The MT usually covers shouts and thunderclaps, so I'm not sure what's unusual about that. The moonkins might have mana issues, but they're there for their aura anyways, and you can add resto shamans to each DPS group to help them. Frost mages spamming ice lance against a target with JoW on it (and you can have a holydin put that up) are not going to run oom in a thousand years. Healer numbers can be upped and you can replace some non-paladin healers with paladins to get your blessings.
The point is, once you get 7-8 mages in a raid, every additional mage will be doing an absurd amount of damage. The optimal raid formation for any DPS check becomes to cram as many mages into the raid as possible.
The ideal might go even further - something like:
Frost DK tank
Affliction warlock
Resto shaman
2 holydins
IDS priest
Shadow priest
3 mages
3 groups of resto shaman/boomkin/3 mages
That would make 7 healers and 12 mages. The DK is the MT and shouldn't have any aggro issues with his target considered permanently frozen (and most of the mages can have tranquil air and salv anyways). Frost mages using molten armor get almost nothing from spirit, and the mages who are specced 33 into arcane should have plenty of regen without BoW, so two blessings should be sufficient. The raid lacks demo and tclap, which can be remedied if necessary by swapping in a warrior, but if the boss doesn't hit extremely hard can probably just be healed through.
Basically, you don't bother bringing any physical DPS because supporting them would only take raid spots away from mages.
It's very broken, and obviously can't make it to live. (I do hope they don't just axe WG though - making it unrefreshable would be a much nicer solution.)
It's very broken, and obviously can't make it to live. (I do hope they don't just axe WG though - making it unrefreshable would be a much nicer solution.)
Probably the solution is going to be similar like the Ignite "fix" making it a personal debuff only affecting the owner of the WG debuff.
Densor: A very cohesive collection of points, though not much in the way of news. There are some points, however, which are terribly interesting.
I was not aware, for one, about the Disco-priest shield issue. It seems, by your post, to infer that it'll reflect 50% of the damage assigned to it, even if it doesn't absorb as much. Do we know if this is WIA or a known mechanics miss-application?
Secondly, some of your statements conflict. You diss Combustion for offering "only 2-3%" and a few lines down, call Hot Streak "pretty good" despite it only in fact offers 1.5-2.5% crit for three talent points deeper in the tree. It's not that good, it's remarkably shit. Combustion, in contrast, can force multiple crits when you need them, something Hot Streak can't.
I'd also argue that the 1% burnout is a big deal, one I'm not willing to sacrifice if Burnout (as is currently believed) is only half a Spellpower. It'll totally fuck fire AoE efficiency to death, it negatively synergizes with Incineration (which I feel is simply retarded) and it will practically make your Scorch six times more expensive 35% of the time. 1% of your mana may be less significant to Fireball, but for Scorch it's murder. I don't want to be punished on a non-scaling basis for using a debuff I need in order to maintain competitiveness! Remove Scorch from Burnout's list, and I'll consider full fire. Potentially losing 2-3k mana at the initial 5 scorches per boss, however? Not my idea of intelligent design.
Originally Posted by Gediablo
Probably the solution is going to be similar like the Ignite "fix" making it a personal debuff only affecting the owner of the WG debuff.
Unless we're discussing in the context of removing the raid-synergy by dropping the physical % hit, that is rather non-applicable. I also see it as unlikely they do some bullshit "everyone gains 4%hit, but only you treat it as frozen, does not stack with other applications of it's self for the %hit"
I see it much more likely they drop the duration to 3sec (thus Bolt-Lance or Bolt-Bolt-Lance with massive haste, which is unlikely), possibly even drop the proc chance to 8%.
I kind of agree that Deep Freeze is not overly exciting from a PVE perspective. But just for the sake of how incredibly powerful this is going to be in PVP, many mages seem to just underestimate this (or maybe a "we don't talk about Ice Lance" v2.0).
Let's first take a simplified look at what we can do when dealing alone with 2 opponents: well, Polymorph one and nuke the other. Depending on which classes you have to deal with, this goes from easy (2 warriors) to hard (1 healer, 1 melee) to more or less impossible (2 warlocks).
Now add the utility of Deep Freeze and your CC options become drastically improved.
