Something I think needs changed is to move the dmg talents away from the bottom 2 tiers. Make the bottom 2 tiers the fun optional ones so that when youve filled a tree and picked all them essential dps talents your not looking at your last few points thinking "which of these last few points in other trees will up my dps most" and instead thinking "which cool toys would I like to play with now I have my essentials"

as it is now once you stack any of the trees your left picking more essential talents (piercing ice, incineration, burning soul, netherwind presence, arcane potency (which needs arcane concentration)) rather than something like permafrost, improved counterspell, improved sheep and other such fun but non essential talents. Of course the problem lies in pvp giving too many of these toys but maybe instead of having trees fat at the low tiers and slim at the top have it the other way around.

So I have taken a long hard look at the latest beta build's mage talents, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

A lot of people on the official forums are praising the latest build as being an amazing set of talents for mages. On some points I agree, but others, I think some of the more outspoken evangelists of the new talents are just more happy that their chosen spec is doing well, and projecting this delight onto the other specs without thinking about it much.

I understand what I have written is long, but hopefully you will find it a level headed analysis of the new trees.

Frost
This tree is definitely looking like the best of the three trees right now as far as "interesting choices which effect your gameplay" goes, which will be the metric by which I will analyze the new trees.
Needless to say, I'm loving how the new frost talents (improved freeze, frostfire orb) fundamentally change what you can use the affected spells for by adding new gameplay, e.g. frostfire orb serving as a massive, moving aoe snare, or the water elemental's freeze serving as a mechanism for on-demand burst (or control). I really can see a frost mage in pve serving as the raid's goto person when a large pack of mobs needs to be controlled. This kind of niche is needed to add value to such a spec in a raid.
The best thing about some of these new frost talents is that they are relatively PvE/PvP agnostic, which I feel should really be a design goal for all talents across all trees and classes.
I also wanted to add that as of this point, Frost is hands down looking like the most 'fun' spec to actually play, as far as rotations, proc management, real time casting decisions and overall playstyle is concerned. I may be overstepping my bounds, but I feel pretty confident in saying that I am sure people like Lhivera (and other frost aficionados) must be beside themselves about the new frost tree. I know I am.

Fire
I think this current incarnation of fire is suffering from the "o.k so we heard you wanted to be able to take some 'fun' talents in your pve specs so we will force you to take them but we forget that the 'fun' talents aren't really all that fun in pve since you won't ever use them" syndrome.
That being said, I do think some of the synergies for fire are coming along nicely. I like how they are multiple fire talents that play off of fire's dots, which we know they are trying to emphasize with the new fire.
That being said, I feel there is not much variation in playstyle within the fire tree itself. True, there may be different fire specs out there (where most of the variation being in which offspec you choose), but apart form that, the actual talents in the fire tree themselves seem rather bland. Increase fire dot damage, increase fireball damage, etc. That being said, the spec is turning out to be very solid for pve right now.

Arcane
Arcane is definitely working very well when considered as an offspec for either a fire or frost main tree. However, as a main tree itself it seems, for the lack of a better phrase, mind numbingly boring. Which is a shame, since Arcane is meant to be the 'dynamic' tree.

The biggest issue I see with Arcane right now is that absolutely none of the talents will actually change what you would be doing anyway. Almost all talents just take the spells you would already be casting and just make them hit harder/do more damage. There is very little the talents are doing in terms of actually adding gameplay to the spec.
E.g. in frost, flame orb's base functionality is being expanded in pve. There is no such talent in the Arcane tree doing so. The closest a talent comes to changing/adding gameplay to an existing ability is the new mana gem, which may cause you to think about when to use it to maximize the damage gain (which itself is not really that hard of a decision to make), but apart from that, you would still be spamming Arcane blast and arcane missles just like you would have anyway.
Take tier 5 for arcane for example. The entire tier exists to almost justify the existence of Ttw. If you think about it, for a raiding mage, you really have to take all the talents in that tier to make TTW worth it, which means, essentially 6 talent points used for a 6% damage boost, which seems rather bland. Not to mention that those 6 talent points you just spent didn't really change what you would have already have been doing, that being, spamming Arcane blast.
It would be much better design if those talents took existing arcane spells and added some extra functionality to them or mixed up the rotation a bit, you know, expanded the playstyle rather then just add more passive %dmg bonuses.
Overall, Arcane looks great if you are fire or frost mage, but if you want to be an arcane mage, you may find the tree itself to be really really boring to actually play. I am pretty sure it will still perform well on the meters though, but at what gameplay cost?

