Expose Weakness procs on the HUNTER'S crits, not the hunter's pet's crits.

That being said, I raided as a demo warlock on my reroll and the felguard crits a lot, so I wouldn't be surprised if one demo lock could keep the caster-EW up nearly permanently.


EDIT:

Lhiv, it makes sense for them to really hurt downranking, as they're increasing the mana cost of spells in the 71-80 range. If players are going to be running around with 2000+ spell power, there wouldn't be much harm in using rank 13 fireball instead of rank 15 because it costs less than half as much, but the extra mana you'd save is staggering.

It's not nearly as big of an exploit for mages, but healers and warlocks would gain an insane amount of longevity if level 61-70 spells scaled as well as the level 71-80 ones.

Rather, getting naked should lead to higher ranks absorbing nothing. You have same -(Y) spelldamage penalty but nothing of your own to compensate for it.

Arazan - the buff new Demo ability is being compared to is not Expose Weakness but Ferociuos Inspiration, which procs from Pet critical hits.

Uhm... I may not have typed that quite right then. Say you use a rank thats 40 levels below you, that might remove X of your spell damage from said rank. Getting naked, you would still lose X spell damage (which would take it further into a negative amount, but visably show no difference).

to test it you would need to use a rank where you're losing a clear amount of spell power, and then test with different amounts of spell power on gear.

it may be as simple as 'for every level below your character level (starting at 10 lower), you lose 60 effective spell power contributing to that rank of the spell.'

So for a spell 70 levels below you, you'd lose 60x60=3600 spell power for that spell

So for mana shield at 2000 spell power you'd be calculating as if you had -1600 spell power, reducing the total absorbed by around 800 (more than the base amount for that rank).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, thats all total speculation and its more likely that it really is just a bug. Or maybe just a bug that negative spell power values are affecting shields, or many other possible things.

I missed that a new page had been created, and edited my previous post. If you're interested, I added info from a couple more Frost Novas which helps narrow the coefficient range.

I believe the comparison was being drawn not to Expose Weakness, but rather to Ferocious Inspiration, which procs on pet crits. The difference is that, while DP may not be up as consistently as FI, DP's value while up should be higher than FI's, so they should balance out nicely.

Oh, I have no argument with or question about that whatsoever. I'm merely pointing out that it's happening, according to Rancid's tests.

Many thanks to Rancid for his testing and passing information through Lhivera, it is greatly, greatly appreciated. I'm keeping the WoW Mage forums (WoW Forums -> Zaldinar's WotLK checklist) up to date on anything I get out of here, so the word is at least theoretically getting out.


Massive changes to AoE coefficients don't make me happy if thats what they think is going to change our AoE situation, unless we are to assume that the Hyjal style trash AoE situations will disappear, and we'll return to the AoEs of the skel packs in the front part of Strat, 6-10 mixed Elite/Non-Elite/Caster/Melee types. Do we know if anyone has actually confirmed Beta caps match known BC caps? Sancus mentioned in a thread on the beta forums (WoW Forums -> 51 point mage talents.... again?) that World in Flames wasn't scaling the caps, but not the particular numbers involved in that conclusion.

The scaling of AoE seems unchanged so far. Blizzard has the same "8 ticks at 14% each, 114% total" as on live. It's base damage is 50% higher and the first calculations used the 2.0 tooltip with the 3.0 data, so it looked like a change.

Check my post, Blizzard is all the same. [Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion
Only Frost Nova had it's -80% snare penalty toned down to the -10%/-20% range.

Great write up otherwise, thank you

Confirmation is no more than Blizzard stating that they are left with just the 'polish' phase for the mage class. Now your interpretation of what 'polish' means may differ from mine or theirs. To me 'polish' means that the only thing left now is numerical tweaks rather than additions.

As far as other classes go, from what we have seen so far, the reliable information is pointing to almost all classes getting just 2 new abilities in WoTLk (with the exception being the warrior who still needs 1 more ability, but then again, they are not just left with the 'polish' of the warrior class)

Druid - Savage Roar, Nourish
Hunter - Bear Trap, Kill Shot
Mage - Frostfire Bolt, Shatter Shield
Paladin - Shield of Righteousness, Sacred Shield
Priest - Mind Sear, Divine Hymn
Rogue - Dismantle, Fan of Knives
Shaman - Lava Burst, Hex
Warlock - Shadowflame, Super Blink
Warrior - Shield Break


The other thing that seems to indicate just 2 spells, is that for each class, they get the first spell at lvl 75 (<-- first time in WoW to get a core spell at an odd number, barring portals and such), and the other spell at 80. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Aah, missed that post somehow, re-editing the coefficients out of my list then, and strike the concern about coefficients being the change to the relative usefulness in AoE. Back to the same old song of "So, what are the level 80 spell caps, and have the mechanics changed?" being the theme of the AoE question.

