We've had a few builds' worth of the new 31-point talent trees released so far, so I'm going to offer some brief comments on the Fire tree and mage talents in general. In a word?
Awkward!
Most of the talents which remain are those which I expected to hang around. Master of Elements, Incineration, Ignite, Fire Power, Improved Scorch, Hot Streak, Molten Fury, Critical Mass . . . these are all recognisably similar to existing talents in the Fire tree, which fit with the schema of "something that changes the way you play" rather than "something which passively increases your damage" that Blizzard is openly aiming for. Then there are the four "new ability" talents, which are much the same as they always were - Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, Combustion (albeit altered, and I'll come back to that), and Living Bomb.
The problem, as I see it, is that once I have taken all of the obvious PvE talents that I'd like to have as a raider, I'm left with cruft which is either obviously PvP-oriented, or involve making changes that probably won't show up at all in 90% of my gameplay. After taking Master of Elements, Incineration, and Ignite, I have to put a point in something I have almost no use for in order to advance.
Burning Soul is a PvP talent - it has its uses in PvE, but even with increased health pools in Cataclysm I doubt I'll want to stand around getting beat up enough to make investing a talent point in making my spells faster while it's happening. The priority will always be to get out of that situation. Likewise Blazing Speed and Molten Shields. Therefore all I have left is Improved Fire Blast, reducing the cooldown and increasing the range on a spell I almost never use.
The next tier is fine - Fire Power, Blast Wave, and Improved Scorch are all welcome. Well, technically, I don't have Blast Wave in my raiding spec at the moment, but it's a fun talent and it will presumably have its uses if Cataclysm succeeds in making crowd-control a more important part of gameplay. Knocking loose adds away from the healer and back towards the tank is always a good time.
In the next tier, Hot Streak, Combustion, and Pyromaniac are all interesting enough. Combustion's changes make it a very different spell, but I can see that it will be very useful for lining up multiple damage-over-time effects on a target, then popping Combustion and nailing it with a Fireball or even a Pyroblast made instant-cast by Hot Streak. Speaking of the latter, the change from "2 consecutive critical strikes" to "3 consecutive strikes within 6 seconds of each other" is fine with me.
But then in the next tier we get Dragon's Breath - again, welcome, and making a return to my spec where I skip it now - and Molten Fury, which I've found very useful for raiding . . . but there isn't enough in this tier to get me anywhere. So I have to go back and put another point in Improved Fire Blast.
Critical Mass is great, but all by itself in the second-to-last tier it's just frustrating. So what else have I got to go back and get? Impact is a PvP talent - the chances are that a 7% chance to proc a stun from a Fire Blast is going to come up at a time which is useful are pretty damn small. A stun is always welcome in PvP but will more often than not be wasted in PvE.
Improved Flamestrike is not awesome, but it's the best of a bad lot of choices - more damage and a reduced cast time can be useful when dealing with packs of trash, and it might well count towards the various effects that key off damage-over-time effects on enemies. I'll take it, but again I feel like I'm using up talent points on stuff I'll rarely if ever use, just to reach what I really want to take - and that's not supposed to happen in these new trees.
Now I can finally have Living Bomb, hooray!
My options outside of the Fire tree are actually a little complex. Do I focus, for instance, in the Arcane tree, picking up Arcane Concentration for Clearcasting, Netherwind Presence for haste, and Arcane Potency for improved crits after Clearcasting procs? In this instance, I still have to decide between Frost's mana-reduction from Frost Channeling and increased crit chance from Piercing Ice. Or do I skip Arcane Potency and instead fill out both of the Frost options, leaving Arcane Concentration at 2 points?
Obviously final decisions won't be made until I'm level 85, and no-one knows what the trees will look like now. My final conclusion on the talents as they stand, however, is that Fire still has a few places where I'm required to choose talents I don't care about at all, and ironically the interesting choices lie in what I'll choose from the other trees. Hopefully Blizzard is still tweaking Fire, and I'll feel more positively about it in the future.
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