While I do partially agree with you on not having all the haste stuff stack. Getting frostbolt, as well as other spells very low without haste from gear might be a little over powered. But, what's the point of implementing all this haste? if the boomkin aura proc doesn't stack from wrath of air, and ret aura(didn't even know they added haste to this) Whats the point? Personally, I feel that getting 100 spell damage which WOULD stack with other stuff would be greater.

I just feel implementing all this haste, but not allowing it to stack just makes no sense to me. The change to ret aura, wrath of air, and the boomkin aura allow more group synergy, but gets killed if they won't be stacking.

I feel Ret aura needs to stack with everything else, as it's such a small number in comparison to other buffs.

Making Imp. Moonkin Aura not stack with WoA and Bloodlust would be kind of fair I think. It needs some changes in the proc duration and cooldown to tune it as approximately equal to twice the effect of WoA, though, to balance out the fact that it's party only. That would basically mean decreasing the cooldown significantly or even removing it.

Bloodlust not stacking with WoA/WF is something that they really need to implement, though. A single shaman being able to give 56% melee haste for quite a long period to a melee group, as well as 43% to a caster group, is kind of over the top.

So, I was answering some things and my browser ate it. Short version:

Arcane Barrage

* ABar-FrB vs. ABar-FB, ABar-FFB
FrB filler means more time spent casting ABar. But FB is so much better than FrB that it compensates for the loss of ABar cast time.
FFB scales well, but with 20 points to spare in non-arcane and having to spend at least 10 on useless fillers, you can't build up scaling.
* ABar-FB keeps up Imp. Scorch, fire is still ~half your damage. Without it, FB would be a worse filler.
Scorch is in the cycles listed, there should be a noice of it. You actually improve DPS with ABar/Fire by more aggressive Fire Blast use and Scorch only if needed.

All that is included in the Barrage rotation DPS values.

* You have 20.1% passive haste from WoA, Ret, NWP talent. ABar-FrB caps at 33% haste, leaving you 11% haste from gear/procs/stuff.
ABar-FB(FFB) caps at 50% which leaves you 25% haste from other sources.


Frostfire Bolt

I'm an idiot and used 100% instead of 86% scaling for the FFB specs.
Remove 9.97%/10.98%/11.49% of the FFB spec values at 1800/2600/3200 damage.
Tones them down a bit, but I still think it's overboard.
I'll fix that later.


* I did the calculations with a sheet like Setia's, just not as flashy:
[Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion
Spell values were taken from wowhead/wotlkwiki.

* Setia - your FB/FrB base are exactly 5% above those on the sites.
Did you have 4T6 when copying numbers in game? That set does affect tooltips even in the base UI.
If I read that right, you seem to miss Playing with Fire in the FFB calculations. Also, Combustion is a bit better for FFB and you have Cold Snap for double IV on trinket2/molten fury/heroism.

I'll have another look later. But if I shot 10% too high and you shot 5% too low, we might meet in the middle


1.5s Chaosbolt with a 229% coefficient? I don't believe that until I see it. Got any source?

Not to mention it would be absolutley silly not to give it some coeff penalty for penetrating any kind of defense including immuneties. If it scales that much I think we will start getting a lot of whining when warlocks start wearing T9 in the arena nearly oneshoting people with this skill that cant be toned down by any amount of resiliance.

Edit: Oh and comparing fireballs to frost bolts you have the advantage of 70% pushback resistance on them. In any fight with contant raidwide damage frostbolts will often be pushed up to 3 sec cast time anyway.

With a coeff of that magnitude it would hit for 6k with avarage gear, good joke. In my opinion even a full or 3/3.5 coeff is too much due to it's unresistable/piercing nature. 1200 base damage on r1 (we know nothing about further ranks) + 2k spellpower (easily with their OP armor) + talents it will easily hit for 3.5k at least.

I have a question regarding the Water Elemental and pet changes in WotLK. Are the WE's spells/abilities being added to the pet page (like hunter/warlock pets) when you are talented for it?

Also along a similar line. The how does the Deathknight's Ghoul pet's abilities scale compared to the WE?

Finally, any talk of plans to improve the WE?

I'm pretty sure he meant not a talent sheet, but a pet tab on the character sheet which shows the pet's stats. Warlocks do get this tab, and it would be very helpful if Frost Mages got it as well, as it would deobfuscate the scaling of the pet. We've done a good job of figuring out the +damage, +intellect and +stam scaling, but we know nothing of the pet's armor and resistance, and only a vague idea of its crit rate, for example. We assume it starts at 5% crit like other pets -- but how does Intellect scaling affect that? We don't really know. Hunter and probably Warlock pets are gaining a fair amount of base resistance as they level up. Will the Water Elemental? No idea!

