Pintofbrew: I know, I kinda like complaining though :P I just don't like that our utility comes with a 30% DPS loss.

It really seems like Blizz is trying to level the playing field through nerfs. The LT change is a big nerf for destro, especially shadow since it's less efficient. The damage gap between spriests/afflic locks and other casters is being lowered by the haste changes while forcing mages (to some extent) and especially locks to gem for hit rating.

hypetech: It helps dps, but very, very poorly. With the change to Evocate, Blizz should have reitemized mage gear with better stats. Especially since they seem so intent on making Arcane nonviable for raiding, they are really the only spec that benefits from spirit in any way.

Technically, there is very little merit for *any* mages in the raid, perhaps bar one for food, water and portals, and sheep for trash (though if you dont care about DPS, then you can always stick a warlock to succubus on trash)

Best possible situation would be to have one mage provide all these things just before the boss, and then kick him out for a shadow destro warlock for the bosses.
Mages take up a curse slot, and provide inferior dps, aswell as scaling worse than warlocks, and having less hp, aswell as eating SP slots

The reason why there are mages in raids, is because
a) not everyone except knows this
b) raid leaders don't like to alienate a whole class
c) its hard to get 8 well skilled people of one class, as opposed to 8 from 2 classes to choose from

Related to c), very few guilds have damage meters that actually look like what they're "supposed" to look like (for example we have an elemental shaman who will frequently out-DPS all the other casters on any encounter without significant pushback).

A lot of trash would also be an awful lot more painful without mages (and extra time spent on trash means less time available for bosses). And mages can do some things warlocks can't do (spellsteal, decurse, and root things, notably).

There is a way to min-max for any given encounter - for Teron you could run one warlock, one survival hunter, 5 healers, a feral tank, 4 enhance shammies, 4 DPS warriors (one arms, three fury), and 9 rogues. It would be a terrible lineup for Naj'entus or Bloodboil of course, but it would make Teron die really fast...

Well, that's arguably true, but I don't see how the warlock changes affect that. Either you lose your spriest entirely to the locks, or you retain the spriest who now does 20% less damage due to lack of CoS and ISB since all the warlocks went fire.

There was a great list somewhere in this thread about the tradeoffs for your class between dps and regen (ie swap Destro Pots > Mana pots first, then Flame Cap > Mana Gems). If memory serves, evocation was at the middle of this list, and evocation now provides similar mana returns to lifetapping without endangering the caster.

Yeah, I had that list made. Should have asked for a link in the first post. (Page 72 of this thread)

Mage Armour is estimated with the 2.4 changes (very gear dependant), Elemental Precision is much more valuable now with little hit on gear.

Evocation is pretty much on par with untalented Life Tap now for efficiency, 9k mana over 10s vs. 1.4k mana over 1.5s.
Both get the same benefit from haste.
Life Tap has the health cost and may lead to gib-danger in high random damage scenarios.
Evocation can be interrupted, can't be cast on the run, and has a cooldown.

It all depends on the situation really.

Life Tap on Council can be tricky. Evocation on Teron followed by random nuke spam will net you a whole 1.8k mana, AFK for a drink while waiting to get mana back.
I'm very tempted to make an IV+Evocation macro against those annoying interrupts. Will definately use that when tanking Council.


With pots/gems/Evo, mages will last for 4-5 minutes of straight nuking.

MoE scales with crit, which has a pretty low DPS/itembudget return. I've gained maybe 5% crit from starting gear until now, and will lose some crit again in Sunwell I think.
It's 9% mana reduction at 30% crit (greens/blues), 13% at 44% crit (geared and buffed).
Honestly, I couldn't care less if they made a flat reduction. (The fire AoE cost would suck though, but that's not out topic).

I'd probably prefer that since getting a streak of bad luck means that you do low damage and don't get mana back.



Life Tap scaling has changed a lot. But that doesn't mean that the sky has fallen. Or that changed cannot be adjusted.
If the coefficient changed from 15% to 17% mana, Life Tap shouldn't be too different from it's current with the 20% haste you can't avoid from Sunwell gear.

[Edit]: With "scaling coefficient" i meant the percentage of max mana gained from life tap.


[Edit]:
Checking Leulier's warlock DPS spreadsheet with Sunwell gear, raid buffs, totem, Destruction Warlocks go from 2211 (2.3.2 mechanics) to 2243 (GCD change) to 2175 (GCD + Life Tap change). 2% loss from mechanics. Mages lose around 1% from removed cooldown stacking.

Just an update on Rawr.Mage. I added talent and mage armor comparisons, dps uptime, scorch maintaining, interrupt model and ABAMx3+Sc with AM on clearcasting as an example of dynamic cycle. Same download location.

