Unless, of course, the Dispel is of the "Holy" school, as the Priest's version is. Purge and Devour Magic would be fairly effectively countered by the expected ~120 Resistance (130 vs. Devour if you're a Draenai or Undead, or 125 vs. either if you're a Blood Elf), but Dispel Magic would continue to go unhindered. I'm not sure if Arcane Shot would be affected, either; despite doing Arcane Damage, it can't be mitigated by resistances anyway, as far as I remember; so I don't know if the Dispel component could be resisted, either.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, on the whole; on one hand, 120 all-school resistance will also cut into incoming Magical damage in a way basic Dispel Resistance can't, but on the other hand, Dispel Magic is almost certainly the worst of the four standard Dispels, with Arcane Shot coming in close behind, so even though it sort of approaches the problem, I think it misses the mark. There's also the concern that standard Arena gear comes with about 95 Spell Penetration available in the form of weapon swapouts and a Cloak enchantment already in Season 3; It could even be more in Season 4, and who knows how much Penetration can be stacked in Season 5+?
Personally, I'd prefer to see a focused talent that, rather than offer across-the-board dispel resistance, simply makes all Armor and Shield spells 100% Resistant (i.e., Immune) to Dispel effects, while not affecting any other self-buffs or offensive magical effects; similar in effect to the Paladin Retribution talent making Seals and Seals alone Immune to Dispel.
My understanding of the mechanics was that arcane school resistance level applied towards resisting holy spells.
Remember, though, if you're casting as quickly as you should be, you can often outrun certain effects that should be instant. Arcane Blast is a prime example; you cast at 2.5 secs, you send your next cast request before it goes off, and you get the 2.5 sec cast speed rather than the 1-stack reduced cast speed that you should get.
This may work on our favor with NP; you could have your next AB started before the buff shows up, thus giving you 1.5 secs to decide what to use it on. This doesn't work with Clearcasting because mana consumption happens at the end of the cast, but it could well work with NP since cast time is determined at the beginning of the cast.
Indeed, but to my discredit I'm not able to pull that off 100% of the time (i've tested)... Quartz only shows about half of the time you're able to beat the cast bar by and between a fairly poor FPS in big raids and my own judgement, I can't rely on that.
I guess i'll just watch final numbers on ABar and see if the cast cycle I described above is worth trying. Oh, and pray they apply NP to pyroblast... that'd be pretty awesome :P
As for 11frost versus 11 fire... I still prefer IV for nuking through AoE damage and general DPS buffing. It was stated in the druid WotLK thread that the current improved moonkin tooltip is bugged and innacurate, so it may be that IV is still a good investment.
My understanding of the mechanics was that arcane school resistance level applied towards resisting holy spells.
Another common misunderstanding. Holy Spells can be resisted according to level-based resists (i.e., a cLevel +3 target will resist your Holy Spells 17% of the time), but there is no associated "Holy Resistance" stat; this is balanced against lower base damage for all damage spells of the Holy School, since there is no mechanic by which they can be partially resisted. (via Gear, anyway. It is *possible* that inherent level-based "Resistance", which we know mobs possess, may apply to Holy - I don't know myself - but this level-based ghost "Resistance" cannot be overcome by Curses, Spell Penetration or anything else)
Accordingly, Spell Penetration is of no use to a Holy DPS caster.
Another common misunderstanding. Holy Spells can be resisted according to level-based resists (i.e., a cLevel +3 target will resist your Holy Spells 17% of the time), but there is no associated "Holy Resistance" stat; this is balanced against lower base damage for all damage spells of the Holy School, since there is no mechanic by which they can be partially resisted. (via Gear, anyway. It is *possible* that inherent level-based "Resistance", which we know mobs possess, may apply to Holy - I don't know myself - but this level-based ghost "Resistance" cannot be overcome by Curses, Spell Penetration or anything else)
Accordingly, Spell Penetration is of no use to a Holy DPS caster.
Looks like we'll need to rely on dummy buffs and buff procs to help agains dispell then. At least its quite mana intensive for them (unless they're disc).
hrm.
Hopefully beefed up resistance will allow me to generate mana though Magic Abdominals to help with the 'mana race' against priests.
Well, any 2's composition where the primary DPS is a caster paired with a healer, you'll want to use Mage Armor. There aren't many aside from Warlock + Druid, but it happens.
Who bothers with any armor if you cant do much during the game becouse of being trained?
