3.1 Mage Changes

[Fuegogrande]

I figured I would post the changes, and update this post as more are announced/they change them.

Talents and Spells:

Arcane
* Mirror Image: The images no longer cast Polymorph.
* Polymorph - Transforms the enemy into a harmless Turkey, forcing it to waddle around for up to 50 sec. While waddling, the turkey cannot attack or cast spells but will regenerate very quickly. Any damage will transform the target back into its normal form. Only one target can be polymorphed at a time. Only works on Beasts, Humanoids and Critters.
* Polymorph - Transforms the enemy into a harmless rabbit, forcing it to scamper around for up to 50 sec. While wandering, the rabbit cannot attack or cast spells but will regenerate very quickly. Any damage will transform the target back into its normal form. Only one target can be polymorphed at a time. Only works on Beasts, Humanoids and Critters.
* Arcane Meditation - Now allows 17/33/50% of your mana regeneration to continue while casting. Up from 10/20/30%.
* Mage Armor - Now allows 50% of your mana regeneration to continue while casting. Up from 30%.
*Arcane Blast stacking effect is no longer considered a Magic effect and will not be dispelled.

Fire

* Burnout - Now increases your spell critical damage bonus with all spells. Changed from only Fire spells.
* Pyromaniac - Now allows 17/33/50% of your mana regeneration to continue while casting. Up from 10/20/30%.
* Fiery Payback - Now also melee and ranged attacks made against the target have a 5/10% chance to disarm your attacker's main hand and ranged weapons.
* Impact - Gives your damaging spells a 4/7/10% chance to cause the next Fire Blast you cast to stun the target for 2 sec.
* Ignite: The damage done by this talent no longer receives modifications from effects that increase or decrease damage done by a percentage.
* Improved Scorch: Increased critical strike chance is now 1%, down from 2% per application of the Improved Scorch effect. In addition, the critical strike chance of Scorch, Fireball, and Frostfire Bolt is increased by 1/2/3%.
* Living Bomb AOE damage has been greatly increased. Rank 3 now deals 690 Fire damage (up from 306) to all enemies within 10 yards.
* Molten Armor now increases your critical strike rating by 35% of your spirit. (Up from 25%)

Frost

* Improved Water Elemental - Increases the duration of your Summon Water Elemental spell by 5/10/15 sec and your Frostbolt spell has a 33/66/100% chance to grant the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.25% of their maximum mana per second for 15 sec. (Renamed: Enduring Winter)
* Winter’s Chill: Increased critical strike chance is now 1%, down from 2% per application of Winter’s Chill. In addition, the critical strike chance of Frostbolt is increased by 1/2/3%.
* Ice Barrier now prevents spellcasting from being delayed by damage. (Old - prevented spells from interruption)

Glyphs:

* Glyph of Ice Lance -- Your Ice Lance now causes 4 times damage against frozen targets higher level than you instead of triple damage. (Old: Increases the range of your Ice Lance by 5 yards)
* Glyph of Ice Armor -- Your Ice Armor and Frost Armor spells grant an additional 50% armor and resistance. (Old: 20%)
* Glyph of Deep Freeze *new* -- Increases the range of Deep Freeze by 10 yards.
* Glyph of Living Bomb *new* -- The periodic damage from your Living Bomb can now be critical strikes.
* Glyph of Arcane Barrage *new* -- Reduces the mana cost of Arcane Barrage by 20%.
* Glyph of Mirror Image - Your Mirror Image spell now creates a 4th copy
* Glyph of Ice Barrier *new* -- Increases the amount of damage absorbed by your Ice Barrier by 30%.
* lyph of Molten Armor - Your Molten Armor grants an additional 20% (Up from 15%) of your spirit as critical strike rating.
* Glyph of Improved Scorch - The Improved Scorch talent now generates 5 applications of the Improved Scorch effect each time Scorch is cast.

