Ilyawen

Well, as interesting as your observations may be, I cannot quite agree with you. You are just throwing in a few things which, if you think about them more closely, are either not as bad as you think or, as with Number 3, just don't matter.

Lets start with the end, actually: Your third point about the PvP-viability of even a raid-specced Frostmage. I am not going to deny the fact that Frost does possess these utility-talents, and that even as a raidspecced mage (including on live) you can easily go into a battleground and NOT be slaughtered to funny little confetti-pieces as a fire- or arcanemage would be.
Then again, whats wrong with that? For the survivability and utility frost has traditionally (and will keep on doing so, from the numbers we have seen so far) given up a significant ammount of Raid-DPS. This is a choice one can make, true, and the difference is not as severe as to completely exclude Frostmages from a PvE-Environment. On the other hand, what good would a frostmage be if with all his survivability, he didn't put at least some decent damage
The question of Frost vs. Fire is a question of not only playstyle, but of philosophy. Even on live realms, deep into BT some mages have argued that they happily accept a 5% or more penalty on their DPS for the additional tools that frost offers them, and it was a choice they made knowing- and happily. And thats exactly the sort of choice Blizzard probably wants mages to be making. They give us a tree full with cool Talents, like the Frost tree, but at the same time see to it that it doesn't overshadow both the other trees by putting out too much damage.
Within the fire tree, its the same. You CAN pick up the talents you mentioned, all it will cost you are probably a few points of DPS, and tadaa, you have some PvP-viability. This goes, with varying degrees, for pretty much every specc you can mention. Be it a full arena Frost-ICS-build, be it Arcane-Fire-pewpew-speccs, or even the odd PvP-Elementarist. Those are FUN speccs, or good PvP-speccs, but they give up PvE-DMG. Classic Deepfire is the opposite (and Arcane-Frost was about the same on live), giving up pretty much everything "fun" or every PvP-Talent in order to maximize damage. And that can be fun too, when raiding in a progressive environment. There are a myriad of options in between the two opposites, and Blizzard has, if anything, done a good job up to now in bringing up a lot of cool talents for people playing the game in a not-as-competetive environment who just like to play arround.


For the Icy Veins and Frost-tree question, I also have to disagree. Although I'm going on a bit of a speculation-rampage here.
Strictly limiting ourselves to the 11-point talents, you are right. Icy Veins is superior to Arcane Focus (and also to Pyroblast, for that matter, in case you're going for deep arcane and are looking for something to specc your last points into). But even under the best circumstances of cooldown-stacking (which is not going to be AS much of an issue, considering the change of execute-mechanics) it is NOT as irreplacable as you might now presume it will become.
From what I see, we are going back to making the first points in Arcane a viable choice for the deepfire-raider, not just a gimmick you advise kara-starters without a shadowpriest to specc into.

Lets compare what the two trees (Arcane up to 18 and Frost up to 18) give you as a Deepfire-Mage:

For Frost, its 13% less mana cost (nice), the very powerfull Icy Veins (even better) and 3% hit (situational. I believe that with the varying debuffs for more or less hit on enemies, we are going to swap hit gear a lot more at least during the early phase of Wrath, and 3% aren't expensive enough to really make this a decisive factor).

For Arcane, its a buff to your AE-usefullness, 80 resistance (this MIGHT be fun, depending on the encounters), a 10% mana cost reduction (pretty much on par with frost, though frost pulls out ahead), Arcane Focus (which is a single talent point for 3% crit on a raidmember, and pretty guaranteed 3% crit up on you - its not IV, but its VERY nice, especially since it gives us a stackable buff; that might just be our backdoor-entrance into a raid via secret stacking ^^). Up to here, Frost is lots better, as it is on live still. Going further will really level that out though. We gain a bit of spirit and, MUCH more importantly, a way to use that spirit on our gear. From what I'm gathering, this might make a HUGE difference, since mana is going to be somewhat scarce, and spirit is probably not going away from our gear. If these 3 points can make the difference between keeping LB up with Molten Armour or having to use Mage Armour, they might pull ahead even in DPS-terms over Icy Veins, apart from already just... "feeling" better since you don't have a completely wasted stat on your gear.
For months now, I have looked longingly into the Arcane Tree, wanting to specc the mana-talents since they just feel right for a mage. With all the upcoming changes, Blizzard seems to be making these a viable choice, and seems to move away from the "put out all you can, mana will never be an issue"-policy.