E.g. in your fight against the healer-meele-team, you can now CS the healer (whether it is 4 seconds since you can still have Improved Counterspell or a full school-lockout) followed by a Polymorph. If he trinkets out of your Polymorph, you Frostnova the healer, Deep Freeze him and have a another 5 second window of no heals for the melee opponent.
Prolong with another Polymorph (another 4 seconds) and wonder how anyone can think of this as "meh".
Sorry for derailing into PVP, but nevertheless it is something i'm really looking forward to and my carrot on a stick regarding WotLK.
Still, deep freeze offers something no other class does as well as we do: Sickeningly powerful AoE snare.
Currently, full-talented blizz slows down to 25% move speed. You've all seen the glacial speed at which targets move under this potent debuff. Imagine now, that same speed, reduced to 3/5 it's value. An utterly crawling pace. For all intents and purposes, a fullt-talented slow blizz with Frostbite could paritally reduce the need to AoE Tank. By the time shit gets to you (or the lock Seeding, or whoever is ranged AoEing), you can freeze them with the WE, relocate, reapply.
Anedris, before jumping to the conclusion that WG is broken, I'd like to see what a well put together melee group can do, taking into consideration their own new talents. We are very impressed with ourselves here without having any clear idea of what the grunts are capable of.
We will leave aside the issue of encounter design. Recruiting 12 mages for a minority of fights that allow for said stacking makes zero logistical/political sense to me, min maxing notwithstanding. Looks like massive guild drama begging to happen. It becomes a headache in terms of guild administration and loot distribution. A very few guilds might pull that off, but even many top raiding guilds aren't 100% progression machines who can run roughsod over their members like this.
I do think your raid setup is the pretty close to the best attempt to maximize WG. Putting in a DK for MT is the right idea, and your caster groups make more sense to me, although I believe you underestimate the mana drain on the mages, who will surely be doing more than just pure icelance spam. Still inclined to use shadow priests in them over a shammy, but it's an emprical question we can't answer at this time regarding mana usage.
Probably the solution is going to be similar like the Ignite "fix" making it a personal debuff only affecting the owner of the WG debuff.
The problem with that is that you just went from adding a single debuff to adding (1 + # of Frost Mages) debuffs to the target. One shared debuff for the +2% hit effect, and then one individual debuff for the Frozen effect.
It also makes no sense conceptually (how can the target be frozen for me, but not for you), and I suspect it runs counter to part of the intended design, which is to give Frost mages some synergy, both with the occasional non-Frost mage with Shatter, and with frost-based DK tanks (Howling Blast maybe becomes a useful threat ability if a Frost mage is putting Grasp on the target).
I'm not saying they can't make adjustments along those lines, just pointing out that such adjustments carry their own problems.
Originally Posted by Pintofbrew
Secondly, some of your statements conflict. You diss Combustion for offering "only 2-3%" and a few lines down, call Hot Streak "pretty good" despite it only in fact offers 1.5-2.5% crit for three talent points deeper in the tree. It's not that good, it's remarkably shit. Combustion, in contrast, can force multiple crits when you need them, something Hot Streak can't.
Well, assuming my script produced reasonably accurate results:
- At 10% Fireball crit, Combustion is worth 3.4986% crit per talent point, while Hot Streak is worth only 0.264% per point.
- At 40% Fireball crit, Combustion is worth 1.5944% crit per talent point, while Hot Streak is worth 1.1506% per point.
- At 47% Fireball crit, Hot Streak surpasses Combustion's value, at 1.3721% crit per point vs. 1.3528%.
47% is of course going to be unreasonably high most of the time. But when you factor in how well Hot Streak works with AOE, I don't think it's fair to discount it as terrible.
Originally Posted by Weepel
I kind of agree that Deep Freeze is not overly exciting from a PVE perspective.
I actually disagree, simply because it's going to add some entertainment value to trash. Anything that makes trash clears more fun is a positive in my book!
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.
- At 40% Fireball crit, Combustion is worth 1.5944% crit per talent point, while Hot Streak is worth 1.1506% per point.
- At 47% Fireball crit, Hot Streak surpasses Combustion's value, at 1.3721% crit per point vs. 1.3528%.
6% more crit from 5/5 hot streak at 40% base crit rate ? Something feels out of place.
