Milage may vary...

A new world...

Well, 1.11 is here, and now a couple of days later and some real world testing I have a quick report on my new spec.

My Spec

Odd Notes:
Elemental Precision is really nice. Thursday night in ZG I had a combined total of 3 resists from the bosses. Before the patch, I would see anywhere from 6-8 per fight.
Frost Channeling is "teh hawt". The treat reduction is just insane. Frost spells were always the lowest aggro spells before, now you're blowing a hole into a mob and they don't act like they notice. The other night in UD Strat Thay was talking about was really the clincher for me. Thay took on tanking duties in bear form. The fight I remember the most was just after we got inside, Thay was tanking a ghoul and I critted 3 times in a row with a frostbolt. I dropped close to 5000pts of damage on this guy in the span of about 7 seconds and he didn't even look at me. Also, as Thay mentioned, I was dropping pryoblast on stuff for giggles and still wasn't pulling aggro. If there's one thing that came out of this review that was well worth it, the threat reduction wins.
The jury is still out on Master of Elements. I've seen some pretty good mana payback in a couple of fights and not so much in others. If there's one thing I might change down the line it's this. I'll have to play around with it some more to see.

All and all I'm fairly happy with the way it all came out. Here are some thoughts I have overall.

Instant arcane explosion and evocation as a trainable spell is great. I'm kind of disappointed that improved counterspell was not given the same treatment. That was one of the things they promised from the outset of the review was to make the arcane tree more appealing and useful. I really think overall they made the arcane tree less appealing and really of limited utility. Don't get me wrong, if I was doing more soloing, the arcane tree might have some things in there for me. However, I'm an instance runner with the occasional farm grind. My primary concern at the end of the day is how much damage I can pump into a boss from a distance. I'm also kind of disappointed they didn't add more to improve our downtime between fights. They added a new rank of conjured food, but to me that's pretty worthless. I'd rather have a new level of conjured water or a better mana stone.

I guess at the end of the day the review was not that bad. I've noticed that my damage has gone up and the rate at which I check out has gone down. I know that will be a disappointment for Mewgai because there will be less "ha ha ha ded mage". However, I like not getting hit in the face and eating floor.

posted by Dave @ 6:14 AM