Evalara

Would WG still be crazily overpowered if it was reduced from 10% chance to apply to, say, 5%? Or reduce the duration slightly? That seems like the simplest solution that isn't just removing it.

 

radikal

I don't really think the problem is WG. I don't realy agree with the idea that it is only two points and that shatter is "utility" for outside of raids. It's a 9 point investment. (hi2u imp nova) It should be potent for a deep frost mage and unless stacking deep frost mages gets super out of hand, which I'm not convinced of yet, I don't see the issue.

The problem is Frostfire bolt. It needs a redesign. It scales mindlessly with WG and is clumsy and bad and going to be a problem in conjunction with WG.

WG is a sweet talent. It is very fun/dynamic to play with. Putting a proc cooldown on it would ruin it. (It's fun reacting to chain procs based on when they proc'd, how much haste you had, the distance of the target etc)

I really don't share the fear that stacking mages is going to become this hugeomg problem that seems to be the common belief here. It could work out that way, but without understanding the context in which we'd be doing damage, I'll wait to worry too much.

 

Akston

Obviously stacking WG mages will be powerfull but in order to do so you are losing a lot of utility from other classes. It is possible that they may design encounters to need a balanced raid somehow, which would make mage stacking a non-issue because, regardless of the dps benefits, it just wouldn't be worth it because of the requirements of the encounter.

 

Arazan

Even were it not for FFB, a 33/10/21+7 build would do the exact same thing: exploit exponential returns. ALL mechanics that give exponential returns are bad, and it's why ISB has contributed to warlock/spriest and shadow damage supremacy.

Any debuff that gives exponential returns inspires class stacking... so even if WG only affected frostbolt and ice lance it would still be bad because either you balance frost's damage around WG (in other words, nerf the hell out of frost but give it a broken mechanic to rely on) or you balance frost's damage normally and let it insanely outclass all other class and specs dps by giving it an easily exploitable mechanic.

Imagine if every warrior in a raid could stack sunder amor on their own debuff slot. What would you get? Every raid would bring enough warriors to reduce the boss's armor to zero, and then you'd stack the buhjeezus out of melee dps... which means rogues and more warriors, and classes that are there purely to enhance your rogues and fury warriors. Or you can simplify the example by saying that every rogue could use their own expose armor... it'd be the same thing.

Any ability to gain exponential returns is impossible to balance. Either you can turn your cheek to it like they did with ISB throughout TBC, which is now conveniently being nerfed, or you have to remove the mechanic like what happened with rolling ignites.



The best fix I can think of for WG is to make it a self buff with a high proc rate. WG at 10/20% effectively boils down to 10% crit for 9 talent points along with some other benefits... which isn't bad at all (not too good or too bad) and isn't exploitable either.


EDIT (for clarification):

I should specify that what I meant for WG to have a 10/20% proc rate would be to only affect the next spell cast... or to last 3 seconds or less so that you couldn't gain a lot from the high proc rate. Though in all honesty 20% chance (as a self-buff) to treat all targets as frozen for 5 seconds probably wouldn't be too overpowered either... so... yeah.

 

mulco

Isn't there a way they could handicap WG so as to discourage extreme frost mage stacking, while leaving it functionally the same for an appropriate number of mages? For example, have WG procs carry a number of charges like ISB, and a short reapplication cooldown like 10s counting down from when the debuff was first applied. 6 charges to a proc, and a single mage would only consume all the charges by spamming IL save for extremely hasted frostbolts, and two mages with 3s cast frostfire would not consume all the charges unless frostfire can be talented down or with a certain amount of haste. More than two mages and WG would fall off before the cooldown was up again in a normal raid encounter, and though bringing more WG mages would increase the total number of WGs, their damage wouldn't scale so extremely as it does now.

I think the short cooldown is necessary as distinct from ISB due to the scaling nature of frostfire bolt; if all the talents that effect it now carry through to live, the power of WG stacking mages will, as many have have already said, most likely result in a hasty and heavy handed crippling of the spell and mage viability.

EDIT: k so the numbers here won't work, for some reason I was thinking WG was a 10s debuff not the 5 it really is :p I want to say the same concept still applies, but due to the nebulous nature of WoW's casting mechanics (think being able to work a frostbolt -> IL -> IL shatter combo without breaking freeze), such a method of managing WG scaling might be more complicated than expected.

