◊ Vontre

The modeler shows arcane/ice with ice floes/AP stacking would be 1575.45 dps. That is without Winter's Chill. So with Winter's Chill it could be upwards of 1700, which handily beats fire. Of course you still have problems with pushback and spell selection.

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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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Mysticfox

This change is looking really good for fire, with a 2/48/11 spec you can time the Icy Veins to be up everytime your Flame Cap is. Just imagine how much DPS you'd be able to put out popping everything at once. Once the boss hits 20% for Molten Fury you could pop everything... Drums of Battle, Heroism, Combustion, Icy Veins, Flame Cap, Destruction Potion, Skull, Icon (or Hex Shrunken Head). With all those effects up at the same time w/ Molten Fury we could see some very big burst numbers. 2500+ DPS anyone?

 

◊ Vontre

I would caution that this ability also seems too powerful, don't be surprised or disappointed if a nerf comes along.

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Cardynal

That is going to be pretty nice for both fire and frost. I'm surprised they're increasing mage dps again so quickly.

However it also increases our consumed mana per second even further, making us further dependent on a Shadow Priest. The new mana gems should help with this, but it would be interesting to see if these changes will give an overall increase or decrease in mana longevity. The fact that you would be losing ClearCasting to pick up this new talent for fire will also be further detrimental to our mana consumption.

I am calculating around a 2% overall increase for fire as well...so I'm not going to complain too much =)

 

Duodecimal

Bah, before all that "overpowered" stuff starts getting slung around, remember that we are Mages. Mages! We're ranged rogues. We're not overpowered until Rogues can't keep up with us, a non-hybrid DPS class. As far as utility goes, Rogues are about as utilitous (it's a word now, dammit) as mages in Raid encounters.

 

Cardynal

Popping that much in top end gear would break 3kdps

 

Lhivera

Yes, the reduced cooldown on Cold Snap is what's really going to give Frost a boost compared to Fire and Arcane. Every mage can get 20 seconds of haste every 3 minutes. Arcane/Frost and Deep Frost can cold snap it on the new shorter cooldown. Deep Frost can cold snap it on an even shorter cooldown thanks to Ice Floes, and gets increased use out of the Water Elemental as well.

 

◊ manly

3k dps for a short duration has no real purpose when you realize that over a flattened timeline you still fall flat out behind destro locks. Destro locks can handily do 2.1 - 2.2k dps with just a resto shaman. I have never gotten 2k dps and rarely broke 1.9k dps.

Icy veins will help, but doesn't do anything to help us beat destro locks. They need to change a stupid amount of stuff to make us compete with destro locks in fact, probably too much to hope to get this fixed ever.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Whiteknight

I've seen you comment on CoE a couple of times now pointing out that raiding mages very rarely get this curse. I also remember folk mentioning that spell penetration was a worthless stat because of CoE...

Just wondering, in light of the realization that CoE is often not worth putting up, is spell penetration for mages still so worthless? Or is it just really really bad and CoE has no bearing on it?

It seems to me that if you're struggling to put out 1.9k dps as a mage, compared to your warlocks putting out 2.2k, subtlety (for example) is something of a waste, and you might get more benefit changing one or two enchants here and there to pick up a small baseline of penetration.

Obviously I'm not a mage, and I'm not exactly up-to-date with the current theory crafting for this. It's more a personal curiosity.

 

Cardynal

Manly, do you ever have CoE up? We run with 3-4 mages and always have CoE up.


And for these destro locks, are they using a buffing curse or dps curse?

 

Hate Monkey

It's barely better than a Trolls Berserking racial, so doubt it will see any nerfs. Thought this does need a lot of testing from Trolls to provide an accurate amount of dps gain by speccing into it.

 

Sackobones

We have 3 locks in our raids and 4 mages. We only skipped COE when we all went arcane.

 

Maraji

I always assumed it was the 10% extra fire and frost damage from CoE that benefitted us, not so much the 88 less target resistance.

Curse of the Elements - Spells - World of Warcraft

 

◊ manly

Having COE depends on having 3 warlocks. We rarely do.
And no 2.1-2.2k dps is without dps curse. Just s.priest and resto shaman. If they had an elemental shaman and dps curse they would probably get 2.3k+. (and I'm understating things here, COD is 200 dps, elemental shaman would give them 3% more crit and 3% more hit, which is a huge boost to destro lock dps thanks to the best scaling in the game. It would probably be more like 2350+ dps).

EDIT: I'm talking sustained DPS using the calculations from WWS. Violation regularly 'rates' our warlocks as having 2.6-2.9k dps whereas for the same dps WWS ranks them as 2.1-2.2k.
Well, I don't use subtlety enchant on the cloak. To be honest all cloak enchants are almost universally uninteresting for mage dps. If I could get like 10 stamina I would probably take it over 20 spell penetration, or subtlety, or dodge or even shadow resist. I could debate on the relative worth of every enchant, but under realistic scenario its hardly more than just arguing for the sake of arguing - almost every TC mage will agree that the benefit is small enough to ignore.

I use 20 spell penetration on my cloak merely because it was most readily avaiable and can be used for supremus. It might just as well not be there and I would never notice.

With all this said, there is no conclusive evidence that bosses have mitigable resists. It is definitely true that if a boss ever has any resist 88 penetration from COE would be more than required. Thing is, every mage has 10 spell penetration because all specs have 2 points in arcane. It is arguable, and as I said, currently unknown, whether cloak enchant + 10 spell penetration from talents is enough to mitigate all the partials from bosses.

