I don't know if I really agree with you on the whole Berserk mechanic being given to every class. The only classes that have this are BM hunters (I don't think they're terribly big in arena right now, but I don't follow arena team configurations much.) and now feral druids (I'm fairly sure that no serious arena team currently uses feral druids so this is almost a wash.) as their 51 point talent.

An Arcane PvP spec is sure to pick up Magic Absorption which is an additional 80 resist on top of the 40 from mage armor. 120 is no slouch in terms of resistance. That number only goes up if you get a MotW or Shadow Protection buff. I think mages will be extremely difficult to cast on in WotLK.

The 70% slow that we have would only be with CoC. Blizzard will have an 85% slow if they don't make any changes to it which is absolutely ridiculous. even 60% from our frostbolts (or potentially frostfire bolts) is going to be a big deal. With a deep frost build Ice Armor is going to be a 50% slow for anyone who melee attacks a mage.

Shatter shield also helps tremendously against melee in that it will absorb around 2400 damage once spell damage is taken into consideration and freeze them in place once they do eat through the shield. Ice Barrier is also going to soak up around 4000 damage which is quite significant.

Mages already have a good representation in 3's right now and the new talents and potential combinations really do a lot to shore up any weaknesses that the class had in terms of PvP. I think there are a lot of scary possibilities out there and right now I feel that mages will really shine on the PvP stage. This opinion may chance once the talents and skills are released for the other classes, but I like the new changes.

In terms of countering the berserk effects that other classes have, with our newly improved shields, I'd just use both, use IV and start casting at them. Even if they eat through those shields you still won't take any cast time loss from their attacks.

Have you considered an elemental build that picks up blazing speed from the fire tree? You don't get as much out of frost, but it does give you significantly more mobility against physical attackers. I think both will work out quite well, but which to choose probably depends on the PvP landscape in WotLK and which teams are the new cookie cutter arrangements.

Assuming you're recording mana usage you could, it would just take a while. If out of 100 times Clearcasting procced in the sequence Cast Time->AM->Cast Time the AM was never free, it could show either you're super unlucky, or the AM is missing the proc.

T+0.0 - Start Fireball 1
T+3.0 - Fireball clears, AM starts
T+8.0 - AM clears, Fireball 2 starts
T+11.0 - Fireball 2 clears

If fireball 1 procs it, and the precast AM doesn't consume it fireball 2 is free. If AM procs it fireball 2 is free, if fireball 2 procs it, fireball 1 of the next sequence is free. So say a sequence of Fireball->AM->Frostbolt, write a quick addon to record mana changes in correlation to spellcasts, watch for the expected mana reductions from the three different spells and pick which ones arent completing when they should be.

The test is completely viable, just a little more complicated than the simplistic explanation I gave at first.



Unfortunately I'm a dummy and started the simulator in a terminal on my Mac running on my Linux box. Terminal app froze, I wasn't thinking and killed the process, and thus lost the simulator. I'm not certain I trust my initial simulator for some reason, it kept giving Combustion way too much credit, I rewrote it here (http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/sims/hotstreakcombust2.pl) fixing a few design flaws that slowed it down and actually made it inaccurate (mid cast Combustion popping, d'oh), if someone can dummy check me on the Hotstreak implementation in there I'd appreciate it, for some reason when I run it with combustion and hotstreak enabled it loses crit rate vs its performance with just combustion.

The big reason it was taking so long the first time around was I'd forgotten I'd set the simulator up to think in 1000ths of a second, and was running each 5% jump in crit through a full years worth of theoretical casting to ensure that it was super averaged out and a clean overall signal. 4 base settings, 19 crit rates, 365 days to thousandths of a second fidelity... around 2.396 * 10 ^ 12 iterations of the main counter loop.


Edit: And actually I'm thinking for some reason combustion isn't behaving, not hotstreak. I can confirm the general shape of your graph through combining two lines generated by mine. The general downward trend of combustion combined with the curve of hotstreak. For some reason HS + Combust yields about the same result as just HS for me at the moment. But that initial downward trend of combustion being an insane increase at really low crit rates, then as your crit rate rises the influence of HS takes hold as you get more three crit runs.

Is it even worthwhile trying to make Combustion work around HS? In farm fights I'm generally saving Combustion for sub-20% since the fights aren't long enough to use it twice in many cases or I'm using it early enough that'll it'll be back up for 20%. Considering it's probably more important to make sure it's up for Molten Fury in the long run, I'm not sure if it's worth trying to make sure you work it into an HS chain if you've already gotten 3 procs and the crit counts as a new chain or if you've already started a chain with one (or more) fireballs and want to up the odds of completing it.

