[Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion - Page 172

Skallewag · 07/27/08, 7:47 AM

Like stated it seems nigh impossible to balance something like mages procing shatter crits for eachother on bosses. I really really like the idea to bring a core talent of the frost tree like shatter into bossfights but for balance reasons I think it would be far better if it gave the mage a 5 sec buff that made all his spells consider targets frozen. I realise that means the mage chould suddenly do a shatter combo on another target but would that really be a problem?

In raid situations you could proc it on anything you cast on and when it procs you could decide if you want the shatter crit on your current target or on another target. For example procing it on an add that will soon die would let you go shatter on the boss instead. Would add a nice element of flexibility to PvP too if you could freeze anyone on a WG proc. You would still be relying on a 10% proc chanse or landing frost novas so it wouldnt let you deep freeze people whenever the freeze CD is upp, but it would be a little bit easier to select your targets for it.

But most importantly it would remove the stacking problem so frost and elemental damage can be balanced around it, not would it cause any troubles with debuff slots like each mage having their own debuff would. It could get dispelled from you I guess, but being a magic effect it could be dispelled from your target as well. The only drawback would be that you loose the +hit debuff tanks would have gained, but that can be solved in several ways. Either mage WG have a dual effect improving VC so VC adds a bit of +hit chanse on stuff or just upp the proc chanse on WG a bit and trade that +hit for damage.

Slander · 07/27/08, 8:30 AM

Making WG a self-buff would potentially become too powerful in PvP. I mean proccing WG on one target then getting a shatter combo off on someone else out of nowhere?
Same goes for Deep Freeze, while I do believe the extra flexibility would be nice for PvP it is possible that would become too powerful there instead.

If I understand this correctly, WG will only become powerful beyond reasonable levels with a FFB build, do we know anything about the raid encounters planned for wotlk?
To me it seems as if FFB will provide a flexible build to work around heavy resistances/immunites I think some CM said that as well(no reference, sorry). At the minute one could only speculate whether it would be overpowered or not, for all I know the majority of the encounters can be heavily frost resistant/immune which means losing wc and wg. If it's likely or not doesn't matter, until it's actually known you can only scream "potentially OP".

As far as I know warlocks got to keep their isb, it got a 25% nerf though but it still amplifies shadowpriest damage as well. I had a glance at DK abilities and it does seem like they will be able to freeze/benefit from the target being frozen so maybe it's just an insane way of levelling the playing field.

I guess what I am trying to say is that one can only wait and see how things pan out.

Ulthwithian · 07/27/08, 9:10 AM

Well, I had an idea about Frostfire Bolt (or any other dual-school spells) that I wanted to propose.

One way would be to simply break out how much damage each type does, and then apply the appropriate talents to that portion of the damage.

Thus (numbers being made up): 400-450 Frost damage and 400-450 Fire damage to the target.

Then you apply the Frost double crit to just the Frost portion of the damage, e.g., while Ignite only looks at the damage from the Fire portion of the spell.

Now, common sense would tell me that the damage each part would deal would need to be increased from current, or else the spell fails its design criteria (i.e., make better use of elementalist specs). This method would also give a boost to the Arcane +dmg talents (like Arcane Instability) since those apply to both parts of the effect.

I have another idea, but it's so wacky that it needs some more thought before being posited on this forum.

Skallewag · 07/27/08, 9:39 AM

Im not sure I see how that would be to powerfull in pvp Slander. I mean if youre focusing fire on one target and proc WG, how is it broken to chuck a shattercombo at someone else? Or if you for some reason deal frostdamage to something else than what youre supposed to be damaging then how is it to powerfull if youre allowed to deal the damage to what you are meant to? (For example frostnovaing someone trying to disrupt you.) Having it be a self buff will mean you can chose targets for a shatter combo or deepfreeze someone other than your focus fire target. It does sonud good, but I really fail to see how it would make mages dominate the arena.

Jonny_Monroe · 07/27/08, 11:18 AM

If it becomes a self-buff then blizzard automatically becomes the best AoE in a mage's arsenal (if spec'd WG).