Other thoughts
I am not sure if blizzard has stated their new goals for each spec but there does not seem to be any sign of the "we will include spells/talents in the Arcane tree to allow Arcane mages to play with the Mana Adept mastery". It was my impression that this was a design goal for the Arcane tree, i.e. to use arcane talents to provide mana management tools for Arcane. Could a mage in the beta please confirm with blizzard if this is still the case?
The best example I can give of a talent tree or a set of talents playing into the strengths of a mastery would be the new Frost tree. The quick frostbolts + the buffed frostfirebolts really allow frost mages to have a varied and interesting rotation that plays well with the tree's mastery.

edit: spelling, grammar, etc

Well the dynamic element of the Arcane is supposed to come from its mastery, ie maintaining high levels of mana for as long as possible. That in itself is management enough without adding lots of tricks and complications throughout the tree. The main problem with this is that Arcane doesn't really have anything new to manage with. As a spec it can pick up some mana reduction talents from the bottom of the other trees but that's not management. Having Arcane Barrage guaranteed to proc a (free) missile barrage would be a step in the right direction were it not for the fact it has been bumped to a six second cooldown, which prevents a mana saving rotation.

Ultimately we were promised the Arcane tree would have lots of tools to help us manage our mana. From what I can see Arcane hasn't gained any tools at all which undermines one of the more interesting masteries and just turns it into a passive +damage that will be balanced around an expected amount of mana rather than the idea you can actually control your mana.

DPS Caster Crit Damage Bonus - Spell - World of Warcraft
This is listed as basic class ability (like armour/weapon proficiency) for mages and warlocks. Not sure if it's new in this build or not. The value of this ability only makes sense if it increases the whole crit damage by 33%, i.e. from 150% to 199.5% (hooray for easy calculations!). The name of the aura modifier is the same as the crit meta gems' ones are but the aura ID is different (126 on caster bonus vs. 859 on meta gems), so this partially makes sense. (Notice that all other +crit damage bonus talents - which that increase only the bonus damage, not the whole crit damage - use a completely different wording, an "aura add modifier - %".)
Also, an armour mastery effect has been added as well. If you wear only armour of your type (cloth/leather/mail/plate), you get a 5% bonus to your primary stat (str/agi/sta/int), probably spec dependent for hybrids.

It would be nice if some could check whether this crit damage increase has been impleted already.

[Edit]: The major gameplay change I forgot to mention is of course gnome intellect being changed to % mana. Also, testing of the annoucne spell lockout change for dual-school spells still pending as well.

I confirmed this morning that the Water Elemental is indeed permanent now. Tooltip changed and everything. This means Improved Freeze will be available to force an FoF proc on every Deep Freeze cooldown. Is that strong enough to make it a mandatory talent? Dunno.

ETA: Untalented Arcane Missiles hit: 1051
Untalented Arcane Missiles crit: 2096-2097

Confirmed all spells critting at 200% (slightly under).

Should be around 199.5% crits. Lhivera found this DPS Caster Crit Damage Bonus - Spell - World of Warcraft which mathed out by his observed AM crit rate matches nicely with the crit modifier being (1.5 * 1.33) now.

Edit: Whoops, my bad Roywyn, I didn't notice you had linked it earlier. Credit where credit is due.

Improved Freeze may depend on whether the Elemental can afford to pay 25x the cost of a water bolt to cast Freeze on a regular basis. It may be fine, or it may be expensive enough that it counts only as a pretty situational burst talent, making it optional.

I understand the PvP uses for Nether Vortex, but is it going to become a necessary PvE/Raiding talent so that we can keep our 6% damage from TTW on untanked/non-snared mobs? If that's the case then (in PvE) we're essentially spending 6 talent points for 6% damage (3 in TTW, 1 in Slow, 2 in NV). I suppose that's not a bad return but it seems like an uninteresting use of our talent points when they can increase our damage by 6% in other more interesting ways or give us a flat 6% damage increase to arcane spells from the tree bonuses and give us a few more interesting spells or mechanics. Maybe there will be more opportunities to slow targets in Cataclysm raids. I'm not in the beta so I'm not sure how these mechanics actually work in practice.


Forgive me if I don't have all my facts straight, but with the removal of Frostbite will we see far less frozen/rooted targets that can be shattered with a frostbolt + ice lance/DF? As opposed to FoF procs that can only use IL or DF and don't root the target. Frost nova, CoC and WE Freeze will be our only sources of creating frozen targets? I like frost for leveling and solo pve and I loved Frostbite. I'll be sad to see it go.

I look at nether vortex as Blizzard's way of increasing arcane's switching costs. It's one of the best specs, if not the best, at switching targets. Many specs got increased ramp up time or delayed damage, which hampers their target switching ability.

