This flies in the face of blizzards current design goal of 'no spec being vastly superior for any given content'. In a 10-man you can't rely on a frost mage bing present, or any other mage for that matter. Hence the mage feeling obligated to grab Imp Scorch for the crit debuff. Theres no hard law saying 10-man content doesn't have a DPS stress test. Patchwerk, ZA, etc...

Its partly a flaw with arcane, partly a flaw that mages are expected to provide a buff that needs to be spec'd for that can't be reached in the arcane tree. Before someone says 'but other classes provide raid buffs through talents...' How many of those buffs are exclusive to that class? And more importantly, available as base abilities for other classes? Nothing else is as exclusive as the mage's raid buff. I admit most 10-mans won't have 100% buff coverage but theres a big difference between asking the Holy paladin to spec ret for a mana battery and asking a mage to spec frost for Crit.

Min Maxers will certainly respec for any tough fight to optimize their dps. But they probably won't bother for farmed bosses.

My objection to Alar wasn't so much on first kills, but when on farm. I was willing to respec frost for Alar, but it was a pain to run around with a gimpy spec for the rest of the instance. Mages either had to be fire specced and use gimpy frost spells on Alar, or had to spec frost on the entire instance, or had to respec to frost for Alar and respec back to fire when done and get summoned back.

Frostfire offers a way out. Spec optimally for the first few kills, but once the boss is a safe kill, just use your preferred instance spec plus frostfire.

My worry is that Blizzard usually takes with the other hand when they give with one, particularly when it comes to spell school mechanics. They keep touting mage's spell school choice as an advantage, when it fact all it does is give Blizzard an excuse to create mobs and bosses which are immune to our schools - something they don't do for classes that have less school choice (shadow is the obvious one). The only time our spell school variety has been useful rather than a respec pain is on school rotational fights like Chromag.

As such, my fear is that giving us frostfire bolt just indicates that Blizzard is going to be drowning us in fire and frost immune bosses and mobs now, and just say "use frostfire" when mages bitch that this kills their dps.

In my experience, I've seen far more mages sitting out rather than respec. Not necessarily out of the mage choice, but raid leaders choice. And were I a raid leader I'd probably do the same.

As a raid leader, and a mage, it's far easier to have them sit out, sitting is typically the fastest way...since most mages take a while to change their spec and UI, though I managed to get it down to <3 min for changing my spec, and my UI from Fire-->Frost and Frost-->Fire.

Although it's only desirable to sit the mage if there are no changes in the fight properties from one phase to another, or if there isn't some mage gimmick (such as parasites on Illidan or mage-tanking).

There could be the possibility that an immunity boss exists where it has a fast-respawn gauntlet before it that requires a mage, or the boss switches immunities between Frost and Fire, or any sort of other similar gimmick. It seems like a very Blizzard thing to do, to make specific gimmicks for classes that are likely to get sat due to fight mechanics.

Also pushing this will be that the Arcane mage can maintain the scorch debuff without dps loss (aside from the chance to proc MB).

As for dedmon's sim, I went through the arcane calculations fairly carefully to get them to match up with my spreadsheet. I didn't check the fire/frost portions as carefully because I don't have those specs on my spreadsheet. For those asking about rotations other than ABr->FB, here's a sim run from my setup (which is based on the naxx 10 spreadsheet numbers we've been using and have most of the changes sondag put in with the exception of pom+pyro):

3638 Mage_Arcane_Fire
3589 Mage_Arcane_Frost
3227 Mage_Arcane_AB

Fireball has a 1.5% miss rate here and everything else is capped, so fire is slightly further ahead if you hit cap. All in all, you can take your pick for whether you want Fire or Frost. I wouldn't trust the sim numbers to be authoritative for differences under 3%. Also, using FFB with a 53/10/8 build produces dps below the frost numbers here and you don't get any flavor talents from the fire/frost tree, so I don't see a point to speccing that way.

Any arcane rotations discussed here are 60-70% arcane damage at minimum. I've always considered the chromatic spell buffs to be part of the arcane tree identity and those lead directly to viable off tree nukes. Tweaking rotations to allow AB as a viable filler isn't hard (I like the ABr gives a short duration AB buff solution because it leaves stacked AB unaffected) but keeping AB in line as gear scales is difficult due to Ice Shards and Ignite. The crit bonus is actually a significant fraction of the difference showing up in the above numbers. Without the huge amount of crit raid buffs provide, the numbers are much closer.

The pom+pyro part was the kicker that made my arcane_fire the definite best choice in tests.. would it be hard to calculate in your spreadsheets too? i'm interested in how "my" rotation is performing.

Mirror Image
As of Buils 8982, Mirror Image is off GCD. It does trigger a GCD on trinkets though.
So, if you make a macro with Combustion/Mirror/Trinket/Fireball, you'll get Comb/Mirror/Fireball on your first cast and Trinket/Fireball on yur second cast.
So true min-maxers would make one Comb/Trinket/FB and one Mirror/FB macro.