The Water Elemental doesn't have ranks, it simply gains a damage increase to its spells with every level as you level up (16.3 damage per level, though I don't know if this holds from 70-80). The Elemental's scaling is really not so bad, at least in terms of damage output. Could be better, but every 4.375 points of +Damage you add increases its Waterbolt damage by 1 (before debuffs/crits).

Yes I was thinking along those lines, as opposed to the talent tree thingy. I'd really like to see a retooling of the Water Elemental into a more permanent pet.

I like it as-is, as a temporary burst damage buddy (bdb...bidibidibidi, that's right, Buck), I just want some more transparency on its mechanics.

Hehe, yeah. Well I kinda liked how they did the ghoul with the DK's. For 8 points in 2 different talents, you can increase the uptime by 75%, make it stronger, and reduce the cooldown in half. You can still only summon one, but the cooldown is shorter than the ghoul's potential life-span. From what I read, it has 8 abilities, and 1 of them is a defensive one.

I think they learned some lessons from the mage's WE, and I hope they'll take a second look at it.

OK, I stopped worrying about it because the accuracy was challenged by posters over on MMO champion. Now there is a follow-up post regarding changes in the last beta patch and the item "Arctic Reach no longer effects Ice Lance" is still there.

Different calculators have different wording for the Arctic Reach talent--sometimes Ice Lance is included in the description, sometimes it isn't. Can someone with a beta key check this for us?

I can't imagine they would do this intentionally. Give WG to allow IL to be a reactive spell and then forcing frost mages to be within 30 yards makes no sense. Especially since they finally gave arcane mages a range boosting talent.

I hope Blizzard doesn't change the Water Elemental in a permanent pet. Right now he is a very nice dps output every 2 minutes and 15 seconds (and it will become 2 minutes in its new Improved form) compared to the damage output of any other lock pet, with any decent source of regeneration it won't end his mana and it is a cheap instant cast.
If it will become permanent I guess we'll lose the cheap instant cast, the dps will be lowered and it will become one more thing to attend to during the raid to avoid his death.

I've heard this. But the official calcs on WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator have a description with no Ice Lance, so I was hoping for a test. Not that page could be somehow incorrect, of course.

Right, but the official calc for the live talents also has a description with no Ice Lance. There have been a couple posts on the official forum from testers attempting to debunk this rumor. This is almost certainly just a tooltip error carried over from the live calculator.

Further regarding the Water Elemental:

- It won't become permanent. It was tested as a permanent pet in early TBC alpha/beta, and found to be ineffective.

- If the rumors about spell hit mechanics matching melee/ranged hit mechanics are true, and the miss rate vs. +3 targets is being reduced from 17% to 9%, then the Water Elemental is gaining approximately a 9.6% DPS increase from that change. (Still would be awfully nice to get +1% hit per talent point on Imp. WE, though.)

People keep saying that and I really really cannot see why its such a persistant idea. Having the WE as a permanent pet would mean a lot less samage output from it. If blizzard were to make the current version of it permanent once summoned they would haveto drastically lower its damage since its balanced around never living longer than 45 sec. even if they were to buff it and let it bolt at current level of damage with infinite mana it would still be better to have them buff damage the 45 sec its out and not change the pet being a temporary buff. For the same reason that Ap is better in its current from than compared to if blizz just made it a passive buff. WE gives frostmages borst and controll when they need it. Dont get me wrong, Im not trying to say its a bad idea to change the WE in any way, theres plenty of changes that would be very usefull. But making it a permanent per is not one of them. In fact even if it doesnt scale as nice as we would like and dies easily from damage it is easily one of the best designed 41 pt talents in the game.

Oh and one more thing that would haveto be nerfed if it was made permanent is gaining boosts from your own temporary buffs. Currently if you fire upp all your trinkets and damage CDs and then pop the elemental he gets a share of that. If they made him permanent they would haveto nerf that part since people could abuse the mechanic. Go to botanica and MC a preist fo the damage buff and then summon your permanent WE, stuff like that. Even if its silly and lots of work it would be a usable exploit that would make it impossible to balance the WEs damage meaning the WE getting boosted from your short buffs would get nerfed and scaling would be worse off.

