Skallewag: Well, I am a confirmed Arcane mage at heart. I certainly don't mind dipping into other trees, but I want the fact that I am specced deep into Arcane to be immediately noticeable beyond 'wow, he's casting arcane spells'.
Would it be possible to simply change Arcane Missiles into Arcane Missile, singular? Currently, AM greatest rank is listed on WoWHead as:
360 dps for 5 seconds for 1135 mana.
Could they switch that to:
1s cast
360 Arcane damage
227 mana
Clearly, it would only have a 1s cooldown, but it would shift AM to work like the other spells...
Apparently, Malan was in the Alpha doing Shaman work... since the NDA is lifted, anyone here who was in the Alpha and can offer insight into the feedback that Blizzard received regarding this issue?
Skallewag: Well, I am a confirmed Arcane mage at heart. I certainly don't mind dipping into other trees, but I want the fact that I am specced deep into Arcane to be immediately noticeable beyond 'wow, he's casting arcane spells'.
This was discussed at length upthread, but I think your opinion on this matter is simply at odds with Blizzard's. They simply don't have the same desires for deep Arcane DPS mechanics as you do. Not that it really matters much; Arc Barrage is your new primary nuke, Frostbolt/Fireball/FFB are your secondary nukes which will make up very roughly half your damage when you're conserving mana, and Arcane Blast is your mopping-up nuke that you'll use between Barrage casts when you want to amp up the DPS and can spend the mana to do so. It'd take some pretty dramatic alterations for this to change, and it sure seems, looking at the tree, as if Blizzard's pretty happy with it this way.
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.
Lhivera: Actually, my opinion is more or less shaped by Blizzard's. I don't mind at all if half of my damage, as an Arcane mage, comes from outside the Arcane tree, if it is recognizable that I am an Arcane Mage and not another kind of Mage.
Right now, my Mage is throwing around nothing but Frost Bolts, basically. I look like a Frost Mage without Ice Barrier or Water Elemental.
My two posts here are actually trying to find ways to assist Blizzard in shaping their vision of the 'Arcane tree'.
Basically, I want the Arcane tree to have its own spec. I don't want the Arcane tree to be simply a utility tree raided by Fire and Frost mages to get certain abilities.
And while I have read the entire thread in the past 3 days, I am sorry if I'm just rehashing an old argument. I will try to pay better attention to the currents in the thread.
Lhivera how usefull do you think the new Magic Absorption will be. 1 resist per lvl at 80 then giving back 5% mana might make a full arcane spec viable with some Frostbolt/Fireball/FFB fillers if you do happen to get low on mana. Right now looking at the talents I am very eager to try out arcane for Barrage if nothing else.
I have been toying with a deep Arcane/Fire spec get ignite/flame throwing and .5 off Fireball but rest into arcane. I think that Magic Absorption will make a difference on resists and thus getting 5% mana back (1s cooldown).
Lhivera: Actually, my opinion is more or less shaped by Blizzard's. I don't mind at all if half of my damage, as an Arcane mage, comes from outside the Arcane tree, if it is recognizable that I am an Arcane Mage and not another kind of Mage.
Right now, my Mage is throwing around nothing but Frost Bolts, basically. I look like a Frost Mage without Ice Barrier or Water Elemental.
Hm, then I'm not sure what's wrong. Do you not find that Arcane Barrage solves your problem?
Originally Posted by Kerbi
Lhivera how usefull do you think the new Magic Absorption will be. 1 resist per lvl at 80 then giving back 5% mana might make a full arcane spec viable with some Frostbolt/Fireball/FFB fillers if you do happen to get low on mana. Right now looking at the talents I am very eager to try out arcane for Barrage if nothing else.
80 resistance from MA is 80 resistance you don't need from gear on resistance fights, which translates directly to additional damage. I have my doubts that it will actually increase the number of MA regen procs, due to the rumors that the partial resist table is now much more granular. It's likely that 80 resistance with a 10% increment table will actually produce fewer full resists than 10 resistance does with a 25% increment table.