<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 said I'd discuss Burnout later. Now seems like a good time. Based on what the other 46-50 point talents give, it wouldn't make sense for it to be what we all want and hope it will turn out to be. A 3-4% damage increase is all that the comparative talents give, so it can't give much more than that. The 1% mana cost isn't even a big deal. I'm betting that regen will be the big stat of this patch, and getting to the point where you can regen enough mana to sustain yourself without much support will likely be possible. As a result, more focus will be on stacking spirit rather than int, which reduces the mana you lose to Burnout, without changing your effective mana pool.
I would disagree that the 1% is no big deal.
The base cost of the max rank fireball in WotLK is supposed to be 655, so with Master of Elements, Pyromaniac and Elemental Precision, the true mana cost for a fireball crit is
655 * 0.97 * 0.97 - 0.3 * 655 = 420 mana
Let's assume a 15k mana pools (which seems like a realistic guess, if base mana and int increases as much as we expect other stats to, and if mana pools are supposed to increase to the same extent as spell costs). Then the 1% will be 150 extra mana cost on a crit. That is a 36% extra mana cost for 8.3% more damage. This is for fireball, the best case. For short casting time spells it is even worse, for a scorch crit, it is a 94% mana cost increase for the 8.3% damage increase (!!). Assuming a 40% crit chance, the overall mana cost increase for fireball spam:
Cost without Burnout : 655 * 0.97 * 0.97 - 0.3 * 0.4 * 655 = 538 mana
Cost with Burnout 538 + 150 * 0.4 = 598 mana
An overall increase of 11% mana cost for fireball spam, which does seem like a big deal to me. The 1% would counter going 10 points into arcane to get Arcane Concentration, and consider that some of the knowledgable people on this board have been discussing whether taking Arcane Concentration may in fact be a necessity.
I think it is a big leap of faith to expect mana regeneration to be increased enough for us to have practically unlimited mana. If mana regen is somewhat balanced for someone without Burnout, then you will be 11% short with the talent. In fact, I am not really seeing any good indication that mana economy will be less of an issue for us. Mana cost for each spell seems to be up around 40%, and the gain from VT is decreased. Just making up for this would require a big increase in regen. Which would have to come from changes to other classes, like improved totems, consumables and spirit based regen. Spirit based regen as it is only cover somewhere between nothing and a modest fraction of our budget (nothing unless you have Arcane Meditation and/or mage armor), and since it depends on the hand tweaked level based base mana regen value, it will be whatever Blizzard decides it should be (so, unknown but most likely tweaked so mana won't be infinite for anyone).
Originally Posted by Densor
The huge increase in DPS seen in BC vs vanilla is not going to be repeated in WotLK. I foresee at most a 7-8% increase in DPS for each class, while the effects from ratings drop and spell damage continues to grow at about the same rate as seen in BC raiding. People expecting to see the same jump that we saw from vanilla to BC are going to be disappointed (and that is most of us, it seems).
But the thing is, our dps potential has been worse than other dps classes in a raid setting during TBC, and increasingly falling behind, in spite of us mostly offering nothing but ourdps to a larger extent than warlocks and hunters. With our worse scaling, and increased base damage being minor in WotLK, this is only going to get worse. We really need a buff the size of the "good version" of Burnout just to catch up to the other dps classes, and apparently for what we know at the moment, deep fire needs it just to stay viable compared to other mage specs. AE is all fine, but the thing is, it is used any in maybe 10% of all boss fights, and apart from that just on the obligatory gimmicky trash packs with the big "mages are supposed to feel useful here" signs. Something as situationally useful as AE just can't make up for the lack of single target dps, when single target dps is what we are doing 95%+ of the time, and which is most often the critical contribution we provide to getting down a boss. Unless it's fixed, it seems there will be little motivation to keep playing as a mage, compared to rerolling.
Oh its a 3 pointer. Shows how much I care about speculative talents.
<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
Anedris, before jumping to the conclusion that WG is broken, I'd like to see what a well put together melee group can do, taking into consideration their own new talents. We are very impressed with ourselves here without having any clear idea of what the grunts are capable of.