That's not true, actually. The WE's stats update live along with yours. You can easily see this in action by summoning the WE, letting it get a couple bolts off, then popping a trinket and quaffing a frost power potion or something along those lines. You'll see its bolts immediately start hitting for more damage. Similarly, if the trinket wears off before the WE expires, the bolts will start hitting for less damage.

Winter's Grasp right now appears to be comparable with pre-2.0 Ignite. But I'm looking around and find that a single Frost Mage will provide enough uptime of it to gain about 10% crit from Shatter, so it's 7 points for 10% crit, if you check crit talents around different trees of all classes, it's a fair deal. The second benefit of WG is helping people who are not hit capped, but doesn't really make it not worth to stack last 2% hit, even for dual-wielders.

I see however a problem around Shatter, because it seems amount of time targets can be frozen or considered frozen is simply much higher, than when the talent was originally designed. Since its original design, Frostbite was moved earlier and was made more efficient per point, Water Elemental was added, and then its duration was increased, and now lastly Winter's Grasp is added which is even benefitting from haste.

I don't like all those charged debuffs, all they did with Improved Shadow Bolt was forcing all Warlocks to spec into it if they ever plan to use Shadow Bolt, and the poor design made it so that there was no option but spamming Shadow Bolts, and also no options in Destruction T1, but that's another story for another thread.

So in my opinion a nice solution would be raising WG uptime (lowering number of Mages needed to cap it), while tuning Shatter to desirable crit returns with expected WG uptime.


As for Frostfire Bolt, if the current implementation of gaining from all debuffs at the same time stay, it will simply kill all single-school spells for all classes. I agree that it's a fair deal for it to be affected by both Fire and Frost talents. On the one hand it doesn't have "Improved" and "Empowered" talents like Fireball and Frostbolt do, but on the other hand it benefits from talents in other trees that provide comparable benefits.

Double benefit from debuffs is way above balanced. It makes it best even for pure Fire and Frost specs in big raiding situation, not just for Elementalists. I would find it reasonable if it would hit as either Fire or Frost, as its tooltip suggests, and based on it choose the debuffs it benefits from (but benefitting from all talents regardless of school), using single roll for both fire and frost damage amount, resists, misses, crits. So if Fire damage debuffs are better, but mob is resistant to Fire (FFB should be binary, right?), and there is Winter's Chill (crit debuff, not damage), in most cases it would hit as Fire, benefitting from Fire debuffs, but sometimes as Frost, when WC converts Fire hit into Frost crit, or when due to resistance Fire resist becomes Frost hit (or crit), misses I believe should be identical. Also if enemy has Fire or Frost Ward it will be more likely to pick school enemy isn't warded against.

As a possible tweak to Winter's Grasp... what if the target is considered frozen and gains 25%/50% of the effects of shatter (per point in WG). This still may be too overpowered, however I think it would be a step in the right direction and not a complete nerf. 25% increased chance to crit, giving approximately 55% crit chance for the next 5 seconds instead of 80%.

Thoughts?

A longer duration in PvE(think Fear, half duration vs PvP targets), coupled with a target specific debuff preventing reapplication for a set period of time would fix the problem.

EDIT: Oh, and has anyone done any type of threat calculation on FFB 33/38 and 30/41 specs?

Hello

I am new here and followed just a few pages of this discussions. Very interessting readings but I have a few questions of my own. I hope in case this has already been answered that no one is angry it's simply too much to read through all 100+ pages and find for these pieces of information. I want to add that english is not my native language though I am trying to write to the best of my abilities and you can accept that it's not that great maybe.

Now o my question.I was wondering if the range increase of Arcane Atunment affects the spells Spellsteal, Blink, Counterspell and Sheep. Has anyone tested this already?

I was wondering also if Arcane Barrage could be cycled with a ABs stacked to 1.5 second casts or would the mana cost and/or the difficulty be prohibitive to keep that up?

Are there any indications to the values of intellect and spirit being decreased so there will be a lot more allocated per item level in WotLK?

Thank you in advance for all answers.

One by one:

Yes, it will affect the Arcane Utility Spells. That's more of the point than it affecting ABar, IMHO.

That cycle is what a lot of people originally thought, but it just isn't sustainable. Thus the debates between FB. FrB, and FfB

There are no indications of an item cost change happening again, in fact blizzard reps have mentioned that there will not be one happening. However, itemization itself is going to be changing, since more classes will be relying more on Spirit.

Has anybody checked if the 1% unremovable spell miss chance has been decreased or removed? If it remains, the hit cap will be at a measly 8%.