Alrighty! Mage time! Thoughts, feelings, regrets, loves, losses, fireball crits? I noticed that our 81-85 abilities aren't in game yet, I'm quite sad about this because I really wanted to see our Fog spell :D I also notice that some of our masteries aren't yet working? Unless I've missed something. Currently I'm fire and there's no Flashburn debuff on the target, if there is one.

---

Q u o t e:
Shatter: No longer increases crit chance against Frozen targets. Now increases damage by 5/10/15% against Frozen targets.

---

Shatter has been a lot of things. At the moment it is double crit chance vs. frozen targets for 1 point and triple crit chance vs. frozen for 2 points.

I'll try to update some of the other concerns and make corrections when I get some time.

---

Q u o t e:

We need a lot more than that.

*We either needs tools to keep it alive in PvP (Siphon Life-ish), or the cooldown needs to be reduced to something closer to an Unholy Death Knight's ghoul.

*We need some sort of mana recovery option for the pet

---

So, making the pet not self-expire while simultaneously not making it or the mage less powerful means it also needs to be easier to keep alive? Strange logic imo. =]

---

Q u o t e:


In PvP, I believe the concern is that making the elemental permanent makes it less available, not more available, because of the new cooldown scheme. It can be killed just as quickly, but now it takes longer to call it up again.

In PvE, the issue is that we have to make the raid wait after a wipe until the cooldown is back up.

In solo/quest mode, the issue is that if we have no way to heal the elemental, we have to stand around waiting for a while before continuing our questing.

The answer is, I think, either to use the current cooldown scheme or the Ghoul cooldown scheme, and to add an out-of-combat heal. This should allow the elemental to behave in PvP much as it does now, and remove the inconvenience factors in PvE and solo/quest play.

ETA: Naturally, we expect to be balanced around its permanance. We don't expect it to be free extra DPS.

---

The post-death cooldown will definitely be lowered to around 2 min, the intent is definitely that after it dies you're waiting a somewhat similar amount of time before it's up again as you would have under the old scheme.

On another note, the revamped Fire tree should be in the beta sometime early next week. There will be some slight changes in the next beta patch (today/tomorrow), but don't put much stock in them... some of those changes have been changed in other ways, and many more things will have changed the build early next week.

...fixed name. :0

---

Q u o t e:

'Permanent is longer than 45 seconds so this must be a buff' is incredibly short sighted.

When we're leveling and my Water Elemental drops down to 10% health for whatever reason, what do you expect us to do - dismiss it and wait 2-3 minutes to summon a new one? That makes little sense for a permanent pet - you're essentially giving us the functionality of a temporary pet, but the duration of a permanent one.

At present, people don't bother killing the Elemental in PvP because PvP specced Mages have an elemental duration of 50 seconds. The time spent killing it isn't worth it because it'll die on its own soon anyway, and you will only get hit by a maximum of two pet freezes. If people know that they can kill it early and not eat any pet freezes for 2-3 minutes, they will. Many games where the opponent isn't expecting a quick kill will include some swaps to the Water Elemental. It makes sense to give us the tools to deal with that, or balance us around the assumption that pet uptime will be low. If the latter... why is it permanent in the first place?

If you want to make us a pet spec, make us a pet spec and let us actually support our pet. Frankly I like the old model a lot more, because we don't have any keybinds to spare and I'd rather rely on my healers to keep my WE alive (or just let it die) than to rely on a pet that is easily killed, and have no way of healing it back up on my own. If things go live as-is, I'd expect total pet uptime to be lower in arenas than it is now.


edit: It is also important to note that the current Water Elemental duration synergizes pretty well with Cold Snap. By the time you summon a pet, use both freezes, use a DF or two, maybe Ice Block a CC or if you're getting killed... you've used most or all of your frost cooldowns and you can coldsnap a new set, including a second pet. If my pet gets targeted early and killed, which is likely if you make it permanent but give us no tools to keep it alive, I'm in the uncomfortable position of having no pet but not wanting to snap a new one. Obviously that can happen even if it has a 45 second duration, but it tends not to because the risk:reward ratio for killing a temporary pet just isn't very good.

Maybe you could shed some light in to why you made the pet permanent, especially since you seem to be against the idea of giving us tools that other permanent pet specs/classes have.

