Probably, but the list of mob abilities on Wowhead named Hex don't have the half second cast, so it's a new Hex spell; where it goes, we don't know since it's not on trainers yet.

Did anyone notice the wording change on Counterspell (as listed here)?

51610 Counterspell Counters an enemy's spell, preventing the enemy from casting that spell again for $d. Generates a high amount of threat.

That worries me quite a bit, though I guess there's maybe a chance it's a mob ability instead.

There's mobs that have that exact wording in live ( Counterspell - Spell - World of Warcraft ), so likely another mob ability.

Even if the duration is short, the 1m cooldown might be there to prevent this spell from becoming the next Cyclone (good thing).

I realize that we are still early in the alpha but I'm getting a little concerned about frost mage dps.

If I am reading posts in this thread correctly:

-- frost bolt is no longer binary, so that a 5.1% miss that frost mages have to deal with in the expansion
-- fireball damage at the higher ranks has gone up more than frost bolt damage (by %)
-- unknown if the Elemental Precision bug/ghost hit will change in WotLK
-- Lhivera's calcs showed Frost close to fire and arcane, but those posts were before the binary/5.1% change

While I love Winter's Grasp (we've all been asking for that talent forever), it seems to be basically an extra frostbolt/ice lance combo every once and a while.

I know Blizzard has stated they want to make specs more viable for PvP and PvE, but at first glance I don't see frost keeping up.

Am I missing something basic in the math?

Lhivera also pointed out that Frost has a fairly significant advantage on its crit rate and damage, which will probably make up for the amps on the base damage... until gear hits T8 level, anyway, but we'll see what comes

No, Frost DPS definitely drops further back with Frostbolt no longer being binary. However, Frost offers a lot of potential synergy by providing Grasp for other shatter mages, plus a wee bit of melee/ranged synergy with Grasp and Winter's Chill for Death Knights. Also remember that my numbers did not account for whatever the Death Knight frost vulnerability debuff does.

I wonder also how the level-based resistance will actually work out. If it remains at 24, it'll be reduced from 5.1% resistance to 4.5% at level 80. But at level 60, everyone was working on the assumption that bosses had 15 resistance, not 24, so maybe the resistance per level difference increases as we level up.

Regrettably, I deleted that script from my server a while back on the assumption that it had served its purpose, and it appears I did not have a local copy. I'll try to make time to reproduce it, but it's been a pretty busy time lately.

Rumor has it Frozen Rune Weapon increases Frost Damage taken by 1% when debuff is up. Presumably it stacks. I hope.

In the end, it all boils down to this stark concept:

1)Is the combined totals of Your DPS + DPS you bring to the raid better than the person you're competing for a spot against (warlocks/hunters), with outside effects (buffs etc, healthstones, soulstones, mage food) factored in.
1.5) If there are gimmick fights, are you satisfied with your role as a mage to only be brought as the one or two token mage(s) to do that fight, then sit? Akin to Sunwell?

That's how it is in Sunwell right now. Tell me Manly, with your greatest dps parses (i have some too), on a "fair" fight like Brutallus, where you got top 3 with a stacked group, Could you have done more damage if you were instead a warlock who casts Curse of Doom, plus the additional RAID DPS you bring by increasing Shadow Vulnerability uptime. Barring your trinket (i have robes off Muru instead >.>), i am yet to find this happening despite prime time <20% heroisms and the best stacked group that the best warlocks also get.





Personally, if we dont bring more raid dps than a Curse of Dooming warlock who increases raid dps via Shadow Vuln and Soulstones, and the only way we raid is if we're needed for gimmicks, then i dont want to play the mage class.

Hard to say depending on whether or not you count infernal summons. The thing with warlocks is, the shorter the fight, the less lifetaps. This leads to increasingly absurd the numbers. But lets assume for now that infernals don't exist.

Wow Web Stats
For reference, I got 2400 dps this week with no coe, 2 burns, no innervate (I called it, but just as I called it I got burned, so moved out of range). Planning on an innervate and not getting one means ~6s lost to evocation. 2nd Burn also costed me roughly ~5s of dps time (if not more). This is with a ret pally, elemental shaman, 1 bloodlust and only 1 drummer. Also, the 2nd burn threw me off on rotations and I failed to activate 4 times the muru trinket.

Is this result good ? Well, its not bad. but that doesn't change the fact that I wouldn't be competing with a warlock COD'ing. I would be below, simply put. Keep in mind that there is a gear discrepancy too, but regardless mages are fine as long as we get coe and that warlocks get 10% COS and no COD. Anything outside of that setup places mage in teh clear disadvantage.

