In PvP it seems to last 5 seconds rather than 10 seconds on the first cast however, so DR-wise it would be 5s-2.5s-1.25s

I'm not sure though, it could also just be that they tend to double polymorph and immediately get a 1/2 Diminishing Return on the enemy before the 1st one of 10 seconds ran out anyhow, but I somewhat doubt it, a 10 second silence is kinda TO powerful.

Correction: Sorry, I was looking at the ignite talent and not the debuff. The debuff is in magical school and is dispellable. I should have known this.

This is misinformation.

Ignite is dispellable by Dispel Magic, and shows up as a buff with a blue border. It is most assuredly Magic.

Which tree is looking the most promising for a 61 point build after we get the new talents deployed on the live servers?

Not having the luck (or the time) to have a beta account, I'm concerned that the arcane builds being suggested here wouldn't work because they wouldn't have the mana efficiency that you get with by adding another 10 talent points. Any thoughts from people in the know?

All build lose 10% mana efficiency with 10 points less. And mage talents await the chopping block anyway.

I think you linked the talent; this is the actual spell: Ignite - Spell - World of Warcraft

Ah, yes, I did in fact link the talent and not the spell, and consequently read it all wrong.

Well, then that is interesting... I really only considered Mage Armor to be used against Warlocks and possibly Shadow Priests. Thanks for the clarification, nevertheless.

That seems to disproportionally raise the value of hit for arcane up to cap, and likewise disproportionally penalizes arcane for not capping. Although, I guess it's not so much worse than fire having to scorch early in case of a resist - the imp scorch glyph helps somewhat mitigate that though.

Still, I wonder if that's intentional or a bug introduced when they changed the AB debuff?

when mirror image changes your facing, dos it also change your camera facing? If your camera is still facing the same way its a simple matter of holding the right mouse button down to automatically re-face after a switch. Otherwise, its still not hard with good mouse sensitivity to get your facing to within 90degrees of the target most of the time (at least, as a fire mage with a long cast its not) - simply hold down the RMB and adjust as needed.

My concern with the 'switching' its the potential to pull you into a bad spot. Say you pop MI and suddenly a void zone spawns under you. Being a plucky mage with a zest for life, you run out of it. Your masochistic mirror images see you doing this and shout 'hang on, sonny Jim', swap places with you and you're right back in the void zone eating pain. Admittedly not a common event, but certainly not one you'd be pleased to experience.

Changes camera facing and your characters. Sometimes you skip around so much (the mage images are feared etc) that it becomes a clusterfuck of confusion and I just end up spamming ice lance. It's quite amusing the first few times it happens.

I'd guess that happened when they changed full resists to actual misses.

It's been reported that [Eye of Magtheridon] didn't proc on the new spell misses either.
Not sure if that has been fixed by now, but the roots of the problem might be the same,

You mean status effects like sheep sleep and such spells? Unless theres an abundance of those effects in most raid dungeons it sounds like MA wont do much for three points. Actually Im still waiting for some change to happen to either spell damage resist mechanics or the talent itself. Seems very rare to get a full resist ever. Having it return a percentage of any spelldamage you resist would make it a lot more interesting. Something like that. But theres still a magepush ahead of us so its not to unlikely it gets a change soon.

I used images on Grobbulus, bad idea, they ported me to the middle of the raid after I got targeted by the disease and was moving out.

This spell still has a lot of rough edges.

I wonder if it would be possible to make two types of the Mirror Images spell. One similar to its current form where the images act as an aggressive pet, and then another where the images act like a pet in purely defensive form?

Without knowing for sure, from what I've read Blizzard likes the fickle nature of the spell and thus hasn't given a Mage much control at all over the Images. (Perhaps they also didn't want to complicate things by making them a pet, requiring the Mage to deal with 2 pet control bars when a Water Elemental is up, etc.)

My main concern is I really don't like the idea the Images can take off and attack other mobs when you don't want them too. It's a problem which probably can be dealt with either by not using them, or making sure you are in a safe area, but I would like to if possible see the spell avoid situations where other party members or raid leaders say, "Mages don't use Images", especially if it this becomes common. There is no way for me to know at this point, or formulate my opinion better until I get to see it first hand.