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 level 60, we need X rating for 1%.
At level 70, we need 82/52*X or ~1.5769*X for 1%.
At level 80, we need 101/52*82/52 for 1%. That is 1.9423 times the level 70 value.
Or 3.06287 times the level 60 value.
Prediction for ratings for 1% at level 80:
(Spell) Hit 24.50, Crit 42.88, Haste 30.63; Resilience 76.57 (1% crit, 2% critdmg)
As I read it, a certain amount of hit rating would give for example 10% spell hit and 8% melee with the unified ratings.
(Because spell hit retains 8rating/1% and melee keeps 10rating/1% as it's scaling factor.)
ABar with FFb as a filler. You get a huge crit damage bonus on FFb (spellpower, ice shards + ignite). The downside is having neither pyro nor icy veins to blow for crazy burst DPS.
ABar with fireball as a filler. You get Pyro to use with PoM for burst damage, and MoE for a bit of efficiency. Lower overall crit damage; I'm not sure how the mana efficiency numbers work out as 2/3 MoE may or may not make up for the higher mana cost of fireball.
ABar with frostbolt as a filler. This gives the worst crit-ratio of all 3 builds but by far is the easiest on mana. You also get Icy veins, which is the superior 11point tallent (just about).
These are all, of course, 10-man builds. I suspect elemental will be superior in 25mans as FFb builds just look better poised to take advantage of the liberal availability of buffs.
[Edit]
The frost setup above looks most attractive to me, but what I notice is that I will have nice control over my clearcasts and what spell I blow them on. Would it work out to my advantage to drop frost channeling and instead take Emp. AM, then blow clearcast procs on AM? Ah, descisions.
[edit #2]
anyone else notice that MMO-C is listing FFB as 40yards by defualt?
Last edited by Jonny_Monroe : 07/18/08 at 8:16 PM.
Where ABlaX means "cast with X debuffs", ABla3* is casting while the debuff runs out.
And even if it means clipping at high haste, -ABar-ABla3- spammed might be worth it in some low-haste situation because ABla3 is just such high DPS. Even if you lose cast time due to waiting on the 3s cooldown.
(( Or -ABar-ABla3-ABla3- spammed as mana dump in high haste situations. I predict that as pretty bad mana dump though. ))
If people simulate cycles, I'd love to see those cycles calculated as well. Even if only to make sure they're not worth it.
Well, its clear that haste will be readilly available in WotLK both on gear and from group buffs (moonkin, shaman, even 3% from a ret paladin).
So using Abar/Abla rotations would have some clipping issues, although Abar/(Abla*2) might be more functional.
I think, though, if I get an elemental shaman in my group I would be best set up to got with 51/10/10 weaving Abar/FFb, since I'd have EO, IS, Spellpower and Ignite all buffing my crit damage. This rotation also doesn't suffer from haste untill 35%+ values (something like 33% being ideal to get Abar once on each cooldown - easilly doable with a wrath of air totem backing you up).
Two things, first... we should make a new thread for this and lock this thread down. Way too much blind speculation in this thread, and a fresh start would be nice with the NDA-lifted beta info.
Second, after seeing the new hunter info I'm pretty much guaranteed that if I play WoLK it will be with my hunter as my main... mostly because of the absolutely INSANE group utility of Hunting Party:
Your critical shots have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to restore 2% mana, 10 energy, 4 rage, or 10 runic power to all members of your party. This effect has an 8 second cooldown.
Think of the affect that has on mage regen... if you're assuming a level 80 mage will have ~15k mana, that's ~188mp5, because it will proc every 8 seconds (the hunter crits a shitload)... and 188mp5 is amazing.
So with this, do you guys figure SV hunters will just be the new shadowpriests... where pretty much every bluebar group will need one?