Its a close battle between the two trees, admitted, but thats what makes it fun, what makes it a real choice, and I don't really see frost coming out ahead for me right now

 

Jonny_Monroe

isn't it self evident that, at least in his opinion, they're better than the alternatives? Its a fair assumption to make too, considering the alternatives (on live at least), are considered joke talents by many mages.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Xentropy

1) The first arcane talent that makes spirit useful is in tier 4, which I don't consider a "lower tier talent" at all. Moving elementalist hit into arcane would hurt deep frost mages tremendously, since we already need to put 10 points into fire for ignite on our Brain Freeze procs, and basically being "required" to split points three ways wouldn't be fun, especially in a tree as dense as frost's (even after the 4 talent point savings introduced this build).

2) If you feel Icy Veins is such a requirement, why is getting Elemental Precision on the way an issue? That aside, you immediately dismiss Focus Magic as worse than Icy Veins, when in reality they are very close to the same power. Focus Magic should functionally have 100% uptime in a raid setting; by casting it on a target with a high crit rate to begin with, along with its own crit and the large number of crit bonuses that come from raid buffs, 50% crit is not out of the question, and with 50% crit NOT critting for 10 seconds would be rare. Icy Veins (with Ice Floes) averaged over time is 2.778% haste. 3% crit not only synergizes better with the fire tree, which on a percentage rather than rating basis already prefers crit, but doesn't have the drawback of haste, which is possibly reduced Living Bomb uptime due to faster mana drain. The only benefit Icy Veins has over the new Focus Magic is since it's activated on a cooldown it can be stacked with other cooldowns. That's not an insignificant benefit, granted, but 3% constant passive crit can come very close, and if you add the rdps of 3% crit to another person in the raid, Focus Magic may come out clearly ahead in an overall output sense.

Now given Focus Magic probably IS in its current incarnation better than Icy Veins, Fire ends up with the same problem Frost would have if the hit talent were in second-tier Arcane: Splitting points three ways. You'd have 11 arcane and 8 frost for FM and EP, leaving only 52 points for fire. That said...

3) I'm not sure why you go from "frost has too many good talents," which implies frost is too dense, to "fire can't afford to put points into our good talents," which implies fire is too dense. An ideal frost single-target raiding build uses 0/10/55, leaving 6 points free (4 of which were *just* freed up this patch; fire may be up for a similar pruning soon). That doesn't include Frostbite, Permafrost, or Improved Blizzard, which could have situational use in some raid encounters (to use TBC examples: Vashj Striders, Illidan Shadow Demons, and any AoE-inclusive encounter in Blizzard's case, now that it can crit and the chill effects would then proc FoF and Frostbite for increased crit rates). An ideal fire single-target raiding build includes 0/53/8, leaving 10 points free, but again doesn't include AoE-improving or situational talents (such as Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, Firestarter, Incineration, Impact, etc.). If you consider Incineration part of the ideal build due to its 6% Scorch crit (though that's such a small portion of your overall damage I didn't include it) it'd be 0/56/8 used with 7 points free. Still better off than Frost, it seems to me, as long as you can avoid putting points into all three trees simultaneously as may be the case if Focus Magic becomes the extra-dps talent of choice as I believe it could.

If your issue is that frost can move more seamlessly between PvE and PvP, that's not entirely true either, since 17 Arcane for Improved Counterspell is still considered pretty much an entry fee to even consider Arena, and no raiding frost mage worth his salt is going to have 17 Arcane. That means ANY mage, even Frost, is going to have to respec to PvP seriously, and there's no way any frost raiding mage is going to agree with losing PvE dps for this nonexistent advantage. If the two-saved-specs promise gets implemented, this could be a moot point anyhow.

