Worse yet, a lot of these new utility elements have variable percentage returns based on stats. Even Winter's Chill is going to have diminishing return as crit rates rise. Compare with Curse of the Elements, which will always have the same percentage return so long as raid composition does not vary with gear level.

It's bad enough trying to figure out how good some utility is. It's worse still when you know that the power of that utility is going to vary with gear.

I'm pretty sure it's 13%, unless they changed something recently. And I haven't heard anything about that. Which means they're the same as far as the +% magic damage goes, but ebon plague will boost disease damage 60% while CoE reduces resistances on the target. Of course, the only player disease not from a DK is an undead priest racial, and the -resistance on CoE is usually worthless for raids. So about even.

Sorry, my info was out of date. I was assuming it was still a stacking effect, so it looked like 4% stacking 3 times to me.

Regardless, CoE is still only dropped if there's a DK in the raid of the correct spec, and if there is such a DK, you swap in the damage curse and your DPS goes up, so it's a self-correcting thing. If CoE + Imp Buff means you do 3% less damage than a Fire Mage, then when you drop CoE, now you're doing the same DPS as the Fire Mage; you've traded utility for DPS, and in fact you have the advantage of being able to make that trade on the fly, built into your class.

How easy is it to apply and maintain ebon plague compared to CoE?

I don't think people are viewing LB in the right PvP context. It isn't an active knockup or spell interrupt, 12 seconds is a very long time in PvP and would have to be combined with a full set of Cyclone DR to have any viable & predictable CC timing associated with it. I think it will be a nice anti-melee tool in that you are given relief for surviving 12 seconds (although I hear the knockup is far from effective if considered an anti-melee ability).

I think the real PvP benefits associated with LB will be the ability to have a predictably timed damage burst + CC off the GCD that you can prepare burst damage sequences with. I consider it like an automatic fireblast+impact proc cast by someone else in 12 seconds. You can knowingly start a damage sequence against the target to hit at the same time as LB for unmatched burst damage, and be able to follow it up with DB/blastwave CCs to finish the job preventing reaction.

I think it could be perfectly viable for an arena team with a skillful target-switching strat. Toss LB on the eventual target, play defensive, CC, & soak damage into a separate target. Switch targets right before LB blows, get an added damage burst & CC off the GCD. It really does have some interesting PvP potential, although entirely hinging on the ability for a fire spec to survive a focus fire.

On the PvE side of the timing aspect, I'm curious to see if you could pull off an AOE triple shatter bomb due to latency using a flamestrike+blastwave/DB to coincide with the timing of the explosion on a novad group of mobs using a 0/51/20 spec. It would certainly be possible with combustion and possibly hot streak procs too.

I'm sorry, but has it been confirmed that Ebon Plague overwrites non-Malediction/Malediction CoE, or the other way round? Which one gets priority?

If CoE/Ebon Plague isn't overwritten do their secondary effects get cancelled out?

Looks like they updated calculator: WoW -> Info -> Classes -> Talent Calculators

Things that I immediately noticed:
-Deep Freeze still has a cast time
-Missile Barrage can't be proced by Arcane Blast
-Fire Starter still at 45% chance

Looks like it reverted to an older version of the calc. FoF is back to one charge. I would disregard or treat with high skepticism.

I don't think they've been correct even once so far. I'd go by MMO-champion.com's calculator's, they seem to have them together correctly, not to mention they're great at hunting down blue posts across the beta boards.

Agreed. I've since stopped looking at that official talent calculator because lately it has seemed to be more "unofficial".

They changed 2 words. They removed "of" in Torment of the Weak, and corrected the spelling of "damage" in Living Bomb. Trust me it's nowhere near current.

I can see absolutely no reason for expanding the damage range of imp scorch, and the crit range of WC, and NOT having them stack, they are completely different effects. It is outside the bounds of logic that they would even consider such a thing. Now they may consider limiting the range of schools it effects again, but that is different.

What precedents are you basing yourself on to come to this conclusion?
(and please, don't name coe, thats merging existing mechanics)

It seems more likely they would just make imp scorch include shadow damage and have it not stack with CoE and the new DK ability. After doing that, they can buff fire's single target DPS while also adding interesting and innovating new talents high in the tree... and my dream will be complete.

Not based on any precedent, just on my own sense of things. I can understand not wanting to have damage modifiers stack on into infinity. Particularly when a raid debuff has the same power level like ebon plague and CoE with the proper spec. But again, these are identical debuff types of the same power. Not having them stack is likely a function of wanting raids to have multiple ways to get a certain debuff and have more flexibility in achieving it. I am unaware of any other debuff granting 10% crit to 3 schools. If there was, then I could easily see them not allowing them to stack, but this is not the case.



