Talbain

The unfortunate problem with PvP right now for Mages is that we're again pigeonholed into Frost. It's got more options, survivability, and hell, at this point, utility as well. Assuming the elemental gets still more buffs (which it's looking like it will), it will make Frost more powerful still. Frost either needs scaling back or Fire and Arcane need scaling up to be on par with Frost in PvP.

Resident Cynic
My Blog - Genesis
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Zeldyrr

From a Blue post on Feral tanking:

This is more indication that Blizzard does NOT theorycraft. Whether FFB is a million DPS ahead of Arcane or Frost right now doesn't really matter. If they feel that it is "impossible" for them to balance threat and mitigation across 4 tanking classes before the level 80 raiding content is done, then it won't try to balance DPS across X dps spec/classes either.

 

Lhivera

Merena posted an update on that FoF thread for me on the beta forum. Sancus replied:

I was thinking in the 650 range at level 60, and in the 1800 range now when you add in raid buffs/consumables/totems, which would make triple a bit of an exaggeration, but not much (about 275%). However, I stopped raiding after Illidan, so maybe my view's unrealistic. Am I overestimating how much spell power increased from 60 to 70 endgames?

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

◊ manly

Pre TBC you had 150 dmg flask that stacked with every single potion known to earth. Granted, there were no oils, or food, but still. You had Elixir of Frost Power, Elixir of Greater Firepower (i think this didn't exist back then) Elixir of Firepower (not sure it stacked with arcane elixir), Greater Arcane Elixir, Mageblood Potion. The difference was that flasks/pots were not common place back then.

edit: additionally we should not forget that there are new enchants in tbc that didnt exist in pre tbc. For example, +15 to bracers. Also the best weapon enchant was +30 damage.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Muphrid

Well, I think Sancus has committed an error in thinking that is very common: it's good enough, in his words, for Deep Freeze not to be obsoleted due to the constraints of how much gear there is. This, to me, is very backwards. We shouldn't need to know how much gear there is or will be available in order to be able to theorycraft DPS. Deep Freeze should not become a more and more trivial part of the Fingers of Frost "Shatter combo" (which it will do even if the 3k +damage line is not reached: the punishment for bad play--the DPS lost by just doing two Frostbolts--will be lessened as gear rises).

Deep Freeze's coefficient is simply too small for its base damage.

 

Lhivera

Actually there were the ZG oils, come to think of it. There were no totems. But I'd forgotten all about Supreme Power and the old stacking. So I suppose he could be right and that we're closer to double than triple what we had at 60.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Nurru

Oil existed pre-BC, and anyone in the back end of Naxxramas was using both Pots and Flasks. Though, I guess people far in Naxxramas were in the minority.

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Zeldyrr

Lhivera I don't think your response you had posted was strong enough. The two charges isn't just bad because of DF scaling. It is bad because it is boring.

-- If DF is on cool down, I'm won't combo with IL...I'll just do two Frostbolts.

-- If I proc FoF but have to run because of the boss encounter, I can't spam 3-4 IL's on the run.

-- I can't choose to spam three ice lances instead of 2 FBs in the same time window because I want FoF to reproc. It might not mathematically be the best thing to do but it might be good in some situations.

-- I can't stack haste in the hopes of sneaking in an extra cast within a FoF proc. Or hit a haste trinket to get in an extra cast.

Boring. Boring. Boring.

 

Mekasha

Just tallying up rough values on +dmg on my final set of naxx gear I'd say I had around 650ish unbuffed. That was with everything at the end, all best in slot, sapph shoulder enchant, atiesh, etc.

And yes, madass consumable stacking. On Patchwerk you'd hit a Flask, Greater Arcane Elixir, Greatre Firepower Elixir, Mageblood, and use your Brilliant Wizard Oil. Those alone were another 210ish spellpower I believe.

Going on that you could hit around 850ish damage total, whereas now in Sunwell (though admittedly gear set isn't finished yet) I've probably got something like 1500 fully buffed between food/flask/imp DS/wrath of air.

Yes, I gem for a little more haste than damage, but even if I replaced all gems with full +12dmg, you still wouldn't hit a solid 1600 as a mage.

One thing to keep in mind is that we see the huge dps increase going from naxx to sunwell because of better talents as well as raid debuffs. Empowered Fireball scales great with gear, which is part of the big jump in dps, as well as things like Misery and Malediction now. Of course if blizzard goes through with their plan, you'll be losing a large chunk of target debuff modifiers. I'm curious if you'd even bother needing to scorch for the debuff if you have an unholy DK or malediction lock in the raid.

