Testing has shown, however, that an AoE spell cast while under the influence of Hot Streak will provide the 100% crit benefit to every target (and cause another hot streak proc).

So unless the testing reported on this by others is false or out-dated (it was reported some time back in this thread), your conclusion that hot streak doesn't benefit AoE anymore than it does single-target isn't entirely accurate. The chance of it getting into a 'loop' of 100% uptime is a lot slimmer, but still existant. You may also be able to screw around with combustion and find a reasonable way of forcing the 100% effect.

I heard people post random stuff from time to time.

I have heard no such rumor, but if that happens, I have to seriously question the long term raid viability of arcane given that the entire spec is built around this nuke. If it's going to scale like an ordinary instant cast, it's going to get left behind.

These pvp videos are poor indicators of future viability and hope Blue isn't taking its lead from them.

As long as paladins exist, mage aoe snares will never really be a meaningful addition to the mage class or the raid.

I too have toyed with the idea, back when I was trying to figure out what mages actually bring to the table, of thinking of the mage as more of an "AoE controller" and the warlock as an "AoE destroyer". Meaning, that mages would control a large group of mobs using powerful AoE snares and roots etc, while warlocks would provide the immense damage needed to take them out, making the 2 classes work in tandem to complete a difficult AoE encounter.

But then I realized that there is no need/place for an "AoE controller" class, since the AoE tanks in the game are soo proficient in what they do. The extra snares on blizzard will not do much in a raid environment since the paladin tanking the hyjal trash will either do his job and the mobs will stick to him like glue, or he wont, and the raid will wipe. Your improved blizzard will not help at that point. Thankfully, paladins are masterful at holding aggro on multiple mobs, so in effect, they already provide the "control" aspect that you would want to mimic with an AoE snare. Furthermore, their control far faar outperforms the control a mage could provide with an aoe snare.
At the end of the day, your improved snare does almost nothing for raid aoe trash, since the function it is trying to serve is already been performed by the tanking paladin. i.e It is the tanking paladin that is "keeping the mobs in place and making for some very controlled killing", not your imp blizz

The only way snares, roots and all the secondary effects of mage aoe will ever really be useful, is if they severely nerf a paladins ability to aoe tank, which is something I am 99% certain they wont.

I do not think this would be that hard to start going, especially during the scorch stack, as scorch has the extra 6% chance to crit. Also, because of the shorter cast time, you would get 2x more casts in the same period.

If you do get the hot streak to start rolling using fireball + fblast on the 100% crit, the ignite bug would become much more evident. Also, it might be worth a rotation such as Fireball + Fblast + Scorch (for the crit), in an attempt to sustain a 100% crit rate. It would require calculations to see if the addition crit from scorch is worth the cast time instead of a fireball.

Fair enough. If an AoE spell has a 100% crit rate when hot streak is up, then it is indeed better for AoE.

I can hardly imagine that it is intended for an AoE spam to have a perpetual 100% crit chance once you happen to proc hot-streak, but it could be that way on the test realms right now (has this been observed?). As Qbert pointed out, it requires a multiple of 3 mobs to proc an 'infinite' streak. The particular number of mobs required and the need for combustion to generate a HS proc make it a bit difficult to produce, but certainly not beyond the realms of possibility to exploit.

that talent doesnt work in wotlk.

It seems to me like a 0/50/21 build switching to FFB+Fireblast on Hot Streak procs is more valuable (297.5% crits vs.. 227.5%) since the crit is guaranteed, then a scorch to try to keep it rolling. I have a feeling that resorting to scorch spam to try for a proc would technically decrease DPS because the marginal crit% increase only gives a slightly better proc chance at the cost of a lot of DPS downgrading to scorch.

I have a feeling we (the mage community) significantly underestimated Hot Streak if this is how it will work in live. It is essentially a refurbished version of rolling ignites the way it is now if it works like I think it does.

Indeed, Arcane Barrage's coefficient is poor enough as-is.

Consider the table of m/r values (empowered talents apply):

Fireball: 904
Frostbolt: 908
Arcane Blast: 1230
Arcane Missiles: 961
Arcane Barrage: 1680
Scorch: 956

With the exceptions of Arcane Blast and Barrage, 900-950 seems to be the norm for our staple nukes. If anything, to bring Arcane Barrage to that level of scaling, it should have a coefficient between 1.1 and 1.15.

