Note that blizzard isn't used to the max since you do not have winter's chill, permafrost, shatter and FoF. So instead of trying to save a small damage bonus with puting 2 points in ice shards (you won't crit much anyway*), you're probably better of with putting 2 points in frost warding (you can also use a minor glyph that increase the effect by a extra 5%, finally SOME use for the minor glyphs!).

*Crit on some of the mobs does help your dps, however you won't kill the group faster (even if 4 of the 20 mobs dies faster you'll still have to cast until the whole group is dead). FoF will make you crit on the whole group, making crit a better way to go.

I would think that 1% more hit on everything would trump bigger crits in your blizzards. For anything but a deep frost mage you'll be mainly saving the tank a little bit of pain from a mob or two killed slightly faster and goosing your trash dps on the charts a bit.

It's different if your frostfirebolts also benefit from the talent. Although frostfire builds tend to take BOTH 3/3 precision and 3/3 ice shards. They don't skimp on either. Their blizzard is ok, but nothing like a deep frost blizzard. If frostfire really wants to aoe, the usual tradeoff is frost channeling+something utilitylike in the fire tree for dragon breath, blast wave and firestarter, with a "dragon breath+firestarter flamestrike+blizzard" for nuking down trash. Once we get the blast wave glyph that will change to "dragon breath, firestarter flamestrike, blast wave, downranked firestarter flamestrike,blizzard"

Arcane aoe....blizzard or arcane explosion spam is pretty much a wash. Neither better than adequate. It'll get the job done but doesn't do nearly as well as what frostfire or deep frost can do.

Arcyla, when was the last time you aoe'd with blizzard and only crit 4 out of 20 mobs? Do you get one wave off and quit?
You seem to have gone off the deep end trying to prove pintofbrew wrong and have lost touch with reality.

More crit dmg on blizzard will be a help when clearing trash or aoeing adds on boss fights. It WILL kill whole groups faster... there is a very high probability that at least one wave of blizzard will crit on every mob. Not to mention you normally cast a couple blizzards on a pull. Yes the ward will provide a benefit on very few boss fights, and if that's what you are shooting for, great. But Pint is correct, blizzard crit would be more useful most the time which makes it a useful pickup option for arcane builds. He's saying it's subjective and there's no definitive answer. He's right.


Solbergb, I have a hard time seeing how I will drop hit enough that 6% will be useful. Even if I re-gem, I only lose about 20 hit. It's not that the hit isn't better, it's that in end game gear, our hit is very high and it's hard to ditch enough extra hit to make all 6% from talents useful. Personally I'll take all 6% hit, but I see their point after looking over my gear and gear possibilities.

Pintofbrew didn't make a conclusion, other than that it's subjective. I was trying to prove Pasture wrong, not pintofbrew.

You seem to be active so you've probably read the post where they stated that arcane explosion ~ blizzard here's the quote:

Now, as a arcane mage in a raid (let's say it's a 25 man raid with other mages). Now, let's compare the ffb blizzard spam (without shatter).

In a arcane spec with frost here's the thing you'll lose and gain with blizzard:
-6% dmg. No chill effect (so no frostbite).
50% crit dmg bonus, 6% dmg, 3% crit chance and dmg, 6% haste and arcane mind + mind mastery spell power bonus. You will also proc talents like: clearcasting and arcane potency. And you'll get to use arcane power if needed.

Here's what you'll lose and gain with arcane explosion:
You lose nothing.
50% crit dmg bonus, 6% dmg, 3% crit chance and dmg, 6% haste and arcane mind + mind mastery spell power bonus. You will also proc talents like: clearcasting and arcane potency. And you'll get to use arcane power if needed. (same as with blizzard)

The 1.00 arcane explosion spam will get closer the 1.24 blizzard spam. But also, what you'll probably do, just because your a kind soul and think about the raid, is to use frost nova and cone of cold into your AoE rotation with arcane explosion. Frost nova will freeze the target and cone of cold will also freeze some (because of frostbite), frozen targets allows deep fire guys to use blast wave (or ele shammys to use thunderstorm (if both do not have the glyph)) and it helps blizzard guys with shatter.

