Stein

keep in mind that int/spirit are significantly more valuable in 2.4 (bringing the T5 gloves up to/past spellfire's level).

 

[DRF]Solmyr

This doesn't directly affect TC, but here:

MMO is reporting epic quality gems for 15 heroic badges. All TC should not assume access to epic level gems.

edit: removed picture, jic.

 

Lurker

Hi. Friendly neighborhood Lurker here. Got a Shaman to test this with me for 800 attacks. Shaman had 4% to crit on her sheet, and had zero gear on. 350 weapon skill with a level 2 club. 350 Defense on me with zero resilience. This one was done with Molten Armor on and attacks from behind to eliminate the odd dodge chance.

http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/4...ortest1rj7.jpg
Result? Not one crit on the Shaman's part.

This was just a quick confirm test of 200 attacks to make sure crit was working.

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/765...ortest2av2.jpg
Result? Crit working as intended. It'd begin to average out near 4% if we were to continue to oblivion, of course.

Finale: Molten Armor is reducing melee crit chance.

 

Kavan

Rawr.Mage is finally in a state where I feel comfortable using it to make some cross-spec comparisons. So far we've all come to conclusion that Arcane looks promising in 2.4, but how does it really play out after you take into account Sunwell gear.

First observation is that there is a ton of spell haste and spell hit on gear. This puts arcane at great disadvantage. You'll get at 200+ haste, 10%+ hit even if you try to avoid it. Even so it's not so bad as it might seem.

All arcane specs are very close together with 40/0/21 slightly in the lead. The AM variants depend very much on how many on hit effects are in play. Anyway the differences are in 1% range, so I'd say mostly a personal choice.

If we put all specs on the same playing field with both COS and COE then Fire has a large lead. At 300 mp5 sh priest regen fire/iv clocks at 2691 dps while arcane/frost is at 2584 dps. Deep frost seems to be on the losing end here at 2453 dps. If the arcane/frost had winter's chill up it would put it at 2651 dps, so still not enough to catch up. When COE is not up arcane gets in the lead. 2498 dps for arcane/frost compared to 2382 dps for fire/iv. Numbers are very similar at lower sh priest regen rates.

So the conclusion would be that depending on whether you have COE/COS or not either Fire or Arcane is a better choice. It would be interesting to see what the situation would be if there were equivalent gear that had spell hit converted into other stats. Unfortunately you can't get more dps talents if you remove spell hit talents. The only exception is 43/0/18, but there frost plays a very minor part.

 

◊ manly

Your numbers seems to match closely the ones I was expecting. Although, I believe you give less credit to arcane spec than is due. As you know, fight duration, and JOW will play a big role as far as arcane spec is concerned. And of course, it does win out on trash and aoe.

What I had came to conclude when I had done my TC was that basically it made arcane a real competing spec once again. It does give out exactly what I wanted the spec to be, which is 'its gonna win some fights, and its gonna lose some' because that is how all specs should be really. To me it felt like pre 2.4 arcane was really lackluster, and the int/spi changes really put things back in line.

I guess now all specs are arguably on equal footing as far as PVE goes. I think frost spec has the most to lose, given that WE does not scale as well from sunwell gear because the pet gets no benefits from spell haste (which comes at teh cost of crit in the case of sunwell gear, which the WE was scaling off of).

In any case, I think much of the arcane power will depends on whether or not they change the int/spi before 2.4 goes live, which is why I reserved my judgement until then.

kavan: have you tried with this gear config ? http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-m...tml#post660467

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Kavan

That setup gives me 2743 dps for fire. Using Sunflare/Heart of the Pit combo for Arcane/Frost gives 2624 dps.

I agree that I'm probably downplaying Arcane a bit. One thing that I don't consider for fire is the initial Scorch stack, which is about 10 dps loss longterm. Then of course there are a lot of other intangibles like threat and range and specific fight mechanics which will give either spec an advantage. Another interesting thing is that Arcane specs get relatively better on longer fights now because of extra regen. On a fight like Kael'Thas with lots of downtime Arcane gets a clear edge.

 

Icicles

All arcane needs now is an int/spirit gem cut for seaspray emerald

Edit: Although, without that cut, how should 2.4 Arcane optimize gems? 12 dmg in Red, 10 int in Yellow?, 10 spirit in Blue...problem I see with that is, the value of more int diminishes slightly in terms of regen, but what's a better alternative?

 

Andorian

Did your arcane setup include 3/5 of Arcane Focus and the rest in Magic Absorption? While it would be optimal to only have 6% from gear, magic absorption does add a little to DPS on some fights especially with 15-17k mana pools.

