Rumoured WotLK spells

[Buzzooms]

A dataminer from over at Elitist Jerks has found a couple of spells that might be coming to mages in WotLK to replace Shatter Shield and Focus Magic. The Focus Magic replacement sounds pretty dodgy to me, but the Shatter Shield replacement is sounding a bit more solid...

Replacement for Shatter Shield:
Mirror Image
Creates 2 copies of the caster nearby, which cast spells and attacks the mage's enemies.

Replacement for Focus Magic:
Mana Link
Establishes a mana link to the target, causing spells you cast to draw from the linked target's mana pool instead of your own.

Im not saying in any way these ARE gonna make it into the expansion, however the guy who found these by datamining the patch was pretty certain of the first one. There are obvious questions about their worth and what the descriptions might actually mean (do the copies cast spells that do no damage? Do they mimic the casters movements? Can you mana link with an enemy to use their own mana to kill them?). I do think these are interesting pointers to what might be coming up though...

[MFive]

The mirros image sounds fun, and it is a trick taht we see in SCIII and in WoW with several bosses.

[silverlight]

bah cool spell but rogues should ahve that imo :)

[Buzzooms]

Links to Wowhead where they now list these spells...

Mirror Image (http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=55342)

Mana Link (http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=55582)

Obviously still no clue about whether they are gonna be mage spells in the final WotLK, but at least theres some numbers for duration and cooldown here just in case.

[edit] Oh yeah, and its 3 copies for mirror image, not 2.

[MFive]

I have done some calculations to see how the specs will work out. This is based on the curent information, so involves a lot guesing :). I used 1000 spelldamage, 20% base crit and 600 intellect for TBC, and doubled the intellect and spelldamage for tLK.

Frost mage's:
DPS without the pet 1940 (85% increase)
DPM 1:7,12 (25% better) (around 10% because you get free fireballs)
Spec brings awesome raid utility trough the pet and winterchill.

Arcane mage's:
Arcane blast spam 2431 (87% increase)
DPM 1:4,1 (77% increase) (add 10% for clear cast)
Bring reasonable raid buf with focus mind.

Fire mage's:
DPS of fireball spam 2000 (85% increase)
DPM 1:6,4 (15% better) (add 10% for master of elements)
Bring awesome raid buf with 6% damage increase for frost, fire and arcane

It looks like arcane still will be the spec with the highest DPS but still with the lowest DPM. Frost mage's gonne be pretty awesome if they keep it like this. Most bossfights will have 3 times icy veins and a pet uptime of 50%.

[Buzzooms]

Well up until recently i was still thinking we might get some sweet sweet loving via frostfire bolt and trying to make use of crit mechanics (crit spec elementalist at heart).

However check out this blue quote:- BlueTracker (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/4/9023678411-kalgan-says-mages-are-doing-too-much-damage.html)

That kind of implies that a) Frostfire bolt is going to have a chunk less synergy with talents and b) their rogue testers suck ass!