ye i think its possible we will scale better than other classes, its not certain though, other classes are going to scale as well and the gap is a big un - will we scale 10-20% more than other dps classes doing well at mo, seems like a lot.

Fire mages right now to me feel a bit underwhelming. I think that with gear we will gain a bit with the scaling but as the next tier content comes out and we get higher hit requirements and crit suppression i see this cycle starting back over again. We will be forced to reforge more important stats and regem to get to the new hit caps. Also lower crits as we all know equals less HS-Pyros, which translates to less DPS and less DPM. Less crits in general also means less ignite which devalues how much our mastery affects our dps and also affects our DPM again cuz of MOE. Granted our mana pools will be larger to help counter act some of this via more from Evo / Replenish. It would be nice though if they made Evo more reliable of a cooldown so that we don't get screwed when life threataning abilities target us or spawn underneath our feet and we have to move.

Even though we can't hard oom with free scorches I still feel we are too mana ineffecient as a dps caster class. If i remember blizzard wanted to develop it so that a dps caster should be able to always sustain their dps via cooldowns to replenish mana. However after a certain point that in itself is the trade off. Once the fight goes on long enough our dps will gradually drop due to having to use mana management abilities more often rather than sustaining a optimal dps cycle. But right now if we have bad crit streaks and an evo gets interrupted your basically resorted to scorch spam the rest of the fight. Occasionaly throwing a few fireballs when you can gem and during a trinket proc or whatever. Being mana ineffecient also stems to not only fire but arcane in a big way. Arcane not only relies on it for boosts of dmg from its mastery but a full AB stack for a burn cycle depletes your mana too fast and isn't enough of a dps increase to keep dmg competitive during the mana effecient cycle's. For some of he longer fights frost has to swap to mage armor part way through to make it to the end of the fight as well. I mean in terms of how much a spell costs now to be equivalent to what we used to be able to cast with our mana pools in WotLK we would need like 160K mana. Which most of us are sitting anywhere from 75-95k raid buffed. Which again will probably be yet another thing that will hopefully be solved by gear scaling.

Some of the other thing's that are still finicky with fire are the crit dependencies which still plague the spec as always early on in gear progression. At end of WotLK it was an awesome fun spec because we finally had the mana, crit , to support an optimal dps cycle. However right now our Hit requirements are absorbing every bit of extra possible stats we can accumulate through reforging and gemming and enchanting. I think if they made hot streak a flat % chance to proc off of any spell hit from the current list of spells that can proc it would be one thing that would help out. Almost like missile barrage is flat 40% or the final tick of LB will gauranteed trigger one or something to kind of make it more stable on how many you get through out the course of the fight.

Also gimmicky talents like pyromaniac. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not. I mean are we balanced around the fact that if that is up we will be slightly ahead of other dps by being able to keep it up. Or is it supposed to be that if we do manage to get it up we are balanced for having the buff up. If it is the later i would rather not have this gimmicky situational talent and be balanced around not having it so that we are comparable w/o the talent.

There are some other small irritating things that I think would be nice as far as gearing up. Right now for healers there is an abundance of spirit on gear for their mana regen. This translates though to any type of a hybrid dps caster being able to get the hit cap very easily. However this doesn't stop them from rolling on gear that is just int/stam with Hit and one of the other stats on it. So even though their gear is useless to us the gear that is best for warlocks and mages still gets rolled on by them. And an even smaller quirk is the leg enchant that gives Int/Spirit is more beneficial dps enchant for them as well allowing them to get hit cap easier or reforge away extra hit on gear / regem for better stats.

Anyway enough of my gearing QQ rant. Overall i currently think we are a bit behind the curve and I am hoping that once we get geared up that we might start pulling our weight. But sitting around just waiting to be better while we finally get to a certain gear point is kinda frustrating. I think there is definately a few things that blizz could work on changing so there is more of a smooth transition from expansion to expansion on our DPS curve throughout it. That way we aren't completely sub par at the beginning and finally competitive at the end.

One question involving the switch to Succubus on Demonology build. With the loss of the Incinerate glyph, is Simcraft showing a change in priority between Molten Core Incinerate vs. Decimate Soul Fire? Under the old setup of Incinerate glyph and using Felguard, MC Incinerate worked out to just slightly higher DPS than Decimate Soul Fire during the execute phase so MC Incinerate was prioritized above Decimate Soul Fire. However the loss of the 5% damage increase on Incinerate due to using Succubus and LoP glyph, this might push Decimate Soul Fire to slightly higher DPS now than MC Incinerate thus prioritizing Decimate Soul Fire higher.

[Gurgthock's Garish Gorebat] (Sppwer Mace from the new ring of blood) did not have its dps values adjusted to be in-line with other caster weapons.


