Going to guess that Deep Freeze doesn't since it claims to be a stun and no other stun behaves that way. Unless you meant to suggest that it isn't actually a stun and the tool tip is wrong.
...
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.
I was thinking only of mage talents in that, partiularly those such as Arcane Power and Arcane Instability.
For Combustion, the gain is dependant on forcing a double crit on the last charge, and even then only increases the gain of the talent by 20% or so.
Shatter, having no CD, is a bit more interesting...any benefit realized is mostly dependant on the frozen status ending after the third, though even without that the gain during shatter is around 50% over the normal hot streak.
On both of these, sims would be needed over pure forumae, as they get a bit complex, but I'd expect the actual gains to be somewhat lower since I didn't disallow 2 crit strings overlapping each other.
AoE could be nice, if it's possible on larger packs to essentially force a 100% crit rate.
These are in term of long term benefit, of course direct control over abilities can give hefty burst damage. For long term single target, no matter what, it only barely exceeds a 4% gain for 3 points given the perfect crit rate.
Blizzard really needs to more more creative on mage talents, or new mage spells. We already have so many different color bolts, and so much of our talents are all about just basically increasing damage on our bolt spells. At some point, it gets boring if all we are looking forward to in WOTLK is just either more powerful bolts or new bolts which we have to decide if we will now cast instead of old bolts.
Do we honestly need so many different bolt spells when most of the time, we will just spam that one best one based on which ever tree we spec into?
We need new mechanic to make playing a mage fresh again. While living bomb sounds fun, it isn't even something new since mage have been running in spamming AE like a suicide bomber for ever so long already. So, now, the only difference is that we will just run in spamming AE and end with a bang. Hmmmm. Locks get a ranged version of living bomb in TBC already with their SOC. We actually need to run in to 10 yards to make it work? Plus we can't even trigger it early the way locks can? sigh.
And how come locks get to transform into a big scary demon, and we can't transform into anything at all. Locks even get a new teleport. They just keep on adding more and more interesting mechanics to locks. While mages just get new bolts to play with. At some point, does it matter what color the bolt that is coming out of our hands is? They are going to balance it such that its going to be similar in damage to that purple colored bolt coming out of the locks hands anyway. Gee, I can do lots of fire, frost, arcane bolts but they will all be balanced to do similar damage to each other and to a warlock's bolt anyway. So, in the end, is that much variety really going to make playing a mage more interesting? Its not like I can cast two bolt spells at the same time...
Locks get pets, get to transform into a demon, they also have DOTs, bolt spells, and curses and they can do ranged AOE, and point blank AOE (hellfire) as well. They get to teleport in WOTLK too. It just seems that locks have so many tons more play options and mechanics than mages. I am not even talking about who does more damage here. Its about making mages fresh again for those that have played a mage for more than 3 years already. I mean, the invis we got in TBC makes us blind...
Blizzard really should think about adding something new to mages that locks can't do so that we feel more distinct as a mage class rather than just a bolt spamming DPSer that so many other classes can do as well.
How about a spell that causes a gigantic arcane hand to grip the mob and won't let go for a few seconds and that causes some damage too in that few seconds? Or how about letting us cast a mirror image or two? We can conjure up flaming balls of fire, but we can't even make a simple illusion? How about a spell that transforms us into a golem that has high armor, hits hard, and has high resistance to spell but in turn, can't cast spells until we click off the transformation or the duration ends ?
How about a spell shield that absorbs incoming spells and throws it back at people! Or just make a new arcane talent that modifies our counterspell such that a successful counterspell not only counters the spell, it throws it back at the castor. That would be a new fresh mechanic rather than just more damage, more crit on our bolts.
A mage as a class is supposed to be so interesting. There are tons of new mechanics they can introduce without defying belief simply because with magic, anything is possible.
At least they tried in TBC. They gave us water elemental (pet), invis, and spellsteal. In WOTLK, its just more bolts and a different AOE for fire ... Ok, frost mages get a stun... on a target that is already frozen to begin with ...
Going to guess that Deep Freeze doesn't since it claims to be a stun and no other stun behaves that way. Unless you meant to suggest that it isn't actually a stun and the tool tip is wrong.
No suggestion intended, I'm just curious whether we really get 5 seconds to go whole-hog-shatter-wild on something that is 100% incapable of fighting back. 'Cuz if we do, you know, that'd be fun.
