New Mage Talent Trees Revealed

[Rinnhart]

I may be a loon, but I'm leaning toward this build currently.  I feel that with a build like this I'll be getting use out of all of my talent points.

If I were to go for master of elements I'd feel that alot of points spent on fire talents building up to it are getting wasted.  The improved flamestrike might be good for more AOE power, but improving fire blast seems less worthwhile to me.  Basically I would be looking at spending 18 points for one possibly two good talents and a whole bunch of weak ones.

Meanwhile if I move those points to arcane I feel that all the talents I put points in are useful.  I gain clearcasting, arcane explosions that crit more and get resisted less, and improved counterspells.

Of course I'm typically not much of a raider and so I'm mainly looking at 5-10 man content.  When you move into the raiding scene the arcane talents may become less useful and master of elements may gain even more use for its mana savings.  I'd also probably move the 3 out of cone of cold for 3 in frost channeling.

I'm unsure if master of elements will be a great deal better than clear casting in raids though.  Is 30% mana back from crits better than a 100% free spell 10% of the time?  I'm guessing you won't be doing any of the tricks to gain mana from master of elements in a raid because if you are hitting more than one target you probably want to be doing so with blizzard for its range and it not being fire based.

So I'm left feeling like I may stick with the frost/arcane build even for raids.  In 5-10 man's the mana you might get back from master of elements probably won't matter that much because the fights are so short anyway.  In 20-40 mans you probably won't be able to do that many AOE tricks to gain mana from it.  I just feel that when things settle it will be a nice skill that some will play with, but not a real game changer.  I could be completely wrong though.  My mage experience is limited at best. : )
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I'm probably going to go with an Elementalist spec when these come out, do the the SH grind to 60, and switch back to my Arcane/Fire build. There's still a stack of utility in Arcane, though the gap between Arcane Meditation and PoM is annoying.