What we do know is that it seems COE has no impact on partial resists compared to having no coe but using 30 spell penetration.

My point was mostly that if the partial resists played an important role in a PVE context, then the worth of COE would be high enough to be valued as the 2nd best curse. The net impact of this would be that COS > COE > COR rather than the current case of COR > COS > COE

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Vhad

Had a destro warlock today getting aggro on Kaz'rogal doing something absurd like 2900 dps for the duration untill he died at 30% and still was 2nd or 3rd on dmg done, only topped by another destro lock...

What!?

 

Prom

bringing 2-3 warlocks to the raid means that they need to be willing to put up CoE.
Regardless, warlock DPS in HJ and BT is way too high. It would be nice if they could change our spell dmg coeffs. so that we gain more past 1000spell dmg for example.

Im curious to see where these changes lead us, however im sceptical that we shall see a substantial increase in dps.

 

Roywyn

CoE/CoS are put up for the +10% (13% talented) damage increase of fire/frost or arcane/shadow spells. The 88 resistance reduction is completely useless on most raid mobs.

Karazhan Sentinels have ~150-200 ArcaRes, Rage Winterchill has ~200 FrostRes, Supremus has ~200 FireRes and Felhunters in Hyjal trash have some universal resistance.
No other level 70 raid mob I know of has any resistance that can be overcome by any means. None. At all.

Some time ago, mobs could have negative resistances causing extra damage on spell hits. Then they capped resistance at 0 (or at 8*level_difference or so for the unmitigatable 5% partial resists), making the curses mostly useless, and they added the +10% damage to compensate for it.

Mages usually pick a spell penetration enchant because the other alternatives even less useful, and pick the Arcane Subtlety talent for the threat reduction on Arcane Explosion.

 

Beska

Is 2/48/11 being discussed as having the potential to out-dps the oh-so-classic 10/48/3?

 

Koosha

It easily will as long as you can keep your mana up without clearcast, which shouldn't be a problem at all.

 

Whiteknight

I guess spell pen really is as worthless as ever. Oh well.


Instead of adjusting CoE/CoS, wouldn't just giving one of them to mages instead of warlocks fix the problem?

 

Beska

Keeping up Fire Vulnerability and a curse at the same time oh god.

 

Zure

You know, with T6 crit rate, and a moonkin, elem shaman, ret paladin, 33/28 outperforms 10/48/3 in single target damage. The breakeven point is a little over 46%. The fact that Vontre doesn't model AP (combined with AP being a much bigger boost than Combustion), and that the last 20% of a mob's health tends to go down at a faster rate than the first 80% biases his model towards deep fire. There's absolutely no reason to bash it universally... it's a very niche spec.

Granted... once these change hit, it will not be able to catch up to fire + 11 frost. Still, it's worth noting.

****************

I think a very useful measure to have would be a rough average length of every fight for each tier of dungeon. We could use that to determine the approximate value of cooldown based abilities. I'll lay out an example: It would all be very rough, but if we had 2-3;3-4;4-5;4-5; 9-10 as average fight lengths, we could see that you might get to use a three minute cooldown once in the shortest fight, twice in the next three longest fights, and thrice to four times (just say 3.25) in the longest.

If this were the case, we could then divide 24.5 minutes by 10.25 uses of the cooldown and get an effective cooldown of 2:24. This means the cooldown is 25% more valuable than we would expect by just using uptime divided by cooldown.

Of course this number is highly imperfect as the number of dps, class composition, gear level, etc. all change the average kill time across guilds and even within guilds over time. But, and this is important, anything is better than what we have now, which is simply assuming the fight lasts for an infinite duration, since we know this is false.

 

◊ manly

Well, we have never ran with more than 3 mages, and we have never ran with less than 3 warlock/s.priest (in total). In other words its always better to have COS over COE. Anyway, COS means more shadow priest mana, which means more dps from shaman, s.priest and warlocks (I mean, in addition to the dps gain from COS itself). A fire mage would hardly feel a difference since fire mage has pretty much infinite mana. I could probably cut 30%-40% of my total available mana on any given fight and keep fireball spam. I use almost exclusively flamecaps and destro pots. I don't get anywhere near anything that could be associated with mana problems, until I need to AOE, in which case I will be fine but without a bunch of spare mana.

I doubt any guild can realistically want COE over COS. To even get to make that choice implies you have at least 2 warlocks. If you have 2 warlocks you have almost assuredly at least 1 shadow priest for shadow weaving. You might have a group composition with 3 lock/s.priest and 4 mages, in which case COE is probably better than COS, but I would have a hard time to imagine this case being common.

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Kaimani

I've had great success with 33/28 as well (although I can't seem to convince anyone that the difference between it and deep fire is minimal). Under ideal circumstances it's capable of keeping pace with deep fire. That said, this next patch will be the last nail in the coffin for arc/fire hybrids - nobody in their right mind will skip Icy Veins for any raid spec. Goodbye PoM Pyro.

Depending on how drastically the coldsnap cooldown reduction is (and whether it effects Icy Veins) I might have to entertain the possibility of going deep frost in the future. 2/48/11 seems like a no brainer, but this talent actually opens up a lot of possibilities.

 

Antoine

Quick clarification: there's no way a Warlock in top-end gear (enough to do 2k dps) will have less than ~195 hit, so the crit is the only real gain from an elemental shaman.