I really agree it would be nice if there will be some other kind of pvp than the most minmaxed version of deep frost viable for competitive pvp. Sure there will always be one spec thats best and I think frost will be keeping that titel for a long time, but I think arcane could easily be given a couple of tricks to bring another kind of mage to the aerna.
Like make slow a lot cheaper, perhaps nearly free with a short CD so it was a tool you would want to reapply as often as possible. Changing imp blink to give some kind of in combat stealth for 2 sec isntead of the current miss thing, possibly lowering the CD of blink as well. That would make arcane blinking very tricky. Another idea is to have arcane meditationadditionally allow you to drink while invisible without breaking it. Would be a 5 min trick so generally a once per arena match thing that would make arcane mages very sneaky.
After all there allready is a lot of nice talents in arcane with pvp uses. Imp AM for a good pushback spell with some anti pillar mechanics and arcane barrage for dps on the move. Magic absorbtion and mage armor would make for a lot of base spell resistance that added up with resiliance might make mages a bit tougher against casters. If you meed a heavy melee team all that needs be done is change to frost armor. With just a few added stunts to pull for arcane mages they might gian survivability enoughe to rival some of the arena frost mage dominance.
Long story short it would be very nice if there was a school of mage pvp that was more about trickery and other tricks than just freezing everything that moves.
Arcane's newfound mobility and burst damage potential make it a serious contender for arena play, particularly in the smaller brackets. So it is not at all clear to me that we are just going to see more of the same, frost, in pvp. Between Arcane Barrage, Netherwind Procs, and AP/POM the arcanist doesn't have to rely on a single cast time spell and has an array of powerful instant casts that can be chained together.
So let's assume for a moment that FFB is affected by all things fire and frost, which kinda sounds like what they were implying. It also sounds a lot like superbolt, or the ONE bolt to rule them all, bind them in the darkness etc etc. I quickly figured out the optimal elementalist build, which is basically 0/30/41 with a nifty water elemental. You get winter's grasp, winter's chill, ignite + ice shards, fire power, ice barrier.. and you don't even have to take playing with fire! Here are results:
If I guess the debuffs only count for one school, then it will lose 15% from the improved scorch debuff, and only be 3065 dps. The cool part is, mobs that are fire immune or frost immune are going to ruin your debuff synergy and liquify your dps (see: ignite, winter's chill, DK frost vuln, improved scorch). So uh... sounds cool.
I don't think this has been very well thought out. The fire and frost trees are built around the concept of the top tier talents being very strong, and getting weaker and more specialized as you go further down. If the top tiers both work for a single spell, you just have an absurdly broken scaling coefficient. I just hope it has a cool graphic, because if they don't dispose of it in the fires of Mount Doom we're probably going to be spamming the shit out of it.
Arcane's newfound mobility and burst damage potential make it a serious contender for arena play, particularly in the smaller brackets. So it is not at all clear to me that we are just going to see more of the same, frost, in pvp. Between Arcane Barrage, Netherwind Procs, and AP/POM the arcanist doesn't have to rely on a single cast time spell and has an array of powerful instant casts that can be chained together.
Contrary to popular belief, Arcane was already better in the mobility department, given that AMs go through LOS checks, as well as having the main "burst" being insta cast and having AE buffed. The problem with arcane in arena was not necessarily LOS, but primarily survivability. One iceblock, while helpful, does almost nothing in high end arena play.
Secondly, arcane severely lacks the raw control that frost provides. Slow is almost useless in arenas, and arcane just has no real way to control the fight effectively enough. Naturally, there is all sorts of other goodies that frost provides that arcane just cannot make up on, Ice Barrier being one of them. (winters chill sheep protection being another)
As far as arcane's "new found" burst potential, I am not sure what you are talking about. Both PoM and AP have always been there, they have always been countered and they always will be.
The only new thing arcane brings in ABr and Netherwind procs.
