Warning for jak3676: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

• Vykromond · 10/30/09, 4:57 PM

Post: General Mage Discussion and Information
User: jak3676
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
Points: 0

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Was it really necessary to copy/paste the patch notes when people are already discussing them? Not to mention the bit about Frozen Core was already changed

Original Post:

WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes
Mage -- WoW.com

I’ll post the Mage stuff below. They were already working on some nice changes to the Water Elemental and to Ice Lance. Now it looks like Blizz is looing at our 51-pt talent too. It looks like they're putting a lot of effort into making Frost Mages viable in PvE again. There’s even some small buffs there for Fire and Arcane Mages. I should probably toss out the disclaimer that these are all changes that are in place on the current PTR. Noting is official yet.

Mages
Talents
Arcane
Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
Fire
Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.
Dragon's Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.
Improved Scorch: The debuff from this talent no longer stacks, and instead can apply the full effect from a single cast of Scorch.
Frost
Deep Freeze: This spell now deals a large amount of damage to targets permanently immune to stuns.
Frozen Core: This talent now also causes Ice Lance critical strikes to reduce the cast time of the mage's next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 seconds.
Pets
Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
Mirror Image: Health on the mirror images has been increased.
Water Elemental: Waterbolt mana cost reduced by 80%.
Glyphs
Glyph of Improved Scorch: Renamed Glyph of Scorch. This glyph now increases the damage of Scorch by 20%.
Glyph of Eternal Water: This glyph allows for a summoned Water Elemental to last indefinitely, but it can no longer cast Freeze.

So for Arcane Mages they’re getting the same raid buff that BM hunters and ret paly’s had. Nothing huge here, but any ability to get buffs easier is probably a good thing.

For Fire/FrostFire mages there are a few nods to PvP and some slightly better AOE, but the big change will probably be to PvE. They are essentially getting something that used to take up a glyph spot for free. Fire Mages used to have 3 good glyphs and one that they all had to carry around just in case no one else had the imp scorch glyph. Now they get the glyph built into the spell for free so they can all take the glyphs they want without fear of loosing the buff. This also means that there’s no excuse for a Fire mage not to keep this buff up full time (just like Frost Mages and Warlocks with imp shadow bolt do now).

Frost Mages are getting 3 significant changes – all designed to make them viable in PvE again, and they even come with a nice PvP boost as well.

The base damage on Deep Freeze is 1469 to 1741 (it's currently 0). This will make it stronger than Pryoblast in terms of damage, but it’s an instant (with a 30 second cool down). We essentially get a new spell added to our rotation. This is in the neighborhood of 2x as strong as a standard Frostbolt. So instead of getting ~ 21 Frostbolts per 30 seconds at 10k each, we’ll get 20 Frostbolts at 10k and 1 Deep Freeze for 20k. Napkin math puts that at about an increase of 300-400DPS or 5%.

The change to the glyph of water elemental (now glyph of eternal water) and the reduction to the mana cost of his waterbolts means that he'll be with us full time now. The way it is currently, if fully talented and glyphed, he stays up for 1 min and has a 2 min timer for recast – i.e. he’s up 50% of the time. If you have a short fight you can cold snap to recast him after 1 min, but that messes up your ability to sync all the other 2-min cool downs. It was estimated that the Water Elemental did about 1k DPS for the time he was up (slightly better than 600DPS over the length of a typical ToC fight) and that meant he was about 9% of our overall damage. So this change will be in increase of about 400-500DPS or about 6-7%.

There’s still a lot of Theory crafting going on for the changes to Frozen Core and how it will impact PvE (if it goes live at all). It may look super sexy, but Frost Mages are already pretty close to hitting the point of diminishing returns on haste. When you have a spell that goes off every 1.4 seconds, trying to reduce the cast time by 1 second just isn’t possible (blizzard doesn’t let the global cooldown go below 1.0 seconds). Casting Ice Lance itself is a DPS loss to begin with – even as an “instant” cast spell. So there’s some trade off involved. In cases where you can use the reduced cast time (not under blood lust or icy veins) it may be a very slight PvE DPS increase if you execute it flawlessly in combination with Fingers of Frost "ghost charges". Best case we’re looking at about 100DPS more or about 1%.

Overall the changes to Frost currently look like they are good for as much as 1000DPS or about 14%. The current theory crafting numbers had Frost more than 20% behind Fire and Arcane. So this may not make everything totally equal in terms of pure single-target DPS. But Frost is still the king of AOE DPS (although they are going to place limits on AOE damage). Frost is the most mana effient Mage build. And Frost can be a little more durable with ice barrier, and more ice blocks. If all this actually makes it into the next patch I’ll be pretty happy and you may even see a few other Mages raiding as frost again.

Anyone else looked some theory crafting numbers for the DPS changes?

(Admin note - The 3.2 Raiding as Frost thread is locked. When/If these changes go live I can repost the thread. But for now it's pretty speculative to make judgements based on PTR notes.)