Anedris

Xeth, Lhiv states at the top of his post: "All answers should be considered tentative as many come from unknown sources, and are subject to change." I am not sure what about that does not make it clear that none of what he presents is in any way "fact" or "reliable" or "sourced."

There are no facts. It's alpha, and it's under an NDA. If you don't want to do any discussion without facts, come back in a few months. We don't really have much else to talk about though - the TBC game has been more or less TCed into the ground. Speculation is fun. (But please, no whining about warlock scaling... I do not enjoy reading that sort of speculation.)

 

Lhivera

The "grapevine" to which I refer is, essentially, this very thread and its participants. I'm essentially trying to summarize:

- The questions that have been raised and discussed in this thread, and
- The answers that thread participants seem to be approaching consensus on

...as a method of:

- Saving time for all those who would otherwise be doing what I did in the process, scanning through the nearly 50 pages of the thread, and
- Identifying those questions that are still entirely open, with pretty much a "we have no idea" status rather than a "we have a pretty good idea" status.

In short, when a thread gets as long as this one has, I find it useful for my own mental bookkeeping to stop once in a while and summarize the interesting points. In this case, I figured other thread readers might find such a summary useful as well.

As for the original sources people are quoting or alluding to, I am taking it somewhat on faith that the participants in this thread are much less likely to make wild claims based on crazy, out of this world sources (such as private-server-only testing) than people on the official forums would. That is, I feel, a reasonable inference from the high reputation this forum has earned. And, of course, I try to make it clear at the top of that post that the paper trail is tenuous at best.

ETA: Naturally, there are folks in this thread who are undoubtedly getting info from people who they know for certain are themselves getting it off the legit alpha servers, but they don't wish to name their sources for obvious reasons.

Also, I've heard today that Hot Streak's forced crit does indeed count as the first in a new chain, which raises the obvious question: how does this affect the math discussed here?

 

Jonny_Monroe

Lhiv, I don't think you need to defend yourself against people who don't seem to know the purpose of this thread.

Back on topic; hot streak's mechanic makes more sense (at least to me) if it does indeed allow to 'run over' itself. Its called hot streak, not hot one-time-only-occurance. As a tallent, its not a fixed % modifier and generally speaking, random effects tend on average to be more powerful than fixed effects or on-use effects. The tallent still presents worlds of possibilities when used alongside shatter with a WG mage around; if WG proc while you're mid-cast on a fireball you can probably get a 2nd fireball off while its up and squeeze in a fireblast in an attempt to force a hot streak, effectively getting 4 crits out of a WG proc. Obviously, it has the effect of potentially forcing combustion up to 4 crits per use (5 with combustion combo?)

As a general point, I would say the mage trees are extremely well balanced right now,as I am honestly finding it VERY difficult to decide what I would want to spec given current tallents. I still think arcane will be best for my specialty (10-mans), but when I look at the other trees I see so much possibility. For other classes, there are cookie-cutter specs and those are basically all that works. For mages, we can push various specs to high performance in a lot of situations. I really think blizzard have done a good job with our trees.

One point I would make is that the trees as they stand are becoming further and further apart in terms of stat requirements. Fire in its current form will be ALL OVER crit rating, arcane as usual will want a wide mix of damage, int and spi; and frost will probably go for a more traditional +damage roll (having few mana issues and getting more WE damage from +damage). The only solution I can see for this is if gear s given a few core stats and then gem sockets are loaded into everything to allow the player to optimize.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Deedre

Johnny, for 25 mans, synergies favor fire and frost over arcane, unless the arcanist brings along imp scorch (at some cost to himself in terms of personal dps.)

As for myself, it's pretty much a no brainer for big raids: deep fire down to at least burnout. I'm not at all sure whether to put the rest in frost to grab shatter or if mana requirements will force me down arcane to clearcasting or even arcane meditation. From a pure dps standpoint frost is the clear winner as a secondary tree for fire. Frost is a good alternative, but it will depend more on raid comp than fire will, and also on the number of frost mages, which almost necessarily will be limited.

In a 10 man, like yourself, I'd happily spec arcane. But I cannot justify it in a larger raid with what I'm seeing so far.

The wild card here is frostfire bolt and possible elemental builds based on it. Witholding judgement on that pending further development on that nuke.

