That wouldn't increase mage raid synergy, that would just keep it the way it is; with no incentives to bring more than 1 or 2 per raid. Of course now that AM spam is good DPS the tables are turned, but if the mage DPS isnt good anymore (read: pre 2.2), then there really aren't much incentives to bring mages to raids.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
If someone takes 20 stacks, that means it also takes 20 stack of their inventory space. I am pretty sure it wouldn't be standard practice to burn through the stacks just to be an asshat.
I use Trade Dispenser to automate handing out food and water. A couple of my guildies, when feeling mischievous, will repeatedly initiate trades just to empty out my current stock. The automation amuses them, as does my irritation about having to make conjure up more so that the next person doesn't get "I'm out of food/water" messages. (Thankfully Trade Dispenser lets you cap the number of trades so that you can prevent this.)
But you're probably right about the Ritual. Since snapping up a dozen stacks of mana biscuits doesn't annoy me as directly as before, I doubt there's much incentive to try.
I am seeing unbuffed deep fire numbers on ptr that are roughly what I was seeing for AM spam with 2.2's ptr. I mean, I don't see the random 'wtf' high dps reports. But the average is fairly similar. And I'm still wearing more arcane-oriented gear. If I actually had good fire gear, obviously my numbers would go up and I'd start seeing superior results to 2.2 AM spam. At least, I likely would.
So as a class, our dps really isn't going to be going down. The only 'problem' is that everyone else's is going to be going up where as we're going to need to respec to get back to around where we were. Granted, where we were was fairly solidly ahead of the other 'pure' dps classes for most fights. It'll be interesting to see how all this pans out in a real raiding situation.
Anyone done more testing with frost spec on PTR? I know vontre did some theorycrafting that showed it was pretty decent (something like 10 dps higher then fire in 'patchwerk' scenario, but up to 50dps lower in more realistic simulations).
I've always liked frost thematically, but I like performing well even more. If the difference is truly situational and/or negligible between fire and frost (+/- 20dps is negligible imo), me and a few other guild mages are looking forward to speccing frost for the auxiliary benefits. However, other then Vontre's initial theorizing, I haven't seen much else to back it up.
edit: also curious if using the MSd with frost, and casting AM on focus procs would be an increase or decrease of dps (since you'd stop frostbolt cast) and if just using the new CSD would just be a dramatically larger increase. My suspicions say the CSD would be better, or just using a non-meta helm, but sometimes little tricks like that creep up and are hard to model.
Anyone done more testing with frost spec on PTR? I know vontre did some theorycrafting that showed it was pretty decent (something like 10 dps higher then fire in 'patchwerk' scenario, but up to 50dps lower in more realistic simulations).
I've always liked frost thematically, but I like performing well even more. If the difference is truly situational and/or negligible between fire and frost (+/- 20dps is negligible imo), me and a few other guild mages are looking forward to speccing frost for the auxiliary benefits. However, other then Vontre's initial theorizing, I haven't seen much else to back it up.
Fire still tops off as it always did in a PvE situation. Frost, even with Spell Pen and Spell Hit will have the issue of full-resist; incapable of ever having a partial resist.
i always thought that was one of frost's few advantages when running a theorycraft simulation. That fire gets more then 1% total resists, when factoring in partials, even with maxed hit gear.
Vontre did a simulation that shows with full water elemental uptime (meaning he survives the whole time, and you recast on every cooldown) on a patchwerk style encounter, frost won by about 10dps. When you have scenarios that the elemental could die, or you take spell pushback (which frost has no way to reduce) fire wins out again. (edit: I'm not sure he tried to model elemental tricks, other than bloodlust, such as always timing trinkets and other dps boost abilities to coincide with elemental cast. Also, I'm curious if spell haste and this coefficient un-nerf also increases the WE's damage? I would guess no to the coefficient, but haven't seen anything about spell haste effecting the WE, only +dmg and such)
Considering the coefficient nerf that is being removed was the same flat amount to both fireball and frostbolt, frostbolt benefits slightly more to the un-nerf, since it's a faster cast spell. Maybe I'm missing something though.
