Tizzlewump

I conjecture that mages will go through the same learning process that priests went through when learning the difference between the Holy spell school and the Holy ability tree. We all know that if you CS a priest's heal they can't PWS because the Holy spell school is locked, but a priest in shadowform can PWS because it is in the Discipline ability tree and only the Holy ability tree is locked by shadowform.

Frostfire bolt is going to teach us all that the frost talent tree is buffing spells in the frost tab of our spellbook, not our spells that do frost damage. The way it tries to do damage makes it sound like a Fire spell, with an effect that tries to skip immunities and exploit BWL-drakonid-style vulnerabilities. You don't really believe it's going to run the numbers for two talent trees and then give the mob a resist roll for both its frost and fire ratings on top of it all, do you? In any event, it isn't going to appear in both the Fire and Frost tabs of our spellbook (nothing else ever has for any class) and which we find it in will tell us a lot about how it works. (Moreover, if I'm wrong about the double-entry thing we still learn a lot.)

There is no precedent for a kicked frostfire bolt to lock out both fire and frost schools -- no one can yet get double-school locked. I'm also going to conjecture that whichever skill tab it ends up in will be the school you lock with a kick, but I don't think this necessarily follows the skill tab location.

I really like the comment about the snare making this spell binary. A very worthwhile observation I missed at first through fifth glances.

 

Lhivera

I think we're just going to have to wait and see on this one. I'd love a single bolt that was buffed by all the non-spell-specific modifiers in both trees (Fire Power, Piercing Ice, etc.), and thus could perform as a halfway decent nuke for both specs when facing an immunity situation. And I'm sure it's within their technical capabilities to do that. But whether it's what they're really going for is another question entirely that won't be answered until we see it in action.

 

Tizzlewump

One way to do this is to flag the fire talent tree to affect fire school damage and the frost talent tree to affect frost skill damage and give frostfire bolt to the fire school while putting in the frost skill tab. No new mechanics required.

I wouldn't have posted such speculation if it weren't such a speculative thread. Fun stuff. Time will tell if this is a clever new mechanic, a weird raid-specific tool, or a clumsy way to say "sorry about all the [blank]-immune stuff we had to put in for lore, please don't respec twice a night."

 

Illidor

Shatter Shield has potential, despite the massive mana cost. Other than the obvious applications vs melee, it is also a great spell in small scale pvp vs warlocks. While it's up, it will basically provide full immunity from spell pushback due to pets hitting you. Combine this with the 120 resists to all from Magic Absorption + Mage Armor that a pet cannot overcome (unless we see better scaling for pets that includes them inheriting the caster's spell penetration), and a felhunter might no longer be anything except a minor annoyance.

 

PSGarak

Blizzard explicitly stated that they're trying to soften some of the hard-counters, with the given example being warlock vs mage. The new mage armor (especially duration decrease) is a prime example of this. Shatter Shield I don't quite see being warlock-specific, although I suppose pet interruption is a big deal for some specs. Not to say that mages will suddenly turn into warlock-killing machines, but at the least the fight will take more reactiveness on the warlock's part to deal with new abilities, and will have to rely on his own new abilities (eg empower->dispel vs shields, decimate vs iceblock).

Also: Oddly, if warlocks are to be given meditation (and I believe that's still revertable at this point), we probably benefit from it more than most other caster classes aside from arcane mages. Most classes have a can/cannot cast dichotomy with respect to mana, and try to push that as far as they can while still using DPS consumables. Arcane mages actually swap casting cycles, so they can stretch as far as they want at the cost of short-term damage. Because of lifetap, warlocks are in a similar situation: we can go for as long as we need to, but we've found that the DPS increase from not needing to incur the GCD so often is actually kinda big. A 30-39% meditation self-buff will likely have a considerable effect on our gear selection. The change is not just lip-service, we actually will be wanting that junk that has some spare item points spent on spirit. Expect all gear to be designed with spirit on it.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Ceara

How long could this be viable against a Warlock with a Fel Hunter though? Lets not forget in addition to the counterspells, the Fel Hunters eat our buffs.

 

Illidor

True, but with the 120 resists Devour Magic should see a ~25% resist rate or so. Not necessarily a huge difference, but a significant one. Refreshing Shatter Shield and especially Mage Armor is always an option too, though I worry about the mana consumption in this case...

 

• Intermission

The way it's worded, it has to be simply "increases damage and healing by up to X" type buff:

Incanter's Absorption
When you absorb damage, your spell damage is increased by {5/10/15}% of the amount absorbed for 10 secs

EG:

A priest casts PW: Shield on you. It will absorb 2000 damage. The boss does an AoE, it hits you for 1000 damage. You then gain 150 spell damage for 10 seconds because you absorbed 1000 damage. 12 seconds later, you absorb 500 more damage, so you gain another 75 spell damage for 10 seconds.