If combustion happens to cause three crits in a row and gets me a forth crit, great. But I don't think it will have a huge impact on the talent. I expect that abuse of game mechanics (fireball > fireblast if these crits can count as 2 stacks) will play a larger roll in utilizing this talent. Until we test this talent in game to see how it performs we won't know for sure how to accurately simulate it.

Combustion and HS mix together well mainly from a pvp perspective. For pve raiding, the large number of spells cast over a raid boss fight evens out the overall crit rate. But in pvp, if you crit 4 times in a row, you probably have a high chance of killing whoever you are targetting. So, the impact is far bigger.

With Winter's Grasp and multiple Frost Mages, why wouldn't the Frost Mages all simply spam Ice Lance and forget entirely about Frostbolt? With 3 Frost Mages, you'd have around 83% uptime on Winter's Grasp via Ice Lance spam. And while Ice Lance spam is pretty silly most of the time, when 83% of those Ice Lances are triple damage and you can't apply Chill effects anyway, it stops looking so silly.

If you crit 3 scorches in a row you might scratch them. Otherwise what are you chain-casting? I know we're all used to PvE around here but from my arena experience you don't get to sit there chain casting fireballs at all. Maybe you can do that in the 1400's bracket but that's about as useful as theorycrafting the ideal spec for heroic crypts.

Even with combustion there's no guarantee that all three crits are in a row. On a side note will a combustion charge be consumed if the spell should have crit but resil negated it? I know there was a blizzard post a long while back that stated talents that proc from being crit will still proc if the attack should have crit but was mitigated from resilience. No idea if that mechanic still exists or if it works both ways, but it could throw a monkey wrench in your line of thought.

While we're at it, fire crits get double penalized from resilience which makes them additionally less valuable. Until they address this, it seems as though fire will always be at a disadvantage in terms of PvP. I suspect Blizzard doesn't care much as Fire is currently the main raiding tree for most players and therefore useful for something.

So it could be their way of trying to add more pvp viability into fire specs. Blazing speed is a pvp talent, and its deep in the fire tree as well. The math already done on hot streak shows that it just isn't very good from a pve standpoint. Not to mention living bomb, at the very end of the tree, seems more catered towards pvp as well. How many raid mobs requiring aoeing last up to 15 seconds anyway? You can't even trigger the final blast early unlike SOC.

Most of the time, by the time living bomb goes off, I believe what ever pve mobs you are trying to AOE would be dead already.

Assuming a 45% critical strike rate with Frostbolt and a 40% Critical Strike Rate with Ice Lance, Frostbolt with 1500 Spell Power is actually doing 1,627 DPS; Ice Lance, assuming 100% Winter's Grasp uptime (sufficient Frost Mages), would be doing 1,456 DPS.

Of course, let's assume the Mage also has 5/5 Shatter; so Frostbolt has a 95% Critical Strike rate, while Ice Lance has a 90% Critical Strike rate: under these conditions with 1500 Spellpower, Frostbolt is doing 2,174 DPS and Ice Lance (with 100% Winter's Grasp uptime) is doing 1977 DPS.

So, yes, Frostbolt is still the spell you want to use if multiple mages are able to keep up Winter's Grasp; however, pure Ice Lance spam is still doing absolutely silly amounts of DPS if you can assume high amounts of Grasp uptime, on a ~124 mana level 66 instant-cast spell, with an amount of spellpower T6 Mages are already exceeding easily

I can't see WG going live as it is; I'm sure it will be changed so that the debuff only affects your own spells.

Hot streak is supposed to balance out the fact that we lose 1 ignite tick if we crit two times in a row but totaly fails. They should change it to something like +20% damage to the next spell after 2 crits.

I'm sorry, what? Molten Fury, the talent that pretty much makes the mage class work in raiding, and without which fire spec would be completely unviable, is a PvP talent?

How can you post something like that?

At those PVP folks getting wet dreams about a combusted POM-Pyro, last time i checked, no combustion charge was used when firing a POM-Pyro off. Was that mechanic changed?

This has already been discussed several times in this thread.

The huge gaping hole is that nobody knows if one mages WG will be shared or a self-only debuff on the target.

You clearly have never AoEd in Hyjal, or if you did you didn't pay attention to your watch. 10sec worth of AoE doesn't even register as an AoE pull. Every single wave in MH is over 20s long and often over 30. You may notice you often have time to BW twice. The fastest AoE encounter I recall is Solarian's waves which are particularly frail, but even they last around 10sec probably.

And let's not even get into how Molten Fury is a pvp talent... Even PvPers don't bother speccing it, as 20% of a target's life is probably around 2k, which whether you spec molten fury or not is either one fireball's worth or two of fireblast/blast wave/scorch/DB. Speccing MF to lower that to 1.7*Scorch will do approx nothing. This is beside the point that fire pvp mages are as rare as rocking-horse shit.

