Lepew

Touching on some of what Keyne said-

I agree with some of your analysis regarding advocates of certain specs. For me the real acid test is pure classes should outperform hybrids in their chosen function. You give up versatility in being pure, and there should be a real obvious advantage gained by doing that. For instance druids, shaman, paladins clearly are hybrids blending healing, tanking, and dps functions. Warlocks and Hunters combine dps with pet tanking and in my mind are also hybrids. Mages, rogues, warriors, priests are the classic big 4 pure archeotypes and should outperform magic dps, melee dps, tanking, and healing over the hybrids. In some cases this holds, but in the case of mage my impression is warlocks and hunters can top them in ranged dps. Something needs to happen there.

 

Janathema

I got a question concerning winter's chill:
Did anybody notice that maybe something's wrong with it?

We tried Illidan yesterday and one of our shadowpriests uploaded his WWS for 2 Trys, cause he wanted to show sth to another shadowpriest. I looked up some mage-stuff and noticed that my frostbolts didn't crit that often than the frostbolts of the other 2 mages. Here my quote from another forum:

I didn't have the opportunity to test it since it was yesterday and I can't raid the next few days, so I'll ask you other mages.
Any suggestions?

 

Darkchani

Our shadowpriest usualy make the joke that he pots so we dont have to, and its pretty much true... the only fights i really pot on is usualy kazrogal and mother because of the mana drain and IC if it drags on too long. Otherwise its destro pots and flamecaps (when i care enough to use them heh)

But its most likely a problem with your shadow priest, we had one for a while that would return such pitty amount of mana we would always be oom like you are talking of. Found out he "didnt had a rotation"... it improved alot since then

 

Cardynal

I would look at your shadow priest as the possible issue for both of you. It is very easy to tell the difference between a good and bad shaow priest simply by the amount of mana you're getting back. It's also possible that your locks aren't putting up CoS...which will increase the mana being returned to you.

I didn't look at your spec, but I'm assuming you have 5 points in clearcasting.

If you're really having issues...pay off a paladin to put up JoW. You just really shouldn't have issues running out of mana w/ a SP & Shaman. I can non-stop spam AM on just about every fight and still not run out of mana. I don't even use evocation on a lot of fights.

 

Lhivera

Well, I didn't get as many frostbolts in last night as I'd hoped due to rotating mages in and out for different encounters -- but I lobbed 141 frostbolts at Kaz'rogal with two misses, a 1.42% miss rate.

I was wearing 122 Hit Rating, and was not grouped with a Draenei, so my miss rate should have been 4.32%.

The difference is awfully close to the 3% everyone else is seeing.

Small sample rate, but boy, they sure are adding up.

 

Rouncer

I'm actually going to disagree with this sentiment (although, as a mage, it pains me to do so).

In Vanilla WoW pure classes played those roles better then hybrids could ever hope to and what happened? Well, Warriors were the only tanks and all Shaman were healers and Warlocks were brought to raids only to supplement the dps of Mages and Rogues via 2 curses.

It seems like Blizzard was initially trying to balance Hybrid vs Pure classes by giving Hybrids subpar individual performance but then balancing it by giving them group utility to offset it. It's an approach that has works ok so far but it is starting to have some issues.

I think they need to work it from an other angle. I think they need to make it so that if you are ideally geared and specced for a specific role as a Hybrid that you are completely abyssmal at any other role but that one.

They are changing +healing to give 1/3 damage, well they should change +damage to only give 1/2 healing.

Ret pallys want to do damage (which I actually agree with) then they should barely be able to heal. They also should be unable to do any damage while invulnerable. Change Divine Shield so that you can't do any damage to anything while shielded and that the only healing you can do is on yourself. Then they could place a talent in the holy tree to allow them to heal others while shielded but it would limit their ability to maximize the other trees, somewhat, to spec it.

The issue is that a moonkin can still heal decently well even in their max damage set, sure they have to change forms but they maintain that ability yet they want to be able to do equivalent dps to Mages and Rogues who can't heal themselves at all. If the healing on their spell damage set was cut in half then they would have to choose whether to be able to do dps or to be able to heal and wouldn't be able to do both by just changing forms.

Mage's need some work or both fronts. We should have our dps increased so that we can compete with Hunter's and Rogues and Warlocks but we shouldn't surpass them. At the same time we need to have our "survival" talents brought up to par with those possessed by the other classes.

Improved Blink should remove debuffs

Blazing Speed should make you immune to all movement impairing effects while active.