Main Hand Mace
405 - 755 Damage 1.6 Speed
(362.9 Damage Per Second)
172 Stamina
115 Intellect
62 Spirit
85 Critical Strike Rating
1532 Spell Power


Enjoy FT/FT

I just finished posting in the Fire thread they kind of had a thing going on what peoples concerns were with fire atm. Alot of it seemed to stem mainly from gear scaling being a big issue currently and hopefully that dps will pick up to be competitive once we get geared up.

My question is how do you think frost will fare down the road once we get geared up. I mean right now we are doing decent raid dps but we are still getting blown out of the water by quite a few other classes by quite a large margin. Do we think that gear scaling will help remedy some of this like it will for fire. Or will it be the opposite and we will only fall further behind.

This kind of got me thinking cuz we will still have some problems that will be similiar to what was wrong in WotLK. For instance crit once we reach the 33.3% soft cap will be quite devalued. Granted it will be better than it was in WotLK but it
will be much lower in value than most other classes/specs. The other thing that has me concerned is how well our Water Elemental pet will scale right now it seems to be about 10-15% of our dps but how will that fare once we get higher levels of mastery that don't affect our pets. The other thing is if we get enough of it there is also kind of a mini soft cap as well for Haste. Once you get down low enough to get 1 sec gcd since alot of our procs / casts will be instant this will devalue haste. I don't think this will so much be a problem during our normal cycles but most definately during cooldown stacking with icy veins / time warp + other misc raid buffs and procs. We won't scale as well during these times of extremely high haste. Also in the fact that a big portion of our dps atm comes from deep freeze usually for me it is either second or third on my dmg list. Haste will not affect how many of these we can get per fight since it no longer lowers the cd with haste. I was thinking that blizzard could do something so that if it does the deep freeze stun effect and doesn't do dmg that it will have the standard cd. However if it deals damage that the cd could then be affected by haste. This would make it so that it isn't too overly accessible for pvp but that it would scale for pve dps.

Also my last concern at the moment is for frosts AOE. I don't think this is something that will be fixed by gear at all. Right now I think someone at blizzard screwed up big time on what classes do how much aoe dmg and how they scale. I mean frost aoe used to be quite strong at the start of WotLK. Now it is completely laughable. Blizzard is completely useless from 2-6 targets. I can sustain equal amounts or even greater single target dps due to the bonus chill effects from PC proccing more FoF for better single target. And even at 6+ targets its barely better than my single target and completely underwhelming to just about every other classes aoe capabilities atm. I think that a huge step in the right direction would be to give blizzard a tiny snare of like 10 - 15% or something and lower the imp talent to give it the proper snaring effect of what talented blizzard gives right now. This will allow it to proc FoF and set it up so that it will be benefitted by Mastery. And secondly is CoC. To say it hits like a wet noodle is a bit of an overstatment. I am just in awe of how blizzard thinks that this abilities damage is noteworthy. We are killing questing mobs that have 75-100k HP. Elites have 250k++. Players almost all are over 100k. Right now with 5500 SP my CoC hits for 2400 and crits for 4800 with an 8 sec cd. Is it just me or would this ability not even be close to over powered if its damage was multiplied by 4. I mean I am looking over damage on recount and i see abilities like howling blast Criting for 30-35k and that is simply limited by runes which I believe would equate to less than an 8 sec cd. Not to mention the factor that CoC is harder to hit many targets with due to its Conal shape and range. I think the damage on this should be modified to a more appropriate level and that it should also some how be able to benefit from FoF.

Hi guys I had a question about a specific encounter in BWD and wanted to know your take on it. In the Maloriak fight (for those of you who have done it) when dps is called to take down the aberrations do you find that your dps is a bit low on the aberrations? The first attempt I only had about 300k dmg done to the aberrations and I was using divine storm/concencrate/holy wrath. Is it better to single target them down? Do you guys have any tips on getting on the adds quick enough and avoiding getting knocked back to far when Maloriak switchs to the green phase?

To be fair, this is only outperforming some of the 2.3 speed blue maces by about 100 dps according to my sim output. FT/FT is already leaps and bounds better than WF/FT in raiding situations, and weapon speed is the least of our concerns with it at the moment.

I don't know if these questions fall into the simple questions category... But here we go.
What is the Expertise cap suppose to be?
How much Crit and AP does Agility give?
Last and maybe the hardest one.
List these 3 stats from (1) being the most helpful to (3) Being the least. Critical Strike Rating, Haste, Mastery rating.

I am a Combat rogue if you needed to know that

Next timer I will be able to craft either:

Breeches of Mended Nightmares - Breeches of Mended Nightmares - Item - World of Warcraft

or

Flame-Ascended Pantaloons - Flame-Ascended Pantaloons - Item - World of Warcraft

I am going to play as an icemage and I am not sure which version I should prefer. I was going for Flame-Ascended Pantaloons but would like to know other opinions.

yesterday my succy was about 3000DPS

today it is lowered by about 1000dps

I also notice that Reesi is gemming completly for agility as well, which I wouldn't have expected to be the norm. I would have thought stam would be the #1 choice.