3.0.2 – Mage, Full Frost + Full Fire

Ugh, terrible week for arenas. 2-8. The worst part is, aside from not playing defensively enough one game, and not dragging a warrior away from his side-of-the-bridge pillar-standing priest healer in another, I can’t really point out anything specifically that we did wrong. Of the two games we won, we fought a Druid/Rogue where we barely pulled the win out (and Ferrus was out of mana at the end) and the other was a pair of frost mages who were a bit out of their league (I swear, the one ice blocked because I was looking at her angrily while she had me nova’d).

At least I got some nice pants out of it, but we dropped from 1679 to 1586.

Starting to get frustrated with the warrior, and I’m not sure the patch or the expansion is going to make that any better.

*****

I haven’t messed with Arcane yet, but I tried both the Frost and Fire specs out a bit on the PTR for 3.0.2. I’ll start with Frost.

The additions to Frost are basically “more of the same.” They don’t add a lot or make any significant changes to the existing playstyle. The one new spell, the new culmination of the tree, Deep Freeze, fits in well. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it plays similarly to the current pre-WLK Frost Mage. The learning curve will not change directions nor get steeper.

The new passive abilities, Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze, play out like many of the new passive talents in the other trees, allowing certain talent specs to make use of abilities they wouldn’t normally have in tBC due to cooldowns or inefficiency (or in the case of Frost, lack of ability to “freeze” many targets immune to the mechanic via Fingers of Frost).

As well, the new mana battery aspect of the Water Elemental is a nice bonus, and the talent Shattered Barrier (which procs what is basically an automatic Frost Nova when your Ice Barrier spell is beaten through by damage) will be awesome for PvP and soloing.

Winter’s Chill now affecting all schools of magic (and working exactly like the newest version of Improved Scorch) is a good thing as well which will let Frost Mages fit into raids much better than before.

As for Fire, well, yay Pyroblast? As with the Frost Mage and the two talents discussed above, you’ll get to use Pyroblast more thanks to a new talent called Hot Streak, which after critting twice causes your next Pyroblast to be instant-cast. As well, for the close-range AoE fans, any time you use Blast Wave or Dragon’s Breath, thanks to Firestarter, your next Flamestrike will be instant-cast as well.

The tree acquired some new PvP utility in the form of Firestarter (for burst damage on spells you’d probably be using anyway), Fiery Payback (which reduces the cast time of your Pyroblast based on your health percentage while adding a cooldown to it, not sure how that will play out), and a new talent called Burning Determination. This last one causes the mage to become immune to Silence and Interrupt effects for 10 seconds after becoming victim to one or the other. It is in the second tier of the tree as well, making it easily accessible to other specs.

I did not get to try out Living Bomb. I had it, but could not find a good test bed for it. Its latest incarnation is an instant-cast application, 12-second DoT on your target which explodes, knocking all nearby targets into the air either when the spell runs its course or when it is dispelled. I’m not sure if this is a similar knockback to Blast Wave and Thunderstorm or not, but I would guess it is.

On the subject of Blast Wave, yes, it by default has a knockback component now, much like Thunderstorm. However, the added benefit here is that it still comes with a slowing component, meaning that targets you’ve knocked away are now slow and will have a tougher time getting back to you. As well, with the added instant Flamestrike afterwards, will add up to some possibly significant burst damage. I half expect to see fire mage multibox teams make an appearance in the arena scene.

Anyway, that’s that. I’ll come back to Arcane, and still have to look at Holy paladin, and both Prot specs (warrior and paladin).

For a more complete listing of talents, check out QQ’s guides:

* Arcane
* Fire
* Frost
* Talent Builds

Spicytuna’s Posts on Spell Rotations in 3.0.2:

* Part 1, Pre-3.0.2 Rotations, for reference
* Part 2, Post-3.0.2 Rotations