Skallewag

Chezus *facepalm* Yea thats right, the GCD of ABar also adds to the time in between casts. I really shouldnt be trying to theorycraft 3:00 AM. O well, being wrong for the better of our class is totally ok with me.

 

Stormhole

Very true, all you have to do is look at the 33 frost mages vs. Ragnaros video to understand the potential of FFB + WG.

The big if at present though: is WG going to be retuned pre release ?

 

Skallewag

Yes WG still has me confused. If it wasnt for the +hit component of the debuff Id simply expect it not to work for other mages negating stackability. But the +hit part of the debuff just doenst make any sense if it only applies to the mage who proced the debuff. So were looking at insane stacking or a very very weird component to the WG debuff.

 

maxi

The hit part of WG is only there to buff dual-wielding meelees and tanks. They are the only ones who regularly run with a portion of their damage below the hit cap (white damage on DW meelees, all tank swings and abilities).

2H meelees and casters need to be hitcapped without having to rely on random proc.

 

Roywyn

That looks about right for how much Hot Streak adds.

Since I don't know that much about programming, I just determined the exact formulae for Hot Streak.
Removes the random elements of a sim.
( How to do it? Set a/b/c/d as chances that you have just had 0(that means you broke the streak with a non-crit)/1/2/3 crits in a row. Then the chances total to 100%, and you have 4 equlibrium equations / a Markov chain. )

If C is your crit chance, the the 100% crit buff is up H = C^3/(1+C+C^3) of the time.
The actual crit chance increase from 3/3 Hot Streak then is K = (1-C)*H = C^3*(1-C)/(1+C+C^3).


If you can get a Fireball+FireBlast from the 100% crit buff (like double dipping the 3rd Combustion), then the 100% crit buff is up H = C^3/(1+C^3) of the time.
That mean your rotation would consist of (1-H) Fireballs with a crit chance of C and another H combos of Fireball+FireBlast at 100% crit.

To find out the exact value of that, you have to calculate the "rotation" and it depends even more on gear.
You can improve Hot Streak by 50-80%, so it's still not that hot really.
At 40% crit, you'd get the benefit of what 4-5% crit would give you. About ~7/8% at 50% crit, 10/11% crit at 70% crit.

But considering crit is a pretty bad stat overall, you'd gimp yourself too much stacking it.
Also, bear in mind that I can't test whether you can exploit Hot Streak that way.
And there is still the issue of Ignite potentially bugging in these situations. I'll probably sim it twice - with a normal FireBlast and with a FireBlast that doesn't get an Ignite. (Or should the Fireball instead lose it's Ignite?)

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

maxi

Hot Streak is a fire aoe talent in it's current state, which is most useful for flamestrike spam, where it will guarantee 100% crits after the first proc, and - in that scenario - will synergise very well with Burnout (with 1% mana tax on burnout being overcompensated for by MoE, when high-mana fire aoe spells are conerned).

If you think of it, all of fire tree past 40 points is pure AoE.

Whether it is bad or imba in it's current form will largely depend on how much aoe is needed in endgame instances, and how much of a problem will threat be in these aoe scenarios.

 

Gediablo

That is a very neutral/optimistic point of view on this matter that I sadly don't share. Looking back at all raid content in WoW so far counting the encounters where having talented AoE is needed I can't think of one single encounter. Encounters where max talented single target dps have had a significant impact are quite common. Even in an AoE heavy encounter like Felmyst, you are better off speccing for single target dps rather than AoE. The most general application of AoE is to speed up clearing of easy trash - the trademark of the mageclass.

That most dps-specs for all classes seems to get some sort of (weak) AoE damage doesn't really convince me that speccing for AoE is going to be worth it in WotLK - it just means that mages and warlocks won't do several times the dps of other classes in AoE fights which is fine by me (feeling nearly useless in an encounter isn't fun and many classes tends to hate e.g. MH due to this). It also opens up for more AoE trash and in both raids and 5 mans, which is fun from a mage's point of view. But it is and always will be the bosses that matters, and I simply cannot imagine maxed talented AoE to matter. Also, the stuff I have seen so far, just seems to boost frost and fire AoE relative to arcane - not really increase the mage AoE potential (which is fine, since warlock AoE damage has been nerfed ~15%).

Isolated the AoE talents in themselves are fine, just as the judge talents for the holy paladins make sense somehow. The positions in the skill trees and the overall result of deep fire compared to all other mage specs isn't however. The mage fire spells already being the school with most AoE spells doesn't really need a new AoE talented spell either.

