I updated my spreadsheet...

The A spells are 20 or less points in Arcane, 40+ in their respective school.
The B spells are 40 Arcane, 21 in the other school.
Fireball C is 31 Arcane, 30 Fire.

I'm not including rolling ignites, Arcane Power, or Molten Fury.


Damage, int, crit%, and hit% are from gear. Delay is casting delay from chaincasting. DPM/MPS is including JoW procs, which is why Scorch is so high.
DPS w/hit% calculates it at +3 levels. I'm not capping it at 99% because I don't know how. :(
I'm using the AQ40 versions of AM, Fireball, and Frostbolt. Described version of Arcane Blast, current level 60 Scorch.

My spreadsheet is at http://www.ainur-guild.org/spreadshe...esheetinit.xls please tell me if you spot any errors.

Doesn't evocate last 8 seconds? If so, the obvious thing to do in a raid setting is cast invis and channel evocate. Aggro and mana reset ftw.

Well, the issue with both spells is if you get hit somehow or try to cast something harmful you lose the buff/effect (and it still sets off the long cooldown).

It does add more strat to the class though, since you can try to hide from AEs or use ice block to make sure Invis works.

Hunter Protip: ITEM RACK.

Done.

Well, this seems to confirm that there is something useful for Invisibility to do, even if its not at all what I would have wanted from it. It also seems to explain the super-long cooldown. The other limitations are relatively self-explanatory. Meh, still not *stoked* about inviso... but a use is a use.

It also seems to confirm Falcon's post of:

http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/s...waterbolt.html

as a much more likely ability for the frost 41 point talent. Its nice to see that I really can spec 31 Arcane (or more) and 30 frost now (or less) and still be just as good a "frost" mage (assuming I con someone into speccing into the stacking debuff. I got some thing for frost...Yes, I've read all the posts about how much its going to suck in comparison to fire for dps... I dunno why, frost is just my thing.

Could you redo the math for the currently reported max rank of spells? Currently, scorch is 4 levels behind fireball but if the curreltly leaked info becomes reality it will be 4 levels ahead, significantly altering the balance of power between the spells.

Second, if you factor in empowered fireball into fireball you need to factor arcane instability into scorch, because if I went for a fire efficiency scorch build I would most likely pick up that talent.

really to me it begs the question of why you'd ever bring rogues or hunters along anymore, besides just having someone to hand the loot to :)

Which is exactly the basis for my complete and utter opposition to the idea.

Name one fight in current content where invisibility in the form described (8sec cast time feign death) would significantly improve mages.

Any fight where I can actually get in the top 5 DMs because of feign and feign alone. (Because guess who at least 2 of the other 4 people are?)

Is it not bad enough that they make us largely pointless on most fights as it is? That's the point. I have no real utility to back up any damage output I can muster. They've already marginalized feign to the point of stupidity in Naxx. :(

I'm not going to shit this thread up with this debate, let me just say that I hope to god they realize that they're going to have to do something pretty amazing with hunters or else we'll be relegated to needing tranq as our only excuse for a raid slot once again. That's infuriating.

None?
Seems like they are just moving aggro reduce from passive to active.
Doubt a 5 min aggro wipe will be more than the 20% passive aggro reduce we lose.
Neither a buff or a nerf imo.
Obviously it will be a nerf for some encountersand a buff for others, but overall I bet it wont change mages very much, except that we now need to stand for 8 sec and do nothing.
Not much different from evocation (which might be a instant cast spell in BC btw, if we can trust curse-gaming... but ye I know, we cant yet :D)


About bringing hunters and rogues. Hard to comment about hunters yet. But its fairly obvious that we will want to bring all classes in BC raids. Ofc, people might not like the reasons for why they are brought into the raids. But that will probably never change.


Back to mages, am I the only one who fears they will nerf/change ignite in BC?
40 debuffs... We might get an ignite debuff each.
Would be quite a nerf for fire mages. But at the same time, if ignite is not changed it might be too strong.
Hope Im wrong, I would hate to go frost again.

Well it all depends on the "instant" it says. If you're interruptable in those 8 seconds and you don't "fade" if you take damage, a new dot or a new debuff, then, basically, no fight.

If nothing interrupts it (ha, yeah right), it could be meh, useful. As Shadoubt said, useful in some, less useful in others. There aren't many fights (any?) where you are not taking some kinda damage/debuff/dot/something every few seconds anymore.

This was one of the louder "whines" of how we could get a non-overpowered invisibility back in one of the most recent go-rounds about the spell on the WoW boards. It sounds like the devs were like, ok, then we'll do that. Aggro wipe it is! Another large group of posters pointed out its not inviso if its just an agro wipe... but, who cares, right?