I've just started playing around with the new trees. A few thoughts. (I won't comment the interactiveness or not of the trees, indeed arcane has already mana to manage but not enough managing tools, frost is fun and all, and fire seems a bit boring but solid.)

Arcane PVE:
I don't agree with Logix on the tier 5 part. Nether vortex won't apply the slow effect on a boss so it's really a pvp talent. The 31 PVE talents to take in arcane are quite obvious, and once again you end up with Improved Blink and Prismatic Cloak. The interesting part is about the remaining 10 talent points. There are just so much talents in T1 of both fire and frost that could be useful. Depending on your mana preferencies you could go for a range of possibilities between Master of Elements + Frost Channeling + 4 other damage talents and taking full Bruning Soul + Incineration + Piercing Ice + 1/3 Frost Channeling.

Arcane PVP:
So much possibilities. You could actually use the whole 41 talent points to take all arcane talents and it would be a fun and survivable (burst oriented) arcane pvp spec. Or you could try to sort a few talents out to take a sub-spec in frost - many possibilities here, for example Shatter (missile barrage on this frozen target makes cookie monster happy, add Arcane Power, Arcane Potency and Invocation talents into it and cookie monster goes wild), Early Frost and Ice Floes for a defensive sub-spec. Here again, the huge number of straight damage talents in T1 frost and fire create other possibilites. And Burning Soul isn't bad at all in PVP.

Fire PVE:
You still have to chose between Improved FS or Improved FBlast. For 1 point. Given all the previous reasoning made on this thread (going as far as Roywyn wondering if FS would be a good choice on single target rotation), I suppose 1 point in FS to lower the casting time would be the more popular choice (but I liked the long range and manoeuvrability of Improved FBlast). Concerning sub-specs the choice is pretty obvious here. I'd go 4-31-6 as Liquephyre.
Actually I am more concerned about the fact that Improved Scorch is still a 2-points talent for 66%. Previously I just assumed it was a mistake. But it remained. This is annoying and unnecessary. This dynamic effect created is not the fun, proc-based one I want to see.

Fire PVP:
I never really played this spec. But I used to see what could be an obvious fire pvp spec. I'm not so sure with the new talent system. If you wanted to build a BG focused fire pvp spec then multi-LB, Pyromaniac, Hot Streak and all have very good synergies. Can dots proc Arcane Concentration ? If so Arcane Potency could be fun. Or if Arcane Concentration still has 10% to proc per target then Flame Strike should also generate fun potential before a double instant-pyro (easily generated by the massive number of LB dots all over the place). Overall not a viable spec in 2v2 or 3v3 Arena, but it has the potential to be fun in 5v5 or in BG if correctly hided behind a wall of allies. Afterall, Fire PVP has always been that: not specifically solid for survival, but really fun in massive pvp encounters.

Frost PVE:
As said, very dynamic and proc-oriented. Fun. You currently 2 talent points to put in either one of the following: Enduring Winter (if nobody already generates the effect in your raid), Cone of Cold or Shattered Barrier for adds control, Piercing Chill in case of adds (the additional chills raise dramatically the chances of FoF in this case). Btw, Improved Freeze is a no-brainer as there really is no better choice to progress in the tree. Even if you don't automatically use it on CD for mana concerns as Lhivera stressed out.
For the sub-spec, once again plenty of choices in T1 talents. Incineration seems to be a no-brainer, Netherwind Presence and Burning Soul are good. Ignite seems very useful also. I don't think you'll lack mana here.

Frost PVP:
Here you have different possibilities. Improved Freeze seems useless. Unless you fail when launching freeze, your next two spells if you attack right after will already be against a frozen target.
Once again many tempting talents in T1 but I'd rather take a strong sub-spec in Arcane (Improved CS, Netherwind Presence, Invocation, Improved Blink) and then use the last remaining talent point for 1/2 in Improved Cone of Cold. The final result is a solid spec.

Frostfire PVE:
I think we now all agree to say that such a thing doesn't exist anymore. Frostfire is just a part of Frost spec. I actually don't have any problem with that. Forst PVE spec is fun and all.

Overall, I am very satisfied by Blizzard's work here. I think they will still be modifying the T1 talents for a patch or 2 (maybe this much pure basic damage talents is too much, plus it doesn't fit the 10 points you have, it's more often 9 or 12). But in the end I just have the feeling I'd like to have 6 dual-specs (that doesn't mean anything, so maybe 5 secondary specs, or let's just say 6 simultaneous alternative specs). Which is a great feeling. Until I remember that dwaves and orcs will be fellow mages (then I just feel mentally raped once again).

On this last racial point, as a draenei I am quite frustrated they still didn't announce the promised changes of racials.