Playing with Fire shouldn't do additional damage to the mage. Not sure how to fix this one but it really is ridiculous to think that a fire mage has to spec to take more damage just to be able to do equivalent damage to other classes. Maybe make it an activatable ability that lets the mage do 4/7/10% more damage at the cost of taking 4/7/10% more damage for 20 seconds with a 2-3 minute cooldown.

Prismatic Cloak should give you a slight (2/4%) chance to become immune to additional damage for 4 seconds whenever you take damage.

Mana Shield really should to be reworked so that it has a 1:1 ratio of damage to mana.

While they are at it they can also change Arcane Meditation to give a percentage of the Mage's Intellect as mana/5 and change Mage Armor so that it costs no mana to cast and either increases all mana gaining spells and effects by 20% while active or gives a percentage of the Mage's Intellect back as mana.

All of those changes would be perfectly balanced and would stop pretty much all the QQing currently seen on the Mage Forums. Will any of it happen, doubtful, at least not before the number of people playing a mage drops below the level of those choosing to play a Shaman or one of the other under-represented classes.

Edited to add:

For the mages having mana issues, 100 bucks says it's your shadowpriest. The difference between a well geared and good rotationed shadowpriest and one not so well geared with less of an understanding of their dps rotations is night and day. I've actually seen my mana pool start to rise a little during bloodlusts with our best Shadowpriest (its kinda sick to realize the amount of mana he generates).

Get "debuff filter" and add Vampiric Touch to the debuffs it looks for on the target. If his VT uptime is good then you should watch your omen cause unless he is sleeping he should be having aggro issues on just about every fight.

Might want to also grab a WWS parse or 3 and link them in one of the shadowpriest threads and see what they think about his performance. I would recommend reading the thread a bit first just so you have a basic idea about their rotations before posting though since to do otherwise is a bit rude.

 

Keyne

A) You say that they need to "have our dps increased so that we can compete with Hunter's and Rogues and Warlocks but we shouldn't surpass them." I gave a philosophy for why we should not even be competeing with rogues for sure, and likely not hunters either. It is likely the Blizzard believes that fundamentally, our ideal place on the DPS meters is behind both, not next to.

B) All of your proposed buffs to mage talents seem pretty greedy to me.

 

irbi

It does appear that the hidden cooldown on the MSD is around 40 seconds.

For those of you skimmers - I try to post a general summary of my thoughts at the end - so that you can take something from my posts.

This translates two things to me.
1. Viable arcane missile spam is dead
2. Weaving arcane missiles in between your primary spell will result in a dps loss

Lucky for me I was a noob during most of the MSD hype. I was raiding arcane without the MSD for every ecounter in SSC and TK. (Ouch?)

Assuming that I was willing to use between 20-40 mana pots (pending wipes) in a given 4-5 hour raiding period I managed to hit top 5 every time on every encounter in SSC and TK. (Every encounter I have managed to place first several times, second when the rogues step it up)

Of course - no matter the encounter I force myself to mana pot every time its up (the mana dump to dps aspect of arcane is the only true strength I have found in the tree). In essence your mana pots function as destro pots (you can force yourself to pot and gem at any time, and doing so will increase your dps)

The translation to me is that a pure arcane rotation can still be viable. I easily hit 950-1036 sustained dps without a dependancy on the MSD proc. Granted, I am one of the fortunate mages that always has a shadow priest.

To put a perspective on gear I am wearing all tier 5 except the robe...Kael is a jerk.

Of course when I started using (or abusing if you prefer) the MSD I noticed a substantial increase in DPS. The nerf will of course devestate that effect. This detail has no effect since my above DPS experience was assuming a 0% proc rate.

I would do some number crunching for you and provide WWS reports if I weren't sitting in a software design course right now. In the mean time, the support of this opinion comes from my raid experiences.

It also appears several of the people here are great at number crunching and better at math than me anyway. Thank you Your posts are great and allow slackers like me to post opinions backed by your hard work. <3

Summary
1. Viable arcane missile spam is dead
2. Weaving arcane missiles in between your primary spell will result in a dps loss (Not enough to make arcane not viable, but yes a weakness)
3. Top 5 dps was easily attainable as an arcane mage - not using MSD
4. Other mages (arcane, fire, and frost) were not even close competition to me then.
5. I am a heavy user of consumables - although I would be regardless of spec.

 

Logun

Blizzards 2nd blue post on arcane tree concerns. Scroll down to the 2nd blue poster and follow his link. I could not help but laugh at the irony of it.


WoW Forums -> Elemental

 

tedv

As the well geared shadow priest in question, I'd like to note that I almost never have threat issues. I'm almost always #2 on threat of course, but the tank usually has another 20% on me, even when I use my max burn cycle. Your priest shouldn't have aggro issues, but they should be one of the highest ranked players on threat; I think that's what Rounced was trying to convey.