Edit: Grammar

 

Jarlyn

It's worth noting that if the changes to the warlocks' fire spells remain intact, fire will likely become the preferred spec for destro locks - making CoE and Imp Scorch important for both mages and warlocks. Speaking in terms of my guild, we usually raid with 2-3 mages and 2 destro locks, both of whom are at least considering going fire. This would make CoE the preferred curse over CoS (4-5 fire users vs 3 shadow), and as such we'd probably get maledicted CoE from our Affliction lock. More DPS for both classes makes a pretty compelling argument for 2/48/11, at least in my book.

 

◊ manly

I'll be honest with you. Current-level TC is a long way from being able to accurately model somethings thats even remotely close to a real encounter. Now try to give a qualitative value to Magic Absorption? I'm sorry, but before we even consider that we need tools that can at least give a semblance of an actual fight.

To be honest, I think those talents boil down to personal preference. They are not direct DPS-increasing talents, so I consider them pretty much on that level.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

◊ manly

But then again, I could definately understand your raid leader enforcing a 1-affliction lock minimum per raid solely for Shadow Embrace (-5% boss physical dmg). Just to drive the point home -- I know back when EJ was still learning new bosses in TBC, we would literally skip raids if we didn't have one affliction lock in the raid (although I have to mention we heavily bias towards quality of time over quantity). I think it is too soon to be able to gauge out whether firelocks are good, and where the shakedown is.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Duravi

The good news with a firelock would be we could always count on having CoE up heh. A question I have for you Manly, or really anyone with some experience on Sunwell bosses on PTR, is range a factor in any fights we have seen (or school resistance/immunites) up this point? I don't like to underestimate how much encounter design factors into speccing,

 

Selun

Don't know why underestimate Magic Absorption so much, if you get 8-9k mana back in 6-7minutes then that means it was worth it and is a dps increase because of the mana gain, and you do get alot of resists in the boss fights, I personally seen this because I do have +7resist on cloak, use magic armor, have imp. mark of the wild and the buff for a specific school (e.g. shadow protection). And I must say that resisting 3 carrion swarms at Anetheron was lucky, but 1 is normal. At Rage Winterchill again you'll be resisting at least 3 times be it a nova, bolt or decay. The bad part is that the shorter the fight is the less Magic Absorption effect is, but on fights like Al'ar, Vashj, Kael, Karathress it's doing a really good job on the mana regen part.


Anyway as Pintofbrew looked at the mechanics presented by a site for a specific spell being wrong, you can consider the same for Prismatic Cloak talent in regards to magic resistance. I "tested" this at the mobs in SSC/TK/MH with a warlock and the magic dmg received was differing by about 5-6dmg whereas the 4% reduction from a 3k hit should be 120 with an average +/- because not all hits are exactly the same. Did anyone bother to test this throughly and not just compare magic dmg taken on hit with someone else that doesn't have this kind of reduction?


If Prismatic Cloak has magic dmg reduction mechanic (not a flat % dmg modifier), then using this with Magic Absorption, Mage Armor, +7 resist enchant on cloak, buffs and the 2.4 Imp. Blink, you can effectively get to about 60% magic dmg avoidance/reduction for those 4sec after blink so basically forcing the Magic Absorption to get back alot of mana (given that you'll be arcane with these talents and have a huge mana pool and also blink costing only 313 mana). So you basically don't die from magic attacks and also get back more mana than you used but only in 60% of the cases, even more if you'll be having the +70 resistance to 1 school of magic.

 

Selun

In regards to locks going to fire and using CoE over CoS, wouldn't this move nerf their curses dps and also lower the mana regen from a shadow priest? Would that be a smart move to do for personal mana efficiency or having a shadow priest in group will balance the things out?
I guess a rule of thumb will be for locks to go shadow-destro if a spriest will be in group, if not go fire-destro.

 

Duravi

Probably the ideal scenerio would be for a raid with 4 locks, 2 destro/shadow, one destro/fire, and one aff/malediction. Even a fire mage will inirectly benefit from CoS because of the increased mana regen your SP will yield so we don't want a situation where it is CoE vs CoS, much better to have both, throw in another lock for recklessness and we have the bases covered.

 

Pintofbrew

I was under the impression the WE scaled off your Int, Sta and Frost spell power? Crit didn't figure into the story just like hit didn't.

