Lileith

First , it doesn't work that way , the synergy has a limit , between 5 mages and an infinite amount of mages the dps difference is only 5%. If 3 stacked mages can't outdps a warlock then you can't call that synergy overpowered even if 5 stacked mage outdps the warlock by 6% (and that's the actual difference between 3 mages and 5 mages , 12% uptime difference = +6% crit)

About the incinerate thing, it wasn't my point , I just wanted an estimation of the warlock wotlk talented dps with the gear mentioned above to estimate how far 3100 dps is overpowered.

I'm not judging the new warlock talents (even though wasted talents are things that happens (and that's only 5 points not 14) , especialy when you have talents such as emberstorm which increase your dps by 20% for 5 points invested : you can expect other talents to be less usefull)
Front load damage from immolate is still lower dps than incinerate so even if it's not that great it's still a dps increase.
Anyway it's mainly the 10% damage on crit that will increase warlock dps.

 

Pintofbrew

Lhiv, I'm not too clear on what exactly you concocted, as I'm not aware of what DPSCT is (perhaps you mean DPCT?), neither is it obvious what all the factors you punched in are.

Did you include your calculation of the Immo DD component, the effect of Backdraft, as well as the DPS increase from using Conflag? There seemed to be a link in the lock thread that indicated it's substantially more than before.

Either way, semantics of another class's details still is irrelevant to my post: Comparing Immolate to Stacking Frostmages for Inflated WG is irrelevant.

Edit: You typed the response above mine while I was typing mine.

I am aware that 5 mages and infinite mages has limited returns, but if you notice raids are either 10 or 25man affairs. Given that we'll soon be 10 character classes, that means we should be aiming for two, or perhaps three of each class per 25raid. At an absolute push, four of one class, to the detriment of others. This makes 5 mage scaling "too much" as far as I'm concerned. Whether the ceiling is 5 or 15 is irrelevant, because it results in something that is not desired: Too Much Synergy. When each mage gives each other mage 150-100dps up to beyond the maximum limit acceptable by demographics, it's excessive.

Would you see it reasonable if we changed the average raid to two locks, one affli mal-CoE and one fire spec giving CoR, then five mages giving massive synergy to each other? I'd rather not see 10-cloth raids simply because we have a talent that scales wildly out of proportion with anything else in the game.

 

Cryic

That, and change it where the Scorch Vulnerabilty works off of stacks of 5/10/15% instead of the slow as shit 3/6/9/12/15%. If you don't think its a big deal, go and run ZA as the only mage with a deep fire built. 90% of the night you spend trying to decide if its worth your time putting up Scorch to cast 1 or 2 fireballs at 15% extra damage.

5 Stacks was fine back with 40 raiders and 5 mages. But running 10 mans and upcoming DK class will mean more times then naught, you have only 1 or 2 fire mages and it feels like a damn chore to put up scorch on each target switch.

 

Pintofbrew

By "five stacks was fine @ 40man" you mean "1.5sec was fine"? I don't think i-scorch has a particularly bad deal here; Winter's Chill takes 40% more time than i-scorch to ramp up, unless you're brain-damaged and try and apply it with Ice Lance, and an SP's Shadow Weaving takes obviously more than i-scorch, not least because most SPs spec 4/5 or even 3/5.

If you're spending ZA deciding whether or not to scorch, I believe calculations on when it's worth scorching had been performed a long time ago, resulting in "if you're alone and mob life > 40sec, scorch" or something like that. Ultimately, I'd argue "don't fucking bother" for the combined reasons of spike agro, so little difference it doesn't matter, and one-less button to press during trash.