No suggestion intended, I'm just curious whether we really get 5 seconds to go whole-hog-shatter-wild on something that is 100% incapable of fighting back. 'Cuz if we do, you know, that'd be fun.
Well, there's no guarantee that the target will remain Frozen *and* Stunned. If you're dealing damage, probably just Stunned.
A 1.5s cast is a bit rough to work with, though; Instant-Cast, at least, would make is usable.
No suggestion intended, I'm just curious whether we really get 5 seconds to go whole-hog-shatter-wild on something that is 100% incapable of fighting back. 'Cuz if we do, you know, that'd be fun.
It would be fun. Though we already get to do that to a certain extent with sheep. And it has to be frozen. Which means that the only way its gauranteed to be cast successfully is if you frost nova the person. Winter's Grasp is too low a percentage right now to be reliably used in conjunction with deep freeze.
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.
Given that Master of Elements is capped at one proc per spell I see no reason to assume that Hot Streak will proc more than once a cast. Simply put, Hot Streak is a terrible talent. From a PvP perspective no one wants to be swimming upstream against Resilience. For raiding it represents a return to the bad days of spike damage and in conjunction with Burnout, mana issues. I don't know about the other Fire Mages out there, but the smoother my DPS/threat curve the better.
Given that Master of Elements is capped at one proc per spell I see no reason to assume that Hot Streak will proc more than once a cast. Simply put, Hot Streak is a terrible talent. From a PvP perspective no one wants to be swimming upstream against Resilience. For raiding it represents a return to the bad days of spike damage and in conjunction with Burnout, mana issues. I don't know about the other Fire Mages out there, but the smoother my DPS/threat curve the better.
Lhivera wasn't implying that you would get more then 1 additional crit per cast in AoE but rather that when it procs you will be 100% crit rate you will crit everything you hit with that AE which would be huge with a spell like blastwave and combined with World in Flames. Basically would make Deep Fire the AoE Kings by a very large margin.
Lhivera wasn't implying that you would get more then 1 additional crit per cast in AoE but rather that when it procs you will be 100% crit rate you will crit everything you hit with that AE which would be huge with a spell like blastwave and combined with World in Flames. Basically would make Deep Fire the AoE Kings by a very large margin.
Which is all well and good, but I'd trade every one of these AoE-oriented talents (because if Hot Streak does work that way, AoE will be the only thing it's good for) for some substantial single target DPS buffs.
Given that Master of Elements is capped at one proc per spell I see no reason to assume that Hot Streak will proc more than once a cast.
I'm not really expecting that one cast could provide more than one crit toward the count of three -- however, it does seem sensible to expect that the AOE that consumes the proc will have a 100% crit chance vs. all its targets.
Edit: Er, which has already been explained by Rounced. My apologies, I should read ahead.
Lhivera wasn't implying that you would get more then 1 additional crit per cast in AoE but rather that when it procs you will be 100% crit rate you will crit everything you hit with that AE which would be huge with a spell like blastwave and combined with World in Flames. Basically would make Deep Fire the AoE Kings by a very large margin.
It really depends on how Living Bomb works. If each pulse were capable of procing another charge than it would constantly be up. Otherwise you'd have to spam Flamestrike a lot which somewhat defeats the purpose of Flamestrike. Considering World in Flames is currently applied pre-cap it probably won't make a huge difference unless there are few mobs or the cap is raised incredibly high.
Also, because we're going to be in melee range using fire AE our threat threshold is 110% instead of 130%. Who cares if we're the kings if we're just going to get killed because of it? If Flamestrike wouldn't overwrite it's DoT we could actually do quite well from range, but due to the nature of our AoE we're generally in Melee range.
I suppose we could get a TA totem to give us more room to work with, but I'm still disappointed with the way our AoE spells function.
Also, because we're going to be in melee range using fire AE our threat threshold is 110% instead of 130%. Who cares if we're the kings if we're just going to get killed because of it? If Flamestrike wouldn't overwrite it's DoT we could actually do quite well from range, but due to the nature of our AoE we're generally in Melee range.
Well, you'll have all those Impact chances from the Living Bomb pulse, and of course -15% hit from Brain Freeze on the nova'd...OK, nevermind, I can't say that with a straight face.
Remember though that Hot Streak is not limited to Fire crits. You can use Arcane Explosion to charge it up, then blow the proc on a Blast Wave or something.
I'm not really expecting that one cast could provide more than one crit toward the count of three -- however, it does seem sensible to expect that the AOE that consumes the proc will have a 100% crit chance vs. all its targets.
