Kailhasa

This is the crux of the FFB debate. Ignite + Ice Shards is nifty, but without a cast time reduction it's probably not enough. Add in Shatter + Winter's Grasp however, and FFB could go from "meh" to "why bother with anything else?". Toying with WG is risky though, since it directly impacts deep frost's performance and weather or not it will be able to compete with fire or arcane.

Blizzard is kind of between an ice block and a hard place on this one...

If I had to make a bet though, my money would be on neutering the newborn. It will be relegated to immunity duty and parlor tricks, nothing significant. Blizzard wouldn't dare ruin all their hard work and balancing done up to this point with a shiny new "Jesusbolt".

(PS: If FFB turns out to be omgwtfamazing, I want credit for naming it Jesusbolt, ok? )

 

Arazan

If Jesusbolt catches on, I hereby stake claim to Christlance.



Also, I was thinking along the lines of a FFB build being a 41/30 or 33/38'ish build... but I just had a thought. Let's assume for the sake of this that FFB is NOT affected by any talents that affect fireball or frostbolt, but is always affected by effects like Winter's Chill. What about 47/10/14? With spell power, ignite, and ice shards, you're looking at 3.15 crits... and while you lose some of the big fire talents like Molten Fury, Fire Power, and Critical Mass, you pick up Arcane Power, Mind Mastery, Potent Spirit, Student of the Mind, Spell Power, and 2/5 Netherwind Prescense... and of course you can always leech imp scorch and WC off of another mage in the raid.

To me, a 33/38'ish build seems better for a FFB build, but what do you guys think about 47/10/14?

 

JonIrenicus

What are the damage coefficients on Arcane Barrage and living bomb?


Both are instant cast so normally it should be rather low, though for such high tier talents this is probably not the case.


Also, is there ANY additional effect of "deep freeze" as the 51 pt frost talent? Is it just a standard 5s stun? Are the targets considered frozen during those 5s or is it just a plain vanilla stun?



Last question concerns the absorption rate of ice barrier, currently it grants additional damage absorption based on spell damage. I looked at the wotlk absorption rates and they seem to have increased the base levels substantially, about triple. Any confirmation that we will still get a bonus from damage to the amount absorbed on TOP of the increased base amount?

 

Prinsesa

Arcane Barrage is an exception to the normal coefficient rule, instead of getting a 1.5/3.5 (or 42.86%) coefficient for being an instant cast, it has a 3/3.5 (or 85.71%) coefficient, presumably based on its 3 second cooldown.

Living Bomb's coefficient is unknown at this point.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

alvinrod

I think it would be much better to run at least 37 points in frost. This allows you to pick up Combustion and Molten Fury and Winter's Grasp. Since FfB appears to count as both a fire and a frost spell it would be able to keep WG up by itself. With enough haste you'd be able to squeeze off two FfB and an Ice Lance which would do some ridiculous damage.

What might be even better is to run 0/30/41 and pick up the WE instead of anything past Fire Power in the fire tree. The WE will probably provide just as much punch and way more utility than the fire talents would. The only thing that these builds would suck at would be AoE since they don't get the threat reduction for Arcane Explosion and that leaves using IV with Blizzard as perhaps the most viable AE.

The build probably does okay for solo play you can pick up frostbite and impact and can skip the improved bolt talents since they don't do anything for your main nuke which happens to choose the appropriate form of damage to deal against mobs that would otherwise be immune.

I really don't care if it ends up being the best nuke in our best spec. It solves the problem of mages having to spec around immunity fights which happen from time. Some spec will end up being the best DPS spec. Why should we care if it's this particular one instead of some arcane hybrid spec or deep tree x with filler in tree y?

 

Gediablo

As it was mentioned much earlier in this thread. I still have my doubts it is intended though, unless other cooldown based instants have their instant-coefficient-penalty removed as well. The argument that it is a deep tiered talent hasn't so far been enough reason to make such change to other spells (e.g. Dragon's breath, which actually use a double cooldown). If they add the usual penalty to ABr the spell ofc becomes less useful in standard arcane PvE rotations in end game raiding, which relative to the other arcane spells makes sense (not overall though, as AM and AB could need a boost).