EDIT:
Even if you assume a little lagtime between the hidden cooldown and HP procs and say it will proc every 10 seconds, that's still 150mp5 for a mage with 15k mana...
Eshams get an ability that increases critical bonus damage and decreases spell costs by 6% (if they can keep it up), retadins restore mana equal to 20% of judgement damage but only to up to 3 party/raid members, and VT as we all know is being nerfed to only 2% damage-to-mana returns.
Don't get me wrong, those are all nice, but imo none of them can really compare to 2% of your total mana restored every 8-10 seconds.
Well, its clear that haste will be readilly available in WotLK both on gear and from group buffs (moonkin, shaman, even 3% from a ret paladin).
So using Abar/Abla rotations would have some clipping issues, although Abar/(Abla*2) might be more functional.
I think, though, if I get an elemental shaman in my group I would be best set up to got with 51/10/10 weaving Abar/FFb, since I'd have EO, IS, Spellpower and Ignite all buffing my crit damage. This rotation also doesn't suffer from haste untill 35%+ values (something like 33% being ideal to get Abar once on each cooldown - easilly doable with a wrath of air totem backing you up).
With ffb clocking in at 3s this means missing a lot of arcane barrages. Frostbolt still looks like the winner here so far as fillers go, except at unrealistically high values of haste.
I like Abar/AB*2 if the mana supports it, which is doubtful, that's going to be a bear to sustain. Possibly a rotation of choice when you are on a burn fight or the burn portion of a fight.
Something interesting that I noticed is that the Death Knight Frozen Rune Weapon (11 point frost talent) seems to have been updated. Instead of the formerly ambiguous "Also has a chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Frost Damage", the datamined version up on MMO-Champion indicates that it:
"Imbues your rune weapon with the power of frost. For the next 30 minutes your melee swings have a chance to cause your target to take an additional 1% damage from Frost for 20 sec. This effect stacks up to 10 times."
I admit to not having read the entirety of this thread, but I've read the last 7 pages or so. But I have a question.
If Frostfire Bolt is as described by lhivera, receiving the bonus from both frost and fire regardless of actual damage type dealt, would it not be best to just try and stack as much crit as possible and make a build around FFB?
to utilize Spell Power, Icy Veins, and Ignite to try and get (if my math is correct) 315% FFB crits. This is counting the damage from ignite. This would seem to have a higher crit rate for the FFB overall. I understand that FFB seems to have the lowest base damage of the nukes in our arsenal (Arcane Barrage, Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and even Arcane Missile if you're feeling generous), but would it be safe to assume given the possible scaling of spell damage from gear as we approach 80 that a FFB-crit dependent spec could be possibly raid worthy?
This is of course assuming there are no changes to FFB between what has been posted and release.
As stated before FFB might become viable material to build a raidspec around or it might not. We need some data from the lucky lucky bastards in beta to figure out wich talents benifits it and wich dont.
I admit to not having read the entirety of this thread, but I've read the last 7 pages or so. But I have a question.
If Frostfire Bolt is as described by lhivera, receiving the bonus from both frost and fire regardless of actual damage type dealt, would it not be best to just try and stack as much crit as possible and make a build around FFB?
to utilize Spell Power, Icy Veins, and Ignite to try and get (if my math is correct) 315% FFB crits. This is counting the damage from ignite. This would seem to have a higher crit rate for the FFB overall. I understand that FFB seems to have the lowest base damage of the nukes in our arsenal (Arcane Barrage, Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and even Arcane Missile if you're feeling generous), but would it be safe to assume given the possible scaling of spell damage from gear as we approach 80 that a FFB-crit dependent spec could be possibly raid worthy?
This is of course assuming there are no changes to FFB between what has been posted and release.
Basically the viability of a FFB build depends on how Winter's Grasp works. If it goes live and WG has no internal cooldown or DR or anything, there will be no better dps spec than 0/33/38, and 0/50/21 (or some form of 40/10/21) once you have enough mages to keep WG up almost permanently.
