Deep Frost boring?! Blasphemy! Haha, everyone has their own style of playing. Weather it be blowing stuff up fast, kiting a mob to death, or… uh, arcane-ing the mob to death, you have your picks. If you like complicated, Arcane is the way to go!

@ Larisa

Hmm… my advice would be to stick with the spec you are raiding with now, and just upgrade that spec when the patch its. If you are Arcane, stay Arcane, and so forth. Of course you won’t have all the talent points to be able to pick up everything in the specs I have above, so you would be the Arcane and Fire spec without Icy Veins, and Frost without the Focus Magic.

I tried out all three specs on Beta, and all three are fun to play with, and do around the same amount of DPS for me. 1600-2000 self buffed. Of course I did more DPS as Frost since I was a lot more comfortable with the spec, but a good Fire or Arcane Mage will be able to do as well with the other specs.

Once Wrath actually hits, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more and more theorycrafting, and start seeing Wrath “cookie-cutter” specs. But until that time, I can only go with whatever I’ve tried out so far. I haven’t gotten a chance yet on Beta to “compete” with other Mage specs yet in a raiding atmosphere yet.

@ Squirrelz

On Beta, I have been able to squeeze off that Ice Lance or Deep Freeze at the last moment. The Ice Lance or Deep Freeze would get the “Frozen” bonus, and usually that 2nd Frostbolt wouldn’t crit. This is just due to server lag, and the game sees the Ice Lance/Deep Freeze hit before the 2nd Frostbolt, so they would receive the bonus.

This is similar with Hot Streak, with Pyroblast “eating Ignites” you might be reading about lately. The instant cast Pyroblast would register BEFORE the previous Fireball, and that Fireball’s Ignites would be lost.

So for Frost Mages (for now), you can get a Shattered Frostbolt + Ice Lance, and a non-Shattered Frostbolt in 5 seconds of casting by squeezing in the Ice Lance.

I haven’t been able to get the PTR to work, and this line confused me. Can you still squeeze in an ice lance at the end like that? From what I’ve read about Fingers of Frost, it’s a self buff that goes away after you cast 2 spells. Does it stay up, like frostbite does, until 2 spells hit a target? Very cool if it does.

Also, love the picture at the top of the post.

I think it’s a common theme with most classes for WotLK. Prot warriors are leaving the days of rotation behind and are watching S&B procs, e.g.

Great stuff!

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