Another question: Did anyone in the alpha try and reproduce the more than 1½ year old ignite bug yet? If you cannot create it on live-realms don't bother, though - I have seen too many false PTR test fail at testing this. Should I get into the beta at some point this is among the first things I want to test myself.

 

Sayuki

Most of your questions have been answered earlier in this thread. Anyone with questions should check Lhivera's post on page 48 before asking: [Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion

As for Ice Barrier still scaling with spell damage, there's no reason to believe it suddenly won't until a "reliable source" says otherwise. It's like some of the people saying that Winter's Grasp won't work on bosses. We don't need anymore paranoia going on in this thread.

 

Nota

The only reason they're there is because they decided to stand between the 2 to see what would happen. I mean take a good look at the talents that came in with BC and the talents coming in with WotLK.

Arcane:
Improved blink - Finally became a good talent within the last major patch. Until then it was a worthless talent.
Prismatic cloak - Currently it's pretty bad. The change in WotLK is decent but still not a great talent.
Arcane potency - Decent talent at best. Not amazing but not horrible like the rest of the arcane tree.
Empowered arcane missles - It's basically your average empowered talent but with a drawback of costing you more mana for speccing into it.
Spell power - The only true good talent arcane received in BC.
Mind mastery - Kind of a meh talent if you dont' plan on using arcane primarily. It's biggest problem is the poor scaling of int.
Slow - Honestly, there's times I forget that this is our 41 point talent.
Potent spirit - Requires a lot of spirit on our gear otherwise it will be worthless.
Student of the mind - Same as potent spirit.
Incanter's absorption - Seems like it tries to be good but in the end will probably be a let down. I don't know the specific mechanics of this but I doubt the amount you absorb from one hit rolls over into the next.
Netherwind presence - Looks like it's just a gimmick. Nothing special in pve and in pvp it's not a high enough chance to reliably use it.
Arcane barrage - It's the only thing that arcane really has going for it. The only real question is whether or not the mobility from barrage warrants giving up the other trees.

Fire:
Master of elements - A pretty solid talent for raiding.
Playing with fire - Pretty bad considering where it is in the tree. Even after being buffed to only 1% damage taken it's
still craptastic.
Blazing speed - An alright talent. Gives fire a little bit more survivability but pales in comparison to what's available in the frost tree. Definitely has a spot in arc/fire for pvp.
Pyromaniac - Considering how deep the talent is it's kind of blah.
Molten fury - Solid raiding talent.
Empowered fireball - Your average empowered talent
Dragon's Breath - Short range kills it and the fact that it puts CoC on cooldown is kind of like putting the last nail in the coffin.
Fiery payback - a decent talent to catch your opponent off guard with in a 34/37 arc/fire pvp build.
World in Flames - seems mostly like a gimmick.
Hot streak - Again, seems mostly like it's a gimmick.
Burnout - Absolutely worthless. I nominate this for worst talent ever conceived if it goes through like this. Not only does it do jack to increase damage caused but it even costs an additional 1% of your total mana.
Living bomb - Better have a pretty good coefficient otherwise it seems like it's just a talent to make world in flames seem not so gimmicky.

Frost: I'll admit, this tree seems to get a lot of love.
Icy veins - A great talent. One of the best on its tier.
Frozen core- A bad talent. One of the worst on its tier.
Ice floes - A pretty good talent. The decrease on CoC and ice barrier makes this talent worth taking if you need the extra survivability when getting trained.
Winter's chill - Good raiding talent and a solid buffer in pvp.
Arctic winds - Another good raiding talent and helps out quite a bit against physical dps classes which scale far better than us right now. The survivability from this talent scales directly with physical classes so this gets better as they get stronger.
Empowered frostbolt - see previous empowered talents.
Water elemental - This was the talent that redefined the frost tree as being one which now has high controllable burst.
Improved water elemental - Will still cast the same number of freezes but at least the elemental won't go oom on the second freeze and will even deal damage a bit longer in pve.
Brain freeze - Only really seems useful against hunters unless it puts a debuff on them that's separate of frost nova.
Winter's Grasp - This talent is currently holding the spotlight for all of the other mage talents coming in WotLK. I hate to say it but this talent alone may be what decides the future of the class.
Chilled to the bone - Decent pve talent. This talent really shines in pvp though where it will now give our CoC a 70% snare putting it on par with crippling poison but even more effective do to the aoe capability of CoC.
Deep freeze - This one really has me going wtf. 1.5 second cast and requires the target to be frozen. To make it worse it's a stun so it will likely share diminishing returns with all other stuns except kidney shot. Doubt it will be needed in pve and it's like it's trying to be a pvp talent but will probably fail in the end.