Regarding the DPS viability of dedicated classes (eg mages) versus hybrids (eg shaman), the system that has worked well is 95% efficiency in the primary role and 80% in the secondary role. It turns out that flexibility is rarely worth paying more for. Druids are 95% as good as Warriors for tanking (-5% for no shield wall and last stand), and scale about 80% as well as rogues. With that, innervate, and rebirth, it's worth taking one feral druid to a raid. If a hybrid is only 80% effective in their primary role, they will never earn a raid slot.

I mean, I'm 60% as effective of a healer as our holy spec priests, and the ONLY time I heal in a raid is Archimonde, when I get airbursted away from the raid and nearby people need healing. A 50% nerf to the effects of healing on damage gear seems pointless because that gear is so rarely used to heal anyway.

I agree that many of the arcane mage talents need reworking though. Prismatic cloak in particular feels really weak, since a continual stream of damage is generally not why mages die. Perhaps something like a 3/6% chance to resist any debuff placed on you would be more appropriate.

 

Rouncer

A) I have always thought that we should be competitive with Rogues with it all coming down to encounter design. As for Hunter's, I really don't understand why you think they should be doing superior dps to us, considering misdirection and no issues whatsoever with threat. That said I really do think that all classes should be able to do competitive dps if that is the role they are specced and geared for.

B) Why? Very confused about that one. None of the suggestions I posted seemed to me to be at all greedy. First off they are for the most part all associated with Talents and all placed so that no one can get them all. They are also designed around the notion of giving Mages the other side of the equation.

Mana shield being 1:1? Lifetap is 1:1, and all other shields offer far superior damage absorption for the mana cost. Fixing that ratio goes a long way towards fixing the imbalance that is Mage survivability when not specced Frost.

Prismatic shield giving a small window of taking no damage, Warlocks have a similar talent with a similar place in their tree with a MUCH higher percentage of activation.

Playing with Fire? 3% more damage in exchange for always taking 3% more damage just strikes me as lazy developing, especially if that 3% doesn't put you above everyone else in the balancing game. Making it into an activatable ability with a cost would fix that. Think about it this way, 20 seconds of use with a 120 second cooldown means that it gives an overall 1.67% damage increase. So it loses 1.33% of its overall damage boost but gives back a lot more control about when it will be active.

Arcane Med and Mage Armor - the changes are both designed around making Intellect our real Primary Stat and so help the Item designers to better design a single Tiered set that would actually be better suited to mages of any spec.



Frost, currently, is the only tree that feels fully developed and has a clear direction in mind while the other 2 feel more like works in progress. If you consider that dps is being equalized out among so many classes both Arcane and Fire both have too many "glass cannon" talents for a class that the developers don't seem to really want to be a "cannon" any longer.

That suggestion was more for Arenas and PvP then in regards to raiding. Raiding is too much about pushing the envelope for the healing a moonkin or an elemental shaman could do to matter, if you get to the point where they are trying to heal you've pretty much already lost the encounter anyway.

 

Roywyn

Right - I ran Vontre's new sheet, that now includes the TLC/MSD cooldowns.
CSD is modeled as multiplying the final crit damage by 1.03. I don't know if that's how it works,
I have only read source that claims it is more likely to work like it was with the first RED, increasing damage more than that. So, take the CSD a bit carefully.

I'm not sure if TLC is modeled correctly - as there is only a cooldown after shooting a lightning, not after gaining charges.

Setup is endgame gear tailored for the specs, as always.
Assuming 10% CoE, 13% CoS, molten armour, 200 mp5 shadowpriest.
No totems, no bloodlust/heroism.


AM spam - 1620 DPS with MSD, AToI and The Skull of Gul'dan.
Using TLC over TSoG'd is a 24 DPS loss. MSD is still worth 72 DPS, CSD is only 28 DPS.
Sustainable for 12 minutes, 5:30 minutes if JoW is not up.

Fireball spam - 1842 DPS with MSD.
1835 with CSD, including the small loss of having to socket a second blue gem.
1801 DPS rotation scorch in to keep it up (8:1).
Sustainable for 11 minutes with JoW, 8 minutes without it.

Frostbolt/WE spam - 1749 DPS with MSD.
1574 DPS from Frostbolts.
374 DPS from your WE when it's up, said to be averaged at 175 DPS over the fight.
CSD beats MSD by 2 DPS, but you'll lose at least 4 DPS but fitting in a second blue gem.
Sustainable for 17 minutes with JoW, 10 minutes without.