Originally Posted by Wander
3's compositions that are CC heavy, you're probably going to want to use Mage Armor on, and rely on your teammates to peel melee; running around in an armor that reduces Polymorph, Fear and other magical CC's
Again lets train and chain dispell mage, if you are trained you are not CC'ed. If you are not trained something is wrong with opponents leaving most fragile class out alone.
Originally Posted by Wander
In 5's, I have little experience, but my impression is that Mages aren't often focused on 2345 and Eurocomp setups; if you aren't getting hit, Mage Armor is definitely going to be of greater benefit.
A single pet is enough to cut my dmg in half that its already pathetic, relying on shatter is a broken mechanic unusable vs too many teams. Add training mage and voila we have 4vs5 or even worse 3vs5 if teammates must spam heal you.
Originally Posted by Jonny_Monroe
Hopefully beefed up resistance will allow me to generate mana though Magic Abdominals to help with the 'mana race' against priests.
Its gonna be still RNG with dispells thus, if you don't resist you have armor gone, what happens next, is to ask yourself whether i lose more mana rebuffing and wasting GCD or better to do something else than relying on RNG.
Sorceror, nothing you said actually addresses the points I made, that you quoted. I'm sorry that your experience is being trained, but I pointed out three specific situations where the Mage is not going to be trained by melee (in 2's, RMP in mirrors, and from what I'm told in 5's).
If you're being trained by casters, Mage Armor is of a huge benefit. Ice Armor is for when you're under attack by melee. I'll further point out that the Duration-reduction is still probably going to be stronger against Felhunters than Ice Armor, anyway; you'll get 33% more Dispel resistance vs. Devour Magic and a 1.5s Silence only when Spell-locked.
I think someone else pointed out that spell penetration will nulify it anyway.
Afaik theres a 30 spell penetration enchant on back and considering how does pvp gear looks like now i cant find a reason why blizzard wont put a spell penetration items out there in Wotlk aswell.
And from my mage perspective, if they dont train me (which they do in 3-5s) at least via pets i feel bad for other teams becouse they are doing really big mistake. Seeing from my warrior and rogue perspective there is no other fragile target that trained is shut down totally beside few other classes and some rare compositions. How often do you see a warlock/enh/mage +2x teams out there?
I think someone else pointed out that spell penetration will nulify it anyway.
Afaik theres a 30 spell penetration enchant on back and considering how does pvp gear looks like now i cant find a reason why blizzard wont put a spell penetration items out there in Wotlk aswell.
And from my mage perspective, if they dont train me (which they do in 3-5s) at least via pets i feel bad for other teams becouse they are doing really big mistake. Seeing from my warrior and rogue perspective there is no other fragile target that trained is shut down totally beside few other classes and some rare compositions.
Shatter Shield utterly defeats pets-only training, and I was the one who pointed out Penetration on Arena gear.
The flight time is fast enough that it won't be reflected in PvP unless you get really unlucky. I'm ignoring the damage portion there since thats a private server and thus the damage can only be guessed at (although if thats close - 1600 naked hits, then it is powerful). This pulls my mind back to AB/ABa cycles proccing NP for instant, cheap balls.
the log would look something like this:
AB lands
ABa cast
AB cast
AB/Aba lands (2x chance for NP proc)
ABa cast - spend the GCD looking to see if NP Procced
Fireball with NP, AB otherwise
ABa
repeat. This cycle gets broken by haste, so it probably fails compared to a cycle used with an owl druid. And ABa is instant so scalling may be bad. I'd say this is probably more an 'entry level' cycle, with a more predicable, regular cycle coming in at higher gear levels to take advantage of the scalling of AB, also frees up 5 points dropping NP.
A few thoughts on some of the spells and talents and other areas
Frostfire Bolt
To me this seems like a toy for fire mage solo play or elemental PvP. The fact that it can deal frost damage certainly makes it interesting and difficult to anticipate exactly how it functions. My belief is that it does in fact use the talents of both the fire and frost tree where applicable. For example whenever it deals fire damage talents such as fire power, ignite, impact, etc. would apply. Talents such as permafrost and frostbite would apply to it since it has a chill effect. My best guess concerning the damage switch is against something like a warlock with nether protection who is now immune to fire damage. This makes him "more vulnerable" to frost damage and would probably cause the spell to switch to frost damage.