When you throw in frost's additional benefits, such as intelligent use of iceblock for things that you might normally run out for (saving movement time), ice barrier survivability, arctic winds reduction of damage, added CC ability for trash/hyjal wave mobs etc.. if it can get within 40dps, I'd consider it worthwhile to spec into. That theoretical difference can be made up by good play on my part, to the point where I'm overall competitive with the other mages in my guild, and situationally at an advantage for some encounters.
What kind of frost builds are posters referring to when they mention raid viable frost (or frost/arc or arc/frost) builds? I don't see any specific specs mentioned aside from the 0/0/61 referred to in the OP.
In 2.3, if there are no additional changes, deep frost and deep fire are both viable raiding specs and deep arcane is a dead spec.
Fire will be more dps and less vulnerability to spell knockback. Fire will also slaughter any other spec on any fight with an extended <20% phase.
Frost will be significantly more survivability and basically equivalent dps provided the elemental can be maximized. It will also offer the ability to significantly control adds especially in AoE situations.
Arcane....well.....it's minimized threat for substandard dps with an extreme thirst for mana and horrendous range and extremely mana draining on any encounter involving movement (move midcast and it costs you full price but you get a lot less damage for it - move midrotation and you just blew your rotation as well). With 2T5 it will do less damage then any other spec with the rotations and it gets even worse once you level your gear past that level (2T5 rotations were roughly equivalent to Deep Fire but that was before the Tax was removed). Only advantage is that you can work your way through all the raiding encounters in the game (besides the curator in Arcatraz in karazhan, which isn't really much of a deterrent) without requiring a respec.
i always thought that was one of frost's few advantages when running a theorycraft simulation. That fire gets more then 1% total resists, when factoring in partials, even with maxed hit gear.
Vontre did a simulation that shows with full water elemental uptime (meaning he survives the whole time, and you recast on every cooldown) on a patchwerk style encounter, frost won by about 10dps. When you have scenarios that the elemental could die, or you take spell pushback (which frost has no way to reduce) fire wins out again. (edit: I'm not sure he tried to model elemental tricks, other than bloodlust, such as always timing trinkets and other dps boost abilities to coincide with elemental cast. Also, I'm curious if spell haste and this coefficient un-nerf also increases the WE's damage? I would guess no to the coefficient, but haven't seen anything about spell haste effecting the WE, only +dmg and such)
Considering the coefficient nerf that is being removed was the same flat amount to both fireball and frostbolt, frostbolt benefits slightly more to the un-nerf, since it's a faster cast spell. Maybe I'm missing something though.
When you throw in frost's additional benefits, such as intelligent use of iceblock for things that you might normally run out for (saving movement time), ice barrier survivability, arctic winds reduction of damage, added CC ability for trash/hyjal wave mobs etc.. if it can get within 40dps, I'd consider it worthwhile to spec into. That theoretical difference can be made up by good play on my part, to the point where I'm overall competitive with the other mages in my guild, and situationally at an advantage for some encounters.
It really is Apples and Oranges.
There are way too many factors that play into Fire vs. Frost. There would be several fights that would benefit one and hurt the other spec, or just do neither for both. It really is impractical, but plausible, to really say which is better.
In the PvP world it's more systematic and you can easily track out how well your DPS and so on, but really, in PvE, you have things such as Ignite immunity, knockback (Burning Soul or Ice Barrier to compensate), Frost Nova immunity (burst ice lance damage, etc.
Fire does have the upper hand in sustained high damage (especially with Imp.Scorch), but Frost really depends on Crit on high damage.
In 2.3, if there are no additional changes, deep frost and deep fire are both viable raiding specs and deep arcane is a dead spec.
Fire will be more dps and less vulnerability to spell knockback. Fire will also slaughter any other spec on any fight with an extended <20% phase.
Frost will be significantly more survivability and basically equivalent dps provided the elemental can be maximized. It will also offer the ability to significantly control adds especially in AoE situations.
