Change for 2t5 is good for lvl80. I just hope some things:

- There will be an arcane talent which does 2t5 same effect
- This change wont affect lvl70 2t5 when all the changes will come to live BC. Or lot of people will have to re-gear, and take (finally) 4t6.

Glyph of Frostbolt is now possible to make and test.

It does just as it says, removes the snare from Frostbolt. However, while the target is not slowed at all, Frostbite and Fingers of Frost are both still able to proc. Apparently as far as the Frostbite code is concerned, Frostbolt still applies a chill effect even when it's not actually snaring the target at all. So three less talent points "lost" to the glyph, but could still use work. Opening up with a frostfire bolt means little change to playstyle in solo, though.

Do you have any number showing if the 5% spell power penalty from the snare is removed or not?

The change to Incineration, Spell Impact, Arcane Empowerment and the first change to the Arcane Blast debuff with +15% damage per stack instead of -0.33s cast time was a DPS neutral change.

The second change from +15% to +25% damage per stack would be DPS neutral with removing 2T5.


So one could argue that 2T5 is already in effect baseline. And the changes were huge for mana efficieny.
They single-handedly killed any alternative for DPS or DPM.


The Arcane vs. Fire at 70 debate depends on other things.
Fire gets Burnout, Hot Streak, Living Bomb, loses Icy Veins.
Arcane gets Haste and a better Arcane Power cooldown and more mana than they can spend.
Glyphs may play a role too, the Fireball/Frostbolt ones won't be available though because they need Northrend herbs.

I'm currently testing the coefficient on it and it seems to be the same old 3.0/3.5 * 0.95. Will need more testing to confirm though since rolling min and max damage takes a LOT of casts and the world server is continually crashing as normal for patch night.

Edit: Confirmed. Coefficient on frostbolt with the Glyph of Frostbolt installed is still 81.429%. 198 casts with 1028 spellpower then 124 casts with 983 spellpower was enough to confirm it beyond any reasonable margin of error based on damage ranges seen.

The math:
Tested as 0/0/0. I am level 75, tested against an SI:7 boss dummy (which should be acting level 78).

Base tooltip damage for rank 15: 702-758 (avg 730)
Tooltip damage with Glyph: 737-796 (766.5)
Damage range with 1028 spellpower: 1617-1675 (1646)
Damage range with 983 spellpower: 1577-1636 (1606.5)

730 + 1028 * 81.429% = 1567 * 1.05 = 1645 (matches 1028 spellpower w/in 0.1%)
730 + 983 * 81.429% = 1530 * 1.05 = 1607 (matches 983 spellpower w/in 0.1%)

Other info:
Oddly though I have 12.76% crit on my character sheet, I crit 18.232% of the time (using mage armor, not molten, so I could get more casts in between drinks). Could the glyph be bugged to add 5% crit *and* 5% damage right now, or was this just a testing anomaly? Do training dummies take extra crits somehow? (No one else was around, I had no buffs except mage armor, and no debuffs were showing up on the dummy at all. I was talentless. The change in gear to lose 45 spellpower only changed my crit to 12.73%.) This variation seems far greater than should have been seen for the number of casts.

I missed 10.6% of the time with 5.83% character sheet hit. This would make 16.43% hit to cap. Due to the margin for error in only 322 casts this could just as easily be 16% as 17%. Smart money's still on 17%.

Additional:
Well, just to see if it had anything to do with the Glyph, I then cast 200 frostfire bolts. Confirmed that FFB still has a coefficient of 85.714%. With 5.83% hit and 12.73% crit on my character sheet I had 20.5% crits and 10.5% misses. So bottom line there's just something weird going on with the SI:7 "skull level" dummies that's causing abnormally high crit rates. Or else the character sheet crit is way off. I'll have to test on creatures in the wild of equal level when Northrend is more stable.

This part caught my attention, I'll start by assuming you meant 80 and not 70. Now projecting a 51 pointer scenario in fire means you have 20 points left to spend across the "support" trees. However, if you spend 10 points outside of frost, you loose IV as a talent... I conclude that you went for Arcane Concentration to get added mana efficiency which is an old but effective deep fire trick.

What strikes me here is the fact that the remaining 10 points are near useless in the frost tree so what kind of spec do you have in mind exactly? Are you thinking of going all the way to arcane and picking up Meditation by any chance? I'd appreciate if you reformulated that sentence to clear things up.