I would disagree with labeling it an exploit if it is reproduce able simply due to Fire lacking any real viable fire AoE that can be spammed to abuse the mechanic. Spamming Flamestrike crits would not be much of a damage increase compared to AE spam and Flamestrike's area of effect is so small that it would be extremely difficult to consistently hit the mob-pack at an even multiple of 3. If Hot Streak applied to all spell schools (i.e. AE spam) then I would concede it would be open for exploit but not when limited to Fire AoE.

Problem with 0/50/21 is that you're lacking winter's chill, which I think cannot be underestimated when talking hot streak. 10% or 20% crit depending on your take of the whole thing.
The closest you can do with both hot streak and winter's chill is

0/43/28 (3/3 hot streak, 3/5 wc)
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

which I doubt is better than 0/50/21. In any case, I'm just pointing out that I believe you pretty much absolutely need WC to get to use hot streak.

I do not have access to beta, so I'm limited to the wording on the WotLK calculators on mmo-champion and the blizzard site.

From the (often confused) blizzard calculator, Hot Streak reads:
"Any time you score 3 spell criticals in a row, you have a 33/66/100% chance the next spell cast within 10 sec will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit."

This would imply Hot Streak applies to AE (as well as Blizzard).

Wouldn't it be a very good idea to change hot streak to something similar to the lightning capacitator instead? Or maybe after you have had 3 crits (they don't need to be consecutive) you're guaranteed your next spell will crit, resulting in some very fun and dynamic DPS tactics.

Isn't WC now a 3-point tallent? Thats what the oh-so-reliable official calculator is showing. This looks like a viable FFB spec to me.

Hot Streak is a bad, imbalancing talent until Blizzard implements a way to counteract the inflation of crit chances as gear levels rise. Until that occurs, there is no way to make sure it is both valuable enough at a low gear level and not overpowered at a high gear level.

I really hope they don't make any decisions based upon stupid videos showing PvP players in S3/S4 gear ganking green geared nubs in green/blues with 8k HP and 0 resilience.

._.

Was there any official statement to the Arcane Barrage nerf by the way?

I'm inclined to agree with this... the value of the talent is incredibly volatile relative to crit chances (i.e. a 50% crit rate has ~double the Hot-Streak proc chance as a 40% crit rate). The concept is starting to sound like a really interesting player-based mechanic that I could find myself having a lot of fun with... but I really don't like the broader concept of talents' value scaling with gear. At least in this case, the scaling is positive (up to a limit) compared to Combustion scaling negatively.

Although, technically all crit talents are negative scaling talents, and all crit-based proc chance talents scale positively up to a threshold crit level. Hot Streak just happens to be on a volatile scale.

With some luck I got a string of hot streak procs against groups of 3 mobs.


http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/8117/hotstreakos9.jpg

The first set of crits are due to combustion giving me 91% crit. As the last three are crits, I recieve the hot streak buff, making my next flamestrike 100% crit on all targets. Because I hit three each time, I keep recieving the buff. Finally when I hit five targets I lose the buff (although it is refreshed after hitting the third mob). The screenshot doesn't show it, but I crit a fireball afterwards which gave me the buff again, showing that within a single flamestrike the hot streak charges are resolved individually, and only give the crit bonus against one mob.

There's some big potential for exploiting this if you can make sure you only hit 3/6/9 etc mobs at a time, although obviously it's very situational.

Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd like to redo the whole foundations of WoW mechanics if I had the chance, but Hot Streak is just...especially egregious in my opinion. It strikes me as Blizzard wanting to make something fun at excessive cost to ability to balance.

Hot Streak is moderated by Combustion. Going from 40% to 50% crit increases Hot Streak from around 3.5% crit to around 4.6% crit, but it also reduces Combustion from around 1.6% crit to around 1.3% crit; the total increase is about 0.8%. Within any reasonable range of pre-Combustion-and-Hot-Streak crit rates, the total benefit of the two talents remains pretty consistently between 1.0 and 1.5% crit per talent point, which doesn't strike me as terribly excessive variation.

One thing that's on my mind a little is trinkets. Is it even worth worrying about at this point, since it's a good chance a lot of them could and probably will be replaced by the time we start into the serious endgame raids (especially since from 60-70 trinkets like ToEP, ZHC, and to a lesser extent Nelth's Tear/Sapphirons trinket got replaced with something better)?

But since Arcane's had a complete playstyle change, is it possible to see TLCs and Ashtongue trinkets make a comback, at least until something better comes along?

I suppose this does mediate the effect somewhat, though I can't say I'm thrilled that the best they can do is find something to counteract Combustion's reverse scaling, either.