Unless I'm missing something, the second trainable warrior ability is Bloodbath - Spell - World of Warcraft, which differs slightly from the 75/80 standard since it's trainable at 60. Shield Break, of course, is 75, and there's no new ability at 80.

Let's not get into a big argument of "well they get TWO trainable spells and we only get 1!" Honestly, I could care less if we got NO new trainable spells, because I'd be much happier if they solidified what we already had rather than just giving us new crap that doesn't really help the class.

As for RoR2, my guess is that it'll either be implemented as a quest or book drop, similarly to how maxrank conjure water was gained from the DM quest at 60 and how the maxrank 70 conjures were book drops. Though I secretly wish they just make conjured food/water BoP so stop this nonsense that somehow RoR is some amazing and unique utility that mages have.

So I've been looking at the various forums since my last post, and I got a few more questions.

1) Given blizzards ability to crit now, it seems that the raw numbers of overall damage put it just under the effectiveness of AE (paraphrasing Lhivera here). But, given that it's a 8 second channeled spell, how much haste rating (given level 70 values) would be required to increase it's average dps over that of AE? I'm thinking that since it's an 8 second channeled spell, it would benefit quite well from haste. I don't beleive it's out of the question to have a current t6-level caster able to hover around 200 haste rating, which would reduce the channeled time to ~7 seconds. Could this possibly imply that at a certain value of haste, Blizzard becomes better DPS than AE?

I'm keeping in mind the extremely high mana cost of blizzard, which means it's DPM would probably be in the tubes unless you had support classes funnelling mana to you constantly (shadow priests, shamans, druids, etc)

2) Given the current speculation around Frostfire Bolt (FFB) gaining benefits from both frost and fire talent trees, I keep looking at the possible ways to break FFB. Creating various talent builds, doing some basic math given various values for stats with different stat priorities, etc. One talent build I've been leaning towards is a 0/32/39 build. (Fire down to Molten Fury and Frost down to Winter's Grasp.) Now, like just about every mage everywhere, when I put points into fire, I throw my first 5 points into imp fireball. But....

Given the (very remote) possibility of having an elemental spec not using fireball or frostbolt in a spell rotation, Wouldn't it be considered more useful to try adding a stun proc (A la Impact) to our new favorite spell? It's like a straw on some poor camel's back, a drop in a massive bucket, another tree in the forest, <insert metaphor here>. You now have a spell that slows, can freeze, crits more often than not for 280% damage, and also has a chance to stun!

The basic layout of this elemental build can be found HERE

3) I've seen (and I think posted) an alternate build trying to utilize Arcane Barrage along with Frostfire bolt. Something possibly looking something like this. )50/10/10 + 1 As with question 2, the lack of fireball in the spell rotation made me decide impact would be more useful for FFB. My question regarding this is: what is the point of putting that final point in arcane barrage if the primary spell for the build is FFB? FFB gets the benefits from ignite, ice shards, and in my case impact. For every 2 Arcane Barrages cast, assuming no Haste, you lose out on an FFB and all that fun for a pair of 5% chances at an instant FFB. I simply do not see 5% as being significant enough to merit taking that point. Would it not be better to cast Icy Veins at that point?

Atrocity for affliction tree.
Atrocity - Spell - World of Warcraft

Well, remember that AE also benefits from Haste now; apart from latency (which favors longer casts, but the degree to which it does so is going to vary a great deal from player to player), there's no inherent benefit of Haste to longer casts until you actually peg the shorter cast against the 1.0 second minimum GCD -- which takes 50% haste. After that, Blizzard will start to catch up. But remember also that AE doesn't cap nearly as quickly, so AE will always have the advantage on larger groups of mobs.

Mana cost alone means nothing; to calculate DPM, you need to compare mana cost with the amount of damage being dealt per cast. And on this point, Blizzard is very strong indeed. It's expensive, yes, but it's extremely efficient.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000



Done, it keeps all the damage increases of fire, such that they are, and leeches off winters grasp.


