AoE cap in 2.0.3, Mage bugs

Yeonora · 01/10/07, 7:53 PM

I was able to find this in the damage coefficients thread:

First, the base AOE penalty is now 1/2 instead of 1/3.

Second, if an AOE spell lasts for 8 secs in some way, it gets multiplied by 0.83 in addition to the 1/2 AOE penalty. No idea why, but this fits consecration, rain of fire, flamestrike's DoT part and blizzard. This might just be a bug, or it might represent another way to calculate the coefficients for which a cleaner formulation isn't clear yet.

And I was able to verify that the AoE penalty is now lowered to 50%. However, I noticed that the AoE cap was implemented in 2.0.3. Specifically, my arcane explosions were hitting for an average of ~650 while bombing the trashpacks next to Patchwerk according to SWS (but that was with AP and Hazzarah's Charm of Magic), while they were hitting for an average of ~180 while bombing after the decimate hit fighting Gluth (only with AP). Quite a noticeable difference.

Now the question is, is there a cap based on a fixed damage number per spell (e.g. 5000 for arcane explosion, 8000 for blastwave, ...) or based on a fixed number of targets it's supposed to hit (e.g. full damage against 10 targets, 50% of full damage against 20 targets)?

Could anybody test this already or found some reliable information? Or does anybody know how many zombies you're bombing in the Gluth encounter, so we can get a rough estimate?

One other bug I noticed is that arcane missiles seem to very often lose one missile. I then tested this in duells and it is independent of the rank of arcane missiles you are using. I got a rough 50% of casts that were missing one missile, giving me an effective 4.5 missiles per cast of arcane missiles rank 3-8. Nothing was hitting me, and I got 5/5 improved arcane missiles anyway. This basically reduces their dps and dpm by a staggering 10%. Quite sad.

Edit: Also while doing some test duels against a protection paladin, I noticed one of my fireballs hitting him for a measly 851 fire damage, none partially resisted (I double-checked the combat log). This fireball was casted with arcane power. All the other fireballs I hit him with hit for the normal ~1500 damage, the arcane power fireballs for ~2000 as they should. Why this one particular fireball hit for only 851, I have no f*cking clue.

Zoner · 01/10/07, 8:10 PM

Originally Posted by Yeonora

Could anybody test this already or found some reliable information? Or does anybody know how many zombies you're bombing in the Gluth encounter, so we can get a rough estimate?

Last I heard the damage cap for AOE is 10 times the base damage of the spell, any more and the max damage is spread out to however many targets you are hitting. I.E. 10 targets or less = full damage, 20 targets = half damage, 40 targets = 25% damage etc.

Yeonora · 01/10/07, 8:12 PM

Originally Posted by Zoner

Originally Posted by Yeonora

Could anybody test this already or found some reliable information? Or does anybody know how many zombies you're bombing in the Gluth encounter, so we can get a rough estimate?

Last I heard the damage cap for AOE is 10 times the base damage of the spell, any more and the max damage is spread out to however many targets you are hitting. I.E. 10 targets or less = full damage, 20 targets = half damage, 40 targets = 25% damage etc.

I remember reading that somewhere too, but I cannot find the source. Also, it was quite some time ago, maybe one month.

Edit: Also, is it 10 times the base damage of the spell as the trainer lists it, i.e. 243-263 damage for arcane explosion rank 6, or 10 times the base damage of the spell including all bonuses? In the first case, that would reduce the number of targets I can hit without penalty to only 5.

novasphere · 01/10/07, 8:28 PM

Edit: Also while doing some test duels against a protection paladin, I noticed one of my fireballs hitting him for a measly 851 fire damage, none partially resisted (I double-checked the combat log). This fireball was casted with arcane power. All the other fireballs I hit him with hit for the normal ~1500 damage, the arcane power fireballs for ~2000 as they should. Why this one particular fireball hit for only 851, I have no f*cking clue.

Was this particular Paladin specced into Ardent Defender? If his health dips below 20%, all damage recieved is reduced by 50%.