Selun, let's assume a 15k mana pool, which is a slight bit on the enthusiastic side. Full Mag Abs (which is unlikely to be the case) will grant you 750mana per resist. That means the 8k mana you assume represents just under 11 full resists. I sincerely doubt that you'll resist that many of anything on the vast majority of fights. More likely to me it seems that you gain in the region of 2.1k from perhaps 3 resists of something nominal, like Azgalor's silence or RoS P1.

Granted, I disagree with Manly in that it -is- a DPS tool in the context that extra mana is more AB/filler ratio, but I agree on his oppinion that it's more preference than anything due to it being unreliable and uncontrolable. Were it to be changed to 0.5resist/level at max rank rather than a paltry 10 resist, I'd be flying a different banner but at 5 points for a negligible resistance increase and an uncontrolable situational effect with small pay-off, it is a totaly personal-preff choice.

Duravi: the 2.7% increase from Mal-CoS to the SP is negligible (your 300mp5 will go to 310mp5. Not particularly a selling point vis. the potentialDPS difference.). So is the point of mixing Shadow and Fire destro locks. Either one is superior or the other, there is no reasonable excuse (except ISB uptime) to mix the lock types.

The Affli lock for the majority of cases will be a given, for reasons beyond the scope of this thread. Given a raid with at least one Fire mage and at least one SP then the choice is rather clear:

Does [Mal-CoE * (Firemages + Firelocks)] + [CoS * (Affli + SP + Arcmages)]

Equal more than [Mal-CoS * (Affli + SP + Shadowlocks + Arcmages)] + [CoE*(Firemages)].

Easy as pie. Given you can integrate ISB uptime to the Shadow calculation side...

 

Goggles

This has come up before and I've always believed the opposite to you (reduces actual damage taken, rather than reduces number of hits you take) but have never put it to the test. Given I don't want to respec and don't have access to PTR I decided to take a look on WWS to see if I could find anything. I found this parse: Mages - WWS

It's a recent parse (March 2nd), shows Essence of Anger (WWS handles this fight badly but I'm only after Aura of Anger info which in this case seems to be displayed fine), has 2 mages taking the same number of hits from the aura. Deorman is Arcane and has Prismatic Cloak. Yoogo is Fire and has Playing With Fire. The damage range on Aura of Anger is minimal if anything and they are taking the exact same hits at the same time. If you take the view that Prismatic Cloak reduces actual damage taken by 4% then you'd expect to see a 7% difference in damage taken (+3 for Playing With Fire), if it relates to number of hits you'd expect to see 3%. In this case it's almost exactly 7% for both average and maximum hit. Personally I'd say that's pretty conclusive.

Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.

 

Pintofbrew

Goggles, I'm not sure how you infer Selun wants to indicate "prismatic cloak should reduce number of hits taken" but it doesn't matter because you correctly demonstrate it shouldn't.

As for testing for spells, it'll be a lot simpler to test using a holy priest and a Duel (and I say holy, because misery and/or shadow weaving applying/expiring will fudge results). Reset talents, get a SW:P to tick on you, spec into PWF, see if the SW:P goes up to 103%, spec PWF & Pris Cloak, see if it goes down to 99%, reset talents again, get only Pris Cloak, see if it goes to 96%.

You can do the same with a rogue using Kick as it's flat damage.

Bare in mind certain damage sources like Naj'entus bubble, Mala'kress' spirit-bolts or Al'ar's flame... thingummy are non-mitigateable. This means no modifier will prevent/alter them, including amp/damp magic. They are, of course, fully avoided from immunity effects like IB or Bubble. Except for Gruul's Shatter, for some utterly bizzare reason.

 

Goggles

Well Selun was suggesting that Prismatic Cloak was either not working or working in a different way than most of us expected and from what he'd said he seemed to suggest it might affect resists in some way (ie number of hits taken). I can't work out any other way of interpreting Selun's post.

I also say in my post I don't want to respec and don't have access to PTR at the moment so this was the quickest way I could think of to prove it.

Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.

 

Selun

Yes Pintofbrew, the 8k mana average will be gained in the long fights from SSC/TK whereas in MH is a whole different story with so short fights and MA will have a lower effect. The bad part still is the uncontrollable nature of this talent, because even if you know that the bosses magic abilities are mostly binary (thus 0% or 100% resist) you can't predict the timeframe the server is gonna choose to give you the "x% magic resistance = y resists" and sometimes you get hit 4 times and get 3 resists, other times get 4 hits and no resist.

Anyway MA should be a filler talent for AB with AM as filler for a heavier proccing gear and some haste, due to IV not bringing too much as you'll be already 1sec AB or almost there and FrB not being good as AM for proccing things like the new trinket, enchant, etc in 2.4.


