Last night Blizzard hit us with the latest PTR Build (9704), which revealed all the set bonuses for the Tier 8 gear of all classes. You can take a look at all the set bonuses here at MMO-Champion.

Mage Tier 8 Set Bonuses:

• 2 Pieces: Your Arcane Blast, Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, and Fireball spells have a chance to grant you 350 spell power for 15 sec.
• 4 Pieces: 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.

The 2 Piece Bonus is a good step up from the previous bonus from the Tier 7 set. We won’t get 40% more Mana from our gems, but we’ll have a Spell Power bonus more often. It would be good for all specs.

The 4 Piece Bonus will be great for all specs except Frost. You’ll be spitting out extra Pyroblast and hasted Arcane Missiles more often if you were Arcane, Fire, or Frostfire Bolt Spec, but if you are Frost, looks like you’ll still be spamming the Frostbolt key.

Brain Freeze is still not a worth the 3 talent points. It is not worth throwing out an instant Fireball at the cost of the Global Cooldown, because it doesn’t do more damage than a Frostbolt. There is no talents in the Frost tree that will improve that Fireball. Maybe if it threw out an instant Frostfire Bolt, or even an instant Frostbolt would make this talent worth the points.

Spell Changes:

• Molten Armor: now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Improved Scorch: now increases spell critical strike chance against the target by 1%.
• Winter’s Chill: now increases the chance spells will critically hit the target by 1%.

Glyph Changes:

• Glyph of Molten Armor: Your Molten Armor grants an additional 15% of your spirit as critical strike rating.
• Glyph of Mirror Image: Your Mirror Image spell now creates a 4th copy.

The Imp. Scorch and Winter’s Chill nerf we saw coming for awhile now, so that isn’t a real shock to us. The change to Molten Armor however, is.

Okay before you all get all upset and start conjuring water with your eyes, let’s take a closer look at the changes. I’ll even throw in some math for fun. The old Molten Armor gave you a flat 3% crit increase, additional 2% with Glyph for a total of 5%. The new Molten Armor increases your crit by 25% of your Spirit, additional 15% with Glyph for a total of 40% of your Spirit.

Yes we will see it as a nerf at the moment. To make it even with the 5% crit we have currently, you would need 573.75 Spirit. 40% of that would be 229.5 crit rating. 45.91 crit rating = 1% crit, so 229.5 crit rating will give us 4.9989% crit. That is quite a bit of Spirit.

Most Mages have around 400 Spirit unbuffed, and would lose 1.5% crit or more with the new change. But if you look at it from a positive stand point, we now have a buff that SCALES with our gear. With the way Blizzard is itemizing gear, we’ll see more and more Spirit on our gear, and eventually Molten Armor will give us more than 5% crit, and it won’t be long either.

Look at my gear for example. You can take a look on the left side bar or go to my Armory Page. I currently have 517 Spirit unbuffed, and I wasn’t even going after gear with Spirit. I just took normal Caster DPS gear, and my Tier 7.5 gear. So that gives me 206.8 crit rating, 4.504% crit. If you add a Divine Spirit, I’ll be at 5.201% crit. It is actually a buff for me already!

Related Posts:

• PTR Patch 3.1.0 – Newest Build Give Mages Buffs
• Attention Mages: Calm Down About Spirit!
• PTR Patch 3.1.0 – New Mage Glyphs
• WotLK: Build 8820 – Mage Glyphs
• My Dual Specs