Arcane....well.....it's minimized threat for substandard dps with an extreme thirst for mana and horrendous range and extremely mana draining on any encounter involving movement (move midcast and it costs you full price but you get a lot less damage for it - move midrotation and you just blew your rotation as well). With 2T5 it will do less damage then any other spec with the rotations and it gets even worse once you level your gear past that level (2T5 rotations were roughly equivalent to Deep Fire but that was before the Tax was removed). Only advantage is that you can work your way through all the raiding encounters in the game (besides the curator in Arcatraz in karazhan, which isn't really much of a deterrent) without requiring a respec.
The problem is that as long as arcane and fire are designed for the same purpose, whichever one does more damage will be considered the PvE spec while the other considered a dead spec. Rather than arguing for a distinct role for each tree we always end up playing tug-of-war for which spec gets the DPS this month. I think it is as much a problem with the mage community as it is with the developers' inability to make up their mind.
What kind of frost builds are posters referring to when they mention raid viable frost (or frost/arc or arc/frost) builds? I don't see any specific specs mentioned aside from the 0/0/61 referred to in the OP.
The arc/frost you hear about is probably some variant on 40/0/21 where you spec Arcane up to get the extra crit bonus from Spell Power. However, the theory indicates that the Arcane-heavy build is superior DPS only if you've got someone else applying Winter's Chill. Personally, I don't hold much truck with this idea because of that reliance on a second mage who is specced deep frost. What if that mage can't make it tonight? What if he dies early in the fight? But if you can always count on an Winter's Chill mage tagging along, maybe this is worthwhile.
As far as frost/arc, most likely it's something akin to 10/0/51 - you get up to Clearcasting in Arcane and then plow the rest into Frost's DPS talents. Been a long, long while since I've raided as Frost, so I don't know if Clearcasting is even necessary to be mana-efficient as Frost; could be that full Frost (0/0/61) may work just fine and give you some extra Frost utility as well. *shrug*
What kind of frost builds are posters referring to when they mention raid viable frost (or frost/arc or arc/frost) builds? I don't see any specific specs mentioned aside from the 0/0/61 referred to in the OP.
I usually ran 4/0/57 with 2 in Subtlety (mainly for AE) and 2 in Focus to have a 99% hitchance in tanking gear (for Spellstealing on Council). I also prefer getting deeper into Frost for Imp CoC, Shatter, Frostbite and even Permafrost over Arcane Concentration b/c i have virtually no mana issues.
The arc/frost you hear about is probably some variant on 40/0/21 where you spec Arcane up to get the extra crit bonus from Spell Power. However, the theory indicates that the Arcane-heavy build is superior DPS only if you've got someone else applying Winter's Chill. Personally, I don't hold much truck with this idea because of that reliance on a second mage who is specced deep frost. What if that mage can't make it tonight? What if he dies early in the fight? But if you can always count on an Winter's Chill mage tagging along, maybe this is worthwhile.
As far as frost/arc, most likely it's something akin to 10/0/51 - you get up to Clearcasting in Arcane and then plow the rest into Frost's DPS talents. Been a long, long while since I've raided as Frost, so I don't know if Clearcasting is even necessary to be mana-efficient as Frost; could be that full Frost (0/0/61) may work just fine and give you some extra Frost utility as well. *shrug*
Yeah, the 40/0/21 was the one I've heard about. Something about arcane spec mages being better at throwing blue bolts than frost spec mages. I doubt I'll ever see winter's chill applied to a raid mob unless I'm the one doing it, so if I do swap over to frost I'll keep that in mind.
Honestly, I just want to see different colored bolts for a little while without sucking too much.
The problem is that as long as arcane and fire are designed for the same purpose, whichever one does more damage will be considered the PvE spec while the other considered a dead spec. Rather than arguing for a distinct role for each tree we always end up playing tug-of-war for which spec gets the DPS this month. I think it is as much a problem with the mage community as it is with the developers' inability to make up their mind.
