New Mage Talent Trees Revealed

[MongoJerry]

I also really expected some new talents that will help Fire mages in PvE, especially given Naxx is right around the corner. With a lot of spell damage, Frost can put out the damage not that far behind Fire, while using only 1/2 or so mana - and that Fire damage is limited by aggro anyway. I'm really confused there - it's like Blizzard wants mages to be useless in Naxx.

I'm always confused when people suggest fire mages aren't good in PvE, because the mage who consistently puts out the most damage on our raids is a fire mage. The only thing that held fire mages back in the past was that the first two raid dungeons introduced to the game had mobs with a lot of fire resistance. However, that isn't the case in AQ40 and anyway, there has been a lot of gear introduced that negate resistances on targets. A frost mage's damage is limited by aggro as much as a fire mage's damage, so I don't see benefit either way there. You're right when you said that a frost mage's mana efficiency is better, but again, I haven't heard any complaints from our fire mages about lacking mana. Also, keep in mind that fireball, as a 3.5 second cast spell, benefits more per cast from +damage gear than icebolt (a 3 second cast spell). That plus fire's natural ability to deal more damage per attack allows fire mages to use lower ranks of their spells both to improve their mana efficiency and keep under the aggro cap.

Also, here is my attempt to quantify the new Combustion - is it better or even worse then before? It might seem that the new Combustion is better - but with a good crit percentage, the new combustion "charges" could have been eaten by crits that would have happened anyway.

Actually, my initial reaction was that this change to Combustion was a huge nerf, but your math showed me it isn't as bad as I thought. A lot of it depends on how long the buff lasts and how much critical strike% you have already. If you have a lot of critical strike%, it helps less, because as you said, the charges will be eaten by crits that would have happened anyway. If you have a low amount of crit%, then you get helped a lot -- but only if the duration of the buff lasts long enough for you to get three criticals in that time.

My feeling is that the idea behind this change to combustion is to reduce its impact on PvP (fewer "Omg! I got killed by a 7,000 damage pyroblast!") and yet help fire mages in PvE deal more damage. It's an interesting way to go about it.