Edit: Er, which has already been explained by Rounced. My apologies, I should read ahead.
If it works similar to combustion than it will certainly crit every target. In fact if it functions like Combustion you could Flamestrike > Blastwave and get it to crit everything twice. If that were the case and both of the new crits were able to count towards the start of a chain you could do something like this: stack so next spell is crit > Flamestrike > Blastwave > Flamestrike > Flamestrike > Dragon's Breath. Assuming that you get a single crit from that Flamestrike following the Blastwave the next Flamestrike will crit and so will the Dragon's breath which puts the stack back at two again.
All complete speculation, but it could be very possible to abuse the mechanics of this talent. It may be advisable to weave Arcane Explosions in there so everything doesn't turn around and beat you to death because that combo would generate a lot of threat.
Also if it were bugged as such it would be best to Fireball > Fireblast to get the double crit and potentially stack it to two again so that if you're next fireball crits you can keep do it all over again. Unfortunately if fireblast still overwrites Ignite this may not be worth while.
On the flip side this talent could also cannibalize a combustion charge. For example if you crit one or two spells before you pop combustion and the next spell (or two) crits, then the hot streak effect will be used on the next fireball which will also consume a combustion charge. Probably unlikely to happen often, but still possible.
Well, you'll have all those Impact chances from the Living Bomb pulse, and of course -15% hit from Brain Freeze on the nova'd...OK, nevermind, I can't say that with a straight face.
Remember though that Hot Streak is not limited to Fire crits. You can use Arcane Explosion to charge it up, then blow the proc on a Blast Wave or something.
Good point. For some reason I thought that it was for Fire talents only. Not sure where I got that from, but it does change my opinion of the talent slightly. For the most part though, AE isn't a big part of many boss fights which makes it seem rather meh.
Lhivera wasn't implying that you would get more then 1 additional crit per cast in AoE but rather that when it procs you will be 100% crit rate you will crit everything you hit with that AE which would be huge with a spell like blastwave and combined with World in Flames. Basically would make Deep Fire the AoE Kings by a very large margin.
No, it wouldn't. You and Lhivera have already discussed the fact that point-blank AoE spam is generally a kamikaze maneuver, but you're missing a larger point: it is not an at-will ability. Unless they give us a button we can mash we will remain at the mercy of the RNG. How many times have you heard the chime of Clearcasting halfway through a Scorch, knowing that the correct play is to finish the cast rather than interrupt for a Fireball? Hot Streak will end up in exactly the same boat: acceptable from a mathematic standpoint, but unreliable and unexciting in practice.
Of course, this begs a larger analysis: specifically the number of Mage talents that either punish (e.g.: Burnout, Playing with Fire) or are based off procs (e.g.: Clearcasting, Ignite, Frostbite) compared to those of other classes. I'm too tired to sift through all of them, but my gut instinct is that we have far and away the largest number of these sub-par abilities.
Living Bomb with Arcane Explosion seems like it would be a bit much for AoE in PvP. I was thinking Living Bomb would be better off replacing Ice Block for a mage, such that you gain all the immunity of iceblock, but you can move around, while dealing damage from the pulses, but cannot cast any spells until the duration is up. I was thinking this would make it a much more desirable talent then currently.
At least they tried in TBC. They gave us water elemental (pet), invis, and spellsteal.
Don't forget arcane blast, having a high dps high mana that you mix with low dps low mana, and managing mana for stacking cooldowns is a bit different from fire or frost play. I find it a lot more interesting than fireballs with the odd scorch. Of course it seems almost accidental considering the random itemization for it and it's rapid scaling in t5 and far slower scaling in t6/sunwell, as fire catches up and overtakes. Also not having it viable until t5 2 piece is also a bit off.
I agree there doesn't seem to be much in the way of new mechanics in WotLK. I really enjoyed elemental specs for general play/leveling, I wonder if frostfire bolt is an attempt to make a viable elemental or tri-spec build for pve? If it benefits from both fire and frost talents, but not debuffs (or early ones at least). It doesn't appear any different from spam 1 spell however.
Has anyone found any details of how inscription effects spells? I'm hoping it will be the location of say, the t5 2 piece bonus in Wotlk, so we don't have a similar situation with items to the current one.