Mirror Image really isn't that hard to fix.

- Remove the random swapping ability and turn it into a skill that the mage can use when he has mirror images up. Give it a 5-10 second cooldown and this is set.
- Make the images scale with the mage so that there isn't a situation where it is too strong early on and too weak later. Also if the images can benefit from most of the group buffs/debuffs, even better,
- Code the images so they don't attack CC objects (if this wasn't done already)

Unless the internet i'm using is a different one to yours, MA is only 2 points. Right now the extra survivability you get for only 2 points brings the spell to near break-even and the current arcane tree makes those 2 points easy to find in early arcane (although deep arcane is much harder to place tallents in). What i'm looking for in in binary effects are AoE or RST silences, damage with knockbacks, CC, etc. If you can get such effects reliably in even a few encounters then MA becomes a very attractive tallent.

Its a beta, so tree changes can happen at any time regardless; but the feedback for arcane on the official boards hasn't touched much on MA and i'd be suprised if it sees any changes to its mechanics (nor do I feel the mechanics need much change). We don't really know what cycle blizzard wants arcane to be using so we can't accurately say how useful the mana will be, but if AB ends up as an expensive mana dump spell as some hope it may then we can put value on it in that context. If it reaches a point where the mana becomes a more significant part of the tallent then I'd like to see it restore mana based on the amount resisted; eg:

Magic Absorbtion
bleh bleh resistance, and also restores up to 2/4% of the mages maximum mana whenever a spell is resisted, based on the amount resisted.
(a 30% resist would restore 30% of 4% of your max, a 20% resist would restore 20% of 4%, a full resist would restore 4% of your max, etc). 4% in that context might be a bit high, so perhaps 1/2% would be better. Its still a creamier tallent.

With regards to Mirror Image: It would seem ideal if they could just allow us to remove the buff again for switching. We'll soon see where they're going with that, I suppose.

The problem with that is as far as I know two simultaneous pet bars isn't possible. So a frost mage casting water elemental and mirror image would lose control of one or the other, or be told he can't cast one until the other has expired (similar to not being able to use certain quest items that give you control of a pet while you have an active pet).

Edit: having reaaaly slow posting atm. What above poster said.

one way to grant controll over switching could be to have the spell conjure a couple of magic globes in your backpack upon cast (with the same duration as the spell ofc) and when you use them you switch places with someone. Not that I know anything about programming but it might be simpler to code such a conjured item and any player knows the concept of draging items onto hotkeys for easy use.

Being in full control of the switch timing would make this spell pretty overpowered in PVP. I doubt that Blizzard will go that way.

In a sense, consider MI as someone who is quad boxing. There may be a button to swap between one of the images randomly which could have a cooldown of ~5 seconds and pet commands like most normal pets: attack, aggressive, defensive, etc. The attack button could be used to assist the mage or fight something else to lighten the load, much like our WE. Hopefully this is more or less what Pintofbrew had envisioned.

The more I talk about it, the more I understand just how difficult this would be to implement because, as some have already mentioned, you can only have one pet bar up at any given time. So this would mean quests using pet bars, events, and our WEs would all get bugged or broken while MI is active.

It just sounds like a fun little toy that mages shouldn't pop on every cooldown until one considers the environment (solo, raiding, PvP). CC breaking, spell interrupts, and the disorientation I keep hearing will simply be a pain while raiding unless the swapping and target assisting can somehow get controlled. If they are able to add a secondary pet bar with some of these actions for MI, then that would be the best solution I could imagine.

Currently Iceblock icon change after using it , when pressing it an other time It removes the buff, I wouldn't be that hard to make MI work that way : You press it once , It summons the images, then the icon change for an other effect , you press it again you swap position.

Another option is to use a similar system to sentry totems - right-clicking the buff causes you to swap with an image. I'm not too up on shamans so I don't know if the effect can be reproduced in a macro, however.