I think I’m a little delirious, because you know, the title of this post probably has nothing to do with the contents of the post..
let me check…
Ummm no, not really, err, maybe kinda.
No Yankees, but there is some Fire Mage Talent commentary
** WTF! **
So, how ’bout that new 31 point talent tree?
Is the question I got asked, to which I responded…
31 point talent tree?
Yeah, a Gnome with his finger on the pulse… wrong pulse, but there is a pulse there somewhere and a vein, maybe just give me another dozen attempts to jab that needle in…
So what’s the best way for me to approach this… yeah leave it to someone else…
Celeglin writes:
So, how ’bout that new 31 point talent tree? Can’t wait to see your write up.
Honestly, I’m worried. We’re losing a good chunk of our PvP talents and are getting no new ones inside the Fire tree itself.
The Good
- Increased range of Fire Blast. Luvs it.
- Molten Shields affect to Molten Armor now affects spells as well. Too bad I still have no desire to use that armor.
- +20% crit chance on Scorch
- Arcane Repulsion and Improved Blink. Not in the Fire tree, but both very well suited for our PvP play style.
The Bad
- Impact’s proc chance reduced by 3% (this is huge)
- We’re losing our Spell Reflect from Molten Shields
- No more Interrupt immunity from Burning Soul
- Scorch effect only has a 66% chance to proc
- No more instant, free Flamestrikes
- Redesigned Pyroblast does not seem conducive to PvP
- Combustion is just ASKING to be dispelled
- Fiery Payback GONE. No more anti-Execute and no more disarms.
- First tier of Arcane is still pretty lackluster to get at Arcane Repulsion and Improved Blink
- Improved Counterspell is no longer reachable (I didn’t use it anyway); Magic Absorption and Arcane Fortitude are gone.
- The entire Fire tree seems far more geared toward buffing Fireball/FrostFirebolt… But dammit, I don’t want to be casting those spells.
Sorry to vent… got up this morning, saw this and just went “blaaah”. Doesn’t help that the PvE Frost tree is sad too (no more Winter’s Chill and Focus Magic make me a sad Frostie).
Celeglin
To which my real reply was:
Awesome… I was wondering how to post on this… you just did it for me!
My take on going all the way and 31 point talent trees.
On going all the way… Larisa, she of the “I don’t theorycraft Magecraft mentality” has already discussed this.
Personally I like Gnome girls that go all the way, I even like 1/2Gnome/ 1/2Elf girls that go all the way.
When it comes to Fire, it’s just natural that you would go all the way, in fact it feels so natural that I wont call it the fire tree any longer, to me it’s the Nature tree.
When I was a young Mage, I went all the way.. with Nature, (or fire for you non-believers) and I have to say it was so much fun that I forgot that I was 8th on the DPS meters (yeah, that was in 5 mans… ohh well).
To me there was nothing better than mixing Blastwaves and Dragon’s Breath and other “PvP” talents with PvE raiding, in fact forsaking rading talents for PvP talents seemed just natural
THEY WERE FUN!
Sure, they were also useless in a PvE environment (which is where I was at that point in my WoW-life), but I’m not the sort of Gnome that listens to folk that tell me I am doing it all wrong… if I was, I wouldn’t Arena as Fire.
There are two ways of looking at this right now.
- The WoWhead Talent calculator, which gives you a 31 point talent tree and 76 points to spend (err whoops… that’s not right, but you can do just about anything), or
- The MMO Champion “I’m going to bring you right back down to reality” talent calculator.
You know I like options, so if I have an option in this, I am going with WoWhead… I don’t like reality so much, so leave me with 76 points to spend in a 31 point tree and I am almost happy.
Only almost, because knowing that things will change between now and 3.3.666 (the pre-Cataclysm-talent-reset-patch-whose-number-I-just-made-up) I can’t get too worked up about the current state of the talents.
I will say, that if they stay the way they are, we are going to have some fun talent trees, where the talents will be fighting between PvP and PvE It will be kind of a PvPE tree.
The thing I really like, is if you put all your talents into one tree, the ONLY tree, you only have one point left!
What are you going to do with one point?
Just ignore it until it goes away!
Seriously, any noob can see that this will be the only viable spec!
Gnomer and Out!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
You’re challenging me, mr Oh-look-at-my-big-balls-of-fire?
I’ve told you so many times over the years about the benefits of Arcane and you just don’t listen! But I’ll show you… I’ll show you… oh wait…
hm…
To put it slightly more seriously: there isn’t much to show off for arcane mages yet. And the information they gave a couple of months ago was far, far from impressing and exciting, but more on the worrying side considering the strange ideas about spell damage connnected to how much mana you had left. I was under the impression that I’d be forced back to playing fire again.
But I’m trying not to worry too much. I’m just biding my time, taking a nap while the EJ people will work their asses out to help me out. There will be cookie cutter specs in Cata, just like before. And I’ll happily use them.
I can be a unique and beautiful snowflake in other ways than through my talent tree.
It’s important to note that these trees are incredibly early and will see big changes before ever going live.
I think it’s equally important to note the lack of PvP talents in the Fire tree on Blizzard’s initial pass on the tree. This tree is the result of their “first thoughts” when they think of Fire. Clearly PvP isn’t counted among them. Very unsettling.
I haven’t looked into the talents in any detail yet. I got your email late, wrote the post early and only really had time for a quick screenshots.
That said, I wasn’t as concerned as you about the pvp aspects – remember, no detail pursued.
In fact it was the requirement to take so many pvp talents to get to the end of the tree that concerned me from a pve perspective.
Of course, maybe the new “colorful” glyphs will change everything.
Or not
All trees for all classes are “suffering” from the same thing in PvE. I’m not as concerned about that though. We certainly haven’t lost any PvE centric talents (baring the passive +% ones that are being baked into the tree), in fact Fire mages at the least have gained some.
Adding more PvE talents into the trees to fill out a raiding build doesn’t seem condusive to me. There are only so many abilities and quirks you can have in a PvE rotation before certain things just don’t stand up (example: Brain Freeze for Frost mages up until T10, DoTs for Boomkins after T9), become purely situational (Incanter’s Absorption post nerf), or just too complicated (Affliction at the beginning of Wrath).
I don’t mind picking up PvP/soloing talents in a raiding build now that all the passive +% bonus off to the side (except for that STUPID Piercing Ice talent in Frost. LOATHE. THAT. TALENT.). At one point I had to have a raiding Frost spec and a solo Frost spec simply because I couldn’t function outside of a group anymore: this is really taking away that mess.
That all being said, I think the Frost tree is a joke right now raiding. Yes, they may be able to get our damage up to par with these new rotational options and better access to passive tweaking, but 8 (EIGHT) of the talents in that tree give effects that raid bosses and a lot of trash are immune to, offer something other specs bring better, or are just useless for the spec (hello mana reduction, thank you for reducing the casting cost of the cheapest mage spells in the game. Very helpful.).
“No more instant, free Flamestrikes” ???
NNOOOOOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
i feel a chill, like someone just stepped on my grave. you can’t get rid of that, blizz! it’s one of our major “Warlock-B-Gone” spells!
>: (
They said it was a first pass for Arcane, so that one should change a lot:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24702229998&sid=2000
“While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations. “
Hang on, just the other day you were quitting for good and now you are QQ’ing about beta information from an expansion with no release date yet! – Lithium much?
Try reading the post on July 10th before pointing fingers Whiplash.