Cryic

Christ I hope not. Everybody knows that if you can do max damage by using Motlen Armor and Deep Fire spec people are going to do it, and be 100% reliant on JoW / SP / Shamans etc to do that. And then we get donkey slapped every time we get our tier gear and its loaded up with Spirit.

Even a base change such as All classes will regen 10% Health / Mana in combat would be nice.

 

◊ manly

Well, the part that youre missing here is that fire mages don't use mage armor, they use molten armor (3% more crit, yay). In other words, our MP5 is limited to what BOW gives, and that is it. If we use mage armor, then we get mana regen, which is nice, but at the cost of losing 3% crit too.

If we had 100 (or 130 even) dmg armor and 30% mana regen at the same time, or even 3% crit and 30% regen, you can bet your ass it would be a ludicrous boost.

And for the new mage talents, they are very good, I am not denying it. However, they have a major loophole in them. You have the choice between 2 specs. That means you have some points in 2 trees in both cases, so you need to make a choice between giving 10 points to tree A, and 10 points to tree B. Would you really get burnout/hot streak at the cost of arcane instability (+3% crit +3% dmg), arcane power (+30% dmg for 15s / 3min), spell power (+25% crit dmg), presence of mind ?

And keep in mind, arcane power is flat out 100% better than burnout. That leaves only hot streak (which is pretty bad lets be honest here) vs everything else.

The new talents might be very good, but the way our trees are made were choosing between high-end fire talents that are worth tier-1 talents vs tier-4+ talents...

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

dexia

I don't know where you are getting that number. I just looked, I'm 138 MP5 with no buffs, I can't see with raid buffs getting to 300! I'll have to look next time I'm raid buffed. Some of that 300-350 may come for BoW, which isn't spirit based and not effected by new Fel Armor. I'm only seeing maybe 250 MP5 in my gear now raid buffed.

Don't forget VT is 2% in alpha build, not 5%. SP DPS got a boost, but it isn't going up 300% to compensate. A 1200 dps SP is worth 300 MP5. At 2% VT, a 1500 DPS SP is worth 150 MP5.

Current.
Fel Armor mana regen + VT = 0 + 300 = 300

Alpha

30%*(250) + 150 = 225

Mages have substantially more spirit on their gear. Arcane mediation/mage armor may become mandatory with the VT nerf. 3% crit from molten armor really isn't a big dps boost, especially since you may still go OOM with a SP.

 

Deedre

Which is why I see arcane meditation becoming quite popular in deep fire builds down the line. Frankly, I'm liking arcane all the way down to 33 points for spellpower and AP in lieu of burnout, too.

 

◊ manly

No, I fully agree with you. I am all for it. I like the entire philosophy behind the build. But won't you agree with me that the new talents feel like tier-1 level talents, and that something should be done about it ?

Keep in mind that, while we may have more spirit, and besides arcane meditation, we get nothing out of our spirit, as fire spec, for as long as we use molten armor, which generally we do.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

dexia

Burnout just looks goofy. It remains to be seen, but I wonder if Blizzard intends frostfire to be the "long fight" spell of choice for fire mages, and then using fireball for massive dps/burst dps/short fight option.

 

Flamingcloud

Warlocks are not going to replace t6 with level 78 blues, lol I think I only replaced one level 60 item before 70. The gear reset is going to be smaller than the last time(no new broken itemization in the form of sockets and stamina), not to mention this time there is things like the 4pc T6 bonus of +6% shadowbolt. I doubt the first 10 man loot will even make you want to break the set if the bonus remains unchanged.. perhaps not even the first 25 man.

Well according to the mp5 formula and the values of my int/spirit on the warlock spreadsheet in my current gear raid buffed.
5 * 0.0093271 * Spirit * Square_root ( Intellect )

5*0.093271 *298*sqrt(604) = 341.5

Fel armor is 39% talented, which everyone is at 70, so 133.2mp5 and using your numbers for shadowpriests that would put me 11 mp5 behind where I used to be, and of course far higher when I don't have a spriest.