Edit:
With a 10% CoS, AM spam drops down to 1577.
So, at the cost of a pet, mana efficiency and some of the best survival talents in the game, you gain 3 DPS. Yay?

Also, I still haven't figured out how the pet uptime in the sheet can be so high. But ~10% of your damage coming from the pet looks alright, so I'll check it later.

 

Nadiar

Well, some mages I know believe that if you're not specced 100% for maximum DPS, then you're not viable at all. Personally I disagree with that. When I look at Damage Meters I see things like:
1 ||||||||||||||||||||
2 |||||||||||||||||||
3 |||||||||||||||||
4 |||||||||||||||||
5 |||||||||||||||||
6 ||||||||||||||||
7 ||||||||||||||||
8 ||||||||||||||||
9 ||||||||||||||||
10 |||||||||||||||
11 |||||||||||||||
12 ||||||||||||||
13 ||||||||||||||
14 |||||||||||
15 |||||||
16+ ||| (non dps)

I personally consider anyone there in the top 13 to be viable dps. When I see the people in the top 2, I actually start to wonder how much of a hidden drain they're creating. On many boss events, a dead mage means more than simply -1100 dps averaged out over the entire raid. Often it means that the job they were supposed to be working on, such as 'take out the adds on your platform' go unaccomplished, which will often wipe the raid.

I honestly think that Frost and Fire just aren't differentiated enough in Survival. Arcane gets lots of gimmicks, I just think (excluding 2.1 and 2.2) the gimmick's aren't "awesome" enough. Either the talents that differentiate each talent tree should completely differentiate it, or they should all be balanced to do the same dps.

 

Cardynal

If it is changed to 1.06, you see a 23dps increase over MSD on fireball spam. Has there been enough testing done to say if it's 1.03 or 1.06 yet?

 

Sancus

Probably includes optimal cold snap usage, for example with a 5 minute fight you get three water elementals in a 5 minute fight, which is 45% uptime, your proposed dps average(175/374=46.8%) is pretty close to that.

Water Elemental's contribution to your dps is probably going to shift up and down depending on how the fight length matches up with your cooldowns. If a fight ended at the 4 minute mark, for example, you'd still have 3 elementals for that time. And hopefully one of those elementals is bloodlusted, I wonder if the sheet includes bloodlust's effect on the elemental in any way?

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

 

◊ manly

It does.

I'm sorry, but I cannot and will never agree with this. First and foremost, the very goal of every theorycraft and this forum in some sense is to be at the extreme end of min-maxing. I am not claiming frost has no place in raiding. I can imagine some players need extra survivability. I never had a need for it, much in the same sense that I constantly and happily answer that threat is mostly a non-issue for firespec. Your shadow priest will have aggro issues much before you do. If that should happen, then TA is down, removing any possibility of having aggro issues. Now using the very same logic, I personally flat out don't buy that you need extra survivability for raiding. It simply hasn't been my experience.

However, here's where I have my biggest gripe about that mentality. If you follow this, its not too obvious where the line ends. Are slackers OK because they fit in the general upper half of your dpsers? In my experience the willingness of a player to top meters does go a long way to increase ones' dps. In any case, I don't see why would someone strive to not achieve the best their task. And to elaborate on this - since its not obvious where the line ends, does that mean its ok to gem only with stamina gems, and have every stamina enchant?

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Cardynal

I would argue that many of the people that top the dps meters are also the people who die the least on bosses that require 100% attention. I have yet to see a boss (My guild is at Teron) that would require mages to have Iceblock. Basically iceblock is only there if you screwed something up. If you wish to look at the rage or Azgalor kill on our WWS from last night, I had the most damage done and very low damage taken in. (I got hit once on the azgalor fight when the tank went down)

WWS - 10/30 - Hardlycore

So if you have 2 mages in the same gear, and 1 does 200 more dps, why would you take the other one when neither one of them should ever die? I'm hard on the mages in my guild if you couldn't guess =)

 

◊ Vontre

200 dps is a fantastic fucking difference in dps that is accounting for far more than just spec. In fact frost is extremely competitive on paper, and a good ice mage should (in 2.3) be putting out damage much closer to optimal fire.

Basically I know a lot of guilds will look at a damage meter and go "ZOMG SKILL", reality is there are three ways a mage can fail in a raid scenario:

1. not providing enough damage
2. not providing proper control
3. dieing

Funny thing is the two end-game fights right now clearly favor frost, as Illidan needs control (freezes/snares, I don't know details yet) and Archimonde is almost soley focused on duties (decursing) and survival. It is easy to say that ice block is useless because you shouldn't be fucking up in the first place, but if no one fucks up then clearly you're going to win anyway. Unless, of course, you lack enough dps to beat a hard or soft timer. Some encounters are dps races, some are control/survivability oriented, some are a clear mix of both. Effective dps does not mean absolute min-maxed fuck everything else damage is all that matters. Frost has a good balance of control/dps/survivability, it is very much in line with the 2.3 calculations.