 

Thordarsen

For the sake of accuracy, ISB has always had charges eaten by any nonperiodic shadow damage (and in the distant past, by DoT ticks as well). Which means Mind Blast and SW eat charges. (along with shadow damage wands) If that weren't the case then adding extra warlocks wouldn't affect ISB uptime since one lock can use up the charges faster than they timeout anyway. As for the functioning of ISB in WoLK, I know that originally in alpha it only affected nonperiodic, but right now the wording is back to live (-5% nerf), but not being in the beta, I dont know if thats accurate.

 

Zeldyrr

There are many ways to tweak WG. None of the ones often suggested keep the fun aspect of it. People have to remember that if you take away WG, frost raiding comes back to pounding FB for 10 min + summoning an elemental. I _love_ that WG makes you react, at least somewhat, and throw an IL in here and there. And also IL on the move.

In this case I'm willing to wait to see what Blizzard does. (Do we have a choice?) 'Cause they were pretty inventive in the arcane tree and came up with solutions I had not read about anywhere else that most people seem pretty happy with. Let's hope they do the same with fire and frost.

 

mulco

The aim of my suggestion was to have it so there was no effective change for a single frost mage and rarely with two, and mainly attempt to curb the effects of stacking more than 2-3 mages in a raid. So it'd have little effect on PvP mages from its current implementation, and would still allow for adaptive rotations for raiding elementalists.

I'm not sure how to work the numbers with a 5s duration charged WG (compared to the numbers I mistakenly made up for a 10s WG) without making a longer reapplication cooldown than the length of the debuff, since even with a limited number of charges, given the short time frame you could have as many mages as you want land a shatter at relatively the same time due to current casting mechanics regardless of the number of charges WG could carry. So without the longer cooldown, implementing charges wouldn't curb stacking as much as probably needs to be done, and a longer cooldown would be too negative of a change I think.

Would reworking WG to a 10s duration (and 10s cooldown from beginning of the debuff) and making it a charged effect (with 5-6 charges) not be a better idea? It leaves enough time inbetween WG debuffs to limit excessive uptime from stacking, and even with stacking shortens the duration to probably 3-4s, yet doesn't penalize a healthy number of mages in a raid setting vs. its current implementation.

EDIT: so 10s WG would probably be too OP for PvP/Arena, although simply making WG disspellable might do the trick.

 

Thegoodman

Just to give a picture of how good FFB can be...

This spec 34/23/14, with 2000 spell damage, a FFB will hit for 2610 damage and Crit for 8222 (after ignite).

 

Akston

That honestly doesn't sound all THAT much better than something like 40/0/21 with frostbolt spam on live.

 

[DRF]Solmyr

I did a quick search, but none of the beta testers have reported on this. Does Magic Attunement increase the radius of Arcane Explosion to 16 yards?

 

Arazan

Until you consider that FFB mages stacked in a raid for maximizing WG will have 70% crit easily before gear.

And the math I did a while back actually showed that 0/33/38 and 0/50/21 scale better than any deep arcane FFB spec, and that was when I was doing the math assuming WG would never make it to live because it shouldn't...

Plus, remember that bigger numbers doesn't necessarily mean higher dps. The higher consistent damage of a 0/33/38-ish build quickly overtakes the flashier crits of a 33/10/whatever type build.



As for our proposed changes to WG not "keep[ing] the fun aspect" of it... a self-buff version of WG would function very similar and keep that fun aspect of WG alive... the thing that we all intend to change is the exponential returns of it, which is really not possible to do if WG remains a debuff that increases in power level as you stack more WG mages.

That's sorta another problem with things that give exponential returns, and why ISB is going to be so terrible with the changes to it. Debuffs like that change sooo much in power level with the slightest changes, a change to WG that makes it a 4.5 second debuff instead of a 5 second debuff would greatly impact the power level of WG because of the fact that it's affecting and affected by multiple players. So not only are exponential return mechanics dangerous because they're so easily exploitable, but they're bad design because they're so hard to balance that it's basically impossible for it to not be overpowered and exploitable or just crappy and not worth taking. Not to mention the flaw I mentioned earlier where if you give a dangerous mechanic like WG to a tree like mage frost, how do you balance the tree? Do you balance it to be completely dependent on stacking WG mages in a raid to be competitive, or do you balance it without WG and let guilds who push the edge of content take 10+ FFB/WG mages to each raid and exploit the mechanic?

