Or they could add the +1% hit on Winter's chill instead.
Moving it to another talent would probably be the best solution. Winter's Chill is unfortunately already pretty valuable, but it's also the only candidate that wouldn't use up another debuff slot.
One option might be to add it as a modification to Winter's Chill as part of the currently weak Brain Freeze talent. Make WC required for BF, make BF add 0.5/1.0 melee/ranged hit per stack to Winter's Chill.
Then they're free to clean up the "Frozen" half of the Grasp effect without messing with the +hit.
I'll be quite honest. I am not really concerned about the mage class as a whole. While I do believe the new deep-tree talents must be 'must-haves' for deep-tree specs (ie: talents that are better than other tree competing talents in the 25-35 branch), I am confident that the new light shun on the mage lack of synergies will make things much better. It is not often that Gurgthock/Praetorian makes a new thread about issues in wow, but generally the developers have listened. You can see pretty much everyone agreeing that something is off about mages as it is right now. I wouldn't expect really a huge makeover from Blizzard. But we can hope that we gain something akin to ferocious inspiration. That would fix both our scaling issues as well as our raid synergies without overpowering us for 5man content.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
I still see a remarkable amount of resistance to the idea that mages are underperforming, Manly. People continue to parade excuses and special pleading to explain this away in the face of rather overwhelming evidence. This is more so in the official forums than here, granted.
But it's nice to have Gurgthock on our side.
For myself, I still like arcane brilliance aura, but shadowpriests have already occupied that sort of raid synergy, alas. And then there's the whole spirit business. Blizzard appears to be reworking things to make toons more self sufficient in terms of mana.
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.
1) I don't expect mana shield to be used with it much, except in an emergency, or for when you have tons of spare mana.
2) Shatter shield's 1200 mana is pricey at BC gear levels, but probably not so much at LK gear levels. Given rough DPM values, and assuming it benefits from spell damage, I would expect shatter shield to have pretty decent DPM when used in conjuction when AP/Heroism/Icy veins, but mediocre DPM when used otherwise.
3) There are other passive shields. The blacksmith damage wards suddenly become a dps consumable. The greater rune of warding becomes a passive +60 damage for 10 seconds every 90 seconds or so, on fights with routine physical damage (gruul, TW, Leo, Mag, Lurker, etc.)
4) Don't be afraid to find out what you can get by asking. Too often, arcane mages have been mocked for their supposed requests for innervate, without the mockers even knowing that the innervates are often currently going to waste, or being used to save mana pot money. Tell your priests that shields prior to damage will boost your damage substantially, and you may easily find that they have the mana to spare. they don't shield you now simply because there is no need to. 540 mana for 2300 shielding gets you ~350 spell damage for 10 seconds. That's a good tradeoff, particularly if the priest is just biding time waiting for the next burst of raid damage.
5) My argument is that the talent needs to be considered when assessing whether arcane *is* viable. Currently it seems to be ignored. I think that is a mistake.
I still see a remarkable amount of resistance to the idea that mages are underperforming, Manly. People continue to parade excuses and special pleading to explain this away in the face of rather overwhelming evidence. This is more so in the official forums than here, granted.
But it's nice to have Gurgthock on our side.
For myself, I still like arcane brilliance aura, but shadowpriests have already occupied that sort of raid synergy, alas. And then there's the whole spirit business. Blizzard appears to be reworking things to make toons more self sufficient in terms of mana.
Such statements are obviously subjective, but I think mage inferiority arguments are often confused between pvp and pve, and even there the debates are different depending on which type of pvp you are in and what pve progression level you are at.
But the extensive data mining available from wws stats is pretty hard to argue with, and Blizzard probably has access to more through data. My take has always been that their mistakes in estimating class balance were simply due to 10 million players being collectively more clever than a dozen developers in coming up with imaginative ways to boost their damage.
5) My argument is that the talent needs to be considered when assessing whether arcane *is* viable. Currently it seems to be ignored. I think that is a mistake.
The problem is how to model this talent?
Can we expect priests to give us shields to make it more valuable?
How many fights will exist such that we able to use shatter shield or fire/frost ward to make it useful ourselves?
These things make the value range on this talent almost impossible to accurately model at the moment.
Considering some of the entry level raids are a re-build naxx, and blue dragons, lets assume frost and arcane damage are going to be thrown around liberally. Thats one use for IA.
