To be honest, that's just a nerf, my frostbolt alone breaks frost novas if it crits most of the time. So you would rely on luck and damn fast reactions to get a frb,frb,il/df or frb,il/df combo. Although I don't know how the freeze mechanic works exactly but it seems rather dodgy to me.

I'd rather just make a small tweak to FoF, consuming charges when the spell hits and not when it finishes casting, this will allow for consistent use of frb,frb,il or frb,frb,df, you would need to experience very high latency or laggspikes to not be able to pull it off then. This way I assume both parts will be happy, PvErs gets to beneficially weave in il/dfs in their rotations making it more fun and PvPers will have a their long duration to give place for consideration of use while the charges limits it to not being OP.

You're thinking in TBC terms. CC breakage on things such as Frost Nova, Fear, and Entangling Roots has been changed such that early breakage happens if you deal damage equal to approximately 40% of the target's total health. This has been discussed some upthread.

The breaking point of freezes has been balanced such that generally a crit frostbolt alone *will* still break the freeze. However, a crit ice lance does NOT. The typical casting order after a freeze, if you aren't already halfway through a frostbolt anyway when you see it (i.e. after a frost nova rather than on a frostbite proc), is icelance *then* shatter combo, since the ice lance is guaranteed to keep the target frozen, whether or not it crits. In fact, at least at my gear level, I'm generally safe with two ice lances IF the first does not crit.

Basically you just ice lance once or twice while you're getting out to range after a frost nova. It's a minor change to gameplay, but definitely some extra quasi-guaranteed damage on controlled freezes. Sadly, most world trash has not had its health scaled the same way damage has been with all these new procs and changes. So it's hard to optimize solo play because everything's dead just as I "shift into second gear" as it were. I blame this on my gear level, as things were probably balanced around people in level 70 blues and greens coming to Northrend, and I should get more opportunities to play beyond my "opener" in Dragonblight and beyond.

As a side note regarding mage gameplay flavor in Lich King, Dalaran's mage trainers being the only class trainers in all of Northrend makes me want to sing "Damn it feels good to be a gangsta" of Office Space fame every time I go there. We also get a (simple) quest that teaches us to self-port there at 71, while other classes are completely unable to even use the available transport until level 74 (excluding mage port, which we learn at 74 ourselves). At release, mages will be the first to even be able to see the inside of Dalaran by at least a day or two, which could have interesting/fun benefits. I really do feel like I "own" the city, as a mage. They did a great job with it.

There are also (and I haven't seen this mentioned previously; even Roywyn keeps talking about Dr. Boom) a couple of target dummies in the sewers of Dalaran, so no more treks out to our friendly well-out-of-the-neighborhood goblin. (Dummies are freezeable and level 1, and have one hitpoint that isn't removed by any method. Thus they functionally always have 100% health for the purposes of talents/abilities that do special things under 20%.) I spent a while testing double-use of the second charge of FoF on a dummy and have managed to be able to do it nearly every time, at least when my latency is stable at 50ms.

So it still kind of depends on how this works against mobs with a lot more health. And actually, that could present a big problem; you'd pretty much be guaranteed 12 seconds of Frozen status against a boss if the 40% health carries over there. So nevermind, that suggestion's no good.

They really should be giving Mage-only access to the penthouse suite in the tallest building in the city, so we can sip cocktails and watch all the other classes scrounging around in the streets, over which we empty our chamberpots.

A poster on the official forums just said that the Glyph of Frost Nova seems to be affecting Frostbite as well. They are, since installing the Glyph, able to get a crit frostbolt off on a Frostbite proc without breaking the freeze. That makes that glyph VERY useful while leveling/soloing up from 70 to 80. Turns Frostbite procs from one shatter combo to an extra frostbolt plus a shatter combo, a significant increase in burst.

Ironically, against anything but a boss, a much better increase in dps than the Glyph of Frostbolt.

