New Mage Talent Trees Revealed

[Bob the Beholder]

As stated by a mage on my guild forums:

After reading over people's evaluation of certain talents, I've come to realize that I have a choice. I can either spend 21 points in arcane essentially for PoM and Improved CS, or actually get the new Combustion and go 20 into Frost. Basically, I want to keep my 30 fire points, and after that, I've got no #$%&ing clue what to do with the rest of the points.

Any other mages feeling the same way? It seems like after these changes, you're either AP/something spec or you put 30/31 points into an elemental tree and have no idea where to spend the other 20.

My response:

That is exactly how I feel, actually.

The only real options now are heavy arcane, or elementalist. I've been playing around with a talent calculator somebody set up with the new info, and here's a spec I've come up with that may be able to compete with AP, in my opinion. (Very unsure about this. Doing without PoM is just something hard to wrap my head around. Although I suppose I've done it before--just not for a long, long time. Also note that if Ice Barrier only has a 30 second cooldown, doesn't get overwritten by PW:S, and I don't have enough points to get PoM anyway, then it's looking pretty nice.)

Heavy frost: http://www.wowhead.com/talent/?RhZVtr00MZVVcuMVot

Much better survivability than fire or arcane. Ice Barrier + Ice Block = yes. Shatter for the crits, Winter's Chill and Arcane Subtlety for the raid DPS. Note that I've skipped over Improved Cone of Cold. It's a lot of mana and three talent points for one spell that you could just replace with a fireblast in your shatter combo, now that Shatter works with fire. Only really worth it if you're hitting several targets, and still perfectly useful for that. Head over to fire for some of the promiment early scorch/fireblast spam talents, such as impact, ignite, incinerate. Flame throwing to bring Scorch and Frostbolt to the same range. And a couple points in Master of the Elements for raid DPS.

But, once again, I am a bit tied to the arcane tree. I've just gotten used to having the option of heavy, instant burst damage. I honestly don't know what I'd do in, for example, WSG, with only slow-cast spells, and the relative inability to hit a button and suddenly become the enemy flag carrier's most dangerous enemy. But, wow, 800 damage shield, every 30 seconds. I can totally tank that flag carrier if he weren't running away very, very fast.

Improved Counterspell, also, is something that would be difficult to do away with. Now that I think about it... how am I going to keep paladins and priests from just dispelling my frost nova, or pretty much anything else from crowd controlling me in some way in mid-frostbolt. "Haha, stupid mage. My fear is faster than your frostbolt, and if you stop casting now, the frost nova will break before you can cast another frostbolt."

I am going to have to do some heavy testing on this. As it is, I am in the process of deciding whether I should slow down playing on my mage and move onto my warlock (who dinged level 57 last night, and equipped the Robe of the Void and Felcloth Gloves I twinked him), or stick with the mage.

The counterspell issue may be workable. I've checked, and dispel and cleanse both are holy spells, so I could work a paladin or priest with scorch to get him to heal, then counterspell and do the frost nova shatter combo. And similar for warlocks and mages--bait them into casting a shadow/arcane spell (fear, sheep, whatever), throw down an ice barrier, and charge in for the kill.

With this build, though, much fewer quick kills, and no more running off solo to insta-kill a flag carrier in the middle of his own base. But much higher survivability, and failing to blow 20 near-worthless points in a tree just to get the really nice top-end stuff.