-----

Bottom line, I would have no problem with making Arcane Focus and Elemental Precision both effect all three schools and be moved to Tier 2, with some sort of caveat that only one or the other is in effect at a time. ("This effect does not stack with <other talent's name>," in the tooltip would suffice.) This would give Fire mages the freedom to go 11 Frost for Icy Veins *or* 11 Arcane for Focus Magic and pick up 3% hit on the way; it seems highly likely that a Fire mage WILL go at least 11 in one or the other no matter what, so putting the Hit talent in Fire itself doesn't feel like a necessary change to me.

 

Pheroz

In TBC, deep fire mages lack a mana dump. I have infinite mana as a deep fire mage right now, and I cannot realistically spend it faster. Won't be the case when living bomb enters the picture. That will higly increase the value of clearcasting.

3% crit to myself and another raid member certainly seems comparable to icy veins, espcially when you factor in hot streak returns and those crits are granting instant cast fireballs.

I honestly don't know which is better, but it's not self evident. And you can't make arguments that assume something like that. If you want to argue that Elemental precision and Icy Veins are MANDATORY talents, thats fine. But prove it, becuase making assumptions and suggesting changes based on unsolidified assumptions is horrible and shouldn't happen on the elitist jerks boards.

 

Shadout

Was looking at a fire build yesterday, and choosing between arcane and frost seems to be somewhat difficult. While going frost offers a bit more dmg, arcane requires less points to gain the most important stuff, and adds some aoe dmg to it.
Im not very happy spending 18 p in frost anyway, you would have to lose some decent fire talents. Arcane offer a cheaper solution if you dont go for the spirit talents, and thus more points for fire.

The main factor between the trees might come down to how much you value the 3% hit from frost.
Dont forget Icy veins make you spend mana faster too, which might eat up the extra mana frost gives you. While Arcane give you 3% crit which will return more mana instead. This is assuming mana will be an issue determining how much you can use Living Bomb ofc.
Maybe frost does come out in front (mostly because of the %hit), but Ill argue its not a cleat-cut win by any means.

Both fire and frost trees are quite dense right now. But since its part of Blizzards plan, we probably wont see much improvement here. We are going to have some slightly harder decisions talent-wise than before.

 

piken

I did some extensive testing of Living Bomb last night in Chamber of Aspects and Naxx 10 man to see if the mechanics of the spell changed.

As of right now, the explosion is on the caster still, but you can no longer force an explosion by reapplying LB. Also LB is not going off anymore when the target dies as in 8926.

Also, the eplosion was going off 1 sec after the debuff ended, I think this was due to lag but will test more tonight. If this is the case, uptime of LB will be hard to maintain because anything before 13 secs after last cast will end up in a dps decrease and a dpm decrease.

Also the new frostfire glyph while paired with a spec to maximize both frost and fire dmg seems to have pulled ahead of fireball crits now since the change to the fireball glyph and only slightly behind non-crits. (This was tested at 1600 spell power, 22% crit to all spells, 54 haste, and 175 hit)

 

Shadout

So if the target dies before the timer runs out there is no explosion? Doesnt that remove a major part of its aoe utility.

 

piken

On trash in naxx, that would cut dps on the target alot and I am hoping it is a bug. Filed a report and waiting to see.

 

Leialyn

I guess they just have all frost spells that can proc Frostbite/FoF in a table (of a database) and if you cast, they just check that table and your talents to see whether FoF/Frostbolt can proc or not. Glyphing Frostbolt alters the spell but doesn't remove Frostbolt from the FoF/Frostbite table, thats why it can still proc. Ice Lance got removed from this table in the current build.

This is mechanic is used a lot for general casting (like Molten Armor charges eating up FoF) and only treat certain cases as an exeption (so Molten Armor needs to be added as an exception)

So FoF and Frostbite both proc together... it seems like FoF should be the raiding replacement to compensate for bosses imunities.