I've been so infuriated with the state of the Hunter class post-Naxx, that I've all but signed-in-blood my intent to reroll Blood Elf Paladin. Then I could justify low-tier DPS with oodles of utility.

Apologies for the sidetrack.

Praetorian's point is really that heavily threat-limited fights are a thing of the past, and most likely will remain so, as they just aren't fun.

That said, yes, Hunters need some help, but that help does not lie in going back to the poor game mechanics of intensive threat-control fights. Do keep in mind, though, that on any fight with any sort of interruptions or significant movement requires, Hunters do have a relative advantage. Is that enough? Well, that entirely depends on the form of fights in TBC.

Rogues do high enough damage that I do not see Mages threatening them any time soon. Fire Mages are all well and good, but Rogues still seem to generally outdamage them, especially when you normalize Ignite and don't commit the fallacy of claiming that the Ignite holder represents "mage dps".

Fire Mages also die much easier than Hunters, and Invisibility is not capable of saving you if you get adds on you. Some people will claim that survivability is irrelevant in raids, and that having 6k hp raid buffed in mail armor with a 30 second instant aggro wipe to save you is no justification for having even slightly lower raid dps, but I would disagree with that.

There's not much point in being a glass cannon in cloth with so few hp that hp becomes a major issue on some fights(hi2u Loatheb), and with a high risk of instadying when adds even breathe on you, unless you have some sort of dps advantage.

Should that dps advantage be so massive that you want to replace Hunters with Mages in raids? No... but it should be there. Same reason the Rogue advantage over Mages is there, because they risk themselves more by being in Melee. Hunters are a lower risk class that is capable of functioning at higher percentages of their dps under interrupt and movement stress, and unless you remove that, you can't really honestly claim equal dps.

IMO Hunters should be competitive with Frost Mages, but not Fire. They are generally not with either, atm, and that is a problem.

I hope threat limited fights wont come back, but its kinda hard to say that, just because there isnt much of it in Naxx.
Why give 2 classes new aggro wipe/reduce if they wouldnt make content where threat matters.


And good point about the 25 man raids and fire mages. Though I doubt you would want to bring a slow-specced mage. Guess we will see :)

Oh, another thing to add to the list of Mage nerfs.

Counterspell is on the global cooldown in TBC.

Wow that's horrible. =\

Been pretty patient with the BC changes, but at this point, any news relevant to mages lately has been bad news. The class is not going in the direction I'd like for BC -- there's still a lot of time to make changes, but I can't see much reason to play the current BC mage.

Ever since AR, there's been this weird "we know these talents suck and don't make sense, but we don't care" vibe. That's not a complaint about the overall class (which in current game is significantly too strong in PvE, and about right/too-good PvP), but just that class dynamic becomes increasingly frustrating as large portions of the existing and BC talent trees are deadweight.

I'd like to see a move away from huge damage dealing into more elusiveness (and not just melee) in PvP, which the original Spellsteal (the dispel dmg stacking version), Slow, the Water Elemental, and talents like Blazing Speed pointed towards. Whereas the current BC direction seems mostly a 3-hit things with new ranks of fire spells, or AP icelance shatter spam.

One of the main benefits to being a mage, and one of the reasons that so many mages whine rather than reroll is that mages fundamentally are fun to play in wow. Not ever having to sit in roots or be stunned for extended periods of time plus a decent arsenal of instacasts makes mages feel "faster-paced" than most the other classes. I'm hoping the BC changes can embrace this aspect of the class instead of the sheep-fireball-pom pyro side.

No, they do not.

I can't provide a link because Curse is incompetent and doesn't provide proper data for the spells in their db, but, this is taken from the Alpha dbcs. Anyone who knows how to parse them can verify it.

I do agree with you there really is no use for this spell except to be oh hey cool for 20 seconds only warlocks and other pve invis seeing things can see me. It should be an instant cast, aggro dump invist for 1 minute on a 3 minute cooldown. That way we can have cool encounters having to use invisibility mages. Hell have invisibility last 5 minutes or something but make it so you can see all the targets but you cannt attack from invisibility and when you come out you cannot attack for 4 seconds.

That seems pretty fair and it makes it actually useful in some cases and hopefully some instances where a invisiblity is needed.

Er, the webpage was changed to show "Lasts 20 secs" for Invisibility some time ago.

Not worth it at all to even use the spell. 8 Seconds for it to become active and then only last for 20 seconds and then to add hurt a 5 minute cooldown. Not to mention breaks if you become hostile to anything. Name one good use for that spell at all.

get aggro, invis + ice block. ice block's not hostile.

Yeah, I know it depends on a 21pt talent. Yeah, I know it'll prob get nerfed even if it does work.

But hey, it's one good use :P