A little amusing thought I had: Assuming incoming damage is steady and mana is infinate, IA and MS form an exponential loop. Mana shield absorbs damage, giving you more spell damage, making the next mana shield absorb a greater amount of damage, giving you a grater amount of spell damage... ad infinitum.
If they clone the vaelstrazs encounter in WotLK, this could become quite rediculous.
Almost to a one, the examples you pointed out are problematic. A large number of them are not fire/frost specific damage. This means you're suggesting Mana Shield or Shatter Shield. The former costs a fuckload of mana, and as arcane, I won't be willing to sacrifice that, and the latter also costs a lot of mana due to it's additional snare effect. Then you go on a number of examples to assume you will get damage (al'ar, leo, others) when you in fact, don't know if you'll get hit at all. Need I remind you that currently our Wards are in the region of 400 mana -and- a GCD? You may argue that you can do them on-the-run, but when we can spec Incanter's we'll also have specced Barrage, which can also be done on-the-run.
A lot of the scenaria you propose include asking for a PW:S and then purposefully going into harm's way. I'm sorry, but that simply is not a good way to propose strategy. Walk into Supremus's volcano?! You are aware that more than one tick -will- kill you, right? And all that for...? a gain of perhaps +200 on the -moving- phase of a boss when you don't have time to DPS to start with? Life-tapping during a raid and expecting healing is one thing, but purposely demanding shielding in order to specifically go in harm's way and endangering yourself is just not an acceptable raid strategy. Jumping in the water for Lurker entails a 3-5sec manoever. Even assuming you do this just -just- before he emerges you'll end up with perhaps 4sec of resultant +damage effect, in exchange for (1) considerable mana drain due to breaking OO5SR (2) the chance to not be able to jump back up and thus cost more dps than you gained.
Gruul, VR, Vashj... "throw a shield"... Which one, Mana Shield? To what purpose? Mana shield on VR the Arcane Orb that hits for 5k? and gives you a big, fat silence? Or Mana Shield and get hit by Gruul's Stoned, which might in fact kill you later on but early on when it won't, it still won't matter because you'll waste at least 5 of the next 10sec getting back to your position.
Solarian? Again, Mana Shield. If you cast that, AoE and pull any agro, gain the buff and.... Wait a further 8 sec for Solarian to appear. Or have massively buffed single-target on a softie priest add which dies before she emerges anyway, and thus is pointless.
Al'ar? You never should get any fire damage on Al'ar, unless the Meteor lands on you, in which case you're so dead it's not funny because you gain prox agro to the adds. And gaining some spellpower buff is marginal at best, because you're probably skimming threat from the freshly-acquired adds, let alone trying to make some distance from them before they explode in your face.
I'm not even going to go into how patently mad Mana Shield is in an arcane spec. And given the tremendous cast cost of Shatter Shield it's not far off at all. If Arcane mana consumption remains anywhere near what it is now, barring Fire and Frost ward and only occasionally (as I said, I'd be perfectly happy to do it on Naj) by and large all the examples you cited make a bad case and are far from beneficial.
Though, someone proposed chain-activation. This is an interesting thought; I'm almost adamant this will not come to fruition, however, because the talent will gain a Cooldown, but if it does not you'll initiate Shatter Shield on any boss with constant, low, ambient damage, and keep the buff up with rank1 mana shield. First thoughts indicate that the sum of absorbed damage will constantly increase and reset, resulting in what can only be described as "great reason to gain internal CD".
Though, someone proposed chain-activation. This is an interesting thought; I'm almost adamant this will not come to fruition, however, because the talent will gain a Cooldown, but if it does not you'll initiate Shatter Shield on any boss with constant, low, ambient damage, and keep the buff up with rank1 mana shield. First thoughts indicate that the sum of absorbed damage will constantly increase and reset, resulting in what can only be described as "great reason to gain internal CD".
I would assume that it replaces previous buffs, rather than increasing existing ones (with a weaker buff ignored).
Example:
0 seconds: Absorb 1000 damage, gain 150 damage
5 seconds: Absorb 800 damage, ignored, still at +150
9 seconds: Absorb 1500 damage, gain 225, replacing the previous +150 buff, timer resets.
Almost to a one, the examples you pointed out are problematic. A large number of them are not fire/frost specific damage. This means you're suggesting Mana Shield or Shatter Shield. The former costs a fuckload of mana, and as arcane, I won't be willing to sacrifice that, and the latter also costs a lot of mana due to it's additional snare effect. Then you go on a number of examples to assume you will get damage (al'ar, leo, others) when you in fact, don't know if you'll get hit at all. Need I remind you that currently our Wards are in the region of 400 mana -and- a GCD? You may argue that you can do them on-the-run, but when we can spec Incanter's we'll also have specced Barrage, which can also be done on-the-run.