Actually, thats a good point. Exactly how is this a nerf to warlocks at all?

Raid warlocks have more mana points than HP points, so now you get a *better* ratio of health to mana conversion than previously.
This is more likely, a pvp nerf, where warlocks will more likely have more hp than mana.

One really key thing about lifetap though is that it cant be interrupted and it can be cast whilst moving which is a huge boon. If a fight has *any* break time at all, or *any* times where you are not DPSing, then you can simply save yourself a lot of time by life tapping then, since your DPS would be zero at that time anyway.

Where are you getting 26%? It's 16%.

I believe you're wrong. You make a number of statements which are based on how you interpret events but I believe you aren't seeing the bigger picture. SP and Affli isn't being "nerfed" because of haste changes, simply a new mechanic is being introduced that hasn't been used ever before and it seems to be affecting certain specs more than others. In the same way that Armor Pen isn't a "nerf" for Enh Shaman because Rogues benefit more. Already haste has been modified to take into account instants so within less than 4 months of haste being introduced it affects your DPCT already. The fact that you gain less than a direct-cast class is not intended to nerf you, it's simply a side-effect of a new different mechanic. Just because both DOT and DD end up on the same damage meter doesn't make them identical in rights, abilities or mechanics.

Gemming for hit-rate? So what? What's the problem? By having lower hit-rate on items it gives people with high hit from talents the opportunity to not cap out. Frost mages in T6 were capped out without trying, even Fire mages were capped out with optimal gear. What's the difference between 10hit on an item and a slot which can be a 10hit gem? You see being "forced" to slot Hit as a bad thing but that's being petty. Even slotted to hit in most slots the 2.4 epics blow 2.3 content to bits for the most part.

The change to evocate was a much needed modification in terms of consistency and pvp. I won't advocate pvp changes affecting pve but doesn't anyone else think swapping spi weapons a little bloody stupid? It's clearly not an intended mechanic and not atall smart. The change was well made and I'm happy for it. Everyone seems obsessed with removing spirit from mage gear, choosing the easy way out. Well no, thanks. If you remove spirit from gear, that realistically leaves only priests and druids with any interest in the stat at all. Does anyone else see this as dumb? Think of it like this: The game will have 5 base stats of which one applies only to 2 of 9 classes, and even then only to half their specs. Kinda odd, isn't it? I want to keep spirit and I want it reworked into something useful and beneficial. I don't want all cloth to be stamped from the same mould and have to compete for it with everyone. I'd like to see both Mages and SP gain from spirit gear, even if it's a spec-specific gain and I want to see the damn stat made useful.

This ties into the main reason I answered your post. You claim "intent on making Arcane nonviable for raiding". You have no evidence for this. When BC-arcane was conceived it was totally impossible to tell if it was raid-viable or not and to all intents and purposes it was perfectly fine. Since then, it has received no nerf (unless you're particularly picky and point to the Evo change, but again, this was not an arcane nerf but a non-intended-use fix). Everyone thinks 2.3 was an arcane nerf, you're totally wrong. What 2.3 was, was a fix for a badly-implemented bug introduced with 2.2. In 2.2 AM was made to proc-per-pulse and so created the MSD-TLC-ATOI-AM combo we all tried, which was blatantly item abuse. Someone ran numbers back then and discovered that without MSD, in order to reach MSD values you needed an additional 350 spellpower. Does it seem logical that one gem is worth so much? Of course not. If this had been discovered by during testing, clearly, it would have never made live but it wasn't and we had a month or two of merry machine-gun. 2.3 was not an arcane nerf, it was (like Evo) a change to make the game more consistent and "correct". There has never been any evidence that Blizzard wants to make Arcane "non-raid viable". On the contrary, I see exactly the opposite: T5 in itemization and boni is totaly arcane-geared, the spirit change affects pretty much only arcane, the change to Arcane Meditation in 2.3 affects only Arcane, the haste->GCD affects arcane more than fire and the increase to the AE Damage cap affects Arcane the most. If anything I'd say Blizz is trying to make Arcane the "Big Spender, Big DPS, AoE king" spec.

While I'm in general agreement with you about spirit, if what we're getting in 2.4 is the "major overhaul" that we were promised, then it should be fairly clear that spirit is never going to be made into a truly desirable DPS stat, and as such, I'd like to see it removed from my gear. With the exception of Enh Shaman T6 pieces, no other class has such a large portion of their item budget spent on a stat that would be generously described as mediocre. As I said, I agree that the whole stat is a bit silly as is right now, but I'm not going to hold out on a blind hope that it's going to made any less useless in the foreseeable future.