 

Akston

was referring to the weird 33/20/10ish build or whatever it was that was linked in the post before mine. FFB specs are best as 0/33/38 or 0/30/41. Do arcane talents even effect it? I know they didn't used to but i don't know if that has changed recently. Basically my point was that going 33 in arcane and making it so you can't get the good talents from fire and pick up WG is really rather stupid. A spec with WG is pretty much always going to be better than a leach spec, especially when the leach spec isn't actually a leach spec because it doesn't even take shatter.


Basically.. I was pointing out exactly what you go on to say in your post about elementalist specs being better than FFB specs with heavy arcane investments.

Edit: Anyway it really wouldn't surprise me if WG made it to live and even lasted a patch or two before blizzard caught on. It really doesn't have an insanely OP pvp benefit, which seems to be all that devs really care about anymore. It will probably get nerfed eventually but I suspect we will get to be top tier dps for a while before that happens.

Wouldn't an elementalist spec using FFB still be our best bet for dps even with only 2 mages with WG in the raid or if WG was moved to a self buff or a charged debuff like ISB? Really it seems to me like WG is just icing on the cake for FFB specs.

 

Shuror

In general, range increasing talents don't increase AoE radiuses unless they specifically state they do so. For example, Arctic Reach applies to Frost Nova, but Flame Throwing doesn't apply to Blast Wave.

Edit: I imagine dropping PwF and one point in Arcane Potency for 3/3 Critical Mass would be far better for sustained DPS, with the astounding crit damage modifiers of that spec.

 

Mortos

Hello, I dont usually write here, I have a couple of thoughts on the subject:

WG is indeed very powerful. But nerfing it into a Single Player Buff will take out Alot of what its good for.

In my opinion one of the major problems Mages had in TBC was a lack of synergy with other classess. No other class used either Fire or Frost and we only buffed other Mages with the same spec and even that was minor minor for Frost (Winter's Chill is always up as is when you spam your frostbolt, so only the first few Ice Lance spam was downed from 7.5 sec into 3 sec)

One of the thing Im looking forward in WotLK is that Synergy, Blizzard seem to want Destro Locks to use Fire and finally we have a class that Use Frost abilities and wants to attack Frozen targets as much as we do, and who knows maybe even the Elemental Shamies will cast fireballs as well as Lightning in the Expension.

WG adds Synergy, and its better then any other talent solely because of this - you want a Mage in the Raid cause he does good dmg <hopefully> AND buff other classes DMG as well, its still too little considering Hunter/Warlock added values (not to mention Hybreeds) but its a start

Im not saying WG shouldnt be nerfed (though it might be fun if it will happen after it goes live and we can enjoy it just a little).
I just dont think making it a "Only The Caster treat this target as frozen" will be a good solution, yes it will make us a little reactive, but from what I understand you will spam FFB and not Ice Lance even when the Mob is frozen so it wont make FFb builds reactive (maybe just in the sense of poping trinkets/CDs)

they can Simply remove FFB from Procing WG will be enough, FFb can still get Shatter effects and if another Mage put WG on the Target then the FFb mage will be enjoying his 70% crit chance for 5 sec but the FFB mage wont proc WG himself. Since Frostbolt and Ice Lance spamming even with 7 Frost mages is not "off the charts" (atleast according to this forum) I think this will make it a good option.

this way mages who pick the "better" dps spec of FFB will want a Frost Mage to Proc WG for them with Frostbolts...
but stacking 6 Mages with WG just for the last Mage with FFB wont be that much offscale...

yes it will still be open to exploits but I think it wont be as bad as it is now.

thats my thoughts atleast

 

Skallewag

Like stated it seems nigh impossible to balance something like mages procing shatter crits for eachother on bosses. I really really like the idea to bring a core talent of the frost tree like shatter into bossfights but for balance reasons I think it would be far better if it gave the mage a 5 sec buff that made all his spells consider targets frozen. I realise that means the mage chould suddenly do a shatter combo on another target but would that really be a problem?

In raid situations you could proc it on anything you cast on and when it procs you could decide if you want the shatter crit on your current target or on another target. For example procing it on an add that will soon die would let you go shatter on the boss instead. Would add a nice element of flexibility to PvP too if you could freeze anyone on a WG proc. You would still be relying on a 10% proc chanse or landing frost novas so it wouldnt let you deep freeze people whenever the freeze CD is upp, but it would be a little bit easier to select your targets for it.