Yeonora · 01/10/07, 8:42 PM

Originally Posted by novasphere

Was this particular Paladin specced into Ardent Defender? If his health dips below 20%, all damage recieved is reduced by 50%.

Ah, entirely possible, that would explain it. I asked him as well if he had any clue why that fireball hit so low, and he was at a loss of explanation himself, so I'll just ask him when he's back online whether he got it specced or not.

RK · 01/10/07, 9:32 PM

Also, he could have been specc'd into Blessed Life (10% chance to take only half damage from an attack).

manks · 01/10/07, 9:34 PM

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/47160568.htm

Originally Posted by WoW forum poster

6) Early reports from beta are saying that AoE spells are doing less damage to large quantities of enemies. The perceived reason for the lower damage is an overall damage cap that the spell is capable of doing. Since this is counter to the primary purpose of AoE, AoEs are already the worst scaling and least mana efficient spells in the game, and AoE is the Mage's main strength, is this an intentional and permanent change? Or is it a side-effect of beta tweaking that will eventually work itself out? What is the intended role of AoE given this new paradigm?

Originally Posted by Kalgan

6. First, it's important to note that we've recently increased the spell damage coefficients on the affected AE spells (although this might not be in the version on the test realms yet). So, this change explicitly gave us the ability to improve those coefficients for the "normal" AE case, yet protect the spells against infinitely scaling against more and more opponents. Our desire is to tune the AE spells so that the damage doesn't cap out until you exceed about 10 targets, as our AE encounters are actually designed around an assumption of players AE'ing around 10 mobs. Any more than that, we consider unintended and/or exploitive. So, we're probably going to be bumping up the damage caps a bit to account for the now stronger effects of +damage gear and our desire for players to be able to AE around 10 targets without really feeling the effect of the damage caps.

Yeonora · 01/10/07, 10:01 PM

Now the question is, what exactly did Kalgan mean by *around* 10 targets, and is this really the way it is implemented now, considering this post is almost 2 months old?

Edit: I did some testing in the stockades (me 2/44/3 at the moment), together with a bwl-equipped arcane mage, and it seems that the damage you can do is hard-capped, independent on spelldmg or talents. The numbers we came up with are (we got almost exactly the same numbers):

Rank 6 Arcane Explosion:
4012

Rank 5 Blastwave:
6945

Rank 2 Dragon's Breath:
6470

Rank 5 Cone of Cold:
5130

Rank 6 Flamestrike (DoT component seems uncapped):
5940

Blizzard seems uncapped (tested it against 17 enemies, the other spells cap at around 8.5-10 enemies).

If you hit 16 enemies and one resists instead of hitting 17 enemies, the damage you do is the same, the damage you do per enemy is higher.

Another edit: Even with Arcane Power you can't do more damage than this cap with the given spell (except by critting, as usual). So even Arcane Power is only useful for reaching the damage cap with fewer enemies now.

paopao · 01/11/07, 5:24 AM

:( this is sad...
They changing mages in almost every patch.
Btw did u see one more bug from first 2.0 patch...
example...
I log-on in WoW checked my mail and waiting 20 sec to get a loot from mailbox.. but ok server lag from 2.0 patch...
and go in duel place at Gates of IF, when i go there some hunter invited me in duel, we start duel etc.. i lost but that`s not important now i lost so fast that i didn`t cast anything than i check log file and there is something very strange.. he hit me 3124 damage with aimed shot arcane etc but = 3124 damage... but before we start duel i was 100% (4232) hp and 100% mana full and i checked WTF how i can be dead with 3124 damage?
btw i play a lot of PvP and that things happend to me in PvP every day 1-2 times.. i was dead in 1-2 sec by some noob geared mage or hunter...

btw.. i was Grand Marshal and play wow 170 days many many days in PvP so this was never happening to me before this patch 2.0...

What will be f*cked in next patch?