 

Deedre

Oh, I'm very underwhelmed with the new fire talents. They've got to do better than this.

I'm even more underwhelmed with the arcane tree. As folks who frequent the official forums know, I'm a big arcane fan, but even I have to concede the tree is utter crap without the t5 set bonus for pve. I assumed that Blizz was going to add an "empowered AB" talent or somesuch thing. They did not. It looks pretty bleak for arcane in pve, and bizarrely enough, the tree is looking good for pvp.

Frost came out the big winner imo. Although it is suffering from a severe case of bloat. But you could easily stick all 71 points in there and be happy. Frost mages might even get by with just mage armor and feel no need to dabble in arcane meditation simply because they get so much crit out of WG.

 

Lhivera

Hot Streak may be flawed in concept and unsalvageable. The higher your crit rate, the more likely it is to proc, but the more likely it is that the guaranteed crit would have been a crit anyway. If you're at 35% crit, it's less than a 1% crit increase based on my rough estimates (maybe a smidge higher with Combustion). The only time it gets cool is on AOE. Burnout may be fine if Fireball base damage increases fast enough.

Actually, the post that got me banned was a look at an Arcane DPS rotation of either:
1x Blast/1x Barrage/Fireball on NP proc, or
2x Blast/1x Barrage/Fireball on NP proc (more haste-friendly)
+Oomkin arcane% debuff

Combined with the spirit increase, both of these produced a small-to-moderate (6-14%) increase in DPS over present-day Arcane Blast spam, and a very significant DPM increase over present-day AB spam (40-52%). It relies on the theory that when beating the latency on the AB casts, you'll be able to beat the NP proc (much as you can outrun the cast time reduction debuff) so that you have time to lob that Fireball on the proc.

When I calculated out the DPS for "new frost" and "new arcane" using my current stats and level 70 spell ranks, "new arcane" actually beat "new frost" by a smidge. Mind you, it had significantly lower DPM, but then, it also had the ability to boost its DPS further (I hadn't worked IV into it, whereas I had on the Frost calc; I hadn't factored in AP or POM; it still had the option to mana dump with extra AB's).

This was all very preliminary and very much open to debate -- I'll post the math a little later if people are interested at picking it apart. But my initial impression is that Arcane is going to do OK. (Note: I did not include 2xAB in the Arcane calcs; I did include 4xT6 in the Frost calcs.)

Winter's Grasp needs an adjustment -- probably a reduction of the buff duration to 3, maybe 4 seconds, and a replacement of the +hit% proc with something that people don't try to keep capped (crit, AP, armor pen, something). Unless I'm mistaken about melee trying to stay hit capped. Water Elemental could perhaps stand to be changed to a cooldown reduction since sometimes the limiting factor is incidental damage wiping it out rather than its own timer. But in general, yeah, I think they've hit what Frost needs pretty much on the head. Except for still no change to Frozen Core, which baffles me.

 

bortson

I actually wondered about this. How does the game calculate when an AoE crit occured?

Presumably every AoE doesn't get farmed out to a parallel circuit, so the actual calculation of the crits must be done sequentially. Whether AoE helps this proc depends on how the calculation is interpreted.

For instance, let's say you hit 5 targets with an AoE spell and it crits three of them. Does the program interpret those 3 crits to have happened simultaneously/in a row and therefore hot streak is procced, or does it actually matter in what order the three crit "rolls" occured (ie, if the sequence in the processor was crit-crit-hit-crit-hit it doesn't proc but if the sequence was hit-hit-crit-crit-crit it does)?

Edit : I realized after writing this that the meaning was probably "this gets cool when you cast an AoE spell under the effects of hot streak" in which case it is definitely cool. I still wonder how the AoE crit order is determined, though.

 

hypetech

That's not entirely true. While it may not be a HUGE deal, we do get 10% of our spirit as spell damage with a imp spirit priest in the raid. That ends up being about 40 more spell damage for me at least, raid buffed.