But most importantly it would remove the stacking problem so frost and elemental damage can be balanced around it, not would it cause any troubles with debuff slots like each mage having their own debuff would. It could get dispelled from you I guess, but being a magic effect it could be dispelled from your target as well. The only drawback would be that you loose the +hit debuff tanks would have gained, but that can be solved in several ways. Either mage WG have a dual effect improving VC so VC adds a bit of +hit chanse on stuff or just upp the proc chanse on WG a bit and trade that +hit for damage.

 

Slander

Making WG a self-buff would potentially become too powerful in PvP. I mean proccing WG on one target then getting a shatter combo off on someone else out of nowhere?
Same goes for Deep Freeze, while I do believe the extra flexibility would be nice for PvP it is possible that would become too powerful there instead.

If I understand this correctly, WG will only become powerful beyond reasonable levels with a FFB build, do we know anything about the raid encounters planned for wotlk?
To me it seems as if FFB will provide a flexible build to work around heavy resistances/immunites I think some CM said that as well(no reference, sorry). At the minute one could only speculate whether it would be overpowered or not, for all I know the majority of the encounters can be heavily frost resistant/immune which means losing wc and wg. If it's likely or not doesn't matter, until it's actually known you can only scream "potentially OP".

As far as I know warlocks got to keep their isb, it got a 25% nerf though but it still amplifies shadowpriest damage as well. I had a glance at DK abilities and it does seem like they will be able to freeze/benefit from the target being frozen so maybe it's just an insane way of levelling the playing field.

I guess what I am trying to say is that one can only wait and see how things pan out.

 

Ulthwithian

Well, I had an idea about Frostfire Bolt (or any other dual-school spells) that I wanted to propose.

One way would be to simply break out how much damage each type does, and then apply the appropriate talents to that portion of the damage.

Thus (numbers being made up): 400-450 Frost damage and 400-450 Fire damage to the target.

Then you apply the Frost double crit to just the Frost portion of the damage, e.g., while Ignite only looks at the damage from the Fire portion of the spell.

Now, common sense would tell me that the damage each part would deal would need to be increased from current, or else the spell fails its design criteria (i.e., make better use of elementalist specs). This method would also give a boost to the Arcane +dmg talents (like Arcane Instability) since those apply to both parts of the effect.

I have another idea, but it's so wacky that it needs some more thought before being posited on this forum.

 

Skallewag

Im not sure I see how that would be to powerfull in pvp Slander. I mean if youre focusing fire on one target and proc WG, how is it broken to chuck a shattercombo at someone else? Or if you for some reason deal frostdamage to something else than what youre supposed to be damaging then how is it to powerfull if youre allowed to deal the damage to what you are meant to? (For example frostnovaing someone trying to disrupt you.) Having it be a self buff will mean you can chose targets for a shatter combo or deepfreeze someone other than your focus fire target. It does sonud good, but I really fail to see how it would make mages dominate the arena.

 

Jonny_Monroe

If it becomes a self-buff then blizzard automatically becomes the best AoE in a mage's arsenal (if spec'd WG).

Of course i'm assuming its a bug that blizzard currently doesn't proc WG.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Roywyn

Talent spec estimates, round two

So, I've been polishing my calculations, fixed some things, and added cooldowns as flast multipliers.
I basically looked what kind of an increase a certain combination of cooldown talents in a certain spec was in Rawr.
That included one heroism and two clicky trinkets, and I obviously did some manual adjustment to account for new talents.

Most specs see a 4-10% increase from cooldown talents, so the error margin should be 1-2% at most for cooldowns.


Raid debuffs/buffs

I assumed Misery and 13% CoE as raid buffs and disregarded partial resists. They don't actually matter as they affect all specs the same way.

I did not assume Frozen Rune Weapon - World of Warcraft either for now. It's an 11-point talent in the frost tree, the tanking tree, and frost damage seems near irrelevant for DPS specs (1-2% of total damage is frost). Tanks will probably have it, but they claim it's not too exciting for them. With the windfury change, the imbue would only compete with a sharpening stone and not windfury.
It's probably worth it for 1 Death Knight to respecc into it if you have at least 2 mages. That's pretty dumb design though, to rely on a buff from a talent of another class that they wouldn't take otherwise.

Whatever, add +10% to Frost/Frostfire damage if you think it'll be up permanently on boss fights that matter.
Winter's Chill and Winter's grasp can prove useful for Death Knight tanks, but have very little impact on DPS specs right now. The whole class is under constant retuning, so it can change every day.