No, it wouldn't. You and Lhivera have already discussed the fact that point-blank AoE spam is generally a kamikaze maneuver, but you're missing a larger point: it is not an at-will ability. Unless they give us a button we can mash we will remain at the mercy of the RNG. How many times have you heard the chime of Clearcasting halfway through a Scorch, knowing that the correct play is to finish the cast rather than interrupt for a Fireball? Hot Streak will end up in exactly the same boat: acceptable from a mathematic standpoint, but unreliable and unexciting in practice.
Of course, this begs a larger analysis: specifically the number of Mage talents that either punish (e.g.: Burnout, Playing with Fire) or are based off procs (e.g.: Clearcasting, Ignite, Frostbite) compared to those of other classes. I'm too tired to sift through all of them, but my gut instinct is that we have far and away the largest number of these sub-par abilities.
are you trying to be dense? AE spam is quite a bit different from single-target. I'm gonna be patronizing here but your response annoyed me ("no it wouldn't").
large number of mobs....cast Arcane Explosion.....of that large number at least 1 mob gets crit (1 "charge").....wait ~1.5 seconds......cast Arcane Explosion again.....of that large number at least 1 other mob gets crit (2 "charges").......wait ~1.5 seconds.......cast Arcane Explosion again.....ooo lookie here there was at least one other mob getting crit (which is definitely in the realm of possibility due to having a significant crit % and there were a large number of things being hit)....While waiting the ~1.5 seconds for the GCD to run you notice that a new buff has become active, OMG it's Hot Streak!!!....cast Blastwave and oooooo everyone of those things gets crit (very Big Numbers), or just keep spamming Arcane Explosion (not as big but still very satisfying numbers) doesn't matter what AE spell you cast everything hit by it is gonna get crit (unless it was Blizzard and then it probably wouldn't use up the charge anyway).
Sure if you were spamming Flamestrike from range then the whole "at will" aspect would come into play. Except that if you are a Deep Fire mage and you are spamming Flamestrike at range what other choice would you be making when Hot Streak procced....you would probably want that applied to another Flamestrike, wouldn't you? Or lets say you start with a flamestrike and then move into melee range and start AEing so that you are not overwriting the DoT. Then you get the GCD to decide what spell to use it with. Sure in a single target situation the whole "at will" thing is definitely an issue but the whole worth of the talent in a single target situation has yet to be determined (and right now it ain't looking very good at all) BUT in an AE situation the talent would definitely be good and that actually might be all that Blizzard was intending for the talent in the first place.
Originally Posted by SanSul
Living Bomb with Arcane Explosion seems like it would be a bit much for AoE in PvP. I was thinking Living Bomb would be better off replacing Ice Block for a mage, such that you gain all the immunity of iceblock, but you can move around, while dealing damage from the pulses, but cannot cast any spells until the duration is up. I was thinking this would make it a much more desirable talent then currently.
Whosawhatits???
you haven't even seen the talent yet, no one has really seen it yet, and already you are saying that it needs to be replaced by a walking Ice Block that pulses Fire..... so many things come to mind with that image and none of them has anything to do with "desirable talent".
At some point, does it matter what color the bolt that is coming out of our hands is?
Sums up my feelings to new mage spells/talents pretty much. I really hope Blizzard class designers read this forum and notice our sentiment
WTB Fresh, innovative and exciting new mechanics. Not just more pretty bolts, its been 3 years now - we expect more, especially after enviously looking at the priest/druid stuff.
I wanted to check the impact of WG for raiding and the synergy between multiple frost mages.
WG uptime may be difficult to estimate considering the use of IV or Skull which would increase its chance to proc due to faster casting time. As it can proc of icelance as well as it was pointed out I think it would be very difficult to bring up a formula expressing uptime and dps increase.
Using Matlab I worked on a simulation which would estimate the dps increase from stacking frost mages.
The N mages have an independant gameplay and follow the basic rule:
If WG is not up , or if the duration is > 2.5sec(or less if haste factored) he will cast a FB
If WG duration is < 2.5sec(or less) he will cast an IL
They will also make use of Skull and IV/Coldsnap whenever its up.
All this is looped ignoring any mana issue.
The stats used:
10% proc chance and 5 sec duration on WG
1500 frost power
2.3 base casting time for frostbolt
35% crit chance (+5% for frostbolt)
5% damage on FB (4 T6)
10% element
5% misery
Note that due to the random numbers used in the simulation the curve isn't perfectly smooth (I would have to increase the loop length)
I also added the current frost mage dps for comparaison (which won't change with the number of mage of course).
