice choice. If you examine around a DPS window model and take a fair medium of, say, 25second nuke windows; you get;

~91.4% DPS relative to uninterrupted AB spam
adding 10% haste will allow for 11 casts rather than 10, which is roughly 10.93% damage increase.

In 50 second windows:

~95.7% DPS relative to uninterrupted
10% haste adds ~10.44% extra DPS

I've got a chart for all values of cast windows from 10 seconds up to 90seconds. Very few encounters would allow for uninterrupted nuking beyond that, and likely at that point the mage would self-impose interupts for evoc/refreshing FM/etc. Its way too cluttered to post here; the point is to show a good value for what haste will provide for the arcane mage.

Also note that MBAM is only worth casting if the buff is still active on the mage after losing the AB debuff; before re-ramping the next one. Never is it worth dropping the AB debuff for. The MBAM buff lasts for 15 seconds, which is somewhat restrictive if you're saving it for the next interrupt event.

Yeah doesn't make sense unless its a 1 hour cooldown, 1 hour duration, unlimited use sorta thing. Still, it sounds tedious to manage.

Always time for them to change their mind, but it seems like they must have tested and disliked the 4-second version for some reason. If it's a mistake, it's a pretty big one, as the talent functionality is now implemented and it's using two charges on the beta server.

I don't know what to tell you except that I 100% disagree. What you want is permanent 100% crit build. You're not remotely interested in the talent itself. Hotstreak, as it was, was somewhat really crappy and uninteresting because having your hot streak proc during a cast meant you wouldn't use it for anything else than just a pure +crit% increase talent. Besides, it was fairly disappointing to play with, since getting 3 crits in a row is fairly rare (particularly with lvl 70 gear at 80).

Now we have a talent that we feel rewarding because it procs every 2 casts, plus I'm pretty sure I'd much rather have an instant cast pyroblast over a garanteed crit (ignoring here the clutch fireblast thrown in for good measures). It feels a lot more rewarding as a player to have, although I doubt the dps boost will turn out to be huge. I do, however, for normal use, expect it to give a better dps increase than teh previous iteration.

Personally I'd rather have the more powerful (two charge) FoF over a the 'shatter combo' four second version. If specced for Ignite would Frostfire Bolt be worth casting on FoF charges?

From a PvP perspective being able to set up a Frostbolt + Deep Freeze is preferable to hoping that it's up when you have the few second window on a proc.

All told I want to be challenged by and pay attention to the encounters and my opponents so I"ll go for power over a minor cast sequence variation.

It's actually less powerful. With the 4-second version, assuming a 1-second travel time on Frostbolt:

-1.0 seconds: Frostbolt 0 casts, start Frostbolt 1
0.0 seconds: FoF procs
1.5 seconds: Frostbolt 1 casts (gets Shatter bonus), start Frostbolt 2
4.0 seconds: Frostbolt 2 casts (gets Shatter bonus), cast Deep Freeze (gets Shatter bonus)

Obviously that cuts it to the wire, but with even a little haste, the 4-second version guaranteed you not only the two Frostbolts you can get with the two-charge version, but also the combo cast at the very end.

My bad for some reason I thought it was a proc on cast instead of spell hit.
From a purely PvE perspective then yes I'd agree and like to see it reverted. I wonder how much haste it would take to squeeze in a FFB instead of Frostbolt 2. (Assuming a crit FFB is more dpct than a crit frostbolt, including the dot of course)

Did you account for the fact your one paladin can only cast one blessing total, and your one shaman can only drop one totem per element? Part of why I needed two pallies was to cover two blessings. Most people want kings *and* X, not just kings *or* X. And a second shaman covers overlapping totems as well.

All your arguments revolve around Torment the Weak affecting all targets all the time as they're currently bugged to do. Since you can't snare a boss I model that talent as useless to raiding, and expect it to be fixed to that degree. It's MUCH too powerful to be as shallow as it is in the tree if it works on bosses.

Hmm, you had different raid makeups than I did. We brought maybe 2 locks and 2 mages, and the Tidewalker murlocs lasted well over 3 GCD's. Our MH trash runs are far from "trivial", so I'd add 5 bosses right there. Solarian's spawns definitely die faster than the murlocs, but still not quite a lifespan of <4.5 seconds, and given the shorter time available to pull them together, blizzard's chill can come in handy. So Hydross, Tidewalker, Solarian, Kael, 5xMH, that's 1/3 of the fights. Guess it depends on how much your raid makeup overkills the AoE. Ours never did.

Re: FoF. UGH!!! I'm going to have to make a very angry post about that, which will get pushed to page two and ignored completely by the dozens of people complaining that fire was nerfed so much by the imp scorch change. I hope we can go back to the reactive play of the 4-second debuff. (Or, if the debuff is still acting like it was for me last push, 5 seconds. I would NOT be getting the full use out of 4 seconds by far.)

I think WE was overly nerfed. It now amounts to 24% of a Replenishment effect, and is only up half the time. I'd prefer the mana regen just go away completely rather than be kept in some token small amount and be replaced by an AoE avoidance passive to help keep the elemental up in more fights.

Good change to Hot Streak, Slow's still not very good (mana cost decrease would be better than a buff to its power), I'll have to test Focus Magic a bit. I agree with the previous poster that said arcane can afford to spend extra GCD's less than anyone, and they get the buff that requires the most non-dps GCD cost. Odd.

Hopefully Slow Fall and Arcane Int are minor glyphs. They fit the flavor and power of a small glyph in my mind. I wish we were getting more information on major vs minor.

Wow, this would make them...different. Kind of annoying, actually. Did we need more consumables? I liked the previous reduction in consumables. This is also more consumables based ultimately off of HERBS. This will cause herb prices to continue to skyrocket relative to minerals which tend to make one-shot items rather than consumables. Bad design, in my opinion.

It DOES fix the issue with the Glyph of Frostbolt, though there are other better ways by far to implement inscription.

From a pure math standpoint, there's never anything better worth doing in PvE on a 2-charge FoF proc than two frostbolts. Period. You have functionally unlimited time to use the two charges, so cast time is meaningless, and you just want two of whatever spell gets the most benefit from +50% crit. A 4-second proc means you actually USE combos. You'd never frostbolt/deepfreeze on a 2-charge proc over frostbolt/frostbolt, unless your 10 seconds to use the two charges was in danger of running out. The challenge level of using FoF has DROPPED because now you will always continue to frostbolt.

It does free a talent point up from deep freeze for a frost raiding build, though. Not much point in it except PvP. PvE mobs that can be deep frozen die quickly enough to ice lance spam.