Empowered Fire

Mage Tier 10

In a rather surprising move, Blizzard devs posted the Tier 10 set bonuses in a thread and asked for people to give feedback based on their class and spec. For mages, this meant that our set bonuses could be evaluated for fire, frostfire, arcane and frost, presumably so we wouldn’t end up with a four piece set bonus that was useless for half of the specs. To further my shock, Blizzard promptly (and, in my opinion, adequately) addressed the concerns listed by mages in the thread.

The original set bonuses were:

2 pc – Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 15% additional damage for 10 sec.
4 pc – Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 3 sec when the effect of the talent is consumed.

While I liked where the devs were going with these changes, the math just didn’t support it. Giving mirror images a trinket-like status seemed like a good idea to me — it’s already used as a threat dump, so it makes sense to line it up with other cooldowns. Making the four piece set bonus grant haste instead of spell damage (or, god help me, crit) seemed to be in line with my projections for Icecrown Citadel: we’ll finally hit the magic spot where gemming for haste will provide more of a DPS benefit than gemming for spell power. (Given full BiS T9/TotGC gear, we’re not quite there, but it’s close.) So, good ideas in theory, but there was one glaring problem: Blizzard forgot about the GCD. Mirror images and Hot Streak both trigger the GCD, which means the actual benefit of the bonuses is drastically reduced. Then you take into consideration Mirror Image’s long cooldown, which means that you get 15% additional damage for effectively 9 seconds every three minutes. You don’t have to crunch the numbers to realize that’s not a very big boost to your DPS.

But all is not lost, mages! Blizzard has updated the set bonuses. Observe:

2 pc – Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 5 seconds when the effect of the talent is consumed.
4 pc - Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 18% additional damage for 30 seconds.

Hot. Damn. The change to the Mirror Image bonus is significant: it provides a considerable cooldown to use on fights where burst is necessary — something TtW fire mages have lacked. My crappy napkin math shows it to be about a 3% DPS increase on a six minute fight, which isn’t too shabby. Giving the 2pc bonus a few extra seconds means we can likely squeeze in two casts with the haste bonus. I don’t have the mathematical talents necessary to model the effects of that, but intuitively I think switching the bonuses around was correct. I’m looking forward to someone really crunching the numbers to break down the benefits further.

Frost mages are still screwed by the Hot Streak/Missile Barrage/Brain Freeze bonus, though. Of course, if you’re raiding T10 content as a frost mage, you are probably quite used to being screwed over.

Tags: mage-tier, mage-tier-10, patch-3.3, PTR-mages, tier-10