tenarius

Talented Amplify Magic now provides a substantial boost to healing, but obviously it can increase magic damage taken by a tank as well. I'm curious what the verdict is from various raid leaders on where it's worth using and where it should be avoided. Some fights are worthwhile, others are a little more up in the air. Where do you use Amp Magic?

 

Sicks

Fights without heavy magic damage on the tank...

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Kasi

One could argue that even heavy magic dmg isn't an issue. If you're getting hit for 3000 magic dmg every 3 seconds lets say, getting a bit over a 100 more magic dmg isn't going to be a huge deal. Certainly not enough to drop the +225 or so healing you get. 3120 to 3000 isn't much of an issue. Where you wouldn't want to do it is in fights where you're taking lots of continuous magic dmg at low intervals. I'm not sure there are many of them, since I've not raided as far into endgame as many here. Lets say an encounter where you're getting hit by 2 sources of magic dmg every tick for about 150 dmg each. Using amp magic would be very bad there. In the first case above using it would add like 5ish percent more dmg from the magic attack, so it's not bad. In the second case, amp magic would nearly double the dmg you take. Very bad.

I'm not sure if Vael's aura counts as magic dmg, but if it is and the hits are constant enough, that would seem to be a bad place for it. Perhaps Huhuran's poison volly in the last 30% would be a place to not have it on?

 

tenarius

Obviously. But that's fairly ambiguous - where do you draw the line? My guess is raid leaders differ in what they consider dangerous to boost with amp magic, thus the reason for this thread. I'm not asking for what SORT of fight, I'm asking which specific bosses you do or don't Amp tanks on. Some are obvious, others much less cut-and-dried.

 

tenarius

Kasi's post is much more what I was looking for =p What about Broodlord's Blast Wave? Sufficient reason not to have Amp on? Spike damage kills tanks, but spike healing stops them from dying, etc. It's a dilemma that I am interested in hearing peoples' thoughts on.

 

arch

As already been mentioned, it's a given at any fight without magic damage and if I were the raidleader I´d use it on fights with occasional magic damage aswell. I doubt there's any fight where the extra damage could be that dangerous, let alone exceed the massive healing you gain.

 

Chiquihuite

In my experience, raid leaders tend to be very gunshy about things like that. After a wipe, the MT likes to look at his log and find out what killed him. When he sees that that time he just HAPPENED to die because Amplify added just enough to kill him, Amplify is immediately banned forever. They just don't like to take risks. The problem is, of course, that you can't as plainly see when Amplify saves your ass, so the net benefit of using it is overlooked. The same is true for Recklessness in many cases. Sure, it's a bit of extra damage, but it also shortens the fight by a noticeable amount, reducing the chance of death to spike damage by at least as much as it adds.

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Kytrarewn

Anything that casts Shadow Flame would also, probably, be a poor choice for Magic damage. Also, anything that can cast Incinerate/Ignite Flesh, or Blast Wave. Probably anything that casts Conflagration as well.

In other words: BWL probably doesn't work well with Amplify Magic.

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Copernicus

Any fight with constant magic attacks, auras, or procs is bad.

I think that list is Golemagg, Firemaw, Chromaggus, Ragnaros (really bad with Sons of Flame), Nefarian phase 1 (maybe). Nefarian phase 2 is also probably a bad idea because of berserking shadow flames. Probably also not that great on Grand Widow Faerlina.

The real problem with it is the mana consumption and no group version of it, meaning it's only really good on a few tanks.

Occasional magic attacks like Shadowflame is fine, as the extra damage is countered by two flash heals.

 

dojke

Does anyone know how amplify/dampen actually works with npc casted spells?

We did some pvp tests with dampen a couple days ago and found out it really doesn't work the way you'd think -- or it does if you think of it like another focus effect. The +heal on amplify definitely scales based on casting time (much like bolight.. in response to the mass spam folr2 tactic), and the -dmg on dampen spreads the dmg across dot ticks (ie it removes a whopping -7 dmg per serpent sting tick or something).

Which of course immediately begs the question, how does amplify work exactly on npc casted dots (and ae's in generall... does it get scaled down based on casting time when most npc spells are instant?) , and does dampen work the same way on npc dots that it does on pc dots?

It kind of matters a lot, because no one cares about +135dmg over 8 seconds from acid spit, but we sure do care about +135dmg every second for 8 seconds.