Let's imagine you had elements, which is exactly 10% damage we'll say, so you did 2640 dps to his 2500.

Your fireball had a crit rate of 46%, which is a little high, i'll ignore that. You also did not have to invis (i normally always have to if i get elements) -5 seconds dps time.

Let's imagine you were replaced by a warlock of your warlock friend there's clone (you are competeing for the same spot), he can CoD, which is ~7-8% dps, so he's at 2700 dps.

Ok fine, another dps class beat you by 60 dps (despite you critting 8% more). Then you realize that that warlock added to raid dps by debuffing shadow vuln, gave healthstones to help your melee stay alive during burn, a soulstone in addition, and suffered a raid dps loss by having such an usually low number of warlocks (less shadow vuln).



Manly, we are NOT balanced until our raid DPS contribution is at or slightly above the people we are competing against for the spot. We need to either be doing 3000 dps raw (Like hunters, except they also add 3% party damage so im not sure how that fits in), or we need to be doing 2800 dps and add 200 raid dps worth of synergy.

A CoDing warlock is not providing a healthstone, because if he's using CoD he's the fourth warlock and there are only three ranks of healthstone.

I'm not sure what the aggressive tone is about. I haven't heard anyone arguing that warlock damage isn't a little out of hand, but given that this expansion is already over obviously nothing is going to be done about it until Wrath. So in Naxx it was the fury warriors and fire mages and in TBC it's been warlocks and BM hunters. Time to wait and see who'll be a little out of line in WotLK.

Because there's nothing in the next expansion to suggest anything is going to be done about this imbalance. Both classes have issues at this point in the alpha, but the same retarded scaling that makes warlocks imba right now is going to keep scaling to make them retarded again at the mid to upper levels of WLK. It's annoying.

edit: clarity

Not to start an argument, but what scaling do you see on live that's going to continue with the current alpha talents?

Assuming that Fire becomes the preferred warlock spec with all the nerfs to lock/spriest synergy,

Demonic Sacrifice (15%)
Emberstorm (10% + 10% haste)
Shadow and Flame (still the best version of all the "Empowered" talents)

And further assuming that CoE and CoS have been merged, it will only take 3 warlocks for the last one to start casting CoD, which won't be quite as massive for a fire lock but will still be powerful enough.

My beef with it is that all of those things scale directly with gear. The better your gear is, the more powerful those become. I know that there's not much new stuff in the alpha that will scale like this, but there's not many changes to the existing talents either.

A number of the mage talents are either flat increases or things that operate independently of gear (see: Netherwind Presence). As it stands, I see locks being initially weak as spell hit/haste ratings drop with new levels and the early raid tiers, and maybe we'll see mages doing that chart-topping DPS that led to the original coefficient tax in BC. But as time goes by and gear improves, warlocks will catch up again and (I think) we'll end up with the exact same situation we have now.

That's not really likely to happen, considering what really gives locks an edge right now is improved shadowbolt. Those 3 talents were not enough to make fire competitive till the last buff emberstorm got, and even with that its not really a success. Honestly, i think you're worrying about a situation that doesn't truly exist, its shadow that's always been out of hand, not fire.

Shadow and flame gives shadowbolt and incinerate 20% extra +dmg. Imp shadowbolt and bane are the 2 other shadowbolt specific damage increases in the tree and they are T1 and T2 respecitevely. Incinerate is a base 2.5 second cast spell which had no cast time reduction abilities, making it the redheaded step child next to fireball/frostbolt/lightning bolt/wrath. Only after almost a year did blizzard add a cast time reduction talent onto emberstorm to close the gap between fire and shadow scaling.

These are major reasons why deep destruction has a good talent for increasing destruction nukes. The problem comes from the 21 point in another tree scaling an extra 15% which throws off the balance of the destro tree.

Yes, and in WoW it is both in ZF, LBRS, Sunken temple, Zul'Gurub - even the Shadow Hunter in Warcraft 3 got this Hex ability. And all those casting it are totem casting shamans. It makes perfect sense that Shamans gets this spell. A polymorph that doesn't break on damage, doesn't heal, but with a long cooldown and a short duration (my guess is 8-10 seconds on mobs - shorter on players) that enables shamans to CC a little bit, without being overpowered compared to other more dedicated CC classes. Shamans could use a kind of weak CC for both PvP and 5 man content. I'm pretty sure that they will get Hex for WotLK - I was even sure of that before the alpha was out, simply because it makes perfect sense lorewise and balance wise to give it to them.