How this will work with overlapping absorbs remains to be seen. Either a 'more powerful spell is active' error if a 500 absorb happens after a 600 absorb; a replacement buff, refreshing the timer yet going only off the most recent damage absorbed; or even multiple absorbtion->spell damage buffs, which could get quite spammy if you have a shield on you and a pet is attacking you.

To get around those problems, it could only make the calculation apply once the absorption spell (mana shield, PW:S, etc) has left completely, either by timing out or destroyed. So a 2000 PW:Shield that times out, but 500 of it was used before it timed out, could be a 75 dmg buff. Or a 2000 Shatter Shield that was slowly eaten away by a hunter pet and was broken through, you gain the 300 dmg once it breaks. Or a Mana Shield that absorbed 800 damage and then was /cancelaura'ed off would grant 120 dmg.

 

radikal

I'm really hoping they at least give mages some dispel resistance on their own buffs or a mechanism that reduces the effectiveness of just spam dispelling mages and training them. All this new stuff in wotlk looks pretty cool until you think that it'll be all dispelled anyways. (not saying it isn't useful still, but to a lesser degree)

Maybe with shadow prot or mark, you might argue a hunter or felhunter (with zero pen on either) will have a hard time dispelling you, but this still requires you run around in mage armor giving up a lot of the deeper frost synergies with frostbite.

Other random thoughts:

Winter's Grasp would be cooler if it was 20% proc 3 seconds duration. At 10%, it's going to just feel like stupid RNG when you proc it and get free stuns or multiple ice lances. (4?)

Deep Freeze is cool. I'm torn on whether/when you'll be able to land it however. If it were instant, I think its potency would be quite obvious, but as a cast, it's a little unclear when I think of when I'd be trying to land the stun. Say you frostbite proc a warrior, you spend 1 second getting distance to avoid pummel giving you seemingly plenty of time to land the freeze. You start to cast, midcast, he spell reflects, midcast you react and ice lance. You blew call it 1 second on the aborted cast, and 1.5 on the lance, you're at 1.5 on the bite proc, and it's a bit unclear whether you can finish the cast before the bite ends. It becomes much more obviously problematical by mind numbing, infected wounds, CoT, slow etc. I envision similar issues when trying to build long cc chains and chain polys into novas into stuns etc against a lot of classes.

Ice Floes - No Deep Freeze , Icy Veins, or Water Elemental still? Seems perfectly reasonable to lower these CDs as well.

Permafrost/Chilled to the Bone - 30% CoC snares seem pretty nasty but the tree is so bloated that it is almost impossible to create a decent 17/0/54 spec. And with the improvements to lower Arcane, that 17 feels more necessary than ever.

I see really no changes that are going to change frost gameplay from the current version:
- Run around and kite/tank hunter/melee
- Spam shields on yourself and hope that their primary dispeller is busy and not dispelling you
- Look for windows to get a poly cast off
- Spam instants on the damage target
- Focus CS their healer
- Shatter combo if you somehow make it free

Obviously, the above is a generalization/simplification and you could arguably simplify many classes' roles in that way in arena, but probably not to quite the same degree.

Maybe the gameplay shouldn't change very much and that's fine, but it feels like other classes are getting somewhat better designed talents/abilities tailored to their needs when compared to what's currently offered. Wait and see I guess.

 

radikal

I was very confused by this talent too. It kinda seemed that there was some potential for infinite stacking damage if it was addititive by pws->seed->pws->living seed etc

 

Sorcerer

Incanters is more or less pvp stuff but considering chain train mage and dispells, it won't work aswell as if you get trained the window to get a shatter combo is really narrow thus negating effect of increased spelldmg.

We need some talent (in T1-3 talent tree max!) and/or spell that will do fancy stuff if enemy spellsteal/purge/dispell us. Like a 3sec silence upon dispell? I am just giving an example, 3sec silence could be gamebreaking.

 

Everune

My apologies in advance I have played a mage since day 1 but were are only on illidan so I am not the most experienced player and I haven't seen it all but hopefully I can offer something to this discussion.

albeit a but early to start number crunching I think that most people have been looking at the talents from the wrong direction (I myself almost hit someone when I saw the new talents and spells)

[Edit] Sorry I was a bit late on this section.. GG Lhivera I skipped your posts on accident my bad!

I would propose two things: First mages need no new damage talents we just need more points to play with. I would stand to argue that 33/38/0 would be a strong spec thought only get 3/5 empowered fireball I am scared to see how it scales.

Of particular notice, although elemental precision is nice the lack of that talent will allow an end game mage to use more + hit gear. Hit being such a cheap stat it seems like in the end game it best to be able to spend as much as you can there in gear before losing talents on thins gear can get you, if you can get it thats is.