Based on the leaked information for the spell I'm guessing that it has a 3 second cast time (same as talented fireball) and costs about the same as a fireball. Although that's only an educated guess I think that most would agree it's reasonable. For an elemental spec PvP mage it's a fairly hard hitting nuke that has a chance to stun, freeze, dot, and snare a target making it rather nasty in those regards. The only problem is that it probably has that three second cast making it impractical in many cases for the mage to use. The PvE uses are probably limited to a fire mage using it as the first spell to put a snare on the target. Otherwise the fact that it will have a lower coefficient than fireball, likely the same cast time, most likely cost about the same, and have fewer talents to improve it makes it nearly useless for PvE raiding.
Living Bomb
Color me underwhelmed. I think that all of us knew somewhere in the back of our minds that Blizzard would make the 51 point fire talent another AoE talent to make fire AoE competitive instead of fixing the underlying problems with our current talents. My main beef with this talent is that Arcane Explosion is generally a better form of AoE even completely untalented than anything else we have. Since Arcane Explosion is our only AoE ability that can be spammed with any worthwhile return we generally end up in melee range which puts us in a more precarious situation due to the lower threat threshold. Arcane skates around this by generating significantly less threat than our other spell trees so it's not a problem. Any extra fire damage that we do while in melee range increases the chances that we're going to die an untimely death. Why couldn't this be a spell that we cast on a mob who deals the damage to any targets near him? Put a cooldown equal to the duration of the spell to prevent it from being spammed or give it a cast time. This talent shows that Blizzard is only attempting to bandage some mage issues rather than dealing with the underlying problems. They should consider overhauling the way our existing AoE spells work before tacking on new and gimmicky spells that don't solve the problem.
Hot Streak
I read a few comments that said this talent was completely worthless. I'm not sure how you modeled the talent to determine the effective critical strike increase, but I'm not sure if it's as bad as everyone thinks that it is. I used the equation y = (1-x)x^3 where x is the critical strike chance for your spells. At 40% spell crit this worked out to be a 3.8% effective increase in spell critical strikes. There's also another possible consideration, which is that the guaranteed critical strike can count as the first critical hit in the next chain. If this is the case then using y = (1-x)x^3 + (1-x)x^5 + ... (1-x)x^(2n+1) gives the total effective critical strike gain by considering long streaks. In this case the effective gain in spell crit at 40% is more like 4.5%. If you really want to have some fun, try stacking your crit rate to around 50% (Possible with a moonkin, elemental shaman, and a ret paladin) which yields an 8.3% increase provided that the talent functions in the manner I described. Even if it doesn't it still provides a 6.2% effective critical strike increase which puts it on par with critical mass.
The talent is an interesting concept, but it really only seems to work reasonably well if it works in the manner that I described (which would make it equal to critical mass at 44% crit) otherwise it punishes mages for not having enough crit. I suppose it gives mages more gear flexibility instead of making spell damage worth even more.
Burnout
The only thing that I really dislike about this talent is that if I crit a first rank scorch I still consume the same amount of mana I would if I were to crit a max rank Pyroblast. It would probably make more sense for this to consume mana based on the damage done by the critical strike or the cost of the spell.
It's nice that it gives our fire critical strikes more initial punch, but I still feel as though they could do a little bit more by adjusting the ratios. For example, if they changed it so that Ignite did 160% initial damage and 30% as a DoT over time it would result in the same damage as the current system once this talent is considered (although it's a 2% nerf without this talent) and a greater initial burst which is more beneficial for PvP and solo play. It would also reduce the amount of ignite damage lost at the end of a boss encounter by a slight amount.
Arcane Tree
Still suffers from having too much useless crap when all I really want it a tempting reason to get to Arcane Meditation while speccing deep fire or frost. Dropping that talent down to the third tier would probably make mages more likely to invest into Arcane to pick that talent up. Right now Icy Veins is simply more appealing to a fire spec, especially considering that you need to pick up elemental precision anyway. If Arcane Focus were changed such that it affected all spells things might change slightly, but having Arcane Meditation that deep in the tree still makes it too difficult to pursue considering that both fire and frost use around 55 points each for their deep tree raiding specs (this doesn't include a lot of utility talents either) leaving you to either sacrifice damage or mana regeneration, which lead to mages relying so much on shadow priests.
Many of the new talents feel rather bland or gimmicky. It almost seems as though there's still no real reason to go beyond 33 points in the Arcane tree considering you'll get more out of them in another tree. 33/0/38 or 33/38/0 has some damned nice potential either way simply because you can pick up part of the empowered bolt talent. You also get Arcane Meditation and Arcane Concentration in these builds which should probably solve most mana problems as well or potentially allow us to function without a shadow priest. There's also the potential to pick up Magic Absorption which means that for any resist fights we can probably get away with wearing two fewer pieces of resist gear. The more I think about it, the more I start to like it.