Of course i'm assuming its a bug that blizzard currently doesn't proc WG.

Roywyn · 07/27/08, 11:27 AM

Talent spec estimates, round two

So, I've been polishing my calculations, fixed some things, and added cooldowns as flast multipliers.
I basically looked what kind of an increase a certain combination of cooldown talents in a certain spec was in Rawr.
That included one heroism and two clicky trinkets, and I obviously did some manual adjustment to account for new talents.

Most specs see a 4-10% increase from cooldown talents, so the error margin should be 1-2% at most for cooldowns.

Raid debuffs/buffs

I assumed Misery and 13% CoE as raid buffs and disregarded partial resists. They don't actually matter as they affect all specs the same way.

I did not assume Frozen Rune Weapon - World of Warcraft either for now. It's an 11-point talent in the frost tree, the tanking tree, and frost damage seems near irrelevant for DPS specs (1-2% of total damage is frost). Tanks will probably have it, but they claim it's not too exciting for them. With the windfury change, the imbue would only compete with a sharpening stone and not windfury.
It's probably worth it for 1 Death Knight to respecc into it if you have at least 2 mages. That's pretty dumb design though, to rely on a buff from a talent of another class that they wouldn't take otherwise.

Whatever, add +10% to Frost/Frostfire damage if you think it'll be up permanently on boss fights that matter.
Winter's Chill and Winter's grasp can prove useful for Death Knight tanks, but have very little impact on DPS specs right now. The whole class is under constant retuning, so it can change every day.

I did assume Earth and Moon, the 6% Arcane/Nature debuff from a Balance Druid in the raid, they look desirable enough.
The values without Earth and Moon are added as well.

Winter's Chill/Fire Vulnerability are up if the spec has it.

I did assume a CSD Meta and Elemental Oath (Shaman in the group) to determine crit damage.
I didn't consider (Improved) Moonkin Aura, since that's a mess to model and the Moonkin might be in another group.

I disregarded Mana for now. Many raid mana abilities were cahnged and probably see more tuning, we have no idea what it'll finally look like. I'd expect everything (barring Arcane Blast spam) to turn out sustainable. I used everything with Molten Armour for equal grounds.

As for buffs, Wrath of Air is 10% spell haste, Retribution Aura is 3% haste, 2% damage, Totem of Wrath is 3% crit and 3% hit, Judgements add 3% crit, Faerie Fire adds 3% hit. Flametongue and consumables are rolled into "buffed spell power".

I assumed 50ms cast dealy, which is the standard setting for Rawr.
I assumed 350ms cast delay for the Water Elemental, which is quite generous I think. Seems to be more like 500ms from what I saw in raids.

The gear setup

A haste-heavy get of Sunwell gear has 1.6k spell power raid buffed. We expect a blue set to be half a tier above that in power. Add new gems, enchants, consumables, and 1.8k spell power seems a conservative estimate.

With some unavoidable intellect, 13% crit from base, intellect and crit rating sounds conservative to start with.
Assuming 5% haste from gear, and hit capped. 800 intellect with AB/MotW, without BoK.

That was the first set of gear.
The second set assumes 2.6k spell power, 20% crit, 15% haste.

For Arcane Blast spam with 2T5, I removed 80 intellect and spell damage from the first gear set, 130 from the second.

The specs, spells and numbers

Listed values are always damage per cast time. The first value is for the lower gear, the second one for the higher gear.
We don't have a base value for Waterbolt, I took 750 as a guess.

Arcane Specs with 51-53 in Arcane. I didn't include Icy Veins at all because it will mess with Cycle. Add it as 2.5%-3% DPS over time if you can fit it in the spec.

