Empowered Fire

Patch day whooo!

It’s official: 3.3 hits today! Whether you’ve been meticulously following every change and quirk on the PTR or if you’ve been completely out of the loop for the past couple of months, we’re here to help you get caught up quickly. Our guides have been updated accordingly (3.3 Raiding Guide, Ding! 80!…Now What? (for new 80s), and our Mage Leveling Guide), but if you want to jump in as soon as servers are live (whenever that may be), here are the salient points.

Arcane changes
Arcane was left largely untouched, and still looks to be be top mage DPS for single-target situations. The big change here is a bit of utility: the Arcane Empowerment talent now also adds 3% increased damage by your party or raid after a critical strike with AE, AM, ABarr, or AB. This utility buff is the same as the one provided by ret paladins and BM hunters, so for 25 man raids this won’t likely make a difference.

Fire changes
Even though I’ve only played fire a handful of times since 3.2, I’m still excited about the scorch change: one cast of scorch now applies 5 stacks of the increased critical strike chance debuff. The Improved Scorch glyph has been renamed Glyph of Scorch and now increases the damage of scorch by 20%. (No, you don’t want to pick it up. Might be fun for a PVP fire build, though.) Given that mages and locks are the only ones who can apply the crit debuff, and given that fire does very well on fights with multiple targets (particularly if they are tanked near one another), we’ll still see many fire mages in ICC.

Frost changes
Here’s where mages got the biggest overhaul, though unfortunately the changes fell short of frost mages’ initial hopes. Deep Freeze was tweaked so that it now does damage to targets immune to stun (i.e., raid bosses). A new glyph was introduced for frost mages as well, Glyph of Eternal Water, which gives you a permanent water elemental but you lose the ability to cast the nova spell. Fluffy’s waterbolt spell’s mana cost has been reduced, so you shouldn’t have to worry about him going oom too quickly. (Longer fights may require a resummon, I’m not sure.) All these changes are nice, but frost still falls very short of the potential output of arcane, fire, or even frostfire.

Other mage-related changes
Black Magic went from being a piece of crap to being the best enchant for decently geared mages. It’s decidedly better for players who have a one-handed weapon, though it’s likely still an improvement for mages with staves equipped. You’ll want to download the latest version of Rawr to get a more accurate answer dependent on your own gear and raid buffs.

Mana costs on all lowbie spells have been reduced, which means that leveling mages (and other classes) will be able to use their spells without going oom after three casts. Attack has been changed to auto-attack, and it won’t even show up on a new mage’s bars now. These changes mean mages won’t spend levels 1 through 20 wanding and meleeing, so good job on that account, Blizzard. If you’ve ever thought about leveling a mage, now is an excellent time to start!

Fire mages will no longer be able to drop on top of a mounted player, cast unglyphed blast wave, and knock him off his mount. Pity — I have to admit I enjoyed doing that after the occasional WG battle.

That’s it as far as mage-specific changes, but there are dozens more affecting all areas of play. Full patch notes can be found here. So many changes! I’m geekily excited about the macro language changing so “@” now means “target=”, but I’m likely the only one. Hey, my polymorph macro is long enough as it is.

Good luck, mages! May your servers be stable! And, hey, if you’re in Ais’s and my battlegroup, you might run into us as we’re furiously pugging heroics.

Tags: arcane-mages, black-magic-enchant, fire-mages, frost-mages, improved-scorch, patch-3.3, water-elemental-change