HOWEVER, if WG goes live as it is now, then FFB mages will absolutely *NOT* need to stack crit. See, crit and damage are relative values... at X value or damage, crit has a relative value of Y, however if you start stacking X then Y becomes more valuable. So FFB builds that can rely on WG will be working with ~70% crit with *zero* gear... so damage will be far more relatively valuable.
Lhiv or Murph can do the actual math, but at that level of crit I guesstimate that at no realistic point of gear will stacking crit be more valuable than damage.
And awesome as it may sound that very fact is what makes me have higher hopes for arcane viability than ffb viability. 70% crit while naked is something that´s either to good to be true or that screams for a nerf. I guess theres an off chanse that ffb really will go live in some crazy form outdoing all the old bolts and blizzard happily noting thir sucess in boosting mage damage and giving us a new cool spell, allowing it to continue all the way into the next expansion. I mean thats basicly the story of SoC. Dont get me wrong, Im very eager to try out ffb myself and play around with various elemental specs, I just dont quite dare to hope for something that good to be released on purpose.
I made a spreadsheet (basically napkin math without rounding errors) that gave me values for haste rating and crit rating versus spell damage for live (they were comparable to values on the spreadsheets I checked). Modifying it for WotLK, I need values for int -> crit conversions and rating conversions. Much earlier in this thread, the numbers were thrown out for 90 int -> 1% crit @ 80, and recently numbers of 42.88 crit rating -> 1% crit and 30.63 haste rating -> 1% haste were suggested as being extrapolated. Either way, until someone gives us definitive numbers, we can't be sure of anything.
That said, my numbers (WotLK numbers use slightly buffed stats from my current gear):
Current 2/48/11 Fireball:
1.18 spell power per haste rating
0.78 spell power per crit rating
Current 40/0/21 Frostbolt:
1.34 spell power per haste rating
1.00 spell power per crit rating
WotLK 33/38/0 Fireball:
0.74 spell power per haste rating
0.59 spell power per crit rating
0.37 spell power per intellect
WotLK 51/0/21 Frostbolt:
0.82 spell power per haste rating
0.60 spell power per crit rating
0.71 spell power per intellect
WotLK 51/10/10 "315% crits" FFb:
0.80 spell power per haste rating
0.82 spell power per crit rating
0.85 spell power per intellect
Given current guesses for the values, ratings will be worthless except as secondary DPS stats. The primary DPS stat for casters will be spell power. At 2500 non-raid buffed spell power, the value of crit and haste barely start to be as good as the value of spell power for socketing. We will also be getting haste and crit buffs that will reduce the value of haste and crit rating even further. I should probably figure out the calculations for intellect versus spell damage, since intellect may end up providing a large portion of our crit rates.
Edit: I forgot to mention builds that take advantage of shatter/WG. From the numbers, you can be certain that if no other build wants to seek crit rating, shatter builds won't, since more crit will reduce the value of more crit compared to spell power.
Edit2: I just ran through the formula for intellect vs spellpower and have added them above. For arcane specs, intellect would be better than crit rating. The numbers include Mind Mastery (where applicable), Kings, Arcane Mind, and my gnome bonus, because I have it in there. If these weren't rough numbers anyway, I'd remove it. I'd like to stress that I'm using 90 int per 1% crit, which hasn't been verified. It is possible that the conversion rate will be different and thus will change things.
Edit3: I noticed that I made a mistake with the intellect -> effective spellpower formula, and fixed it.
I made a spreadsheet (basically napkin math without rounding errors) that gave me values for haste rating and crit rating versus spell damage for live (they were comparable to values on the spreadsheets I checked).
That said, my numbers (WotLK numbers use slightly buffed stats from my current gear):
Given current guesses for the values, ratings will be worthless except as secondary DPS stats. The primary DPS stat for casters will be spell power. At 2500 non-raid buffed spell power, the value of crit and haste barely start to be as good as the value of spell power for socketing.
