The latest patch was released yesterday during Tuesday’s regular weekly maintenance. Though the patch will only be remembered for being the Nerf Hammer for Retribution Paladins, there were a few changes that will affect Mages as well. You can check out the full patch notes for the latest patch HERE.

As for Mage changes, let’s take a look at the new changes we need to deal with:

Mages

• Arcane Potency: The additional crit bonus is now consumed immediately on cast of a travel time spell, so it is no longer possible to make two spells benefit from one charge. (Ex. Fireball followed by Fireblast.)
• Blast Wave: no longer receives double the intended critical strike bonus from Combustion.
• Burnout: Now consumes extra mana as intended when Living Bomb gets a critical strike.
• Brain Freeze: Now only frost spells that can chill can trigger the free Fireball proc from this talent.
• Cold as Ice: No longer reduces the cooldown on Deep Freeze.
• Deep Freeze: Now consumes a charge of Fingers of Frost when used.
• Focus Magic: Now works properly when mages with this talent use the ability on each other.
• Frostfire Bolt: The periodic damage effect from Rank 2 of this spell now benefits from spell power gains.
• Living Bomb: Mana cost reduced to be the same as Arcane Explosion.. It no longer causes the caster to stand up when the final explosion occurs and it is now possible for each mage to have Living Bomb active on a target.
• Master of Elements: Now works with Living Bomb.
• Molten Fury: This talent no longer prevents Ice Lance ranks 2 and 3 from dealing triple damage against frozen targets.
• Reduced the mana cost of Fireball, Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, Arcane Blast, Arcane Missiles, and Arcane Explosion.
• Torment the Weak: Now works correctly when the Mage also knows the Molten Fury Talent.

Buffs:

A big buff for Mages is the Mana cost reduction on all of the Mage’s main nuke spells. Some players were having Mana problems, and this should help a bit.

Nerfs:

Brain Freeze can only proc off of Spells with a Chill effect now. This means it will no longer proc off of Ice Lance. It does however mean that it can now proc off of Ice Armor.

Deep Freeze is no longer effected by Cold as Ice now. This means that the 30 second cooldown of Deep Freeze, can no longer be reduced.

Fixes:

The rest of the changes are fixes to talents to make them behave like they should have been. You could say they’re all small nerfs, but this was the way the talents were supposed to be.

Thoughts:

The Mana reduction is a nice change to have. I personally haven’t had any Mana problems at all in PvE, but in PvP, this will be a nice change for me.

The nerfs to the Frost Tree I saw were coming for quite some time now. Brain Freeze being able to proc off of Ice Lance was a bit too powerful for PvP, and led to excess amount of Ice Lance spamming. Taking Deep Freeze off of the Cold as Ice list, I thought was uncalled for. They have already nerfed the Spell big time by taking off the Damage component, they really didn’t need to nerf it even further.