After 2 expansions a lot of fire and arcane talents seem like they're counterproductive to the tree in which they exist, counterproductive to the other trees, are nothing special, or just plain suck and Blizzard seems to be content with that. There's a good reason we're looking towards hybrid specs right now and that's because the talents deep in the trees just don't seem to do anything truly remarkable for the class. Sure, I can come up with reasons to use each talent but are those reasons really good enough to justify gimping myself overall? I understand that these talents are subject to change but as they currently are I can honestly say I'm not at all excited about playing my mage in WotLK. The only thing that's currently holding my attention on the mage class is ffb and I don't doubt that it will be nerfed before release.

 

Maledict

Just to nag, but it isn't average. It's strictly inferior to every other empowered talent, as it was nerfed in TBC beta as they were worried about mages scaling too well. Warlocks, Druids, frost mages and arcane mages all have better empowered talents - even if the arcane one still doesn't make the spell worthwhile.

 

Prinsesa

Isn't that the point, though? Empowered AM is a "more powerful" effect on paper but still doesn't do enough to make AM worthwhile, while Fireball is still a viable even if its talent "gives less than the others"

Saying that Empowered Fireball isn't as powerful as the others doesn't really say much without context.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Badmojo

I'm worried about it's uses in Wotlk pve content. Deep in my heart I'm a frost mage and I'd love to be able to spec frost again for raids once wotlk hits.

Yet I think it will all depend on the "selective aoe" dmg in raid encounters. I still can't figure out why some Bosses' AoE dmg ignores Pets (i.e. Illidan's P2 Fireballs) while most Bosses AoE dmg is more than enough to one-shot our elementals.

I'm really excited about the changes to the frost tree but I fear that the factor to make or break frost pve will again be dependent on Bosses AoE abilities and "if" they will affect our pets. Looking at the contribution of the WE's dmg to our total dmg (this also rings true for Beastmasters and maybe even wotlk fire locks), I can't think of any reasonable downside if Boss AoE would ignore pets in general.


Maybe I'm missing something - any other thoughts on this one ?

 

Thegoodman

If FFB truly takes advantage of all Frost and Fire damage modifiers, it could be a great spell. A 0/50/21 build with an additional Mage or 2 in the raid that is Deep Frost w/ WG could make it a terrific spec.

Is there any word on the raiding formats in WotLK? I would personally love it if they went back to 40 man raids.

 

Rouncer

Raids are staying at 25, the only change to raiding is that they said that there will be 10 man versions of all 25 man raids.

 

rimmer

Every raid instance will have a 10 and 25 man version, with different gear equivalent to the difficulty.

 

Deedre

10 and 25 man only, Blizzard has explicitly stated they have no intention of bringing back 40 mans. But they are going to make an entirely parallel 10 man progression game, which is a new thing. (All the 25 mans will have a 10 man equivalent scaled accordingly.) This hasn't entirely sunk in yet, we probably should talk more about mage builds for the 10 man content, which isn't necessarily the same thing as 25 mans.

Slightly offtopic: our own Lhivera got his 15 minutes over on WoWInsider. Congratulations!

 

Zeldyrr

Off topic, perhaps, but my intention wasn't to say that Blizzard doesn't work hard to make things balanced. I just don't have the evidence that they use math to do it. There have been numerous examples of talents / skills / class changes being released that tip the balance heavily in one direction. Then in a series of patches things are adjusted by tweaking numbers until things are balanced. For example:

-- The infamous "mage tax" was implemented because of ZOMG damage. But the math didn't support ZOMG damage and people scratched their heads. Then real raid numbers didn't support ZOMG damage and (finally) the tax was removed.