I'm going to try to get my hands on one of those Glyphs to confirm.

So with all the talk of Frost and slightly fire, is it safe to assume Arcane is done? If so can we expect that they will be raid viable in there current position?

I can confirm it. I got the glyph earlier today after farming The Barrens for Mageroyal and yes I can get a Shatter Combo with Frostbite and Frostbolt but not FFB atleast not all the time.

http://www.nethersturm-legion.de/ima...b35a3ad808.jpg

1210-1531
452/12 sec

Focus Magic is currently using charges backwards. Charges are not consumed when I cast, only when I am HIT by a spell.

Kind of makes me wonder if I am buffing myself, or the mobs.

Has there been any further data-mining about our second new ability beyond FFB? Somewhat trivial here, but I'm also curious if they plan on updating our muffin table to level 80. Having used RoR for these past months has made me far too lazy to ever consider conjuring hundreds of water again.

WotlkWiki lists a new spell called Mirror Image as a possibility.

Yes, I'm sure that's the case, though since Dr. Boom is level 68 he was never really useful in a test of hit/miss rates either. Thus, the dummies aren't a true test of personal dps that's comparable to a boss, but can be used reasonably well in relative-dps testing (as in, how your personal dps changes with minor changes in spec...tests relative to yourself). Since Dr. Boom could not really be safely entered in melee combat, this is also the first time melee gets to try things out (and hunters get to send in their pets) without worry. I did put in an in-game suggestion to add a "boss dummy" that is just like the current dummies but skull-leveled and immune to freeze/slow effects and the other usual boss-immunity mechanics, since that would be extremely useful to us scientific types.

Even in relative-DPS testing one has to keep in mind that melee DPS have vastly inflated crit rates against those level 1 target dummies, so you have to be wary when it comes to comparing caster DPS vs. melee DPS when your test target is level 1.

You can't assume ANYTHING is done. Even if Blizzard haven't touched certain talents and trees in a while you have to keep in mind that they haven't even begun balancing raid encounters quite yet. Anything until then will always be speculation since WotLK still isn't due for a few months. There's plenty of time for tweaking and overhauling although there's nothing wrong with being happy or angry with the way a certain spec is turning out.

As an Oceanic player I was interested to see how practical shatter combos were for the new 2-charge FoF talent when your in-game latency is in the hundreds (I don't know exactly how high as the in-game monitor seems to have gone AWOL in beta - how are you measuring it Xentropy?).

As stated upthread, the timing is tight (i.e. you spam your ice lance/deep freeze button like crazy when you are halfway through casting your second Frostbolt) but it seems achievable 90% of the time (the exception being if you have a lag spike as the second Frostbolt nears completion).

What I'm considering for an arcane cycle right now is Arcane Blast spam. If the encounter forces you to drop your stack for whatever reason and you have MBAM up then use that before re-ramping AB; Barrage on movement phases. The spec is probably still 11 in frost for IV, but the trees haven't quite settled down yet so it is of course all subject to change.

56/3/11(+1) seems like a fair go at an arcane spec.

Edit: further refined the spec down to 53/3/11(+4)

The performance of arcane specs working like this will come down to how often you lose your AB debuff. You can help keep it up more with some haste and if you're good you can maybe even PoM one to hold the debuff up (for this reason I think Focus Magic should go up to a 2 minute duration - allowing a deep talented arcane mage to refresh FM and PoM AB in order to refresh FM without losing the AB debuff). To balance the dependency on 'stand-and-nuke' situations, you also have ABar which allows you to out-perform many specs during excessively mobile encounters.

Considering all that, I really like the current state of the arcane tree and I hope any changes they make to it from here to release are not gameplay altering ones.

Has anyone noticed that Fiery Payback and Hot Streak both use the Pyroblast spell as part of the talent, but are not dependant on Pyroblast at all? What happens to those talents if they proc and the caster is not talented for Pyroblast?

