Pintofbrew

Manly: That would make a lot more sense. I can see a full-frost providing WC and WG and everyone else speccing either tri-spec, or fire-shatter, or33/0/38 to abuse the WG.

Did anyone else notice how suspiciously similar WG is to the suggestion Lhivera posed when we were considering a talent that eventually became IV?

PS. Latest build has WG at 5sec. This clearly means Bolt-Lance-Lance, and with some (200ish?) haste you may even get three lances in v. frozen. Which in turn gives a higher up-time, because it's more frost-spells-per-second.

 

aikiwoce

Oh hey, just noticed I messed up again. The % mana doesn't scale with rank on Burnout.

Burnout(Rank 5) - Increases your spell critical damage bonus with all Fire spells by 25% but every time you critical with a Fire spell you lose an additional 1% of your total mana.

 

Soul

Builds that depend on the target being frozen are pretty specialized, though - note that in order to have this kind of synergy, you need at least one Frost mage in the raid. Otherwise, you have a a lot of wasted talents. We also are uncertain as to how often the debuff will be up. As for the buff being self-only, I suspect that this talent is meant to synergize with Death Knights too... don't they have a lot of tanking talents that depend on the target being chilled or frozen?

 

arch

Must be the exact same mechanic as MoE but reversed of course, so per cast it is.

 

Kel S'jet

Note the "instead" in the spell description. This leads me to believe that Frostfire bolt will not benefit from both the bonuses of the Fire tree and the Frost tree, but just one of them, depending on which spell school it chooses to execute the final damage with.

What this means, imo, is that if you are, say, a deep fire mage, and you encounter a Fire immune mob/boss, Frostfire bolt will do frost damage, but since you are a deep fire mage who (let's assume) didn't spec into the Frost talents, you will not get any additional benifit from Frostfire bolt.

What this does, is leave us with the question, "Will it just be better to cast Frostbolt or Arcane Blast instead? Since Frostfire bolt will not really end up doing any "special" kind of extra damage anyway"

I truly believe that while it looks interesting on paper, there really is no place for such a spell given the way the game is set up. A deep fire mage will still use rank 1 frostbolt for the snares, and a deep frost mage will still use one of his 'other' primary nukes (Fireball, AB) for damage against frost immune mobs.

Unless the damage values and/or cast time or some other factor makes it worthwhile, I do not see mage's casting this spell for spell school immune mobs, they would just be better off casting the nuke of their off-school instead.

 

kadgar

The proc chance is 10% according to latest information. 2,5 sec cast and 5 sec duration = 5 mages just frostbolt spamming needed to keep this buff up all the time. (more because the proccs will overlap, less if they equipp haste)
These 5 mages will have 100% crit for thier frostbolts with good gear.
Every additional mage with shatter specced will have + 50% crit additional to his buffs, talents and items.

 

Immortalfire

They should just make frostfire bolt similar to the new warlock decimate talent/spell in that it ignores resistance and absorption so that it can still "proc" an ignite per say and still chill/work in conjunction with shatter/ice shards. Think about all of the deep fire talents needed to be sacrificed in order to get the ignite with ice shards and spell power, going for the "tri" spec would sacrifice fire power most, if not all, fire crit talents MF and burnout (which does appear to be a great talent if its only 1% rather than 5% mana loss). if its fire OR frost (as it appears now) i believe that it will just turn into yet another unless skill or possibly one thats very situational (spell steal)

 

aikiwoce

Another question is, Will the Winter's Grasp effect be considered a chill effect, and thereby be affected by permafrost?

 

Pintofbrew

Unlikely. If they build-in any more requirement to stack frost talents I'll reroll. The bloody tree only works correctly if you invest over 56 talents in it.

We have a total of 10 talents, which by and large say "+1%damage" each, we have 7 talents to make WG work (and a further 2 for WG) and 5 to make WC work, a further 5 for crit, 3 for flat 2% damage increase, and 3 for range/economy/threat. Four for WE and... COME ON. Optimized Frost tree at 80 is looking like a damn struggle to even get Clearcasting.

Jesus christ blizzard. Can we have some LEANING-OUT of the trees please? It's rather fundamentally flawed if I need to spec upwards of 15 talents, each one of which basically says "same negligible increase".

 

bortson

Speculation = Fun. (And I actually mean that, I'm not being sarcastic).