Additionally, 33/0/38 seems like it might be viable though it may be less so as "slurpy" (my water elemental) is so much dmg and the threat from shatter + spell power will be hard to manage


Second, I would propose that frost mages will function as "enchanters" with an ability that no one dreamed of... a boss stun. The deep freeze talent in combination with the winters grasp might just allow mages to stun bosses. we have been looking for some uniqueness and the gave warlocks our damage we may just be getting something even more valuable.

 

Alvira

They would never give anyone the ability to stun or cc bosses unless they meant for the bosses to be cced in the first place. It would be too easy for a raid to stack mage and hence prolong the time of the stun. You put a 30 second cooldown to it? Clever raid leaders just stack 6 frost mages. Suddenly, you have a rotation going that will ensure that the boss keeps on getting stunned all the time.

Plus it would be the ultimate interrupt if it was allowed to work on all bosses. Boss A with potential raid wiping AOE ability like Magtheridon? Have your frost mage stand by. Once the ability is being cast, Stun the boss and interrupt the ability. Then you won't even need to bother doing whatever they meant for you to do to survive the AOE attack.

 

Alvira

A lot of the discussion on 33 arcane/ xx specs are all due to one thing. arcane power and spellpower and two extremely power talents that are percentage based. When applied only to arcane tree, which doesn't have that many other percentage based damage boosting talents in it, its balanced.

But when combined with fire and frost trees which have lots of percentage based damage talents. these two arcane talents become overpowered. It was managable in TBC because we didn't have as many talent points to work with and AP, spellpower was still so deep down the arcane tree, you really had to sacrifice a lot for it.

With ten more levels and an additional ten more points, you can go fairly deep into two trees, which then makes the 33/xx specs so good. They are just finding it difficult to increasingly top existing powerful talents they have already created at 21, 31, 41 points, or even 11 points!

Icy veins for example. Available at 11 points into frost. It is overpowered clearly as a 11 point talent, because it is so easy for arcane or fire specs to throw 11 points into frost and suddenly get a talent which will make a noticable PVE plus pvp impact. Given how raids have learn to create stacked groups utilising blooodlusts, and the predominacne of drums, icy veins in terms of raid dps power is every bit as powerful as arcane power (with the same cooldown), and yet, you jsut need 11 points in frost to get it.

In their focus to make mages viable in arena and pvp, it looks like dedicated pve raiding mages will simply not take the new wotlk talents in favour of getting existing older talents which will provide a much bigger DPS boost in pve raiding. Its why I observed that most of the new talents seem to be all about arena or pvp.

 

Everune

I think this true of arcane fire but im really not sure about frost ... frost seems like it will be PvE viable but instead of facing mana issues will instead face threat issues as its cap on damage.

ok who still has their fetish of the sand reaver?

... just saying (and if blizzard touches it I will have some ones head)

and like I previously said I think that there is a good 10% chance on getting a boss stun. We have continually been given "unique" rolls in raid welcome to polly morphing adds, AoEing skellies, and SS tanking, I really wouldnt be surprised.

 

Deedre

Burnout is underpowered and needs some loving, is the bottom line. The rest of the deep fire talents are poorly conceived. A fire mage is virtually forced to look elsewhere.

Frost is solid and even though 33/0/38 looks like evil fun, it isn't mandatory. A frost mage won't go far wrong in putting all his talents in frost and taking a pass on the other trees. It stands well enough alone. Fire does not.

Ironically, the arcane talents in question leave arcane relatively underpowered. Low crits, poor scalability continue to plague the tree. Although Lhiv may change my mind on this, waiting to see the math.

 

Alvira

They just need to put some top tiered talents (above 41 points) that futher increase only arcane crit damage by another 25% and they would balance arcane scaling out. But for some odd reason, they still haven't done so.

Melee gets at least 200% damage crits. Frost gets 200% damage on crits. Fire gets more than 210% if you add talents. Only arcane is in the bizzare situation of getting only 175% on crits.

 

Kel S'jet

I do not believe their is any chance of mages getting a boss stun through deep freeze.
The reason being, firstly, blizzard would have to open bosses up to stuns. That in itself is a whole can of worms. Secondly, even if they DO open bosses up to stuns, they would supply "boss stun" spells to a variety of classes as inherent spells and not talents.
Why?
Well if bosses could be stunned then, firstly, they would have to design encounters around that fact. What this would do is, in order to not just have an encounter completely trivialized but perma stunning the boss, they would have to design encounters assuming the boss will be stunned. This means that those encounters would now REQUIRE something that could stun the boss in order to beat the encounter. Now if deep deep frost mages were the ONLY class that could do this, it pretty much means that you will be forced to bring a frost mage to every encounter otherwise you will not succeed.