You can't measure the contribution of your raiders with a meter, no matter how much you want to.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

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Cardynal

I never said that Frost is not a good option...but was only giving Iceblock as an example of survivability. Nadiar was saying that it really doesn't matter if you maximize your spec for dps, which I and obviously manly disagree with. Basically it sounds like he's justifying taking a pvp spec into pve and putting up sub-par numbers.

As far as surviving in the Archimonde fight...iceblock is not needed at all. It is extremely easy to stay out of doomfire as a mage...blink is your friend. But you are correct that the focus is on decursing and staying alive...as you can see by my wonderful dps spot on attempts on archimonde =)

 

aliengrey

EDIT: Deleted.

 

Rouncer

I think Lhivera said it best about Frost viability in end-game raiding. Fire is more dps if all you did was standstill and cast the whole time, but if your dps is interrupted due to debuff or having to move from some damage source that a Frostmage could just Ice Block off that difference can be enough to equalize the dps.

In the end there is another simple principal that should be taken into account. Dead Mages do no DPS. Ice Block can keep you alive when you shoulda died - be it your fault or just completely outta your control - and on some encounters you dieing can mean that the raid just wiped.

Last night on Archimonde. I had moved towards the melee to decurse and had a doomfire spawn to my right just as the fear went off, the fear literally moved me into the path of the doomfire and made me run right along it, killing me. WoTF was on cooldown from popping it 3-4 fears earlier to decurse someone who was doomfired and at 50%, trinket was on cooldown from the fear before that one when I was feared directly at the doomfire. There was literally nothing I could do, wasn't lag, wasn't that I misclicked and died, wasn't that I wasn't paying attention, there was literally nothing that I could have done to avoid that death.

However if I had been Frost specced I would have been able to Ice Block and I would have lived. True the raid probably would have wiped on that attempt anyway (I think I was the 2nd or 3rd death that attempt) but I wouldn't have died if I had been specced that way. You can't predict everything, raiding would be very boring if you could, but some tools make it possible to survive things you otherwise shouldn't and that can be worth a lot of dps.

I'm planning on speccing Frost when 2.3 comes out and if my dps really ends up being subpar then I'll spec over to Fire and deal with respeccing for illidan every week, hopefully that won't be necessary but won't know till 2.3 comes out.

 

◊ manly

Then you still had your healthstone and pot cooldown up. You were not boned.

In any case, again, thats a case that happens rarely, given that you had to get a number of consecutive bad luck to come to a point where it could have been good to have (although again, doomfire alone won't kill you, you can still get healed and be just fine).

In any case, we can argue until the end of time about which spec provides better DPS. We both know that for every point we can bring a counterpoint and effectively make the debate last forever. I prefer a much much more simplistic approach of looking at WWS, see what works best over time.

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◊ Vontre

I think you missed the part where he was feared.

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Tyrian

In about 60 archimonde attempts/3 kills ive never died once stupidly, unless we were wiping already. I could say its all skill, but a strong strategy is the other part. Iceblock is in no way required for Archimonde in any form unless you 1) might not be top notch with survival skills and 2) your guilds archimonde strategy is not solid enough.

Sorry - but I would still consider this your fault (or more specifically: your guilds archimonde strategys fault).

Why was it you that had to perform this dangerous move, knowing your two prime escape mechanisms (wotf, trinket) were not available? Theres other decursers in the raid and one of them could do it. Running into archimonde to perform a dangerous decurse knowing your trinket/racials are not available is asking for trouble - dont blame 'bad luck'.

Also, why do you have to run to the melee to perform a dangerous decurse? Whats stopping them from running to you? Why not put a druid on melee so he can decurse and you never would have to run in? If the most dangerous area near archimonde is close to him, why have a strat that requires people to run in close to him like this.

The major problem with what you said is the strategy. You wouldnt need to move to decurse melee at all if you put a restro druid standing on your melee and made him responsible for melee/mt decurse.

But you are indeed right, if a Archimonde strat is not solid - a frost spec can help make up for its shortfalls.

 

◊ manly

fear + doomfire doesn't kill you. You can still get healed if you get doomfired. More often than not you survive. And totems also help greatly at dealing with fears, if that ever becomes a problem.

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