Actually, that's one of the problems I have with frost as a raiding tree... most of the survival talents count for nought when all the things you're fighting are immune to roots and snares and mass AoEs make pushback nigh unavoidable. Much of your burst damage is negated by this immunity to roots and, furthermore, frost's damage coefficients are lowered due to these snare components that are non-existent in a raid situation.
So, I have a proposal for a new 21-point talent to replace Ice Block. Call it "Supercooling" or "Cryolysis" or something else cool and frosty.
The talent would be an instant cast single-target debuff with a one-minute duration and a 50-second cooldown (OK, the cooldown should be longish so you can't just spam a whole ton of targets with the debuff). The debuff doesn't stack on single targets; casting the spell on a target already so debuffed will just refresh the duration. However, you can cast the debuff on multiple targets (within the cooldown or by using Cold Snap). A debuffed target which gets snared will be slowed an additional 5% by this debuff. However, a debuffed target upon which a snare or root fails to land, for whatever reason (resists, stronger snares already on target, immunity to movement impairing effects, etc.) will take ~50 frost damage (at level 70) + 5% of the frost damage of the caster trying to land the snare or root. The damage can be partially resisted, can crit and can cause pushback. The spell will cost about 320 mana base (so that in a little less than 45 seconds in a raid situation, it pays for itself by supplying the damage of an additional frostbolt for the caster). The debuff's cooldown and mana cost are affected if the caster of the debuff has Frost Channeling, Elemental Precision or Ice Floes. The damage done by the debuff on a missed snare is attributed to the caster of the snare and is affected only by the stats of the caster of the snare (which means that a crippling poison proc on a target with BoF will do 50 damage).
The point of this talent is to eliminate the coefficient penalties that spells with snares suffer in raid situations, to bring the damage scaling per time per point of spellpower of Frostbolt somewhat in line with other nukes and also to provide additional frost synergy in PvP to make up for the fact that all mages will have Ice Block now. Of course, the numbers are a little rough and can be tweaked, but the point of this proposed skill is to address the inadequacies of the Frost Tree without Ice Block specifically (substandard dps and scaling, lack of special utlity in PvP).
I'm guessing your healers were taxed fairly heavily?
Nope. Unfortunately these fights were a long time ago and our wws has expired, but me and our two other mages were constantly on the least damage taken list. As in on VR we took either one orb (5-6k) or no dmg whatsoever. On gruul shatter damage is sometimes unavoidable because it is not in your own hands, but it's still relatively easy to avoid taking it from more than one person. Honestly the only times I ever died on gruul really was maybe the first time I saw the encounter and times when half the raid was already dead and IB would've made very little difference.
I don't recall any healer every spending more than a few seconds throughout the fight healing me. Usually one resto druid handled all raid healing on gruul. If I ever did get hit with an orb on VR it took a big chunk of my hp, sure. And perhaps I could've iceblocked instead of moving (our resident frost mage did this), but really all it took was one HoT or simply walking out and bandaging yourself to fix it (can't use potions or healthstones obviously). And this was all while keeping around 800-900 DPS which is decent for that level of gear. It was also not a matter of extraordinary skill as our other mages were the same way.
Edit: My point is not that stamina isn't a useful stat, far from it. I'd absolutely love if all the spirit on our gear was converted to stam. And frankly I would've gladly taken sidegrades that offered more stam if it was available to me at the time. My main point was that iceblock was not necessary. If mages can survive with a horrible 5.8k hp, then mages can survive just fine without iceblock. I don't want fights based around immunity gimmiks. Like others I'd vastly prefer 15% more stam than an iceblock.
Right now it's pretty pointless discussing possible 21 point frost talents to replace Ice Block. Sure it's fun, but the point of this thread is to theorycraft, not speculate. There'll be plenty of time for discussion when Blizzard announces what's coming.
Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
If everything else is truly equal (gear, skill, etc.) then the pure dps class should beat the hybrid. If a raid chooses to run without rogues, mages, warlock or hunters, they should expect their overall dps to be lower. You can quote me on that.
It would flat out not make any sense that frost gets spell pushback from talents. The talents are also made to assist you levelling up. Frost is the survivability tree, and as such, spell pushback prevention has no place in a tree devoted towards avoiding damage. Fire has nothing in the tree besides blastwave devoted towards kiting, so it is somewhat assumed that pushback prevention is there so you can keep casting while mobs hit on you.
While this is purely tangential, magery in general is devoted towards avoiding damage. Thats the mage playstyle. We are frail, but to counter-balance this, we avoid taking damage with tools such as blink, frostnova, mana shield, ice barrier or kiting. I would say that anything that reduces the damage we take is stupid at best with that design in mind, but hey we get 2 talents that do that so I guess the developers ran out of ideas (no seriously prismatic cloak/arcane fortitude?). If we were not frail and could have a lot of armor it would be flat out OP. It's pretty obvious in that sense that the overall design philosophy for frost was that you don't need pushback prevention because you can avoid taking damage in very multiple ways:
I understand that in PVE context your ice barrier isn't really helping much in that department, but check in contrast the fire tree, its immediately obvious that the entire tree is devoted towards increasing your damage. Even blastwave isn't there as a kiting tool, its basically an extra instant attack more than anything else (ie: burst dps). The only way firespec can deal its damage, because all the talents are solely damage increasing talents, is arguably burning soul. There is no way around that for soloing if you were playing using only one tree. Mobs are gonna be hitting on your and you need to keep dpsing them. What do you have? pushback prevention.
If you can't see that it doesn't makes sense that frost gets pushback prevention through talents I fear I cannot explain it to you or that we will ever agree on anything.
I agree that fire needs a pushback prevention (for leveling and raids), and I agree that frost doesn't need one for leveling and I thought I've written that in my post.
My point ist, that frost needs could need such a pushback prevention for raids, because all this slowing/kiting tools are useless in raids and the advantage of IB is gone.
Arguing that frost mustn't get a pushback prevention because it would break leveling balance sounds strange to me. Leveling balance is already broken because of water elemental and frostbite + icelance. A pushback prevention won't change or help leveling for frost that much as you assume. Mobs rarely reach the mage and if they do you frostnova them before they do and finish them off with a frostbolt and a fireblast/icelance. Kiting deamons in winterspring or soloing Barov is fun, but not really an issue, some calsses/speccs can kite, others cant. You can kite with firespecc also (lvl1 frostbolt), it's just not that effective (btw: you forgot impact, dragons breath, blazing speed, pyro and increased range in the list of fire tools). If you are kiting with frost, you also don't have an advantage of a pushback prevention ...
When you have problems mobs meeleing you as fire mage, start casting at bigger range, or with a pyro, specc impact and if the mob reaches you, frostnova, one step back and finish him off with scorch/fireball and fireblast. Or don't use FN, finish him off with dragons breath, balst wave, cone of cold, AE. Pushback prevention is nice if you do some boring farming/dailys while watching tv and only paying 25% attention; where you casting fireballs/frostbolts from 20m range and where you know the mob will be dead fafter the 3rd or 4th fireball.
I'll stop here, because I think discussing balance of leveling isn't useful at all. (frost leveling from lvl 70 to whatever level will be "broken" as long as blizz doesn't change 2p T4 set bonus anyway.)
Raiding and PVP are important factors. A pushback prevention for frost is needed for raids but might be a problem for PVP.
I can't discuss mage pvp as I'm not expirienced with that much.
Originally Posted by manly
Mages always had mana issues. In early wow, magery was mostly a matter of stacking as much int as possible. 13k mana pools (in T1 no less!) were not uncommon. That was one of the first signs that mages had mana issues. Then they made evocation free to all mages because it was required to have. To this day clearcasting is still arguably a must-have talent.