Frost Tree
This thing really needs some pruning. It takes 57 talent points in order to have a barebones essential raiding spec. A few of these talents could easily be combined with others to save some investment room. Picking up Frostbite, Permafrost, Improved Blizzard, and Icy Flows brings the total up to a 68 point investment. Even before that there's no way we have the room to pick up Arcane Meditation with any amount of ease. It seems to boil down to a utility vs. clearcasting decision if anything.
Some talents such as improved blizzard should just exist by default so that other specs can make use of the blizzard snare or be changed so that blizzard does additional damage and makes it a viable AoE for frost mages. Improved Cone of Cold should be absorbed into something else. There are a lot more, but at this point it comes down to personal preference of how the tree ought to look.
Fire Tree
Suffers some of the same bloat problems as the frost tree but not to the same extent. It's possible to make a decent build and have enough points left over to get Icy Veins but at this point we're really relying on other classes to keep our mana up. I expect some theory craft on whether or not it's worth it to use evocation during the fight and run with molten armor or whether it's better to use mage armor and not use evocation. It's hard to predict the mana issues without actually playing the alpha and seeing the cost of new spells and if the new talents behave exactly as worded.
For the most part the new raid talents seem to focus on increasing the value of spell crit rating, which isn't necessarily bad. I still feel that some of our fire AoE spells need to be reevaluated in terms of method of delivery and cooldown length. Otherwise it seems as though we're back to where we've always been, spam casting arcane explosion and maybe weaving in blastwave when it's up.
Would have also liked to see one of the talents include something about fireball refreshing the improved scorch debuff. Then we can finally become a one button class for the most part, about the same as every other nuke class seems to be gravitating towards.
Raid Role
Through the latter half of TBC I've felt as though the mages raid role centered around CC on trash, being around on some fights as a decurser, and handing out water and making sure Intellect and Amplify Magic are up. We can do good damage, but it's not the best among ranged damage dealers. Right now it looks as though moonkin will be getting a significant damage increase. Considering they're also able to decurse and can now use their root spell indoors, it's almost as if there's no real reason to take more than one mage considering moonkin also provide some great raid and group synergy on top of their DPS. Warlocks are always valuable simply for their curses even if their DPS isn't top dog. Hunters bring a little bit of raid utility and essentially have no threat cap which is useful on some encounters.
Mages don't need to be the best DPS beyond any reason of doubt, but near the top is necessary if we want to maintain any raid presence beyond one out of necessity and extras to fill spots. It's fairly easy to limit the potential of mages by requiring that our best DPS specs have little mana sustainability making it necessary to support the class with a shadow priest or in some other manner.
If the main reasons for bringing multiple mages begin to disappear as other classes are expanded to fill some of the raid roles that we serve now, then how are we expected to remaining useful?
Spirit
It seems as though with the warlock changes we're going to have spirit on almost every piece of cloth gear, but this really doesn't change the fact that deep fire or frost mages generally want to have nothing to do with it. They added a few talents to the arcane tree, but they're in the deep, mostly worthless, section of the tree that no one will want to go into.
If Blizzard wants to make mages actually care about spirit, perhaps modifying a few talents in the lower tiers of all three trees would give us reason enough to embrace it rather than avoid it like the plague and take a shadow priest to act as our mana battery.
If you spec 33/x/y then spirit is fairly useful, but otherwise it simply isn't because Arcane Meditation is too deep in the Arcane Tree to pick up in the standard deep fire or deep frost builds. Add to this that our best DPS armor is molten armor and it pushes us away from the only other reason that either fire or frost have any use for spirit.
The only thing that appears to have changed is that we're going to have even more spirit pushed down our throats, probably pushing us towards a 33/x/y build just to make some use of it.
Leveling Spec
This really hasn't been brought up much of it all, but what is everyone thinking about for their leveling spec?
Although fire is generally nice for raiding I find it has some annoying problems while grinding/leveling. The most obvious is that critical strikes generally take an extra four seconds to finish off the mob instead of outright killing it. That's means wasting four seconds waiting for it to die while it probably beats on me or wasting mana on a new spell to kill it before the ignite fully ticks off.