 

Kavan

When I looked at the level 70 versions of spells I just didn't see a way to include Arcane Barrage or Netherwind proc in a meaningful way. I did assume 2T5 though. With the numbers I got Barrage was barely above AM dps but with horrible dpm tradeoff. With 2T5 it's also better to use Netherwind proc on Arcane Blast, so I don't see how you could increase dps above AB spam. I thought that AM could serve as a tool to generate the procs, but even if it procs on each wave you can barely turn it into an alternative filler cycle.

 

Kel S'jet

So I wanted to take a quick moment out from the spirit discussion to draw attention to something I just realized about some of the auxiliary Arcane talents and spells.

I can see a serious issue here. We know that Mana Shield scales with +dmg now, but the mana drained scales as well. With Incanter's absorption, we could potentially end up loosing even more mana. Say you use mana shield to absorb 1.5k damage (3k mana) then you get your spell damage increased by 15%, hence making the next mana shield absorb damage, potentially loosing a further 3.5k mana, hence loosing a total of approx 6.5k mana over the course of 2 attacks. [nb. the math is a rough estimate, but you get the idea]
My biggest concern is that if they don't attempt to scale mana values in WoTLK (similar to how they scaled HP values in BC), the currently existing mana issues of mages will only exacerbate.

The other thing that irks me is the new Shatter Shield spell.
I'm not sure what blizzard thinks of mage's current performance in PvP, but I cannot understand this spell's current values. Even now, near the end of BC, melee "white" damage is approaching levels where 2k white damage is commonplace. Does blizzard actually believe that a 30 sec cooldown spell costing a whooping 1.2k mana and having enough strength to absorb just a single "white" damage attack is good enough to offset the non-frost mage's survivability problems? The problem with all this is that with these new abilities, the mage game seems to be getting closer and closer to the point where mages are having to spend almost all their resource (mana) on attacks from an enemy who has to spend none of theirs (rage, mana, energy etc). This will naturally leave the mage at a great disadvantage, since the enemy can easily exhaust the mage using "white" attacks and saving their resource using attacks for when the mage is drained.
This would be fine if the mage had adequate defenses so as to allow him to spend at least some mana on offense, but so far, it seems the mage will constantly have to play defensively just to survive "white" attacks, leaving him with little to no resources to actually attack (unless, of course, there is a MASSIVE buff to wanding coming in WoTLK :P )

And all this doesn't even touch the aspect of how severely crippled a mage is when he is hit by a dispel.

 

Deedre

Lhiv does this math assume full AB debuffs prior to cycling? And yes, I wouldn't mind seeing the nitty gritty.

So far as netherwing procs go, I'm assuming the best arcane build is 50/18/3 or some variant, in order to get the most out of the fireball instants. Maybe 50/21/0 if you can swing the hit and skip elemental precision. It's a damn shame pyro doesn't proc off netherwind.

I'm still wondering if AM procs netherwind on a per missile basis or not, but the point is moot for your analysis. Actually, you seem to tacitly concede that AM still sucks and aren't using it at all, lol.

 

Proudmoore

I think that's a matter of interpretation. Mana Shield scales directly off Spell Damage (i.e. "Increases Damage and Healing done by X"), and not off % increases to damage done. However, there are also talents that refer to "Increase your Spell Damage by Y%" that do not directly increase your bonus +damage to spells, but rather affect the overall damage that they do (usually School bound). I would interpret the "Increase Spell Damage by 15%" after a Shield is broken as increasing all damage done by 15%, and not the Spell Damage number in your character window, and hence, not affecting the absorption of Mana Shield at all. Your second point touches an important issue though, 2k may be reasonable at 70 (may), but at 80, especially for such a large amount of mana?

<Insert standard blurb about how numbers are almost certain to change between now and release here>

 

dexia

I would expect shattershield to scale with spell damage. Don't forget that when it wears off, it freezes enemies in place.

All classes are vulnerable to dispels. If anything, a low value shatter shield absorbtion would make it harder to dispel in time before the warrior/rogue set it off and got frozen.