This fact and the fact that we can get to 100% hit lets me think about if the casting mechanics have changed to a one roll system. There was a discussion some time ago and a lot of ppl said that casters use a two roll system.
Any thoughts on this?

I think LB should be changed to a more Seed of Corruption like spell... e.g. reduce the Dot damage to make it not viable as single target dps (we are not warlocks), allow it on multiple targets and let it explode when the mob dies or after 8sec.

That means no 4th major Glyph anymore? That whoud really hurt a lot. I was going to give up enchanting for Inscription because of the 4th Glyph slot allowing more flexibility.

 

Ilyawen

You are off a bit there. Living Bomb does not favour clearcasting over Frost at all. Every procc-based casting which does not give at least a one-cast-in-progress warning before being spent is necessarily used with a fireball-spam. Hot Streak works because the charge doesn't go away when you are chaincasting fireballs. Clearcasting won't work on Living Bomb, because you are NOT going to cancel the cast in progress when it proccs to cast a LB which is most likely wasted anyhow, because the DOT still has uptime left.
The clearcast is much more likely going to be stuck on a comparatively "cheap" fireball, which is also nice, but does penalize Arcane a bit in favour of frost, which has a clear 13% mana reduction on ALL spells. On the other hand, I believe the other Mana-regen-tools Arcane offers more then set that off.

Anyhow, I have already tried to summarize the benefits of the Arcane first 18 points and the Frost first 18 above, from those playing Beta or PTR and testing these things, is there anything to add, or something that has slipped my attention?

I am only mentioning those 18 points because I believe it will be highly unlikely to see speccs like 11/52/8. The problem is that, without Meditation, Arcane is not worth the points, since IV+EP would probably pull ahead. So its either 18 Arcane, or none (leaving these points to go to frost). At least I don't see the benefit of speccing for Arcane Focus only. Its a great talent, as I said before, but its not great enough on its own to justify the loss of Icy Veins (which is its direct competitor) and the Elemental Precision on the way. Arcane picks up speed for firemages only afterwards, though this will be highly dependant on how the mana-situation will look in the final shipping version of the expansion.

So: My bet is on 18 Arcane, with an occassional 18 Frost for places where mana isn't an issue (or where you need Blizzard).

 

Thegoodman

I strongly disagree with this. One of the biggest problems Mages have had in BC is the lack of a powerful DoT. Another area where we are lacking is AoE. LB solves both of these problems and is a very underrated spell so far in these talent discussions.

Again with the class identities, they do not exist. Warlocks are better at AoE than Mages, the supposed AoE class. Why should we not have a significant DoT? Class roles overlapped long ago and to say one class should not do XYZ because another class can do it is irrelevant. Hybrids are just as capable of any role in the game as any class that is focused on that role. To say that our own role is limited to "Direct Damage, no DoTs, some AoE" is just silly. There is no reason to ask for our class to be pigeon-holed to only be effective in encounters that require no movement (few encounters in BC require no movement).

 

Shadout

Thats a contradiction. We arent locks so we shouldnt have a single-target dot, but still we should have a Seed-like ability? Beside, locks have already been mages for ages, where destru have been the preferred spec.

I kinda like what Living Bomb seems capable of, a reasonably strong dot which will use fire mages excessive mana. We already got quite strong AoE, although Living Bomb should of course be able to explode when the target dies. By only allowing it on 1 target (and not exploding when refreshing it), it doesnt make all our other aoe abilities obsolete.

 

Thegoodman

The Molten Shields talent wording says it has a 50% chance of effected ranged attacks, even with 2/2. Is the talent wording correct or is it a typo? I know the talent is mostly irrelevant, but I'd still like to know if it is bugged.

 

arch

It's been like that for some time.. it changes every other build. Sometimes it's 100% sometimes 50%.. Most likely a bug.