Full frost generally ignores these issues and now has a really nasty snare on its main nuke and probably the best survivability to ward off would be gankers for anyone playing on a PvP server. I didn't touch on Winter's Grasp before (mostly because it's currently so broken for raiding that it's bound to be fixed in some way) but for solo grinding it actually seems to work out rather well. Combined with Frostbite there're good odds that I'll be doing a lot of critical damage. I also have a lot of kiting potential with the additional 10% snare.
You could also use a 33 point arcane build and anything else which should ensure that you don't run out of mana at any point. At level 80 you'd be able to pick up Winter's Grasp and let the ridiculousness implied by this build ensue.
Miscellaneous Addendum
Lhivera getting banned from the Blizzard forums is probably the worst thing to happen for that mage community there that I can ever recall. I don't think I'll ever go back to the cesspool unless I'm full tilt drunk and in the mood for a good laugh.
I hope that the developers read this thread so they can see why some of their talents are currently crap or issues that have been overlooked while designing the new talents. Perhaps someone could write a nice summary post of what's broken and what's pointless or even what class problems remain unaddressed. The community here is large enough to spot most things that are broken or open for abuse and has enough mathematically inclined people to show blizzard a pretty graph of why a certain talent or ability is crap.
Hopefully a few more alpha keys start to circulate soon so there's a better chance of some anonymous first hand accounts or additional information starts to crop up.
I read a few comments that said this talent was completely worthless. I'm not sure how you modeled the talent to determine the effective critical strike increase, but I'm not sure if it's as bad as everyone thinks that it is. I used the equation y = (1-x)x^3 where x is the critical strike chance for your spells. At 40% spell crit this worked out to be a 3.8% effective increase in spell critical strikes. There's also another possible consideration, which is that the guaranteed critical strike can count as the first critical hit in the next chain. If this is the case then using y = (1-x)x^3 + (1-x)x^5 + ... (1-x)x^(2n+1) gives the total effective critical strike gain by considering long streaks. In this case the effective gain in spell crit at 40% is more like 4.5%. If you really want to have some fun, try stacking your crit rate to around 50% (Possible with a moonkin, elemental shaman, and a ret paladin) which yields an 8.3% increase provided that the talent functions in the manner I described. Even if it doesn't it still provides a 6.2% effective critical strike increase which puts it on par with critical mass.
The talent is an interesting concept, but it really only seems to work reasonably well if it works in the manner that I described (which would make it equal to critical mass at 44% crit) otherwise it punishes mages for not having enough crit. I suppose it gives mages more gear flexibility instead of making spell damage worth even more.
Could you possibly explain your math there a little better? I'll agree that given your formulas, Hot Streak does indeed start to look much better, epically if the Hot Streak crit can start a new chain, but I'm not sure where you're really coming from on the y=(1-x)x^3 formula? I worked out some calculations based on the expected number of casts before you get 3 crits in a row, which can be found here and Zaldinar has gotten similar results to mine from simulating large numbers of casts, as he says here.
Could you possibly explain your math there a little better? I'll agree that given your formulas, Hot Streak does indeed start to look much better, epically if the Hot Streak crit can start a new chain, but I'm not sure where you're really coming from on the y=(1-x)x^3 formula? I worked out some calculations based on the expected number of casts before you get 3 crits in a row, which can be found here and Zaldinar has gotten similar results to mine from simulating large numbers of casts, as he says here.
I worked it out pretty much the same way you did, but honestly I've always needed to ask for help on these probability things, so I'm not at all sure I did it right.
Here was my method. I'll assume 35% crit for the example.
First, the chance to get 3 crits in a row at 35% chance to crit: 0.35^3 = 0.042875
Now, the expected number of casts to experience a chain of 3: 3 / 0.042875 ~= 69.97 (This is the step I'm really unsure of)
The guaranteed crit is the 70.97th cast. Normally, in any chain of 70.97 casts, we would expect 70.97 * 0.35 = 24.8395 crits.
The guaranteed crit increases that expected number by 0.65 to 25.4895.
25.4895 / 70.97 = 0.359159 = 35.9159% crit, an increase of 0.9159%.
This is obviously very different from some of the more promising results posted above, but I'm not sure how I'm getting it wrong.
The expected number of casts to reach 3 crits in a row is a Bernoulli sequence.
P is the crit rate
Q is 1-P
A is the sequence quantity, 3 in this case.
(1-P^A)/(Q*P^A)
So for example, with a 50% crit rate, you'd expect 14 casts on average to get 3 crits in a row.
To get the actual benefit, add 1 and divide by Q (Since every time you DO crit that 4th time, there's a Q percent chance it was from Hotstreak,and a P percent it was your normal crit rate.)
