I think this is known but regarding FFB and double dipping...

Currently the new chimera pet for hunters (exotic pet, BM) is critting for up to 7K. People were asking why. The answer from blue is:

WoW Forums -> Chimaeras doing 5-6-7k crits?

Not that he refers specifically to "that new Mage spell" (frostfire bolt) and says the scaling from doing two types of damage is a "problem". You could be optimistic it and read that some other way, but to me it screams "we didn't expect this kind of scaling, it is a problem, we will be fixing it." I won't guess what they will do to fix it but it seems obvious they are going to do something.

I think he is implying that the Chimera's ability is not supposed to act the same as a Mage's. Our double dipping is appropriate where as the Chimera's was overlooked.

This would be the optimistic view I mentioned. I read the blue post as saying "scaling of spells that do two schools of damage simultaneously is broken" but you can read it otherwise. Time will tell what Blizzard actually intends, of course.

Double dipping is never justified. You're either doing too few damage, or too much. If you do a 5man, and you're missing coe, its going to deeply affect your dps. Your dps is probably balanced around all the buffs being up (at least, I hope to god, because double dipping will really ruin any other approach). If your dps is balanced around all buffs being up, that means at any given time you don't have them up, you're below the intended dps. This isn't too bad normally because your debuffs don't double dip. But since here they do, your base dps is bad, and your scaling doesn't make any sense. It can't work in the long term.

Lets see what history has to teach us. Looking only at mage talents

-Scorch/COE used to double dip and apply to ignite as well. This was removed. Granted, it took a long time, but it got fixed.
-Arcane Potency. Arcane Potency on live does double dipping on AM. In wotlk, it doesn't. Well, of course, they messed up and POM+clearcasting up gives +60% crit, but thats because they fucked up and arcane potency should only apply when the spell consumes POM or clearcasting.

Well... Mana Shield does absorb 2k-3k damage per cast, so, if you have to use multiple GCDs to absorb damage, odds are if you didn't have Mana Shield you would be dead, or else you'd be forcing your healer to spend his time and mana chain-healing you. In this case you can probably afford the GCDs, but if you pull aggro, I can't imagine Ice Block isn't going to remain your #1 panic button.

Mages still won't want to get attacked directly -- Arcane Subtlety is still your best defensive talent. If Mana Shield/IA pans out, it would be mostly useful in situations dealing with boss AoE and other unavoidable kinds of damage -- which are usually fairly predictable and I figure represent a large portion of the damage taken by mages. In this situation, assuming you've foregone +Stamina and stacked +Intellect, talented Mana Shield would allow you to spend that expanded mana pool instead of health, boost your +dmg with IA, and avoid spell pushback. There are numerous tradeoffs (such as the GCD, and the fact that your mana pool can't be healed like your health pool).

I agree, in terms of Arcane Mage survivability, a Mana Shield/IA style mechanic is exactly what I'd like to see flavor-wise. It remains to be seen if it'll actually end up being usable.

1) FFB scales only about 2% worse than FB in most settings and a 0/51/20 type spec.

When you just compare hits, FB gets 115% while FFB gets 86%. That is a huge difference.
But when you consider that you can easily get 50% spell crit with all those raid buffs and talents and add 6% damage from Piercing Ice, then that 34% advantage of Fireball melts down to 2%. The improved crit scaling has such a big impact on it.
All other talents are shared. Assuming that you can replace 4T6 when you start raiding.

When you cast an instant, the FFB DoT actually gets to tick and you get another 5% of your spell damage there from the tick.

Oh, and don't blame Burnout. With a 25% Burnout, FB would only be 1% ahead.
That's without Doubledipping or Death Knight Cheese debuffs.

If you check the end of my linked post, you find Fireball and Frostfire Bolt as 0/51/20 within 1% of each other.
They are so close that we have no chance to tell which one is better.


2) Casting Living Bomb every 12 seconds is a ~10% DPS increase just for single target DPS. It's the best talent in the whole Fire tree.

Chimaera Froststorm damage was staged up to 35k I think.

There is also a EU mage post of a mage who tries to figure out how he crit for 20k with a FFB on molten fury range when all crits before that were about 8k tops. That was on a normal Utgarde Keep instance run.

This mana as a substitute for hp is a very interesting concept. Unless I have the completely wrong impression, the focus on stamina wont be quite as high on WotLK as it´s been in TBC and Im allready playing around with a 14-16k manapool compared to 10k health. Thus maintaining a 1,5:1 ratio on mana/health doesnt seem to farfetched in wotlk and possibly arcane mages will even be fielding a 2:1 ratio? Also the thing this kind of stat balance doesnt make you is vunerable to burst. It makes you able to take more burst than anyone since you have such a huge manapool to throw up shields on demand. Offcourse taking continous damage will eventually deplete your manapool but mages arent supposed to do that cause thats called tanking. Well... in pve thats called tanking. The point still stands tho, if mages have huge manapools and strong regen plus raidwide manaregen available then they have the ability to soak huge bursts.