The inclusion of a snare might be a blessing to some. I would bet that gnomes escape artist would be able to remove it in this case.

Gentlemen, I really don't see why this normally moderately fruitful discussion has descended into the over-flogged dead horse of Lock Vs. Mage.

What exactly is the point trying to be made? You take parsings of BC data, take talents off WotLK alpha, don't bother looking at either the changes to mages or the changes to warlocks and then go off on the all-too-familiar "locks scale too far", which is clearly being addressed.

ISB is being nerfed from 20% to 15%. It's also being nerfed from affecting all shadow effects to affecting only DD spells and not DoTs. Thus terminating the SB-over-scaling

CoE and CoS are being united into one, wholesome spell. Thus terminating the "mages reliant on locks, locks getting mal-CoE further unbalancing". You're even going to gain a free 3% from Mal if the warlocks do.

Current Destrolock talents are showing clear indications that it's Blizz's intention to take emphasis away from the Destro-Sack spec. They may have not achieved a scenario yet where a Destro lock will eschew a sacced imp/succ but the intention is there and I expect them to resolve that issue. Thus terminating the "sacced pet gives too much %"

Their highest-dps setup/spec is in a much, much worse state than ours. Full fire is beyond a shadow of a doubt head-over-heals better than full destro, currently. Fire or shadow.

Their gain of regen from spirit has done nothing to their autonomy at all; the costs of their spells have scaled exactly as much as is needed to match the increase in mana gain; the only reason they gained spirit-regen was to (1) drop the 20% healing from the "raiding" shield, reducing survivability to be in line with other classes and to lend reason to the Demo Armor spell which was underused since BC and (2) so Blizz can get away with even less gear disparity, now all cloth will have spirit more or less, be it destined for priest, mage or lock.

I don't see why everyone's suddently ape-shit over Mage Vs. Lock all of a sudden, particularly when said argument is based on BC observations and in the WotLK Preview thread.

Pintofbrew is right on this, I believe. I'm not sure deep Fire is head-and-shoulders over DS/Destro Fire, but it does seem likely to lead by a nose, and besides, Blizzard is obviously still working hard at providing a tempting alternative to DS/Destro -- and while they haven't quite succeeded yet (the Empowered Imp move has some problems), they've at least finally reached the point where Warlocks are actually running numbers to see if it'll work rather than glancing at it and saying, "No, forget it," so they're getting closer to the mark. Additionally, deep Arcane will outperform any Warlock spec on a fight with heavy movement, and deep Frost will now match deep Affliction's ability to handle heavy movement (and with higher base DPS, will outperform it).

And to add to this point, one of our longstanding arguments for why Mages should be producing significantly higher damage than Warlocks was our lack of synergy. This, too, is being resolved:

- With Fire becoming their preferred school, Destruction Warlocks will get more out of Improved Scorch than Fire Mages will get out of CoE

- Frost mages are offering a small amount of synergy with Ranged/Melee classes, and a potentially huge amount of synergy to Shatter-specced Fire and Arcane mages, through Winter's Grasp, benefit to DK's through Winter's Chill, and will possibly be receiving synergy from DK's through Frozen Rune Weapon.

It's a different ball game. Yes, we should be looking at these things to see where they're going, but we need to look at them with the understanding that their context is in a great deal of flux.

This thread has not "devolved" or gone downhill in any way, i merely stated what NEEDED to happen if the mage class is going to be worth bringing to a raid.

My point is that right now we are hardly worth bringing to a raid, and i explained why, and pointed to warlocks to show that they are currently a better choice.

Yes warlocks are being nerfed, yes mages are being buffed, yes if mages dont add the same or more raid dps than a warlock or deathknight, or only fairly compete when there is some gimmicky "Spellsteal X" buff that is on and off every other fight, i will possibly change my class.

First, I agree that it is far too early to panic. While right now it looks (to me) that Frost's utility does not make up for the pure DPS numbers of other specs, it is only early, early in the alpha. No one knows exactly where will we end up (even Blizzard) at this point.

On the other hand, when looking at synergies, I think it is important to consider ones that are cross-class. While talking about shatter synergies is nice, there will be at most maybe 2 other mages (and likely only 1 other) in a 25-man raid with a frost mage, right? That's a different situation than buffs that affect all melee, all fire, etc.