To make it short:
Yes our first mage sets were stuid, hell we even had agi on them. But we definitevly didn't had to stack int. Spell dmg was the stat we had to stack right from the point where it was introduced (and this was before most people started raiding), or better its functionality was explained by blizz.
I had 5500 mana (buffed) in MC and mana was never an issue. (frost specced for these fire imune instances of course) I used single manapots at Garr sometimes, maybe at Ragnaros, 1 at ebonroc and maybe 1 at nefarian P1. Robe of the Archmage - Items - World of Warcraft and Celestial Orb - Items - World of Warcraft did a great job saving mana pots.
Mana stared became an issue when people went to AQ40 and respeccing fire.
Originally Posted by manly
(and AEing while jumping increases it further fyi)
No longer in 2.3
Last edited by kadgar : 11/09/07 at 9:02 AM.
Reason: typos
Pushback prevention from AE-effects could be enough already, as this causes ~95% of pushbacks in boss-fights anyway. Would still be somewhat odd as a "21" talent.
So we hitting page 35 and it's getting quite fuzzy here. I will try to give a short summary of what was talked about lately, please fill in the gaps, as a surely I missed a lot...
Frost versus Fire versus Arcane
Somewhat consensus is that Fire will do slightly more DpS than Frost but the difference shouldn't make a Frost Player subject to flame. Pick your playstyle!
Arcane is far off after 2t5 Bonus and is currently not considered viable. Lhivera's Theorycraft Script and Vontre's spreadsheet (http://www.homegirlsguild.com/mage_dps.zip) try to incorporate the changes
Elemental Precision bugged?
Frost Speccs seem to have a higher +hit percentage than they should. The Issue is not resolved yet but evidence suggests that Elemental Precision adds 6% to Frostbolt (instead of 3%). I believe the discussion somewhat stopped here: http://elitistjerks.com/538273-post676.html
Equipment
The Mystical Skyfire Diamond was nerfed with a 45sek internal CD, and can be expected to procc soon after.
The Chaotic Skyfire Diamond seems to be very good (multiplicative after talents, is that right?) look here: http://elitistjerks.com/535928-post618.html
The Lightning Capacitor has now an internal CD on gaining charges?
Iceblock
Blizzard stated that Iceblock will be a Trainer Spell rather than a Talent, to be implemented someaht after 2.3. No News yet of what the replacement 21-point talent will be. The Utility of Iceblock is highly debated, but hey its free !(well it will be)
I think the conclusion on Frost is that if the Water Elemental's uptime is at 50%, it's not completely terrible. That means fights slightly shorter than five minutes, the Water Elemental getting fed mana, and the Water Elemental staying alive. Also, Frost suffers much more from pushback and random AEs than Fire.
CSD > MSD, but it's not an amazing metagem that requires a mage to go for a metagem helm. The equivalent 3-socket helm (Spellstrike, Grand Engineer's, or Hood of Hexing) should work. There are three seperate reasons CSD is better. First, at pre-BT/MH gear levels it allows greater freedom for socketing the Veiled gems into gear to work on capping the hit rating. Second, with the new badge/Z'A haste loot, the CSD scales with that while the MSD does not. Third, MSD plays poorly with frost- so people at the Tier 6 level preparing for Illidan should get the CSD.
OK, but I'd still like to see how we can do 2000dps, because I would consider that to be the absolute minimum for Mage dps to be said to be better than other ranged classes. I still haven't seen a single post from you stating how or why you think Mage dps is higher than other ranged classes in more specific terms.
I honestly want to believe that Mages do more dps, but you haven't said even one single thing to prove it. Even your spreadsheet seems to blatantly disprove it, since it does not give numbers any higher than any other ranged dps class I've seen actually play or in WWS, and spreadsheets over-report real dps.