The big boost frost got was the winters grasp ability, the added 5% to frostbolt is essentially negated by the ghost hit loss and partial resists coming.

So I think fire may still be king. With ample frost mages of course. You forfeit alot of the soul of fire though.


Anyway, this spec may be redundant if it was already considered, but I have yet to see any variants of it.

As a side note, even IF this happened to be the highest dps mage spec I could not stomach taking it, its so void of all personal utility I can taste bile just thinking about being that spec.

Now that Blizzard can crit, how does it interact with MoE? Does it only get one mana return? Or can crits on separate ticks proc the mana return? Either way, it could be an even more efficient AoE option for FFB elementalist builds in particular.

I did consider bloodbath, however, I believe that my intentions were to show the new abilities for existing classes between 71-80. I would not consider bloodbath as one of these 'new' abilities but rather a 'the class really should have this ability to serve its function'. We can see that blizzard has already done this before, especially with paladins (take note of the introduction of Spiritual Attunement at the onset of BC). I believe this is blizzard's intent with bloodbath as well.

The reason I say this is that blizzard is making it abundantly clear that almost all classes need AoE (and to a lesser extent, CC). Even rogues, who are touted to be masters of single target damage, now have AoE abilities. I think that this new paradigm for classes is motivated from the belief that blizzard does not want to make it necessary for any one class to be absolutely essential for at least 10 person raiding. This leads to an easier group makeup, hence making it possible for more people to experience content in some form.

That being said, I am quite certain that Warriors will indeed receive a brand new ability for the 71-80 range. Lets not forget that, unlike Mages, Blizzard has not stated that only tweaks/polish is needed for Warriors. They are still in development mode with Warriors.

Well first, the initially rumored coeff was 3/3.5 or 0.857. Second, I don't know where you got that 0.5-0.6 number. Taken from the post linked:

Where X = base damage, Y = coefficient

X + 1180*Y = 1490
X + 42*Y = 480
------------------
1138Y = 1010
Y = 0.88752

Fairly on-par as I see it.

It most certainly is not a simultaneous equation. Firstly since the value of "X" is not an unknown, and secondly since the value of "X" in the two cases is not the same. A little common sense helps here.

Since no one on the beta has lvl 80 spells
Arcane Barrage - Rank 2 -> 865 - 709 dmg :: Avg = 787
Arcane Barrage - Rank 1 -> 368 - 470 :: Avg = 419

Since the player reported a ABr score of 480ish, it is more than safe to assume that either the was wrong in reading, or he used Rank 1 by mistake (or he did not compensate for resist/partials, in which case that entry is invalid) since he cannot achieve 480 with rank 2 since the lower bound is 709.

This leaves us with

1490 - 787 = 703
703 / 1180 = 0.59 for Avg

1490 - 865 = 625
625 / 1180 = 0.52 for Upper bound

etc...

or, more likely, he's using rank 1 in both examples and is getting the 'rumoured' amount of co-ef. Which, probably, is why he's reporting it as a bug (since its in a concerns post, and he's reporting it as getting the abnormal co-ef).

A little common sense goes a long way.

Looking back to Lhiveras information from Rancid on the last page...


Edit: I've also not heard the 3.5 / 3.5 rumor, its always been 3.0 / 3.5 or 1.5 / 3.5 or ??? for weird inbetween. Looks like it matches 3 / 3.5s scale, more detailed testing required to be certain.

Atrocity was removed, replaced by Cripple which was finally replaced by Haunt. For more details refer to search in this or Warlock WotLK thread.

Okay, now we begin to see examples of the itemisation in WOTLK, i guess then we can begin to see a bit more of the picture..

Worldofraids has a list of new items here: World of Raids | WotLK New Items and Dungeon Pages Updated

New blue items seem to stack quite a bit of int, sta and spirit so i guess we will get a nice large mana pool with a nice regen and perhaps crit bonus from the spirit to boost..

-Edit-

I created the new item:

Attuned Crystaline Boots
166 Armor
+41 Intellect
+31 Spirit
+31 Stamina
Equip: Increases spell power by 37

in Rawr, and it looks like it is equal to Karazhan, crafted and badge epix from TBC.. So perhaps we don't have to exchange all our hard earned epix with green stuff this time, eventhough there is a nice spirit and int pool on the blue stuff..