---

Don't get me wrong, I totally get the issues and there are more changes coming soon... just thought I'd point out how odd it is that a theoretical buff to a spell can end up being interpreted as a nerf. Again, I totally get why, and it's not an unexpected outcome from the change. It's just curiously odd.

---

Q u o t e:


If you feel subspec arcane to be an equal option, that's not really the point I'm worried about. If it really does turn out to be as viable as picking up pushback resistance+blazing speed+Imp CS, arcane deserves the same argument.

Each class shouldn't just have 1 "golden boy" pvp spec that's far and away the best for pvp, then Blizzard just takes that spec and gives it the best of the other specs available to subspec. No one will ever look at fire seriously (or arcane to satisfy your argument) if frost just gets the perks of fire w/o fire getting anything new.

---

Fire is getting plenty of new. The changes you'll see in the beta early next week (again, not the today/tomorrow build) are very meaningful.

---

Q u o t e:
...All the PvE subspecs look like they have weak Tier 2 talents now, unless Ignite is good for FFBs. Hopefully this means we can make optional choices in our last 10 points too, not just our first 31.

---

Yep, that's the intent (the having optional choices part... not the FFB part).

Quick preview of upcoming fire changes (talents are from left to right, *denotes a change to the talent):

Tier 1:
*Master of Elements: now 2 ranks at 15/30%

Burning Soul

*Incineration: removed

*Improved Fire Blast: moved from tier 2


Tier 2:
Ignite

*Fire Power: Increases the damage of your Fire spells by 1/2/3% and gives your Flame Orb a 33/66/100% chance to explode at the end of its duration.

Blazing Speed

Impact (no useful raid utility yet... awesome ideas welcome)


Tier 3:
*Cauterize (new, 2 ranks): You have a 50/100%% chance that an attack which would otherwise kill you will instead bring you to 40% of your maximum health. However, you will burn for 12% of your maximum health every second for the next 4 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.

*Blast Wave: A wave of flame radiates outward from the target location, damaging all enemies caught within the blast for X Fire damage and are slowed by 75% for 3 sec. Cooldown 15s.

*Molten Shields (new 1 rank, Blazing Speed is a prereq): Reduces the global cooldown of your Mage Ward spell by 1.5 sec and your Mage Ward triggers the Blazing Speed effect when it dissipates from absorbing damage.

*Improved Scorch: Reduces the mana cost of your Scorch spell by 50/100%


Tier 4:
Pyromaniac

Combustion

*Hot Streak (the instant Pyroblast no longer costs mana)

*Firestarter (new, 1 rank): Your Molten Armor allows you to cast the Scorch spell while moving instead of reducing the chance you are critically hit.


Tier 5:
Improved Flamestrike

Dragon's Breath

Molten Fury


Tier 6:
*Critical Mass: Your Pyroblast and Scorch spells have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5% and lasts 30 sec.


Tier 7:
Living Bomb


Edit: forgot change to Blast Wave cooldown (now 15s, down from 30).

---

Q u o t e:

One of the biggest benefits of Shattered Barrier is that it procs while silenced, stunned, etc.

---

...worth noting that the same is true of Reactive Barrier.

---

Q u o t e:


Yeah, but how much is this really going to help in a raid environment? If we're taking enough damage while feared/stunned/etc that this talent really helps keep us alive, isn't the encounter going to be brutal beyond hope for specs that don't have such abilities? And if we're not taking that much damage, is the talent valuable? Especially considering we're trading shield uptime before the event for the proc, since we need to save the cooldown.

I could be wrong, but it strikes me as the sort of thing that might be useful in one fight out of ten, vs three or four like, e.g., Improved Blink.

---

There's a reasonable chance a talent like this ends up being better in practical use than in theorycraft. It could end up needing a little something extra, or a redesign, but I'm willing to let it ride for a while to see how it actually plays out.

For anyone remembering the times they've died because they stayed a tick too long in the fire, this talent probably would have kept them going... at least until their next mistake. ;]

---

Q u o t e:


The Blast/Missiles changes seem like they're pushing damage around between the spells a bit. Arcane MIssiles gets nerfed by the spell change (presumably by about 25%), but then buffed by the Arcane Blast buff (multiplier goes from 1.6 to 1.8 at four stacks, a 12.5% buff). All told, about a 16% nerf. But Arcane Barrage is buffed 12.5% in the process. Dunno if there's any practical result there.