 

Lhivera

It does, yes. I want to go over the figures a bit more before I post, I'll get to it later this evening or tomorrow.

I think probably Icy Veins still does more for you. Only about 1 out of 20 spells you cast will be a Fireball in this scheme. It's just that Arcane does a good enough job of buffing off-schools, and Fireball's base damage and gear bonus are high enough, that it's worth casting on the proc.

Yeah, unless it can proc on every wave, AM is largely a lost cause.

 

Lhivera

I wonder if the freeze effect will happen if it is dispelled/stolen?

 

Tamraine

Yes, as a priest as well as a mage, I would too.

It's been implicitly mentioned several times, but I believe a mob-side PPM will go into effect for Winter's Grasp.

I will be a 10 man raider in Wrath, so it it less likely I'll have a shadow priest. Currently mana has always been a worrying concern for me--mage armor, mana potions, and mana gems are necessary over molten armor, destro potions, and flamecaps. I suppose a deep disc priest may end up footing the bill -- I guess it's too early to tell.

Lastly, I'm disappointed by your ban, Lhivera -- I woke up this morning to check on the WG thread I was playing devil's advocate on only to discover the bad news. Oh well, hope to read your posts here.

 

Soul

Badly. Consider Master of Elements... sometimes, you get one mana return off a bunch of crits... sometimes, you get 5.

I was wondering the same for Living Bomb. I've been thinking that a lot of mage buffs need some kind of dispel resistance or backlash upon being dispelled... look at our wonderful talents which improve our buffs and how all our buffs are effortlessly stripped away by a single Felhunter which conveniently prevents us from casting spells at the same time.

 

Bulgarth

It seems like BS indeed, but take into account Blizzard likes to add this kind of stuff as gimmicks that eventually get nerfed. Imp Slam spec, TLC Arcane spec, even having to spec Full Retribution for Kings, all past examples of Blizzard "oops, this is a gimmick/quirky spec" moments. Sure, it's an overpowered and quite a brainless idea of just spamming Ice lance for maximum dps, but as per the description that I see right *now*, it is a plausible spec that would destroy the dps charts if you could reach 100% crit.

On the flip side, Blizzard does make new talents and spell overpowered at first for balancing purposes, then proceeds to nerf them as feedback comes in. I'd give it sometime.

 

Bulgarth

*delete post please, accident triple post from site lagging out*

 

Bulgarth

*delete post, accident triple post from site lagging out*

 

Kel S'jet

True, other classes are vulnerable to dispels, however, almost all of them have a mechanism to prevent/reduce their chance of their spells being dispelled. Some classes, even have outright immunity to dispels. This is where mages are unique. Mages are, arguably, the class most reliant on its buffs and shields for survival (take warlocks for example, their immense health offsets the need for "shield" like abilities as defense. Furthermore, their active defense, soul link, cannot be dispelled), it would only make sense that such a class would have some way to prevent itself having its entire defensive mechanic purged off.

Now, while shatter shield will, most probably, scale with +dmg. I do not see it having a high enough coefficient to be able to withstand the kind of hits mages will be taking at lvl 80. Let us remember, the shattershield value of 2k is from its lvl 80 version. Furthermore, I believe it is more important for non-frost mage specs to gain more survivability with WoTLK rather than have a chance for an extra frost nova, since frost novas wont really help us where we need help, that being, against other casters and ranged (hunters).

Now @Proudmoore's post. I do believe that Incanter's absorption will in fact affect our +spell damage value and not just a blanked increase in base damage. I say this because of the wording. The school specific talents you talk about are in fact worded differently, since they refer to a specific school (ie Increase you fire damage by X%). The incanter's absorbtion, however, is worded similar to Mind Mastery, which we know does affect the +dmg numbers.

 

Flamingcloud

A. Melee are now pigeonholed into a completely built melee group in order to compete due to all these group buffs.
B. This buff as spoiled is atleast 5 times better than windfury for pve.