 

Selun

What I see when I look at Hot Streak is a talent that was conceived to scale with crit, but is limited to not see a scaleing similar to what warlocks have at the moment. I think many posters know about the Surge of Light and the increase to Hot Streak differs from that only on the point where adding more crit will negatively impact it, and mostly will be avoided as Shatter will give alot more if WG is working as pointed out, that is of course depending on mana regen.

At least now as that talent looks we're giving the possibility of DPS filler talents depending on content we're doing, whereas until now we have fillers only for purpose of regen/pvp/survivability, so I take it it's a step forward to what mage class is all about.

Anyone has any information about the spirit rework that blizz said about it somewhere before 2.4?

 

Pintofbrew

At this junction in time I couldn't justify a Fire build without fundamental AoE talents; World in Flames, Blastwave and most likley Living Flame while not adding any boss-dps figure quite highly in my esteem. Taking a pointer from the way many classes are gaining an AoE I'll go out on a limb and say it's probably a lot more useful if a mage specs specifically for better AoE. Having said that, the question is whether or not a firemage on Burnout with no clearcasting and no magic attunement (ie. no mana income bar MoE) can survive single-nuking with the regen that will be available without IV, let alone with IV. I'd be more inclined to think "for fully-stacked, optimized raids yes. Otherwise, no".

 

Zinaida

Wrote a small script to determine how much crit is added by hot streak assuming that the 100% hot streak crit is added to the beginning of the new streak. (Combustion and Winter's Grasp/Shatter are not accounted for)

Results taken for 1,000,000 casts.

Hot streak assuming that the 100% crit does NOT count towards the new streak:
Hot streak assuming that the 100% crit DOES apply to the new streak:
Edit: Added results for the other interpretation of hot streak for comparison.
Edit2: Fixed bug and updated results to 1,000,000 casts.

 

Lhivera

I've updated the list I posted on page 48 with some new info I've received. Of note:

- Netherwind Presence is now 'unanswered' -- too many conflicting reports on 5% vs 15%.
- Hot Streak mechanics now 'answered' -- 100% crit does apply toward next streak
- Burnout mechanics now, annoyingly, 'unanswered' -- recent report says it's now behaving like Spell Power
- Living Bomb mechanics now 'answered' -- see post for details


It's certainly an improvement, but I haven't got the foggiest idea how to calculate how much of an improvement it is. I may throw together a quick simulator and let it do a nice long run and see what I get.

You simply cannot conclude that, Deedre, without knowing anything about the encounters. In a high-movement fight or a very threat-limited fight, the Arcanist's personal DPS may easily be high enough to make up for the synergy brought by Fire and Frost. If there aren't many dual-wielders for Winter's Grasp to provide +hit to, and/or there is no Death Knight or other Shatter mages, deep Frost's synergy is gone. If your Warlocks aren't Firelocks for whatever reason, Fire brings no synergy.

Anyway, word on the wikidot forums is that Blizzard is planning to go back to the drawing board on a few talents -- not necessarily ours, mind you, "Cripple" was the only one specified, but they're not completely unaware of what's working and what isn't, and they're going to be making changes, though it may not happen until after the pally/hunter talents are implemented.

 

Tharia

As I am not that good in math, I wrote a sim for it. As VBA is the only programming language I know, I did it with MS Excel. If there are any known problems with the RNG or calculations of Excel/VBA that might skew the results, please tell me. The sim took 5 minutes to go all the way through for 9 different base crit levels (10% to 90%), I guess this could be sped up by a better language.
What I did: get a random number between 0 and 1, if it is lower than your critchance, cast is a crit and count is 1 up, if not, count is 0. If count reaches 3, next cast is automatically a crit and count is set to 1. at the end, count the crits and divide by the number of casts. I did this for 8mio casts. You actually need this large number because the event you look for is very uncommon. Results are +/- 0,1%, which should be sufficient for our needs (for 50% base crit: 3,7-3,8%). Actually, my System crashed when I tried to do it better, could be another problem of Excel :/




//EDIT: Beaten, but two sims with very different results. I think we need a jury ^^
//EDIT2: Thinking about it, my results should at least be closer than Zinaida's as they are closer to the original. Getting 5 crits in a row, which you would need for the change to have an effect, is very unlikely, so the numbers shouldn't differ much from the original calculation

 

Zinaida

You're correct, seems I made a typo and the streak counter wasn't resetting when getting a non crit, will edit my results.