I did assume Earth and Moon, the 6% Arcane/Nature debuff from a Balance Druid in the raid, they look desirable enough.
The values without Earth and Moon are added as well.

Winter's Chill/Fire Vulnerability are up if the spec has it.

I did assume a CSD Meta and Elemental Oath (Shaman in the group) to determine crit damage.
I didn't consider (Improved) Moonkin Aura, since that's a mess to model and the Moonkin might be in another group.

I disregarded Mana for now. Many raid mana abilities were cahnged and probably see more tuning, we have no idea what it'll finally look like. I'd expect everything (barring Arcane Blast spam) to turn out sustainable. I used everything with Molten Armour for equal grounds.

As for buffs, Wrath of Air is 10% spell haste, Retribution Aura is 3% haste, 2% damage, Totem of Wrath is 3% crit and 3% hit, Judgements add 3% crit, Faerie Fire adds 3% hit. Flametongue and consumables are rolled into "buffed spell power".

I assumed 50ms cast dealy, which is the standard setting for Rawr.
I assumed 350ms cast delay for the Water Elemental, which is quite generous I think. Seems to be more like 500ms from what I saw in raids.


The gear setup

A haste-heavy get of Sunwell gear has 1.6k spell power raid buffed. We expect a blue set to be half a tier above that in power. Add new gems, enchants, consumables, and 1.8k spell power seems a conservative estimate.

With some unavoidable intellect, 13% crit from base, intellect and crit rating sounds conservative to start with.
Assuming 5% haste from gear, and hit capped. 800 intellect with AB/MotW, without BoK.

That was the first set of gear.
The second set assumes 2.6k spell power, 20% crit, 15% haste.

For Arcane Blast spam with 2T5, I removed 80 intellect and spell damage from the first gear set, 130 from the second.


The specs, spells and numbers

Listed values are always damage per cast time. The first value is for the lower gear, the second one for the higher gear.
We don't have a base value for Waterbolt, I took 750 as a guess.

Arcane Specs with 51-53 in Arcane. I didn't include Icy Veins at all because it will mess with Cycle. Add it as 2.5%-3% DPS over time if you can fit it in the spec.

Arcane Barrage : 3973 / 5792 (Damage per Cast Time)
Arcane Missiles : 2479 / 3688 (Without Missile Barrage)
Arcane Blast : 3490 / 4955 (Spammed at 3 stacks)
Arcane Blast 2T5 : 4198 / 5946 (Spammed at 3 stacks)

Frostbolt : 2494 / 3778
Fireball : 2856 / 4350
Frostfire Bolt 53/10/10 : 2448 / 3810 (Overestimating with 2 points too many in Arcane)
Frostfire Bolt 53/0/18 : 2119 / 3237

Barrage rotations are simplified with 1 Missile Barrage every 7 casts.
They are modeled as (ABar-X)3-ABar-AM-Y, X as generic filler, Y as Fire Blast to cover the gap due to haste.
Fire off-specs use Y for Scorch to keep up the debuff. If Scorch is about to run out and MB doesn't proc, 1 Fireball can be replaced by Fire Blast + Scorch with nearly the same damage.

ABar-FrB : 3045 /4390 (It runs into the haste cap with higher gear)
ABar-FB 3234 / 4839

(ABar-FrB)3-ABar-AM-FiBl : 3570 / 5140
(ABar-FB)3-ABar-AM-Sc : 3635 / 5423
(ABar-FFB)3-ABar-AM-FiBl : 3485 / 5221 (As 53/10/10, see comment above)

Without the Earth and Moon debuff, Barrage roations lose around 3% damage and scale down to:
(ABar-FB)3-ABar-AM-Sc : 3521 / 5255


Frost Specs can get 13 Arcane when omitting PvP/control talents.

Percentage values are Winter's Grasp uptime, calculated from the listed amount of mages.
The Water Elemental has up to 50% uptime in a 6 minute fight, so half of it's listed DPS should be the sustained value. Assuming that it actually survives, best case.

Ice Lance spam is given for mobility fights.

Waterbolt: 758 (379) / 894 (447) (Pet scaling is bad)

Frostbolt (lower gear) : 2468 (0%), 2702 (1 mage, 22%), 2884 (2 mages, 39%), 3026 (3 mages, 53%), 3521 (100%) /
Frostbolt (higher gear) : / 3713 (0%), 4074 (1 mage, 22%), 4349 (2 mages, 39%), 4556 (3 mages, 53%), 5205 (100%)

Even with 10 mages, you'd only have 90% uptime at with low gear, 93% with high gear.