4/5 T7
Data taken from the raid of a frost mage with 3% crit meta, for average hits/crits.
Frostbolt - 3531, 7416 - 210%
Blizzard - 988, 2092 - 212%
Arcane Explosion - 1025, 1603 - 156%

Hm, not very conclusive. Especially with the given data being kind of bad (mix of bosses and trash).
But it doesn't seem like a huge bonus so far.

I don't see why I would bind MI and fireball together; to me, the most interesting part of MI is what it does to your threat, not the actual dps increase.

New changes.

Empowered Fireball -> Empowered Fire
Now affects fireball and FFB.

Living Bomb
No more knock up effect

Deep Freeze
No damage.

Evocation
5 min CD

Frost Warding <-> Frostbite
Changed position in the talent tree (why??????)

Arcane Blast
No change.

Missile Barrage
Procs on AB and arcane barrage. Proc chance upped to 20%.

Hot Streak
Procs on fireblast.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage=
updated to include new changes

Because clicking one button is faster than clicking two? You can of course separate them, but adding a button that merges both that you can click when it's cooldown is up is a bit faster than clicking both.



That should be the death of Fireball. That's the problem of balancing two spell in one spec

Frostbite and Frost Warding swapped places for some reason. No other changes in Frost apart from bad Deep Freeze being official.

The point was -- I think the major upside of the spell is how it interacts with threat rather than the dps increase. If you view it form a pure dps perspective -- sure, I agree with your point. In my view, having 0 threat for 30 seconds has many uses, like AOE amongst other things. You definitely want it on its own keybind for the purposes I listed, with a conditional on fireball. something like /cast [modifier:shift] Mirror Image /cast Fireball.

doesn't the Fireball glyph still put the Fireball ahead in the rotation, or is there a similar FFB glyph ?

And that removed a chunk of the possible PvP utility for fire. Now get us a on-death explosion like seed of corruption to replace the knockup please.

Does the Fireball Glyph still tip it in fire's favor VS those 19 pts in frost?

Frostbite is a much better T1 talent than Warding, especially if we can use FFB as our main nuke. Let's face it, it's a sweet looking spell and has an interesting mechanic, much more than fireball.

Still not a vast amount for arcane. The 20% proc rate is of course welcome but I was hoping for something more helpful changed in terms of defining how arcane is supposed to work.

We can't complain about the 5 min cooldown either. If we use it early in boss fights it means we can use it twice. Though how welcome this will be due to the dps loss time I don't know.

Did you also do a PoM+FFB for the frost spec? It wouldn't be that hard, but it would correspond fairly closely to the sim because it's the same math. That's why I went through the sim's code. I was mostly warning people that I didn't really check the fire/frost stuff aside from fireball/frostbolt/pyroblast.

Quickly patching the MB changes (only) into the sim and flipping on infinite mana (the arcane specs tend to go OOM on a 6 minute stand and burn) gets me:
4446 Mage_Fire
3849 Mage_Arcane_Fire
3821 Mage_Arcane_Frost
3776 Mage_Frost
3576 Mage_Arcane_AB

Glyph of Frostfire - Thottbot: World of Warcraft

"Glyph of Frostfire - Increases the initial damage dealt by Frostfire Bolt by 2% and its critical strike chance by 2%."

As far as seeing if the FFB glyph comes close now, we'll have to see on the testing.

Build after build and there seems to be no changes to AM at all, if thats what it comes to I guess
I´ll have quite some fun with fireballs and ABar in northrend, and having something that includes
pompyro actually be a good raidspec i also appealing, but I really can´t grasp why blizzard are so
hellbent on turning fireball into the best possible bread and butter nuke for arcane. Like I said I
don´t mind the playstyle of fireballs mixed with insta nukes along with what fun utility tools you
get from the arcane tree, but the only thing this acomplishes is making one of the base spells in
the game obsolete. Now that it´s confirmed that blizzard does not want any mage to spam AB
wouldn´t it be better to change incineration and spell impact to affect AM rather than AB? In fact
removing some of the damage talents for AB might make it easier to design it as a manadump
spell for all three specs wich seems reasonale since thats the original intention of it.

Perhaps this is an impossible balance to strike but something that would be a nice way to be
using AM is if a 51/20/0 spec made fireball and AM hit very nearly exactly the same DPS with a
slight favour of fireball but that letting the full dot run out, alternating fireballs and AM produced
the best DPS. Or possibly giving fire the slight advantage when theres no pushback to consider
but AM come so close behind that it becomse the better nuke when even 70% pushback means
you loose enoughe casting time for AM to be superior. But I´ll take just about any solution that
gives AM a solid role for raiding and not just being a 13 point spinoff on brain freeze.

I thought it was an age-old assumption that by and large, makeing a

/cast Mirror Image
/cast Combustion
/cast Fire Blast

macro would be a dps increase because it lets you:
Hopefully not crit Fire Blast
Start Combustion at 2 essentially (faster cooldown on combustion, more consistent crits later on)

followed by

/use 14
/use Mana Sapphire
/cast Icy Veins
/use Fire Seed
/use Potion of Speed
/cast Firenuke

And now it makes everyone happy