 

Deedre

Lhivera, as best as I can determine based on the lock thread, the locks will be mostly firelocks in 25 man situations. Destruction remains their highest dps tree, but appears to be shifting towards fire rather than shadow. Please correct me if I'm wrong here. And from a design standpoint, I even applaud this change, since it is nothing but good for mages. But it does mean that somebody is going to have to bring imp scorch to the table.

Raids very likely won't have spots for more than 2-3 mages at most; one of those almost has to be deep fire. Another one very likely will be a deep frostie for various reasons. Then and only then is there room for an arcane mage, and raid comps may nonetheless still favor stacking fire or frost mages beyond the initial two. Mobility encounters are all fine and well, but I see no easy way around the logic of raid composition, and the bottom line is that arcane brings nothing especially interesting to the table beyond imp amp magic, which is possibly something that could be covered by a non arcane mage willing to dabble a bit in arcane.

In ten mans synergy requirements won't be nearly so demanding (and group comps more flexible), and there arcanists could shine.

Edit: as a corollary to this, a deep fire mage optimized for 25 man play and relying on certain group and raid comps might well be poorly suited for 10 mans. (Frosties I tend to see working reasonably well in either.) We should keep in mind here that raids now come in two flavors, and what works in one size, doesn't necessarily work in the other. 10 mans are no longer an afterthought in WotLK but an alternate progression route in themselves.

 

Lhivera

That is correct, but Warlocks are still very much in flux. I expect to see Affliction getting a lot of work still, and Blizzard has been flailing around wildly trying to find a way to tempt Destro 'locks to do something other than sacrifice their demon, so I expect further changes to Destro as well, as they haven't succeeded in doing that.

Agreed, if Fire/Destro remains highly dominant. If not, matters could well change. And with Affliction getting some stronger debuffs (CoW now decreases attack speed better than improved Thunderclap, for instance), there will be demand for other 'lock specs as well.

That, I do not believe is anywhere near certain. Frostbolt becoming non-binary cancels out the DPS increase from Chilled to the Bone. Grasp is only useful to anyone other than the Mage himself if another Mage has specced for Shatter (by no means certain given decreased mana supply from external sources and increased mana cost for Fire mages), or if a Death Knight has specced Frost and Howling Blast is useful for tanking threat (which it may or may not be, I don't know). With 25-35% uptime, the +2% hit debuff for ranged/melee is pretty meagre utility. So the considerably higher personal DPS of a deep Arcane mage (whether stationary or moving) strikes me as reasonably compensatory for the lower utility in a 25-man environment.

 

◊ Vontre

Death Knights have at least one ability that deals triple damage to frozen though. And also Winter's Chill. Ice mages could potentially increase tank threat by a great deal.

www.magegraf.com

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Lhivera

That's Howling Blast, which I mentioned. It's intended as an AOE; I have no idea if it's a valid single-target threat generation spell.

True -- if you have a Frost-spec DK tanking, there's more synergy there. Frost Mages have pretty strong synergy, but it's highly conditional. If you have other shatter mages, Grasp is incredibly strong synergy; if not, all Grasp does is help a Frost mage stay up in the reasonable range of personal DPS. If you have a Frost-spec DK tank, Winter's Chill is a nice several-percentage increase in his threat (something less than 10%, since we know not 100% of his threat will be coming from Frost attacks); if not, same as Grasp.

 

◊ Vontre

I've updated the simulator to reflect this. It made basically no difference at all.

www.magegraf.com

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

• Suggestive

As for the first portion, i don't think there's any doubt they don't really want destruction using SB much at all, judging from the new talents. Whether we use DS or not, fire is going to be the main source of DPS for the tree, with maybe a lilttle shadow here and there...we'll see.

CoW is the same attack speed decrease as talented TC, even improved. The talent was changed to specify that only the attack power reduction is now affected by improved CoW. In a raid with a warrior, it costs the raid less DPS to have the warrior toss both demo and TC. Not sure how high the demand for affliction will be at this point, not sure there's any point guessing either, things will change.

 

Kludge

# Curse of Shadows: This spell has been removed.
# Curse of Elements: This spell now applies to Arcane and Shadow damage, as well as Frost and Fire.

2.4.3 patch notes

 

Kel S'jet

I would like to apologize for not being clear enough. Again, I was not attacking you Lhiv (as I stated on the bottom of my post), or your findings/hypothesis. I was just using your post to emphasize the point of reliability. The reputation of this forum is exactly the reason I made it, since I too believe inferences based off 'private' servers are not useful here. I only made the post because I actually DID find people here negating/enforcing points based solely off testing done on 'private servers'. The post was directed at them, not you, by any means.