Since everything will be modified many, many times before it goes live, it's difficult to make too many guesses about exactly how good/bad everything is, but based on some themes, I think we can make some guesses about what they're trying to do.

The biggest thing that jumps out from the talents is the almost absurd emphasis on crits. This is readily obvious in the Fire tree, but the ability to "freeze" bosses (presumably) means that frost will be seeing a higher percentage of their damage from crits as well. Potent spirit will also boost arcane mage percentage of damage from crits. On top of this, there's the improved moonkin aura which is also tied to crit.

I think what happened is that they realized that, what with resiliance, they can throw out big crit/string of crit goodies without bringing back 3 second pvp matches. They've apparently decided that mages are going to base a lot of their pve damage on crits now.

There's also an added AoE emphasis. Once again, this is most overt with fire, but the other trees appear to have pve AoE possibilities that are more subtle.

Tree specific stuff :

Arcane seems lackluster. A few possibilities come to mind though :

-- Moonkin + arcane mage synergy seems to be something they're shooting for. Is the intent that you group with a moonkin, spam arcane missles to have a really high uptime on the haste buff and instacast non-debuffed arcane blast whenever netherwind presence procts?

-- shatter shield + incanter's absorption + AE + prismatic cloak. Is arcane mage AoE supposed to be based on the following sequence : cast shatter shield : cast AE : Draw aggro, Absorb damage for 300 spell damage buff : arcane explosion : instacast invisibility : Restart AEs with 0 aggro, but hopefully still the damage buff?

Arcane definitely seems to have the "which nuke am I supposed to use?" problem (Blast, Barrage, Missles?)

Fire is really crit heavy, but also seems that it's supposed to be the main AoE tree.

Frost is interesting since they've made an overt attempt to blur the line between PVE and PVP talents. The biggest thing is that since you can "freeze" bosses, shatter becomes a pve talent, which will make frost mage AoE based around frost nova shatter combos.

For the most out there of my speculation points, I wonder if frost mages are being groomed for a 10 man specific role -- that of a kite tank. It's already been commented on how a lot of 25 man fights can't be dropped down to 10 man fights in a logical way since they can need 3-5 tanks. That might mean that there will need to be other ways to deal with the multiple "bosses" that can be fulfilled by non-tanking classes. If the main change in between the 25 man and 10 man version of a 4 mini-boss fight is that in the 10 man, 2 of them are snarable, then hunters, mages or affliction locks could kite-tank them in the 10 man version. There's some precedent for them attempting to do this kind of thing -- tin man, striders on vashj for instance. The increased slow effect from Chilled to the Bone, the decreased hit chance from brain freeze, shatter shield's "oh shit, get me out of here" mechanic" and the ability to stun frozen (and "frozen"?) targets may be intended for this role.

Edit : Further "mage as 10 man tank" speculation. Death Knights are supposed to tank magic damage bosses. Once again, in a 10 man, alternates need to be able to fill the role. SL locks are the obvious (maybe now with some demon form tanking thrown in), but maybe mages are also supposed to be able to with magic absorption (now +80 resist), spellsteal, molten shields and fiery payback.

 

Lurker

Unless Frostfire works differently than it reads, a good ole Portal/respec will mean it never gets used. However, it does seem pretty nifty in World PvE. A Fire spell with a built-in snare? Couldn't hurt the arsenal. Another thing is that we don't know the cast time, and therefore the coefficient of it (or I haven't seen it), or what talents take priority on affecting it. The best indication we have is because it chooses Fire first in the description, that fire talents will take priority. Even still, why would they make this more friendly to Fire mages when there isn't a Frost counterpart (that deals Frost damage first)?

One of the ideas about Frostfire bolt I have is that the spell will calculate all damage on the Fire side and THEN switch a flag to make it frost damage. That still leaves the question of ignite, which is a large component of DPS, though, but it doesn't seem as useless if that's the case. If it changes Ignite damage to Frost as well (a longshot), then we're definitely on to something here.

 

◊ Scorponok

Is it possible that Frostfire Bolt would be meant to replace fireball and frostbolt? I.e. whichever spec you are, fire or frost, you use Frostfire Bolt as your main spell?

