See, this is why I try to avoid blogging about Wrath of the Snitch King.
So many massive changes all the time, it’s impossible to really place… well, anything.
Take fire.
A mere week ago, it was the weakest mage tree.
Three days ago, it was a horrendously bad tree filled with awful talents.
And now it’s pretty damn good.
So here’s an example of why you shouldn’t take anything too seriously coming out of the Beta.
Burnout. Wow. This talent has gone from hated to loved.
5 point talent, increases your critical strike damage bonus with fire spells by 25% (meaning, of course, that fire has the most powerful crits, mage wise, by a large lead).
It also used to cost you an additional 5% of your total mana every single time you critted.
Yes, that’s right, if Scorch critted 4 times, that’s a fifth of your mana pool gone. Just like that.
Then, they changed it to cost an additional 1% of your total mana every single time you critted. So it only sucked really bad this time.
And now it increases the base mana cost of whatever spell just critted by 5%.
Oh wait! Hold up! Not base mana cost, but just plain old mana cost!
/littlejig
Maybe I will stay fire for raiding purposes. This looks much better, even if Living Bomb still seems retarded.
Oh yeah, and Fingers of Frost? Brain Freeze? What the bloody hell is that?
Ok, I can give you Fingers… it did seem like it needed a nerf. But can you make it two charges? Please? I wanna shatter combo raid bosses.
But you can take Brain Freeze and shove it. Or at least rename it Freezer Burn so I can chuckle at it.
PS
Deep Freeze deals damage now.
/littlejig
PPS
Didja notice the clever Blog Azeroth shared topic? Same title different post. I is so clever.
PPPS
My little blogger heart is torn. On the one hand, I have a burning desire to blog about Wrath stuff. On the other, I know many people are sick to death of people talking about Wrath. On another hand, I know I could easily get hundreds of hits an hour by titling a post “Wrath Mage Changes WoW”. On another hand, there’s still months left of BC and valid blogging to do… and on yet another, all that stuff will be rapidly bunk in a few month’s time.
Stupid game world changing.
I NEED MORE TIME TO BLOG, DAMMIT.
Be still my beating heart….
Thanks for the good news.
WoLK reporting… Me thinks the best strategy is leave the WoLK spam for those that spam this sort of info (WI), and just cherry pick those bits that really move you… or me…
PS: Clever cross to BA topic….
I purposely avoid getting worked up about talents/spells while the beta is going on. My guild forum has a thread dedicated to the stuff, which can be good to keep up on what’s going on, but the numbers and the way things work changes so often I find it hard to worry about it at this stage.
Though there is one thing you can count on. Soul Link being nerfed every patch. That is one constant, both in beta, and live. Pretty soon, it will just be removed from the game, mark my words.
Presence of Mind will be trainable when wrath goes live. mark my words. Oh, pyroblast too.
My 59 Twink Mage who is already Fire, is going to absolutely love some of the changes in AV—especially running into those Horde towers and wiping out 3-4 targets in a blaze of glory.
I think that simply looking at the talents, even the raw talents changing every day, won’t really tell the story on how powerful each tree is yet.
I think the true test of the new talent trees for most of the people who read your blog, Euripedes, will be lvl 80 instances and raids. We have no idea yet how Blizzard has designed the mobs and fights yet. Full frost (which my mage is right now because I farm on him only) might be great again for soloing but with the frozen tundra and lots of white instances and raid zones, who knows how many mobs will be “immune” (a word I HATE seeing by the way)? I think we’ll find out in due time, but I have a feeling Blizzard will somehow keep the fire tree for all-out powerful dps.
I do appreciate the WotLK info though… with lvl 70 shaman, mage, and hunter, I like to get the info from people who play those classes as mains, not just from mmo-champion, et al. Sadly, I or someone like me needs to start a shaman blog because there’s just none out there and my shaman is my main.