I'd agree with you on this if it wasn't for the refreshing of WG. On a cast for cast basis frostbolt is in fact higher but only slightly. The difference with current gear would only be in double digits. The chance to refresh the debuff though would more than make up for the difference. If you have 4-5 mages like he was talking about then ice lance should make up more raid dps than frostbolt on average.

Actually in a ffb hybrid build you may want to use mage armor depending on the raid makeup. On frost immune bosses you'll probably want to use molten armor. On normal bosses you may end up using mage armor since molten armor probably won't make a difference in the number of crits you see.

Have to chime in with one more thought.

Arcane Barrage will be helping arcane mages greatly in keeping some DPS up during raid fights that need a lot of movement. On that same vein, if WG works the way it is supposed to (we pray), then frost mages will be able to keep up 100% DPS spamming ice lance on the move.

It would bring frost mages to the top of the table DPS wise, mana efficiency wise, survival wise, and even for DPS during movement wise. Not to mention their AOE would probably have the biggest crowd control (improved blizzard).

All that is banking on the mechanics of how winger's grasp work on raid bosses... >_< Somehow, I just don't like this state of affairs. Even if its goes live, there's a big chance of Blizzard turning around and nerfing it to oblivion if it works out the way we hope it will work out.

Even if I am a mage, I can be objective enough to distinguish between a good talent, and an overpowered one. For raid purposes, WG is not just merely good, its just flat out overpowered. The talent essentially reads "have 5 frost mage or more in raid, and all your ice lances will do triple normal damage permanently and your crit rate will increase 50% permanently (from shatter procs on a permanent WG)."

To make things easier, let's assume enough haste to cast 2 fireballs per 5 seconds. As that is a stupid amount of haste, especially at the start of WotLK raiding, the mana efficiency should actually be better than what follows. Base mana cost is 655, after talents it is 616.

Assuming a balanced raid make up, you'll have a ret paladin and thus JoW. JoW is 143 mana per hit. BoW (w/ talent) is 109 mana per 5 seconds. Assuming JoW proc rate of 50%, BoW and JoW give 252 mana per 2 fireball casts, or effectively 126 mana off each fireball cast. With Arcane Concentration (probably the better choice until mana regen on gear catches up), you're looking at another 10% reduction on fireball mana cost, so that's another 61 mana off the effective cost. Add in mana spring totem at ~80 mana per 5 (didn't see any info, so I'm guessing based on BoW scaling) for another 40 mana off the effective cost. Going with 676 int buffed at level 80 (conservative estimate, IMO) and 500 spirit (again conservative, IMO) with a 0.008 factor for mana regen (once again, conservative) gives an OOC regen of 104 per second, with mage armor and arcane meditation that's 156 mana regen per fireball cast.

Given those numbers, a fireball will effectively cost 233 mana or 93.2 mana per second. With a 19.6k mana pool, Burnout mana cost will equal the mana regained from master of elements, so crit rate doesn't matter. At that point, with current mana gems, you'd be able to go for 287 seconds without innervates, evocates, potions, or any other outside mana regen, nor haste trinkets, abilities, or procs, which will reduce mana efficiency.

Given those numbers, a 15k mana pool instead, and a 30% crit rate, you instead get 219 mana for a fireball or 87.7 mana per second. That's 253 seconds of fireball spam with current mana gems, given the same conditions as before.

So, in general, I don't see why you're bitching about 1% mana loss on a crit. And as shown below, stop complaining about Scorch. Also, AoE spells will see better returns from MoE, and thus will be affected less by the Burnout mana penalty.

That's because warlocks were broken and should be fixed, and hunters... well, I don't know about hunters, but I'd guess they are a bit broken currently, too, and will probably get fixed. Our DPS should end up being only a slight bit behind warlocks, and on par with hunters and rogues.

That doesn't mean that Deep Freeze is any good. Deep frost or CttB are good, but the 51 point talent is not used for AoE kiting.

PvP is an entirely different ball game, and I wasn't even considering talents from that angle, because PvP doesn't interest me.

