◊ manly

As odd as this might sound, I disagree that mages need a DPS boost. As I said many times in the past, I do gueninely believe that mage buffs (namely fire vulnerability and winter's chill) don't really serve as group buffs much as they are really more like a 'ramp-up time' or rather an 'upkeep cost' to mage dps.

With this said, the real problem is that COE is too narrow. It does something that is absurdly narrow -- it boost mage dps in raids where you have 3+ warlocks and 1+ mage (notice how I changed my stance on this and said 1 mage). 1 mage if your mage can push 2k dps, 2 if he can't. Typically this means 2+ mages. Merging COS and COE is just one of the possible solutions, but be aware that there are many others. As crazy as this might sound, you could also give COE to mages, foregoing forever the possibility of maledictioned COE, and mages and lock would be on equal footing (and obviously warlocks would lose COE). Although, to be honest, I don't know anymore if mages are on equal footing. I got a tremendous dps boost from icy veins, enough in fact to truly compete with destro locks (and beat them?). Just to prove my point, I got 2189 dps on teron this week without COE. I would never have had that without icy veins. The DPS boost is stupidly noticeable. The major difference between mages and destro locks is that we DO have cooldowns, whereas their dps is mostly constant. Our cooldowns can be a curse and a boon. If you play your cards right, they should put you ahead of destro locks. In cases where you do something else than spam-casting, cooldowns are a good thing because they allow you to maximize your damage for the window of time you can DPS.

If anything, I don't believe a post here and there about it will really do anything. I think the best way to start is to:

1- come to a consensus as to what is being agreed upon (mage vs destro lock dps, group buffs/synergies etc.)
2- create a new thread elaborating the 'problem' and propose possible solutions (I had in mind to do that for a while, but icy veins kinda changed my stance on that)
3- if you want to spread the word, write it in your sig. both your EJ sig and wow forums sig.

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andastra

The CoE I agree with. It seems the most glaring and the easiest to fix.

I would say still take a look at mana regeneration. The difference between having a shadow priest and not is night and day. Compare that with destro locks. They take a dps hit without a shadow priest, but not to the point of having to do all sorts of stuff or pause dps to save mana. The reason this isn't as much of a problem right now is that most BT/Hjyal bosses are less than 5 minutes long.

Another is stamina. There are some fights with random burst damage and it is a lot safter to be a 13k hp lock than a 9k hp mage. I just think there should be a trade off between raid survivability and dps.

 

drowsy

Things like raidwide buffs and group auras are nice, but something that every class seems to have.

I'd like to see somethig like icy veins made targetable, maybe even stack across mages (and retuned if that makes the numbers unreasonable). The concept of the old rolling ignite where multiple players synergize into giving a great burst to one player is not really something that exists in game today (except power infusion?), though I admit it is still very interesting to me because I was not a mage at the time. Mages have no synergy at all across specs right now, but coordinating stacking veins with other class cooldowns would add an interesting wrinkle to fireball spam.

edit: I meant icy veins, not cold snap. Durrrr.

 

◊ manly

Err I'm sorry but there's a few things that cannot be done. Namely, the return of 1 ignite shared for all mages. It used to make sense back when 20% crit rate was considered 'some seriously solid gear'. Nowadays you can gear with a base 50%+ crit rate using the underwhelming 33/28/0 spec. Second, critting delays the ignite unlike the way it used to be (not to mention, if my rolling ignite theory is correct mages would constantly lose ignite damage by overriding each other ignite). The end result of doing that post TBC would be one of 2 things:

1- either it would largely suck and mages would not get their ignite to tick ever the more you stack mages (because ignite would be constantly pushed back). Note how this goes directly against stacking mages.
2- or mages would specifically adapt a playstyle made to abuse 'rolling ignites', which will be a total clusterfuck to coordinate.

Either way, its not a good idea. Resetting cold snap across all mages suffers the major problem that it is only good for mages speccing frost in the first place, which is the same problem we currently have. We don't even have intra-class synergy. At least all warlock specs can realistically deal shadow damage and benefit from COS or ISB. This change would give rise to 2.6k+ dps mages (hello permanent WE), which is not a good thing.

If you want to give a good reason to invite more than 1 mage in a raid you're realistically looking for some group/raid buff somewhere along the lines of:

- every mage crit (from whatever spell, including arcane missiles) increases raid-wide haste/spell haste rating by 5. Stacks 10 times. Lasts 2 seconds.

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drowsy

Sorry, I meant to say icy veins and not cold snap. It wouldn't have to be that or ignite necessarily, just the idea being that synergizing into buffing a single target would be an interesting change in mechanics from group buffing that many other classes have. I just meant to use icy veins as an example because it is shallow enough in the tree that fire and arcane specs can fit it in. I should probably stop now before we get too far off topic though.

 

LiquidHAL

If we're considering spells that would require bringing more than one mage, I was thinking about the naga castes in zangar who create a glyph circle on the ground that slowly ticks, and if you stay in it when it's done you get nuked for a considerable amount of damage. It would be interesting if they gave mages something like that, only it took 2-3 mages to activate, left a semi-long debuff on the effected target, and caused no threat. i'd certainly be more interested in that than another "increase damage by 5%" kind of talent.

 

Magnum

Not to knock Koosha, as I was actually reading this to up the DPS on my own Mage, but when I look at the details of the WWS of the fight, the details tab seems screwy.

