I continue to not understand the role of FFb, is it just in there to replace fireball/frostbolt as your primary nuke? Does it create a new spell rotation when it replaces them?

If I could make a request of beta testers with FFB, if someone or several someones could enable combat logging, wearing gear with no proc effects that increase +damage, and specced into everything they can that will potentially increase FFB damage (except Molten Fury), post a link to the combat log with details as to your +damage value and what talents you chose for the test.

Essentially I'd like to see if we can predict the damage range observed, it should match:

(min or max tooltip + (3 / 3.5) * +damage) * 1.1 Firepower * 1.03 Playing with Fire * 1.06 Piercing Ice etc etc

And crits should be predictable as well by some variation of the existing crit bonus formulas. Of particular interest would be a test containing Burnout and Ice Shards to see how they interact.

I'd prefer a combat log over short videos since, well, honestly... I can download it and grep/awk the values out of it and see how they look. And combat logs can contain more data in a useful form.

Infact, if you could just enable it while questing and post that log, that could also be useful.

A fire build without Improved or Empowered Fireball? So it's a frostfire build, basically.

The problem with putting a lot of points in deep fire is that 1) living bomb is terrible, and 2) world in flames is terrible. Because WiF doesn't let you bypass aoe caps, and because living bomb is so underwhelming, you're better off going 0/50/21 with a build like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Note that the fifth point in Shatter instead of Cold Snap is not an error, because builds like 0/50/21 should only be used by a guild that's stacking mages and is already bringing enough 0/33/38 and deep frost mages for permanent WG uptime... and 0/50/21 mages will get WAY more dps from the last point in shatter rather than being able to double-up on IV.

However, at that point the mage will be generating such a ridiculous amount of threat that I don't think it'll be realistic for 0/50/21 to work, so my expectation is for mages to spec either 0/33/38 for both Frost Channeling and Burning Soul threat redux on FFB, OR to spec 46/0/25 (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft) and basically play it like 40/0/21 plays now... just with a free +50% crit.

I agree with you 100% on hoping for a good arcane spec. But it doesn't look like elementalist will be too bad either, since you'll be managing the scorch debuff, your FFB main nuke, potentially the water elemental if specced for it, and ice lances during the end of WG procs. So, like, three spells. Hey, it's still better than Frostbolt spam.

Hi, first time poster.
I had to join the forums to ask one question that suddenly occured to me.
hot streak procs after 3 spell criticals, and gives your next spell a 100% crit chance.
My question is this: Will a single volley of arcane missles be capable of effectively "charging" this? If so, when you gain hot streak, what is to stop you chain-casting arcane missles that have a 100% crit chance?

So, frostfire bolt's spell school is technically fire - do we know if it scales off fire-specific spellpower (or likewise, frost-specific spellpower)?

Obviously general-purpose spellpower is going to do the trick, but it does have implications for people wearing [Hellfire-Encased Pendant] or the like (sunfire enchants, etc.)

My gut feeling would be that it probably scales off +fire, with the spell itself being part of the fire school.

quick post-submission thought:
It could also just do the "smart" thing, and use whichever of fire-spellpower or frost-spellpower is higher.

Although, do we even know if we're going to see school-specific spellpower in WTLK, given the moves they've made to make gear applicable to a wider range of classes/specs?

It probably does, but the fire tree is very exclusive... and when you go deep enough for Hot Streak you're not really able to be effective with arcane or frost spells. I'd imagine that spamming scorch could become fashionable for deep fire non-FFB specs... but even then in the long run it's probably less damage than just doing the normal fireball rotation.

Aarpia: The way HS would interact with AM is probably to make the first tick a guaranteed crit but not all five. Even if it would make a bad spec I duobt blizzard will let us have a combo that makes any spell crit indefinetley once you get a hot streak going.

Vektor: This is just a guess really but I think scool specific +dmg items will be more or less non existant in wrath. Or at least very very rare. I know we´ve seen them a lot in the past but its a stat that counters the concept of streamlined gear and it has a tendency to mess upp the item budget. Look at frozen shadow weave for example. If that set would have had generic +damage it wouldnt have beaten T4 and T5 for raw damage.

Celebrimor: Indeed it has worse base stats than frost and fireball and no empowered talent, but being able to score much higher crits than either of the pure spells along with both a ridiculous amount of crit from talents and awesome scaling with crit might make this specc superior to deep fire or deep frost. We dont know yet but its far from impossible. And why not really? I mean there will always be one or a couple of specs that are considered "the" raidspec. Personally I think its more fun if one of "the" raidspecs is a hybrid spec. Toys from two trees, not to mention that both fire and frost 51 point talents feel kinda meh for raiding purposes.

I'm pretty exited about the ffb testing results, perhaps mages ARE getting the buff so many people have been "whining" about.

I just have one probably silly question.. on my current gear i got 1250 fire dmg and only 1178 frost.. since the ffb does frostfire dmg, which of the two numbers will it use? First i thought it would take the number that fittet the type of dmg it did, but since we now know it does FF dmg.. how does it work with gear?

While not nearly 100% certain, I wouldn't be surprised if + "specific-school dmg" enchants on gear and weapons becomes obsolete. We have already seen a conversion to solely +spellpower, so I am tempted to say that we might no longer see +fire dmg or +frost.

Furthermore, Frostfire bolt does "frostfire" dmg it would seem odd (albeit that the spell does benefit from both talents trees) that it's + dmg would come from either +fire or +frost. But I can be extremely wrong since it does benefit from both talent tree there is nothing stopping it from benefiting from the higher of two +dmg schools.

Hmm... does it really matter? I mean the crafted tailoring epics are lv 70 right? So in order to get them you would haveto stay in outland and farm primals for a long time only to get a set that will get outdated really quickly in northrend. I think they will just leave things as they are and let scaling take care of the problem. Spellfire will suck at lv 80 and to convert all gear they would haveto change stuff like Eye of Flame and Freezing Band wich would suddenly have rather silly names if they were changed to generic spelldamage.

But for those who keep any fire specific gear till they get FFB I think that the spell will just slap any fire or frost specific damage you have on top of spellpower. Since there wont be any school psecific items above lv 70 I cant really see how you could abuse an outdated stat together with FFB.