That's the thing - your current gear is T6/T6.5. Endgame, just a few notches under best-in-slot.
"Slight buffing" those will give you the power of level 80 blues mixed with some early epics.
If you plug level 70 blues and heroics into Rawr, you'll see that crit/haste ratings are pretty bad at low spell power levels.
Haste and damage gems become about equal at ~1.2k/1.3k spell damage unbuffed.
If you sit at ~800 damage before raid or crafted gear, haste will be pretty mediocre. And crit is a mana stat anyway
You say haste and damage gems become about comparable at 2.5k spell power.
Sounds still okay to me really, seems comparable to the 1.2k mark in BC.
The rating progressin is a lot steeper in WotLK. 60-to-70 needed ~58% more rating-per-%, for 70-to-80 it's ~94% more.
That simply means we'll need our spell power much more as well for ratings to become good.
[Edit]: Also, haste (and hit, but we have to cap that anyway) is the only stat that increases WG uptime. These secondary benefits might be significant (I never checked the numbers there.)
I assumed a gain of 73 int, 250 spirit, -2 crit rating, 6 haste rating, and 151 spell power, which I feel is within the realm of reasonable upgrades between level 70 and ready-to-raid level 80. However, to get to 2500 spell power unbuffed, you would have to double my current spell power, which seems a bit much, but I have no clue what the best-in-slot endgame gear will be in WotLK.
Also, please note that I'm not saying ratings will be bad things on gear or that we won't be able to get enough. I'm saying that we will probably never be at the point where socketing for them is good. I fully expect that I could be sitting at 500 or 600 crit and haste rating before we're out of T7 content. Personally I hate haste rating currently, because my favorite spec is fire and burning through my mana faster doesn't seem like the best idea if I can get comparable upgrades by gearing for spell damage. Still, I'm sitting at almost 200 haste rating in my gear, only gemming for it in order to activate socket bonuses, since crit sucks even more than haste for DPS increases. I'm also sitting at 302 crit rating, even though I don't really actively seek it out. It is mostly just incidental to the gear upgrades.
My point is that we're going to get the ratings on our gear, because they can't just stack spell damage on. As a result, all our sockets will be used for spell damage (or int/spi, depending on how our mana is), pretty much no matter what, given the current numbers we have. Kind of bland way for sockets to be used. Red gems are going to be expensive...
Where do you get 315% crit from? My math puts FFb crits at 362.6% if you include EO, spell power, ice shards and Ignite.
On another note; FFb is being mined as 40yards by defualt. So, are we to assume flame throwing won't affect it, or are blizz giving us a 46yard nuke? Oh, and thotbott is listing it as doing frost+fire damage.
Last edited by Jonny_Monroe : 07/19/08 at 8:43 AM.
I am guessing by "EO" you mean Elemental Oath, which I did not take into account because I wasn't aware when I ran the numbers that there would be outside buffs that affected our critical strike damage. However, I'm not sure where you're getting 362.6% crits from. The version of EO I see gives at most a 6% increase to critical strike damage. I don't see how you go from 1 + a .5 base modifier, +100% from ice shards, +50% from Spell Power, a 1.4 multiplier from ignite, and a 6% something bonus from EO to a 362.6% crit.
Anyway, assuming that it gives 333.9% crits, the increase in effective spell damage from a crit rating is 0.04, while the increase in effective spell damage from a point of intellect is 0.03. That's for the numbers I gave above. EO at 6% won't make a big enough difference to change the way the numbers point, which is that stacking crit is stupid, no matter how much your crits do.
Yeah, Spell Power and Ice Shards don't stack like that. Both multiply based on the base +50% damage from critical strikes, but don't affect each other. Your numbers give 350% crits without EO, when it should be 315%. I'm not sure how EO will be applied, but it won't get us to 362.6% crits, assuming it makes it to live as is.
07/18/08, 7:07 PM
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