We will leave aside the issue of encounter design. Recruiting 12 mages for a minority of fights that allow for said stacking makes zero logistical/political sense to me, min maxing notwithstanding. Looks like massive guild drama begging to happen. It becomes a headache in terms of guild administration and loot distribution. A very few guilds might pull that off, but even many top raiding guilds aren't 100% progression machines who can run roughsod over their members like this.
I do think your raid setup is the pretty close to the best attempt to maximize WG. Putting in a DK for MT is the right idea, and your caster groups make more sense to me, although I believe you underestimate the mana drain on the mages, who will surely be doing more than just pure icelance spam. Still inclined to use shadow priests in them over a shammy, but it's an emprical question we can't answer at this time regarding mana usage.
I remember playing my mage as 10/0/51 back when kara was serious business, before the mana gem buff and spirit change.... both of which were pretty big buffs to mana endurance. At that time, I could chaincast frostbolts for 10 minutes, and end the fight with 30-50% of a full mana pool (if I didn't end a fight with AB spam). Looking at the base mana costs of spells and the expected cheaply itemized spirit on caster gear, I can't expect that much is going to change there... even considering haste and moonkin buffs.
As for melee, find any way to give all of your melee dps 80+% crit, with the potential of ridiculous 2.8 or 3.15 crit modifiers. WG isn't "hey what a nice option", it's "holy jesus what an abusable mechanic".
Oh and in the raid setup I posted it had 7 healers, which iirc is pretty standard for a 25man raid... and you could easily take out some of the melee dps'ers to cram in a ret paladin for JoW and an extra blessing.
EDIT:
Also, in regards to mana endurance and frostfire builds... you need to realize that those mages will have 3/3 MoE and an almost permanent 80%'ish crit if you're stacking mages. Basically that's like MoE just making all your frostfire bolts 25% cheaper... putting it on par in terms of mana cost with Frostbolt.
EDIT2:
Originally Posted by Jonny_Monroe
and frost channeling.
Oh true, forgot about that. Actually, when you consider this... if WG goes through as it is now, frostfire builds could easily be the biggest endurance mage spec.
Also, in regards to mana endurance and frostfire builds... you need to realize that those mages will have 3/3 MoE and an almost permanent 80%'ish crit if you're stacking mages. Basically that's like MoE just making all your frostfire bolts 25% cheaper... putting it on par in terms of mana cost with Frostbolt.
Whoa, where'd you hear that they're decreasing the cost of spirit on gear?
He is making the assumption that spirit will be worth less because it will be thrown around on gear a lot more.
Like stam was added in TBC to everything in droves, but in Wotlk we will have spirit increased at a lowered item value cost.
Please remember this is not a fact yet and just speculation. They are making gear more generic yes, but who knows what stats they will bring, from what I have seen of leaked gear so far its mostly melee, plate and not much caster loot thus far.
Whoa, where'd you hear that they're decreasing the cost of spirit on gear?
Just based on the new ranks of buff spells, Divine Spirit saw a larger increase than other buffs did. Then again it's not a huge enough change to suggest that spirit cost was reduced. There might be some other stuff about it further back in the thread.
Blizzard has stated that they don't plan to change any stat like the did with stamina in BC.
Something to keep in mind is that there was a change in item setup in The Burning Crusade to where you saw a lot more stamina on basically everything. In Wrath of the Lich King we don't currently plan to rework an entire statistic like that, so instead the items will just get more powerful at a more consistent rate. Of course anything can still change so we'll have to see how things turn out.
Bornakk hedged his bets at the end there, but even if they did change their minds later we wouldn't be seeing it yet.
Ok something i noticed while browsing our sister class's talents. If you had 4-5 frost mages in a raid wouldn't all they would basically have to do is spam Ice Lance the whole fight to get tons more damage and have way better efficiency than a normal frost rotation? Given that in the winter's grasp 5 sec period they could all cast at least 2 ice lances (most likely 3 effectively with a touch of haste) to easily keep the effect allways on. Also given that ice lance does triple damage to frozen targets and has way more damage per mana at that point, also doing waaaaaay more that frostbolt per second at that point to boot. Of course this is in a sterile test environment of no threat cap and not having to move at all.
Please tell me if i missed anything, i was mostly doing rough math and might have easily missed something. Also keep in mind im just talking theory here not effective raid practice.