I agree with that, although I actually thought they did manage to differentiate the 2 specs pretty well before they nerfed the MSD completely into the ground. Since if the MSD wasn't changed (or was nerfed to a lesser degree so that Arcane was still competitive - I thought they would do something like a 5-10 second cooldown) you had Fire with better sustainability for fights with longer duration, incredible dps if the <20% phase was a long one and with far less requirements for group support. Also Fire would be relatively constant dps. Then you had Arcane with basically the same dps but much more reliant on group support for the mana requirements as well as being much more spikey damage, if you got the procs then you would do amazing dps but if they didn't show up then Fire would kick your ass.
With the nerf to MSD they basically might as well have just taken Empowered AM out of the game since AM will not function as a primary nuke and without some other gimmick (and it really would need to be something as easy to obtain as the MSD to be viable) it won't be one until maybe WoTLK and the new talents. AB rotations also won't work without 2T5 and even with that they barely equal the dps from Deep Fire (after the tax is removed) and once you gear past that level Deep Fire will destroy the dps from any of the rotations without any of the timing or mana issues it creates.
Such a shame, I really was liking the spec but starting 150-200dps in the hole with having to chug mana pots every cooldown and praying for enough procs to stay only 100dps lower then Deep Fire just doesn't seem like a whole lot of fun.
What's even worse is that Deep Arcane will be out-dpsed by Deep Frost. At least when you spec Deep Frost you know you are trading some dps for survivability, speccing Deep Arcane means you traded that dps for...... decreased threat I guess (and with the low dps it really shouldn't need to worry about pulling aggro anyway).
Looking at 2.3 patch notes aaaaand... something came to mind.
Would you trade roughly 2% damage, 1% crit, and deep fire "utility" stuff for 30% of your spirit regen in the FSR? In short, under what situations (if any) would you consider an 18/40/3 or related build taking advantage of the newly buffed arcane meditation talent? Something like this?
I'm not really sure how exactly the numbers would turn out. Perhaps the increased regen would allow you to run molten armor where you'd needed mage armor before? Maybe you could go without pots? Perhaps you could yield your spot in the SP group to another player? Not sure - what do you think?
I think its a good thing its in the arcane tree, because fire doesn't need it.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
Fire still tops off as it always did in a PvE situation. Frost, even with Spell Pen and Spell Hit will have the issue of full-resist; incapable of ever having a partial resist.
This is untrue, frost just gets a free pass here. No partials, 99% hit chance.
Arcane does have dps advantages in usability with it's resistance to pushback, negligible threat concerns, instant damage and high rate of fire. Utility-wise it's the best spell we have, and frostbolt is the worst. But it can't ever make up for the whopping 10-12% damage lead of deep fire builds post-patch due to poor scaling.
My frost simulation was done with bloodlust stacking against water elemental, I programmed it like that. Fire was done with bloodlust during the last 45 seconds of the mob's health, so includes a good amount of Molten Fury. I considered execute range to be around 15% of the total dps time, since execute range goes by faster thanks to warriors, bloodlust/timers, and fire mages.
I know there are mages in top-notch guilds who use frost full time, it's not inadvisable. Ice Block is the clutch move here, as there are certain things you can just flat out ignore when you have it. Like doomfire/fear on archimonde. Frostbolt also has the least usability, as it suffers from ramping (stacking winter's chill), has no pushback resistance, and a moderately long cast time. Longer cast times increase the chance of interruption and the dps lost from that interruption. Additionally the water elemental is very volatile, there are some fights where he's just not going to live, it takes a lot of attention to keep him up and dpsing hard. As well as a shaman for totem double-dipping. Frost is certainly viable, but I think the most difficult to play.
Reliability of raid spells would look like this (when specced):
Fire Blast -> Arcane Missiles -> Scorch -> Fireball -> Frostbolt -> Arcane Blast -> Water Elemental
Arcane Missiles is the most likely base nuke to deliver the maximum dps, fireball is middle of the road and frostbolt is the most vulnerable to fuckups. This would be a good working model if AM was close enough to fireball that utility advantages could give it an edge, but it's not even close. You can practically outdo AM by spamming scorch - ok an exaggeration, but it's not terribly far off the mark, and the combination of scorch and fireball give fire spec a utility level that comes pretty close to Arcane Missiles. Flattens it if you're worried about mana at all.