Arcane Barrage : 3973 / 5792 (Damage per Cast Time)
Arcane Missiles : 2479 / 3688 (Without Missile Barrage)
Arcane Blast : 3490 / 4955 (Spammed at 3 stacks)
Arcane Blast 2T5 : 4198 / 5946 (Spammed at 3 stacks)

Frostbolt : 2494 / 3778
Fireball : 2856 / 4350
Frostfire Bolt 53/10/10 : 2448 / 3810 (Overestimating with 2 points too many in Arcane)
Frostfire Bolt 53/0/18 : 2119 / 3237

Barrage rotations are simplified with 1 Missile Barrage every 7 casts.
They are modeled as (ABar-X)3-ABar-AM-Y, X as generic filler, Y as Fire Blast to cover the gap due to haste.
Fire off-specs use Y for Scorch to keep up the debuff. If Scorch is about to run out and MB doesn't proc, 1 Fireball can be replaced by Fire Blast + Scorch with nearly the same damage.

ABar-FrB : 3045 /4390 (It runs into the haste cap with higher gear)
ABar-FB 3234 / 4839

(ABar-FrB)3-ABar-AM-FiBl : 3570 / 5140
(ABar-FB)3-ABar-AM-Sc : 3635 / 5423
(ABar-FFB)3-ABar-AM-FiBl : 3485 / 5221 (As 53/10/10, see comment above)

Without the Earth and Moon debuff, Barrage roations lose around 3% damage and scale down to:
(ABar-FB)3-ABar-AM-Sc : 3521 / 5255

Frost Specs can get 13 Arcane when omitting PvP/control talents.

Percentage values are Winter's Grasp uptime, calculated from the listed amount of mages.
The Water Elemental has up to 50% uptime in a 6 minute fight, so half of it's listed DPS should be the sustained value. Assuming that it actually survives, best case.

Ice Lance spam is given for mobility fights.

Waterbolt: 758 (379) / 894 (447) (Pet scaling is bad)

Frostbolt (lower gear) : 2468 (0%), 2702 (1 mage, 22%), 2884 (2 mages, 39%), 3026 (3 mages, 53%), 3521 (100%) /
Frostbolt (higher gear) : / 3713 (0%), 4074 (1 mage, 22%), 4349 (2 mages, 39%), 4556 (3 mages, 53%), 5205 (100%)

Even with 10 mages, you'd only have 90% uptime at with low gear, 93% with high gear.

Ice Lance (lower gear) : 849 (0%), 1725 (1 mage, 34%), 2313 (2 mages, 56%), 2714 (3 mages, 71%), 3488 (100%)
Ice Lance (higher gear) : / 1166 (0%), 2488 (1 mage, 36%), 3341 (2 mages, 58%), 3893 (3 mages, 73%), 4890 (100%) /

The value at 100% is the value for tossing an Ice Lance on a fading Winter's Grasp debuff. It seems worth doing for frost specs.

With 10 mages spamming Ice Lance, you'd have 98% / 99% uptime of Winter's Grasp.

Fire Specs go 51+ fire and pick Icy Veins, rest utility. I think you can go 0/50/21, adds ~1% for CS'ed IV.
Hot Streak is modeled of your crit rate.
I didn't model any Hot Streak + Combustion interaction. I'm not even sure what the best way to use Combustion is when you have Hot Streak. It depends on Ignite bugging, cast count and crit count issues.

The value in brackets is the chance that Ignite bugs on a Fireball + Fire Blast double crit.

Spell casting without Hot Streak:
Fireball : 2978 / 4543
Fire Blast : 3516 / 4903
FB3-FiBl : 3056 (0%), 3037 (50%), 3018 (100%) / 4595 (0%), 4557 (50%), 4519 (100%)

Spell casting with Hot Streak (first part is the spammed spell, second the cast on the 100% crit buff):
(FB3-FiBl)+(FBFiBl): 3120 (0%), 3081 (50%), 3042 (100%) / 4759 (0%), 4674 (50%), 4588 (100%)
(FB)+(FBFiBl) : 3086 (0%), 3068 (50%), 3050 (100%) / 4769 (0%), 4725 (50%), 4680 (100%)

That means the Hot Streak adds 64 (0%), 44 (50%), 32 (100%) / 174 (0%), 168 (50%), 137 (100%) DPS on average.

