Just have a question about Amp Magic and raid bosses. My guild just killed Kael last week and we're about to enter MH once we down Kael again to key a few more people. It seems like Amp Magic is pretty popular in MH/BT after reading some post mainly by Andersnordic and Pintofbrew. As a mage I only really ever put AM up when I know zero magic dmg will be hitting the tank, ie Gruul and a few other bosses. Is it pretty much tested and true that even if the tank is taking SOME magic damage, it's still worth it from a healing perspective? Which bosses in MH/BT would you NOT recommend using AM on?
Can someone confirm this multiple MoE mana return on AOE? I seem to remember when the BC talents were announced a number of people were claiming Combustion-stacking and BW with last charge into the middle of the chaotic BG which was popular at the time would make it return many times it's own mana cost and as a result Blizz nerfed AoE to proc a max of 1x MoE mana return (or was it "up to base cost of spell"?).
Maledict: You are correct, I miscalculated. I thought using 2/3 permafrost there'd be enough points but I must have miss-clicked and left some talent 4/5 down the line when I checked feasibility of the spec.
As a mage I only really ever put AM up when I know zero magic dmg will be hitting the tank, ie Gruul and a few other bosses. Is it pretty much tested and true that even if the tank is taking SOME magic damage, it's still worth it from a healing perspective? Which bosses in MH/BT would you NOT recommend using AM on?
Amplify Magic is only harmful when your tank takes a significant amount of magic from many sources of small amounts of magic damage.
The amount of extra damage taken is affected by resistance and also by damge multipliers.
I think the common rule of thumb is that the break point is when he takes magic damage as often as he is healed.
The only bosses I wouldn't use it on are Vaelastrasz (constant fire nova), Hydross (extra damage multiplied by his aura) and Doomwalker (enraged crushes + lightning gibs), and even those are debatable.
Amplify is also beneficial on Kael'thas, the absorption gain from PW:Shield is higher than the damage gain of his pyroblast.
Use dampen magic on the imp tank on Illhoof though
Edit:
About MoE - it can only return mana once per cast. I bugs out now and then though, yielding multiple mana returns.
I haven't heard about someone who could reproduce that effect consistently.
Can someone confirm this multiple MoE mana return on AOE?
MOE will occasionally proc twice for an AOE. I've personally never been able to consistently reproduce it. It may be due to the mobs being AOEd having different debuffs and that somehow interacting with MOE in a wacky way (eg. the Seal of Light and Unstable Affliction bug) or perhaps it has something to do with the way simultaneous combat events are resolved in parallel in semi-isolation (eg. you can Shaman Purge Divine Shield if you land the Purge as the DS is cast).
10:48'38.125 Baalzaman gains 352 Mana from Master of Elements
.125 Baalzaman gains 352 Mana from Master of Elements
10:50'58.781 Baalzaman gains 353 Mana from Master of Elements
.781 Baalzaman gains 352 Mana from Master of Elements
.781 Baalzaman gains 352 Mana from Master of Elements
10:53'00.671 Baalzaman gains 353 Mana from Master of Elements
.671 Baalzaman gains 353 Mana from Master of Elements
10:56'23.984 Baalzaman gains 353 Mana from Master of Elements
.984 Baalzaman gains 352 Mana from Master of Elements
It only seems to occur with flamestrike, I have blastwave and it doesn't seem to occur with that
After doing some testing on the PTR im having some questions and would apreciate some input.
It look like 10/48/3 specs could be replaced by 10/40/11 or 0/40/21 for pve raiding.
40/21 giving you 40 seconds of haste instead of 20 at the cost of reduced agro from arcane explosion and clearcasting.
(which will probably hurt in BT/MH, my current raiding content)
0/40/21:
Do you think its worth getting coldsnap at the cost of 2/2 subtlety or would you rather drop 2 points in fire?
To reach combustion and 5/5 empowered fireball youll have to drop 3 points out of either scorch moe pyromaniac or playing with fire. (kinda ignoring blastwave pyroblast and others here). What are your ideas on where to drop these points? Im thinking it makes most sense to take them from pyromaniac.
Has anyone modded these changes into vontre's dps spreadsheet?
Wws testing on Dr. Boom gives some indication but with 5 mages nuking him he simply dies too fast for a good comparison.
I can see how 40/21 would be good for bosses, but I'm personally not at all comfortable in Hyjal without Subtlety, so I'll probably be going 2/48/11. I'm also unwilling to lose the DPS talents from fire for 40/21, as I think PwF, Pyromaniac, MoE etc. are just better. I'm just going to drop the talents that currently don't help me in order to pick up Icy Veins, and right now that's Arcane Focus and Clearcasting.