Ice Lance (lower gear) : 849 (0%), 1725 (1 mage, 34%), 2313 (2 mages, 56%), 2714 (3 mages, 71%), 3488 (100%)
Ice Lance (higher gear) : / 1166 (0%), 2488 (1 mage, 36%), 3341 (2 mages, 58%), 3893 (3 mages, 73%), 4890 (100%) /

The value at 100% is the value for tossing an Ice Lance on a fading Winter's Grasp debuff. It seems worth doing for frost specs.

With 10 mages spamming Ice Lance, you'd have 98% / 99% uptime of Winter's Grasp.


Fire Specs go 51+ fire and pick Icy Veins, rest utility. I think you can go 0/50/21, adds ~1% for CS'ed IV.
Hot Streak is modeled of your crit rate.
I didn't model any Hot Streak + Combustion interaction. I'm not even sure what the best way to use Combustion is when you have Hot Streak. It depends on Ignite bugging, cast count and crit count issues.

The value in brackets is the chance that Ignite bugs on a Fireball + Fire Blast double crit.


Spell casting without Hot Streak:
Fireball : 2978 / 4543
Fire Blast : 3516 / 4903
FB3-FiBl : 3056 (0%), 3037 (50%), 3018 (100%) / 4595 (0%), 4557 (50%), 4519 (100%)

Spell casting with Hot Streak (first part is the spammed spell, second the cast on the 100% crit buff):
(FB3-FiBl)+(FBFiBl): 3120 (0%), 3081 (50%), 3042 (100%) / 4759 (0%), 4674 (50%), 4588 (100%)
(FB)+(FBFiBl) : 3086 (0%), 3068 (50%), 3050 (100%) / 4769 (0%), 4725 (50%), 4680 (100%)

That means the Hot Streak adds 64 (0%), 44 (50%), 32 (100%) / 174 (0%), 168 (50%), 137 (100%) DPS on average.

An Arcane/Fire spec like 33/38/0 performs as follows:

Fireball : 3281 / 5012
Fire Blast : 4102 / 5740
FB3-FiBl : 3400 (0%), 3372 (50%), 3344 (100%) / 5118 (0%), 5063 (50%), 5008 (100%)


Frostfire Bolt specs should use frost and fire talents. Who would have guessed!
I'm using 0/34/37 as standard spec since Water Elemental damage looks quite bad.
You'd have to drop 1% crit, Combustion and Molten fury for an unimproved Elemental, which looks like a sidegrade and more headache.

Those are the conservative values. Add 13% if you want FFB to double-dip from CoE, and another 10% if you want to have a laugh with Frost Vulnerability.

Frostfire Bolt (lower gear) : 3182 (0%), 3532 (1 mage, 19%), 3817 (2 mages, 34%), 4046 (3 mages, 47%), 5026 (100%) /
Frostfire Bolt (higher gear) : / 4888 (0%), 5423 (1 mage, 20%), 5858 (2 mages, 36%), 6186 (3 mages, 49%), 7499 (100%)

Frostfire Bolt with double CoE, Frost Vulnerability and 100% Winter's Grasp : 6246 / 9321

With 10 mages, you would reach 87% / 89% Winter's Grasp uptime.


Frostfire Bolt without Ignite (lower gear) : 2328 (0%), 2514 (1 mage, 19%), 2664 (2 mages, 34%), 2787 (3 mages, 47%), 3305 (100%) /
Frostfire Bolt without Ignite (higher gear) : / 3500 (0%), 3783 (1 mage, 20%), 4008 (2 mages, 36%), 4188 (3 mages, 49%), 5148 (100%)

I figured I'd add the oh-so-great 34/23/14 style specs if Winter's Grasp gets scrapped, which can't bring their own Winter's Chill, and compare with 0/37/34:
Frostfire Bolt : 2822 (no WC), 3200 (WC from another mage) / 4405 (no WC), 4939 (WC from another mage)
Frostfire Bolt 0/37/34 : 3256 / 4993


Conclusions for now

Arcane Barrage does what Arcane Blast was supposed to do:
Provide high DPS, but requires rotation with other spellls.