---

It goes a little beyond that, as the arcane blast debuff only affects arcane blast. Essentially, arcane blast is the highest sustained dps (but unsustainable in terms of mana), followed by arcane barrage, followed by arcane missiles (which is very close to arc barrage in dps, and free of course).

So, from the standpoint of a boss fight arcane is less about a constant rotation, and more about optimizing your mana bar to the fight you're involved in (with a little rng in the mix).

---

Q u o t e:
I worry about the combustion revamp.. with the loss of the next guaranteed crit adding a guaranteed ignite to the combustion dot merger this could be painful if popped and not paired up appropriately. It does give us control over the DoT itself but it adds some complication to the making sure of all the optimal DoTs being on the mob to begin with.

---

In the next beta build combustion's instant damage is guaranteed to crit. Not only does this mean ignite is guaranteed to be instantly re-applied but also that you have a shot at a hot streak to re-apply pyro.

There are also a variety of tweaks to the core damage spells to try to bring the dps of the 3 specs more in line with each other.

---

Q u o t e:


Yeah I was thinking about that myself. Here's my take on it:

I think it's more about managing your average, until the very end where you would wanna burn everything off. Let's say that 50% mana gives Mana Adept about the same overall damage bonus that all other class/spec masteries have. So that's your target average. If you let that average fall lower than 50%, Mana Adept is worse off than having a stable, consistent mastery. If your average mana stays above 50%, Mana Adept would be better than anyone else's mastery.

Let's also say you can barely maintain the minimum of 2 stacks per rotation and average 50% mana throughout a raid boss fight. That's a decent balance between benefiting from mana adept and normal damage. Sure you may have enough mana to manage 3 stacks per rotation, but the loss of damage from Mana Adept would prevent it from being optimal. But maybe you'd wanna throw in 3x blasts every now and then and sustain 45% mana.

At some point (after you get more and more gear), you may have enough mana to average 75% on average with the 2x rotation. At that point, you can throw in more 3x stacks to keep the average mana pool a little bit lower, but do more damage overall. It's going to be interesting where the two benefits will intersect. But I really, really hope we won't be as mana starved as we are now when appropriately geared and raid buffed.

---

Yep, this. That's the theory, at least.

---

Q u o t e:
...To me this means that Arcane needs to be in control of what it casts when it casts, not to mention how they manipulate the power of their spells at a given time.

Mana Adept to me is supposed to do that by having us manage our mana to control our damage output at a given time, but 2/3 our spells are not very controllable due to either having a cd or a proc...

---

Honestly I find that to be more of a theorycraft argument. The reality is that arc missiles and arc barrage are available often enough to give a reasonable degree of control over AB stacks.

---

Q u o t e:
According to Kavan on EJ, this theory of aiming to maintain your mana above some percentage is wrong anyways. If there was a magical percentage, it would be 40% because the idea is to gradually ramp up your cycle's mps as you get closer and closer to using evocation. What matters is the time at which your evocation comes off cooldown, not some magical percentage point at which mastery becomes more or less effective.

---

I think that's more accurate. Generally speaking, the approach is something along the lines of...

Evocation and mana gem are available at the start so you burn some mana quickly, use gem and dps cooldowns, burn more down to 40%, evoc back to 100%, play conservatively until mana cooldowns are available, burn more, then come back up and play conservatively, then nearing the end of the fight you try to time your burn down once again to match the end of the fight.

---

Q u o t e:
I like arcane mastery because it adds some depth to an otherwise shallow spec. It changes the way I play mid encounter in a controlled way as opposed to stupid stuff like hot streak where I just hope for the best. I will be making some mistakes (none as dumb as waiting until 20% mana to evocate or using arcane missiles every time it's up LULZ), gradually over time I'll get bored and look into / math out minor details and make fewer/smaller mistakes.

---

Yeah, that. My gut says it'll be very hard for players to perfectly optimize their fights since optimal behavior will be different from fight to fight and further vary based on mastery level, but most players will (hopefully) be able to use general guidelines to get reasonable results from the spec.