In my opinion, it's unfortunate that Mage tier 5 does not comprise alternate slots. It would be great to be able to wear 4 pieces of Tier 5 and 2 pieces of Tier 4 -- I'm not particularly impressed by the Tirisfal Regalia 2piece, but the 4piece is very nice, and Aldor Regalia's 2piece is just godly. Alas.

Yeah we found that, it was an hum... painfull night. Managed to pull aggro on zeliek at 97% with a single fireball crit at one point >_>


As for Tier 5, i just added up the shadow priest set to the little table presented earlier...

Mage Lock SPriest
stam 99 137 94
int 120 130 108
spi 85 0 89
Stats 304 267 291

dmg 188 192 189
crit 84 91 93
hit 27 27 45
pen 18 15 0

Anyone else finds it pretty... stupid... that shadow priests of all 3 classes get the most crit, and 50% more hit !?

While i dont want this to sound like a QQ post... a priest with this spec http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...10251123051351

does manage to get the equivalent of mage armor, frost channeling, arcane subtelty, arcane focus, firepower(2.5x), artic reach, imp scorch(1.38x), ICS(x1.25), mana tide, impact, a 15% chance to resist stun/silence/fear and some more stuff ?

I understand the whole "hey lets make everyone be able to dps" but this seems a bit over the top...

edit : thats another discussion anyway... sorry for the derail

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=17115

gogo farm, waterbots

What is with the mage tier 5? Who in their right mind would design a PvE set with more crit, hit and damage on the shadow priest set than the mage one? A fire mage values crit far more than a priest, it's just bizarre. Aside from that priests get 10% hit just from talents where as mages just get the recently nerfed 3%, once again giving priests so much more hit under these circumstances is bizarre.

Am I missing something here? Surely a disadvantage of playing a hybrid class is being (at least) slightly watered down.

Anyway ranting aside, I'd quite like to see a bit more in combat utility debuffs/spells. With the exception of the rare fire lock, mages offer nothing to priests, shaman, warlocks, moonkins in return for their curses/auras/totems/debuffs. Fire vun and Winters chill are too incestuous and it would be nice to see some of these synergies working both ways. Something along the lines of Misery possibly.

probably the same people who think dots scaling isnt out of hand in TBC and that mage aoe is exploiting ! heh

As for mages bringing synergy to the raid... they probably think we bring enough with AI and water/food... meh

Fire locks may become more common with TBC raiding and the awesomeness of shadow and flame + emberstorm + incinerate.

Not to mention 0/21/40 builds with sacrificing imp to maximize single target firedamage. Damagepotential looks promising with Incinerate, Soul Leech and all the coefficients from DS, S&F, Emberstorm, Imp. Scorch, Misery and Malediction.

Fire locks will scale very well in regards of +dmg. You'll get 2.07x dmg coefficient for all +dmg for incinerate assuming maxed Misery and Malediction CoE...
(1.15x 1.2x 1.1x 1.15x 1.05x 1.13x = ~2.07)

Firemages get Imp. Scorch, Emp. fireball, Firepower, Molten Fury (which is not as straightforward to model), Playing with fire, Misery and Maledictioned CoE and a bit more of crit from talents and crit benefiting us a bit more.
(1.15x 1.15x 1.1x 1.05x(*) 1.03x 1.05x 1.13x = ~1.87)

Seeing that mages are probably going to have maybe 3-4 more crit with this kind of talent builds than equivalent geared locks and mage benefitting 2.1x from crit instead of 2.0x ruin crits the gap is getting a bit smaller, but Locks do however scale a bit better against +dmg.

(*) I assumed Molten Fury is (0.2x0.2 + 0.01 extra from saving combustion to be used here)

there's always the faint hope that polymorph will retain some raiding use (unlike its pvp uses).

it would be nice if we got an aura or something. i remember someone mentioning a brilliance aura instead of arcane resilience on the US mage forums, which gave mp5. seemed like a decent idea to me.

it would be nice if we could trade off less useful stats to us in a particular fight (ie temporarily lower our spirit to 0 for say ~1min) to get a short burst of dmg ie 20% dmg increase or something. seems a bit arcane power-esque, especially in the idea of lots of whine and an eventual nerf lol.

im going to go look up some lvl 70 spell ranks and see if i can theorycraft some numbers for deep fire, deep frost and deep arcane builds. right after i do the dishes >.>

Come on, don't bring AI into this. 40 int at level 70? You can get the same effect by starting a fight with a green staff of intellect and switching out when you've cast the first 3 fireballs. Yes back when everyone relied on huge mana pools and flash heal spamming extra int was nice, but its almost worthless in current pve due to the huge amounts of mana regenerated during fights. It's about time AI got looked at (hint to blizzard: spell damage please!). It seems natural to me that mages would have a buff that increases the spell damage of themselves and others. Sorry for ranting :P

/agreed

We're a kiting class, seems like bliz has forgotten this. Arcane Fortitude comes to mind....

Has Bliz in Beta done anything to the way arcane brilliance is cast? It's per group, and I wish it was like pala buffs so its per class.

Oh i agree with the value fo AI, it was more ment as a sarcastic thing, altho AI is like 2/3rd of a crit ! heh.

