What if Netherwind Presence increased the amount of haste you already have by 6%, the same way Arc Instability increases your spell power?
Would that make it scale better, or worse?

No, since it decreases cast time with no gear equipped.

I would just like to point out that warlocks can do better than this currently without speccing at all and they don't get reduced DPS.

Agreed, Scorch should be either higher or lower in the tree and focus magic should be baked together with magic attunement allowing you to cast those spells on enemies.

But it doenst feel to unlikel that both lower and higher parts of the fire tree gets rearranged and some stuff swapped for new talents. Blizz are probably very aware that the fire tree if far from a finished tree for any role presently.

It would scale far, far worse. Disregarding DoTs and cooldowns, a talented 6% haste is a straight 6% damage increase. Note that haste increases scale multiplicatively, so in essence it already increases the haste benefit from gear. the way it is now is(disregarding haste buffs):
[spell_cast_time] = [base_cast_time]/(1.06*(1+[gear_haste])) or
[spell_cast_time] = [base_cast_time]/(1.06+1.06*[gear_haste])
What you're suggesting is:
[spell_cast_time] = [base_cast_time]/(1+1.06*[gear_haste])

Your suggestion would result in a weaker effect for all levels of haste.

I am quite happy with the way spec progression worked in TBC. If anything, it was a major improvement over vanilla.
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The thing i am saying is a bit different. Currently we know exactly nothing of WotLK metagems and setbonuses. Also, the only thing we know about glyphs is that they can affect the caster mechanics substantially, by changing the damage, casting time, mana costs of spells, and giving them extra buffs/debuffs. But we don't know any mage-specific glyphs.

As long as we don't know what additional alterations to spells will be available to mages, we cannot really say that we know how the specs will work in WotLK. Theorycrafting current mechanics is helpful, because it allows to understand the current mechanics better. But there is a very real possibility that Blizzard will introduce a new item / spell / enchant / glyph / setbonus / whatever that will change the very nature of mechanics being theorycrafted.

Sorry, no, I must not have been clear. A fully-talented Arcane Barrage scales better than a Frostbolt with 3/3 Elemental Precision, 5/5 Imp. Frostbolt and 5/5 Ice Shards, plus the deep Arcane talents. I expect that a fully-talented Frostbolt scales better than a fully-talented Arcane Barrage, but that wasn't a relevant question to a deep Arcane build that isn't capable of casting a fully-talented Frostbolt.


At 3000 damage and 30% crit before talents, it's still well worth using in rotation. See the math on my page (linked a couple times recently in this thread); it's not going to be dropped anytime soon.



We've always done that because we have to start somewhere, and because we're far enough into the talent iterations that it makes sense to get the meat of the work done so that as talents are refined, the numbers can be refined, rather than starting from scratch when they're done. Even with the finished talents, a comparison with identical base stats is always the logical starting point; once you've got that, then you start branching out to optimal gear adjustments for each spec.

In short, just because you can't get it all right immediately doesn't mean it's not a good idea to start laying the groundwork. And of course even these rough first steps can point out problems -- a gap such as that between Fire and the other specs is clearly not going to be narrowed significantly through alternate gearing, for example.

Yes, absolutely. There shouldn't be any such thing as "spec progression." When the relative power of different specs changes enough with itemization to drive people to switch specs as they gear up, that's an obvious sign of badly broken design. Blizzard of course took steps with the MSD to correct the problem.


But look at their trees relative to each other. Affliction provides more rDPS than Destruction, and thus provides less personal DPS. I grant that, yes, Destruction can offer a solid rDPS benefit while bringing huge personal DPS, but haven't we been arguing for a year that this is a problem? If so, how can we argue that it's any less of a problem if it happens with one of our own trees?

On the WotLK Beta Priest forums they are taking suggestions for glyphs as they are designing them right now. I think we should discuss what we'd like to see from glyphs. Perhaps we could collect the suggestions, and then vote on them in a poll? Hopefully someone in beta would then post the top 10-20 to the WotLK Beta Mage forum.

Here's a few to start:

I wouldn't be particularly concerned on the percentages, but the general effect of the glyph.

Edit: I just thought about something. If each class has 20+ glyphs, that's 10 x 20+ recipes for an inscriber to pay for and learn.

Edit 2: oops 10

They aren't all going to be Epic though, are they :P

Still each class is going to have at least 6-10 desirable glyphs, and that's a lot of recipes to collect.

