#0 - March 6, 2009, 9:23 p.m.
* Fiery Payback changed to one rank with an additional effect - When below 35% health all damage taken is reduced by 10% and your Pyroblast spell's cast time is reduced by 1.75 secs while the cooldown is increased by 2.5 secs. In addition, melee and ranged attacks made against you have a 5% chance to disarm your attacker's main hand and ranged weapons.
Comment: Fire mages typically die in 3-4 hits from most attackers. Now Blizzard is giving a talent that gives a 1 in 20 chance to disarm an attacker. Doesn't look very helpful at all. Impact was frustrating with its 10% chance to proc. Either it procced when you needed it and you lived or it failed to proc and you died. Now Blizzard gives us a replacement with a less effective proc and with a ridiculously tiny proc rate for such a fragile spec.
5% proc rate might make sense for a class with heavy armor that is capable of suriviving multiple hits from an attacker. But its simply not viable for the spec that dies in 3 hits.
* Impact now gives Gives your damaging spells a 4/7/10% chance to cause the next Fire Blast you cast to stun the target for 2 sec.
From the description it sounds like this spell is going to operate just like clearcasting. When it procs the mage will get a short duration buff that gives the next fireblast the mage casts while it is up a 100% chance to stun the target. Compared to the old version this means:
1. Impact is no longer usable as a defensive tool to escape a stunlock since it no longer procs against attackers.
2. Since Impact is changing to a buff it can probably be dispelled, just like clearcasting.
3. Impact stun is still too short to allow the mage to setup any kind of combo attack. The stun lasts 2 seconds, but fireblast's global cooldown is 1.5 seconds. The mage only has a half second to use a combo... not enough time.
4. Impact only works with fireblast. If fireblast is on cooldown, the mage cannot use the stun at all.
5. Its still random since now the mage has to fish for the impact buff if she wants to take advantage of it.
Overall: The change to impact sounds like a significant nerf to fire mages in pvp. Fire mages just lost what little defense they had against melee and the result is frost has just had its place cemented as THE pvp spec.