I dont know where we are heading with the Tier 4 and 5 sets... it seems its a completly different idea than for tier 3... the graphical look is much better at least, but we're going from an overall solid set to a set that is a small upgrade but... a significant downgrade relativly to other casters.
I like the tier 5 set bonuses, the arcane blast buff might be good, and 70dmg on crit is a little "of nice"... Even the icon buff (found on thottbot) looks cool ! but damn, what is up with the actual stats ? at first gance i was happy, a set with a decent amount of spirit on every piece for PVE but... the dmg meh... then you compare with the shadow priest set and a big ? comes up >_>

AI gives about 1/2 spell crit at 70 (every bit helps) and swaping out a 40 int weapon uses the global cooldown (and you lose 1/2 spell crit).

I don't think AI needs to be looked at, other than reducing the mana cost. You have to think of balance, and giving AI some spell damage boost breaks that balance.

How exactly do you kite in group pvp? On my warrior alt I love going after mages who just blinked because I know they're screwed. Are you one of those guys who never buffs himself with Ice Armor when ressing and than complain about getting two shot by melee?

I agree completely, get some nice reduction with in a 41/x/x build wearing Necro's. Hoping for a level 70 version of Necro's somewhere....

I was speaking in terms of 1 on 1 encounters, I'm interested in more abilities so to speak. Blazing speed proc's quite a bit I noticed. It's actually working better than I imagined in some cases. Bah I think I'm whining...I blinked through a bridge last night, probably why.

Right now I 3-4 shot people so kiting is pretty arbitrary, but at 70 I think kiting may play a larger role than it ever had.

And even with ice armor, I'm still getting 3 shotted by descent hunters. Unless I see them first. :P

... so in a 25-man raid you have to cast it 7 times instead of 5?

You had a point three months ago: you don't any more...

INT*0.0143+0.9075 seems to fit the crit/int at level 60 for GetSpellCritChanceFromIntellect

Depends how much you believe tseric.

http://blue.cardplace.com/cache/wow-general/8532087.htm

Now, it has been a while since my guildy once told me this, but there was a study on the mage crit from int by a mage from Risen (I think? I could be very wrong here and if I am I'm very sorry x_x) that decided to test his theory by casting 6000 frostbolts (or was it 3000 total, 1500 at each level of int? I forgot x_x)

He (or she) decided to take off all gear completely and launch 3000 frostbolts vs. lv.1 critters in the snow fields in Dun Morogh and recorded his crit rate, then put on various green gear that gave only +int that totalled to +30 int, then launched another 3000 frostbolts at various critters and found that his crit rate increased by something like 1.001%, strongly leading him to believe that the int to spell crit ratio for a mage is around the neighborhood of 30.

When a working version of Recap comes out, we'll be able to provide more raw data to support or refute this.

My own suspicion is the int/crit ratio is keyed to the level of the target rather than the level of the caster. There's been some indication that the rating systems also work in this manner. It would make the above finding about critter int->crit entirely consistent with information given by CMs at various points. I suspect agility works in a similar manner for physical damage crit rates.

I've been running various tests over the past few days to get a better grip on spell mechanics and will add this hypothesis to the list. (Incidentally, MoE will never proc off a resisted frostbolt, in case anyone was wondering. And it's basically impossible to get 100% resisted fire spells due to resistance scores (at least in PvP against players and pets) so I've never been able to reproduce an MoE proc on a full resist either. They've really made the resistance rates in pvp extremely consistent. A player/pet with 300 resistance will resist 75% of the damage 90-95% of the time, and 50% the other 5-10% or so, unlike what the resistance page seems to indicate.)

This thread is massive to read through, specially now since its over 40 pages, so, please bare with me if this has been asked and answered before.

I was looking into specs that involved 40pts into arcane and 21pts into either frost or fire, mainly because of some talents in the arcane tree, such as Spell Power, and the talent that converts a % of your intellect into additional +spelldmg.

Then it hit me, I started to look into "Spell Power" and wondered how it would work with Ignite and Ice Shards. Up until TBC, it was widely known that Fire spells benefited more from +Crit gear than frost, simply because Ignite made fire spells crit 2.1 times harder, with Ice Shards made frost spells crit only 2 times harder.

How exactly does Spell Power stack with Ignite and Ice Shards? Feel free to point and correct any mistakes in my math.

No brainer for Ice Shards (I think, correct my math if needed)

0.5 * 2 * 1.5 = 1.5 (Critical Dmg portion is increased to a 1.5 mod, instead of 0.5)

0.5 = base crit damage
2 = Ice Shards
1.5 = Spell Power


So, you have 2.5 as the final modifier for a critical strike frost spell.

Now, with Ignite.

0.5 * 1.5 = 0.75

0.5 = base crit damage
1.5 = Spell Power

So, you have 1.75 as the final modifier for a critical strike fire spell

Now, working the new mod onto Ignite.


Fire_Spell_Crit = 1.75 + (1.75 * 0.4)
Fire_Spell_Crit = 2.45


With TBC and the new arcane tree, if you were to make use of Spell Power, then Frost Spells would now take the lead in terms of benefit from +Crit gear? Or did I mess up my math somewhere

Ice Shards and Spell Power are additive:

1.0 + 0.5 (normal crit bonus) + 0.5 (ice shards) + 0.25 (spell power) = 2.25 = 225% damage on crits.

Your math on Spell Power + Ignite is correct.