 

Qbert

To top out at 5% bonus crit for 3 talent points proves the talent just as bad as everyone has thought. I really think it was a misleading attempt to boost AoE damage because it falls way short for any single target damage. I can't say I'm happy that all of the fire talents focus on AoE. Getting a justified AoE buff is one thing... to have to spec for it is quite another. Unless every single boss encounter requires AoE people will not spec a majority of the new fire talents, because it certainly isn't viable for PvP.

 

Jonny_Monroe

word from the beta is that you can indeed pre-cast hot streak and have 2 crits for free adding to the next streak. Can someone show a graph/table of the value of hot streak given that?

OMNOMNOM.

 

Roywyn

I put the info we have so far in a sheet and did a first simulation at 1.8 spell damage, 800 int before BoK, 25% with raid buffs/debuffs but before talents.
I did not take most cooldowns into account, since most specs have 2 out of AP/Comb/IV and they are similar and stackable, and their exact benefit is hard to pin down.
So, I was about to write a summary, nearly finished and my browser ate it. Damn.

AoE spells before caps
Blizzard that can crit beats Arcane Explosion for sustained AoE in any spec.
Flamestrike under 100% Hot Streak is the highest raw DPS.
Blizzard in 51/0/20, if it can use its own 15% Frostbite uptime, can get neck-to-neck with 100% Hot Streak Flamestrikes.
Dragon's Breath/Blastwave are the highest burst DPS even without Hot Streak.

Blizzard is very competive now. The "best" AoE always depends on the encounter's needs.
Issues are interrupts, pushback, mobility, slows, range, threat, positioning and much more.
These are only guidelines, a major deciding factor are AoE hard caps that are not known yet.


Single target spells
Arcane Barrage with FB, FrB or FFB as filler seems very potent, using AM on NWP procs.
Specs are 51Arc+20 in frost or fire or mixed, all three are very close.
I'll call those rotations Barrage and use their DPS as guideline.
Spammed Arcane Blast is similar DPS, probably not sustainable for long.
2T5 is still a significant ~18% boost even with the gear/stat loss. I expect a set bonus or talent change.
Arcane Missiles are terrrible, we know that. They don't even reach ~70% of Barrage.

Arcane/Fire with 33/38/0 is ~10% below Barrage.
Deep Fire is another ~3% less.

Frostbolt spam without Winter's Grasp/Water Elementals is at ~70% of Barrage. With 2 Frost mages with WG, it gets up to 85%. 3 mages, good Water Elemental use and an average 1% hit for DWers, pets, tanks can probably close the gap to Barrage.


Frostfire Bolt without Winter's Grasp and without double dipping CoE is at 95% of Barrage.
With WG from 2 mages, you're 15% above Barrage, just ~3% behind 2T5 Arcane Blast spam.
With 3 mages and double-dipping from CoE, you're 35-40% ahead of Barrage rotations.

That's what happens if you combine Winter's Grasp with a spell that crits for 317% of its hit damage.
I guess it'll take a bit to find out how they want multi-school damage to behave.


Bottom line of the first impressions
Arcane rewards rotations with high baseline DPS. Not that alternating two buttons is that much better than one *cough*
Frost has a lower base DPS, but WG and pet handling can make up for it and improve raid damage/threat as well.
I feel that Winter's Grasp is quite balanced by Frostbolts lower damage/scaling.
Fire simply lacks significant improvements. It's stuck in BC mode, a review on Burnout/Hot Streak could bring it back on par with Arcane.
Frostfire damage mechanics will surely be reviewed.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Zeldyrr

Edit: It seems mmo-champion is (might be?) wrong. Comments on the post I linked note that:

WoW -> Game Info

for 7/23/2008 don't have most of the changes listed on mmo champ.

--------------------

MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies has a post up indicating all the classes had changed trees similar to what was noticed for arcane yesterday. There "polish" for fire/frost hasn't happened yet. The only change there new for mages is that arctic reach no longer affects ice lance.

This is either:

1) Some crappy pvp balance thing and the devs aren't thinking about the repercussions on WG and IL.

2) The devs want frost mages to make a trade off between being really close and getting that extra little bit out of WG.

3) WG is going away or changing radically enough that 1 or 2 aren't relevant.

 

Deltrus

Roywyn, could you see how much arcane scales with WG if they use frostbolt as a filler and and a spec like this?

I am really hoping arcane will get pretty close dps to frostfire when wotlk releases.

