Loooks like Warlocks will have to provide the Spell Crit debuff after the patch.

Hmm, you'd probably want to drop the Molten Armor glyph before Improved Scorch, but I guess it might be down to playstyle. Especially if there are more crit debuffs being tossed around with new changes. Living Bomb glyph is potentially pretty wicked DPS increase, though.

MMO-Champion has the updated glyphs now listed.

Also,

appears to be confirming the 5% crit debuff baseline. We can anticipate the Improved Scorch patch note soon I would guess.

I think the ice lance glyph is a hint fo things to come. The glyph specificaly says that it only works if the target is higher level then you so it's useless for pvp and I doubt that they put out a glyph for leveling on a spell you learn about 14-16 levels from level cap (Don't remember exactly when we get it).

That just means that soon, in a future build for this patch, we'll see the earlier announced change to make shatter combos work in pve (Without dps loss), I just hope the glyph by itself is not what they had in mind.

LB glyph.....*drooooool* I'd probably end up replacing the Imp. Scorch glyph.

Lastly the mirror image glyph.....is that a joke? I hope it's a minor glyph cause otherwise there's not much use since it's a spell on 3 min CD meaning you'd keep winter's chill up for like 45 secs every 3 mins and that's assuming that your images don't die earlier and that they get a frostbolt out right before they die and all to give up a major glyph slot. No thank you.

Definitely not a raiding glyph.

Can see some uses on my arcane mage whilst farming though ;D

Perhaps PvP

And if the periodic damage of LB can crit now... will those crits also trigger ignites? It's a fire-spell after all. If yes, what about ignite-munching?

Good point. I guess if it does proc ignite, ignite munching will just have to be something we'll have to deal with (Unless they have somehow fixed that too)

On another point, what's with the staff enchants? The current 1h spellpower enchants work just fine on a staff, why bring staff specific enchants, anybody got an idea?

MMO-Champion lists this as reducing the mana cost by 20%. I really don't know why Blizzard would make this a glyph instead of just reducing the mana cost. If it's a major glyph it's almost certainly not better than the Arcane Blast, Arcane Missiles, or Molten Armor ones, if it's minor then everyone can take it for free, so why bother? I guess if you were using glyphed Mage Armor you could swap to it, assuming they don't fix the Mage Armor Glyph to do something useful.

[snipped]
Wonder how the LB glyph will interact with HS and more importantly Combustion, should get some testing going soon.

Currently a 1h has the same SP as a staff, given the same I-level. But the offhand also contributes extra SP. Getting a 2h SP enchant seems like a logical way of balancing this a bit.

The staff-only enchants are better than the current any-weapon enchants. +81 for the lvl80 version and +69 for the lvl70 version.

The MI glyph means a deep frost mage can start the fight, pop MI and the crit debuff is up immediately. It's gimmicky, similar to some people casting blizzard to get the 5 stacks of WC up fast. This could mean that they are also going to homogenize it at some point, and make WC/Scorh overwrite, OR remove the WC effect from Frostboilt, and add it to some "other" spell in the mages arsenal.

Even frost mages shouldnt waste a glyph slot with that MI one.

Actually, unless they change it to minor, I don't see anyone using it.

I believe that frost glyphs would be Water Elemental, new Ice Lance and Molten Armor

If it eats combustion charges, it'll be easy enough to make sure it's not up when we pop Combustion, and to not reapply it to the target until other spells have eaten Combustion charges. No big deal.
The bigger issue will be LB tick crits potentially munching pyro/fb/ffb ignites.

Shouldnt they fix the problem then by simply adding more SP to staves (Which should have been there from the start anyway) rather than adding an enchant for it and saying "OK this staff is good but only after you apply an enchant on it"?


Yeah I noticed which is why exactly I wonder why they are even being added to the game. The enchant should be the same for both weapons. Adding a more powerfull enchant to staves is basically confirming that they are deliberately adding underpowered staves to the game (Compared to 1h+off-hand) and that players should compensate by adding enchant to them. Confused..

I don't see any frost mage giving up 5% damage on frostbolt... Frostbolt, Ice lance and WE, 2% crit on MA can be made up with gear. Of course, it'll be interesting to see what the number crunchers come up with. I also think the top dps deep frost spec will change to include torment of the weak and spell impact... something along the lines of: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...0&version=9614 maybe?

Also, doesn't allowing frostbolt to apply replenishment 100% of the time, end up causing the same problem with the buff that spriests were having when all shadow spells caused it? There was a reason the devs made our replenishment work only with mind blast, while VT was up. I'm not sure how the other replenishment classes trigger works offhand, but i don't think anyone else is a 100% effect on the spell they cast for 90%+ of their pve damage.

Sorry I wasn't aware of a problem with the SPriest replenishment. Was it falling off or double-stacking? Did they not want the uptime so high? What was the reason they made it only work with mind blast?

They want you to need 2 classes with replenishment in 25 man raids in order to have it up on everyone with mana at all times. So they made it only work with mind blast so that priests wouldn't trigger it so often. It seems like making it work off of Frostbolt 100% of the time would lead to the same problem. They could just put an internal cooldown on the talent I suppose.

Pretty sure it doesn't work. It's not an increase at all on the legitimate 2-charge combos, and even if you use the latency exploit, it's not going to more of an increase than the Frostbolt, Water Elemental or Molten Armor glyphs. They're going to need to do more to make it work.


Hm, maybe use the glyph and drop two points from Winter's Chill? Can those two points be put somewhere useful enough to compensate for the used glyph slot?


Depends on the Warlock. Destro casting Shadow Bolt is probably worse than an FFB Mage casting Scorch. Demo will be using Shadow Bolt all the time. Affliction uses it a lot, until < 35% health, at which point it switches to Drain Soul; switching to Shadow Bolt at that point is probably a pretty substantial loss for them as well.


Could be a way to try to give Frost Mages strong raid appeal without bumping their damage up.

I hope there are some arcane mage changes on the way. We've already established that in Ulduar we expect longer fights, and for fire and frostfire to scale with gear better than arcane ever can. With this Living Bomb glyph, fire/frostfire are going to do more base damage and also see more hotstreak procs presumably, further increasing damage.

Arcane is danger of being left behind with all the buffs being thrown around (lots of other class buffs going around in 3.1). 20% mana reduction on a spell that most arcane mages use for approximately 2-5% of their PvE damage simply isn't going to cut it.

Arcane needs:

(a) To be able to apply the 5% crit buff. There is no reason at all to prevent arcane from giving this. We bring next to nothing to the raid at the moment while being heavily raid dependent to do our best dps.

(b) To get some of these promised benefits from spirit. Spirit will always be a more attractive stat to arcane mages than any other mage. Allowing us to convert this spirit into something that will keep us competitive would be easily implemented.

(c) With arcane barrage nerfed, and arcane power nerfed, and the arcane power/POMPyro combo nerfed, I see no reason why arcane spells shouldn't benefit from 100% crit damage. The PvP implications are no longer anywhere near as severe as they were in the past.

(d) Is it just me or is replenishment just more of an arcane mage thing than a frost mage thing? Arcane mages are all about mana and mana management. Conceptually at least, if any mage should be buffing raid mana regen, it should be the arcane mage.