Oh and if this has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, do forgive me. I tried searching through the thread as much as i could stand (I haven't been following it regularly) and didn't see anything.
Ok something i noticed while browsing our sister class's talents. If you had 4-5 frost mages in a raid wouldn't all they would basically have to do is spam Ice Lance the whole fight to get tons more damage and have way better efficiency than a normal frost rotation? Given that in the winter's grasp 5 sec period they could all cast at least 2 ice lances (most likely 3 effectively with a touch of haste) to easily keep the effect allways on. Also given that ice lance does triple damage to frozen targets and has way more damage per mana at that point, also doing waaaaaay more that frostbolt per second at that point to boot.
Not entirely true. A triple-damage Ice Lance against a frozen target is going to have higher average DPS than a frostbolt against a non-frozen target, but if they're both hitting a frozen target, the Frostbolt will have higher average DPS. The only advantage to spamming the Ice Lance is a greater chance of refreshing the debuff before it expires. Mind you, that itself may be well worthwhile.
Oh and if this has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, do forgive me. I tried searching through the thread as much as i could stand (I haven't been following it regularly) and didn't see anything.
Oh, we've been discussing it at great length, and in fact most of us feel that it needs adjustment.
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.
Just based on the new ranks of buff spells, Divine Spirit saw a larger increase than other buffs did. Then again it's not a huge enough change to suggest that spirit cost was reduced. There might be some other stuff about it further back in the thread.
That's a bad assumption to make based on buffs alone, especially since fort is being buffed to 165.
Just based on the new ranks of buff spells, Divine Spirit saw a larger increase than other buffs did. Then again it's not a huge enough change to suggest that spirit cost was reduced. There might be some other stuff about it further back in the thread.
That is merely an indication that Divine Spirit was not valued enough as a talent. Not that the whole stat is getting revamped.
Whoa, where'd you hear that they're decreasing the cost of spirit on gear?
I said the EXPECTED cheaply itemized spirit on caster gear.
With the enchants that give spirit and new ranks of stuff like Divine Spirit, spirit is being more generously given. In other words, enchants and buffs that give spirit now are roughly 1:1 with enchants or buffs that give int. The enchants and buffs in the WoLK data show that it's being skewed a little more in favor of spirit. Because of that, and because of the combination of healer and caster dps gear, AND because of some new caster talents being spirit-based, people are speculating that spirit will be more widely available and more widely used.
EDIT:
@Pint, it's not just Divine Spirit. Check out the new enchanting stuff from WoLK... the enchantments popping up that give +spirit are giving more than the ones that give +int... and of course you have random warlock talents popping up that are based on spirit, and locks armor (sorry I can't remember which one it is) being changed to also give spirit-based casting regen.
I don't see what you mean by the word cheaply then since all that means is that spirit will become more useful. Nothing really indicates that it would be become cheaper on gear. In the case of spirit, since it's being made more useful I would expect it to probably be a bit higher than int at this point. Spirit enchants used to be used solely by mages and then they changed evoc and fucked up the usefulness of the spirit enchant. Int enchants are used solely by hunters so they can get extra int for pvp. None of this indicates a reason to believe spirit would require less from the item budget than int would in WotLK.
I'm also not seeing how enchants play a role since both int and spirit are going up by the same amount with Enchant Cloak - Wisdom being the only possible exception but all that does is finally give us a useful cloak enchant. Though haste would probably be better to cloak if they're also merging haste and spell haste into one stat like crit and hit. As far as enchants are concerned they seem to be based off of what's appropriate for that level rather than a set formula for how they increase.
Blizzard is making spirit more valuable via talents and base spell changes (like fel armor), and has to due to the homogenization in cloth gear drops. This is no way implies that the stat cost is changing.
They have to do this in order to make the drops palatable for, say, warlocks. We ourselves will likely have proportions of spirit on our gear (which is the same as everyone else's) similar to the ones today.
The more interesting question is whether or not Blizzard can succeed in persuading mages to actually use mage armor to take advantage of the stat. (Or if they have come up with some other reason for mages to appreciate it.) The class as a whole just does not like spirit and hasn't embraced it, minus a few oddball arcanists like myself.
06/26/08, 3:53 AM
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