I do not believe blizzard would make encounters requiring you to bring not just a specific class (we know they do this aka Maulger/Illi council) but a specific spec of that class.

 

◊ nathanbp

Some Math about Hot Streak
(because I wanted to prove to myself how bad it was)

But first, a picture:

(How to read this graph: At 50% base crit rate, you will on average see 53.33% of your spells crit with Hot Streak)

Calculations behind the picture (note: ignoring 1% miss chance, as it only makes things worse):
Expected # (x) of casts ending in 3 crits in a row with crit chance p:
x = (1 + p + p^2)/p^3 (ref: Dr. Math)
Assuming that the hot streak crit does not count for itself, we will on expect to see x casts with a crit chance of p, followed by a guaranteed crit. Therefore the new overall crit percentage will be p' = (x*p+1)/(x+1) (x*p + 1 crits over x+1 casts, on average). Graphed above is p' - p as a function of p.

Conclusions: Even with 50% base crit (which is on the very high end of reasonable, with a moonkin + gearing for crit), Hot Streak only increases your crit percentage by 3.33%. Not very impressive for 3 talent points high in the fire tree.

(If I've made any mistakes in my math, please correct me.)

 

◊ manly

I think the whole point of hot streak is that you want to spec deep fire/shatter, and have frost mages in the raid freezing the boss. Thats about the only good use for the talent.

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.

 

Prinsesa

Regarding all casters getting in-combat regen and ZOMG LOOK AT THE MOONKIN AURA NOW, this little doozy was found in the Mana Regen thread:

While it remains to be seen whether this is a gimmick of a single fight or a general penalty for mana pot use across the board (I sincerely hope it's the latter), keep in mind that the better-than-Windfury spell haste from Improved Moonkin Aura is probably going to make OOM issues a very real possibility.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Bulgarth

Might as well take the Prism of Inner Calm from Vashj. It's a passive trinket that reduces threat from crits, which is usually what causes you to pull aggro in the majority of cases. Right now the trinket is crap, and probably I for see it being crap in Wotlk too even *if* aggro does become a huge problem with certain specs.

 

kadgar

Oh, I love that trinket in Hyjal at trashwaves, prot pally tank and bloodlust + ap + veins + gem (SCB) = dmg!
An AE crit does negative threat with the trinket equipped.

PS: sadly War Tools :: View talent tree is removed by blizzard.
Kinda silly since it's based on the client which is still downloadable for everyone who has the original downloader which also public long enough.

Still available:
WotLK Information Wiki: Spells Talents Professions

Anyone have a link to a talent tree? (the cache is not working for me)

 

Zaldinar

I wrote a quick simulator (http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/sims/hotstreak.pl) that generally confirms your results. My graph compared to yours ignoring the hit roll matches just about perfectly. Adding in the 1% miss chance reduces the peak to about 3.35% gain at 65% base crit. Your shape is spot on though, and scale is accurate too. In the range we can normally expect to be in (30-45%) this provides roughly 0.98 to 2.35% crit. The next interesting question becomes, how does combustion change this curve, if in any appreciable way it does?

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Pintofbrew

The prism has had an internal cooldown for quite a while now. The possibility of spamming rank 1 scorch to get negative agro is long gone.

If you do have agro issues, and by God with all the raid-buffing going around we sure as fuck will, then another plume in the hat of 33/38/0. Not only do you have Clearcast and Magic Absorption to keep your mana afloat (almost everyone seemed to not notice: Magic Absorption not only keeps the magic off you, it gives you a boatload of mana while doing it too. Before, it was not considered as you'd never resist anything, but at +80all rez it's a different story.)

As 33/38/0 arcane-fire hybrid(or should it be fire-arcane hybrid now?) you'll be able to spec into Prismatic Cloak, making Invis instant.

Crikey, where do I sign up? Resistances galore, 4% damage reduction, mage-feign-death, molten fury, AP-Comb-PoM-Pyro, increased range on AE, Poly and Counterspell, Arcane Mind... What I find most amusing about the spec is you only get the best talents from arcane, leaving out all the ones that make you frown in bogglement and wonder, and almost all the best talents in Fire, leaving out the ones that WotLK seems to be bringing to the party, which are decidedly shit in their current incarnation.

As for Moonkins? Fuck Moonkins, give me a Demonologist Lock any day of the week... Did anyone else notice the talent that said "35% each time your pet deals damage to increase the party's damage by 3%, stacks 5 times, lasts 8sec". Is it me or is that Ferocious Inspiration, times five?

Does anyone else feel Blizz is going a little bit haywire with all the group-buffs? Is there any class left that doesn't in some significant way have a use-based party-buff?