No I do think he is talking about a fire spec at a 70lvl (3.0 i suppose), so you do lose IV if you go up to LB.
So depending or your regen mana I would go for a 0/51/8 and 2 points left whereever you want them ^^

@roy:
Thank you for your answer.

edit:
nvm

I think we all agree here that AB need a longer debuff duration or pushback resistance, even if it's not baseline we need at least a glyph for either 50% pushback reduction (making it 100% with raid wide concentration aura) or 1 sec longer debuff.
I'd love if they made ABar affected by the debuff and/or increase its duration on cast (would only work with a longer debuff of course). ABar should be more DPCT than AB but maybe only under the AB debuff (or It would be too strong for pvp).

Another solution would be to make ABar "consume" the AB debuff for a large % increase per charge, in a way it's somewhat interesting to use it when you know that, due to movement, the debuff will fade before your next AB finish.

Roywyn did some math upthread that showed arcane blast spam still produced better dps than any other spec/rotation for any fight where the debuff drops as often as once every 12 seconds. There are precious few fights in TBC that require movement or taking pushback damage more often than once every 12 seconds, and in those fights you'd slide effortlessly into an ABar rotation of some kind for maximum mobility and still competitive dps (especially since fire and frost would also take dps hits from needing to be mobile and/or taking pushbacks, and arcane would in fact be highly likely to be ahead in those fights too by falling back on its instant rotations).

As is right now, the only reason not to be arcane for Wrath raiding would be the crit debuffs brought by fire and frost. Needing to cast scorch every 30 seconds would likely hurt arcane's dps too much to bother trying to just pick up 18 fire and stick with blast spam. "Min/maxed" raids will bring one frost or fire mage (fire is higher dps, frost has a blessing of wisdom with less uptime) for the crit debuff and any other mages will be arcane. This will (hopefully) change when the dps balancing pass is done, but if Wrath went live today, that would be the bottom line on mage raiding.

Was that with 2pcT5? And do you have a link to those numbers? I can't seem to find them in the thread.

You're right. Probably you can tell I'm a fire mage. I didn't remember that those talents didn't exist before BC.

I think you have to count talents. Many of the "toys" are much better with talents, or talents make some toys useful.

As an example from BC, molten armor is actually a lot more interesting if you add impact and the current version of moltens shields to it, especially in solo/pvp play. Without that the fire damage part of the armor is essentially useless and it is just a crit booster/incoming crit reducer.

As I said many times, I strongly disagree. You have 'pushback resistance' in the form of arcane barrage. It also just so happens that arcane is much better suited to handle movement fights than fire or frost. You don't need either longer duration on AB debuff because the barrage rotation themselves give similar results to the top fire and frost spec, AB spam just being flat out better than the rest.

Good to see that at least someone gets it.


-----
As far as 3.0.2 specs goes, I'm planning on 10/51/0. I could see a case for 2/51/8 being a decent alternative.

edit - missed point of post I responded to. Never mind.

This is exactly what I noticed while running 2 heroics last night. Not only did switches interrupt my casting but often also turned my back towards the mob I was attacking. Very disorienting effect. Another thing I noticed was that if I casted MI while not in combat and did not move or cast anything, no switches happened.

Regarding MI PvE dps: I thought you would get a buff "Mirror Image" which causes you to swap places. I read you could click it off, the Images will live and dps on and you are also able to dps uninterrupted. Essentially using this macro will turn MI into a PvE dps cooldown:

/cast Mirror Image
/cancelaura Mirror Image

Is Missle Barrage worth anything for PvE Raiding? From waht I can see no calculations really seem to take it into acount. I take it that's because of the Debuff falling off.

Someone here said that you cannot click off the Buff anymore. I'm not 80 yet so I can't confirm it.

Btw, another thing I've noticed, every time I get hit I get interrupted. Sure with the new mechanic of shorter interrupt times and dimishing returns per cast but I wonder whats with the Burning Soul Talent. Its obviously not working, did they say it will be interrupt time reduction or will it function as it does now?

I've read some reports (earlier in this thread) stating you get switched quite random, but usually between 1-3 times per MI uptime.

Spell Casting Mechanics

yes, you're correct. spell pushback now reduces interruption time.

I was assuming that these tailoring robes are still getting 1-2 sockets in them, and they just aren't showing up yet?

I think it would be pretty interesting if they would keep the debuff duration at it's current (beta) length, and just have it drop 1 stack of the debuff (instead of the entire stack). That would open up lots of possibilities for managing your mana by "weaving" in different nukes, without totally trashing your AB debuff stack and making you stack it all up from 0 again. This would also work well as a talent, or even a set bonus of some sort.