Keeping imp scorch and WC as is, and not allowing them to stack would just be incredible strange. They are not the same dps increase for different classes, for a frost mage WC is about the same with frostbolt, but WC is slightly better for a fire mage with the 210 crit value, so how would they decide which buff gets applied? depending on the class?

Makes no sense to not have them stack unless they are of the same kind of debuff. If they find it is too much of a boost to other specs, then drop those schools or diminish the crit amounts. But having them not stack is beyond bad design, and I give them enough credit to not allow that to go through.

Well, my reply was more about the philosophy behind it. I believe that expanding a buff to give it multiple school will cause it to suffer an efficiency loss. The more flexible a buff is, the more it needs to be toned down. Scorch was 15% to fire, it got changed into 10% for 3 schools.

Let me put it another way.

The more buffs your class depends on, the more all of those buffs have to be tiny buffs. The best example I can give you is rogues. Rogues depend on a stupidly large amount of buffs/debuffs/raid synergies in order to provide their dps. We're talking 12-15 and I probably forgot a few. Also, it just so happens that most of those buffs are very minor. If a mage had 10 buffs all increasing their dps by 10%, you would have simply no choice but to require all of them, simply because 10% is something major.

In the same line of thought, the more you expand a buff to apply to multiple classes, the less damage it should do, because indirectly it implies that the other classes will assume its existance -- in other words, you add one extra buff to other classes, as such, you want the buffs for every class to be small so that you don't as much rely on all of the buffs in order to provide the dps your class is balanced for.

For what its worth, I've always said if you want scorch/wc to not stack, you want them to have the same effect. If you really don't want to enforce buffs being needed, I think the best solution is something that was proposed earlier (outside of 'make everything not stack'). If you make it so that WC is applied to all spells without requiring to spec for it, but tops at 5%, then you can make WC give you that extra 5%. As a result, you don't rely on a WC-specced player as much. Likewise, you could make scorch give 5% fire vulnerability by default, but a scorch-specced players allows you to go to 10%. I realize this doesn't really fit with the current game mechanic (ie: what happens if a non-wc specced mage refreshes a wc-specced WC stack?), but I'm sure that would be in the realm of doable.

With this said, you dont want buffs to increase your dps too much. If you do that, then your base dps is extremely bad. Or worse, its far too good with everything up. The more multipliers you have, the more a nightmare to balance it becomes.

Well, to be fair:
1) Scorch requries talent points
2) It requires a 5 stack and 5 times as much time to stack up.
3) Scorch requires a lot more refreshing.

I completely agree that scorch needed to be toned down since it was opened up to more schools of spells, but building that 5 stack up is still far more annoying than just throwing up a curse once every 5 minutes, no having to worry about spending talents on it or stacking it up.

Personally, I'd be a lot happier if it were changed to a 2-3 stack debuff that only required refreshing once a minute or two (I'd even settle for parity with Curse of Recklessness for the duration).

From build 8788 -

Torment the Weak - All damage you cause to Ensared targets is increased by 2/4/6%.
Fingers of Frost - Gives your Frost damage spells a 5/10% chance to apply the Fingers of Frost effect, which treat your Frost spells cast on the target as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 4 sec.
Elemental Precision - reworded to more consistent with other talents - Reduces the mana cost and increases your chance to hit with Frost and Fire spells by 1/2/3%.

Will update when I find more.

Edit: Mmo-champion updated their talent calculators to build 8788.

Edit 2: For those interested, WotLK Tailoring recipes are finally getting implemented. I'll try to keep the post here up-to-date with all the details. You'll note the presumed lvl80 2pc sets. We'll know more when the servers come back up.

Edit 3: It's a pretty light patch guys, and not a whole lot of Mage-related changes. Mainly bug-fixes, tailoring/jc/bs recipes, DK-changes, npc/boss abilities, and an interesting chain-Stormstrike ability called Thunderblade. Which I may be coming in the pipeline for our Enhancement Shammy friends, or it could just be another NPC ability.

Edit 4: The Official Talent Calculator was updated again today. It's still got some mistakes, but FoF, Firestarter, TtW, and EP were updated to match build 8788.

Well, Blizzard seems to have addressed the Fingers of Frost problem (of Ice Lance still being useless to cast with it) by implementing the 4-second cap. But this is a simple DPS loss due to Ice Lance's poor scaling and base damage. In addition, with enough haste (which is not going to be too hard to do with Icy Veins at least every once in a while), we're right back to double Frostbolts being ideal when Deep Freeze is on cooldown.

- deleted - same as above -

They seriously need to rename Fingers of Frost. So does Brain Freeze.

Torment the Weak is still pretty weak. But who knows, maybe they're done with the major Mage changes, as it looks like the only things that have really changed are some reversions and mana changes.

Might also just be a minor patch for class changes overall, any drastic stuff for other classes?