-- Mages were gathering up too many targets and AOE'ing them down while grinding. So the AOE caps were implemented. But they were implemented in such a clumsy way that a fully talented frost mage does about the same amount of damage with frost AOE spells as a fully talented fire mage.

-- The int/spirit changes of a patch or two ago make mana regen scale with abilities to the 1.5 power instead of 1. It is the only thing in the game (to my knowledge) that scales with a higher power than 1. This means that the mana regen at high levels of spirit and int is crazy good. Blizzard is going to be chasing that one for a while. Adjusting coefficients at level 80 and again as spirit stacks on level 80 epic gear.

-- I forget the name of the talent but way back when a rogue talent was introduced with text that suggested a modest dps increase. People "ran the numbers" and realized it ended up causing a dps decrease.

-- I haven't played my druid seriously in a while but I believe it is still mathematically provable that using Rake is a bad idea in any situation. The ability is so inefficient there literally no reason to use it.

So yes, I agree with you, Blizzard has made a game where there are a lot of choices and the choices are amazingly "equal" and by equal I mean relevant and fun. I just think they could avoid some of the guess work if they modeled their changes mathematically before implementing them.

To direct this back on topic, has Blizzard "run the math" on Winter's Grasp? Or did they just think it was a cool idea for a talent (it is--I love that frost mages will have to react and switch spells up during a raid) and now will tweak the numbers somewhere in between "who would take this talent?" and "a group of frost mages are gods." Can they predict now that as things stand, Fire specs will fall behind in DPS? Or are they going to get there by watching the alpha and beta and tweaking fire talents until they get fire where they want?

Both methods are valid. It just seems to me they could save themselves a lot of headaches if they had models to predict instead of try-and-tweak.

 

◊ manly

Nobody knows how Blizzard balances DPS from classes. Hell, if the raiders knew, they'd probably be fighting a hailstorm.

My guess is that they pick up some 'random' talents, 1 for each major tree, then do something like a 5min tank n spank. Don't forget that the test are ran without the final gear being done, so they possibly just use either random stats or random gear. I doubt hybrid specs are balanced/tested for their dps output, at all.

In any case, if I were designing the game, it would be blatantly obvious that I would balance classes around pvp, pve dps being a really secondary detail. You can't balance classes around pve, then tweak that for pvp; its just not gonna work. It also means that I fully expect several loopholes to exist and accepted as part of the 'cost' to avoid making drastic changes that would incur further testing/tweaking.

Personally I have no idea how blizzard balances class dps. My best guess is that they hardly do. I mean, I look at talents like ferocious inspiration, and can't stop but wonder how in the hell you're supposed to balance a class dps with that buff existing. If you scale BM hunter dps around 1 of them being up (its own), then does it mean that having 2 more bm hunters in the group (group would be resto shaman/4 hunters) would put hunter dps 6% above what they're being scaled for ? Or worse, does it means that blizzard balances bm hunter dps around having always 3 bm hunter per group, so when you're soloing your 6% dps below your intended dps ?

Log on with different model:
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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.

 

◊ Vontre

Thanks for the plug Lhivera.

Winter's Grasp represents a significant challenge as it seems to have exponential stacking returns due to the viability of ice lance. I think the ideal solution would be to prevent the WGR from being refreshed while it is already active. Say that it only works on non-frozen targets.

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

 

alvinrod

I think that they've already realized this and adjusted the cost of spells accordingly. This works out fine for PvE where you will be using your regeneration abilities, but it does shake PvP up a little bit as our mana regeneration options are more limited. I honestly have no idea how much intellect we can expect to see on our gear at 80, but it seems to me as though if they can get the PvP part of the equation fairly balanced it'll work out fine. If it scales too insanely, they can just modify the formula again slightly in order to lower the amount or move the item budget away from intellect and spirit and more towards other damage stats.

From my end it at least looks as though they're aware of this. Whether their solution to the problem is any good is another story considering some of their solutions to other problems in the past.

 

Thegoodman

Thats a shame about the 40 mans, I really enjoyed them and was looking forward to multiple Frost Mages keeping up Winter's Grasp.

Even so, 3 deep frost mages with a fair amount of haste should be able to keep it up for ~50% of the time, making Shatter an amazingly powerful spell assuming that WG can effect bosses. "Chance on crit" abilities similar to the Ashtongue Trinket will also be all that much more exciting.