 

Samuel

I don't think you understood Pheroz correctly. The point was extra mana you can't spend is useless thus clearcasting was useless. Living Bomb provides a mana sink thus making extra mana more useful since there will now be something to use it on so clearcasting suddenly becomes useful rather than useless even if the clearcast isn't used to cast Living Bomb.

In previous posts people were suggesting, based on testing, that fire mages would be using mage armor for increased mana rather than molten armor for maximum dps. If this is true then 18 points in arcane starts to look very interesting for fire.

 

Leialyn

I just did some tests with Firestarter (I do get the buff) and it appears that the proc is calculated every time I hit a mob... so with 1/2 Firestarter you have a 50% chance for every mob you hit to get the buff... but this still needs more testing, the Beta Server laggs too much now.

Oh and btw, The Human Spirit got lowered to 3% more spirit now, they are really minimizing racial bonuses.

 

Lhivera

No, as you can see in that log output, FoF was applied almost 1.5 seconds before the Frostbolt hit (which is what we'd expect, as it applies on cast, not on hit). It was then applied again almost immediately after Frostbite procced, with no additional Frostbolts cast.


With the new cast time, we'd expect:

(2 / 3.5) / 2 = 0.28571428571

The actual coefficient is just over 255% of this number. Pretty weird, but no question that Flamestrike is now a much stronger spell. A glyph that increases its radius by 1 yard would make a world of difference.


This is simply not true. What every PvE mage needs is to deal competitive damage. Each spec will have different ways of accomplishing this, and motivation for picking up different stats on their gear to accomplish it. Why do you want Icy Veins? To increase DPS, of course. But if you now get more DPS by taking Clearcasting to support Living Bomb casts, you're gaining, not losing, by making that change. Not having Elemental Precision means picking up more Hit Rating, and Hit Rating is a very efficient stat.

It's not a straight talent-for-talent comparison. Icy Veins may be worth a little more for a single point expenditure than Focus Magic (though I'm pretty sure Focus Magic is actually worth nearly twice as much raid DPS), but if you compare the full 11-point expenditure to get each talent, you're clearly getting more out of the 11 points in Arcane, because they also support higher DPS from Living Bomb.


I'd dispute this, as well. Ten talent points for what looks to be about a 1.5% DPS increase? I'll take a pass on Ignite, myself. Leave that debuff slot open for someone who can make better use of it.


I thought the general consensus on Inscription was that it was pretty difficult to find four major glyphs that were actually useful for any given spec?


You're overthinking it. Clearcasting extends the mana pool by around 10% -- that in itself helps to make Living Bomb more sustainable. It isn't necessary that Clearcasting make the Living Bomb casts themselves free in order for it to help you keep casting it.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Zaldinar

It's still a 3.0 second cast, the 2.0 version hasn't happened in 8962 yet. The coefficient may change when it becomes a 2.0 second cast, at which time, I'll repeat this process.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Axira

On Elemental Precision:
Okay, it seems I caused some distress with that statement. But I really considered it as common knowledge and maybe I was wrong in that. Either way I'll give you now the explanation why:

3% hitchance or 1 talentpoint for 1% hitchance is hands down the best talent that can exist for increasing DPS on raidbosses. I could give you the calculations like there have been a thousand before, but I'll just refer you to the numbers Roywyn has already given us at WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3 PTR) . Besides that I'll show you in another way why this 3% hitchance is so essential for a frost or firemage.

To completely max out your DPS potential at L70 you need 17% hitchance. Even with the steeper ratings being hitcapped is still the most important part of your DPS. (As you can see in plenty of theorycraft or the link I gave you before.) To achieve being hitcapped at L80, you'll need 446 hitrating (=17% hitchance).