 

Celani

The problem with the mana vs energy mechanics discussion is that while a rogue does have to wait for energy gains to turn that energy into damage, or the warrior for has to occasionally wait for rage, he's still applying significant damage through auto (white) attacks. Even for the mana-using physical DPS classes (enhance shaman, ret paladin, hunters), white damage is a significant portion of their totals. This isn't the case with ANY caster based DPS, and wands aren't the answer, as moonkin and elemental shaman have no wands. While mana is a more frustrating mechanic, it's never going to change to the degree suggested, and further such discussion seems rather pointless to me.

 

Sancus

CTProfiles.net: World of Warcraft Profiles � Naxxdude � Main

759 with Atiesh, 730 if you were stuck with a Wraith Blade.

It's all I reasonably expect from Blizzard, Muphrid. The chances of them fixing scaling the way you'd like anytime this decade are pretty much zero, and they have repeatedly shown that they like to rebalance the base damage of things as gear increases instead of just making things scale properly, for whatever reason.

It might be wrong and create unnecessary work, but then, so do half of their policies.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Lhivera

Hm, well, the boring angle was really what I was trying to get across, so I'm sorry if that didn't come through. Maybe someone else with posting privs can try to reinforce that angle.

While I think the 3-sec debuff is superior because it allows us some choices (can I squeeze in an extra frostbolt? At the end, is deep freeze up or do I use ice lance?), the two-charge method could still be a reasonable compromise for PvE and PvP since at least it allows a reactive cast choice, while allowing a buff that lasts long enough for a PvPer to use it (they tell me this is a problem, I dunno). But the two-charge method still fails completely on the PvE side if there's no alternative to Frostbolt for that second charge, and as scaling stands now, there isn't.

One thing that would help a great deal would be changing Chilled to the Bone to increase the damage of Deep Freeze instead of or in addition to Frostfire Bolt.


And at present, would it not be possible to break 1800-1900 damage fully buffed including Wrath of Air? Perhaps not, I may be overestimating the Sunwell totals as much as I was underestimating the Naxx totals (and heck, I cleared Naxx, I'm surprised I can't remember how high my damage got).

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Lhivera

razzafrazzin'...sorry, so distracted today and overestimating the speed at which others will reply :P

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Sancus

No way, also the ZG oil is actually better than current oil(I never use Superior Wizard Oil), and the consumable stacking that we had at 60 increases your total to over 1000 spell damage easily. One thing I think that you're missing is that Naxx gear was a gigantic itemlevel jump over AQ gear level(And AQ had a very limited set of drops), Sunwell is a fairly standard one tier above bt/hyjal instead of the weird double tier they used for Naxx - so it's kind of the reverse of the situation we had in pre-bc in terms of raid gear.

(36 zg oil, 35 greater arcane elixir, 40 greater firepower, 150 flask = 261 + 759 = 1020, and yes I did use all these consumables in naxx regularly)

In a lot of ways, Wrath of Air merely replaces what we lost from consumable stacking.

The World of Warcraft Armory

Manly logged out with his trinket effect, and still only has 1626 damage, which Wrath of Air and Improved DS would only improve to maybe ~1750, being generous. So even with the best activatable trinket in the game in use, you still can't reach 1900 spell damage.

You can hit 1350 in full Sunwell gear, tops.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Lhivera

OK, then, that answers my concern; 3000 may well be the very upper limit.

I suppose there may also come a point before, perhaps even well before 3000 where Spell Power stacking becomes less practical; if the DPS stats wind up falling more into the haste/crit area rather than the Spell Power area, Frostbolt won't pull ahead so readily.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

◊ manly

Well, you could get much higher from gear (ie: im not counting mind mastery here) if you were to gem suboptimally or use gear slanted heavily towards spell damage. In a way I think this is what makes the comparison uneasy -- there were no spell haste back then, and no sockets either. I don't see any major leaps going from TBC into wotlk. I do gueninely believe that we will go more towards diversified stats going into wotlk, both from the 'lets make spirit not suck' frontend, and also including the whole 'currently in wotlk all the gear drops use weird ilvl spending' seem to points towards much more varied ilvl spending expenditure.

FWIW, I'm logged off with oils too. I know it sounds stupid, but when I was logging off normally I was getting lvl 1 alts log on malganis and tell me they had more spell damage than me. That's why I always log off with trinkets now. Also pure death of shattrath doesn't increases the spell damage when logged off (at least, not in the zone I'm in).