Under no circumstance would I place Netherwind procs as a contributor to arcane viability in pvp. In fact, I would not place anything that procs as something you can rely on in arenas (unless of course the proc rate is something silly like 90%). That leaves us with ABr, which, while yes, would provide nice boost to damage, it in no way will turn the tide. I see ABr as much more of a pve mobility spell than having that much an affect on the arcane mage's pvp performance. After all, you are not ever going to kill opponents in arenas with ABr or even PoMPyro+AMvolley+ABr+AE (<-- highest consecutive, reliable, combo, over 9.5 secs), at least not the competent ones.
In short, given the addition of a castable stun in frost, frost now has faar too many combat options when compared to the other specs. Its burst (which is easily comparable to arcane's pom pyro), its control (multiple novas, multiple stuns, as well as just slowing everything down), and its survivability (just try to burn through IceBarrier+ShatterShield+FrostArmor+iceblock x2) quite certainly secure its place as the only real viable spec for mages in arena.
The point of ABr is to have a high damage instant cast primary nuke, which removes pretty much every problem with pushback and mobility. I have no idea why you would ever touch Arcane Missiles when you could just chase your target around pillars all day spamming instants. You may be right that frost will still be better in the long run, I certainly plan to stick to the tried and true, but the individual points of your post are so far off base I don't even know what to say. You want to completely discount instant-cast fireballs because it's a proc, seriously? Mace stun is a proc too. Also your death combo example is absurdly worse than what could be done. Offhand, try AP ABr - PoMPyro - ABr - Fire Blast - ABr, which is maybe 10,000 damage of instant cast uninterruptable damage over 6 seconds.
try AP ABr - PoMPyro - ABr - Fire Blast - ABr, which is maybe 10,000 damage of instant cast uninterruptable damage over 6 seconds.
ABr has a 3 sec cooldown, the GDC is 1.5 seconds. You are trying to push a point based of casting 6 spells, one of which has a 3 sec cooldown, back to back, over a 6 second timeframe? And having it do 10k damage? Your math is not just off, its kinda out of this world. To make this clear, a lot can happen in 6-9 seconds, your opponent will not be just standing there and taking it, and neither will his partner, that combo is far from interruptable, mages are probably the easiest class to shut down, arcane mages, even more so. The great thing about the shatter combo is that it produces similar damage, but is repeatable and can be done without the mage being locked into a combo for 6 seconds or more.
As far as your point about AM goes. Almost every single high end arena player sees the unchallenged use of AM in dealing with pillar humpers due to the spell not requiring LOS checks during channel.
And as far as your point of mace stun being a proc too, yes, it is, however no warrior RELIES on mace stun to win matches. In short, mace stun is not the reason warriors win matches in the arenas, it is not part of the strategy, it is nothing more than an added bonus.
As far as arcane's "new found" burst potential, I am not sure what you are talking about. Both PoM and AP have always been there, they have always been countered and they always will be.
The only new thing arcane brings in ABr and Netherwind procs.
Under no circumstance would I place Netherwind procs as a contributor to arcane viability in pvp. In fact, I would not place anything that procs as something you can rely on in arenas (unless of course the proc rate is something silly like 90%). That leaves us with ABr, which, while yes, would provide nice boost to damage, it in no way will turn the tide. I see ABr as much more of a pve mobility spell than having that much an affect on the arcane mage's pvp performance. After all, you are not ever going to kill opponents in arenas with ABr or even PoMPyro+AMvolley+ABr+AE (<-- highest consecutive, reliable, combo, over 9.5 secs), at least not the competent ones.
I disagree pretty strongly with what you've said here.
First of all, it's inaccurate to say that PoM/AP have "always been countered and they always will be" -- in the hands of an intelligent player, they are extremely powerful tools, and several player have been extremely successful with AP/blazing speed builds in the current arena environment (e.g., Pigvomit played mage/priest to 2400+ in 2v2 as 34/27 last arena season).
It's also silly to dismiss Netherwind procs (and procs in general) -- arena matches take a while, and since mage mana regeneration has been improved, it's no longer true that you kill or die in under a minute. When matches last several minutes, you are overwhelmingly likely to experience even unlikely procs. With that in mind, a NW proc could be absolutely game-changing, especially if you save your AP/PoM to go with it. ABr->NW proc -> AP -> (maybe damage trinket) -> Fireball -> PoM Pyro is huge (10k+) damage in under 5 seconds.
