My mage sucks in WotLK, too – Burnout

As most of you have probably seen by now, preliminary mage talents have been leaked for Wrath of the Lich King. There is some interesting stuff in all three trees, but one talent sticks out like a giant dong hitting you in the eye – Burnout.

First off, yes, 25% crit damage bonus to fire spells is HUGE.  Thats 175% damage on the initial hit PLUS an even beefier 40% ignite DoT.  But losing 5% of your mana whenever you crit with a fire spell?  Yep, that’s right, crit too much and you’re fucked, kids.  I’ll grant that maybe the tooltip is just poorly worded, but even that could go either way…

1.  Lose 5% of TOTAL mana – just horrible, doesn’t even need explanation.

2. Lose 5% of REMAINING mana – still horrible.

3. Lose an additional 5% of the mana cost of the spell – This is workable, and is the only reasonable way this talent would be acceptable.  This loss would basically serve to offset the mana you gain back from crits with Master of the Elements, which I would accept happily for the sake of the 25% bonus damage.

So let’s say even with the best-case scenario above, you’re losing mana for every crit, but your shadow priests mana return is getting nerfed, your evocate is regenerating less mana at 80 than it did at 70, AND you have a passive talent which guarantees crits if you get enough in a row (Hot Streak, also new for WotLK).  Put it all together and you’ve got a serious mana problem, unless there are some other major changes on the way…but that remains to be seen.

Of course, you could also argue that Arcane is looking to be the new resident raid spec in WotLK as well.  But then the point of this blog still stands, because Arcane sucks on principle.  We’ll have to see how this plays out, but at the moment it looks like the fire mages damage output will be similar to a 16 year old getting laid for the first time – hard and strong for about 60 seconds and then spending the next 5 minutes apologizing for yourself.