Cardynal

Nice results Alayn. Hard to argue that one =) It would be nice to see a larger cast sample though, say 500 casts....but even at your 140 or so casts...it looks like it is adding 2% instead of 1% per point.


Kadaan. I would agree that your sample size is a bit too small. 1 resist in 50 casts is already a 2% resist rate.

 

Cardynal

If he has points in WC, Emp and Artic winds for both tests, they would be considered constants...and shouldn't effect the test. The only way it would is if in the calculation of those talents, the Elemental Precision hit rate was somehow calculated differently than base hit rate...which is possible.

I suppose the best way would be to run tests of 200 casts with the following specs and 0 hit gear. All the specs below add a talent that effects frostbolt and not ice lance.

1 point in Elemental Precision
Above + Imp Frostbolt
Above + Frostbite
Above + Permafrost
Above + WC
Above + AW
Above + Emp Frostbolt

The first spec that gives you a 2% resistance rate would tell you which talent or combination of talents is giving the extra hit rating.

 

Muphrid

How do you suggest resilience be involved in determining whether a spell lands in the first place?

As for Alayn's methodology, I suggest respeccing with no points in Frost other than Imp. Frostbolt, then systematically testing EP alone, WC alone, and EF alone. Speccing a "full" spec needlessly confounds the results. We want to find out which one it is.

 

Lepew

I read with interest your response on p. 21, and apologize for taking so long to respond. Work has been busy. I find your goal of ( having a class geared for one role perform well in that role and be abyssmal in all other ones) to be something different than what is actually in play now. For instance a Feral druid can tolerably yield melee DPS or tank with a gear switch. So unless they were to overhaul the existing trees to get rid of role synergy within a single branch, I do not see how your goal can ever be achieved. Perhaps for instance with pallys were they to have the 41point retribution talent disable all paladin healing for as long as you held that talent spec, then it might be fair making pally DPS equal to rogue DPS.

Mages have lingering restrictions imposed from the day when there was a benefit to being pure. For instance sheep heals a target and breaks at the slightest tap. This was supposed to have prevented abusive sheep nuking, which they subsequently farmed out to warlocks in the forms of fear dotting and succubus seduce nuking. You used to be able to justify fear dotting and seduce nuking because Warlock DPS was so anemic. They upped warlock damage to mage levels, yet mages are still encumbered by the previous glass cannon limitations they originally linked to that damage level, and their CC has been progressively nerfed, and now the original problems that they nerfed sheep over are evident in warlocks.

So I think they went in a bad direction when they started thinking of hybrids as people who could specialize and perform at equivalent levels of primary classes. I would rather see hybrids strengthened as hybrids, rather than becoming variants on pure classes. For instance I am playing a 30 feral, 31 resto druid right now and I think that is pretty close to an ideal role for a druid. While I am not as strong as a primary healer, or a primary tank or primary DPS, the fact that I can switch as needed between roles make me an asset to the raid. If an encounter requires an OT, I can do that, or if you need a bit more raid healing with HoTs, I can do that as well. The trees should naturally lend themselves to hybrid combos, with talents that make dual function or tri function builds work well.

 

Logun

Edit: Deleted.

 

Lgs

Ya, I expressed my disdain for the CM's in that post numerous times. Be thankful for EJF. The best part is that she locked it!! lmao.

The mage class still has issues (regen, sheep healing, mediocre dps) and I really hope they would at least say one thing about them. But no single utterance...ever. Sure, I am happy for the reverse nerfs, and the class is still very useful w/ AE and CC in raids... but I didn't roll a mage for those reasons. I doubt anyone really did.

For example...when reporting "we are increasing regen in arcane med," she didn't continue with "oh, and we're nerfing that tree so it's useless." And I'm not even going to talk about we have three trees that all do the same thing... TC'ing is fun, but maybe if the CM's gave us a little bit of what the hell devs are thinking, it wouldn't be so necessary.


At least 10/48/3 is back. Rejoice.

 

Logun

Edit: Deleted.

 

Rouncer

If they made it more that hybrids needed to decide the role they were going to play in each fight before the fight started, by selecting their gear, and then were abysmal at the alternative role if optimized then I think Hybrids would be fine with being able to function just as well as the purer classes.