An Arcane/Fire spec like 33/38/0 performs as follows:

Fireball : 3281 / 5012
Fire Blast : 4102 / 5740
FB3-FiBl : 3400 (0%), 3372 (50%), 3344 (100%) / 5118 (0%), 5063 (50%), 5008 (100%)

Frostfire Bolt specs should use frost and fire talents. Who would have guessed!
I'm using 0/34/37 as standard spec since Water Elemental damage looks quite bad.
You'd have to drop 1% crit, Combustion and Molten fury for an unimproved Elemental, which looks like a sidegrade and more headache.

Those are the conservative values. Add 13% if you want FFB to double-dip from CoE, and another 10% if you want to have a laugh with Frost Vulnerability.

Frostfire Bolt (lower gear) : 3182 (0%), 3532 (1 mage, 19%), 3817 (2 mages, 34%), 4046 (3 mages, 47%), 5026 (100%) /
Frostfire Bolt (higher gear) : / 4888 (0%), 5423 (1 mage, 20%), 5858 (2 mages, 36%), 6186 (3 mages, 49%), 7499 (100%)

Frostfire Bolt with double CoE, Frost Vulnerability and 100% Winter's Grasp : 6246 / 9321

With 10 mages, you would reach 87% / 89% Winter's Grasp uptime.

Frostfire Bolt without Ignite (lower gear) : 2328 (0%), 2514 (1 mage, 19%), 2664 (2 mages, 34%), 2787 (3 mages, 47%), 3305 (100%) /
Frostfire Bolt without Ignite (higher gear) : / 3500 (0%), 3783 (1 mage, 20%), 4008 (2 mages, 36%), 4188 (3 mages, 49%), 5148 (100%)

I figured I'd add the oh-so-great 34/23/14 style specs if Winter's Grasp gets scrapped, which can't bring their own Winter's Chill, and compare with 0/37/34:
Frostfire Bolt : 2822 (no WC), 3200 (WC from another mage) / 4405 (no WC), 4939 (WC from another mage)
Frostfire Bolt 0/37/34 : 3256 / 4993

Conclusions for now

Arcane Barrage does what Arcane Blast was supposed to do:
Provide high DPS, but requires rotation with other spellls.

Barrage rotations provide the highest baseline sustainable DPS, they are even above normal Arcane Blast spam and only beaten by Blast spam with 2T5, which is probably not sustainable.

Frostbolts before WG are at ~2/3 of the power of Barrage rotations. With 3 mages and pet use, you get to ~90% of Barrage rotations.
With 10 mages, you reach ~90% WG uptime. Even if you could reach 100% uptime and your pet never died, you'd only be at most 5% above Barrage.

Seeing that you need absurd stacking in order to simply break even with Barrage, Winter's Grasp looks very balanced in conjunction with Frostbolts.

Pet scaling is pretty mediocre, for a lack of euphemisms.
Ice Lance spam in mobile fights on the other hand seems very powerful if you have ~3 mages.

Fire talents simply lack power. Hot Streak is a very cool idea, but it needs some retuning becausee it adds negligible damage. Burnout's issues have been named as well. And juggling around Ignite bugs and Combustion issues doesn't make it any easier.
Being stuck in BC mode, Fire is ~15% behind Barrage. Arcane/Fire specs peform a bit better, they are ~10% behind Barrage.

Elemental Frostfire Bolt specs are broken and overtuned beyond hope, that's nothing new.
But it's not just the fault of Winter's Grasp. Even without Grasp/Shatter in 0/37/34, one-button-FFB-spam is very competitive.
With Winter's Grasp, even if it was changes to only affect the original caster, Frostfire Bolt competes with Barrage Rotations and outscales them.
Arcane variations like 34/23/14 are strictly inferior for FFB.

The major issue that unbalances Frostfire is the powerful crit scaling with Ice Shards and Ignite, two easily reachable powerful talents that are not additive but multiplicative. Winter's Grasp then amplifies exactly that scaling by increasing the amounts of crits you can attain.