(I wasn't really basing my argument on that report, just trying to come up with something better than "what I've seen" because I think arguments based purely on what you've personally observed in your guild or whatever are useless)
For one...it was never even theory crafted in 2.2 for a mage to be able to break 2000 sustained dps. The best numbers we came up with then were between 1800 and 1900...which is what you see on the top geared mages.
From what I've seen on paper, the changes will take Deep fire over what deep arcane ever was. When accounting for raid buffs, i've seen it go over 2150dps in theory.
There is one item that I haven't seen discussed yet when comparing DPS classes. Rogues can have legendary weapons and mages can't. For this very reason, mages will not be able to out dps rogues due to the huge dps increase these weapons give for a rogue. So when comparing dps classes, you really need to throw out the rogues with warglaives until Blizzard gives casters another legendary weapon.
And one last thing. Why do people feel that they are still depandant on a Shadow Priest in 2.3? Sure...we will need CoE up...but you can really get by w/o a shadow priest as deep fire. Especially in black temple and hyjal. The majority of these battles are much shorter than SSC/TK...which was the last time I was fire. I even did Naj'entus as arcane last night w/o a shadow priest. Yes I ran out of mana...but he was at 10% when I did. You may have to use mana pots over destruction pots...but even then i'm sure you could throw some in.
I personally plan to give our priests the normal mage shadow priest in 2.3 and try to survive off of Mana tide/stream and JoW.
I'm hoping that the mana regen changes Kalgan hints at will be enough to remove the shadowpriest dependency and open raids to the idea of moonkin to replace them in the matrix. Moonkin have really been left out of the raiding scene for far too long primarily because their main synergy requires them to be alotted a spot in a group that has no vacancy.
However, despite the mana gem improvements to come, the changes will have to be substantial and drastic which is not a common part of blizzard's reptoire. To relieve that dependency we need to be able to supply ourselves with an addtional 10-15k+ mana per encounter. However, that begs the question of whether or not a moonkin can sustain DPS without a shadowpriest.
It seems like blizzard wants elemental shaman and moonkin to be to mages like enhancement shaman and feral druids are to rogues.... but with an inherent flaw; atm mages/moonkin/elemental shaman are all pretty dependent on a shadow priest as a mana battery to compete, whereas rogues obviously don't require any sustainability source and all their synergy is DPS boosting.
I really think the answer is to boost mage/shaman/moonkin mana regen & reduce vampiric touch to restore ~2-3% of damage as mana ... but to the raid rather than group. This frees up group-synergy possibilities without requiring group sustainability as well as keeping the core of what a shadowpriest brings to a raid while removing a lot of the motivation to bring as many as 3 shadowpriests to a raid. Perhaps preventing the VT debuffs from stacking too.
Regardless of how it is done, I think the raid matrix situation is going to see a lot of changes between now and WotLK. I remember blizzard commenting about the issues with ret paladins and how their primary obstacle was finding room for them in a group matrix and justifying them in a DPS group ... the same can be said for moonkin.
I would just really like to see our furry friends get to partake in some of the fun, that and 5% crit is nice
I really think the answer is to boost mage/shaman/moonkin mana regen & reduce vampiric touch to restore ~2-3% of damage as mana ... but to the raid rather than group.
Even at 2-3% that's going to have your Shadowpriest threat-capped in very short order. Now if they were to change the threat mechanics of that, I'd be all over it.
I'm hoping that the mana regen changes Kalgan hints at will be enough to remove the shadowpriest dependency and open raids to the idea of moonkin to replace them in the matrix. Moonkin have really been left out of the raiding scene for far too long primarily because their main synergy requires them to be alotted a spot in a group that has no vacancy.
However, despite the mana gem improvements to come, the changes will have to be substantial and drastic which is not a common part of blizzard's reptoire. To relieve that dependency we need to be able to supply ourselves with an addtional 10-15k+ mana per encounter. However, that begs the question of whether or not a moonkin can sustain DPS without a shadowpriest.