 

Zeldyrr

I'm not convinced of this actually. The problem is they have one number, one coefficient to work with at level 80. That, and as you point out, spell costs. But consider the difference between non-epic gear at 80 and epic gear at 80. It is reasonable to assume the level 80 epic gear will have a lot more int and spirit on it than the non-epic. For the sake of argument, let's say the epic gear has +400 more int and spirit than the non-epic gear (over all slots).

Before, that would mean the epic-geared mage has 400*coeff better regen. With the spirit change, the epic-geared mage would have 400^1.5*coeff better regen. That is 8000 better regen. So they are left with only two choices. Make coeff really, really small and then non-epic geared people will have like no regen. Or make coeff not so small and epic-geared people will regen their mana bar in a one or two ticks. And they can't fix this with spell costs, because both the epic-geared and non-epic-geared mages have the same spell costs.

Or am I "doing the math" wrong?

 

Arazan

See, this is what really worries me about WG. Back in the day pre-TBC, mages were insanely stackable due to a broken mechanic that allowed them an absolutely insane raid dps potential.

Now, if you really look at WG, it's no less broken than rolling ignites... as stacking mages gives all your frost mages a permanent +50% crit, which is insane... and on top of that, has ridiculous synergy with Death Knight TANKS as some DK tanking abilities have additional affect against frozen targets. So not only do you get the ridiculous mage raid dps, but you make the new class into a ridiculously powerful tank as well...

 

alvinrod

Or they make the blue items have enough intellect and spirit so that the players without epics have decent-good regeneration and then give the epics just a little bit more so that the raiders have better regeneration, but not enough to make the gap incredibly broken. If intellect and spirit start to get out of hand, there's no reason that Blizzard has to keep putting more and more of it on our gear. Perhaps from one tier level to the next we'll only see a minor increase in the amount of intellect and spirit that they allot to the next level, but a larger increase in the amount of spell damage, crit, haste, etc. Hell, they could invent some new stat for us to start chasing or make spell penetration actually useful in PvE and start handing some of that out.

They don't have to create the problem where epic gear has significantly more intellect or spirit than the non-epic gear to begin with. If you look at the arena gear they stopped giving the mages a lot more extra damage and started spending some of the item budget on increasing the armor value of the gear.

On another note, I know some work was done theorizing the damage of FfB specs, but was there any work done to differentiate between 0/50/21, 0/34/37, and 0/30/41? They all use FfB as the main nuke but the first build is not capable of putting up WG whereas the second two builds can manage that and choose between getting combustion and molten fury or getting the Water Elemental. I'm interested to see how they compare to the other, more traditional, builds and how well we can expect them to scale.

Edit: Went back and found this post regarding FfB damage: [Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion

 

Lhivera

I have updated this post so it more closely matches the current thinking in this thread.


I'm not overly concerned about this for two reasons. First, Winter's Grasp somewhat reduces our dependance on the Water Elemental to produce good DPS. The Water Elemental at level 80 may no longer be considered as much of a "maximize uptime to squeeze out optimal sustained DPS" thing. Instead, it might be used more selectively, the way Fire mages will put off using some cooldowns if they're getting close to Molten Fury time.

Second, really, the Water Elemental wasn't horribly vulnerable in level 70 raiding. Yes, there were bad fights for it, but in general we got pretty good use out of it. I don't think there were too many encounters where I couldn't expect at least 9-10% of my damage to come from the Water Elemental. I don't see any reason to expect that matters should be any worse at level 80.


Least I could do, man. I love Magegraf.

Yeah, it's really tricky as it stands. It's going to be very difficult to prevent it from being overpowered with stacked mages without also making it worthless for a single mage. Arazan's comparison with rolling Ignites, below, is very apt. I love that they're trying to solve the problem of so many Frost talent points being tossed out the window on boss fights, and I hope they don't have to abandon it.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Deedre

I suspect that epics will differ from blues not so much in terms of raw stats as in gem slots and various ratings (haste, hit, crit.) And set bonuses where they are applicable, of course. Raw stats will go up some, but not linearly in relation to item level, the budget will be spent on other things.