Barrage rotations provide the highest baseline sustainable DPS, they are even above normal Arcane Blast spam and only beaten by Blast spam with 2T5, which is probably not sustainable.

Frostbolts before WG are at ~2/3 of the power of Barrage rotations. With 3 mages and pet use, you get to ~90% of Barrage rotations.
With 10 mages, you reach ~90% WG uptime. Even if you could reach 100% uptime and your pet never died, you'd only be at most 5% above Barrage.

Seeing that you need absurd stacking in order to simply break even with Barrage, Winter's Grasp looks very balanced in conjunction with Frostbolts.

Pet scaling is pretty mediocre, for a lack of euphemisms.
Ice Lance spam in mobile fights on the other hand seems very powerful if you have ~3 mages.


Fire talents simply lack power. Hot Streak is a very cool idea, but it needs some retuning becausee it adds negligible damage. Burnout's issues have been named as well. And juggling around Ignite bugs and Combustion issues doesn't make it any easier.
Being stuck in BC mode, Fire is ~15% behind Barrage. Arcane/Fire specs peform a bit better, they are ~10% behind Barrage.


Elemental Frostfire Bolt specs are broken and overtuned beyond hope, that's nothing new.
But it's not just the fault of Winter's Grasp. Even without Grasp/Shatter in 0/37/34, one-button-FFB-spam is very competitive.
With Winter's Grasp, even if it was changes to only affect the original caster, Frostfire Bolt competes with Barrage Rotations and outscales them.
Arcane variations like 34/23/14 are strictly inferior for FFB.

The major issue that unbalances Frostfire is the powerful crit scaling with Ice Shards and Ignite, two easily reachable powerful talents that are not additive but multiplicative. Winter's Grasp then amplifies exactly that scaling by increasing the amounts of crits you can attain.

If Ignite wouldn't work with Frostfire Bolt, it would be pretty much in line with Frostbolt and quite balanced.
Yes, that means with Winter's Grasp.


One thing that is pretty awkward is Frozen Rune Weapon - World of Warcraft. It's an outside debuff that isn't really appealing to Death Knights and yet yes to be considered by us.
If it was made either useful and attractive for all Death Knight specs, or changed into something else like a self buff for tanking, it would be easier to balance around.


Disclaimer

The numbers given are not to estimate what our DPS will be, they are give to estimate how our different specs and talents compare with each other.
Because spec performance will largely depend on gear, I have given two gear guesses for low-end and high-end gear.
Their purpose is to give a comparison and find out if a certain spec performs well due to scaling or due to base values.

Comparing their relative performance on two levels of gear helps finding those scaling differences.


[Edit]: Fixed wrongly scaled FFB values.

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.

 

Skallewag

Wohoo! ABar spam looks os sweet! Im really looking forward to not being so vunerable to mobility fights. The short CD means that either Abar or Fire Blast will nearly always be upp if you haveto do some minor movement to dodge boss AoE and even if you gotta stay on the run DPS doenst drop to zero at least.

 

Theophanes

I haven't really looked at other theory-crafting for other classes, so I'm rather curious as to whether FFB spam with ideal conditions will lead to the highest dps in the game, and, therefore, broken dps. While FFB does appear to come out on top over other mage specs, how well will it scale in comparison or measure up to the highest dps rogue or hunter specs?

What about implementing a diminishing returns mechanic on WG so that mage stacking doesn't become a huge issue? It seems to me that removing ignite from FFB would be plain inconsistent, and the better path would be to limit WG scaling with FFB through other means.

 

Searix

I'm bored atm, so im going to post a quick review of talents i believe still really need help.
Source: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Arcane:

Tier 1:
Arcane Subtlety: 5/10 spell penetration needs to scale.
Improved Arcane Missiles: Still a frivelous talent. Definately needs to be less talents, another spell added to it, or something

Tier 2:
Wand Specialization: Other classes are losing their's, why do we have ours? No one's specced this since the dawn of time

Tier 4: Improved Mana shield: Instead of eating 3200 mana with one mana shield, it eats 2640 mana. Joy.

Tier 5: Improved Blink: We already typically blink to avoid damage. Up until 4 seconds is already the safe point. Something needs to change

Tier 8: Arcane Flows: Just a weird talent, it should also reduce Icy veins cooldown, and should be -1 minute.

Tier 9: Slow: Still is useless in pve, still is worthless against 99% of 2's/3's healers (priest/druid). Instant Cleanse and Shapeshift respectively neuter this hard.