If Ignite wouldn't work with Frostfire Bolt, it would be pretty much in line with Frostbolt and quite balanced.
Yes, that means with Winter's Grasp.

One thing that is pretty awkward is Frozen Rune Weapon - World of Warcraft. It's an outside debuff that isn't really appealing to Death Knights and yet yes to be considered by us.
If it was made either useful and attractive for all Death Knight specs, or changed into something else like a self buff for tanking, it would be easier to balance around.

Disclaimer

The numbers given are not to estimate what our DPS will be, they are give to estimate how our different specs and talents compare with each other.
Because spec performance will largely depend on gear, I have given two gear guesses for low-end and high-end gear.
Their purpose is to give a comparison and find out if a certain spec performs well due to scaling or due to base values.

Comparing their relative performance on two levels of gear helps finding those scaling differences.

[Edit]: Fixed wrongly scaled FFB values.

Skallewag · 07/27/08, 2:25 PM

Wohoo! ABar spam looks os sweet! Im really looking forward to not being so vunerable to mobility fights. The short CD means that either Abar or Fire Blast will nearly always be upp if you haveto do some minor movement to dodge boss AoE and even if you gotta stay on the run DPS doenst drop to zero at least.

Theophanes · 07/27/08, 2:35 PM

I haven't really looked at other theory-crafting for other classes, so I'm rather curious as to whether FFB spam with ideal conditions will lead to the highest dps in the game, and, therefore, broken dps. While FFB does appear to come out on top over other mage specs, how well will it scale in comparison or measure up to the highest dps rogue or hunter specs?

What about implementing a diminishing returns mechanic on WG so that mage stacking doesn't become a huge issue? It seems to me that removing ignite from FFB would be plain inconsistent, and the better path would be to limit WG scaling with FFB through other means.

Searix · 07/27/08, 3:17 PM

I'm bored atm, so im going to post a quick review of talents i believe still really need help.
Source: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Arcane:

Tier 1:
Arcane Subtlety: 5/10 spell penetration needs to scale.
Improved Arcane Missiles: Still a frivelous talent. Definately needs to be less talents, another spell added to it, or something

Tier 2:
Wand Specialization: Other classes are losing their's, why do we have ours? No one's specced this since the dawn of time

Tier 4: Improved Mana shield: Instead of eating 3200 mana with one mana shield, it eats 2640 mana. Joy.

Tier 5: Improved Blink: We already typically blink to avoid damage. Up until 4 seconds is already the safe point. Something needs to change

Tier 8: Arcane Flows: Just a weird talent, it should also reduce Icy veins cooldown, and should be -1 minute.

Tier 9: Slow: Still is useless in pve, still is worthless against 99% of 2's/3's healers (priest/druid). Instant Cleanse and Shapeshift respectively neuter this hard.

Tier 10: Missile Barrage/ArBa stop syncing when you get haste, which is counter-intuitive with a spell haste talent one tier earlier.

Fire:

Tier 8: Fiery Payback: Where to begin with this one, Molten armor does less than 1% of a person's health, 20% more of <1% is still <1%. The resist mechanic of this is dumb, are we supposed to stack resists? How many damage classes do we fight in arena that uses instant up front nukes? Now take that and ask yourself how many of those will be fully resisted. Worthless talent.

Tier 10: Burnout: This along with Playing with Fire, this tree has to be hands down the best dps spec in the GAME or what's the point of these talented penalties.

Tier 11: What in the world is with this worthless talent. No damage + putting impact on DR. This in addition to a god-awful amount of mana.

Frost:
In general: Way to many 5 point talents

Tier 3: Improved Blizzard: The reason no one takes this is because blizzard takes 2-3 seconds from when you cast it for it to actually do damage/snare.

Tier 5: Frozen Core: #fire/frost damage dealers: Next to 0. Barring PMR, where you're always on the mage anyways so you take next to no frost damage.
Improved Cone of Cold: Cone of Cold costs way to much mana for way to little damage.