 

◊ manly

With no offense intended, I think we will all agree that firespec is simply not well suited for 5 or 10man content. I believe that your view of fire vulnerability is somewhat biased as a result. Personally I think with 2 mage its fine (on trash), on bosses 1 mage is fine. If anything, we need major class changes - if I can avoid it, I'd rather avoid starting to mention all the little details in the hope more time is spent by blizzard focusing on the stuff that really matters.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

◊ manly

To be quite honest, I don't think its worth bothering with that question. The TTT already contains all the info about when to scorch and when not to scorch, but regardless over-scorching or under-scorching on trash isn't really going to make much of a difference. Sure, it might not be optimal, but trash dps can never be optimal because crits will heavily skew the time-to-death. For the most part, my playstyle has always been to heavily favor scorch/fireblast/dragons breath/blastwave on trash. You don't see me fireballing much, unless the mobs have 200k+ hp.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Pintofbrew

We could discuss this further, but it boils down to (1) how much regen you have (2) as you said there's so little point. Fireball's biggest failing is it's 3s time being a much more significant percentage of the mob's life when on trash, meaning the likelihood of wasting 0.1-2.99(+travel time) sec to mob dying too soon is distinctly possible. In a scorch/fireblast rotation half and more of these cases would be prevented. but ultimately, the dps difference between the two is so little it won't matter.

Frost and arcane will both eat fire's face on trash/5mans. Though I'd like this corrected as much as the next man, you're right in that we should focus on correcting the fundamentals before fixing the particulars.

 

Cryic

No offense taken. I spend 90% of my time raiding SWP / BT, so I'm not a 5 / 10 man guy who only sees raiding through those instances. My point is basically that it takes away a large amount of the "fun factor" to constantly have to stack scorch with only 1 or 2 fire mages (my guild almost always runs with 2 mages anymore).

It's one of the few stacking mechanics that can and did use multiple sources that transitioned from 40 to 25 man content. Where you went from 4 to 5 mages to 2 or 3 mages.

Is it an extremely low priority, yes. But since blizzard is looking at ways to keep refresh other buffs, and we are not thrilled about our top end fire talents, well, seems like a good time to discuss these things.

The simplest change would be to tack on something on to one of our top end talents to make all fire spells put up the fire vulnerability.

 

Lhivera

I've always called it "damage per second of casting time," but DPCT works as well.

I did not include backdraft. Here is a repeat of the calcs, with Backdraft, and numbers from level 80 spells, and with explanation:

Immolate
Base DD: 460
Base DOT: 785
Gear DD: 2.0 / 3.5 * 0.3636 * 1700 = 353 (refer to wowwiki for coefficient formula on mixed dd/dot spells)
Gear DOT: 0.6364 * 1700 = 1082
Target mod: 1.15 (imp. scorch) * 1.1 (coe) * 1.05 (misery) * 0.949 (partial resists) = 1.26050925
Avg DD: (460 + 353) * 1.45 (crit mod w/ruin and backdraft) * 1.25 (imp. immolate) * 1.1 (emberstorm) * 1.26050925 = 2043.18
Avg DOT: (785 + 1082) * 1.1 (emberstorm) * 1.26050925 = 2588.71

Avg casting time (need to recast in event of resist): 1.5 / 0.99 = 1.51...
Total DPSCT: (2043.18 + 2588.71) / (1.5 / 0.99) = 3057.05
DD DPCT: 2043.18 / (1.5 / 0.99) = 1348.50 <--- this is what we're interested in
DOT dmg per tick: 2588.71 / 5 = 517.74

Incinerate
Base dmg: 786
Gear dmg: (2.5 / 3.5 + 0.2) * 1700 = 1554
Avg dmg: (786 + 1554) * 0.99 * 1.35 (crit mod w/ruin) * 1.1 (emberstorm) * 1.26050925 = 4336.34
DPCT: 4336.34 / 2.25 = 1927.26 <--- Clear win over recasting Immolate

Conflagrate
Base dmg: 860
Gear dmg: 1.5 / 3.5 * 1700 = 729
Avg dmg: (860 + 729) * 0.99 * 1.45 (crit mod w/ruin and backdraft) * 1.1 (emberstorm) * 1.26050925 - 517.74 (last immolate tick lost) = 2357.49
DPCT: 2357.49 / 1.5 = 1571.66 <--- Still not worth casting

 

Lileith

According to me (not a warlock so I can totaly be wrong), the whole Improved Immolate->Conflagrate->Backdraft is supposed to be mainly for trash (10 men 5 men) and maybe pvp.