Back on topic, nobody wants to see anything?

When I spoke of a "m/r" value, I was speaking very specifically of the ratio of base damage to coefficient. Though this is not useful for the purposes of calculating expected DPS, this is useful for determining abstractly how well a spell scales with +damage relative to other spells. In short, if we wanted, for example, Fireball spam to beat Frostbolt spam by 7% regardless of gear level, they would need to have the same m/r value, just with Fireball having 7% more base DPS. Spells with the same m/r value stay very close to each other in percentage difference.

I looked at the m/r value of Arcane Barrage solely for the purposes of determining whether, when used in rotation, it will become a more and more trivial part of that rotation as gear increases. I'm quite sure it will.

Do you think an abstract examination of "best-case DPS for a given number of item points" would make sense?

Are you quite certain it's not, in your terms, [spell_cast_time] = [base_cast_time]/(1+[gear_haste]+.06)?

If it happens to be that way, then Netherwind Presence doesn't scale.

stick with the basics.

no interpretable frostbolt/arcane blast
+x damage on spell y
-x mana on spell y

Decreases the cool down on your Blink spell by 2 seconds.
Decreases the mana cost of your Cone of Cold spell by 20%.
Increases the Cone AoE of you Dragon's Breath spell.
Decreases the regen of your sheep spell by 30%.
The mana cost of your slow spell is lowered by 25%
When struck your Water Elemental has a 10% chance to freeze it's attacker in a tomb of ice.
Your Evocation spell channel time is hastened to 8 seconds. (5 ticks happen faster)
Your mana shield now burns mana, energy, rage, and rune power when struck.

I wouldn't mind "Increases the damage and mana cost of Arcane Blast by 20%. Does not stack with Tirisfal Regalia."

Affliction brings far more to the table than just the extra 3% from malediction though and is concidered worth bringing to a raid because of this. An untalented CoE is the closest spell to the new improved scorch that blizzard is proposing and scorch still pales in comparison concidering the upkeep. I honestly can't see why 15% couldn't be kept and apply it to all three schools while balancing the affected classes/specs, it would bring it more inline with CoE IMO.

I personally can't see anything wrong with a class bringing a good buff to the raid and be able to do comparitive DPS, at the end of the day a mage shouldn't be concidered a support class.

Lhivera, your and Roywyn's results are very reassuring, albeit surprising and counterintuitive. My immediate reaction is similar to Muphrid's, in that the tendency here would be for barrage to become decreasingly important in a rotation. But I guess it's happening at a very gentle rate and can be ignored for practical purposes.

I like those, however I'd also like to see them play off talents as well.

Increases the chance Arcane Blast procs Clearcasting by 5%
Increases the chance Scorch procs Impact by 5%
Gives your [spell name] a 5% chance to deliver a knockback/stun/+haste/+spell damage effect, etc.

Glyphs seem really exciting to me, as they can allow us to cover up weaknesses or augment strengths.

You mean 10 classes...

Anyway im really intrigued by the posibilitys of glyphs. Lets go cracy!

* Water juggling jugs - Makes your conjured water turn up in jugling jugs adapted for throwing.
makes conjured water throwable by shift-clicking it, just like a hard leather ball. Yeey, now you
can toss water to people who get swapped into raids without having to hassle with tradewindows
in the middle of chainpulling! (Conjured bread will offcourse turn up in the shape of throwing
muffins, and yes the idea is pinched from Charlies Angels 2).

* Mobile wanding - reduces the cast time of wandshots by 0.5 sec. Now we can move and wand.
(How could it possibly be more OP than hunters autoshot considering the laughable damage
wands do?)

* Slooooow fall - 50% slower slowfall. Lets you jump insane distances if you have a good starting
point.

* Campstrike - Your flamestrikes spawn a campfire when cast. (Cosumes 1 piece of simple wood,
if you have no wood you cast an ordinary flamestrike without getting a campfire.)

* Phase shift - Empowers your blink spell to turn you invisible (not dumping agro) for 0,5 sec.
Point being mobs or players who are targeting you loose their target. Mainly a pvp per ofc.

* Infused portals - Pours vast amounts of power into your portal weaving making them fast cast
but unstable. Increases the casting cost of portals by 50% reduces their cast time by 50% and adds a
5% risk to get portaled to a random city (including opposing factions portal destinations, oh the
lulz-potential of this inscription).