The problem is that Combustion scales negatively with crit, while Hot Streak scales positively with crit. Also, Combustion is a 21 point talent, which should be significantly better than a 2% average crit buff. Combustion is a very poorly scaling on use ability, compared to IV or AP. In general, I find it to be a poor use of a place in our talent tree that could be better used. Not to mention that it doesn't sync well with other CD's, due to being about 15 seconds behind them, and gets poor results if you end up having to fireblast or scorch, due to their increased crit rate. Maybe I'm slightly biased by disappointment in the talent.

I already explained why Burnout isn't an issue for fireballs, and AoE will be fine, since Arcane Explosion has worse mana efficiency than fire AoE's. Since Scorch costs 250 mana base, 235 talented, with a cast time of 1.25s that means the effective cost of scorch is -3 mana. Critting with a scorch with 19.6k mana will cost you 121 mana, or just barely more than a half a fireball cast, so you shouldn't lose any DPS time by using Scorch. If you have a 15k mana pool, critting a scorch will cost you 75 mana. Thus, it will still be more mana efficient to cast a scorch with a 100% crit rate than to cast a fireball with a 0% crit rate. Please run numbers before you start complaining about Burnout.

One more nugget of information I thought of while talking about warlocks below. Spellsteal is also a good way for Blizzard to boost mage DPS, but usually it is implemented poorly, such as a 10s duration buff that takes 1.5s to steal, which sucks or a buff that will wipe the raid if not removed immediately, so that mages have to interrupt their current spells to do it or other classes dispel it themselves. Not to mention that usually only one mage can benefit from the buff, unless the mages come up with a rotation. Depending on how many fights utilize spellsteal in WotLK, we might be better off that what our theorycrafting is going to show.

And now I'm going to respond to people who have said stuff about warlocks. Please ignore the rest of the post if you don't care.

Shadow destro warlocks currently scale better than fire mages. This is because they have Improved shadowbolt, which scales inversely with crit rate due to mechanics, kind of. With more crit rate, you get less extra raid damage from ISB with each crit, but you crit more often. Regardless how it works, until you get more than a 40% crit rate as a warlock, ISB provides damage on par with ignite, if not more. So, as a simplification: ISB = ignite. Then, warlocks also get Ruin, which is equal to Ice Shards. So, our current hope for crit damage modifiers with FFB is what warlocks currently get with Shadowbolts. Also, warlocks get +8% crit from their tree, to our 9% from fire (5% from deep frost, 12% for arcane, 6% for arc/frost using frost). Warlocks also get +15% shadow damage from Demonic Sacrifice, compared to our 17% from fire w/ MF added in (11% for deep frost, 5.5% for arcane, 14% for arc/frost using frost). Their basic debuffs are equivalent to ours.

As a result, warlocks scale significantly better than mages. That is why we currently feel underpowered, and why warlocks are unhappy with the changes to ISB and their new talents (which do nothing to buff shadow destruction, other than provide the ability to get Improved Life Tap).

The new changes reduced ISB from being about 70% to 53% extra damage on a crit @ 20% crit rate or about 58% to 48% extra damage on a crit @ 45% crit rate. That's a loss of an average of 13.5% crit damage, or would be like taking 1 point out of spell power in an arc/frost build, or not taking Burnout in a deep fire build. About a 3% damage loss, maybe.

Given that Fel Armor's DPS bonus is increasing while Molten Armor's is staying the same, and Imp Life Tap will reduce damage lost to Life Tap, while instant corruption will increase damage dealt while on the run, I'd say warlocks won't really lose that much from shadow destruction, while fire destruction and affliction are both getting buffs.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that shadowbolt scales better on its own than fireball, given that it gets 3 seconds worth of coefficient in 2.5 seconds worth of cast time compared to fireball's 3.5 coefficient in 3 seconds of cast time. Plus, Shadow and Flame is better since the cast is faster AND it adds an extra 5% coefficient. All in all, shadowbolt gets about 42.3% spell damage per second of cast time, while fireball gets 38.3% spell damage per second of cast time.

The only reason mages even compete with warlocks is because we can stack cool downs, something that a deep fire spec gets very few of. Spellsteal is also a good way for Blizzard to boost mage DPS, but usually it is implemented poorly, such as a 10s duration buff that takes 1.5s to steal, which sucks or a buff that will wipe the raid if not removed immediately, so that mages have to interrupt their current spells to do it or other classes dispel it themselves. Not to mention that usually only one mage can benefit from the buff, unless the mages come up with a rotation. Depending on how many fights utilize spellsteal in WotLK, we might be better off that what our theorycrafting is going to show.