This assumes that it resets after a proc, and that the 4th crit does not count towards the next sequence.
The maximum is around 65%, at a 4% Crit gain. For 3 talent points, it's pretty underwhelming, especially compared to the fact that most dmg/crit talents give around 2% gain of something per point. While it's a nice idea to have a talent that's not just a flat gain, I feel this one's unbalanceable...right now it's weak, do very much to it and it's way to strong.
On another note, what if Living Bomb was targettable, essentially a 51-point seed of corruption? (Or hey, maybe they could make Flamestrike not horrible...)
I worked it out pretty much the same way you did, but honestly I've always needed to ask for help on these probability things, so I'm not at all sure I did it right.
Here was my method. I'll assume 35% crit for the example.
First, the chance to get 3 crits in a row at 35% chance to crit: 0.35^3 = 0.042875
Now, the expected number of casts to experience a chain of 3: 3 / 0.042875 ~= 69.97 (This is the step I'm really unsure of)
The guaranteed crit is the 70.97th cast. Normally, in any chain of 70.97 casts, we would expect 70.97 * 0.35 = 24.8395 crits.
The guaranteed crit increases that expected number by 0.65 to 25.4895.
25.4895 / 70.97 = 0.359159 = 35.9159% crit, an increase of 0.9159%.
This is obviously very different from some of the more promising results posted above, but I'm not sure how I'm getting it wrong.
I'm not entirely sure I'm modeling it properly either. I simply chose to calculate what the chances of getting three critical hits in a row happen to be. If you're crit rate is x then the chances of getting three critical hits in a row is x^3. Anything outside of those three spell casts is irrelevant unless the cast before it also crit, but than I would assume the calculation started there.
Now that we know how likely it is for three fireballs to crit back to back to back, I wanted to know how much of an impact this would have. I used 1-x to take into account that as your crit increases higher, the talent becomes more pointless considering that at 50% crit rate you're more likely to crit three fireballs in a row, but you were more likely to crit the forth anyhow.
After that I made an assumption that the guaranteed crit could be counted as the first in a new chain and ran with that. Looking at the graph for that, however, makes it seem as though part of the formula is missing due to shape.
The part I may have left out (been a long while since I took Statistics) is subtracting something out. For example, does the math I used count a chain of four crits as two chains of three crits or just as one chain of three crits? Vontre or some of the RAWR guys probably could tell us where either of us may have gone wrong.
I'd like to think that my reason of thinking is what Blizzard was attempting to emulate, otherwise the talent is, as pointed out, worthless. I'd like to think Blizzard isn't that idiotic, but they did give us World in Flames which is applied pre-cap, so who knows.
The expected number of casts to reach 3 crits in a row is a Bernoulli sequence.
P is the crit rate
Q is 1-P
A is the sequence quantity, 3 in this case.
(1-P^A)/(Q*P^A)
So for example, with a 50% crit rate, you'd expect 14 casts on average to get 3 crits in a row.
To get the actual benefit, add 1 and divide by Q (Since every time you DO crit that 4th time, there's a Q percent chance it was from Hotstreak,and a P percent it was your normal crit rate.)
This assumes that it resets after a proc, and that the 4th crit does not count towards the next sequence.
The maximum is around 65%, at a 4% Crit gain. For 3 talent points, it's pretty underwhelming, especially compared to the fact that most dmg/crit talents give around 2% gain of something per point. While it's a nice idea to have a talent that's not just a flat gain, I feel this one's unbalanceable...right now it's weak, do very much to it and it's way to strong.
On another note, what if Living Bomb was targettable, essentially a 51-point seed of corruption? (Or hey, maybe they could make Flamestrike not horrible...)
Thanks for the explanation. This talent gets moved to the full of fail pile along with most of the others. 33/x/y keeps looking better and better.
1 thing I'd like to note about hot streak is that these calculations don't consider synergy with combustion, or the 2xcrits at the end of combustion trick.
But even then, I very much doubt that would pull this tallent up to the ~2% per point area it needs to be at in order to make it compete with other tallents.
Blizzard, if you want fire mages to take crit don't give fancy mechanics that fail in practice, just give a flat 'Increases critical strike rating for fire spells by X% per point' tallent. Sometimes the simple things really do work best.
