Tryst

Pintofbrew, Demonic Pact is 1% health/damage that stacks three times. Only the chance of occurring increases with each talent point.

 

Pintofbrew

Ah, must be the version of Wartools I read was displaying wrongly 1% per rank, stacks 3 times. That makes more sense.

Chance is still 7% per tank per hit? I wonder if that means you can get away with fewer ranks in it as Imp spec; hits/sec as imp should be quite a bit better than as a succy, not to mention the ISB-lash problem.

 

Lhivera

Pardon me for not being able to read this in your math, but I woke up less than 5 minutes ago...are you accounting for the fact that at 50% base crit, there was already a 50% chance that guaranteed crit was going to happen anyway? I think instead of adding 1, you want to add 1 - base crit.

 

Pintofbrew

I didn't exact get what you're saying, lhiv, but I did get a rather clear impression that what the graph displayed seemed correct;

At 50% crit, if you specced the talent, you'd observe a 50+3.3% total crit. The reason the curve peakes after 50% is there's more occasions of chain-crit, but it drops off rather rapidly later on as chance you -wouldn't- have had a crit after the chain that the talent affected becomes ever smaller.

 

Lhivera

I think what I'm saying is that I still need some caffeine. But yes, of course, now I see that's what it's doing. They're really failed to make deep Fire builds compelling in this first iteration, haven't they?

 

Deedre

Pintofbrew, the latest prismatic cloak knocks down invis by 1s per talent point, so it wouldn't be instant, but that's just a quibble. Your basic point stands.

 

Lileith

Concerning Winter's Grasp, I doubt that Icelance spam will most benefit from it due to it's lower sp coefficient (42.86% on frozen target). The "Shatter combo" as it is currently used in PVP or World PVE assume that the frostbolt will remove the frozen state on the target. The best cycle for WG would be (considering more haste than lag):
Frostbolt procing WG + 2xFrostbolt + Ice Lance

 

Pintofbrew

I wonder if that means the spell will pulse faster (unlikely) or pulse fewer times for more percent. Currently it's 10% per second pulse, with the 5th pulse wiping it totally; Would a fully-talented invis go -25% on the 1st second, and wipe on the 2nd, or what? One constant problem with our Invis as it stands now, is having the channel interrupted too early and netting you too little threat mitigation.

 

Zaldinar

Pretty much, Lhivera.

In its current state "burnout" will literally burn you out faster than you can think. even at 1% of your max mana, imagine a 10k mana pool, every crit costs you an extra 100 mana for 9% extra crit damage. In one of the threads you got banned for I did some math on it where it worked out to 3% overall DPS for 38% more mana (this was assuming it was 5% max mana not 1%, 1% dropped to 12% more mana I think?).

Hot Streak looks interesting, but all and all boils down to around 1-2% crit for most of us (currently running some long term simulations to see how it interacts with Combustion).

World in Flames, assuming they don't change the way caps work, junk. Hoping that it indicates a change to caps, AoE Joy.

Living Bomb, we'll need to see how it caps out and what the mana cost is relative to other AoEs before its really good or not worth it.

Fiery Payback is worded too strangely to be certain exactly what its supposed to do. Increased Molten Armour damage, sure. 50% reflection on resisted instant spells? Okay, so instacast DD spells that are resisted get 50% reflection? Good idea, too many qualifiers for now.

If I were handed this tree today, I'd be considering either going 2/48/21 for cold snap, or some bastardized Arcane/Fire/IV build. Hopefully they'll rehash the deep fire talents to make it worth going for.

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Lhivera

You're correct -- I've been really sloppy lately. I compared the average ice lance damage with the average damage of a frostbolt using the average crit rate produced by partial WG uptime, not using the actual crit rate while WG is up. Very dumb of me.

Both spells get: 1.06 (Piercing Ice) * 1.05 (Arctic Winds) * 1.05 (Chilled to the Bone) * 1.1 (CoE) * 1.05 (Misery) = 1.34979075
Additionally, Ice Lance gets: 1.34979075 (above) * 0.949 (partial resists) * 3.0 (frozen target) = 3.84285426525

We're only interested in comparing them when the target is frozen, so the crit rate goes up to 80% for Ice Lance and 85% for Frostbolt.