One more point about how frost death knights will synergise perhaps just a bit too well with frost mages especially if winter's grasp goes through.

Frost Deathknight currently have a talented ability that reads

Howling Blast

Costs 1 frost rune, 20 yard range

Description: Blasts the target with a frigid wind dealing 278 damage to all enemies within 10 yards. Deals Triple damage to frozen targets

Rank 5 hits for 777 damage!!!

If WG works the way it does, this thing is going to always hit for triple damage in raid. Combine with 3/3 mercilous combat, which says that a DK's frost abilities will do an additional 60% damage on targets with less than 20% health...

Basically, the kind of crits and hits that this ability will do in a situation where the raid boss is semi-permanently treated as frozen is going to be .... obscene. BTW, frost AOE with this ability is going to be really fun. Just as well the DK is a tank as well, cos aggro will almost certainly be there if he crits with this on a bunch of mobs that the mage has just frost novaed.

Frost mages will benefit from frozen rune weapon too, assuming it works on bosses. Anything hit by a frost DK has a chance of making the mob more vulnerable to frost. From a raiding perspective, it just seems like frost is too good right now. We will see how it goes though. Since things are in alpha right now, lots of things may still change.

Bear in mind that this ability has a 30-second cooldown, and likely has a very low attack power coefficient, being both instant and AOE. Which is not to say it sucks, but it's not insanely powerful, either.

Why would it not work on bosses? People seem to have this idea that "Frost school debuff" somehow means "probably doesn't work on bosses." That's simply not the case. To date, as far as I know, bosses are not immune to any non-impairing debuffs unless they are actually immune to the relevant school of damage. Why do people think this is suddenly going to change?

Well, then the raid synergies for the specs are:

Frost - synergise with frost death knights and other frost mages.
Fire - act as scorch buffer for other fire mages and locks...
Arcane - helps nobody but themselves only? ... zero synergy

And given that WG right now puts frost mages as top raid DPS as well...

Bosses are generally only immune to snares, roots, silences, and other effects that would drastically reduce their damage output(Curse of Tongues) or mobility. Bosses that are already rooted (Ragnaros, Murmur, Lurker, Muru&KJ?) are not immune to being frozen. Well, at least Ragnaros isn't which was something of great amusement in MC. Any debuff that merely makes you hit them a little harder is just fine.

I fear we may see a lot more frost immun boss than in the past, even if blizzard said that they wouldn't make a new Molten /Frozen Core.
Frostfire bolt is supposed to help us on those boss/mobs but a full frost speced mage spamming Frostfire bolt (without WG, Winter's Chill , Water Elemental) will perform very poorly.

Kel'thuzad is very resistant to Frost (like Rage Winterchill ~20% resist) and Sapphiron is Frost immun, and they aren't the first boss in the instance as Rage Winterchill/Supremus Hydros/Al'ar which were quickly mastered.

Malygos as a blue dragon is also likely to be Frost immun.

Frost may end up beeing the best pve spec but crippled by random(1/3) frost immun boss in every 25 man instances.

I think it won't be so bad as molten core and BWL as I believe Blizzard has learnt from those. Much of northrend is not covered in ice. So, I don't really expect that many mobs to be frost resistant.

I think it will be a fixed %. From what i have gathered, DKs will be dual-wield tanking. Having a PPM system would mean two-hand tanking would be just as good, which is in a way the contrary of that.

About frozen rune weapon proc, i expect it to be always up when haste-dual-wielding, not when two-handing or not under the effect of icy talons. But we'll see.

err, what's PPM ?

And in a raid, there might be more than one DK with that ability. So, whether it takes a longer or shorter time to stack up to 10% might not be that significant. Its remains to be seen at this point whether DKs are going to be forced to tank using dual wield or whether two hander is just as viable.

Right now, the damage lost from strikes probably balances out any DPS gained from Dual wield, plus increasing the chances of being parry gibbed is not appealing. So, I hope its based on this PPM system.