I am getting 26% from the information posted on WoR in their latest undocumented changes, however I have heard reports that it does not seem to be giving what's listed, so now I'm not sure if that's a bug or if they incorrectly wrote the tooltip. I guess 3 things could happen:

1) 26% hp to 26% mana
2) 26% hp to 16% mana
3) 16% hp to 16% mana

It seems that number 2 is occuring atm, which would be a nerf for warlocks that have under 11250 (since most report ~1800 mana per tap live right now). At least in a raid setting, at 16% I believe most warlocks will be close to this number as to not hurt them too much.

Pintofbrew:

I said Blizz lowered the damage gap - they did. The changes to haste increased the damage of DoT's (or rather, allowed more filler via Flay/Sbolt), and the lower hit rating on Sunwell gear means that mages and locks need to save a few gems for hit while spriests can continue to ignore it (though those few afflic locks still out there are kinda screwed). The gap has been lowered.

I can understand your points about spirit. I want to see it made viable, but as it stands, it's not, and pretty much wasted. Though, to be fair, weapon-swapping for Innervate still exists, as does using things like the T5 priest trinket to grossly inflate its effect.

As for Arcane... I guess I can see both sides. They haven't nerfed it directly, but during the item fix they also didn't do anything to keep it viable compared to Fire at T6 levels. (And as a side note, was AM actually changed, or just the items? I was under the impression AM was always proc-per-pulse, but the MSD bug was not only inflated in value but in turn inflated the value of other items).

For Life Tap, what I've heard is that 26% is a display error. It's 16% health to 16% mana, which is a fairly major nerf and makes it more likely that firelocks start popping up since it's more mana-efficient.

Arcane Missiles was changed in 2.2 to be a pulse as opposed to 1 single channeling affect so that you could not continue shooting people when they run out of range or out of LOS, and in turn created it's ability to stack with so many proccing items that didn't have cooldowns.



16% life tap is not as big a nerf as you think. Most raiding warlocks are easily at 10k+ mana pools, and 16% of 10k is 1600 mana. Most warlocks are saying they get 1800 mana per tap right now, so in 2.4 any warlock with 11250 buffed mana will being seeing the same life taps, they will just take more health, which won't be a huge deal. I don't really think warlocks will be hurting from this change as much as people are making it out to be.

--Talking to the locks in my guild, they don't plan on respecing fire unless it actually does more dmg than shadow will, including any affects it may have on the dps of shadow priests.

We were most certainly not promised a "major overhaul" and it has been said before that there will be no serious revision before WOTLC. With changes pending I see your claim at making spirit void until it's fixed unreasonable. What are you asking for? Remove spirit now because it's not needed, but three months down the line randomly insert it again because the stat gets an overhaul? I agree that we're wasting budget but there is simply no feasible solution to mitigate that issue until spirit is patched up. If this was 5 months ago, yes, I'd campaign for spirit to be removed, but it ain't and I find it unreasonable now given (a) this is not a patch which is designed to overhaul gear (b) there is an expansion soon which will overhaul spirit.
Weapon swapping for innervate is still an issue and is still idiotic, however having 10% of the WoW population regularly rely on a mechanic which will either return 2k mana or 15k mana depending on if you quickswap two Spi weapons is a lot sillier than having innervate, which is almost exclusively used on other classes, suffer the same problem. The priest trinket to inflate the effect is a perfectly normal use of the trinket. That and switching on OO5SR time are very logical uses of it and nowhere near as gimicky as a Whacking Stick of Spirit with lvl 60 spirit enchant on and a Channelers Wand of Spirit.

You're still interpreting a fix of broken item mechanics as an arcane fix. Arcane has never been nerfed in the entirety of BC. Not Once. Arcane only received one buff in that AM procced "on hit" effects 6 times instead of once and another buff in Arc Med regenning 30% passively instead of 15%. The freak 2.2 AM spam was unintended and a clear missuse of bad mechanics. Do you see it logical that after the items are corrected to work in a fashion that is accepted the rest of the spec is then subsequently buffed to correct the difference?

There's a very simple fix for all this spirit on items problems. Blizzard should add more tier sets for different mage schools. Let there be spirit on arcane sets and not on frost and fire.

Agreed, the people here claiming spirit is ok are saying that relative to arcane specs. I'm deep fire now and since I generally do get CoE, I won't be changing to arcane in 2.4. I always use Molten Armor and my time outside FSR is probably never more than 10%, if not near 0%. As such, the spirit on my gear is a complete waste right now, and I'd much rather see it either removed outright or at least lowered in favor of more stamina and intellect. Mages have been the lowest hp class for all of BC, generally by a wide margin, and I don't think swapping from spirit for more stamina is unreasonable to ask for.