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.
Actually, given the existing mechanics of the game we should be able to test this using clearcasting as a retroactive check.
If you precast a second AB in a chain while building the debuff it won't get the cast speed benefit of the next stack, but it will get the mana cost (cast speed apparently didn't catch up yet, but by the time mana cost becomes involved it has). From this, a mage with clearcasting could do a cycle of:
Cast Time Spell (any one really)->AM Pre-cast
If the AM Pre-cast doesn't consume the clearcasting, I'd say that could be indicitive of being able to chain cast a given spell until the NP proc pops as long as you are always in the precast window, and then chose your next spell for it.
Obviously it will need actual testing with the actual proc in a latency environment to really be sure, but it is theoretically possible given what we see with AB, and if you could sneak clearcasting with AM it would be a pretty good indication.
Originally Posted by Kugala
Just to clarify on Hot Streak:
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)
This becomes slightly complicated by the 1% miss chance. I ran a simulator to generate a general idea of the curve and got the following for data:
This all assumes a 99% hit rate, and that the fourth crit resets the counter and automatically crits. That is, if you roll a successful crit on the fourth before the automatic it is still consumed (that behavior will be interesting to try to test). The code used to generate this is here (http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/sims/hotstreak.pl) the output was modified to represent a gain over an actual crit rate (crit rate * .99, IAW two roll theory) in the spreadsheet.
Currently I'm running a long simulator to try to get an indication of Combustion + Hot Streak and how it will work out for your crit rate, results still pending from that one (been 37 hours in the run so far), code can be found here (http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/sims/hotstreakcombust.pl). An initial run of it on a very low duration per crit percentage point showed a general trend of having both combustion and hot streak having more gain per percent of input crit from around 25% to 65% or so than just combustion alone, whether or not its an appreciable difference than the same basic trend observed without combustion will need to be seen when this simulator finishes its run, the line was far too noisy in the initial run to get anything useful out of.
And yes, if Manly is lurking, it is a gross over-simplification to treat combustion this way, I know, I agree.
To truly model the game, we first must research it. http://zaldinar.wordpress.com/
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.
This test wouldn't work, simply because when clearcast procs in this example there is no way of seeing if AM proc'd it or if AB proc'd it and you beat it with pre-cast.
As for hot streak - I think whether or not it synergises well with AoE will make or break this spell.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how Hot Streak synergizing with AoE has anything to do with how good it is. Beyond a shadow of a doubt mages have so many AoE tools it's not even funny any more, and there's plenty of effects that make AoE practically a mage-only business now.
How does Hot Streak affect AoE has nothing do with the fact we're almost certain it'll either affect Single Target DPS by 2-4% or 4-5% depending on if it counts it's own proc (extremely unlikely) for three talent points, so deep in the tree. Notice World In Flames next to it, at the same tier, and Living Flame, all AoE talents; thinking HS should have, or realistically would be in any way important if it did have, anything to do with AoE is ignoring the plain facts: Full fire is in every conceivable way worse than 33/38/0 hybrid, and it's questionable whether it's better in AoE terms.
Living flame will have to be extremely good, and even if it is you'll still have to suplement AE as a fire mage (even if in DPS terms Flamestrike can compete with so many talents thrown at it, you'll have to be in melee to use LF and it still will be woefully smaller range than the now 6y larger radius AE) and I sincerely doubt that World in Flames will make 33-arcane AE bow down to fire's AoE DPS.
This however, as I said before, belies the fact that HS is terribly sub-par, and that's that. For the time being, I'd rather have 80 all resist which feeds 5% manaback when I do resist, meditation, clearcasting, range on my poly/silence/AE, spellpower, AP, more crit, 2sec invis AND 4% damage reduction versus fire-spec's IV, some more emp. fireball and HS (worth less crit % than arcane grants) plus Burnount (even with Lhivera-optimism worth less than Spell Power and mana-draining), elemental precision and some weird-beard AoE.
One angle that has not been looked at for Frostfire Bolt: What if Blizzard designs more raid bosses to have higher resist in one or two schools, ala Supremes? Having a slightly less powerful nuke that bypasses 200 or 300 resists on a boss is extremely nice.
Not trying to put sunshine on a pile of shit, I just think it's a bad idea for people to whine and bitch about new spells / abilities when Blizzard could easily change a few mechanics for WoW 3.0 that can dramatically change existing TC.
05/26/08, 12:45 AM
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