Finally, I'm not quite sure what line of logic leads you to say that ABr won't be useful -- it's huge. Even current frost builds do poor damage when focused, unless the elemental is off cooldown to provide damage and freezes. Deep arcane in the expansion is looking to be the first build of any type that does good damage while under pressure. You can have a rogue sitting on your shoulders and you'll still be pumping out instant damage.
Now, it may be that melee is strong enough in the expansion that blazing speed is a "must have" ability for arcane specs (although I doubt it), and in that case, yes, you won't see so many deep arcane builds in the arena. And yes, deep frost is still looking extremely powerful. But it's a little early to start pounding nails into the deep arcane coffin, methinks.
From a PvE perspective, I'm interested in deep Arcane. Right now I'm deep fire for raiding, but only because I don't get a shadow priest, innervates or resto shaman in raids, so arcane blast is not a viable option for me. I spent quite a while trying to make a good arcane missiles based character, but I just couldn't break the 1200-1400 dps range with it even with T6 gear. The concept I had was missiles sustainable, then mana dump to Blast near the end of the fights. I was able to keep uptime on the Ashtongue trinket around 70% or more with crits from heavily haste-loaded Missiles, but it still wasn't enough to make Missiles' DPS competitive at that gear level.
It seems like Blizzard is trying to avoid having things synergize well with Missiles, which is a shame because the spell scales poorly. But any time it got competitive (MSD and capacitor), it was nerfed down. I admit I view Missiles as sort of a cautionary tale to those who think they wouldn't put Frostfire bolt in without making it useful in end-game.
Anyhow, I've read the whole thread, and noticed the arcane trend tends to be (Given we can expect not to have 2 piece T5 in the expansion) based on chain-casting fireballs with ArB woven in, since fireball gets the most benefit from Netherwind Presence.
Is it going to be possible to make an arcane build that actually uses the arcane nukes (Missiles and Blast)? Or is the lack of scaling for them and the weak crit multiplier mean Arcane isn't gonna be about arcane damage? I can't seem to find much evidence here or anywhere else that paints a good future for Missiles, and Blast doesn't seem to be that good without T5 either. None of the new talents I see synergize well either; Netherwind Presence doesn't seem that useful for Blast spam, and if (as was said earlier in the thread) it can't proc on each missile, but only the initial cast, that makes Missiles the /worst/ spell to use with it.
I like the theme of missiles and blast, enough to carry with them out of personal preference if it's a small DPS difference, but not if the gap is gonna be as wide as it is now between missiles and other nukes in raiding.
Is it going to be possible to make an arcane build that actually uses the arcane nukes (Missiles and Blast)? Or is the lack of scaling for them and the weak crit multiplier mean Arcane isn't gonna be about arcane damage? I can't seem to find much evidence here or anywhere else that paints a good future for Missiles, and Blast doesn't seem to be that good without T5 either. None of the new talents I see synergize well either; Netherwind Presence doesn't seem that useful for Blast spam, and if (as was said earlier in the thread) it can't proc on each missile, but only the initial cast, that makes Missiles the /worst/ spell to use with it.
I like the theme of missiles and blast, enough to carry with them out of personal preference if it's a small DPS difference, but not if the gap is gonna be as wide as it is now between missiles and other nukes in raiding.
Nope, it's just as you thought: Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast will fall behind. I feel sorry for those spells. The two-piece tier 5 bonus needs to be stuck onto a talent. I'm thinking/hoping the same thing might happen as did with the priest's tier 2 2-piece bonus. Priests were holding onto their tier 2 at level 70 for so long that Blizzard nerfed it. But eventually they moved it to Meditation, which really resulted in a buff. Arcane Missiles needs to have its mana cost cut in half or a stronger empowered talent.
ABr has a 3 sec cooldown, the GDC is 1.5 seconds. You are trying to push a point based of casting 6 spells, one of which has a 3 sec cooldown, back to back, over a 6 second timeframe?
