3.3 and you: What to expect.

Figure I'll open this up with a bit of commentary on the new patch, and how it affects mage pvp.

Frost

Okay, not much is changing here. With the frozen core change reverted, the idea of speccing deep frost and grabbing burning determination just feels alot less appealing, since you lose alot more damage from TTW. Additionally, burning determination seems to have a hidden cap on absorbing only one silence/interrupt. Probably a good thing for balance overall, as 20 sec aura mastery each time you get wind sheared would be a bit much, but don't expect to see yourself moving any points out of arcane for the moment.

PVE LOL

Okay, we've all seen the 4pce pve bonus and jizzed over it. And just cause I'm that nice a guy, here it is again, so have at it:

• (2) Set: Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 5 sec when the effect of the talent is consumed.
• (4) Set: Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 18% additional damage for 30 sec.

Now, mirror images will once again be one-shottable by aoe in the next patch, however reading this seems to indicate that the buff will remain with you regardless of whether the images die. It's basically an arcane power you can get as frost, which is pretty damn ridiculous as I'm sure most of you realize. The 2pce isn't half bad either, I may end up pulling a point from CTTB or replenishment to max out brain freeze if I get it.

As good as this bonus is, the buffs to the pvp set bonuses (50 more resil from 2set, 29 spell power from 4set), the real decider here IMO is how the stat bonuses are laid out. The stats came out on mmochampion, and hoo boy...

3 pieces of the set are itemised with spell power, crit and haste. The other two are both crit and hit. The best part? One of the hit items is the gloves, so you can grab 3 pieces with haste, and one with hit to help you hit cap, and still retain your gloves bonus (as lackluster as some make it out to be, I feel it's a bit underrated, especially vs BEASTCLEAVE).

So how do you get these magnificent items? It's similar to the ToC system. You can buy "welfare" versions with the new emblems of frost. You can then upgrade your welfare versions by trading them in with a token from the icecrown raid. The emblems of frost themselves drop from the heroic daily, the new boss in vault of archavon, and both versions of the ICC raid. Now, it greatly depends on the ilvl of the pvp sets, but it may be worth grabbing these welfare versions which are ilvl 251 from joining ICC pugs. Certainly, if you think you have any shot at joining a run which can obtain the tokens (one assumes they only drop from 10m hard and 25m normal like toc ones), you should be doing that. The token versions are ilvl 264... I expect the pvp set to be around ilvl 271 so they will definitely be worth wearing over that. Time to get your pve nerd on!

I'll cover fire changes and thoughts in my next post.