Pure PvE build, you lose 1% damage with playing with fire, 1% crit/1% mana cost with pyromaniac, blast wave, 1 in MoE, and gain frostbite/shatter/cold snap
Edit: Btw i don't know what's so great about subtlety, if aggro's a problem use flamestrike, or single target. Screwing up your talent spec for something so minor is not worth it
Pure PvE build, you lose 1% damage with playing with fire, 1% crit/1% mana cost with pyromaniac, blast wave, 1 in MoE, and gain frostbite/shatter/cold snap
Edit: Btw i don't know what's so great about subtlety, if aggro's a problem use flamestrike, or single target. Screwing up your talent spec for something so minor is not worth it
Cold Snap Icy Veins is probably not going to make up for 1% damage and 1% crit loss, although maybe it could I guess.
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
Can someone confirm that the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond was changed to "at least 2 blue gems" on the PTR please? I tried checking thottbot but it doesn't list requirements.
Can someone confirm that the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond was changed to "at least 2 blue gems" on the PTR please? I tried checking thottbot but it doesn't list requirements.
Yes that's confirmed.
With the testing I just did on Boom on the PTR, I was pulling 1700dps with no consumable usage and CoE as 2/48/11, and I don't have a Skull of Gul'dan yet either. No doubt that with a fully raid buffed, Destrustion Pot, Flamecap usage during Bloodlust+IV+Berserking(troll only) 2000ish dps sustained, and with a Skull of Gul'dan, and easy 2500+ dps if not more possible.
It's also looking like that a 0/50/11 build is going to be superior.
Guess we actually have a reason to use Invis now, and possibly Evocation.
EDIT: After some primitive number crunching, and I'm not sure how accurate this will be, but after dropping clearcasting, the value of crit to damage has nearly doubled. Right now, 1 crit rating is worth ~.7 damage, but with the changes on the ptr I'm getting 1 crit rating is worth 1.2-1.3 damage. This is due in fact to the loss of Clearcasting and IV being able to cause more Ignite stacking.
Last edited by Hate Monkey : 11/25/07 at 12:07 AM.
EDIT: After some primitive number crunching, and I'm not sure how accurate this will be, but after dropping clearcasting, the value of crit to damage has nearly doubled. Right now, 1 crit rating is worth ~.7 damage, but with the changes on the ptr I'm getting 1 crit rating is worth 1.2-1.3 damage. This is due in fact to the loss of Clearcasting and IV being able to cause more Ignite stacking.
How do you figure? What metric are you using--DPS? DPM?
EDIT: After some primitive number crunching, and I'm not sure how accurate this will be, but after dropping clearcasting, the value of crit to damage has nearly doubled. Right now, 1 crit rating is worth ~.7 damage, but with the changes on the ptr I'm getting 1 crit rating is worth 1.2-1.3 damage. This is due in fact to the loss of Clearcasting and IV being able to cause more Ignite stacking.
I don't understand what you meant by your last sentence. How does IV causing more ignite stacks gives crit more value? Its no longer the old days of rolling ignites, so I don't really see the point. I also don't understand how the loss of clearcasting increases the value of crit rating.
EDIT: After some primitive number crunching, and I'm not sure how accurate this will be, but after dropping clearcasting, the value of crit to damage has nearly doubled. Right now, 1 crit rating is worth ~.7 damage, but with the changes on the ptr I'm getting 1 crit rating is worth 1.2-1.3 damage. This is due in fact to the loss of Clearcasting and IV being able to cause more Ignite stacking.
I don't understand this at all. Icy Veins doesn't modify crit bonus damage. I can see how the loss of Arcane Concentration will cause MoE's mana returns to constitute a greater percentage of your overall mana returns, but then how does that factor into a comparison vs. +damage, which has never affected our mana return at all? And so far as I'm aware, Ignite doesn't really "stack"; two ignites overlapping don't do any more damage than the same ignites would do separated.
Man, I've been trying to convey my thought process into words everyone else can understand, but I just can't seem to get it right.
When you stack IV, Bloodlust, Skull of Gul'dan, and Troll Berserking(in my case) you can get your Fireball cast down to a state below the GCD, which allows for Ignites to stack nearly twice as fast as normal, causing your DPS too nearly double, and DPM, depending upon how long the Ignite ticks for to double. Ignites still stack, but not the way they did before, so it takes a longer chain of crits to get to the point you're probably thinking of, but still possible.
But basically, by dropping clearcasting your longevity declines to such an extent that using Evocation is nearly a must at all points. And the only way to bring your longevity back up is to crit more, and as a side product of critting more, you get more ignite chains which raise your DPS up to a point which is higher than getting straight damage.
One thing I did forget to mention though is that those numbers were for what I was running with on the ptr, which was 39% Fire crit, and 1289 Fire damage. So at that amount of crit and damage, the new numbers should fit, but for less than that, I am unsure of right now.
I hope that is a translation of my thoughts that you can understand, and see what I mean by crit getting a higher value with the loss of Clearcasting.
Ignites don't stack in any non-linear fashion though. Ignite is 40% of your crit damage(and sometimes less if it bugs), but never, ever more. So there's no way for critting more to do what you're saying.
All I can tell is you're saying that stacking all those things has a lot of burst dps, which is fairly obvious, but I don't see how it provides any novel reason that crit contributes more to your damage than before. That just doesn't make sense.
Maybe you should just show some of the math that you're doing that implies this suddenly boosted crit value?