Tier 10: Missile Barrage/ArBa stop syncing when you get haste, which is counter-intuitive with a spell haste talent one tier earlier.


Fire:

Tier 8: Fiery Payback: Where to begin with this one, Molten armor does less than 1% of a person's health, 20% more of <1% is still <1%. The resist mechanic of this is dumb, are we supposed to stack resists? How many damage classes do we fight in arena that uses instant up front nukes? Now take that and ask yourself how many of those will be fully resisted. Worthless talent.

Tier 10: Burnout: This along with Playing with Fire, this tree has to be hands down the best dps spec in the GAME or what's the point of these talented penalties.

Tier 11: What in the world is with this worthless talent. No damage + putting impact on DR. This in addition to a god-awful amount of mana.


Frost:
In general: Way to many 5 point talents

Tier 3: Improved Blizzard: The reason no one takes this is because blizzard takes 2-3 seconds from when you cast it for it to actually do damage/snare.

Tier 5: Frozen Core: #fire/frost damage dealers: Next to 0. Barring PMR, where you're always on the mage anyways so you take next to no frost damage.
Improved Cone of Cold: Cone of Cold costs way to much mana for way to little damage.

Tier 9: Improved Water Elemental: Do i need to post videos of rogues 2 shotting my pet? The number of bosses that have aoe that one shots my pet? What's 30% more health going to do? This pet has NO resist to spells, and little armor, in addition to horrendous base health.

Tier 11: Deep Freeze: This talent irks me the most. This is ANOTHER talent that is DIRECTLY countered by Druids and Priests? Are you telling me a non brain dead druid/priest won't instantly break my freeze if they see me casting deep freeze?

Blizzard still has a long way to go with mages in wrath.

 

Talbain

Well let's try and fix some of these, hmm? I agree with your assessments for the most part, and well, am always suggesting new stuff. So I'm bored, let's get started!

Arcane Subtlety - Increases spell penetration per level. .5/1 per level.
Imp Arcane Missiles - Becomes:
Improved Arcanics
Arcane spells now have a 33/66/100% chance to avoid interruption while casting, and increases the range of your Arcane spells by 2/4/6 yards.

Becomes:
Arcane Spirit
Identical to Spirit Tap. Links with the Tier 3 "Student of the Mind" talent. 2 Ranks.

Becomes:
Mana Weaving
Decreases the mana lost per point of damage taken when Mana Shield is active by 25/50% and increases your health by 100% of mana lost.

Improved Blink
Reduces the cooldown of Blink by 5/10 seconds.

It currently has two ranks, the second rank being one minute. So your wish already came true on this one. Still doesn't affect Icy Veins, though I don't feel it should.

Add this part to the end of Slow:
Whenever Slow would otherwise be dispelled, its duration is instead cut in half. So Slow is now undispellable, but its duration can now be reduced to nothing by dispelling. I don't know how to make this useful for PvE. I don't honestly think it's possible. It'd have to be a completely different spell in my mind.

I dunno, I think Missile Barrage is fine as is, so you'd have to give more specific examples about what's wrong with it.

Re-work of Fiery Payback:
Whenever you are critically hit, 25% of the damage dealt is returned to the target. 3 second cooldown.

This talent should basically just burn 1% of the target's total mana (or more... I'd like more). Increase the critical strike damage bonus to that of Ice Shards.

Living Bomb
Targeted spell, 35 yard range.
The target becomes a Living Bomb, dealing 750 damage every second for 6 seconds to all targets within 10 yards. The target then explodes, dealing 1500 damage to all targets within 20 yards and knocking all affected targets back 5-10 yards. 30 second/1 minute cooldown.


Same with the Arcane tree really.

Reduce it to one rank and it's fine.

Frozen Core:
Your Frost spells have a 50/100% chance to resist spell pushback and you take 3/6% less damage from Frost spells. Burning Soul in the Fire tree should receive a similar upgrade.

Increases the damage done by 15/25/35% and decreases the mana cost by 15/25/35%.

Improved Elemental - Your Water Elemental is now permanent, however it may only be summoned once every minute. 1 Rank

Deep Freeze becomes:
Chains of Ice
Chains of Ice freezes a target to the ground for 4 seconds. During those 4 seconds, the target may not cast spells or use abilities on themselves. This ability does not affect abilities which make the target invulnerable or otherwise immune to damage. 30 second cooldown.