* Shadow image - enhances your blink to create three shadow images that blink at a 90, 180 and 279
degrees angle from your blink direction. Shadow images copy your looks movement and actions perfectly
for 5 secconds before fading. (Kinda like totems in targetability and HP respects.)

Thats all for now. Keep em coming!

The problem to me is that none of the utility from Arcane or Fire require a true Arcane or Fire spec, so you can't judge the spec's role based on a talent feasibly taken (and applicable) by deep Frost specs. Going 11 pts into Arcane or 18 into Fire for utility shouldn't doom the whole spec into inferior DPS. Like you mentioned, these utilities have to be deeper rooted to warrant a spec defining DPS role. However, I don't like the idea of simply moving Imp Scorch deeper into the tree for example, since it would be an extremely uninteresting and lazy attempt to legitimize the tree into a utility role whereas the entire breadth of the rest of the tree focuses primarily on DPS.

I completely agree, I always thought winter's chill would be a great talent to debuff with, whether that meant slowing attack speed of the mobs/bosses, giving extra crit, there are lots of things that could've been implemented. So far I haven't seen many specs with the proposed changes to scorch that hasn't included atleast 18 points in fire and lets face hardly anyone is concidering deep fire as a viable spec currently.

The only tree that seems worth going all the way to the end talent for at the moment is arcane, both frost and fire 51pt talents just don't provide any incentive to go deep. Fire is becoming the new arcane tree in regards that everyone is dipping into it for something.

Yes, but that's a whole other problem. I'm not trying to argue that the tree is fine as-is; it clearly isn't; I'm frankly not even sure how it can be fixed at this point without badly overpowering some individual talents, or (this is the only real option) completely replacing some of them with single-target DPS talents.

What I've been trying to say is this:

- As it stands now, Fire seems to suffer a DPS penalty for bringing a strong debuff. OK, that makes sense. A spec that brings a strong debuff should suffer a DPS penalty relative to a tree that doesn't, so that it doesn't become the only viable spec.

- However, there are at least two specs that can bring the same strong debuff without suffering a DPS penalty. This is a problem for every spec that doesn't bring the debuff, and doubly so for Fire.

- The only real solution to this seems to be moving the debuff so that only a deep Fire build can bring it -- but doing so relegates Fire to a role that to me, and I suspect most others, doesn't fit the tree.

Does that make my issues clear? I'm not arguing that the Fire Tree is OK. I'm arguing that making the Fire Tree OK is going to have to involve dealing with this strong debuff and what it means for the relative DPS performance of specs with the debuff and specs without it.

This is really extremely surprising.

I don't have the kind of spreadsheets you and Lhivera have. But a simple example I just did shows that high levels of crit will definitley affect the specs differently. (assuming 175% crit for arcane, 210% crit for fire, 300% crit for elemental)

Example: Say with +X dmg, and 0 crit, the specs compares as follows"

Arcane does 1200 DPS, Fire does 1100 DPS, ELemental spec does 1000 DPS.

With the same +X dmg, but with 100% crit now, the specs will become as follows:

Arcane does 2100 DPS, Fire does 2310 DPS, Elemental spec does 3000 DPS.

Granted 100% crit is impossible. But how about 50% crit? At 50% crit, the DPS of the specs with same +X damage is as follows:

Arcane will do 1650 DPS, Fire will do 1705 DPS, Elemental will do 2000 DPS.

So, as gear inflation pushes crit rating higher, the relative performance of the specs are all flipped around and arcane becomes the worst spec. The only way what you and Lhivera says will fit, is if the flip side is now true for +dmg. Hence, Arcane scales the best with +dmg, fire second, and elemetal third.

Hence, when you inflate gear levels to +5000 dmg and 30% crit, because Arcane scales better with +dmg, hence, the overal effect is that all the 3 specs keep their relative positioning to each other. This is both surprising and delightful to know. And if Blizzard has really managed to keep this equation, it would be great. I was looking purely at the crit modifiers and it just didn't seem possible to me that arcane would be able to maintain its scaling as gear ramps up crit. Its reassuring to know that you and Lhivera have already plugged in higher +dmg and crit numbers and that it does not bear this out.

Very very surprising. Perhaps we really should have more faith in Blizzard!