 

Cryic

An interesting question for this: Whats the chance that Incanters Absorption can proc on resists for the full amount of damage? We already have procs that happen *if* something was going to happen, ala warriors enrage if they would have been crit, but resilience changes the crit to a hit (change is probably a poor term for this). If IA can proc on a full resist, and you still have your shield up, this would be very cool indeed considering Arcane mages should be running around with 150+ resist.

 

Pintofbrew

Lhiv: It took me a while to work out what you meant there, essentially by DD DPCT in this instance you mean DPS. I was vaguely confused with including "per cast time" as this is commonly used for DoTs only.

Ultimately then, Conflag and Incin (DD portion) are both inferior to more Incin DPS is what you're saying.

This begs questions, none of which however deserve space in the mage thread. Perhaps further elaboration of your analysis with lvl 80 version sof said spells will reveal more, but it's unlikely anything has to do with us.

Concerning Incanter's Abs. I'm still not sold. the whole notion of "throw a shield on me, I'll fireward and run into the Fire AoE" sounds a lot more complicated, gimmicky and inefficient than it's looking to gain for my liking. How much damage can you absorb, how willing are you to throw yourself in harm's way (endangering healer attention and possible death) for a buff which more likely than not will not at all be when you want it most and will amost certainly mean you have to delay CDs for it, and it'll cost you mana to shield-up, and to top it all off it'll cost you time to position/gain damage. I can't think of one single scenario where it's a useful ability save Naj's shield and Frost Ward.

Assume you want to Fireward->Doomfire on archi. You need to waste a GCD (though while moving) then you need to get cooked, gain a DoT which is annoying and dangerous, in order to gain 10sec of a buff worth perhaps +200dmg. Even with CDs stacked to the brim it's not exactly earth-moving stuff, nor is it likely better than standing still and casting another two ABs in that time you were moving. Remember, you need to move -out- as well as move in to gain damage to absorb.

Bad talent? Not really. Better than moderate? I doubt it. I'll spec it at the time, provided I've capped full arcane and IV and have points left over, though it's more a situational gimmick from lvl 70 standpoint. Whether we'll gain a dozen different shields during WotLK, and whether we'll be shielded more often than we'll be healed remains to be seen, but unless I systematically gain at least +200 more than twice per boss encounter I'd think it's a gimmick.

lastly, on Potent Spirit and Student of the Mind, the former is decent, not great. I'd stand to gain 3.4% crit. That's over 1.5% crit per talent, which is close to my threshold of what constitutes a decent talent. If you gain less than 1% bonus from 1 point, it's shite. It's saving grace, of course, is that the next talent is absolutely massive in current arcane. It's a flat +10% regen, which for me represents over 44mp5. That's a good 80dps right there and for certain fights means I could reach almost 100% AB time.

 

Ivorthemage

Talent says absorb, not resist, or mitigate.

To me, that means the new 2k mage shield, mana shield, power word shield, our wards, a spell-stolen ice barrier or blueberry shield, and the new disc priest and resto druid shield proc-on-crit-talents, those blacksmithing runes, etc.

The big question for me is whether the talent has internal cooldowns and how it handles stacking. Lets say you eat a 400 damage corruption tick, followed by a shadowbolt for 2k 2 seconds later, and a felguard attack for 400 damage 2 seconds later, when you had a PWS and your mana shield on. How much is your spell damage boosted, and for how long, after each absorbtion event?

Do I have 420 spell damage for 10 seconds? 300 damage for 8 seconds left with the felguard attack ignored as a more powerful effect is active? Or do I have a 60 spell damage buff for 10 seconds from the last felguard attack? Or do I have 1 60 damage buff for 6 seconds, 1 300 for 8 seconds, and 1 60 damage for 10 seconds?

Is the buff dispellable? (probably).

 

◊ Vontre

I believe it represents an opportunity to increase dps while you're taking damage. Especially since all mages will have a shatter shield, as well as 2 elemental wards. If you're doing x boss with aoe raid damage component, and you get a power word: shield, you get free damage. Yay! This would help make up for the lost AB damage, since pushback is going to eat that spell alive. Fortunately arcane missiles is looking much brighter with Netherwind Presence in the mix.

Scorch is fine. My calculations were something like 18 second threshold as a single mage, which really in practice means 'scorch everything all the time', because at that low of time fireball starts to lose major momentum from travel time and spell pacing. Fire mages have more than enough quick casts and instants to own at trash dps, unless you're bogged down with polymorph duty (a contribution in itself).