What's left for arcane? Well there's the old 40/18/3, which doesn't look -too- bad if you've got the old 2-piece T5. Arcane Blast rotations are pretty much the bottom of usability, though, extremely vulnerable to interruption of dps (shit I fucked up my cycle) with variant pushback protection and a good number of long, slow spells. If you really need lower threat, spec frost and let the water elly take some. The only thing good about arcane now is sustainable AoE, where arcane explosion spam still dominates. Cool.
I'll be speccing fire, or maybe ice if the raid leaders like the idea.
I think I've asked this question 3 times now and not gotten an answer, if someone did answer it I apologize.
How good are the arcane/fire specs compared to deep fire in the light of the coefficient nerf undone? Specifically looking at 33 28, 33 25 3 and 40 18 3.
I'm asking because I'm unable to draw my own conclusions based on my own PTR tests, I prefer the arcane builds and found them to be pretty solid atleast on Dr. Boom.
There are also 2 additional advantages of Frost when doing trash:
The main nuke (Frostbolt) stacks the debuff, so you get at least some benefit from it while you get practically none from improved Scorch as it's not worth to Scorch up an enemy that's dying in 15 seconds anyway.
Ignite plain sucks on trash compared to 200% crits, when you have some critluck on a trash mob, you may lose a lot of damage due to the way ignite works currently when another spell crits while ignite is on the mob. For example a 15 second fight with 100% crits and 1000 DPS noncrit main nukes for both specs:
Hmm I didn't see it mentioned, but anyone think using 2 piece T4 would be viable for the heavy push back fights like najentus and p2 RoS etc? I know this would break the 4 piece t6 for those that have it but for those of us that are still mid BT progression, I think 2 piece t4 to break 4 piece t5 would be a decent option for pushback fights especially for frost specs.
What kind of frost builds are posters referring to when they mention raid viable frost (or frost/arc or arc/frost) builds? I don't see any specific specs mentioned aside from the 0/0/61 referred to in the OP.
Hmm I didn't see it mentioned, but anyone think using 2 piece T4 would be viable for the heavy push back fights like najentus and p2 RoS etc? I know this would break the 4 piece t6 for those that have it but for those of us that are still mid BT progression, I think 2 piece t4 to break 4 piece t5 would be a decent option for pushback fights especially for frost specs.
I mentioned it a few weeks ago here. I used to switch 4*T6 for 2*T4 and 2*T5 (for AB spam in p3) btw. RoS being pretty much the only fight with serious pushbacks (and i seriously can't recall any unpreventable pushbacks in any other bossfight, maybe someone enlighten me ...) also doesn't hurt frosts viability as a pve-spec over all the current ~25 boss encounters too imo for this reason.
The whole discussion, which seems more like a philosophical controversary between the 3-4 specs, goes a bit too far for me anyway. In the end you spec what it's best for the bossfight you and your guild is currently learning. If it's a pushback-heavy/aggro-sensitive fight you go AM, on a fire-immune fight with serious, erratic AE-damaging frost would be a reasonable choice, and on a huhuran-style boss with a cakewalk p1 and an insane enrage phase you take fire for molten fury. Or at least you should if you want to min-max.
Theorycrafting is clearly fun when you are otherwise bored from farming BT for the 27th time. The benefit from clearing it within 4:59 instead of a full 5 hrs due to an optimized spec is still rather marginal i guess
To give an idea, doing 'casual' 1-button mashing, I do 0.078s - 0.109s.
Spamming as fast as possible results in 0.031s - 0.047s between keys. This is not doable for a long time under realistic situation.
If I bind 4 consecutive keys and 'twiddle' my fingers over them, I get 0.029s - 0.063s.
A funny coincident, 0.031s is exactly the same lowest result I get when spamming a key, so I can no claim to be "as fast as Manly!"
When you make your macro, do you have any wait time between "button down" and "button up"? And also, have you gotten repeat options to work, specifically the toggle option? I can't seem to get that working. It could be interesting to see how many casts, if any, would be lost with a repeated key press at the exact time with the new system.
10/17/07, 2:36 PM
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