Frostbolt
Base: 623.5
Gear: round((3 / 3.5 * 0.95 + 0.1) * 1300) = 1189
Avg Dmg: (623.5 + 1189) * 0.99 * 1.85 * 1.34979075 ~= 4480.76

Ice Lance
Base: 186.5
Gear: round(1.5 / 3.5 / 3 * 1300) = 186
Avg Dmg: (186.5 + 186) * 0.99 * 1.8 * 3.84285426525 ~= 2550.87

4480.76 / 2.5 = 1792.304
2550.87 / 1.5 = 1700.58

So reworking the timeline, and assuming 1.2 sec travel time for Frostbolt (kind of guessing at that, if anyone knows better let me know):

00.0: Frostbolt 1 cast
02.5: Frostbolt 1 release, start Frostbolt 2 cast
03.7: Frostbolt 1 hits, Grasp procs, target is considered frozen until 08.7
05.0: Frostbolt 2 release, start Frostbolt 3 cast
07.5: Frostbolt 3 release, cast Ice Lance

This changes the average ratio to 7 normal frostbolts, 2 shatter frostbolts, 1 shatter ice lance.

 

Lhivera

Let me know how that works out.

A thought regarding caps, BTW: The affliction talent Atrocity appears to simply cast a standard DD Affliction spell on every target. Kind of seems like this would bypass AOE caps, no?

It's not 50% reflection of instant-cast spells (at least as I read it), but rather 50% reflection of instant damage. It would reflect 50% of a Frostbolt, for instance; on an Immolate, it would reflect 50% of the DD component, but none of the DOT component.

Arcane/Fire hybrids will be the way to go if they don't fix this. Which is really kind of funny, since they seem to have done a good job of correcting the problem of the hybrid build being vastly superior to the deep build for Destro 'locks.

 

Zaldinar

Most definitely. Right now I'm just trying to figure out why its crediting Combustion with a 9% gain in crit rate (definitely not in keeping with my earlier simulation). Past that it should just be around a 24 hour run of the program to get a good curve from 0-100% crit rate.


Yeah I'm mildly jealous of that. It basically equates to an area volley of DoT spells. I'm hoping that between that, the boomkin raining stars madness spell (will be interesting to see how that one actually works), and the World in Flames talent, that it all indicates a shift in the way they view limiting AoE, and hopefully they've read your formula for the way caps should be.


Exactly the type of contention in the tooltip wording that makes me want to spend a hour or three with a warlock and a mage in PvP figuring out how it works. I'm going to be very busy on my way to 80.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
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Rouncer

Hot Streak does have a lot of potential though for AE damage. It could mean that they are planning on including a lot more AE on boss fights and in that situation Hot Streak would be amazing, since on the 4th cast everything hit will be crit and that basically doubles the effective AE cap if there are a large number of mobs and/or doubles the effective damage if there are less.

However if they are going to be sticking to current model of it being a majority of single-target spam for boss fights then the talent is pretty worthless.

 

Pintofbrew

You are wrong. Percentile conditional modifiers of this sort are added after caps are calculated. In the same way that Misery and CoE can increase your AoE damage even if capped, this conditional would also increase. Another example of Conditional Modifiers, is Molten Fury. It does work on AoE.

Caps are here to stay, and thank fuck for that. It means a joyous two things: (1) no more retarded AoE encounters like Baron where one poor bastard has to AoE a million non-trivial targets (and no, MGT doesn't count because the mobs are in effect quite trivial) and (2) no more Faxmonkey-style AoEing 93 mobs in one go. Refer to "Stupider Mage Tricks" for this amazing endeavour. Not to demean one of my all-time-heroes, but shit like that makes everyone else grab their pitch-fork and want our heads, leading to QQ, leading to nerfs.

 

Zaldinar

Do you have a link to research backing that up? I was unable to observe any effect increasing the cap itself when I did my round of testing here: WoW Forums -> Sunday morning PTR AoE Cap testing . Should be easy enough to re-test anyway using Molten Fury, gather up a bunch of targets in dead mines, one meleed down below 20%, AE once, golden.

Edit: A quick test disagrees with you, 16 targets in Dead Mines, one wand/meleed to 13% health, 1 blastwave cast 2 589 hits, 5 590 hits, 1 884 crit, 8 885 crits. The target at sub-20% health was one of the 589 hits. The calculated cap of 590 * 16 = 9440 matches what I found in my earlier research which was done with zero spec, this test is done with a stock 2/48/11 build. Enough of that derailment though.

Edit 2: Although a second dummy-check using Imp Scorch I think shows what you're describing. 14 targets, one scorched before blastwaving, 2 1011 crits, 1 1012 crit, 8 674 hits, 1 675 hit, and 1 695 hit which was the scorch target. Cap calcs to 675 * 14 = 9436, so ballparked. Individual target debuffs sneak you by it would then appear in addition to crits.

I too hate the stupid AoE design of "zomg have a billion wimpy targets". I much prefer the skel packs of Strat as an example of good AoE style design, mixed casters, melees, elites, non-elites. Makes it a lot more interesting. Regardless, if you have something that shows that the caps can be modified I'd be greatly interested to read it.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Lhivera

So what you're saying is that Fire Power has no effect if you're already capped, but Molten Fury and now World In Flames do kick in and exceed the caps? That is news to me, and very useful.