Alvinrod, I think you're a bit harsh on the frost tree. While it is true that's it more than a little crowded, there's also no burning reason for a frost mage to bother with arcane (let alone fire.) WG and improved WE are strong enough talents to justify going all the way down the bottom of the tree. And WG is going to produce so much crit opportunity for frost, that a frostie can ditch molten armor in favor of mage armor with minimal dps loss -- and therefore obviate the necessity for arcane meditation.
I think the devs basically got frost right. A frostie is by no means compelled to go 33/0/38. 0/0/71 is totally workable. 10/0/61 is a nice alternative.
And I'm beginning to think that perhaps arcane is workable now with AB rk3 scaling up so massively as it does. (The less said about AM the better.)
They really fell short in deep fire, if we are interpreting the talents correctly. This is the real problem. Everything past empowered fireball can be and will be ignored in its present state in favor of 33/38/0. The hybrid issue is actually a deep fire issue, not a frost or arcane one.
Name: Hot Streak (3 ranks, listing highest)
Description: Any time you score 3 spell criticals in a row, you have a 100% chance the next spell will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit.
- Does is add +100% to your crit chance, as in going from 25% to 125% (everything above 100% is wasted though except for -crit% talents/resilience), or does it just double your crit chance as in going from 25% to 50%?
- Does it work like an auto-catalyst? Or is the game able to distinguish between "normal" crits and "forced" crits from Hot Streak? Or will they just slap a cooldown on it once they see jaw-dropping damage?
If the forced crits from Hot Streak don't count as trigger for Hot Streak, then the overall effect is 2-4% crit as mentioned before. Calculated with probabilty laws of independent random variables.
If there is some feedback mechanism though, the effect would be faily higher. With some tweaking, and if it "only" doubles your crit chance, a Hot Streak without a cooldown might be possible. Very powerful, but still balanced, unless you manage to reach/break 50% crit (via buffs/shatter/etc.).
I was kind of setting my hopes onto this talent, probably because of the ambiguous wording and because there are so many different ways how it could work, and the straightforward interpretation - once you crit 3 times, you never stop - is just too powerful to be implemented.
That's why my question is - does anyone know how this talent actually works. There are just too many ways how it could work, and we can't really judge the talent by speculating.
Alvinrod, I think you're a bit harsh on the frost tree. While it is true that's it more than a little crowded, there's also no burning reason for a frost mage to bother with arcane (let alone fire.) WG and improved WE are strong enough talents to justify going all the way down the bottom of the tree. And WG is going to produce so much crit opportunity for frost, that a frostie can ditch molten armor in favor of mage armor with minimal dps loss -- and therefore obviate the necessity for arcane meditation.
I like Frost, it's a nice spec and I'll probably level as full frost, but that doesn't change my opinion that the tree is bloated.
Frost is probably mana efficient enough to get by without a shadow priest by using mage armor and having all kinds of spirit on their gear. Even still, spirit is an attribute that is only 30% effective which still leaves it looking like crap compared to anything else.
Outside of extra WE uptime and a WG talent that's clearly going to be changed, frost really didn't get much and the heavy point investment even up to WE makes it difficult to synergize with other trees. Besides, 33/0/38 can pick up both WC and WG so any amount of WG imbalance applies to both specs and one of the main drawback of 33/0/28 was always that it needed a full frost to keep WC up which no longer holds true.
Until someone busts out the math who knows which is better.
33/0/38 misses most of empowered frostbolt, lacks a WE (let alone an improved one), and an additional 5% damage to icelance and frostbolt from Chilled to the Bone.
That's rather a lot. It's by no means clear that 33/0/38 is superior to a full frost build with 60ish points.
33/0/38 misses most of empowered frostbolt, lacks a WE (let alone an improved one), and an additional 5% damage to icelance and frostbolt from Chilled to the Bone.
That's rather a lot. It's by no means clear that 33/0/38 is superior to a full frost build with 60ish points.
Never claimed it was better, but it has it's own benefits. If we're going to compare the two it's only right to list both. For example it crits harder and gets to mix AP with an IV. Also has better AE and a decent AB nuke if a mob is front immune or resistant.
We can go back and forth with pointless lists of points and counterpoints, but one is probably mathematically superior for raiding. I'm not claiming one spec is better than the other since I haven't seen that math, but I'm just pointing out what may be a viable spec.
The main point is that frost works well enough that a hybrid alternative is not clearly better. To my mind, that means the devs did their job right on the frost tree.
The same cannot be said for the new fire talents, alas. Unless we are misinterpreting them.
For 3 talent points, it's pretty underwhelming, especially compared to the fact that most dmg/crit talents give around 2% gain of something per point.