But lets put this to rest and get back on topic of discussion.

Personally I am interested in a few things beyond just DPS performance in raids. As we are discussing the WoTLK mage talents and spells, I would like to discuss

and its possible affect on mage pvp as far as how viable it makes non-frost specs in arena play.
Furthermore, I would like to see what insights into the thinking of the designers we can gain from the existence of this spell.

Firstly, we can easily see that this spell is targeted towards a few things. It is physical specific. This could probably mean that blizzard sees physical attacks to be much more of a threat to mages than they are currently. With the increased mobility that almost all physical dps classes seem to be getting, I have no doubt that mages will no longer enjoy their advantage over melee classes as they do now. A second more minor thing I see this spell doing, is helping mages with hunters pets, however, that is such a specific case, that I do not agree that an entire class spell should be made to handle such a small action set. (it is analogous of mages getting a new spell that deals with just the warlocks imp pet, it is a nice idea, but imo, does not warrant the use of one of our "this is a new WoTLK mage spell" quota).

However, one major thing that does irk me is that if blizzard does foresee mages having a problem with physical dps classes (esp melee ones, hence the frost nova on break) why could they have not come up with a more elegant solution rather than having the mage "tank" the damage with the use of 'another' shield. For the longest time, mages have honed their skill set to avoid damage rather than tank it. Having a playstyle bounded between escaping damage though elegant means and using the time in between escapes to cause a massive amount of damage is what, imo, made the mage class an interesting caster to begin with. To now change this dogma now may cause a stir amongst mages, if for nothing else, but for the fact that it pretty much homogenizes the mage playstyle with other casters (priests tank damage with their shields, warlocks tank damage with their health).

The other thing that irks me about this spell is the amount of reduction it gives. Now I completely understand that the number can very well change. However, I believe that the initial value of 2000 at lvl 80 shows a pretty large disconnect between the designers and the reality of how much damage a melee class can put out. It is not totally uncommon for level 70 melee classes to be able to do 2k damage in one hit/crit. I am almost certain that they will be able to do that much at lvl 80 with absolutely no problem at all. Now the frost nova portion of the spell is interesting, though to be honest, I am yet undecided on whether this is a good thing or not. Perhaps I was hoping for something a little more inspired. Though it is true, for frost mages, the frost nova is a godsend, though I am sure I am not alone when I say that having every new pvp spell give the frost spec such a monumental boost will not do much for the viability of the other specs, which is something I believe should have been a focus for the designers when thinking about the mage class for WoTLk. After all, after your thousandth frost nova/snare and your thousandth shatter combo, the frost spec playstyle becomes a little bland and one dimensional.

The final note on this spell, and probably the most important, is that amongst almost all the 'leaked' spells and talents from all the classes so far, Shatter shield is the sole spell that has the unique characteristic of working against just 2 classes in the game, whilst being completely useless against the other 8. These two classes being rogues and warriors. Every other class either has a method to effectively dispel this shield, or does spell damage hence making the shield useless. There is no other new class spell that I have seen in the notes that is of this nature. Since most of the other ones are useful against almost all opponents. If we remember back, that was the initial problem with mana shield, where having a shield that prevents just physical damage was next to useless since the balance of physical damage classes vs non-physical is to tilted to have a spell such as this useful. That was, at least in my memory, the motivation behind changing mana shield affect all damage. In short, I believe that using up the "new spell" quota on spells that are faar too specialized is not entirely a good thing.


In conclusion, I believe that while this spell is 'interesting' it does not serve some of the key things mages needed from an expansion, these being:

1) Better viability of non-frost specs in pvp play
2) An interesting evolution to the mage playstyle in a meaningful and logical way
3) Support for better anti-caster survivability for the mage.
4) Better definition of the mage role in pvp.


All in all, these are just my thoughts.

I would love to hear all your thoughts on this spell and/or this topic

 

Jonny_Monroe

Source?

Edit: never mind, I see it.

Certainly a very nice buff for mages AND warlocks.

OMNOMNOM.