So if you take into consideration that your arcane explosion will deal more damage, than previously calculated, and you'll help your raid dps. Going frostnova + arcane explosion + cone of cold might be your/the raid's best shot.

There really is no need to argue over comparing two talents which both are decidedly moderate and situational.

Jackie: No, let me demonstrate what I mean.

Gaining a 1% economy (ie, a 1% reduction in cost) is like gaining a flat mana increase of 1% of your mana consumption. Say you consume around 300mana/sec, a point in the talent represents 3mana/sec (while casting, of course). Let's not assume Burnout or MoE for this, because it gets messy and doesn't add to the explanation.

If you're arcane spec, and you go through 2 Evocates, which grant you say 20k mana over the bossfight, your glyphed Mage Armor and Meditation give you another 35k, and various other effects give you another 25k (numbers picked randomly, please don't correct me), over the 4m fight you'll have seen 83mps, 104mps and 146mps respectively, for a total of 333mps. Now add one talent point (at 3mps effective regen), that gains you an effective 0/9% relative regen.

If you were specced FFB, which consumes much less, say 250mps, the talent only represents 2.5mps, but you only regen, say, 25k from various effects and about 12k from MoE return, giving a total of 37k in 4m, or 154mps regen. To that 154, 2.5 represents 1.6% relative regen.

Hence, you see the spec that generates vastly more mana, despite being relatively more mana consuming, gains 70% less value from a 1% economy talent than the spec that generates less but is a little cheaper. Not to mention, MoE specs create extra value from cost-reduction talents because the regen MoE provides is based on original casting cost, not modified cost.

TLDR: An Arcane spec will increase his mana consumption rate, but his mana regeneration rate will increase even more, making economy talents less value and less relative. There's little point to a 1% economy talent, when you can gain multiple times that economy by cutting your last Evo short by the appropriate amount

solbergb: The question wasn't whether Ice Shards is better than Elemental Precision, it was whether Ice Shards was better than Frost Warding. There's no question that Ele. Pre is more valuable to an arcane spec, if nothing else because it can afford to lighten-up the arcane tree, as it does the same thing as Arcane Focus, only better. Many people go on and on about how Arcane doesn't need 6% to hit, and then discuss whether to cut-out points from Arc. Stability, from Magic Attunement, from Mind Mastery or from Arcane Mind. Well, why not cut points from Arcane Focus if (1) you're over-capped, (2) you're short on points, and (3) you can spec Ele Pre?

Arcyla: Though you noticed the Minor Glyph of Frost Warding, Blizzard didn't. Both the Fire Warding and Frost Warding glyphs "increase the chance of reflecting (frost/fire) spells 5% while (frost/fire) ward is up" meaning that it'll (probably) increase your chance to reflect a fire ward if specced into Molten Shields, but it's not clear what it'll do:

(assuming spec 0/2 Molten Shields and 2/2 Frost Warding)
1) Nothing, because it specifies a function granted by Molten Shields and it's not a talent you have chosen.
2) Make your 30% into 35% to gain mana from Fire/Frost Ward only, because the mechanics are not consistent with the tooltip.
3) Do nothing to the chance to gain mana, but add 5% to reflect a Fire/Frost Warded spell if it isn't absorb.
4) Give a 5% chance to reflect a Frost Warded spell and reduce mana gain chance to 25% (Frostbite/FoF type overlap).

I suspect either Blizzard meant to make the Fire one duplicate the Fire talent and the Frost one duplicate the Frost talent, or they considered the possibility of wearing a glyph alone, with no talent, and gaining mana somewhere influential (like PvP) and decided to make both the Frost and the Fire one into "reflects damage back". Either way, the glyph probably won't generate any mana, but I'd love to see some tests. Won't take much, probably 30m, a combat log and a warlock on the PTR to cast some down-ranked Immolate.