WGR uptime is a little wonky, but not too terrible, the effect diminishes pretty well after 4 ice mages at about 50% uptime. A charge mechanism ala ISB should do the trick.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

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Pintofbrew

Charges like ISB will do the trick, vontre, but it'll negatively impact the hit uptime. Leaving it as a personal buff, so one per mage specced, will increase the 4%hit uptime much more and provide better synergy, I should think.

I still maintain that this should affect the caster alone. I'd hate to see 0/50/20 specs dominating and turning Frost into the new Affliction.

 

◊ Vontre

Why would this be a bad thing? Cross-spec synergy would be fun, and it still leaves ice in the position of power since 1 ice mage is better than 1 fire mage with nothing to shatter off.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Rouncer

The real question would be if you could refresh the timer by absorbing more damage and having it stack on top the existing buff.

Would potentially be open to exploitation in a situation with a lot of AE type damage floating around if you could refresh the stack and add to it. Rank 1 mana shield would cost you 280 mana and if you get damaged again during the 10 seconds and refresh the stack it could be well worth that mana trying to keep the bonus damage stack alive till you could put up another shattershield.

 

Rouncer

What I think is that they should split the talent into 2 parts. Have it apply a buff to the caster and a debuff on the target. The buff would be 5 seconds where everything hit by the casters spells applies as if it was frozen and the debuff would be the 4% increased chance for all attacks to hit the target. The debuff would be refreshable by any mage but the buff would be personal and only apply to that one mage.

Would hurt synergy a bit but would also give additional benefits in AE situations where the mage could use Blizzard to gain the buff and then apply it to all the targets through a flamestrike or arcane explosion.

 

Lileith

Or they could add the +1% hit on Winter's chill instead.

 

Ivorthemage

Rage Winterchill: Throw up shield at start of fight. Death and Decay is cast. Get the buff. Ask Priest to keep throwing PWS on you if he has nothing else to do. Get death and decay again, cast your shield while moving out.

Supremus: throw up shield while chasing him. Eat a normal volcano tick. get the buff.

Leo: recast shield at each aggro reset, ask priest to throw one on you too. Get a buff each time he hits you with a whirlwind.

Lurker: Cast fire ward each time you jump into the water. Get a buff. Throw shields on yourself and fire ward just before he respawns and jump back into the water to cast from there while getting buffs.

Tidewalker: Cast shield while moving between murloc packs and TW, get buff at next earthquake.

Alar: Cast shield while moving to next position in phase 1, or while moving to position prior to a meteor. Get buff at next aoe damage.

Vashj: shield while waiting for elementals or striders. Get buff on her next lightning attack.

Gruul, Mag, VR, Hydross: throw a shield up while moving. and you move a *lot* for all fights.

Anetheron: optimal positioning usually requires some movement to avoid infernal aoe. Cast shield while moving.

Solarian: Cast shield each time she ports out. Get benefit if you eat damage on aoe phase, or next time she does raid damage.

Akama: Shield between waves of adds. eat some damage.

I personally find it harder to think of fights where I *can't* benefit from this mechanic just by throwing up a shield when I have to move or between phase changes, or just staying in any aoe mechanic as long as I currently do. Kazrogal is the only fight that springs to mind where this won't help much. Cant speak to deep BT and Sunwell though, but from what I have heard you still get pauses or need to move a lot, and you still eat some raid damage.

Is that the most effective use of mana? For arcane, it isn't all that expensive when used in conjunction with cooldowns, and my point about shields from other classes is that they do they stuff to you *anyway*. Also, arcane will be more mana efficient without reliance on 2t5 gimmicks.

Ah, I missed that one. Cast shield while airbursted (what else are you going to do?) Benefit next time you get feared through doomfire or eat someone else's air burst damage.

Almost every single fight I have encountered in the game features movement, dps pauses, and raid damage. *Any* fight where that happens gives you time to cast a shield and profit, without burning GCDs that could be used for your nukes. I will be shocked if that changes dramatically in the next expansion. The days of spank and tank are over.