16% of about 11k raid-buffed mana vs. a 580 + (0.8 * 1687 raid-buffed shadow damage) for me. 1760 in 2.4 vs. 1930 before 2.4.

You may see more fire warlocks than you think. I would normally have about 33% to crit in a raid. 3 Warlocks using shadowbolt at that crit rate can get about a 65% ISB uptime. A single Destruction Warlock at that crit rate can keep up 50% ISB up time. An Affliction Warlock can still manage 30%.

For raid DPS purposes, it will make sense for a 3 Warlock raid to have one Warlock that uses Shadowbolt while the others use Incinerate. The ISB returns on the first Warlock are a lot higher than the others. The one SB-using Warlock still has some fluff talents like Nether Protection and Soul Leech to drop for Emberstorm should a situation arise where his ISB debuff isn't worth the loss of personal DPS. A 2 Warlock raid should probably be 2 Incinerate users with CoE and CoR up though, assuming both are Destruction.

What this amounts to is CoE gains some value and it's less likely than you think for the malediction Warlock to use CoE. If raiding Warlocks adapt to these changes and you keep one Shadowbolt-using Warlock, Shadow Priests don't see a significant loss of damage compared to what the Incinerate-using Warlocks and Fire Mages gain.

I wouldn't mind if Mages decided to go complain about Emberstorm and say 10% haste is stupid and you want a fire version of ISB though.

It certainly isn't necessary to have school-specific damage in order to differentiate arcane and frost/fire tier sets. An arcane set would want very high int, high spirit, low hit, low - middling crit and haste, and (very) high damage. The frost/fire tier would want medium int, no spirit, high hit, balanced haste and damage, and some reasonable amount of crit.

You'll notice that the priest damage tier uses generic +damage, despite being used almost exclusively by shadow priests and thus with one school of magic only. I don't think Blizzard will make the mistake of school-specific damage gear for anything other than ring/neck/other fluff slots again.

Given that the priest DPS set also has spell crit on it, I'm pretty sure Blizzard deliberately mis-itemizes gear. Mage gear doesn't have to be balanced against (read: be as good as) warlock gear. All that needs to be balanced is the damage output of mages and warlocks (such that they are roughly interchangeable in a raid, as it seems they are intended to be and as they generally are - though sometimes you want more of one and sometimes more of the other). Blizzard could make mages scale better than warlocks and then give mages access to only subpar gear to keep them roughly equal (though this would seem a strange way to go about it, but ultimately it wouldn't much matter).

Now, none of this is to say that mages and warlocks are balanced at the moment - but warlocks are getting their own round of tuning and we have no idea at present how things will settle out.

A fire version of ISB will seal the fate on all other non-fire specs, just like what destro locks are right now.

I have to agree with Pint on the spirit argument. Half the crowd wants it removed for better stat itemization and the other half needs it for AB spam. The problem is even if our only REAL option for spirit - Arcane Meditation- were moved to be a 3rd tier talent to be in line with Intensity/Meditation, its still not accessible to fire mages. It would have to be a 2nd tier talent, opening possibilities of an 8/42/11 build... then perhaps rework clearcasting? The arcane tree's viability seems to rise and fall with every slight whim of blizzard's talent / item tweaks. I think blizzard has an idea with what they want to do with the tree - High DPS at the cost of low DPM, but it would be nice to see some tenacity. I'm hoping the theorycraft and sunwell fight mechanics can support an AB/frosbolt build as you all outlined.

Can we please quit with the "I want spirit off my T6" arguments? The vast majority of us are not arcane and are suffering because of it, we all know it, we all would like it. It's absolutely adamantly clear that (a) there is no game-design logic behind removing a stat which is already used only by 3 classes from one of them (b) Spi is getting a substantial overhaul in WOTLC which is (c) just around the corner. Especially when it has been announced by blizz that (d) there will be no substantial class-changes until then, and certainly (e) no item overhauls. Particularly ones which directly affect the one spec which is receiving buffs and benefits so monumentally from it.

Can you immagine? Patch notes 2.4 "spirit now massively increases regen based on int-dependent formula, meaning high-int classes with spirit gain massively. Spirit removed from all mage gear." Does this seem logical to you? Games are not designed to cater for your specific preference, they're supposed to cater for the designer's conceptualization. "but nobody specs arcane" is a great argument, but it's not a valid reason to remove arcane or it's supporting gear, it's a reason to buff it correctly. It's being done in the now-familiar baby steps and maintaining spirit is one of the steps.

We know we'll change in 5 months time, we know spirit will change in 5 months time. It's kinda obvious that just because we like it Spi won't magically disappear from gear for a few months and reappear after that isn't it gentlemen?