 

Saizul

I tried to be clear - the point I was making is that IL spam produces respectable DPS in a situation where movement is
necessary.

I think it's obvious that in any situation where you can stand still and nuke, a cast-time spell like frostbolt or FFB will be preferable and produce much higher DPS than IL spam. However, off the top of my head I can think of MANY fights in the past where DPSers are forced to move, sometimes for significant portions of the fight: Void Reaver, Alar, Supremus / Kael (kiting or chasing), Leotheras, Vashj, Rage, Najentus (grabbing a spine), Archimonde, Bloodboil, Mother, Felmyst...

In some of these examples the movements are quick, maybe only time to shoot off one icelance. In others you may spend more time running around than standing still. The point is that always, in the past, any movement meant near-zero dps. If IL / WG goes live as is, this will no longer be the case. Yes, movement will mean lower dps than stand-and-nuke. But by how much? Even if we are DPSing at only 50 or 75% capacity while running around, it is still vast improvement and very respectable DPS next to what we have faced in the past. And in fact, I think it will be much better than what most other classes will be able to produce while running around.

Barrage Rotations

As for ABr rotations, one of the biggest "problems" I see is that haste affects are going to be abundant. Most people seem to be looking at crossing ABr rotations with frostbolts, but why is this? Icy veins, a more mana efficient nuke to go along with ABr. But as people have pointed out it wouldn't be so hard to get into a position where the frostbolt rotation drops under 3 seconds and the mage will have to chose between some dead time or casting a second lower-dps frostbolt while wasting cooldown time on ABr. Also, on missile barage procs, there will be a similar problem. After the 1.5s missile cast, you will again either have to insert some dead time or start a FrB cast, where as much as 2 seconds of the cast is cutting into ABr uptime.

Unfortunately I dont have the tools here to do a more complete analysis, but I was thinking about a build that crossed ABr with fire:
53/18/0


In this build, your normal rotation will be ABr -> Fireball. On missile procs you cast a quick AM followed with a scorch. It also means that you won't have to switch the rotation until 50% haste.

 

◊ manly

You can't know which of 2 spells will have its ignite 'stay' in case of an ignite bug. It seems related to the order you receive them in the combat log, but in practice its fairly random.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Roywyn

Hm, okay. Do you roughly remember how often it used to bug? Half the time, all the time?


At Deltrus: Your spec doesn't have WG. If you have 2 mages, they can be Arc-Arc, Arc-Fro or Fro-Fro.
Might look at that later. But I feel that if it's worth for the 1st mage to change, it's worth for the 2nd mage as well.

Also, Barrage rotations with FrB as filler have ~70% Arc and ~30% Frost damage, so crits don't hit that hard.
And with Shatter, you can't get Ignite for FFB filler abuse.


At Saizul: I checked it and pure Ice Lance spam looks surprisingly good.
For 2 mages, DPS of spamming IL with WG is like spamming FrB without WG due to the high uptime.
So, they'd have 85% DPS casting FrB while standing, and 70% DPS spamming IL while moving (% of Barrage).

Ice Lance has 50% more base (0 spell power) DPS on frozen targets than Frostbolt.
The above numbers are at 1.8k spell power and relative Ice Lance DPS will drop a bit when you gear up more.
It's still much more than I would have thought.


At Saizul: For ABar, you have to chose a filler and a spec. What I wanted to point out was that all 3 choices are very close before you haste-cap at 3s, they are within 1-2%. What matters in that case is influence on the rest of the raid.
51/18/0+ with FB requires you to keep up scorch, but also buffs raid wide fire damage. No IV.
51/0/20 gives you IV, maybe shatter if some other Mage/DK is around, and allows for a FrB or FFB filler.
51/9/11 gives you IV and allows you to fill with crit heavy FFBs.

I also found some mistakes, which makes 18Fire more favourable.
I still have to fix some more things and compare a low and a high level gear set and consider cooldowns.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Rifk

Not sure if anyone's done the math already... but according to pure TC, how would the following Elementalist build with scorch /ffb rotation compare to the Arcane Barrage /w filler rotation builds?

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

I think that is the best possible FFB elementalist build for maximum single target dps.

 

Saizul

Just wondering, what are you using to model this with?

Anyway the nice thing about 51/18 is that although youll need to stack scorch early on, from there on out it should keep itself up pretty naturally. If you are padding after a missile barrage proc with a scorch, this will easily occur every 30 seconds, and so "keeping up" scorches will happen automatically. And of course, if there are any elementalist mages in the raid either it will be happening anyway, or else you can take the burden of scorching off of them.