In regards to Prismatic Cloak I think that it has the normal magic resistance mechanic (reducing magic dmg in increments of 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%) rather than just a flat % dmg taken modifier, but I didn't have time to test it, just compared my dmg taken with someone else, and in no circumstances I got lower dmg than him. For physical though it should be a flat % dmg modifier because that is how armor works against it.

Prismatic Cloak will reduce the number of hits taken (if it's working as magic resistance mechanic) only if the dmg taken is binary dmg (and from what I've seen the binary dmg is usually stuff that does more than 1.5k dmg), whereas for non-binary hits (Malakress's Spirit Bolt), Prismatic Cloak will make you just mitigate % dmg through partial resists. And so Playing with Fire will increase the magic dmg hits taken by x% against binary magic dmg or magic dmg taken by x% against non-binary magic dmg.

I don't know of any addons that keeps track of magic hits taken and how many partially resisted, fully resisted or full dmg and so is that WWS report. If you have MA yes you might track the full resists because it will trigger some mana back and will get registered, but not the partially resisted. I don't know how to test this except as Pintofbrew suggested to see how it is though I already mentioned that I don't have time for this except for when I'm in a raid or weekends .

As soon as I'll get home I'll post the report for yesterday (I have both MA and PC) and I think there was a fire mage that had PWF maybe that will make it more clear of what I meant.

 

maxi

Got a question about fireballx2->fireblast rotation.
With haste reducing GCDs in 2.4, will fireblasts once again be viable? Or is superior +dam scaling of fireballs still getting the better of them?
For theorycraft's purposes, screw mana efficiency for a bit :p

 

Sancus

Question: Assuming no CoE, is 40/0/21 still in the lead, or do AM-based Arcane variants pull ahead due to Frostbolt losing dps? I assume the answer to this depends on fight time(more frostbolts, less ABs on longer fights), so if you need fight durations - 3 minutes and 6 minutes will do respectively.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Kavan

In most cases 40/0/21 is in the lead. The variations are small enough that each gear change can make a difference. Situation where I've seen AM variants take lead are with no COE, with JoW and a bit longer fight.

 

Pintofbrew

Goggles, forgive the impasse, I thought you were missinterpreting when you weren't.

Selun, this concept of "binary" and "reduces number of X taken" is rather random and counter-intuitive.

Firstly, you're confusing Binary with "can't be mitigated in a way other than 100%". I assure you binary spells can be -reduced-. The only thing Binary spells can not be, is partially resisted.

A partial resist of any type is NOT the same as reducing it's damage. You may try this with a Warrior in Defensive and Berserker stance and see if your Frostbolt hits for a different number. You may also try this with any target and Amplify/Dampen magic. None of these effects have anything to do with Partial Resist and as such are not connected to being Binary.

Assuming a talent causes 4% dodge or 4% resist when it specifies "reduces damage taken by 4%" is inversely implying that other descriptors like Rogue's Heightened Senses (reduces chance you are hit by spells and ranged attacks by 4%) or Mage Arctic Winds (reduces chance melee and ranged attacks hit you by 5%) are somehow doing the same thing but wording exactly the correct effect, while Prismatic Cloak is wording it in a round-about and technically wrong way. Even PWF states "increases spell damage taken by 1%". I fail to see how you interpret Pris Cloak's "decreases all damage taken 4%" as "4%dodge and 4% resist", it simply makes no sense.

For completeness, please also note, that dodge doesn't work from behind or when you're sitting/stunned/disoriented.

 

Saphirox

Has there been any TC or PTR testing done on how the new talent Molten Shields will benefit us?
Im referring to these changes and more specifically the changes in bold.

* Improved Fire Ward has become Molten Shields.
* New Talent: Molten Shields will cause your Fire Ward to have a 10/20% chance to reflect Fire spells while active. In addition, your Molten Armor has a 50/100% chance to affect ranged and spell attacks.

Im not sure how to interpret this but im leaning towards, any ranged and spell attacks made against me have a 100% chance to proc molten armor onto the attacker, thus inflicting 75 fire dmg onto them. In a pve enviroment there are quite a few bossfights where this talent could possibly mantain a nice little dmg bonus because of all the aoe flying around or am I way off in assuming this?

I cant access the PTR at the moment and just wanted to throw this out here to see whats you guys make of this. I did a search back to page 125 in this thread but found no releveant information so please dont chop my head of if I missed a major post about this.