I don't think anyone seriously argues that caps should go away, but some of us have been hoping they would be more directly tied to the number of mobs, rather than using static numbers. Something like setting a cap on the number of targets rather than the damage dealt, and then applying a min(target cap / actual targets, 1.0) multiplier to the damage dealt. This avoids stupid things like a deep Fire mage and a deep Frost mage dealing the same amount of damage with Blizzard, while still keeping things reasonable when you're hitting a lot of targets.

 

Deedre

Perhaps Frost should get a talent to increase damage caps on blizzard? Maybe tack that on to frozen core, which is certainly crying out for a raison d'etre.

 

Lhivera

It's a more general problem; I just used Blizzard as an example. I'm sure the same could be said for SoC, Hurricane, etc.

 

bortson

I certainly hope they're throwing some more AoE in, otherwise there's going to be a lot of mages sitting around wondering what to do with their shiny new talents.

That said, if Explosive Fireball is real, that's an awesome spell. Basically, a front-end seed of corruption. It's nice that fire mages are being given a legit ranged AoE option rather than forcing us to try to convince ourselves that there's a way to make flamestrike effective.

I'm still trying to figure out deep freeze. I guess the best use for it would be to effectively extend your frostbite proc by stunning at the very end. Hopefully if you mistime it and the freeze breaks before deep freeze goes off, it gives an "invalid target" message and cancels the cast rather than saying "immune" and charging you mana.

 

kadgar

Are you sure on that?
I see the potential for abusing e.g. with rank3 AM, but I haven't found anything on a internal cooldown. Not in Procs with/without internal cooldowns and neither on thottbot or wowhead.

I use it in hyjal waves and when I forget to equipp it after a boss, I'm dead after 10 sec (AP + veins + trinket + AE spam), but with the trinket equipped I have no aggro problems at all (while warlocks, doing 30% less dps with their SoC spam, from range and with shaman -aggro totem and no AP or veins, constantly draw aggro).
So from what I see, the trinket works on all crits of an AE and seems not to have a cooldown,

 

◊ Vontre

You guys have this fascinating obsession with dispels considering there are only two classes that can really do it effectively, and resto druids are not one of them.

This PvP theorycraft is absurdly stupid. We can predict how much damage 'x' spell is going to do based on what's out there, but we have absolutely no way of predicting how the pvp meta game will work at 80 without access to more information.

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dexia

Hunter arcane shot
lock felhunter

I guess you mean priests and shamans as the effective (spammable) dispellers. Hunter/locks are on cooldown, but no less annoying. 30 pts demo locks will be able to do a one time double devour magic with MD, not to mention a back to back spell lock.

 

Lhivera

A thought here. I callously pooh-poohed the idea on the mage forum when proposed by another mage, and perhaps someone has knowledge of actual testing that can confirm/deny this:

What if Burnout is not a 25% increase to Critical Strike Bonus Damage (162.5% crits, 227.5% with Ignite), but is rather a 25% increase to Critical Strike Damage (187.5% crits, 262.5% with Ignite)?

I pooh-poohed the poster who was arguing this on the basis of there being no precedent. But I realized this morning that, in fact, there are precedents: the Hunter/Survival "Slaying" talents, and now the updated "Poleaxe Specialization" talent for warriors. There is also a new Warlock/Destruction talent that reads:

Eternal Flames - Your Searing Pain and Incinerate spells have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to refresh the duration of your Immolate spell on the target, and increases the critical strike damage of your Destruction spells by an additional 2/4/6/8/10%.

Note: "Critical strike damage," not "Critical strike damage bonus."

This would, of course, require that the tooltip wording on Burnout is incorrect, but it wouldn't be the first time (or the tenth, or the fiftieth). And it would certainly make for a much better talent. At a 35% crit rate, it would be about a 13% DPS increase. This would also much better explain the exorbitant mana cost.

 

Zaldinar

The test for that is simple in game, run into deadmines or other lowbie area, gather up enough targets to cap out an AoE fire spell, fire it off. Divide the capped crit values by the capped hit values, get the ratio of gain for the crit. Same idea as my long term tests that I did with Ice Lance except using the simplicity of capped AoE instead of expected ranges of damage to isolate the ratio.

Outside of game with only datamined information, I doubt it can be figured out for certain.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
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Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Lileith

The mana cost could also be a percentage of the base mana (like blink mana cost) instead of the current max mana.
(it would be around 22,4 mana @ level 70 which sound a lot more fair than ~100 mana)