Did some math on resistances with arcane spec in a 25man raid scenario at level 80:

Magic absorption - 80
Mage armor - 40
Arcane shielding - 20
Imp motw - 14 (or 10 if not improved, i assume at least 1 druid in the raid)
Total = 154 resist all

Fire, frost, shadow and nature can get even higher via various group/raid buffs. Should auras and totems effect the entire raid, these can be easily available for everyone in 25man raiding.

Paladin auras especially seem to give high resistance (130, not stacking with motw), at least according to wowhead.
Thats 270 resistance with a paladin aura, for frost/fire/shadow damage.

154 resistance would give roughly 28% damage reduction from spells.
Magic dots would do 50% less due to mage armor, meaning 64% reduction on average.

270 resistance would be about 49% reduction, nearly 75% reduction from magic dots.

Does counting magic DOTs at 50% less from Mage Armor really make sense in a raid situation? I might be missing something, but I can't think of any current debuffs that both count as magic (so would be affected by Mage Armor), and aren't dispellable (so would probably be dispelled in a raid before the reduced duration from Mage Armor has any affect). Obviously the big one that matter is Unstable Affliction, which does something when dispelled, but I can't recall any raid DOTs like it (except for the couple mobs that have Unstable Affliction, but again, there aren't any like that that really matter all that much, as I recall).

Edit: Removed Seed of Corruption from post (previously mentioned it as a DOT that did something when dispelled, but got corrected (thanks Dryssa) as it only does something when enough damage is dealt to the target. The point still stands about how most magic effects will be dispelled very quickly in a raid setting.

I think another nice thing not mentioned in your post is in fights that have AoE magic damage. Lets take Netherspite for example, yes yes I know kara is srs bznz, but with mage armor+4 points in Magic Absorption+Shadow Res Buff I resist quite a few of his aura ticks which gives me back 443 mana each time. Now that's not a lot for a fire/frost mage, but for arcane that really adds up over time. Honestly I see arcane being WotLK anti Caster Caster that the warlock was in TBC.

Just because it isn't in the game now, doesn't mean it won't be a very significant buff to our class at encounters at lvl 80. Remember, no raid content is done yet, it's like discussing current dps output on the beta when we know it isn't tuned yet.

MotW rank 9 is 54 resist all. The improved would then be 75.6, for a total of 215.6 resist all.

I'm not entirely sure that an arc mage is going to have Arcane Shielding and Magic Absorption. The core raiding talents (assuming TotW affects bosses) take 55 talent points, leaving 16 for other stuff. If you need imp. scorch, you're already dropping points from Mind Mastery, Arcane Mind, or Arcane Meditation, so I wouldn't expect defensive talents to be an option. If you're leeching the crit debuff, you can get whatever you want, naturally, but I expect a significant fraction of arc mages to be specced for imp. scorch. On that note, it'd be nice if they dropped MM to 3 points. It's fairly lackluster in terms of dps per point (particularly compared to its empowered peers, both of which were lowered) and 3 would allow a fairly clear 53/18/0 build for pure pve.

Aye, the magic some over all magic resistance can be really nice, well... it depends I guess. Is it still very rare to get a full resist and very common that any resist you gain is just a partial in beta? I havnt read any comment on blizzards intentions with resist mechanics but it feels like either the way resists behave or the woriding on magic absorbtion has to change (regaining a certain percentage of any damage resisted would be nice) for both effects of the talent to be usefull.

Anyway the resists magearmor provides (alltho the biggest gain is probably that mages can wear better gear than anyone else in heavy resist fights due to our spells and talents) are definetley a nice raid perk, but like the previous writer says I cant think of any dot the duration shortener wouold actually help with in a raiding situation. Its simply like all the mage armors a more pvp oriented bonus. Not that I´m very bothered by that fact tbh, as long as mages are fun to raid and has as good a chanse as any dps class to dish out their intended damage in wrath I will be happy. The over all result is the only thing I really care about balance wise.