 

Chomp

Why not use both? It depends on how much attention youre willing to focus on it and if its a fight where mages would be aggro-limited and thus have the mana to blow on it or not, but you could amp the tank and have him click it off when shadowflame begins to cast for a boss like ebon, properly tranqd flamegor, and nef. If there was mana to spare, mage could even cast dampen to remove the amp, and back to amp after shadowflame landed and the tank wouldnt have to do anything.

 

Copernicus

In my experience, Amplify/Dampen gives the full bonus to NPC spells. I haven't checked to see if it is spread out over the length of a DoT or not, but for auras or single hit spells, it's full bonus.

 

CrazyGamer

We used to basically never use it since burst damage tends to be a far greater threat than healing endurance in AQ40.

Naxx provides some obvious opportunities to make good use of it early on, such as Razu where it can help a lot on both adds and addtanks.

Grand Widow is a fight where you you see a frequent spam of magic AoE attacks but since it's also quite a healing intensive encounter, amplify magic proved very useful for us there, which has really opened my eyes on how powerful this spell can be, even when the tradeoff is significant.

The buff limit makes the tradeoff even more significant though. As nice as it is to have amplify on the tank at Maexxna, it makes me rather concerned to see ~4 HOTs, abolish magic, PWS etc. along with a flask and all the ordinary buffs, knowing that FoT is the first buff to get kicked off if we pass the buff limit.

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Darkchani

theres really little fights where it isnt many many times better than not putting it
vael, firemaw, rag for example are fights where i use danpem magic on pretty much everyone since its mostly magical auras that do dmg
on like all the other fights its amplify magic, at least on the MT/OT... whats +150dmg to a shadow flame when the tanks get multiple heals per second ?

 

Incoherence

Well, given that the wording on Dampen is -healing and -damage against, one would then think it would work EXACTLY like damage/healing, which is to say that it's normalized to 3.5s cast time.

 

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dojke

Which is exactly not the question. The question is how exactly does it work on npc spells, which clearly can't be normalized like this (due to most spells being instant etc). It seems extremely hard to craft a reply to "when is using amplify useful" if we can't even answer "wtf does amplify actually do".

Example: if you (a warlock) casts rain of fire on someone with dampen, it reduces the rain of fire by a TOTAL of 90 dmg. Using similar logic with amplify, if a guy named Faerlina casts rain of fire on you, do you take an extra 135damage or an extra 540? If it's 135, then amplify is possibly uber, if it's 540, then it's most likely not (yeah ok non-retards don't sit in rof for 8 seconds, but you get the general idea).

Remember that it's scaled for casting time, so you're only going to get +110 heal or so on flash, not the full 225.

 

Copernicus

For spells cast by PCs on an Amplify/Dampen target, they get bonus modified by spell cast time and percentages etc.

For spells cast by NPCs, they get the full modifier ignoring casting time. I haven't been able to check the info regarding DoTs yet. There's also a good chance that certain AE spells from bosses also ignore the effects of Dampen/Amplify, I remember trying it once on Twin Emps and not noticing any difference on Blizzard. It's one of the more difficult buffs to use because if it's a fight where it is bad to use, it will cause a wipe. I remember doing that on Golemagg about a year ago, when I first started using it.

But like I said - VERY bad on any fights with Auras or frequent single-target magic attacks. On something like Ebonroc, Flamegore, or Anub, it's pretty reasonable. It is also clearly a requirement for a fight like Patchwerk.

 

Soul

The problem is that Amp. and Dampen don't work consistently. So you end up having to try it out. For example, Buru in AQ20 has a stacking nature DoT that he triggers in the last part of the fight. It stacks in small increments of 45 so, in theory, you can negate much of it with Dampen Magic. But guess what? Dampen and Amplify Magic have no effect on the DoT at all, so you're better off putting Amplify Magic on everybody for that fight. Ayamiss, OTOH, has a a targetted stacking nature DoT that is affected by both. So Dampening the ranged tanks goes a long way since you negate up to 90 (or 135) dps of DoT damage with Dampen.

 

Cloudgatherer

Sartura and Fenkriss are two no-brainer fights to use Amp Magic on.

 

Incoherence

Well, I'm responding to a post that talks about PvP tests. We know exactly how +damage/healing works in PvP, since players are doing the casting, and anyone who's not familiar with +damage/healing mechanics by this point in the game is already in trouble. But the post implied that this was a new and interesting mechanic. I'm not sure how this relates at all to what you actually wanted, and which others have provided some data points on, which is how +damage/healing works on NPCs.