Ghostcrawler says: "now works with Arcane Blast and does bonus damage to targets afflicted by any kind of slowing effect (e.g. Thunder Clap)."

There is absolutely nothing vague about this statement.

I sincerely hope that if we're next up for nerfs because of the torment the weak change, they target torment the weak for the nerfing instead of other talents. That talent just opens up so many balance problems. There will always be fights where bosses will be immune to snaring effects or it doesn't make sense to use snaring effects and losing 12% of our main nuke's damage just like that is problematic. I'm not too hopeful, though, as it seems they're really, really determiend to balance mages around this talent.

Ah yes my lucky gearset with 359 hit rating
In any case Vontre, the real question is whether or not those numbers include TTW counted on bosses ?

TTW is no longer based on snaring effects. It's based on all types of slowing effects. AFAIK, there are no circumstances under which it's not worthwhile to slow the boss's attack speed or casting speed, so TTW should always be up.

That alone should be a good 10% DPS increase for Arcane since they're no longer spending 10% of their time casting Slow.

yeah, that is far closer to what I see in the Rawr simulations I have run.

I dug into this a couple days ago because for the gearset I was wearing at the time, fire was actually superior to frostfire according to Rawr, once you factored in focus magic. I hadn't seen this discussed anywhere, so I played with better gear sets to see if this was just a quirk of my gear. Fire's benefits marginally decreased as gear improved, but stayed within a percent or two. I gave up on the idea of speccing fire as frostfire had more utility and mana efficiency for its similar dps, and even though I understood focus magic's benefits from a raid perspective, I am just sufficiently selfish that I prefer dps that shows up under my numbers to dps that shows up under someone else's, all else equal.

This is similar to what we see in the dps charts linked to in the theorycraft post, which gives FFB a 5% lead without factoring in focus magic.

But get rid of frostfire double dip, and buff fireball but 12%, and we have a clear winner.

That's interesting. It will, at least in the short term, make it justifiable to have a full stack just so you can stack all your cooldowns with the +45% damage (arcane power and such). Once all the cooldowns are spent, however, you'll have to find a more reasonable rotation to use.

If nothing else, it'll be a very interactive and hard to master playstyle -- much like affliction is for warlocks. The million dollar question, however, is will it be good enough to be viable.

+45% arcane damage that stacks with arcane power = even more people crying about being 1-shot in pvp with arcane barrage. Will certainly mess around in warsong gulch a lot after these changes. Crossing my fingers for +100% damage debuff on flag carrier.

The optimist in me feels that the change to Evocation is a great answer to your "I hate to drink" problem. In my experience I only need to drink after an AoE pull so it seems appropriate to be able to pick up and go to the next pull in a few seconds. Perhaps they have decided that mana should be irrelevant to people who aren't monkeys and can use a few mana gems or spec/gear for efficiency (e.g. FFB). That's not worrisome.

The second change is quite alarming. As an Arcane talent to lower the Evocation cooldown in a patch buffing Arcane damage... are they trying to balance Arcane damage around frequent Evocation? The dps lost by Evocation would imply that the damage done while you have mana would be much greater to compensate. This introduces the classic balance problem where your dps varies wildly with fight length, and it's begging to be abused by the same players who figured out how to make Arcane Blast spam work in 2.4.

On a personal note I can't believe they're actually trying to work with a talent that says "+12% damage!" instead of scrapping it for something a little more subtle.

Is this taking into consideration the Spell Impact talent? Being that Fireball will be our primary nuke once again, we're looking at an 18% damage increase to the spell.

I understand the complaints about evocation, but what are some of the proposed changes? Assuming we would be arguing for a divine plea type of spell?

Preliminary magegraf analysis is complete. By last analysis of frostfire and fireball was WITH the TTW change. I'm assuming it's always up, because it will always be up.

Arcane IS VIABLE.

It's in fact very evenly matched with frostfire and fireball, but you need a very specific build. If you want to get Improved Scorch, you can only get 2/3. 3/3 Master of Elements OR 3/3 Frost Channeling is REQUIRED to be competitive. To put 51 in arcane, pull 2 points from either Mind Mastery or Arcane Flows, they are the weakest talents in the bottom tiers and relatively even in terms of gain. The 2 minute cooldown reduction on evocation does not have any impact whatsoever on the simulation.

Arcane operates on the two-cycle theorem, with one efficient cycle and one burn cycle. The efficient cycle is Arcane Blast -> Arcane Barrage. The burn cycle is Arcane Blast x3 -> Arcane Barrage. Missile Barrage procs are used when they occur.

I'll be posting the magegraf update live in a few minutes.

Unless I didn't get the memo, blizzard wants mages to manage mana. I fail to see how lowering evocation's cooldown does anything whatsoever towards that end. Maybe if spirit had any kind of impact on mana regen, then maybe I would consider spirit on gear and do some basic 'mana management' via gear swaps (not that its ever going to happen, but lets just pretend here).

Or maybe they meant that arcane specs have to manage mana, in which case I doubt many will rejoice at this new gleaned info. Is the overarching goal of the mage changes to be more fun, or more frustrating ?