Arcyla II: For many guilds Frost Nova is still taboo. AoE Agro generation is much better than it used to be, but despite that fact, unless a mob is in melee range of a tank, stopping it from moving will condemn the nearest player (melee or mage AEing) to aggro focus.

So you're saying that there's no use for arcane explosion AoE? Considering a somewhat blizzard talented will freeze some mobs anyway I can't see how a mage can run in between them and AoE.

I'll bow under then. Ice shards to improve the blizzard would be better if you meet more groups that needs AoE dmg than boss fights where you need some mana regen.

When it comes to the glyph, my bad.

They are also increasing the duration according to the patch notes.

With that added to your math, I would think so.

According to mmo-champion, a new glyph of arcane blast has been added according to the new patch notes.

Well we knew it was added, but just so people know where it's from, it simply seems to be trainable from inscription trainers, not discovered like most other northrend glyphs.

Official Patch Note
# A new recipe for Glyph of Arcane Blast has been added to Master and Grand Master Inscription trainers.

Do we know the actual stats/part of the glyph? I did some googling but haven't found anything

From WOTLK wiki.

* Glyph of Arcane Blast - Increases the damage from your Arcane Blast buff by 5%.

There's a little confusion as to what this actually means in relation to stacking the arcane blast debuff. Will it be a standard 5% through all, or will it provide a 5% increase that can be consequently taken into account and will increase as the debuff increases as well.

True enough. I might shave a point or two off elemental precision myself once I get into mostly nax25/eye25 gear. I'm not sure I'll have alternate "non-hit gear" good enough to justify even the 3%.

Pre-Nax, hit's more useful. It also depends on whether you can realiably get raid buffs/debuffs that can require up to 6% less hit. That's something I'll know better after I have some WWS parses to see my actual hit rate in the field.

I'm wondering if anyone has any idea what this is all about, from the updated patch notes,

Read that earlier and still have no idea what they try to accomplish with that change.

Maybe a way around the AoE cap? Only thing I could think of, but it makes 0 sense...

Spell Power the talent in the arcane tree that gives 25%/50% more crit damage bonus to spells.
They are saying it will work correctly with blizzard now.

You don't hit the cap on most trash pulls in an instance, I guess they are just trying to make the talent work correctly and avoid tears about a possible bug.

Spell Power perhaps sheds some light? Bigger grits if you are arcane - frost or simply arcane and using Bliz as your AoE.

I think the change note is confused in some way in relation to spell power and Blizzard. There is no tooltip change, so either before Blizzard wasnt benefiting from Spellpower (any arcane mages want to test that quickly on live?), or something weird is going on.

Currently, this adds 5% to each buff, making it 20/40/60% --and I must say it's a welcomed sight. Arcane seems now to be a legitimate contender in raid DPS with this glyph.

Illustration of the Dragon Soul got changed again and now is 20 spell power per stack (was 18 in the last ptr build). It won't stack that fast with glyphed scorch anymore (since fire vulnerability won't proc stuff) but prestacking still works I guess.

I'm not surprised since it isn't really that overpowered anymore, still is flavour of the month though. These are the top 3 trinkets Rawr suggest (Dragon-trinket with 20dmg increments), Rawr even values it higher than it should be since it counts it as a flat 200-dmg trinket with no ramp up time.

The rawr values dont make sense. Embrace of the spider has passive dmg and passive haste (in addition to the proc), hence the unexpectedly good dps.

Also, illustration is still marked as a 260 dmg trinket.

Sure but you can edit it.

There we have it. I was wondering why the heck EotS had such a high value. Numbers now looks better when I edit out the passive haste. (Illustration was a 200 dmg trinket in my comparison)

Illustration @ 316,73 DPS and EotS @ 273,51 DPS. It's a very desirable trinket wich adds abit of fun gameplay on bosses with movement, but still not a new DST.