Tier 9: Improved Water Elemental: Do i need to post videos of rogues 2 shotting my pet? The number of bosses that have aoe that one shots my pet? What's 30% more health going to do? This pet has NO resist to spells, and little armor, in addition to horrendous base health.

Tier 11: Deep Freeze: This talent irks me the most. This is ANOTHER talent that is DIRECTLY countered by Druids and Priests? Are you telling me a non brain dead druid/priest won't instantly break my freeze if they see me casting deep freeze?

Blizzard still has a long way to go with mages in wrath.

Talbain · 07/27/08, 4:30 PM

Originally Posted by Searix

I'm bored atm, so im going to post a quick review of talents i believe still really need help.
Source: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Well let's try and fix some of these, hmm? I agree with your assessments for the most part, and well, am always suggesting new stuff. So I'm bored, let's get started!

Arcane:

Tier 1:
Arcane Subtlety: 5/10 spell penetration needs to scale.
Improved Arcane Missiles: Still a frivelous talent. Definately needs to be less talents, another spell added to it, or something

Arcane Subtlety - Increases spell penetration per level. .5/1 per level.
Imp Arcane Missiles - Becomes:
Improved Arcanics
Arcane spells now have a 33/66/100% chance to avoid interruption while casting, and increases the range of your Arcane spells by 2/4/6 yards.

Tier 2:
Wand Specialization: Other classes are losing their's, why do we have ours? No one's specced this since the dawn of time

Becomes:
Arcane Spirit
Identical to Spirit Tap. Links with the Tier 3 "Student of the Mind" talent. 2 Ranks.

Tier 4: Improved Mana shield: Instead of eating 3200 mana with one mana shield, it eats 2640 mana. Joy.

Becomes:
Mana Weaving
Decreases the mana lost per point of damage taken when Mana Shield is active by 25/50% and increases your health by 100% of mana lost.

Tier 5: Improved Blink: We already typically blink to avoid damage. Up until 4 seconds is already the safe point. Something needs to change

Improved Blink
Reduces the cooldown of Blink by 5/10 seconds.

Tier 8: Arcane Flows: Just a weird talent, it should also reduce Icy veins cooldown, and should be -1 minute.

It currently has two ranks, the second rank being one minute. So your wish already came true on this one. Still doesn't affect Icy Veins, though I don't feel it should.

Tier 9: Slow: Still is useless in pve, still is worthless against 99% of 2's/3's healers (priest/druid). Instant Cleanse and Shapeshift respectively neuter this hard.

Add this part to the end of Slow:
Whenever Slow would otherwise be dispelled, its duration is instead cut in half. So Slow is now undispellable, but its duration can now be reduced to nothing by dispelling. I don't know how to make this useful for PvE. I don't honestly think it's possible. It'd have to be a completely different spell in my mind.

Tier 10: Missile Barrage/ArBa stop syncing when you get haste, which is counter-intuitive with a spell haste talent one tier earlier.

I dunno, I think Missile Barrage is fine as is, so you'd have to give more specific examples about what's wrong with it.

Fire:

Tier 8: Fiery Payback: Where to begin with this one, Molten armor does less than 1% of a person's health, 20% more of <1% is still <1%. The resist mechanic of this is dumb, are we supposed to stack resists? How many damage classes do we fight in arena that uses instant up front nukes? Now take that and ask yourself how many of those will be fully resisted. Worthless talent.

Re-work of Fiery Payback:
Whenever you are critically hit, 25% of the damage dealt is returned to the target. 3 second cooldown.

Tier 10: Burnout: This along with Playing with Fire, this tree has to be hands down the best dps spec in the GAME or what's the point of these talented penalties.

This talent should basically just burn 1% of the target's total mana (or more... I'd like more). Increase the critical strike damage bonus to that of Ice Shards.

Tier 11: What in the world is with this worthless talent. No damage + putting impact on DR. This in addition to a god-awful amount of mana.

