This is a clip from a screen shot I took last night in Scholomance. Basically, after the patch I went for an Arcane build - ditching my old max damage Fire philosophy (well, more incohearant screaming than philosophy to be honest - but you get the idea).

The reason I did this was because I was a bit worried about the agro issues associated with fire and I was OOMing far to often, Arcane seemed to offer a more steady and controlled damage on demand option that might be more helpful in raiding. What a load of bollocks.

Strobie now has more mana, yes, and massive mana regen as well - he regens about 30 per tick in combat. He's a tad less survivable. But the damage is shocking.

On batman yesterday :
<hit trinket, hit arc inst, cast for 6 secs>
Pyroblast Crits blah blah flappy git for 4621
<hit POM global cooldown 1.5sec>
Pyroblast Crits blah blah flappy f'er for 4203
<cast for 3 sec's inc cooldown I think - seems faster>
Fireball hits blah blah flappy twat for 1255
Fireblast hits blah blah winged lump for 780

Oddly this seemed to pull him right off gradjo who had 5 sunders up and is proc spec'd.

What it means is that Mages are the new hunters, at least Arcane ones are; we always used to have shite gear and never cared for anything apart from +damage. Now Int and Crit are really very much more significant. Spellpower and Arcane Mind make a huge impact. +626 damage means that strobies kit is probably more important than the base spells that are used.

I think that it's imba, I think that it means that the old content is going to get obsoleted really fast, and I think that blizz have made a big mistake. Mages are squealing about nerfs on the forums at the moment, I'm staggered - does this mean that all the other classes have been so gunned up that they can compete with this?