1) You are ignoring that I have focused a lot on coordinating with priests for regular power word shields.
2) Barrage has a cooldown. you know this. You cant spam it. Hit barrage, then your shield.
3) The mana cost on shatter shield isn't all that bad in a build that won't be chewing through mana the way it does now, and gets even more mana regeneration.
4) In the fights I am talking about, getting hit is almost a certainty.
A lot of the scenaria you propose include asking for a PW:S and then purposefully going into harm's way. I'm sorry, but that simply is not a good way to propose strategy. Walk into Supremus's volcano?! You are aware that more than one tick -will- kill you, right? And all that for...? a gain of perhaps +200 on the -moving- phase of a boss when you don't have time to DPS to start with? Life-tapping during a raid and expecting healing is one thing, but purposely demanding shielding in order to specifically go in harm's way and endangering yourself is just not an acceptable raid strategy. Jumping in the water for Lurker entails a 3-5sec manoever. Even assuming you do this just -just- before he emerges you'll end up with perhaps 4sec of resultant +damage effect, in exchange for (1) considerable mana drain due to breaking OO5SR (2) the chance to not be able to jump back up and thus cost more dps than you gained.
5) No, I am not advocating really dumb damage seeking stunts like standing in a volcano. For supremus, I find that I always get a few volcano ticks even if I move immediately. You never ever eat a single volcano tick on most attempts? And its impossible for you to throw up a fire ward while running? Nonsense to both. Lurker is the only fight where I specifically mentioned deliberately going into harms way. Personally, half our raid stayed in the water anyway during his surface phase, as hots could easily outheal the damage and we lost a lot fewer people to water damage than we did to screw ups on jumping in the water. But if you don't want to do that, fine. Just throw fire ward as you jump into the water to avoid his spout anyway. Obviously that is feasible, and you will get the IA buff every time he spouts. You don't see the advantage of that?
Gruul, VR, Vashj... "throw a shield"... Which one, Mana Shield? To what purpose? Mana shield on VR the Arcane Orb that hits for 5k? and gives you a big, fat silence? Or Mana Shield and get hit by Gruul's Stoned, which might in fact kill you later on but early on when it won't, it still won't matter because you'll waste at least 5 of the next 10sec getting back to your position.
I am saying to get a PWS, and then use the buff next time you eat a cave in, or stoned. It never took me 10 seconds to get back into position after Gruul shatter.
For VR, I often stand in melee range to avoid the orbs. Shammies are spamming chain heals in melee range as well which is more than enough to outheal the pounding. Arcane range issues make it harder to duck orbs, positioning often makes me lose shammy totem range, and our threat is so low that being in melee doesn't pose threat problems. But I guess you don't do that.
Solarian? Again, Mana Shield. If you cast that, AoE and pull any agro, gain the buff and.... Wait a further 8 sec for Solarian to appear. Or have massively buffed single-target on a softie priest add which dies before she emerges anyway, and thus is pointless.
No, she does that arcane missile thing and throws that moonfire quite frequently. Eat either of those, and you will several times a fight, and you get the buff. I am talking about PWS again.
I think you are forgetting how much raid damage there is in a lot of these fights.
Al'ar? You never should get any fire damage on Al'ar, unless the Meteor lands on you, in which case you're so dead it's not funny because you gain prox agro to the adds. And gaining some spellpower buff is marginal at best, because you're probably skimming threat from the freshly-acquired adds, let alone trying to make some distance from them before they explode in your face.
Alar gets off his flame buffet a few times each fight. plus I usually eat a couple flame patch ticks a couple of times a kill. Fire ward is cheap, and what else you gonna do while waiting on a meteor?
I'm not even going to go into how patently mad Mana Shield is in an arcane spec. And given the tremendous cast cost of Shatter Shield it's not far off at all. If Arcane mana consumption remains anywhere near what it is now, barring Fire and Frost ward and only occasionally (as I said, I'd be perfectly happy to do it on Naj) by and large all the examples you cited make a bad case and are far from beneficial.
Good thing I am not talking about mana shield. Power word shield, wards, shatter shield, divine aegis (disc priest talent), blacksmith wards, etc.
I would assume that it replaces previous buffs, rather than increasing existing ones (with a weaker buff ignored).