Maledict · 01/11/07, 5:27 AM

It's curious that they consider AE'ing 10 or more mobs either an exploit or unintended, given the presence of 10+ AE mob encounters in every single raid dungeon released. Hopefully, unlike the fear ward note, they will actually follow through on this and not make any more huge AE fights in the newer raid dungeons.

Teenee · 01/11/07, 6:10 AM

I can't recall the last time I AoE'ed more then 10 mobs outside of a raid instance. Maybe doing a suicide run in AV could have hit more, but even then I'm doubtful. And the word is that all future AoE fights are being made with this cap in mind (since this AoE cap presumably affects more then just the mage class).

Hard capped limit is what I've heard from the beta as well (I'm not in the beta, but have read the boards some).

If they buffed the coefficients for AoE spells, then I'm all for a hard cap (though it's very flawed if the cap isn't scaling, or at least brought up for revision).

Greybone · 01/11/07, 6:15 AM

Originally Posted by paopao

:( this is sad...
They changing mages in almost every patch.
Btw did u see one more bug from first 2.0 patch...

I'm not sure what you tried to communicate with this post, but whatever it was I'm sure it doesn't belong here.

seul · 01/11/07, 7:33 AM

Originally Posted by Yeonora

One other bug I noticed is that arcane missiles seem to very often lose one missile. I then tested this in duells and it is independent of the rank of arcane missiles you are using. I got a rough 50% of casts that were missing one missile, giving me an effective 4.5 missiles per cast of arcane missiles rank 3-8. Nothing was hitting me, and I got 5/5 improved arcane missiles anyway. This basically reduces their dps and dpm by a staggering 10%. Quite sad.

Make sure you check your combat log for the actual ticks, Arcane Missiles have shown this behavior for me in the past, but it seemed to
be only a graphical glitch that occurs when you're spinning around your camera while channeling AM. All the ticks will actually hit the target
and cause the correct amount of damage, but their animation will sometimes appear delayed or not at all.

Ignite is still bugged as well, consecutive crits will cost you the Ignite ticks from early crits, hence you'll loose damage if you crit in rapid
succession. The ever-so-popular Fireball/Fireblast combo in conjunction with Combustion is broken due to that bug.

Yeonora · 01/11/07, 8:23 AM

Originally Posted by seul

Make sure you check your combat log for the actual ticks, Arcane Missiles have shown this behavior for me in the past, but it seemed to
be only a graphical glitch that occurs when you're spinning around your camera while channeling AM. All the ticks will actually hit the target
and cause the correct amount of damage, but their animation will sometimes appear delayed or not at all.

I was just standing still (not spinning around the camera), channelling arcane missiles while counting the number of missile sounds and watching the numbers appear in the combat log, while the Paladin was healing himself through the damage. Yes, those missiles really were lost. And I suspected as much, because that day in Naxxramas I was really bad, not leading damage in SWStats by a huge margin like usual. After done with the testing, I immediately respecced to fire :-/

Liandra · 01/11/07, 8:57 AM

Originally Posted by Teenee

I can't recall the last time I AoE'ed more then 10 mobs outside of a raid instance. Maybe doing a suicide run in AV could have hit more, but even then I'm doubtful. And the word is that all future AoE fights are being made with this cap in mind (since this AoE cap presumably affects more then just the mage class).

I guess Blizzard doesn't want any more "look I killed 93 level 59-60 Undeads in the Undead invasion when Naxx was released" like good ol' Faxmonkey managed to do :)

It's understandable that Blizzard wants to prevent that. And while there are now certainly encounters in the 40-player raid instances that allow or even require us to hit more than 10 targets (Suppression Room, corridor before Fankriss, to name two), remember that you can expect similar encounters to have 5/8th of the amount of targets in 25-player raid instances. From my experience with the two examples I gave, that 5/8 factor would indeed bring the amount of mobs I was usually hitting to somewhere around 10 (probably above 10, but not very much).

All in all I'm not too worried about this change yet - but this might change once I see more about the level 70 raid content.