Let's assume we get a shadowpriest in the raid so this amount drops with 3% and to 367 hitrating required.
Let's see what amount of hitrating is currently available at L80 with the best possible gear:

head: 58
shoulders: 0
chest: 45
bracers: 28
gloves: 33 (red gem)
waist: 48
boots: 37
legs: 36 (yellow, red gem)
ring1: 49
ring2: 19 (blue quality)
trinket1: 95** (pvp trinket / +health on use)
trinket2: 42 (jewelcrafter only yellow, red gem)
weapon: 59
ranged: 18

This totals up to 567 and at first glance might appear to be way over the top and thus it would appear that it's easy to become hitcapped... this however is not true. The goal is to get our number down to 367 hitrating. So the first obvious choice would be to remove that PvP trinket from our PvE outfit.
567 - 95 becomes 472.
The second choice would be to remove that JC BoP trinket.
472 - 42 becomes 430.
Then we only got 70 hitrating left to become capped. The boots and gloves would give us this exactly.
430 - 70 becomes 360. About 7 below the number we'd ideally need.

With perhaps some foodbuffs this number gets pushed down a little bit more, but let's see ... what do you currently need to be hitcapped as a L80 without elemental precision: All the best hitrating gear available from Naxxramas, minus only your boots, gloves or trinkets. That is not something that is easy to get. Having elemental precision would give us alot more freedom in how we gear up. With elemental precision for example your weapon + ring wouldn't need any hitrating anymore to be capped. So itemisation in that regard is still pretty much the same as with was at T4 gearlevel. We had to gather each little bit of hitrating we could get to have our best possible DPS.

For a Fire Mage in T7 gear:
100 spellpower = +120 DPS roughly.
100 spellhit = +130 DPS rougly.

Elemental precision gives us 79 spellhit, so about ~103 DPS.
79 hitrating however in terms of stats value should equal 144 spellpower, which equals ~173 DPS.

So a L80 mage in T7 gear would rougly gain 70 DPS from having elemental precision over someone not having it.
And as still the old min/max mindset goes, a mage needs to do maximum DPS on a raidboss. That's the simple basics and that's the main topic theorycraft evolves about, finding the maximum DPS talent build.

In the meanwhile, what would you get from putting those 8 points in arcane instead? As far as I can see nothing useful except for 6% more mana efficiency, but it's already shown that mana is not an issue at the current L80 entry level raidcontent.

On Icy Veins vs. Focus Magic:

Let's assume the following numbers (values that ain't really relevant as increasing or decreasing em will give the same relative results):
3000 damage fireballs and 7350 crits. (assuming full ignite damage).
4000 damage pyroblasts and 9800 crits. (assuming full ignite damage).
50% critchance. And 2,5 minutes or 150 seconds of DPS.

Icy Veins mage (gets to cast 1 more fireball):
So 25,5x 3000 damage + 25,5 x 7350 damage.
You'd averagely get 7 hot streak procs on 51 casts. Half of em which will crit.
3,5x 4000 + 3,5x 9800

This would total 76500 + 187425 + 14000 + 34300 = 312225 damage.

Focus Magic mage (get's 3% more crit assuming 100% uptime):
So 23,5x 3000 + 26,5 x 7350 damage.
He'd averagely get ~8 hotstreak procs on 51 casts. Of which 53% will crit.
3,76x 4000 + 4,24x 9800

This would total 70500 + 194775 + 15040 + 41552 = 321867 damage.

So it appears that this evens out pretty well and that I was wrong.
However the time I took 2,5 minutes and only 1 Icy Veins use was not optimal, because theoretically we'd be able to use Icy veins for a little bit longer a 2nd time.
And I was a bit too generous with the hot streak procs for the focus magic mage.

However taking this all into account it appears that I was indeed wrong and that Focus Magic is about just as good as Icy Veins. The only big issue is... that we don't get our 3% hitchance on the way there which is still essential and like someone else mentioned: "having to split your talent points in 3 different trees, is not good."


On Frost versus Fire:

Sorry, but this is in my opinion simple common sense. A talent build that has higher survivability, ways of CCing it's targets and much higher mana efficiency should not have the same kind of DPS output as a talent build that has lower survivability and has no ways of CCing it's targets. If they intend to give deep fire and deep frost talentbuilds equal DPS, they should also give fire extra things that would matter on single target raidDPS encounters.