It seems like blizzard wants elemental shaman and moonkin to be to mages like enhancement shaman and feral druids are to rogues.... but with an inherent flaw; atm mages/moonkin/elemental shaman are all pretty dependent on a shadow priest as a mana battery to compete, whereas rogues obviously don't require any sustainability source and all their synergy is DPS boosting.
I really think the answer is to boost mage/shaman/moonkin mana regen & reduce vampiric touch to restore ~2-3% of damage as mana ... but to the raid rather than group. This frees up group-synergy possibilities without requiring group sustainability as well as keeping the core of what a shadowpriest brings to a raid while removing a lot of the motivation to bring as many as 3 shadowpriests to a raid. Perhaps preventing the VT debuffs from stacking too.
Regardless of how it is done, I think the raid matrix situation is going to see a lot of changes between now and WotLK. I remember blizzard commenting about the issues with ret paladins and how their primary obstacle was finding room for them in a group matrix and justifying them in a DPS group ... the same can be said for moonkin.
I would just really like to see our furry friends get to partake in some of the fun, that and 5% crit is nice
Our guild has been running a 3 mage 1 spriest 1 oomkin party since the beginning of SSC actually, we usually sacrifice a hunter spot or make room in some other fashion, but the synergy is amazing. Now that our boomkin is quite geared he manages to pull 1000+ dps consistently and the crit we gain helps us really increase our damage output, the mages in that party consistently top the meters in our raids, while without him we have a more conventional hunter/rogue mix up top. Even on AE heavy fights like Kael, swapping a boomkin for a hunter is a good idea, the decrease to tank dmg in phase 2 as well as a much faster thaladred kill makes the moonkin just as useful imo. I highly reccommend trying one to any guild that can make room for one, the battle rez, ability to off heal and crit aura is simply amazing, i'll never go back.
I don't think 2.3 mages will be very shadow priest dependent. If you have a balance druid instead of a shadow priest, and are having mana issues, you can always:
a) use Mage armor for 70 mp5 at the cost of 3% crit, which still yields a net gain of 2% crit,
b) emergency swap to mage armor while moving during the fight if you miss a pot/gem timer or the encounter is going to last longer than anticipated,
c) request a shadow priest for 20% of the fight (the raid certainly needs one for Weaving/Misery),
d) request JoW,
e) re-spec frost ;-)
It's worth noting that mana spring will be worth an extra 20 mp5 untalented, and that ret paladins may actually see some serious raid time and will have an easier time keeping JoW up when they do with a shorter cooldown on CS.
As you mentioned, balance druids may be reliant on Spriests for sufficient mana regen to run a competitive dps cycle. I know this was true in T4 gear, but with more stats from higher tier gear, combined with dreamstate, this might not be an issue.
Originally Posted by Massael
Our guild has been running a 3 mage 1 spriest 1 oomkin party since the beginning of SSC actually, we usually sacrifice a hunter spot or make room in some other fashion, but the synergy is amazing.
An elemental shaman in that spot would give 101 spell damage, 3% crit, 3% hit, and 50 mp5, and bloodlust. That is a lot to exchange for a battle rez. Most people I've spoken to feel that an elemental shaman is also a superior emergency healer overall.
b) emergency swap to mage armor while moving during the fight if you miss a pot/gem timer or the encounter is going to last longer than anticipated,
Unless I missed some unposted change it still costs 575 mana to swap into Mage Armor which means that at the 70 mana/5 (which is only seen while casting - stop casting and wand and Mage armor does nothing) it takes 41 seconds just to regen the costs to cast it in the first place.
Wear Mage Armor at the start or don't but swapping it in mid-fight really doesn't make much sense currently.
I'm really hoping that one of the mana changes Kalgan mentioned will be swapping Mage Armor to give mana/5 based on Intellect and removing the mana cost to cast it. The mana/5 from Intellect would also mean that you would get even more mana returned when not casting so it would help more if used during a movement phase or while wanding if you went OOM. Removing the mana cost would mean that Mage armor would be more "hot-swappable" depending on need.