Koosha - WWS

It shows you as having done all your damage in the fight in a total of 30 hits (25 fireballs and 5 scorches). If that's the case, you'd be averaging 13,699.96 damage per fireball, and 2,728.4 per scorch. Am I reading this wrong, or is the WWS somehow buggy? I don't want to punch holes in the 2400 DPS Mage theory, but this particular WWS report seems funky to me.

 

◊ manly

Here is the explanation for you:

1- he has 57% crit rate. this is very very very far from the norm
2- although I did not check, with that kind of crit rate he probably had a fair share of rolling ignite.
3- his fireballs hit for 4225. the only way to get that is to use the darkmoon faire 1-10% dmg boost buff and either 10% or 13% COE. (and/or nightfall)
4- he has 3+ drums.

For reference, here is what I pulled this week, with no cheap trick to speak of:

2189 dps, no coe and 2 drums
3500 fireballs, 45% crit rate
Wow Web Stats

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Nurru

I'm curious how Koosha managed 5 combustions within one Teron fight. Does WWS count each stack of combustion as a new gain of it?

 

◊ manly

Yes. That is normal.

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Nurru

Just wanted to make sure. Apparently I never noticed.

 

Vhad

Also you misread the WWS report, it was 25 hits and 36 crits 2 full resists and 4,3% partials.

What!?

 

Mysticfox

2400+ dps is very possible and I would expect troll mages could hit this mark much easier. Optimal use of cooldowns and good timing is important.

Just for comparison I was was just 8 dps short of breaking 2.4k this week with a 48% crit rate. Manly probably would have had similar numbers if he would have had CoE: Mysticfox - WWS

Some facts about the fight:

• 10% CoE was present for the duration of the fight
• 2% crit bonus from ret paladin
• Wrath of Air totem was present however Totem of Wrath was not
• Double trinket usage w/ destro pots
• Double Drums of Battle.
• IV & double trinket again sub 20%
• Heroism, flame cap, combustion was used towards the end of the fight
• Empyrea volunteered to keep up scorch and asked only that each of the other mages scorched once at the start

I could have probably irked out a small amount more if I kept track of my combustion crits better and tried to double dip on the last charge by using fire blast. I always suck at remembering to do that though.

And a tip: The TimeToDie mod can give you a rough idea of how long it will take for a mob (boss) to die. For some reason I found it was a little bit easier to time my cooldowns & trinkets for various fights using this.

 

Etherealz

Not to be picky or anything - but if your elemental shaman is only pulling 1650 dps and the casters in his group are all around 2k dps. Does the totem really make up nearly 100 dps on each caster?

Even if you could itemize perfectly to drop the hit, as in you'd gain the equal dps value of 3% hit - which you wouldn't realistically be able to. Let's say you gain the value of 2% hit and 3% crit - It just doesn't seem to be enough - although it's only one WWS so maybe he does more.

Basically I'm saying in a perfect world why not have 1 more resto shaman, one holy priest, and another lock to put up CoE.

 

◊ Praetorian

Because we raid with who's available. We have three locks. One couldn't make it.

 

◊ manly

[edited out due to gurgthock' response]

I am a bit confused by your question. Do you mean the 3% crit totem (and lets ignore the 3% hit for all realistic intent) or the 101 dmg totem ? If I had the choice, I wouldn't really care much between a resto shaman (with drums) and an elemental shaman, but that is just me. If anything, 3% crit is not 100 dps.

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◊ manly

But we never have 3 warlocks online. *hint* *hint*

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Etherealz

I was referring specifically to the crit / hit totem since the restoration shaman can put up the latter.

Edit: Obviously as already mentioned it's unrealistic to have a perfect setup all the time. I was possibly trying to get some insight as to whether that is "Cap" elemental shaman dps, and if so would it be worth it assuming you had other options.

 

Searix

Interesting, manly look at your WWS WWS Loading...

Checking ignite, it looks like it's WAY under what it should be, something like 33% ignite instead of the 40% it should be. I just can not explain it.

Edit: It's 12,000 ignite damage that's missing, i guess it's plausible you simply crit so much it didn't get a chance to tick down but that's unlikely

Edit2: WWS Loading... got 43% ignite

 

Koosha

Was looking at the WWS and it seems to be a ~5.5m hp Teron. Not saying you didn't do very good DPS because you did, but could this contribute to it making it seem higher than it really is?

 

◊ manly

Yeah, the curse of drums + bloodlust + icy veins + haste gear. I'm constantly pushing back my ignite. I admit I did not think I had that much lost ignite damage. It does suck a lot.

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Mysticfox

I don't think it really matters because the extra DPS from the ghosts doesn't get attributed to anyone it is just added to the overall RDPS.

Here's the same report with Vengeful Spirit counted as a mob instead of a pet: Wow Web Stats

 

Koosha

Alright thanks for clearing that up, I was just always curious because I could never really tell the true dps from looking at all the bugged Terons D:

 

Kikler

I wonder how your MT's keep that ammount of aggro really , are you using tanquil air(?) totem ? As i see none of you is using invisibility , i m even dumping 30k aggro usually if i manage.. (fkin bolts on teron really !).I Just got my ToC this week FINALLY after so long farming on illidan and archi , was happy that i'd test it but i got ghost pulled off 2.4k DPS but well dunno how that exactly compares with "real" dps since it wasn't constant.

 

Koosha

Expertise.