Living Bomb
Targeted spell, 35 yard range.
The target becomes a Living Bomb, dealing 750 damage every second for 6 seconds to all targets within 10 yards. The target then explodes, dealing 1500 damage to all targets within 20 yards and knocking all affected targets back 5-10 yards. 30 second/1 minute cooldown.

Frost:
In general: Way to many 5 point talents

Same with the Arcane tree really.

Tier 3: Improved Blizzard: The reason no one takes this is because blizzard takes 2-3 seconds from when you cast it for it to actually do damage/snare.

Reduce it to one rank and it's fine.

Tier 5: Frozen Core: #fire/frost damage dealers: Next to 0. Barring PMR, where you're always on the mage anyways so you take next to no frost damage.

Frozen Core:
Your Frost spells have a 50/100% chance to resist spell pushback and you take 3/6% less damage from Frost spells. Burning Soul in the Fire tree should receive a similar upgrade.

Improved Cone of Cold: Cone of Cold costs way to much mana for way to little damage.

Increases the damage done by 15/25/35% and decreases the mana cost by 15/25/35%.

Tier 9: Improved Water Elemental: Do i need to post videos of rogues 2 shotting my pet? The number of bosses that have aoe that one shots my pet? What's 30% more health going to do? This pet has NO resist to spells, and little armor, in addition to horrendous base health.

Improved Elemental - Your Water Elemental is now permanent, however it may only be summoned once every minute. 1 Rank

Tier 11: Deep Freeze: This talent irks me the most. This is ANOTHER talent that is DIRECTLY countered by Druids and Priests? Are you telling me a non brain dead druid/priest won't instantly break my freeze if they see me casting deep freeze?

Blizzard still has a long way to go with mages in wrath.

Deep Freeze becomes:
Chains of Ice
Chains of Ice freezes a target to the ground for 4 seconds. During those 4 seconds, the target may not cast spells or use abilities on themselves. This ability does not affect abilities which make the target invulnerable or otherwise immune to damage. 30 second cooldown.

Roywyn · 07/27/08, 5:11 PM

Originally Posted by Theophanes

I haven't really looked at other theory-crafting for other classes, so I'm rather curious as to whether FFB spam with ideal conditions will lead to the highest dps in the game, and, therefore, broken dps. While FFB does appear to come out on top over other mage specs, how well will it scale in comparison or measure up to the highest dps rogue or hunter specs?

What about implementing a diminishing returns mechanic on WG so that mage stacking doesn't become a huge issue? It seems to me that removing ignite from FFB would be plain inconsistent, and the better path would be to limit WG scaling with FFB through other means.

Right, me forgetting the "not" in "Elemental Frostfire Bolt specs are broken and overtuned beyond hope, that's nothing new. But it's not just the fault of Winter's Grasp." wasn't exactly smart, but it should have been clear in context.

And the primary issue is *not* WG, it's FFB.
Even if you hard-wire something that FFB cannot affect/benefit from Grasp/Shatter at all, it's still the highest DPS and best scaling mage spec out there.

FFB with 0% Grasp is better than Frostbolt with 100% Grasp. If Grasp was changed to only effect the caster who procced it, then FFB would still be better than Barrage rotations (no Shatter/Grasp there), better than Arcane Blast spam.
What's so hard to get, why do people jump on the "Nerf WG!" bandwagon when even without it, FFB spam is one of the highest spammable DPS and most mana efficient spell out there and has the best crit scaling?

The question for other classes is actually an interesting one. Fireball in BC had quite good scaling, so I'll use the old Fireball as benchmark for BC scaling. So for other classes, estimate how they compared to Fireball in BC and estimate the impact of their new talents.