If you knew scorches were going to be provided from someone else you could switch to MoE for a bit more efficiency, but that's probably not so smart. Not a lot of gain in mana, and leaves you dependent on someone else being present / alive / paying attention for a large chunk of your DPS.

 

◊ manly

Well, I can't really tell you whether its consistent or not. I am still unsure if distance/travel time affects it, although I am fairly sure it does not. The results are not consistent because the testing is done under differing conditions (cooldowns, spell haste) and theres an unknown amount of variables affecting the results. If only I knew whether damage was determined client side or server side could drastically change the results. I realise it would be unlikely to be client side. But truth is, I don't know.

Other than that, its kinda 50/50. If you try to reproduce the bug, you can definately do it without trying hard. But you also get streaks where it doesn't bug even though you'd expect it to. As I pointed out earlier, you get one of the 2 ignites. But I do not know what rule governs which ignite is dropped. It seems to be the 'oldest' (as per combatlogs) ignite that gets dropped, although I am unsure about how reliable that insight is, considering that you can't rely on combatlogs. And if the combatlog order is the definitive order in which things happens (which it isnt), then the order in which you see when both crits land will change 'randomly'. Sometimes you get fireball/blast and other times blast/fireball despise having nearly identical situation.

So yeah, basically im saying that if you do like fireball/fireblast then you get a chance to get ignite to bug. Lets say its 50% chance to work as expected and 50% chance to drop one of those ignites. Then if ignite bugs out, its indeterministic as far as which ignite will be dropped.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

◊ manly

Why would you want MOE in a deep arcane build ?

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Saizul

Because 1/2 the spells you are casting are fire. But it isn't even close to worth it. If you didn't take improved scorch it would make more sense to put 3 in ele precision. But nevermind, it was pretty dumb to mention, even in passing. =P

 

Raglu

There's no knockback, but Impact synergizes well with Living Bomb.

 

Arazan

Fire and arcane are the two least mana efficient trees, so I could understand wanting MoE in an arc/fire build. In all honesty I think that's why a 50+/XX/0 build will never work, because it doesn't have a nice efficient off-spec nuke like Frostbolt. Unless you wanted to do like a 55/13/3 build and use scorch, but that'd kinda suck in terms of proccing Missile Barrage.

 

Sunstealer

I understand that FFB apparently pulls from both your frost and fire talents, but is there some sort of proof or evidence that it "double dips" on CoE?? I was under the impression that it only actually dealt fire damage, even though it locks both schools out... I couldnt imagine it dealing "Frostfire" damage... That would be strange and very overpowered

Honestly, i'm still impressed with the fact that AM is going to become a pretty common spell. With a 188% Coefficient (with emp AM, talents i feel are rather necessary for barrage spec), and only casting it on MB proc, makes this a very impressive combo.

Also, now that blizzard can crit it does seem a very potent AoE spell when combined with shatter. Here's hoping they remove the caps, or at least raise them by at least 3x of what they are currently... AoE still needs a buff i feel.

The problem with MoE and 51/18/x is that MoE ONLY affects fire and frost spells, where the majority of your rotation would be arcane... kinda making that a silly choice in my opinion

As far as scorch, other than not proccing missile barrage, the coefficient is terrible and any bit of haste throws you off by a long shot.

If you go to http://elitistjerks.com/826559-post2474.html you'll find where i did some haste/rotation math. From what i gathered, that with NWP and party buffs like WoA totem frostbolt becomes a very nice rotation, only tossing in FFB when you have Bloodlust. Even that depends on whether outside sources of haste continue to stack or not.

 

Saizul

The proof comes from testing done in the beta by Quantum, which can be found a few pages back in this thread. As of the latest reports, FFB is definitely getting the benefit of CoE twice. However, I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect that will make it to live. It is almost certainly just an unintended side effect of the dual-school type damage, that the devs will sort out whenever they get around to it. Obviously there is a lot going on at the moment.

 

Qbert

As long as impact still has diminishing returns, it doesn't really synergize well. Impact is so quickly made irrelevant from DR that it really loses any consideration in my opinion. Anything not attacking you will not need to be stunned nor are you depended on to stun it... and anything attacking you will likely be immune from MA DR. Seems to me like Fire could theoretically gain huge PvP viability if impact didn't have DR, but unfortunately the PvE implications ruined that possibility (dating back to stacking mages in AQ40 & Sartura stun-locking I believe).

I may have missed it... but is MoE proccing twice from FFB crits too?