Personally I'd expect something around 50-60% increase the spell damage of what we have now, at the top end of wotlk. Thing is, they really spend more ilvl points in diversified stats. Things are really headed that way. I'd say 50% more spell damage may be over estimated. The real gain is much higher haste, crit and spirit over what we have now.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Lhivera

People are weird.

That's encouraging, and it really does make sense. I know once I was most of the way through T5 content, the rate of increase on my spell damage dropped off sharply, while the rate of increase on my other stats increased. A spell with a poor coefficient but huge base damage like Deep Freeze or Fire Blast is going to scale considerably better, relative to a primary nuke, with Crit than it is with Spell Power, so diversified stats will keep it viable much longer.

I'm going to tentatively stop worrying about Frost interactivity then; with Deep Freeze and Fireball injections added to the fact that we must now consider the importance of the Water Elemental's aura as well as its DPS and time its use accordingly, I think it's about as good as we're going to get. If gear seems to be shaping up differently than this prediction come level 80 raid content testing, reevaluation may be in order.

So I think this leaves, for major problems:

Goddamn Frozen Core
Spirit for non-Arcane specs
The unholy mess that is our armor buffs
The problem of Imp. Scorch/WC positioning and its effect on viability of specs
Arcane Blast being possibly ridiculous

Anyone think of other significant issues that likely can't be fixed with adjustments in the balancing-and-tuning phase?

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Sancus

Yeah, that's another thing, if you look at the gear we have now, you'll notice that the stats are proportionally higher than the damage. As an example, best-in-slot shoulders at lv60 had 39 dmg and 12int. Best in slot twins shoulders have 28 int, 2.3x as much int, whereas it has less than twice as much damage even if you include gem slots, which allow easier stat stacking because gems are not subject to the increased cost of stacking 1 stat.

If it weren't for gem slots, those shoulders would likely have only 60-70% more damage than the best-in-slot level 60 gear. There is a clear continued push to diversifying to stats instead of stacking +dmg. So I agree with Manly that we probably we will probably see even less +dmg inflation.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

xiaoxin21

Did they change the T5 bonus in Wotlk? I can imagine doing 10k-15k Arcane blast crits regularly if the old bonus still stands and is multiplicative with the new increase.

 

◊ nathanbp

While I don't believe it's been changed yet for the beta, it is almost certain to be nerfed for WoLK, just like several of the old level 60 bonuses and items got nerfed for BC, so no one is counting on it.

 

mulco

Going from this back to the discussion of rage/energy vs. mana earlier, I'm worried about further emphasis in WotLK on non-damage stats in terms of iLvl for casters. For melee classes, every stat on their gear except stamina has a direct and scaling benefit to their damage output, nor do they waste iLvl points on stats that increase the longevity of their resource system (ie. spirit/int). If we're being pushed more towards higher mana pools and self-regen to remove our raid dependence on other classes, and a greater % of iLvl points budgeted for them as opposed to haste/crit/sd, that seems to further the scaling gap between casters and melee that arose in tBC.

The arcane talent that got removed earlier that turned a percentage of spirit into spell crit was a step in the right direction, but that got removed as well as the MM nerf. I'd like to see these stats gain more and better _base_ damage modifiers on a class (not talent) basis. Int already supplies a very weak amount of crit, and a priest with IDS yields a small amount of damage from our spirit, but in either case neither stat is even remotely worth stacking in most cases past an amount sufficient for their primary purpose (we get more spi/int than we even want already in item budget on our gear), unlike str/agi. Even with the removed spirit->crit talent and prenerf MM using WotLK level int pools, again neither stat would be useful past the amount budgeted for a piece of gear's iLvl.

(As a sidetrack and gripe -ignore this!- but as was pointed out earlier, our mana pools are not primarily a means by which our DPS is regulated against melee, even with current tBC AB spam, and hence seems to simply be a redundant and broken mechanic when our damage output isn't balanced around our regen system.)


This may be too off-topic for the thread, but a further complaint that's been growing with me in tBC with melee vs. casters is the way armor pen. and melee haste have more realized benefit for melee/hunters than spell haste does for casters. The benefits of armor pen. are realized on each attack, and are only limited by latency in so-far as each attack itself is. And melee haste isn't effected much at all by latency due to auto-attacks and the way rage/energy regulate special attacks. But caster DPS is already hindered to a far greater extend by latency, and as such each point of spell haste only realizes a percentage of benefit based on your ping.

