From what I understand that's related more to spell resistance than to spell hit. My understanding is that for every level a mob is above you, they have 8 resistance that can't be overcome with spell hit or penetration.

I really hope they retool this mechanic a bit, but I have heard anything from beta.

Edit: Oh and the 1% was in addition to the ~16% spell hit you needed before.

Totem of wrath + Moonkin FF + WG (when it's up) Would cap elemental hit now wouldn't it (assuming it's 9%) Wouldn't really need the talent in this case.

He's referring to the fact that no matter how much hit you have, there's always a 1% chance to resist that melee/ranged do not encounter.

That's exactly what I was talking about. A mob 3 levels above you has 24 spell resistance that you can't overcome with penetration/hit, and this is the 1% that people talk about.

No, it is not.

From the Think Tank on Spell Penetration:

Yes, this is correct. But this has nothing to do with the 1% miss minimum. Casting a Fireball at a raid boss, you currently incur both a 1% flat resist rate and a 6% average damage loss due to partials.

Since the game now makes a readout distinction between a spell "Miss" and "Resist", let's go ahead and make the distinction clear.

A "Miss" by current standards has a 17% flat chance of occurring against a boss mob. This is mitigated by Spell Hit, down to a minimum of 1%

A "Resist" is caused by resistances, which a boss mob will have 24 to all schools against a player. Except for this level based rating bonus, it is mitigated by Spell penetration. These are the source of Partial Resists, only very rarely causing a full one unless you have 5 times the level of the attacker in the particular resist rating.

EDIT: been explained already, got beaten to it.

Ok, they were always explained to me as the same thing. The only reason it had more of impact on fire was that frostbolt was a binary resist spell.

Edit: thanks guys for clearing that up.

Edit 2: Oh, and another thing, has anyone done any research into how binary spells are being treated? 2-roll vs 1 roll?

Edit 3: Since this is still the latest post I'll ask how much +hit is need per 1% chance to hit for spells @70 - 12.6 or 15.76 in the beta?

Edit 4: Official talent calculators for WotLK just got updated, no mage changes seen so far.

Since we're talking about resistances, has anyone confirmed whether or not FFB is a binary resist spell?

Unless they change resist mechanics, it will be. From what I understand, any spell that has an added effect (i.e. slowing) cannot suffer partial resists.

They justify this by the +damage coefficient that spells receive while having an added effect. (-5%).

Suggestion to replace Winter's Grasp:

Make it so that its an improved Winter's Chill.

Enhance Winter's Chill so that each stack will increase chance to hit by .2/.4% chance to hit and .5/1% to critically strike with frost spells. Also increases the length of Winter's Chill by 5/10 seconds.

Winters Chill with 5 stacks then grants 2% to hit and 15% chance to crit.

2 talent points for 5% crit and 2% to hit. Might be a little high, but not nearly as OP as its current state. Moreover, it helps the raid as a whole.

Thoughts?

(I know this is purely a suggestion that will probably never see the light of day, but its still fun to dream, right?)

25-mans, yeah, in 10-mans you're a lot less likely to be getting all those. Additionally, I'm still assuming that Winter's Grasp only affects melee and ranged. Generally, "all attacks" means melee/ranged, while "all attacks and spells" means everything. I rather doubt we'll get enough data to know for sure before release, however.

My understanding is that binary resists are gone, finit, kaput. All spells now use the same resist mechanics, with secondary effects such as snares being applied as long as the spell doesn't miss or get a 100% "partial" resist.

I'm pretty sure the penalty is meant to compensate for the extra effect, not for the way it affected resistance -- and therefore, I expect that Frostbolt and Frostfire Bolt will still suffer a 0.95 multiplier on their coefficients. However (this is for you, Zaldinar, if you haven't already got it on your list), this is definitely in need of testing. If Frostbolt no longer suffers a 5% coefficient penalty, that's a very significant change to its scaling.

Do you think there is a chance that spell damage coefficients will take effect only AFTER the spell lands, meaning that if the mob is immune to snare, FrB gains 85.7%. If it is not immune, it gains 80.7%.

This could definitely open up some new spells to raiding and also increase the scaling as spell power stacks up over 2k.

I agree it is fun to dream, but you need to dream bigger. The talent you suggested basically reads "make frostbolt a little bit better". Which is just what the tier 10 frost talent already does. Blizzard is trying with WG to address the long standing concern that frost (for mages and now for death knights) has this cool mechanic (shatter) against frozen opponents but bosses can't be frozen. What they came up with was awesome and makes for interactive/reactive game. It gives frost mages an option on fights you have to keep moving. It allowed them to put a stun in for frost mages that only procs on frozen people that will be applicable at random moments.

All these things are good things. They just need to work out scaling issues.

This is how I hoped things would work for many moons now. I even thought it might be a talent ala "Convert frozen energies against snare immune targets to damage." But I'll believe it when I see it--or rather when I read early beta reports about it...

Is that the case with those single effect non-damage spells like Polymorph? If so, would that affect the rate of resist on Poly or would it be around the same ballpark? Too bad you couldn't partially sheep somebody and have run around with a sheep's torso!

Er. No, I'm sorry, I should have been more specific. Binary resists for damage spells are apparently over and done with. A spell that actually only has a single on-or-off effect would still be binary.

Slightly off-topic, but Lhivera, based on what you are saying, even holy spells will have partial resists now? I'd be curious to see how that would effect paladins and priests. (more so the paladins)

Holy spells already suffer from level-based partial resists now. They're only unique in that it's impossible to gear for resisting them.

As I understand it, the reason we don't see partial resists on Holy spells is not because they're binary, but simply because there is no holy resistance in the game to cause partial resists. That would still have to change in order to start seeing partial resists on holy spells.

ETA: I stand corrected, I was unaware that level-based resists included Holy resistance.

Casting a fireball at a lvl 1 critter also gives you a 1% chance to resist currently. It has nothing to do with level or school resistance. Right now there is just a 1% chance to flat out resisted simply because blizzard made it that way. We can never achieve 100% hit against anything.

From everything i've read, they are removing the binary mechanic.