If it will be usable in pvp in any situation at all remains to be seen. But to a pvp scrub like me it doenst seem completely impossible this might become a viable tactic. If you get focus fired theres now a lot of arcane tools to stay alive and if your team is unable to interupt the assult on you you can now actually get a talented invis off and sneak away to drink. In the example of Rogue+Mage teams it looks like it will be hard taking down an arcane mage on the defensive and we know its tricky to take down a Rogue and if things are going really bad both of these can slip out of combat regen back a bit and then go into the fray again. Both are also very competent bursters and with their combined stun, silence, knockback powers you could probably mess up healers a lot.

Like mentioned what would make manashield really interesting is if it had some kind of reflect or absorb ability. Something that consumes the manashield but absorbs all incoming damage fom one attack. 20% would be really nice but even a 10% chanse for such an effect would be ok. It would be to low to be counted on happening in raids so you would OOM from spamming manashield in a AoE heavy encounter, but sometimes you would go "wohoo I dont haveto pay those 3k mana I was just counting on loosing" kinda like a frontloaded clearcasting that comes in the shape of a tax return isntead of a freebie. As for pvp the proc chanse could be stacked with impact and blazing speed (if using molten armor) giving the mage a whooping 10% x3 chanse that each hit will proc something nice. But now Im dreaming away with ideas that arent even a rumor yet. Long story short I definetley be trying to put manashield to some good use in wrath. Blizzard is making an atempt to fix this spell so I will meet them half way and put an effort into applying and using the changes they are doing to it.

Things just keep getting weirder and weirder, it appears that the class devs are looking at our "utility" from our Talents and using them as a basis for lowering our overall output in comparison to a Warlock's base skills.

WoW Forums -> Why Warlocks outdamage Mages.


I really don't want to cry wolf here, simply because it's still Beta and there is a lot of testing still ongoing, but does this appear to anyone else that they're again changing what the Mage class is?

If they balance around us having these talents, then I'll be requiring the mages to have specific talent builds in order to raid(well, not really, but the mages are smart enough to do what needs to be done).

I still need to find more time in Beta to play around, still not too enthused about talents that aren't working correctly, and the lack of response with the double dipping of FFB when they responded very quickly with the Hunter Chimera pet.

Another detail that many seem to be forgetting here is just how horrid partial resists are in wotlk. You get them in almost every single hit vs a +3 mob. This should affect more builds with huge crit multipliers.

I don't see why. Is there some evidence to suggest the average damage reduction due to partials has changed?

Yes, anyone playing in wotlk will immediately notice a majorly boosted amount of partials. Even on +1 mobs.

In light of this, I'm going to have to call foul on some of the group DPS debuffs we're getting. That might have been their intent, but I definitely see now why nearly every Mage debuff was limited to the class itself. The only problem was that the sacrifice wasn't made up for in damage. It's nice they recognize the disparity, but I just wish something could have been done before this next expansion. (They really couldn't.)

And yet our utility is much worse than locks... they either requires a period of much lower DPS or lots of mana. Frost already pays for it even, wth.

Lock/mage balance is going to continue to suck in lk?

I realize having more steps increases the likelyhood of partials. However, were talking here a much much bigger than 5% partial on average on a mob +3. Its more in the 10-15%.

I am sure she is just prodding the mages and warlocks that are jabbing back and forth in that thread. If it WERE to be held true, I expect FocusMagic and TotW to bring more rDPS than an ENTIRE warlock akin to how CoE/S brought more utility than an ENTIRE mage? This wou... SHOULD never happen.

I am pretty sure their point was that fire destruction warlocks should out dps frost mages. I wouldn't read anything beyond that from what they said.

oh btw, hot streak sploiting where you replace the scorch with pyroblast at <35% is pretty sick if perhaps a dumb mechanic

ignite bug needs to be fixed so i can sploit infinite crits for profit

Thats what I get for posting while doing 2 things at the same time. Indeed its the same.

What would be the DPS increase if assuming the use of both spells in turn in order to let the dots tick instead of just using one of them?

I do not understand it either. Our utility helps frost/fire/arcane for the most part. What is Koraa talking about?

The Fireball tick is worthless, so you would go with a 1 FFB 4 FB rotation. Assuming they had very similar DPS to begin with you would get about 3% better dps. Actually, you'd do 1FFB,4FB,1FFB,3FB,1Sc (repeat ad nauseum).

Note - since you would be getting ~3% (actually a little better) on the whole rotation, this would be prefered for a pretty wide range of relative DPS. If the DPS for FFB spam is at least ~4% higher than FB, you would just FFB. If the DPS for FB is more than ~15% higher than FFB spam you would just FB it. Otherwise the rotation looks good.

Come to think of it, you'd also want to FFB on a potential hot streak (2 stacks + a spell in flight), even if it were not up in the rotation. For all practical purposes spells cast under these circumstances get 2 chances to crit.

Combined with the possible Pyroblast inscription from the next post, you could do a slick rotation of FFB,FB,Pyro,FB,FB,FFB,FB,Sc,FB,FB - adding more FB's at the end as haste grew. You'd even get the some of the puny FB ticks to go off, as well as the ignite, FFB, and Pyro ticks. Maybe there will be a level 80 version of Timbal's...

Inscription stuff, he does say 'might add' but interesting none the less.

The only thing this says really is that we cant use current beta dmg numbers for anything, only the intend of each spell and talent. DPS will change up and down lots of times for sure, and for some talents it looks like they pretty much just threw some random numbers in there for good measure (like the mana regen on WE)