Powerade

Here the new JoW and BoW :P

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...g?t=1211549802

 

Cryic

Bandwidth exceeded, anybody care to type out what it said?

 

Powerade

Lv 74 JoW 143 mana per hit
Lv 77 BoW 91 mp5

 

Cryic

Wow, so the JoW progression:

Rank 1 - 33
Rank 2 - 46
Rank 3 - 59
Rank 4 - 74
Rank 5 - 143???

 

Jarlyn

Factoring in that they seem to be discouraging chain-chugging mana pots, sure.

 

• Xenophon

Sorry to hear that Lhiv, though to be honest I was always amazed at how you could put up with the noise to signal ratio over there. Still, banning one of the two (well, three with the rawr folks) main mage theorycrafters is a pretty silly move. Hell, at least Tess kept Tsaric up half the night before he banned him/her back in the day.

As far as WotLK leaked talents go, it seems like there is an effort to make crit a more useful stat for mages, following its relegation to the "stat of last resort" for most of TBC. I'd be curious if they are changing the ilvl item point allocations for the next expansion, making crit more similar to other stats on a point for point bases, as that would alter things quite a bit.

Anyone know if the publically available information from the leaked alpha had any lvl 80 crit/hit rating numbers?

 

◊ Vontre

Sancus looked up Burnout in the data parse, and looking at the aura applied it is definitely 25% on the BONUS crit damage, not on the total. It is the exact same aura as Spell Power.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Lhivera

That's a pity, as that means it's terrible.

Any info on Eternal Flames?

 

Sancus

Eternal Flames is a new aura not used in any other spell called "Mod Crit Damage Bonus (Fire, Shadow)".

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Deedre

Vontre, that's quite disappointing. I thought for sure Lhiv had puzzled it out. It makes a hell of a lot more sense applied to the total.

To put things in perspective and to aid future TC efforts, here are the following values for max rank spells as of level 80:

Arcane Missile: 360 per missile (Rank 12, level 79)
Arcane Barrage: 936-1144 (Rank 2, level 80)
Arcane Blast: 912-1058 (Rank 3, level 80)
Pyroblast: 1190-1510 (Rank 11, level 77)
Fireball: 888-1132 (Rank 15, level 78)
Frostfire: 722-838 (Rank 1, level 80)
Icelance: 221-255 (Rank 2, level 78)
Frostbolt: 799-861 (Rank 15, level 79)

Mana costs for all these are unknown at present.

Edit: added rank number and level learned.

 

Alvira

Some thoughts based on these numbers.

AM at 360 per missile would do 1080 damage in 3 seconds. That's more of less on par with the lv 80 fireball. And this is the untalented AM.

Arcane blast base damage is also on par with fireball. Whereas in TBC, it was markedly lower than fireball. Depending on how mana regen works out in WOTLK, arcane may be viable and competitive still.

Pyroblast got a pretty big boost.

Frostfire is a fire based damage bolt (which means it benefits from fire talents) that reduces movement by 40%! Wow. Fire specs can now cast a hardhitting bolt that slows! Not sure what the cast time is, but its probably between 2.5 to 3 seconds. lots of pvp implcations here. If you take up impact (10% chance of stunning for 2 seconds). Then fire specs can cast a bolt that both slows plus may stun.

Frostbolt damage is lowest. No surprises there.

 

Deedre

I'm doubting that AM will amount to much compared to fireball once scaling and talents take effect.

But I'm starting to get excited about AB.

 

Pintofbrew

Sorry for the late reply, gentlemen. Concerning AoE, I may stand corrected with Molten Fury not influencing AoE, it's been a while since I AoE'd anything (though I do seem to recall last AE's a little bigger, perhaps the cap was loosening due to deaths and I'm over-romanticizing)

The percentile increment was noted in a Lock thread, probably the PvE Compendium, where there was a lot of aggressive exchange of words, which culminated in "there is only one way besides crit, that you can surpass the AoE cap, and that's by CoS every single mob" which then sparked a different discussion on whether or not there was a point on having one lock CoS vs SoC, and how many casters/targets is the break-even point.

If you'd like to check this for yourself, the easiest to do is pull everything, have a lock do a CoE on one mob, and Blizzard. Provided you're at the cap (easy, pull a helluvalot), you'll see a consistent number, which will be less than the number you see vs. an uncapped amount, and one single bigger number, by 10% ideally.

As for this, it's very, very interesting. Let's look at spell-scaling through leveling. Assuming, of course, that the numbers here are the -last- rank we get before 80 and not an intermediate rank.

Current fireball, base, average: 815. At 80: 1010. Net increase:.... 23.9%
Current Missiles, base, average: 280. At 80: 360. Net increase:..... 28.6%
Current Pyro, base, average: 1065. At 80: 1350. Net increase:....... 26.8%
Current Frostbolt, base, average: 655. At 80: 830. Net increase:... 26.7%
Current Icelance, base, average: 174. At 80: 238. Net increase:.... 36.8%

What becomes obvious, is there's some consistent increase between 26.5 and 28.5%, with what's currently "weakest" getting more, it would seem. There's two issues, however, I have with the statistics... Firstly, how come Fireball scales so little. In scaling terms, Frostbolt seems to have scaled 11% more than fireball. Secondly, how come Icelance scaled so very much? This is immense and it shows dramatically given that Icelance is on the *3 treatment.