 

Cryic

I wish, but then they would have to rework half the talents in frost and fire to work on Frostfire also to make it better then fireball or frostbolt. And if they did that, then suddenly you have a nuke that has ignite, frostbite and kinds of other crazy shit that I can't see happening.

 

◊ manly

I find it personally interesting that many players seem to view like the arcane tree like being total shit (in wotlk). I don't understand why nobody views it for what it always was - it is shit. Theses new talents don't really change that fact. The only thing that made arcane viable was MSD/TLC and 2pcT5 which seem to be viewed as nothing more than a gimmick as far as blizzard is concerned. (at least, thats my guess)

Yes they cut back all 10% hit talents for all classes - and I think its a good thing. If you want classes to have a dps boost, getting free hit talents is not the way to go.

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.

 

Maledict

To be fair, that talents been proposed since the game launched. I remember sticking it up on the EU forums suggestion thread 2 years ago - it's stupid that it's taken Blizzard this long to implement it in some form.

 

Bulgarth

WG may or may not make full frost raiding a viable spec. It's not only free crits pretty much whenever it's up, but it's also an additional 4% hit for the entire raid, leaving it as a very nice crutch on everyone who isn't at the hit cap for Wotlk. This of course will all depend on how frost damage will scale compared to fire will. Fire is once again still a higher damage spec from looks of it, but in return, if you can keep WG up 100% of the time (4 frost mages in raid anyone?) The constant stream of crits will blow away any fire mage.

 

◊ manly

You mistyped "will outdps any and all classes" into "will blow away any fire mage."

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.

 

Bulgarth

This is so true. That statement is truly dependent on whether or not Blizzard decides to make Destruction locks overpowered again... and again.. and again...

Which knowing Blizzards track record since making Warlocks useful in raids other then CoE when BC came out, it will continue to happen. We shall see.

 

Adrammelech

Would seem unlikely because its going to get the same 81.4% coefficient that frostbolt does, but it's unclear if any talents from the Fire or Frost tree interact with it. I would suspect if anything the general fire talents will interact with it (ignite, fire power, critical mass) but imp/emp fireball will not. That way on something like phase 2 Illidan you're still tossing out 3 second nukes, but you're not suffering quite the hit as you would even with imp frostbolt. The only way I could possibly see it replacing either as the primary nuke is if it utilized talents from both trees. Ice shards + ignite for example.

 

Cryic

Something else to think about: Depending upon the number of Frost mages (I would never assume 4 in a 3.0 raid), you would actually have some nice TC about the relative value of hit vs crit vs damage will be. Assuming 16% is cap, and you have 3 Frost mages having an average 70% uptime for WG giving 4% to hit. Well, do you want to still go for 16% cap in gear + EP that will waste the 4% to hit from WG, or do you find a sweet spot around 14.5% (just guessing here) of hit that allows you to sub in more +crit and have a 1.5% extra miss 30% of the time.

Fun times indeed!

 

Rouncer

Another side to WG is that it would be very good for all pets (incl the water elemental) on bosses, effectively a 4% damage increase for pets of every variety.

Also think about Hot Streak and AoE. It doesn't say fire spells, it just says spells. So you do 3 rounds of AE on multiple targets and with normal crit rates the likelihood of not getting any crits from each cast are pretty slim and then you get the buff and whatever you AE next, everything gets crit. Think about the potential. AEx3 and then Blastwave with everything getting crit and with World in Flames giving an additional 15% damage on top of that.

Only issue potential issue with a new talent is if World in Flames doesn't affect the AE cap. Which would basically turn it from a pretty nice sounding talent to a completely meh talent.

 

ossi

Did any one start crunching some numbers with the new ranks of spells thotbot is showing?

 

Trel

I believe the WG uptime would be: 1 - .9^(#spells cast in 5 seconds * # of mages).

1 frost mage spamming frostbolt with 10% haste would have 21% uptime of +50% crit - around 8% more damage.
4 frost mages would have a 60% uptime for about +24% damage each.

I guess that won't go live since it's impossible to balance across varying number of frost mages.

 

Bulgarth

Screw it, just bring 8 mages . 100% uptime on WG will guarantee highest damage over any class, period.

 

◊ Vontre

Well Netherwind Presence procs bring arcane missiles up a lot closer to fireball/frostbolt than it used to be. Unfortunately the lack of other shiny toys make the tree still pretty uh... bad overall.

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