Example:
0 seconds: Absorb 1000 damage, gain 150 damage
5 seconds: Absorb 800 damage, ignored, still at +150
9 seconds: Absorb 1500 damage, gain 225, replacing the previous +150 buff, timer resets.
Yeah, thats my guess too. Not overpowered, and doesnt annoy mages by over-writing huge buffs with puny ones.
But Blizzard doesnt always do things intuitively. The internal cooldown method is possible as well, and I actually like that better, given how arcane mages would use this with cooldowns anyway.
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.
I've assumed no set bonuses for all of my WLK simulations.
Base arcane is -decent-, I think I posted the results earlier on. The best cycle is basically a 2-cycle, AM spam to regen mana, AB spam to burn mana, use NP whenever it procs. The two interesting talents are the new Magic Attunement, which will put us up to 100 resist all and just might see some significant mana returns. 5% of our total per full resist. Anyone more experienced with resistance math able to tell me what the chance for a full resist is on that, at level 80? Secondly that shield -> spell damage talent could be either very strong or very useless depending on the encounter. Arcane looks volatile as usual, which isn't very promising but at least they finally got Arcane Missiles right. In fact assuming everything goes WRONG, AM should slightly outdps the deep ice frostbolt spam, which is good. Oh and arcane builds can get shatter as well, which opens them up to ice mage synergy.
Also, you guys know better than to argue stupid boss semantics like that. Sometimes you take damage. Sometimes you get shielded. Sometimes you shield yourself anyway. If you aren't using wards or the occassional emergency shield on difficult end-game bosses, you are doing it wrong.
...also if you are taking volcano ticks you're doing it wrong as well, that's what blink is for.
Vontre, I see you removed that bit about AM from your sig, heh.
Query: in that sim are you using level 70 spells? Bear in mind that AB rk1 is pretty underpowered without any set bonuses compared to max rank. If you run the sim with level 80 spells, I'd expect arcane to perform somewhat better.
I'm still not completely sold on deep Arcane (or for that matter deep anything until the talents mature) but I think that all 3 trees have some viable function. Frost is a great PvP tree and there's the choice to mix it with fire for an elemental build or arcane for a serious anti-caster build. Fire seems like the DPS tree, even though the best build isn't deep fire at the moment. Arcane may well work out to the ideal 5-man or 10-man tree. Right now fire and frost are too mana starved without a shadow priest which makes them less suitable for content where it's unlikely that mages will receive a shadow priest. I'm fairly happy if there's a variety of specs that exist for different types of play. I would be rather boring if only one spec were used in all types of play.
Vontre, the only problem I have with some kind of raid setup where there's a frost mage and an arcane mage (both deep tree specs) is that it requires extra warlocks for CoE. From the warlock talents right now it seems as though we're going to see affliction in the early game. Destruction doesn't appear to have been given much so it almost feels as though guilds may be running with only two warlocks. If the damage is as good as I think it will be, guilds may wish to use more but they'll eventually hid a debuff limit. It may be that the only person the raid who will use CoE fully is a frost mage which makes it rather pointless to put that curse up or to bring a third warlock.
Right now there isn't even the ability to test at level 80 so it's difficult to get actual results. Theorycraft provides some good results, but until we model every class and spec (also impossible at this time) it's difficult to predict what raids will look like in the future. I personally like the 33/38 spec simply because it produces some big numbers, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be the best spec when the alpha smoke clears. I hope that mages provide more useful damage in raids than they do right now, but who knows where we'll end up in the expansion four months from now. We can make guesses based on what little information we have now, but it's likely that none of this is set in stone.
One quick question for someone running a simulator: Is AB spam for 33/38 viable when the mob is in execute range and there's plenty of mana to burn? At certain gear levels in TBC AB spam at the end of the fight was good simply to dump mana and take advantage of the 2pc T5 bonus. Assuming that mages will get a bloodlust at the end of the fight to take advantage of Molten Destruction, does it make sense to switch to AB considering the arcane talents in a 33/38 build make it significantly better than it would be with the current deep fire builds?
Problem with spamming AB with a 33/38 build: no mind mastery. Whereas fireball is getting all sort of scaling bonuses, especially if it crits. If you are going to be blowing all your cooldowns in molten fury range, fireball is going to get more out of them. Then there's the fact that you'll lose some time ramping up AB to full debuff status.
Edit: and AB gets el zilcho out of that nice scorch debuff you've got going. Lead off with AP/POM/Pyroblast when you get into molten fury range, blow combustion, trinkets, etc., and go to town with fireballs.