As stated Rank 1 only costs a fraction of the highest cost and when Combat-rezzed from mid-boss death should always be the first thing you put on: With no BoW and regen enlixirs wasted it's the best thing you can do for your economy.
Zure: The reference was not whether or not Mages could sustain DPS without a shadow priest. That's a given. The question is whether or not the Moonkin can sustain it. Economy is not their strong point and I'd be surprised if the furry monster can maintain 10m worth of wrath-spam required in some encounters.
Rounced: I see no reason to make passive regen into MP5. The fact that you don't like spirit is irrelevant; don't forget we're going to see added functionality to spirit soon. Don't suggest we ditch spirit in favour of MP5 on the brink before spirit is upgraded. As for no manacost? What madness is this? The only things in the whole game that have 0 mana cost are meta-abilities which are usualy derived from talents and only affect other abilities. Things like arcane power, presence of mind, cold snap and inner focus. The idea that you'd swap into mage armor for 0 cost just to increase your regen outside FSR mid-fight is unjustifiable and uncalled for.
An elemental shaman in that spot would give 101 spell damage, 3% crit, 3% hit, and 50 mp5, and bloodlust. That is a lot to exchange for a battle rez. Most people I've spoken to feel that an elemental shaman is also a superior emergency healer overall.
In our case it's been partly due to a lack of shamans on the server. I certainly see the value in an elemental shaman, the one we had for a short while stopped raiding unfortunately. It's a rather difficult decision when figuring out our raid makeup to choose between the moonkin and a possible elemental. In our case we are probably simply going to use a resto shaman in the mage group for WoA in the future. Our raiding mages are for the most part hit capped so I don't see Totem of Wrath being the buff it would be in some cases.
Again YYMV, I don't really think it will be the difference between a kill or not, but I've been very happy thus far, in large part due to the druids 100% attendance and excellent awareness.
As stated Rank 1 only costs a fraction of the highest cost and when Combat-rezzed from mid-boss death should always be the first thing you put on: With no BoW and regen enlixirs wasted it's the best thing you can do for your economy.
Zure: The reference was not whether or not Mages could sustain DPS without a shadow priest. That's a given. The question is whether or not the Moonkin can sustain it. Economy is not their strong point and I'd be surprised if the furry monster can maintain 10m worth of wrath-spam required in some encounters.
From experience I can tell you they can. Our boomkin covers SW/S elementals on Vashj solo and still DPSes hard right up to her death. I think a lot of it is due to excellent management of drums of restoration, innervate, pot timers , runes etc (he is an incredible player) but I'm convinced they can do it, it's just more challenging than for other casters.
If the man has to spam everything under the sun to sustain it, perhaps blizzard need to look into their sustainability issues. While I can see you're blessed with what you describe as an exquisite player I'd rather not take my chances with one less accomplished one only to discover he can't sustain himself.
I really think the answer is to boost mage/shaman/moonkin mana regen & reduce vampiric touch to restore ~2-3% of damage as mana ... but to the raid rather than group.
First, this would be a huge nerf to shadow priests. We rely on our own touch mana returns more than any other class. For example, Mind flay is 195 mana without touch returns. But after the rebate, it's only 65 mana because touch gives you 130 mana back. With 2.5% returns, you're looking at a net cost of 130 (double the old net cost), which roughly cuts your sustainability in half. The net cost of Shadow Word Pain increases by 50%, and so on. It looks like the raid would get more mana overall, but priests would run out of mana much sooner, negating any benefit.
Second, this is a big nerf to 5 and 10 man groups. And contrary to popular opinion here, Blizzard cares a lot about balance in those situations. Touch needs to give mana to the group only so that priests don't have dramatically different power levels in 5 man groups versus 25 man raids.