 

◊ Vontre

The point is to provide a disincentive to training mages, since the freeze will only occur if the mage is dispelled or trained on. And if you think something that specifically targets physical damage classes is too restrictive, I would invite you to play more World of Warcraft. We wear cloth, we are always threatened by physical damage.

www.magegraf.com

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

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Zeldyrr

This is what makes me worry. Personal DPS is more valuable than utility unless the utility is OMG utility. Frost mage utility is going to be, as you said below, highly situational. In a 40-man raid with 5-6 shatter mages, WG would shine. In a 25-man raid with at most 1-2 other shatter mages, it really is a personal debuff.

The binary change with no compensation is outrageous the more I think about it. It effectively, as you said, cancels the increase from Chilled to the Bone. So while fire gets Burnout as a tier 10 talent, arcane gets NP, frost gets...basically nothing. On top of that, frost bolts of higher rank aren't increasing in damage as much as fireballs. Add in all the changes + Deep Freeze + Shatter Shield and I can't help but think Blizzard is going back to Frost = PvP, Fire = PvE. I know they say they are trying to avoid it but that's not what the talents are saying.

My only hope is that this is still alpha and that (this time) Blizzard is paying closer attention to the numbers. Chilled to the Bone needs to be better--drop the snare increase (mainly a PvP thing) and add damage. Since there are too many points anyway, maybe 3 levels for 3% each level. Frostbolts need to scale with rank just like other nukes--frostbolts already do less damage, the gap doesn't need to widen any more. Whatever the changes, Blizzard needs to get creative. Or else frost mages will be situational players, brought in for that occasional gimmick fight.

 

Jarlyn

You seem to have missed retadins, enh shamans, soon to be death knights, and to a lesser extent, hunters.

 

Lhivera

Well, to be fair, Winter's Grasp is probably a 10-11% DPS increase for 2 talent points -- assuming, of course, you already had Shatter.

 

Jonny_Monroe

As vontre elegantly stated, Physical DPS is currently the biggest threat for us in arenas. Ranged classes can be pillar'd or dealt with in other ways, but melee stacked arena teams are becoming increasingly more popular and anti-kiting tools were spread around rather liberally in TBC. Getting steamrolled by melee classes is commonplace for mages now. Admittedly, frost has a few more options for it, but its certainly nothing to tip the scales.

I'm well beyond feeling any right to expect blizzard to give us something 'inspired'. And certainly, they are more obligated to provide functionality over uniquity. I'd much rather have a boring spell that works than an intersting spell that doesn't (invisibility?).

For frost mages, the frost nova component will get eaten by DR. This spell, I feel, is more for the other specs that lack defense and escape spells. Ice lance is not a frost tallent and frost mages already have a freeze off GCD (via a rather fragile pet). This provides a freeze off the GCD which synergises well with either tallented invis (1 second escape) or blazing speed. A lot more mages may spec 20frost for shatter in WotLK and this spell will work effectively for them too, even with a deep investment in another tree.

I felt the change to mana shield was to justify the rediculous mana cost, but thats neither here nor there. They're 2 different spells that exist for different, though somewhat overlapping purposes. I won't go into comparing Shatter Shield to other class abilities. I'm sure people will do a bad enough job of that on the official boards. If you must compare classes, then compare CLASSES, not individual spells.

As you stated, warriors and rogues are the obvious target of this spell and other classes can just dispell it (proc'ing the nova?). Both of these classes can break it in seconds. So, clearly, the important part of the spell is not the shield but the free nova.

1)I disagree, It gives non-frost specs a lot of what frost already has to be ahead (a damage shield and a nova off GCD)
2)This is found more in tallents, which have already spawned a host of theoretical builds/cycles that are vastly different to what we have currently
3)Magic absorbtion? Mage armour?
4)I agree with this partly. Mage doesn't have an obvious role in PvP beyond the ones that teams make through practice. But for PvP is that such a bad thing? In PvE the fights are built to be handled in defined ways, but PvP is vastly harder for developers to script and generally its not a good idea for them to do so anyway. Tweaking numbers to provide balance is the best thing they can do for PvP, 'Scripting' players into specific PvP roles will just annoy players who like paving their own road.

OMNOMNOM.

 

◊ manly

Are you seriously pissed about having to pay the same tax that every other spell is paying ? Frostbolt was bugged for as long as I remember to not pay any penalty from level-based partial resistances (ie: innate resists). They are merely fixing a 3 year outstanding bug.

They should fix EP too while they're at it, but thats just my take on the whole thing.

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.