Um, it's 5 spells, not 6. Neither AP nor POM activate the GCD. And yes, that's 3 ABr's and 2 non-ABr instants in 6 seconds. Now whether 10k damage is correct or not will depend on what itemization looks like at 80, but his all-instants rotation was perfectly viable as long as the mage has no haste. With some haste there might be slight waiting before each ABr, but it will still be exactly 6 seconds between first and third ABr (fifth instant).
ABr has a 3 sec cooldown, the GDC is 1.5 seconds. You are trying to push a point based of casting 6 spells, one of which has a 3 sec cooldown, back to back, over a 6 second timeframe?
Hi, please stop shitting up this thread with idiocy when you don't even understand basic caster mechanics. ABr -> 1.5s -> PoM pyro -> 1.5s -> ABr gives 3 seconds for the cooldown to end, ABr can be chained with only one instant cast in between, the only thing that messes this is significant amounts of haste, and all that does is reduce the window of burst further increasing its danger. And AP causes no GCD. The GCD after the last ABr doesn't count because the damage doesn't wait for the GCD to land.
(0s) (1.5s) (1.5s) (1.5s) (1.5s) = 6 seconds
AP ABr - PoMPyro - ABr - Fire Blast - ABr
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
And again we get back to the survivability. Whatever the burst potential of arcane may or may not be in pvp it will need a couple of tricks to stay alive. Prismatic Cloak is actually a good one, a one sec fade timer wont be an impossible wya to escape and have a drink up in some corner, (given that you dont have any dots ofc)
But a few more tricks would be needed. A verion of slow actually usable in the arena being one of them. Could be done with dispell resistances or with manacost adjustments. Or something like the blink=2 sec of stealth. But I guess some additional sort of disruptive tool would also be required. Im not really thinking arcane will be given these kind of pvp tricks, but its a rather suited tree to be adjusted for pvp without a massive overhaul and it would really be fun if people once again feared the arcane mage but not cause of pompyro.
So much discusion on arcane Arena builds and nobody has mentioned Slow? I'm not sure how many of you have played with slow regularly in PvP, but I can tell you it is a powerful tool. Yes, it can be dispelled, but a smart player will find a way to work around that; through either locking out the dispeller, polying them or teaming with another player who can keep them busy. Slow is instant, so its another spell to weave into ABr, and at the very worst it will cost your enemy a GCD and some mana. It can be instantly re-applied if you're stubborn about getting it on them, too.
ABr --> Slow --> Abr --> Mana Shield (if I can afford 1 in arenas, i'm sure others can) --> Abr --> Shatter Shield --> Abr
if NWP procs;
AP/ABr --> Fireball --> Abr --> PoM/Pyro --> ABr --> Fireblast
And if SS gets broken on a melee'er;
IL --> IL --> IL --> IL.
People seem to have forgotten the 120 undispellable resistance we get as well, which makes purge and fel hounds less of a threat.
I mean if we look at all the stuff introduced, a lot of it is about giving people stuff they have been lacking (whining about) for ages. Shaman CC, indoor druid roots, mobile mage DPS, the list goes on.
Many of the big changes (including shaman CC & indoor roots) are clearly aimed at five-man heroic and, particularly, ten-man raid viability. They're planning for the ten man progression path. We can glean a lot about future five-man and raid design from MgT & ZA. More AoE fights, more huge pulls, more gauntlets/timed events. It's telling they're giving CC & AoE to all classes--as much as they yelled for them before, they didn't necessarily need them in the PvE content. If they're going to vary the bosses in ten-mans, it's going to be required.
The looming problem is they're effectively adding another thing to balance cross-class with the ten man progression. BG, Arena, soloing, 5-mans, 25-mans and now 10-mans. BC launching with only one starter 10-man, it wasn't tuned around the expectation the same group of ten toons in a small guild would later be doing TK, it was tuned for subsets of 25+.
The problem for mages is the stuff being added to other DPS classes (AoE, CC) is what was already our strengths. Sure, hex is no sheep, but int + scorch debuff for one other fire caster is no rez, and haste, and raid-wide pile of totems either.
I'm fully expecting a Blizzard panic mode on live as the lack of balance between 25-mans and 10-mans hits. [Lhivera, this is Ersatzpotato; I think you're right about Grasp. It'll go live. It'll also instantly get nerfed. Probably going to owe you a beer.]