Changing damage/healing to give less healing with the damage would pretty much fix that issue in my mind. Basically if you want to heal and do crap damage then wear healing gear and if you want to damage and do crap for healing then wear damage gear.

All the shadow damage gear that Shadowpriests get seems to me to be based on that notion, I just think they need to extend the concept (somewhat) to all the other spell damage gear so that it has an effect on the healing an elemental shaman or a moonkin druid can do.

 

Nadiar

I'm confused at what you hope to accomplish my making Mages look like whiners.

 

Daemion

Well there is a huge thread running now for mage issues that has 'blue' attention. Might be worth for the more educated mages on the forum to post their vision in the thread.

WoW Forums -> Why Mages Are Complaining

 

◊ Vontre

Your post was deleted, but I actually read it earlier today. For those who didn't have the privilege, basically it was a listing of number of blue posts received on each class forum in the past X amount of time, and comparing the quality of posts received with an emphasis on the mage posts being poor or irrelevant. In short, nothing interesting or relevant was missed, Netherea deleted the post because it was a poorly thought out whine and blue hasn't given any revelations on the state of the arcane tree or the mage class.

I'd encourage everyone to stop posting about blizzard's attention to our class on the forums, it is really not productive or relevant to theorycrafting discussion.

www.magegraf.com

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Logun

Edit: Deleted. Vontre, I have great respect for you and your opinions, I'll take your advice on this for now. I do, however, hope you will articulate some of our concerns in WoW Forums -> Why Mages Are Complaining. Seeing as it now has Nethaera's full attention.

 

◊ Vontre

I just finished typing out a long-ass post, I mean really long, for the wow boards. The forums at e it. I thought I did the copy paste before I hit preview, but it didn't work. Fuck this.

Edit: Here is my post.

WoW Forums -> Mother!#!@ing forums

I am angry. Just forget it, it's not gonna get anywhere. Let the whiners whine on the wow forums because of misinformation, let the min-maxers spec fire and do absurd dps, and let the arcane die-hards get owned for using a shitty talent tree. As long as we have at least one way to dominate that's good enough for me.

Edit clarification: I just typed out a bunch of theorycraft and it took me so long to carefully go over the numbers and construct well thought sentences that my session timed out and the whole thing disappeared. And now I'm late to raid.

www.magegraf.com

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Logun

I know how frustrating it is when that happens to me. I hope that after you cool off you'll make a second attempt at it for us.

 

Zure

Ran AV a fair bit today... turning on recap for Bal/Van and using only rank 1 frostbolt. Interesting results:

5/5 imp frostbolt
5/5 ice shards
3/3 frostbite
2/2 imp nova
3/3 Piercing Ice
3/3 Permafrost
1/1 Coldsnap
2/2 Arctic Reach
3/3 Frost Channeling
5/5 Shatter
1/1 Ice Block
1/3 Imp CoC

5.5% hit from gear (45 spell pen fwiw). Expected resist rate, 11.5%

541 frostbolts, 13.2% resist rate. This seems high. Either they have more than 45 FrR and I missed a CoE in the second set of tests, or it's just odd.

Adding Empowered Frostbolt:

509 frostbolts, 6.3% resists, which is almost exactly 5% hit more than expected.

 

Evalara

Ah, it does show WE's damage on the summary sheet, but not the pie chart. It would be cool if it did :/

 

Eusheka

Vontre, it appears your thread got deleted as well.
Shame, always look forward to reading posts from the more informed mages as opposed to the usual official forum "Mages are fine l2p, we can sheep and stuff" group which seems the norm these days.

 

Redbeard

Could be Pinto mistyped resilience while meaning resistance. Resistance would fit in the conversation better

About the intrinsic resistance at least wowwiki has this to say:
Wowwiki article: Formulas:Magical resistance - WoWWiki, the Warcraft wiki

 

Maledict

The article is wrong. It was never, ever shown that binary spells had a higher resist rate on level 73 mobs - *ever*.