In your example, you are assuming mage armor, arcane mediation and arcane concentration.

You are going to want 51 points in fire to get all single target dps increases, and 3 points in elemental precision. That only leaves points for 2/3 arcane meditation. So you would have to drop a point to get the last point in arcane meditation. And you would have to drop Icy Veins. The loss of Icy Veins and Molten Armor in themselves means a dps loss slightly above what you will get for Burnout in the first place. So, you spend 5 points on Burnout and have to put the rest in arcane, just to end up at Status Quo of what we have now already. That doesn't seem very enticing.

Also, around 4 minutes of mana supply given mana spring, mana gems, 100% uptime JoW and taking all applicable mana conservations across the 3 talent trees seems on the low side.. There are many encounters where you'd get in trouble with that in TBC. Beyond those 4 minutes, there's generally only mana potions and evocation to sustain you (I think I got an innervate something like once or twice during all of TBC). Evocation is unreliable, due to being channeled, and if you do use it after your 4 minutes, because Burnout made you go oom, and spend time where you'd otherwise be dps'ing (which will almost always be the case), that's a further 4% dps lost, in itself almost negating the gain from Burnout in the first place.

In any case, whether you can just about scrape by on a ~4 minute fight even with the 1% penalty , doesn't really prove that the penalty is insignificant, which was what my original post was about. Doing better than barely scraping by lalso ets you do things like using more dps consumables, like flame caps and destruction potions instead of mana potions and mana gems, and you won't be useless the moment an encounter takes longer than expected for whatever reason.

If you want to determine whether the talent is bad or not, I think you really have to compare the situation where you have it, to when if you haven't. Using your numbers, for the 15k mana pool, 30% crit, 219 mana per cast example, you get a 174 mana pr. cast cost instead, letting you cast for 319 seconds instead of the 253(actually, more, because I only counted using the 3 charges of the mana emeral here, when you could be using different rank ones also). That means all else being the same as in your example, you could cast for 26% longer without the 1% penalty, than with it. I just can't see that as negligible. If you disagree, I guess we have a difference of opinion, rather than disagreeing about the actual effect and numbers.

Why are you comparing fireball to scorch? Whether you have Burnout or not, you should have no cause to cast a fireball when you would have cast a scorch, or vice versa. A scorch is still a scorch, and it's only interesting to compare a scorch with and without burnout, in my opinion. All you are showing is that you still don't run yourself oom as fast casting scorch instead of fireball, even with Burnout, which isn't very interesting. You'd better not run oom as fast, considering the much lower dps!

In fact, you are showing that with the 19.6k mana pool, you are running yourself out of mana about as fast casting scorch as casting fireball (in spite of the much lower dps). Is that supposed to be an argument for why Burnout isn't bad for scorch? Fact is, for each scorch you cast, you pay an expected (crit_rate * 0.01 * max_mana) per scorch with Burnout, instead of an effective cost of -3 you would have an effective cost of -48 (presumably giving you mana back to keep you fireball spam up).

Well I agree it makes no sense conceptually, but yet this is pretty much how ignite works now (The target is burning in full flames for me, but not for you).

I think the problem more is the hit debuff that affects everyone. Even if you had a WG debuff per mage that did the "considered frozen" part, there would have to be a shared buff that all classes could "see". Blizzard could do something like that, but it really doesn't fit into their system of buffs and debuffs.

I don't typically like conceptual arguments, but in this case it would just be silly. So the boss gets hit with a magic frost bolt from a mage and WG procs. He is not immune to the effect; now he is easier to hit. But only the mage who cast the spell can somehow do more damage to him. The frost mage to his right, with the same skills and talents, can't figure it out. Seconds later, that second mage procs WG. The boss is no more easier to hit for everyone else. That first mage can no longer do extra damage to him. But mage #2 starts to light him up. That scenario is possible but seems awkward to me.

I apologize if this has already been covered (I read start of the thread and last half, skipped middle to catch up), but given ten man raids will be a full separate progression path through all the content, what do the new talents give us for trees and group stacking there?

It's a vague question I realize, and we need to see the boss fights, but groupings and specs could be quite different for dedicated ten man teams and I'd like to get a take on the options from the regulars.

