Coming Soon: Changes for mages

[Xame]

EDIT: Skandranon, as an aside, what would you say is the "optimal" raid DPS build for a mage post-2.3.2? Something like 2/48/11?

I would go more with 2/48/11. With only 11pts, you really cannot make a good frostbolt and Arcane Blast is still a nice spell as long as you don't spam it (it still might be my opener if a unlucky scorch crit would pull aggro from a tank that caught an opening miss. Wiping a raid is always a bad idea). The 3 pts in Ice Shards could equally end up in Frost Bite or Permafrost. With the mage rarely casting frostbolt a chill effect won't ever really happen. Thus Ice Shards might be the best for a Frost Nova/Ice Lance combo. But in my days as a frost mage Permafrost with rank 1 frostbolt/Cone really helps with the timing on kiting (2x elite kiting is great practice to keep skills sharp). Also Frost Bite might be interesting with Ice Armor in PvP. In summary, you have 5 junk points and I believe utility, even if it is very very limited, might be more interesting. Otherwise you have my new build.

As to your comment, shouldn't Ice Veins have gone into the Arcane tree. Yes!! But so should some "real" defense. It would have been better to boost Arcane Fortitude (~250 armor -> 2500 armor), Magic Attunement (increased effect for dots/hots) and Prismatic Cloak (increase 2%/pt -> 4%) and lower them in the Arcane tree so Fire/Frost could pick them up for utility (<11pt talents). This would give Arcane mages the power boost from Ice Veins and Arcane/Fire/Frost a lot more defense. Of course this is much more risky since you boost the defense of frost mages more, but I believe it would be more in keeping with the flavor of the mage talent trees. The iceblock trainable is a cheap way out without much thought. But this is all pie in the sky and I'm sure it won't play well with what Blizzard has for 51pt talents.

A month after the patch releases people will just assume mages had Ice Block since the dawn of the game (all toons you don't understand are 41/41/41 :wacko:) so we will adjust the spreadsheets and move on. Other classes have had more dynamic game changes then this (hunters anyone? skill -> expertise for melee classes, +healing gear == damage). To some degree these changes make the game fun since what was understood before requires relearning. With enough shuffling over time, mages might be back on top of the dps charts.