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
I'll do some more testing tomorrow to try and confirm my numbers.
All I know is that by the losing Clearcasting, there only way to make up for the mana lost is to Evocate earlier in a fight, or get more crit so you don't have to evocate. Take the theoretical maximum damage done during on evocation period, figure out how much crit you need to get that damage back vs how much +damage needed to make up for that. The crit value scales much much faster than +damage does for that period of time. And by increasing your crit rate overall to compensate for that dps downtime of using evocation, you then prolong the during needed to evocate, and cut down on how long you hold that evocation cast. So by taking the already suggested 1crit:.7 damage ratio, and factoring down the damage and dps loss of casting Evocation over the course of the fight, your crit:damage ratio gets increased to nearly 1crit:1.2-1.3 damage.
Not exact formulas used, but gives an overall idea of what happens when.
My understanding was they put a cooldown on master of elements proc to stop it procing multiple times on aoe. This had the side effect that if you crit a fireball and fireblast at the same time only one would give back mana. This would also explain the unusual multi proc from aoe's. The damage to some of the targets is being processed slightly later and so the cooldown is over.
I'll do some more testing tomorrow to try and confirm my numbers.
All I know is that by the losing Clearcasting, there only way to make up for the mana lost is to Evocate earlier in a fight, or get more crit so you don't have to evocate.
Can't agree with that, as typical 10/48/3 mage you cant run oom with a good bt geared shadow priest if you spam fireballs. So ditching out clearcastng will hardly have any effect on the mana situation.
Hate Monkey: You have posted what seems to have caused a ripple in this thread: "allows for Ignites to stack nearly twice as fast as normal". What does this mean? How does an Ignite "stack" other than the latent damage from the previous ingite simply adding on to the damage of the new ignite? Assume two spells, both critting for 100 damage: The first one assigns two tics of 20 damage but before the last tic is done the new spell crits, assigning 2x20 of it's own. The ignite then adds the remaining 20 of the previous one which has been (I'll use what I understand as) "stacked" and results in 2x30 tics, which is exactly the same as would have been done given no haste at all.
Unless you're implying/can prove that the new ignite falsely gives, eg, 2 new stacks of 40 (because it can't calculate the 1st tic has been consumed and is simply adding 40+40 and spreading it over the new two tics) I'm failing to understand how you come up with 1crit = 1.4dmg. Even if stacking a dozen buffs brings you to GCD casting speed; what percentage of the fight do you expect to remain in that bracket and how do you presume this has such a huge knock-on effect as to double Crit value?
All evidence I've seen of ignites occurring after previous ones have already been on has pointed to ignite tics being lost in the flow of information. How many times have you seen fireball-fireblast double-dipping resulting in only Fblast's ignite ticking? This was the main reason I advocate against 33.28.0: Critting repeatedly sometimes gives full ignites and some times not.
I think that posting the maths with which you came up with the crit values would help a lot more than trying to verbalize what is a rather hard thing to explain. I'm very curious to see concrete evidence/proof of what's going on with ignite.
Even with the loss of clearcasting there should be no need to use evocation as Fire. A Shadow Priest and Resto Shaman should be all you need to sustain constant casting. Remove either or both of those and you'll have to start using consumables or mage armor. Using mana potions over destruction potions should be enough to fix any mana problems.
I'll do some more testing tomorrow to try and confirm my numbers.
All I know is that by the losing Clearcasting, there only way to make up for the mana lost is to Evocate earlier in a fight, or get more crit so you don't have to evocate. Take the theoretical maximum damage done during on evocation period, figure out how much crit you need to get that damage back vs how much +damage needed to make up for that. The crit value scales much much faster than +damage does for that period of time. And by increasing your crit rate overall to compensate for that dps downtime of using evocation, you then prolong the during needed to evocate, and cut down on how long you hold that evocation cast. So by taking the already suggested 1crit:.7 damage ratio, and factoring down the damage and dps loss of casting Evocation over the course of the fight, your crit:damage ratio gets increased to nearly 1crit:1.2-1.3 damage.
Not exact formulas used, but gives an overall idea of what happens when.
You're suggesting that, in a scenario where someone has to evocate near the very end of a fight, crit could have the effect of prolonging your dps time long enough so that you need to evocate for a shorter duration or not at all. This in itself assumes you evocate near the end of the fight, for one. In addition, the marginal DPM benefit of 1 crit rating is almost negligibly larger than its DPS benefit (by percentage--that is, almost all of the DPM benefit comes from increasing DPS and very little from decreasing the effective mana cost).
Furthermore, much depends on the actual length of the fight and what percentage of time the 8 seconds of evocation is to the overall fight length.
One thing that has not been discussed is whether or not MOE + DB/Pyro/BW is better than 6% Clearcasting in terms of mana return and at what point your crit rate would make that be the case. I'm horrible with these simulations so I'll leave that to others more versed in them but to kick start things here is the talent build I came up with that includes 3 in clear casting as well as all the important fire talents and IV.
11/24/07, 1:16 AM
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