If I remember correctly Blizzard has said they're tuning the tens around one tank. I don't buy that for a second but take them at their word, figure MT, OT (dps feral, dps war, DK, or holy/ret pally aoeing), 2-3 healers. 5-7 DPS slots. If Grasp goes live as it stands (I can't imagine it will if it works on bosses, dear lord), does stacking frosts & frostfires & a boomkin have a chance to work by raw damage output or will lack of buffs, cc, and cross-class synergies to MT & hunter/melee kill it? Boom will haste the mages and faerie for the tank/melee, so that part works out. Frosts will add more hit, that also works.

I'll almost certainly end up doing mostly tens through the higher content, and frost isn't looking so good honestly.

TurtleSludge, I'm liking arcane for 10 man action, with perhaps enough in fire to cover imp scorch. Jonny Monroe posted a build along these lines way uptopic.

But I don't see anything hugely wrong with frost for this content, either. Even if WG gets nerfed to some extent. Just because you cannot throw 7 frost mages at this sort of content doesn't mean frost is garbage for it, certainly on live 10 mans are very frost friendly. The cc it brings to the table is if anything well suited for the content. Fight lengths tend to work well with the WE.

10 mans necessarily preclude much in the way of raid stacking and you should aim for flexibility in your build as opposed to min maxing. Look at the subtle things and don't worry so much about crazy raid set ups. Encounter design will surely favor variety in 10 man comps.

Clear loser here is deep fire, but then, deep fire is broken generally at this time.

Edit: and to add to Pint's point about tanks, we have 3 classes available who can swing hybrid dps/tanking builds, namely, druids, warriors and presumably DKs. Only the paladin is somewhat inhibited in this regard, and paladins are strong contenders for MT in 10 mans anyhow.

Because several people in this thread have said things like "I don't want to lose 2-3k mana by casting my initial scorch stack." Or "Casting scorch will now be horrible for fire mana efficiency. I guess we'll be penalized even more for trying to keep up improved scorch." And those people are making a big deal out of nothing, because it is still more mana efficient to cast scorch, and casting scorch is already a DPS loss that we accept because it keeps up Improved Scorch, which is a great DPS boost.

I'll reply to the rest of your post when I get back from work.

I never made any claim of the sort. Neither did I suggest any 51 should be. You will note many, many classes are running positively shite or possibly debateable 51s. Aside of the warrior 51s, which are a respite and welcome oasis of freshness in a sea of bullshit that is the rest of their trees, mostly the 51s are pointless from a raiding PvE perspective. The only arguably PvE influencing talent so far in Alpha, DK aside, is Flourish.

Ahem. Arcane barrage, Pint. Although that one is also hot for pvp, to muddy the waters.

Yes quite. In my frenzy to review the other classes, idiocy overcame and made me miss the goodness that ABarr is. Not to mention Living Flame is rather clearly PvE-tuned aswell, though also is dubious as it's (currently seeming) non-relevant to single-targeting.

Bottom line remains, however, 51s aren't necessarily pinnacles of evolution anymore.

Dug it out, thanks. Along the lines of what I was thinking, or with a pair. frostfire + an aoe slow deep frost.

Certainly. Been 17/0/44 for friends over progression where I couldn't expect any type of support, 10 or 25. Efficiency, solid damage through T5, carebear on the barrier. Going to do things for real next time around which is why I asked. I'll shut up after this post, promise!

Thought I'd acknowledged this in my numbers (which assumed the intent is single tank but not trusting that). Any class MT, dps class OT or no OT and a non-prot pally where AOE grabbing adds is required. 2-3 healers.

BTW, heck if I can find the source about 10's tuned around one tank. Was said when the full ten man progression was revealed but was clearly nonsense. There's no way it'd work. It'd cripple boss fight design and as Pint noted it's not done on current 10 mans. Will end up same as now, 2 sometimes 1-1/2 tank 10 man, instead of 1 sometimes 1-1/2.

We have already seen a number of fights that introduce other classes into "tanking" roles that are not necessarily tanking classes. Locks, Mages, and even Priest (Razuvious) have had their tanking 15 mins of fame. It is possible and likely that many future fights will have similar mechanics.