To emphasise scaling, I turned up spell power to 3.2k:

500 - Waterbolt over a 6 minute fight
4277- Starfire (Druid)
4349 - Frostbolt without WG
4760 - Frostbolt with only personal WG
4870 - Lightning Bolts (Shaman 52/0/19), shared Stormstrike

5009 - Fireball as BC Arc/Fire
5035 - Fireball as BC Fire/IV (missing Burnout/Hot Streak)

5123 - Lightning Bolt (Shaman 43/28/0), shared Stormstrike
5207 - Wrath (Druid), shared Stormstrike
5535 - Fireball as WotLK Fire/IV without bugs
5570 - Shadow Bolt, Destro/Sac
5624 - Frostbolt spam with 5 WG mages
5674 - Arcane Blast spam (no T5)
5847 - Frostfire Bolt without WG/Shatter
5949 - Fireball as Arcane/Fire

6172 - Incinerate/Immolate, Destro/Sac
6237 - Barrage rotation with Fireball filler
6339 - Frostfire Bolt with only personal WG

6730 - Arcane Blast spam with 2T5
7803 - Frostfire Bolt with 5 WG mages

So, what does it look like compared to BC fire specs?
* Deep Fire spec gets a ~10% boost. Arcan/Fire, Frostbolt/WG and Arcane Blast spam are ~10-20% ahead.
* I would guess that most other non-hybrid classes would land ~20% above old Fire, maybe 25%. 5-10% ahead now, 10-15% through new talent scaling.
* Arcane Barrage is around ~25% ahead of old Fire, which should compete well with other classes.
* Frostfire Bolt starts nearly 20% above old Fire without WG, which is comparable to Arcane/Fire.
Using only your own Winter's Grace, it would shoot past Barrage rotations. Stacking mages makes it go up to ~55% above old Fire with 5 WG mages.

So, I'm quite optimistic that mages will turn out quite competitive without WG or FFB.
Even when stacked to 5, Frost/WG mages are still behind Barrage.

Stacking 10 frost mages puts on only ahead of 10 Barrage mages if your pets survive at least half the time, and even then it's just a slighty ahead in the best case.
There is no exponential scaling and whatever people like to claim. You need more than 5 mages to break even, and mustn't have any raid damage that can kill pets. That is not really an incentive to stack frost mages.

If anything, then people stacking frost mages means that Barrage DPS is high enough that Arcane is finally a great spec that can stand it's ground without a gimmick set bonus and massive mana from outside.

I'll have another look at Frostfire once the multi-school mechanics get a review.
If however Winter's Grasp is culled to "fix mage stacking", we're all likely to face a future as FFB zombies.

Comparison to other Classes

Since I was curious, I decided to have a look how other classes' primary spells scale in comparison to ours.
I've used the exact same buff/debuff setting for fair comparison, even if it doen't make sense that a Balance druid has no Moonkin Aura, for example.
I've used the info from the Blizzard WotLK talent calculators with some things that have yet to be implemented.
I am well aware that most classes are still under heavy changes, redesign and bugfixing, but I decided to still give it a shot.

The given data is strictly for their primary spells. Druids may have to keep up Insect Swarm and Faerie Fire, Shaman have to drop totems and maybe renew Water Shield, Warlocks may have to Life Tap (unless current Imp. Soul Leech makes it to release) and will use a curse, etc.
It's just an estimate of the maximum potential scaling of their primary spell.

From the first glance, it seems that I was a bit too optimistic and other classes will give a very good run for their money.

[Edit I]: Fixed calculation errors.
[Edit II]: Added comparison of other caster classes' scaling.

Talbain · 07/27/08, 7:08 PM

Curious but, with a build built around Arcane Barrage, how much will haste benefit it? While it will benefit the spells cast in the interim, with Arcane Barrage being the main nuke, wouldn't it be wise to drop haste for another stat because of it being instant?

Skallewag · 07/27/08, 7:10 PM

It currently has two ranks, the second rank being one minute. So your wish already came true on this one. Still doesn't affect Icy Veins, though I don't feel it should.

Has this been cofiremd? I was under the impression it was just a guess based on some unsure datamining.

Talbain · 07/27/08, 7:13 PM

Originally Posted by Skallewag

Has this been cofiremd? I was under the impression it was just a guess based on some unsure datamining.

Not to my knowledge, no.

Arazan · 07/27/08, 8:18 PM

I did this whole post completely forgetting about the GCD. Just ignore it.