There are quite a few exceptions. All of the below increase damage, hit or crit by 1% per point, and have no additional effects (a number of them only grant their bonuses to a single tree, or even a few specific spells):
- Lethal Shots, +1% crit/point (Hunter/Marksmanship, tier 1)
- Ranged Weapon Spec, +1% dmg/point (Hunter/Marksmanship, tier 6)
- Killer Instinct, +1% crit/point (Hunter/Survival, tier 5)
- Master Tactician works out to ~3% crit for 5 talent points (Hunter/Survival, tier 8, considered a bad talent)
- Playing With Fire, +1% dmg/point with negative side effect (Mage/Fire, tier 5, considered a bad talent)
- Holy Power, +1% crit/point (Paladin/Holy, tier 6)
- Conviction, +1% crit/point (Paladin/Retribution, tier 3)
- Holy Specialization, +1% crit/point (Priest/Holy, tier 1)
- Malice, +1% crit/point (Rogue/Assassination, tier 1)
- Murder, +1% dmg/point against some target classes (Rogue/Assassination, tier 2)
- Precision, +1% hit/point (Rogue/Combat, tier 2)
- Dagger Specialization, +1% crit/point (Rogue/Combat, tier 4)
- Fist Weapon Specialization, +1% crit/point (Rogue/Combat, tier 5)
- Concussion, +1% dmg/point with certain spells (Shaman/Elemental, tier 1)
- Call of Thunder, +1% crit/point with certain spells (Shaman/Elemental, tier 1)
- Thundering Strikes, +1% crit/point (Shaman/Enhancement, tier 2)
- Nature's Guidance, +1% hit/point (Shaman/Restoration, tier 3)
- Tidal Mastery, +1% crit/point with certain spells (Shaman/Restoration, tier 4)
- Demonic Tactics, +1% crit/point (Warlock/Demonology, tier 8)
- Devastation, +1% crit/point (Warlock/Destruction, tier 3)
- Two-Handed Weapon Specialization, +1% dmg/point (Warrior/Arms, tier 4)
- Cruelty, +1% crit/point (Warrior/Fury, tier 1)
- Precision, +1% hit/point (Warrior/Fury, tier 7)
(Poleaxe spec currently provides +1% crit/point, but is being changed in WotLK to also provide +1% dmg/per point on crits.)
Looking over that list, I think it could reasonably be argued that +1% per point is far from being atypical of this sort of talent. Hot Streak affects all schools, and there are ways to milk it via Shatter, Combustion, and of course with AOE it could be downright terrifying.
Hmm, so I just want to check I got this right, assuming the best case sceanario of the hot streak crit is in itself a proc for hotstreak, at 50% crit, it provides somewhere in the region of 8%? If that were the case, it would be quite a nice talent, if only we could get the mana cost on burnout removed or something at least.
I do agree however that for the damage gain, burnout isn't worth it in its current state, world in flames is a nice idea, and I guess we'll have to see how aoe changes, if any work out to see if it is actually good in reality.
Has anyone datamined the new damage for the AoE spells? As I would imagine they are also getting quite a boost.
And living bomb, eeem, it doesnt really seem to do much of anything at the moment, I guess we'll have to wait and see what they come up with, I mean the idea is good, its very fire magey, it just doesn't quite come across in the translation as it were
The same cannot be said for the new fire talents, alas. Unless we are misinterpreting them.
For Fire, everything depends on how Burnout actually functions. I'm no longer willing to assume either answer at this point; knowing that the CSD aura claims to be increasing the critical strike damage bonus for melee attacks tells me that the wording on the Burnout aura may have little to no relation to the actual mechanics.
There are some mechanics we just don't know, others that we have conflicting reports on. What we need to know from testing before we can really evaluate things well:
- Burnout: 162.5%/227.5%, or 187.5%/262.5%? 1% total mana, remaining mana, casting cost, base mana?
- Hot Streak: counter reset?
- Living Bomb: coefficient on pulse? Coefficient on explosion? Per-level scaling?
- Winter's Grasp: works on root-immune targets? 4 second or 5 second duration?
- Improved Water Elemental: +5 secs/rank or +10 secs/rank?
- Deep Freeze: Break on damage?
- Final damage ranges at level 80 (the damage ranges we have are for the level at which the final ranks are trained, which may be anywhere from levels 75-80; most spells will pick up a few points per level after training the final rank).
05/25/08, 12:59 PM
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