Thoughts:
1) Icelance scaling so much may be for PvP reasons, or possibly to ensure it works with WG. I'd assume there's a very real fear that at some gearing level, the WG->Frosbolt->Icelance get's outscaled by plain WG->Frostbolt->Frostbolt.
2) Fireball may be scaling so lowly, purely because the last rank was just too low level; if this is the case I expect there to be another rank before Xpac shipping; Immagine, we conventionally gain one fireball every 6 levels. If at WotLK we gain the last rank of Fireball at 75, we're just short of getting a fresh rank at 80, meaning we're a few percent back in terms of scaling.
3) Missiles scales better than the average, but it's not particularly pants-shitting. It's +damage scaling is still quite bad (ie. the same as it is now). It remains to be seen if mage creativity is enough to overcome boring and seemingly useless mechanics.
4) Pyro is still worthless.

 

Tyrian

My biggest dissappointment with our current spells, based on alpha info so far?

Flamestrike.

C'mon Blizzard, you could really make this spell something. In WC3, it was a formiddable spell - people heard the bells and saw the shadows.. and had a reason to run. It was neat. Our Wow flamestrike is just terrible, even in its horrible animation. I dont want to wait until a third expansion to see it fixed *angryface*

 

Sorcerer

I still think you wont be able to cast it in 3vs3/5vs5 if things go live as it is now. Lets train the mage!

 

Zaldinar

What I saw would seem to agree with the CoS thought, assuming CoS behaves the same way as Imp Scorch did for me (a rather safe bet). I had observed in the early work for that cap thread that Dr Boom took more damage than his bomblets in a capped flamestrike, he had a Imp Scorch on him, but my automated calcing method was very sketchy at that time, and the numbers were small enough that it appeared that Boom just got more of the pie than the rest of them. On that, I also stand corrected.

I really wish that they would do something with AM/Pyro to make them more appealing. As it is Pyro is still our hardest hitting single spell, and excellent for DPM, but deplorable for DPS. I'd love to see its DoT get the full +damage benefit it should based on Pyros cast time, and potentially a secondary effect (or an inscription that generates a secondary effect on Fire DoT effects, or some such). Having Pyro as a viable portion of an actual rotation other than for just screwing around on trash or using it as a DPM/TPS tool would be very nice.

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.

 

Pintofbrew

I'd like Pyro to get the Soulfire Treatment, personally. Increase it by 35% or so, give it a 30sec Cooldown. The problem, of course, is that people who have no contact whatsoever with PvP are then going to have a 2-year flashback to videos of ZOMG BERSERK-PI-AP-POM-ZHC-ToEP-PYRO-LOL 1shots, go totally ape-shit, and get the change reverted back to what it was.

I'd argue that the solution to this would be also change PoM to not work on spells over 5sec (so no more pom-conjuring for YOU!) but then the same idiots who whined about 3m mages would then argue on their 3m mage alts with 780 spellpower (with mind mastery) that "gg blizz, we now have no way of killing ANYTHING, EVER."

Because let's face it. As it stands, Pyro is only a PoM-tool, and even as that it's only marginally better than a PoM-Fball.

 

radikal

Pyro is terribly designed still. I really don't see why the spell can't become a short casting time, slightly less hard hitting, medium cooldown ability. (Mind Blast-ish but longer cd) By putting the cast time sub 3 seconds, you indirectly nerf AP-PoM-Pyro by taking down the damage coefficient that gets multiplied through by AP and allow the ability to become part of a casting rotation.

I haven't seen the point made here or elsewhere tbh concerning the scaling of the instant abilities. All of the instant casts see 40%+ gains in dmg, and the AoE instants see even larger increases - CoC, BW, etc. Obviously, it's preliminary to say much, but it does seem that this and the increased potency of absorb effects could have a pretty large impact on gameplay.

 

arch

That's exactly what I've been calling for aswell radikal. A mid-combat mindblast kind of spell. I don't even know what pyro is designed to be atm. It is not a very good opener or mid-combat cast. It's only remotly viable for arcane/fire mages, which is complete bs as the spell should actually be useful for the tree it belongs in.

Either make it a mindblast mimic or a soulfire mimic.

 

Lhivera

Assuming these are the values taken from the screenshots we saw yesterday, they may not be the final level 80 values, but rather the starting values of the ranks we'll be using at level 80. If one of them is learned at level 77, for example, we can expect that it would run a few points higher at level 80.

 

Lhivera

Two last requests if you have the time: how about the CSD aura, and the Monster Slaying aura (from hunter/survival)?

 

Deedre

The numbers I posted above are max rank, although for some of these spells that rank is hit before reaching level 80. Possibly we may see more ranks added in the game later, and yes, I'm going off the screenshots.

The outlier in terms of percentage gain from live is, of course, arcane blast.

 

Soul

You forgot one:

Current Arcane Blast, base, average: 725 (at 70). At 80: 985. Net increase:.... 35.7%%

I suppose this is lessen the pain of the 2T5 nerf?

 

Rouncer

How much damage would they have to put on 2 pieces of gear to offset the 2T5 bonus? I ask because either they are planning on scaling damage to that level or they will have to do something like what they did with the Rogue ZF trinket and make set bonuses scale down while leveling.

 

Deedre

Rounced, I estimate roughly 200 spellpower to fully offset the bonus loss. Average AB hits for 700, x 1.2 = 840.

I doubt they will throw that big of a bonus on the set, but it gives you an idea of how powerful it is.