Mage Builds!

Oh, I almost forgot. With patch 3.0.2 comes the new talent trees. And with that I had to make some choices. Fire, Arcane, or Frost.

Well, with my new T6 pieces Arcane looses some of it's luster (especially with the changes to AB and the nerfing of 2-piece T5). And to me it seemed a simple choice considering that we got new Fireball and Frostbolt spells (and a new Arcane Missile, but that doesn't cover it).

So the choice was between Fire and Frost. And since I'm fire right now I decided to stick with it for the start. And that left me with some difficult choices. The two obvious ones were 11/50/0, or 0/50/11. At 70, you just don't have enough talents to hit everything, so no matter what you do you have to make some concessions.

It really came down to the choice of IV + Elemental Precision vs. Focus Magic + Arcane Concentration (hmm, I think that's wrong, but I can't look it up right now)

Now, IV is a great talent, an awesome addition to the mage class. And obviously Elemental Precision is extremely important (still annoyed they moved that to T2). But Fire now completely relies on crit rating for high damage output. Without it, the new Fire tree isn't that much better than the old one. Or to put it another way, in my short tests on the targets in IF yesterday, my fire DPS was sustaining about 1200 when I wasn't getting double crits, but was sustaining 1800 when I could.

If this works out, I might not switch to frost until Wrath hits. I'm almost certainly going to spec Frost for leveling (the spec kicks ass for leveling, and will do so even more with the WE for extra mana regen).

Not sure what to think about Arcane yet, so for the moment I'm avoiding it though that may not last long. I'm personally interested in what they do with that spec. The Devs have said they intend to do something with it, so hopefully they can fix some of it's current problems. As it is, I think Arcane is just too situational and reactionary to be fun over a long fight even if I could keep up in DPS with it.

Now IV is a great talent, but Fire now really relies on crits for it's damage output, so to me Focus Magic still made more sense.

So, I specced 11/50/0