On the point about Deep Freeze being best as a .5 second cast with a .5 gcd -- I'd personally prefer it to be instant:
1) Casting speed debuffs. Tongues and Mind Numbing (which is underused because people are retarded) are already big concerns, but we also have a whole "new" set of casting speed stuff in wotlk.
2) Your example with the pet nova could instead be timed as frostbolt->midcast->pet freeze->deep freeze. You can chain the frostbolt crit into the stun and while this will like break your nova, three IV hardcasts into the stun is plenty good damage.
3) Frost still has unreliable anti-pushback. Missing a deep freeze because a felhunter autoattack happened to delay your cast after dispelling your IV is going to cause massive nerdrage.
Currently, I'm looking at Incanter's Absorption as a priest buff more than a mage buff. However, it's basically true that in an optimally-coordinated raid group, mages with that talent will have their raid-damage healed with bubbles instead of normal heals, when possible. Maximizing IA sounds like it will usually not be optimal, but optimizing its use should net a few random spell damage here and there. I've always kind of seen arcane as the 'advanced' tree anyways, back when it worked mostly as a result of procs and cooldown-stacking and fire was just nuke-spam. IA is a way to bring that back.
I'm also wondering if there are any ways to intentionally proc it, outside the environment... [Demonic Rune] comes to mind, and there is a DK spell that buffs damage at the cost of health, although it's currently physical-only.
Another possibility of implimentation is that each new absorbed attack puts up its own separate buff, with its own separate timer. So a hunter pet would give you three hundred cascading buffs of +2 spell damage each, which is probably bad.
I don't understand why anyone believes Arcane Blast will be viable long-term if it doesn't receive some form of the 2t5 bonus as a talent (or some equivalent in terms of scaling).
As I see it either:
- the base DPS of max rank AB is so much greater than other nukes that gear scaling never reaches the point where other nukes catch up (even though they do scale better). This is highly unlikely as the DPS disparity would be such as to essentially require all mages to be arcane for serious raiding. Also expect oceans of QQ; or
- the base DPS of max rank AB is such that it is competitive at say the t7 level of gear but quickly falls behind thereafter because of poor scaling. This relegates Arcane to the same role it "enjoyed" prior to 2t5, or that currently "enjoyed" by Affliction (but without Affliction's mitigating utility of SE, Malediction, Blood pact etc).
Less obvious fixes include new ranks of Arcane Blast in mid-progression instances a la AQ20, or a set bonus on our tier that duplicates the scaling bonus of 2t5, but these are very much band-aid solutions.
I don't understand why anyone believes Arcane Blast will be viable long-term if it doesn't receive some form of the 2t5 bonus as a talent (or some equivalent in terms of scaling).
Back on page 12 there were some calculations on spell scaling. Arcane Blast (and Ice Lance) were about 10% above everything else.
I have a hunch that AB's future will depend not entierly on raw damage, but also how well it uses spell damage buffs (Incanter's Absoption?) and procs (Netherwind Presence?).
It's possible that T7 gear will give AB some coefficient. I think that Blizzard must realize that AB is the main Arcane nuke. Also it's necessary to consider that the nature of the spell makes if fairly effective even without the large coefficient buffs that fire and frost receive simply because it casts one second faster (at most) than the speed at which its coefficient is based. Currently, it's the only spell that behaves that way. Technically it has a built it ~14% coefficient buff just from that alone which puts it on par with empowered fireball.
The huge bump to the base damage may make it more viable considering that it needed to rely on 2pc T5 in order to do well previously. It will eventually be surpassed by the other specs, but that doesn't mean that it won't be viable for a while at least. AB's average damage is only 25 points lower than fireball's at level 80. Just because arcane is based around a set bonus right now doesn't mean that it will be in WotLK.
Until we have good numbers and a good model for all of the talents and new abilities I don't think it's fair to discount Arcane. I really haven't seen many people presenting math or numbers so there's no proof at this point, only conjecture. I know there's no way to get exact results or information at this point, but if you can present some simulation numbers along with any assumptions that were used along with how talents were modeled we can make some rough estimates. Until then we can only argue about the utility merits of each spec or point out the differences between each.
Also it's necessary to keep in mind that in WotLK that 10 man raids will probably be important for a large portion of players. I imagine that most people to spend time here will be participating in 25 mans, but that doesn't mean that the ideal mage spec is the same for each.
05/28/08, 4:51 PM
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