The problem for mages is the stuff being added to other DPS classes (AoE, CC) is what was already our strengths. Sure, hex is no sheep, but int + scorch debuff for one other fire caster is no rez, and haste, and raid-wide pile of totems either.
For some reason this doesn't worry me. Ressing isn't an in-combat utility, so its not going to get a huge focus. And with druids getting an out-of-combat res as well as priests, paladins and shamans; 40% of classes will be able to res. I don't think anyone is going to get a raid spot priority on the grounds of 'we need another resser'.
AoE and CC; we're still best at that. Roots doesn't affect ranged abilities, and its self-damage component makes it a bit less reliable. Sap, even in its buffed form, can't be refreshed and is hard to land in raids without imp. sap tallents. AoE? Deep fire will probably have the edge in that, but I honestly don't see AoE encounters being a significant problem given what i've seen of WotLK so far. Warriors will have shockwave, Frost mages will be more common in raids, which may mean 85% blizzard snares, coupled with nova totem stuns and shadownova stuns, plus 100% uptime on hurricane debuffs (for attack and cast speed mods)... Unless blizzard does something huge to AoE pulls I struggle to see how they could be anything other than trivial.
raid-wide totems means that every shaman in the game will have to have 11 points in resto. I'm sure they'll be thrilled about that.
Well blizzard are promising us raw buffs to damage and I for one think they will do a lot better acheiving that promise in this expansion. I simply think they have learned a lot about how to scale classes and spells. Its offcourse impossible to know for sure and with the massive overhaul and streamlining of gear we cant say much about scaling either. Buf IF we just pretend that everything will go like blizzard says and hopes, that all the other classes will get CC tools (that in pve are still inferior to polymorph) and we will be the no.1 caster dps class again and the unrivaled kings of AoE. That scenario would probalby work out really nicely for us. Timed events will mean our superior nuking will be desired, gauntlets will mean the best available AoE will be desierable and on top of that we still have reliable long duration spammable CC. When its time to move on to 25 mans mages will still have that great damage to offer and you dont turn down the best DPS and AoE for 25 mans.
As for shammys and their resto tree I cant say I feel a world of pity for them. First of all both enhancement and elemental go 13 points into the resto tree for hitrating and how long havnt raiding mages had to go 10 pts into arcane and 2 pts in frost. (possibly 11 pts in frost since IV) Thats 12/11 points that we just HAVEto take not to field an inferior raid spec. In fact I bet these arent the only examples. Having a competetive raidspec means theres some stuff you need and no class will find all of that stuff in their main tree. In fact I say it would be pretty boring if tossing 71 points into one talent tree would be the optimal spec for any class or any role in WotLK. Its when 21 pointers start being more usefull than 41/51 pointers that things are wrong.
So much discusion on arcane Arena builds and nobody has mentioned Slow? I'm not sure how many of you have played with slow regularly in PvP, but I can tell you it is a powerful tool. Yes, it can be dispelled, but a smart player will find a way to work around that; through either locking out the dispeller, polying them or teaming with another player who can keep them busy. Slow is instant, so its another spell to weave into ABr, and at the very worst it will cost your enemy a GCD and some mana. It can be instantly re-applied if you're stubborn about getting it on them, too.
ABr --> Slow --> Abr --> Mana Shield (if I can afford 1 in arenas, i'm sure others can) --> Abr --> Shatter Shield --> Abr
if NWP procs;
AP/ABr --> Fireball --> Abr --> PoM/Pyro --> ABr --> Fireblast
And if SS gets broken on a melee'er;
IL --> IL --> IL --> IL.
People seem to have forgotten the 120 undispellable resistance we get as well, which makes purge and fel hounds less of a threat.
I will not pretend to be a PvPer, but how exactly does our 120 resistance correlate with slow being anything beyond shit? Debuffs placed on targets have exactly nothing to do with your own resistance. "At the very worst costing a GCD and some mana" isn't much of a consolance when Slow costs 20% base mana. That's what's known as "a shit load". Granted, you may play at the control game, where you force someone to make spell selections based on your choices, but a dispell costs next to nothing in comparison and a 3s cycle with one slow and one ABarr is still a dispell-FoL/LHW/FH/Shld/Ren cycle for the target.