People are misunderstanding me. They aren't bad talents. They just don't make spirit a whole lot better. Take potent spirit. 14% of my spirit comes back as crit rating? Stack 10 more spirit. Thats 1.5 crit rating. 10 more int gets me more than 3 crit rating, even ignoring its greater impact on my mana pool.

It might be sufficient to make it beneficial to throw spirit gems into blue gem slots if you want the set bonus, but otherwise spirit will be an incidental stat, same as now.

 

alvinrod

Someone had pointed out that 33/0/38 would be dependent on a deep frost build in order to keep WG up, but it's possible for the 33/0/38 build to pick it up instead of empowered frostbolt if it turns out that WG is more of a DPS gain.

Also in the tests for x/50/y builds Burnout was modeled as working in the same manner as spell power. Since there has been some speculation about how it works it may be appropriate to model it in those other ways in order to see the potential difference it makes.

Although we're not using a very advanced model for hot streak currently, how much does the talent improve if you use the proc to fireball > fireblast and already have two crits in the next chain? Assume that the ignite bug is fixed so that fireblast won't overwrite the ignite. I think if we abuse some game mechanics we can perhaps get better potential numbers out of this spell. Even assuming that above scenario works, would using fireblast in the DPS rotation be too much of a DPS loss to justify this tactics use?

Has anyone run some deep Arcane specs or used Arcane spells as a primary nuke in a simulation yet? Maybe I just missed it while reading over the new posts.

 

Deedre

Potent spirit more or less offsets the fact that arcane mages will be using mage armor instead of molten even with arcane meditation thrown in there. For 2 talent points, that sounds pretty good to me. It also addresses one of the scaling issues of the tree, namely, a relative lack of crit related talents.

It's fine.

The real questions about arcane are how AB will play out at level 80 and if netherwind is usable in an AB rotation or not. There's also the side issue about AM procing netherwind on a per missile basis; if yes, that possibly makes the spell attractive for use in rotations. There's some interesting math to be worked out on arcane barrage.

All in all I'm mildly optimistic about arcane, although this may be a case of ignorance being bliss. Way uptopic Manly warned me that TC for arcane at this stage is difficult to impossible due to a lack of information. He was right. It always was the most difficult spec to model.

 

alvinrod

The biggest problem with Incanter's Absorption is that you can't pick up this talent along with IB, which is a mage's best shield. Maybe we'll get PW:S more often if we can get priests to toss them out, but generally they're healing or giving them to people who need it to live.

It works nice for when we soak up incidental frost or fire damage or now physical damage with shatter shield, but I can't ever see wanting to use mana shield to get this to proc. The level 79 rank of the spell will absorb 1330 along with whatever you get from spell damage. It's going to cost a little bit of mana to put up and then 2660 when it gets used. Shatter shield is also moderately expensive, at 1200 mana.

It's great for when you use fire or frost ward to soak up some damage from an encounter, but otherwise the amount of mana cost to get such a short buff doesn't seem worthwhile to me. I'm more interested in how much of an impact the damage shields from the new priest and druid spells are going to be up.

I suspect that this talent will be more niche than you'd like to believe, but that's only my opinion. It also makes the assumption that you're arcane spec, which may or may not be viable for 25-man raiding at this point. Then again 10-man raiding will be just as important in WotLK and it does seem more viable there simply because it has the most mana regeneration options available to it.

 

Lileith

What cycle are you thinking about? Arcane Barrage will scale poorly due to instant cast, Arcane Missile will remain meh. Arcane Blast , t5 bonus will probably get changed to +x damages to prevent us from using it in wotlk.

Maybe ABlast ABarrage ABlast ABarrage ABlast ABarrage Frostbolt ABarrage ABlast ect may works or 3xABlast , ABarrage Frostbolt ABarrage?

 

alvinrod

Was thinking of a full out AB spam until the mana ran low and just switch to frostbolt or something like that. They bumped up the base damage on AB a lot so this may compensate for the loss of T5. Go ahead and make some wild assumptions for a few different simulations such as still wearing 2pc T5 that is unnerfed and that each AM bolt can proc NP. I'm interesting in seeing what kinds of potential the tree has even if some of the assumptions may be a little overblown.