 

Actovision

I was encountering what seemed to be frostbolt messages early this morning on the ptr. Is it possible that you're missing a frostbolt cast after the snapshot you provided that would explain things? Or a lagspike, since timestamps are client-side(confirm/deny)?

 

Lhivera

Oho, teach me to not have it on my cast bars (my tiny, tiny, unmodified cast bars, which I hate).


Definitely not. I was experimenting in Shadowmoon Valley specifically to avoid the heavy latency in the more populated areas of the server. There were no peculiar timing gaps in the log, either.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Zaldinar

Something you're missing in all this mate is that the desire to go into Arcane vice Frost for 51 point fire builds is based around the need for more mana. If Living Bomb stays in the same relative state it is currently in it can be an incredible tool for damage output. The issue it encounters is it is expensive. Very expensive.

18 points into arcane nets you Clearcasting, more spirit, and 30% regen while casting to support this, plus the 3% crit shared buff deal that Focus Magic has become. This lends towards supporting the mana usage of Living Bomb.

Now, while it is true that hit is ridiculously good, it's also ridiculously cheap. At present it's hard to shed enough hit in high end gear to not be over the cap as you showed in your example. If instead of spending 8 points into frost to get EP, you pick up the hit in gear, you can put 18 points into arcane, come out with super mana regen, and support living bomb, which more than makes up for not having IV.

Basically, the equation is a lot more complex than you're making it out to be, and this is exactly what Blizzard intended, for there to be no super easy decision. 10/47/3 + 1 was super easy and obvious. Then 2/47/11 + 1 was super easy and obvious. Now all we really know is we want 51 points in fire to make people blow up, the other 20 points have a dozen configurations they can take, the reality of which is best is likely going to boil down to personal preference.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Vhad

Focus Magic is really weird at the moment on beta, it's a 10 second buff on target. No way we're going to keep that up...

@Zaldinar, we don't have alot of configurations. We have 3. Either you spec 18 frost or arcane or you spec 4 in clearcasting and get IV.

What!?

 

Axira

That's only if you learned rank2 by the way. Rank1 works like it should. Seems to me that something went wrong when trying to make a ranked spell (giving more spellpower on each rank) into a spell that gives the same thing (3% crit + 3% crit proc for the mage).

 

◊ manly

Its odd; my perception of icy veins and clearcasting doesn't match, so far, anyone elses.

First thing first; I prefer Focus Magic over Icy Veins. I already made the switch. However, theres a hidden cost that nobody mentioned. As soon as you go anything above 2 points in arcane, you shut down any hopes of ever using FFB. FFB requires ice shards and piercing ice, which you will not get under any fire spec having more than 2 in arcane. This is ultimately what you give up. FFB can give potentially DPM savings, which haven't been much analyzed.

11/52/8 is an awesome spec, if not for the fact that it can't use FFB. Focus Magic means more crit = better DPM (= more master of elements = more Living Bomb) = more hot streak. Icy Veins isn't really all that awesome when you know you will go OOM; all it does is get you there faster. Oh it can increase DPM, but by such minimal amounts its not really much to write home about. So there you get it, a better estimate of

Focus Magic (3% more crit (not even counting another player having 3% more crit), better DPM) vs
Icy Veins (about the same DPS increase, but without the DPM increase)

Although, as I pointed out, going 0/53/18 needs to be checked on for FFB rotations as far as DPM is concerned. Maybe doing FFB rotations could outdo the DPM saving from Focus Magic. If I were to guess I'd say its a toss up. Then theres the option of 18/53/0, which means you get to gear up more hit rating (which is not as fine as it used to be, since now its about as expansive as spell damage to gear up with). I am skeptical about 30% passive regen vs 3% better DPM and 3% hit being. It might be better, but not early on.

Then again, my opinion is probably being highly distorted by the fact that the few naxx 10/25 bosses I tried I frequently ran totally OOM without even using Living Bomb (since the new patch).

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.