You're trading a massive amount of mana and a lot of time for your opponents equal amount of time and pathetically low mana. Hard trade to sell. Slow, to my knowledge, is consistently bad in any structured PvP. CoT and Mind-Numbing are both better in the cast perspective and frostbolt/r1CoC are better in the snare perspective. Nobody really cares about the ranged attack speed slow, to my understanding.
However, during the Q&A, one of the audience members was a lot more pointed. Now that everyone seems to have their own spammable crowd control, he askes, what's being done to bring Mages back to a more unique role?
The answer was awesome. Simply put, if everyone's doing crowd control, then Mages are going to be buffed in their hallmark: raw, unadulterated damage. Especially since Seed of Corruption shines against our AE damage ability, Chilton says we should expect to see our overall damage output increased.
Well blizzard are promising us raw buffs to damage and I for one think they will do a lot better acheiving that promise in this expansion. I simply think they have learned a lot about how to scale classes and spells. Its offcourse impossible to know for sure and with the massive overhaul and streamlining of gear we cant say much about scaling either. Buf IF we just pretend that everything will go like blizzard says and hopes, that all the other classes will get CC tools (that in pve are still inferior to polymorph) and we will be the no.1 caster dps class again and the unrivaled kings of AoE. That scenario would probalby work out really nicely for us. Timed events will mean our superior nuking will be desired, gauntlets will mean the best available AoE will be desierable and on top of that we still have reliable long duration spammable CC. When its time to move on to 25 mans mages will still have that great damage to offer and you dont turn down the best DPS and AoE for 25 mans.
Problem is, if mages are no.1 caster dps and unrivaled kings of aoe, what will warlocks do? I do prefer an environment where mages are preferred to warlock, but getting back to MC times when warlocks were only good for curses is very bad as well.
What i would like to see is a differentiation of the two classes, which have been brought too close by TBC - specifically the 0/21/40 lock spec. Affliction as the main boss dps spec for warlocks, for example, would be a good thing. They put DoTs, we use bolts. Their damage builds over time, ours is direct. They consume debuff-slots - but add some great debuffs, we consume less. etc etc
Offcourse not, noone wants the revamped 25 man naxx to be just the same old naxx all over again. Raid balance for classes is about each class having something unique to contribute. A simple balance between damage and utility. (Along with the overall state of classes having a balanced amount of utility vs damge, if theres to much utility to go around you just end up with raids that dont bring the classes with least desierable utility.)
If mages are to have lower utility than all other casters we need to have higher damage. Just one or the other without turning back time to 40 man naxx.
The balance between those two is actually surprisingly simple to achieve. In the situation where an extra Warlock brings no utility, other mechanics should ensure the Warlock still brings a comparable amount of damage to the raid. Luckily these mechanics are already in place in the form of damage dealing curses.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
mages and warlocks becoming more different - well, blizz is working on that, in the very unique way..
mages will be bombers. locks will focus on single targets.
aside from that, i still would bet that mages will in fact be even worse against single targets than they are now.
holding up scorch-debuff and bombing if necessary, this imo will be mages in wotlk.
frostfire sounds nice - for pvp only. in pve its probably going to be another spell i would love not to get as a mage.
why? it's the ultimate excuse for another instance unplayable as frost or firemage.
scaling with gear is the natural enemy of the mage, and looking on talent trees for wotlk you don't have to think it over in order to realize that this will drastically increase in wotlk.
most sucking feature in wotlk: gameplay won't change a bit, as it seems. more hours of spammig x-balls on target?
is an arcane rotation really enough to keep you awake? i personally still doubt hunters are raiding two-handed.
any reason to play wotlk as a mage?
i think pve-mages will become the ultimate beginner class (or are they already?). boring to play, easy to master.