Originally Posted by Iod
Even at 2-3% that's going to have your Shadowpriest threat-capped in very short order. Now if they were to change the threat mechanics of that, I'd be all over it.
Mana regeneration threat is assigned to the person who gained the mana, I believe, not the person who caused the gain.
Tedv: I considered this aspect when I read the post too. It would be utterly out of the question to reduce the priest's self-regen. Zero mana regen is the reason S-priests used to be considered no-raid-viable back before BC.
However, I don't think it'd be hugely overpowering if VT only gave the party you were in half the regen it gives you.
I do think that raid-wide regen is a bad idea though. Having your agro generation depend on how many rogues/feradroods/warriors are in the raid is a bad idea.
If the man has to spam everything under the sun to sustain it, perhaps blizzard need to look into their sustainability issues. While I can see you're blessed with what you describe as an exquisite player I'd rather not take my chances with one less accomplished one only to discover he can't sustain himself.
I would agree, this probably applies to balance druids more than any class, but to the same extent mana management hasn't been fixed *yet* for mages or spriests either. I hope the upcoming changes Kalgan has mentioned rectify that for us, however Blizzard still has a long way to go on this entire front, warlocks may be the only class that has a completely reliable and fair mana management system, as they still sacrifice DPS to regain that mana.
Honestly I see the biggest obstacle to this as the brainstorming. How long did it take for them to come up with VT, applying spell damage to lifetap etc? If they can somehow buff moonkin regen without making dreamstate the cookie cutter resto spec, then I think they may have finally realized what their philosophy needs to be.
I certainly would love it if mana gems had their own cooldown timer, that change alone would make a big difference for mages in dangerous situations, I can't even count the times i've wanted to HS and had it on CD from popping a mana gem just under 2 minutes earlier.
Tedv: I considered this aspect when I read the post too. It would be utterly out of the question to reduce the priest's self-regen. Zero mana regen is the reason S-priests used to be considered no-raid-viable back before BC.
However, I don't think it'd be hugely overpowering if VT only gave the party you were in half the regen it gives you.
I do think that raid-wide regen is a bad idea though. Having your agro generation depend on how many rogues/feradroods/warriors are in the raid is a bad idea.
Well keep in mind that at typical fresh 70 and kara gear levels, the mana returns from a shadow priest are reasonably appropriate. It's only at the high levels of gearing that obscene things happen-- like giving a mage mana faster than he can spend it during bloodlust. So cutting the group returns would hurt 5 man groups in a different way.
What they really need is a way of scaling the vampiric touch returns with the damage spells you cast but NOT the spell damage you have. Something like "While touch is active, shadow spells you cast on the target restore X% of their mana cost to all members of your party". At any rate, this is probably better discussed in a shadow priest thread.
Completely true that they're missplaced in this thread. However, do note the following:
All the group-regen in the game is static. From divine spirit to blessing of wisdom to mana spring, except mana tide which scales with recipient's mana pool and SP regen which scales like a monkey on crack cocaine with SP's gear. Perhaps it's time it was given some kind of restriction before it surpasses chain-pot spam with alchemists stone... Oh wait, it already has...
Mana regen and spell damage are separate scales that should never, ever be combined (I'm looking at you warlocks). Spell damage increases much faster for dps classes than intellect, spirit, etc but our mana expenditure never increases. Frostbolt costs the same at 500 spell damage as it does at 1500. So as long as mana regen is based on a scalar stat, whereas costs don't scale, it's going to cause problems.
Blizz isn't going to merge COS/COE because of 4dps in 5s. Yes pvp/pve crossover is dumb, but Blizz insists on doing it.
Yes damage and mana regen being combined causes balance problems, but Blizz makes 3 out of 5 casters scale like that...and moonkins have other problems looked at first.
Blizzard should just bite the bullet and give mages shaman clearcast.
11/09/07, 4:16 AM
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