Sorry. I meant to say blazing speed. I don't know why I put in molten fury. :X I will go edit my post now.

Yeah my numbers were without crit.

I think living bomb/world in flame may be usefull in wotlk, (depending on the last rank damage / spell coefficient). If you look at other classe new abilities there are many new Aoe :

Warriors : Shockwave (Aoe stun), Bladestorm (aoe whirlwind) and Bloodbath (aoe rend with real damage)
Druid : Typhoon (Aoe damage+ KB effect) , Starfall (aoe damage)
Priest : Mind Sear (Channeled Aoe)
Warlock : Shadowflame (Coc like) , Haunt (bouncing between target with corruption) + Atrocity (aoe corruption)

So we can expect aoe damage to be an important part of Wotlk pve and we can also expect the aoe pack to last a lot longer than 10 secondes (or Atrocity wouldnt make any point).

Well, unless all AOE in WOTLK is like Mt Hyjal. But looking at most of the other instances, most of the AOE mobs don't require such long sustained AOEing. Whether its 10 man, 5 man, or 25 man instances. Mt Hyjal seems like the exception rather than the norm when it comes to trash AOE mobs that can last for a while.

Karazhan, TK, SSC, BT trash AOE mobs, they all die fast. The murlocs on Morogrim and the aoe mobs on solarian die pretty fast too.

Besides, has a great AOE spell really been that important for a pve spec? All 3 mage specs can do nice AOE damage. Arcane can do one of the highest. But that was never been the defining thing that about arcane nor did it ever make arcane the best pve spec. Dragonbreath is an AOE spell too. But I hardly think that spell is what makes fire specs a good pve spec either.

Aye, but Ice Lance does higher DPS at 90% Grasp uptime than Frostbolt does at 30% Grasp uptime. That's what people are talking about -- using Ice Lance spam to keep Grasp up almost full time. This isn't feasible with a single mage, but with multiple mages, it would be, which is what may drive a change to Winter's Grasp -- I fervently hope that the change will not be removal of the talent entirely.

I suspect what's going on here is not necessarily an increase in the amount of AOE, but rather a desire to make sure that design elements such as AOE can be kept in 10-man fights where they can't assume the presence of any particular class or spec.

In a sense, it sort of leads to a Prisoner's Dilemma problem amongst your Frost Mages; if they all Spam Ice Lance, they can keep WG up close to 90% of the time; but then one Mage could dramatically improve his personal DPS by surreptitiously switching to Frostbolts, letting the other two to the bulk of the work keeping WG up while he leeches a higher WG uptime than all the Mages together would be able to manage each using only Frostbolt.

Really, the simplest thing is to make the Winter's Grasp Mage-specific, like Ignite. In fact, concepted as a "Frost Ignite", it works pretty well.

I'm somewhat disappointed that there's still no pushback protection for frost spells, given that there is a lot of raid damage causing pushback in BT and that even S priests are getting pushback protection, although that will depend on whether the expansion will have a lot of AE pushback damage.

IV + ColdSnap + Ice Floes all help considerably for pushback if a) you know when the damage is coming in ala RoS or b) PVP. Toss in the fact that Ice Barrier will have around 3.5 to 4k worth of protection and it looks nice.

A passive 50% via an existing talent would be extremely nice though. God knows Frost tree does not need any more bloat.

Re: stacking a raid with 4 or 6 or 20 frost mages for winter's grasp/shatter fun. I actually wouldn't be that surprised if this works, is allowed and won't make nearly as much difference as people are hoping/fearing.

1. It's been pointed out that a LOT of classes are getting AoE options and we're getting more. This suggests that the AoE we bring may be more important than spamming frostbolt at approaching a 100% crit rate.

2. We don't know what shammies, rogues and hunters are getting. For all we know, hunters are going to get "Expose mortal weakness," rogues are going to get "Double all physical damage poison" and shammies are getting "Totem of Brutal sodomy." And when all these talents come out we're going to switch from worrying that WG is OP to wondering how we're ever going to get a raid slot.

3. The mere existence of frostfire bolt seems like a giant flashing sign that says "You will have to deal with resist/immunity in WotLK." If it turns out that Arthas is frost immune or has such high frost resist as to be effectively immune, I can't say I'd be particularly surpriseed.

4. Finally it's clear that whether by design or by accident or a combination, there are eras in the game where certain classes are stacked over others. Right now, it's shammies and locks that get lots of love. Maybe, just maybe it's the magi's turn.

Also, in terms of living bomb and worries that everything will be dead before it goes off for real, I can imagine scenarios like "Ok guys, he's starting to summon adds, fire mages activate living bomb" similar to the old "Locks put of curse of doom so that it goes off when curator evocates."