So let's assume for a moment that FFB is affected by all things fire and frost, which kinda sounds like what they were implying. It also sounds a lot like superbolt, or the ONE bolt to rule them all, bind them in the darkness etc etc. I quickly figured out the optimal elementalist build, which is basically 0/30/41 with a nifty water elemental. You get winter's grasp, winter's chill, ignite + ice shards, fire power, ice barrier.. and you don't even have to take playing with fire! Here are results:
If I guess the debuffs only count for one school, then it will lose 15% from the improved scorch debuff, and only be 3065 dps.
Improved Scorch and Winter's Chill should (if the former assumptions are correct) both work while dealing Fire damage, but the Frozen Rune Weapon debuff would not, I believe. You would also not want to count Arctic Winds, since it specifies Frost Damage (as opposed to Frost Spell or Frost Damage Spell), but I'm not sure if you already left that out.
However, I do think you're right. I think balancing this spell is going to be an extremely ugly process, if not actually impossible.
Originally Posted by Sayuki
Nope, it's just as you thought: Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blast will fall behind.
Arcane Blast still serves its originally-intended function, which is to serve as a mana dump. If you're approaching the end of a fight and you have excess mana to burn, you'll start using Arcane Blast as your filler between Arcane Barrage casts. 2xT5 does not need to be encoded into a talent, because AB was never intended to be used as a primary nuke.
Oh, I'm sure it'll get nerfed, but it'll get nerfed in terms of what it does and/or how long and/or often it does it, not which targets it works on. Mmmmm, Coal Creek Porter...
Originally Posted by Skallewag
Well blizzard are promising us raw buffs to damage and I for one think they will do a lot better acheiving that promise in this expansion.
This is what makes Burnout so inexplicable. They've now explicitly told us our damage didn't scale properly (I do not read his statement as referring explicitly to AOE damage; that struck me as him hitting on two separate points.) They've given both Arcane and Frost significant DPS increases. It simply does not seem plausible to me that Blizzard is unaware of the problems with the Fire tree. I will be shocked if we don't see significant changes to it in upcoming patches.
As for shammys and their resto tree I cant say I feel a world of pity for them.
I don't claim to understand much about healing, but it seems as if the 51-point Resto talent is the bee's knees for mitigating high burst damage against the MT.
IIRC, that is wowinsider's interpretation of his statement, not a verbatim quote (at least, it doesn't match any of the liveblog transcripts I saw, though they aren't verbatim either).
Originally Posted by Cornelium
Problem is, if mages are no.1 caster dps and unrivaled kings of aoe, what will warlocks do? I do prefer an environment where mages are preferred to warlock, but getting back to MC times when warlocks were only good for curses is very bad as well.
First, it's not nearly as bad as it was back then, because we're no longer looking at 2 mandatory curses and 5 raid slots per class, resulting in them losing 3 raid slots; we're looking at 2 mandatory curses and 2.5 raid slots per class, resulting in them losing 0.5 raid slots.
Second, I really didn't interpret the statements as saying that we're going to be number 1 caster DPS. I haven't seen the stream myself (and I may reevaluate when I do), but this is the Q&A that the "raw, unadulterated damage" statement was based on, I believe:
"Now that every other class has CC, what are you going to do so that Mages are more viable?"
Make sure their damage is competitive. They are "sidelined" by Warlocks now. Intended for Mages to be kings of AoE but Seed of Corruption was too effective. Scale up Mage damage, make sure they can overtake AoE.
Overly pessimistic people are saying this just means they're going to improve our AOE performance. Overly optimistic people are saying it means we're going to be the uncontested top damage caster. I believe the reasonable interpretation is that they're going to improve our AOE so that we're the top AOE caster, and they're going to improve our direct damage to be competitive with Warlocks.
Now of course, if they don't fix Fire, we will be the top damage caster, simply because there won't be any Improved Scorch for the Destro 'locks to make use of.
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.
Now of course, if they don't fix Fire, we will be the top damage caster, simply because there won't be any Improved Scorch for the Destro 'locks to make use of.
I'm not sure what you are implying? Is this assuming that Winter's Grasp remains the same through release? Making a 3xFrost Mage, 1x Warlock raid makeup the probable scenario?
06/30/08, 7:22 PM
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