Melee have the dual advantages of having their damage scale well with all of their stat budget (except stam) and are far less penalized by latency. This seems obvious to me, but nothing in the beta currently makes me think Blizzard notices this or sees it as a problem, and no steps are being taken to fix caster scaling in a general sense.

 

Talbain

While the advantages of spell haste versus melee haste are fairly obvious, the only way to really fix that problem is to simply makes all spells instant. We're not going to see that happen. So casters will always have more problems to deal with than melee, but in theory we're supposed to have more mitigating factors (damage for example) that allow casters to deal with those disadvantages. More of a question of whether people see those disadvantages and begin building casters to those specifications. Thus far it's looking like... maybe.

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Raglu

Perhaps we've lost sight of wands, which stand as an infinite-damage source for casters. The damage dealt by wands pales in comparison to our spells, and does not scale with nearly any stat at all. The former part is not the problem, and the latter part is not the problem but a problem. The real reason why wands have been ignored for casters is because unlike the melee's autoattack and hunter's autoshot, our spells do not cleanly cast between wand shots. As a result, wands are used by mages only while soloing at the end of a fight when the sliver of health left does not justify a Fire Blast or even an Ice Lance. Holy/Disc priests use the wand to solo more extensively, but shadow priests and warlocks almost never touch it. Warlocks even come with a conjurable stone to replace wands.

Blizzard too seems to be abandoning the wand, removing both the priest's and the mage's Wand Specialization talents, which weren't very good to begin with. The truth of the matter is that wands were implemented as "cheap bargain damage" when a caster did not want to, or could not, spend mana to cast a spell. Due to the way the 5-second rule works about mana regeneration and the way you cannot weave casts inbetween wanding, wanding's optimal use is when out of mana completely and wanting to regenerate it, unlike how hunter's autoshots add in some more DPS while keeping the mana cost the same during a whole fight.

Stats that regenerate mana or increase the mana pool may have been ways to keep casters out of the low-DPS (but infinite DPM) period of wanding as long as possible. However, regeneration stats were made too powerful for this concept to take hold--instead, players would regenerate just enough mana needed to maintain such and such spell rotation infinitely (or at least for a very long time) that has a higher DPS than flat wanding. The highest burst-damage / wand-while-regeneration / burst again spell rotations didn't compare in damage to simply "mana-efficient" DPS rotations, either because wands were too weak, strong spells were too cheap, or a combination of both.

The wand is a source of infinite damage in the mana-pool-limited caster mechanic, yet we all know that there are indeed problems with the mana system currently. So why isn't the wand fixing that?
I believe the problem may lie not with the concept of the wand, but the magnitudes, the raw values of damage and mana regeneration availables, which render wands virtually useless in practice. As such, if my argument is valid enough, perhaps beta testers could post on the forums about the direction of wands? In my mind, the best ways to include the wand in system of caster DPS would be to increase the burst potential of caster spells while increasing the mana costs but allowing wand damage to scale (but perhaps poorly) with stats from items, or to simply work the wand autoshot to work like the hunter's and be able to fit casts inbetween constant wand shots (but allowing the potential of clipping wand shots, unlike how Steady Shots no longer do so). In addition, I'd advocate restoring wand specialization talents, but rather than simply increasing damage, they should give chances to restore mana (not in percentages though!)

In most of those math'd out data listings I see, wanding is down as one of the worst choices for a mana-conscious caster, only above scorch spamming.

 

Talbain

This is really like saying a melee weapon is an infinite damage source for Hunters. To make wands practically useful, they should probably simply restore mana on damage dealt (and Hunters should probably receive the same advantage with their melee weapons, though it would be nice to be able to move with wands). That amount should simply increase by a flat % on weapons. To a maximum of 5% total mana restored per wand hit would probably be an option at least to make Mana consumption less of an issue, but it still doesn't change the fact that certain classes never have to worry about "running out" and dying. There's a definite problem there, just how much is up to the designers to decide. I still don't think a solution such as wanding for mana is a good solution, but barring not having to worry about Mana, there's a definite need for Mana on demand (and I'm sorry, but Evocate is not Mana on demand).

Resident Cynic
My Blog - Genesis
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Jarlyn

Wands doing damage comparable to normal spell casting would break PvP, a lot. The real comparison here for this argument is Moonkins being able to restore mana by melee'ing things. The capability exists for them, but it's always going to be absolute last-ditch resort when everything else fails. And if you're reaching that situation on anything more than an extremely infrequent basis, you'd be better off subbing out for a class that wouldn't have such problems.