 

Sancus

And thus I have corrected it =)

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

 

Athemeus

I do not agree with all the mages saying that the lack of viability of the arcane tree is not an issue, as long as we have frost and fire as strong DPS trees. I agree, that it doesn't really matter if you shoot blue or red bolts, as long as the DPS is fine, but arcane added so much more to the game. The AB rotations, clipping and more than that the mana regeneration, which became a new factor in the mage game. It really is/was fun to play a mage like a real mana class and not just having a mana bar for sake of it. You had to conserve your mana, you could make use of interruptions of encounters and clever mana use (5SR time) affected your DPS.
Now with fire, its single-spell-spam again with very little possibility to improvement (combining cooldowns and effects), and frankly, i'm not so excited about it.
Note: I'm talking about T5 AB-arcane and not the spam it became with MSD and AM.

 

Lgs

I did not like the arcane tree, and I don't think it was good for the class as a pve dps tree. Here is why:

Basically arcane was in competition with fire. Assuming they are roughly equal, mages will have to make a hard decision which way to go. They will have to consider gear, encounters, raid make-up, among other things like survivability, utility, etc. So basically, it could go either way if one tree does not dominate the other.

Why is this bad? Because speccing into fire automatically makes you less useful on certain encounters, where speccing arcane makes you weaker in others. Now you have effectively reduced your usefulness in a certain percentage of boss fights.

On another note, you have also taken a path to need a certain set of gear that is somewhat different from other tree. Now you cannot switch and be as effective as you were had you started with that other tree. You are now locked into a spec that you don't want.

Also, now the devs have to balance the two trees in both pve and pvp. And everyone knows that blizz's class balance is their weakest link. WHEN they make future changes, you may have to switch to be more effective...but you will be in trouble due to gear. I suspect that would have to be done frequently due to blizz's extremely inconsistent class changes, unnerfs, and whatnot.

Lastly, fire has synergy between mages. If both are equal and 50% of the mages in the raid are arcane and the other half are fire, that synergy is lessened.


If there is only one tree to worry about, it will have to be effective on all encounters, at least theoretically. It seems like blizz is slowly catching onto this, but who knows. I would rather see massive buffs to fire than buffs bringing arcane back up. I would absolutely hate to see a situation where blizz alternates which spec is more effective. This would be a disaster for our class.

 

Sackobones

They have already done that really. Depending on the quality of your gear and the extra bonus's differn't specs have been viable at differen't times.

I spent a lot of time gearing for Arcane and now I have to switch back up my focus. I put low value dkp bids on things like Solarians wand and Grand Cowl of the Engineer only to find that I need spell hit in larger amounts again. I stopped trying to get my cape off prince because as Arcane I was running with 132 hit and wasn't trying to hit the cap. Now I need to get back to the Hit cap and it will require some regemming and a few items being hunted down that if not for Blizzard I would still be paying little attention to them.

These changes do affect pre teir 6 raiders as they move beyond teir 5 with the gear they have only to find they should have picked up a few things along the way.

 

Lgs

I said that class balance is blizz's weakest link, but I should revise that. Take a look at the post on the EJ public forums about the RNG....

ITEMIZATION + Class balance are blizzard's biggest faults. The huge differences between the specs obviously aggravates this even more, assuming one has to switch.

There are two good ways for things to go (and obviously many bad ways).

1: They keep arcane useless and gain the intelligence to buff fire.
2: They turn arcane into something that is useful but not straight-up pve dps. This is slightly less desirable, but seriously wth is the point of that tree? It's worse than disc priests atm...

 

Cardynal

Why do you feel it's bad to be in competition with another line? Really, each line should be better for one fight or another. If they weren't...why have different lines in the first place?

They are also different play styles. Some people like playing one way over another. I had a mage in my guild that specs differently every month because he gets bored with the same spec raid after raid. He actually just quit the game because he was so tired of arcane...but there is nothing else that touches arcane dps in 2.2.

And the gear that maximizes fire or arcane really isn't all that different in the end. With TLC gone, it's only 4 or 5 pieces of gear that you would need to change to have the best gear for Fire or Arcane.

It is a good thing that they're nerfing items that made the arcane spec all powerful. It lowers the dependance on specific items even more...which makes it easier to switch from spec to spec. They need to make one last item nerf...take the damage of the arcane blast bonus on 2t5 down to 10%. Then they need to increase the base damage of both arcane blast and arcane missiles by a few hundred...or modify the talents to increase the bonus damage or crit % by a large amount on both arcane blast & arcane missiles.

I personally think they should take the raw damage approach since the other 2 lines have such a large bonus increase on crit...it would give it a different feel.

We may not see these changes until we get the 51 point talents.