Talent Calculator

Tier 8: There is no dress on the Tier 8 model in the 3.1 files
Female
Male
* Mage T8 2P Bonus -- Your Arcane Blast, Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, and Fireball spells have a chance to grant you 350 spell power for 15 sec.
* Mage T8 4P Bonus -- You have a chance for the effect of your Missile Barrage, Hot Streak, or Brain Freeze talent not to be consumed when you cast the spells which benefit.
Tier 8 10-man and 25-man stats:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...t8_10_mage.jpg
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...t8_25_mage.jpg

Bug Fixes:
* Arcane Potency: Fixed a bug where sometimes the benefit was consumed before altering the critical strike chance of the mage. In addition, will no longer benefit the critical strike chance of Molten Armor’s damage.
* Deep Freeze: Floating combat text will now display when this ability is able to be used.
* Focus Magic: When spell-stolen, this buff will no longer grant the originally casting mage a buff when critical strikes occur.
* Frostbite: Fixed a bug preventing this from overwriting the effect from the Frostbite talent.
* Ignite: The debuff from this talent now benefits properly from Arcane Subtlety. In addition, effects which modify damage done will no longer be applied a second time to the damage from this talent.
* Master of Elements: Now refunds the correct amount of mana when used with Arcane Missiles.
* Mirror Image: Mirror Images will now appear with maximum health and mana. In addition, this ability can no longer be used while riding any type of vehicle.
* Slow Fall: Can no longer be cast on NPCs.
* Torment the Weak: Now properly increases damage when used against victims of the snare from Hunter Frost Traps.



Edit: Added glyphs
Edit: Added Fire changes
Edit: Arcane and Fire addition
Edit: Added Tier 8 models
Edit: Glyph of Mirror Image, Glyph of Molten Armor, and Molten armor changed
Edit: New Molten Armor and Imp. Scorch/WC changes. Also T8 stats and bug fixes.

Note: Though it does not say it, Imp. Scorch and Winter's Chill only grant 5% improved crit.

[Convertabull]

nothing really special for mages...kinda makes me sad

arcane brilliance on wowinsider put a fake note in that i thought was pretty funny

Mages: New Spell: Anti-Anti-Magic Shell: Ability that allows the mage to shoot through the cheap Death Knight ability Anti-Magic shell, allowing the mage to kill a DK in pvp

[Book]

So....spending time on adding new useless polymorphs (dont get me wrong, its fun and all, but......) but no effort whatsoever into fixing ignite?

Its been a bug for what? 3 years?

While I admire their effort for trying to make frost a viable raid spec; what they offer is pointless. There is already so much replenishment in the game that it wont matter if the frost mage gets that. Winters chill is nice and all, but scorch does the job - and it doesnt stack.

As of now, the only way to make frost viable in raids is to make the elemental a permanent pet. But that would of cource mess up PvP balance. Or you could make winters chill stack. But then again, that would make dual mage way OP in PvE.

Lastly, a crit debuff (like scorch/WC) as arcane/frost would be nice :P

Or wait, one more thing; They wanted to make fire viable as PvP spec. Why nerf the best thing it had going? Nerfing impact is not the way to go. Yes, the change might be good in certain situations - but having impact talents, molten armor and the talent points in molten shields was the best thing fire had going for it.

Overall verdict: Meh.

[Barugaara]

hmm... Waddling, or scampering...

[Manuss]

You know it would be quite fun if more than one polymorph could be used then. the it would be mage=ultimate CC. I dont see the point because then you would have all possibilities. turkey, rabbit, pig, penguin, sheep, black cat. just a little fun for the mages, i think that would be quite interesting.

you know those mage haters out there would say it would another mage buff, yet they took away the PoM and Arcane Power combo. So now pvp is a little less fun.

[Fuegogrande]

Several updates (3/27/2009:3:54 P.M. CST), I advise that everybody relooks at the list.

[Xianghua]

Perhaps now frost will begin showing up more often in raids.

[Fuegogrande]

Originally Posted by Xianghua

Perhaps now frost will begin showing up more often in raids.

Well it is getting closer to being viable because of this change that GC talked about...

We added AE avoidance to the shadowfiend, wolves, water and fire elementals, and treants I believe. The avoidance does work in PvP. My earlier comment meant to imply that pets are a big liability on those raid damage events because they just die without avoidance. But it does let them survive AE in PvP also, such as Bladestorm and Whirlwind. That is a (small) nerf to warriors.

We don't make classes with temporary pets buy avoidance, because honestly they wouldn't spend the talents etc. on a temporary pet. It is not nearly the power multiplier that a hunter, warlock or DK pet is. But I can see the argument that avoidance is just an unalienable right for all pets and we might eventually just give it to them all. (We probably won't make this change for 3.1 because it involves changing a couple of DK talents and redoing all the pet talent trees.)

We can give it to Mirror Images. They are extremely frail

...since with the Ele dying so fast on fights with a lot of, non frost, AE damage. This being a noticeable hit to DPS.