[BETA] Balance Discussion
 

This thread is ONLY for BETA discussion. If it's on live, use the appropriate thread.

Sunfire Issues Corrected
 

I tested Sunfire a bit last night in the beta. It now seems to tick every two seconds and scales with haste. Unfortunately I didn't think to check the coefficients to see if they changed.

Testing some rotations on dummies and in heroics this morning. Mana issues have been greatly resolved, while i obviously am unable to test in a specific raid scenario, mana has gone to sub 2 mins worth of casting on a test dummy to 6.5 mins. As our mana pool increases, and with raid buffs / replenishment, it looks like we are in a much better place. This was in basic 333/ 346 gearing.


For those who are interested, troll druid forms are up, basically you are an orange moonkin from Hinterlands, debate as you will.

Did Heroic GrimBatol and Deadmines today and never went below 40% mana with replenishment and might without using innervate on myself (exept after dying obviously :P), ergo the need for mana managment in raids seems to be gone now

EDIT says, avgIlvl 346 with wildhammer exalted neck and belt :O

Did the 10 man version of Baradin Hold last night and even feeding my innervates to the priest on cooldown my mana never went below 50%. Perhaps they went a bit far with the mana cost reductions?

That is a fight where you are standing still pretty much the entire duration. You should have more eclipses proc during a fight like that over one where more movement is involved. Consider longer fights, and you'll definitely need to innervate yourself.

A lot would depend on the nature of the movement. If it is very short (move out of the void zone), you are replacing nukes with full-cost MF, and that burns mana almost three times as quickly. For longer periods of movement, you are replacing nukes with essentially free MF.

Also, WM use (or not) may make a large difference. In ten seconds, before Haste, you can cast 3.3 SF for 36.3% mana. Throw in WM and you have 3 SF + 3 WM for 66% base mana.

Put up a math post here on Glyph of Starsurge, since it's such a common question and not easy to model well. Slightly refined model will be in the sheet next time:
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/hamlet...starsurge.html

This is actually my biggest complaint about LS, how often will we get to use it @ 3 stacks?
But then again, how will you fix it so its not too good?

Atleast for PvE, it doesn't really matter if it does anything up to normal rotational dps, noone is gonna bother spamming moonfire for 5-15minute bossfights. So as long as its just slightly below normal rotation, that should be no concern.

For pvp, I dunno, it seems on paper like MF spam is gonna be the play anyways due to how pvp (arena) works, so maybe a change to one or two stacks or something won't be so bad.

Arenas won't even be coming back until Cataclysm and by then, we'll be having Rated BGs instead. I don't see this being much of a problem, personally.

I just spent a good 20 minutes pouring 20M damage (averaging 15.4k DPS) into a dummy in Orgrimmar with my new self-buffed ilvl 359 premade rocking 6.5k SP 14.6% Haste, 17.9% Crit and 12,8 Mastery. In other words, once we get some decent gear our mana issues will dissapear completely. We are however rather dependent upon being able to innervate ourselves.

I know I've been quiet for a few days--mostly relaxing a bit on WoW stuff after the flurry of activity around Blizzcon and will probably just be trying to get the guides/sheets up to date for Cata launch at this point. But want to at least stop by and mention a few things I've thinking about that hadn't been mentioned on this thread or the 4.0.1 thread yet:

1) Which meta will be best? Chaotic currently has the odious blue>red requirement on the beta. So in order to use it, we have to shunt nearly all of the gemming off of red (our primary stat). Now, this is not necessarily as bad as it sounds, since socket bonuses are a much bigger deal than in WOTLK. Instead of the current 4/6/8 of a stat, socket bonuses on the beta are 10/20/30 stats (I think the point of this was to make gem choices interesting eve though red is now clearly the best for everyone).

Possibilities are:
Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft
Ember Shadowspirit Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft
Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft (allowing a different boot enchant)
Bracing Shadowspirit Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft

Maybe the answer is easy, but I haven't tried working it out in the sheet yet (and figuring out the gem issue for Chaotic might require figuring out likely gemming at low levels of gear).

2) Do any other classes have a good model for multiple temporary haste procs? We're going to have NG, Hyperspeeds, and Berserking at least, and I wonder if there's something more accurate that valuing them all independently using average uptime. Just want to know how much this has already been done somewhere else.

You seem to have missed Forlorn Shadowspirit Diamond. The 10% silence duration reduction may not be as useful as the other meta gem secondary effects but it comes with the easiest requirements. Right now the balance gear has only two socket bonuses worth matching, both of which are blue. Placing a purified in both the helm and legs blue sockets and a red in all others seems to be the best.

I have played around with numbers in the spreadsheet a bit as well as testing in game, it is just a dps loss losing so much Int trying to activate the new chaotic requirements.

Fleet is mediocre since it has mastery while Ember has intellect. The difference in boot enchants too small to compensate (it's about half as good for mages).

Chaotic's new requirement hurts, you'll have to gem for <50% intellect and >50% ratings, as apposed to all intellect but 1-2. Since you don't seem to have anything that makes you favour crit (besides 200% from specialisation), Ember will compete with Chaotic in T11 gear with 10 sockets. More sockets lead to a harsher penalty while better gear reduces the difference between intellect and combat ratings.

Since you also follow/help mages: Frost favours Chaotic since half their spells auto-crit and mana is no isssue. Fire is not clear, since it has a huge crit multiplier (>310%, Ignite+Mastery) but also mana issues, Arcane favours Ember (200% crits) even without the extra mana, and Moonkin seem to be similar. Chaos has a great meta effect, the problem is that intellect is 2-3 times as good as any other combat rating (assuming you can hit cap from gearing/reforging). Which also makes gemming for blue/yellow with non-intellect bonuses pretty weak.

The best gemming for Chaotic to save you time is: 1 green in yellow. Fill 1 green + 1 red as long as you have 1 yellow and 1 red. Fill the rest with purple. (If you have more than 1 more yellow than red, fill the yellows with good sockets first. If there are any yellows with good bonuses remaining, try filling them manually, but it's likely not worth it.)


[Edit]: Ah, I thought there was an actual change, thanks for the explanation. We technically have 150% crits and a 1.33 multiplier. That explains why we're at ~206% (205.485%) while you may still benefit from the old 209% through your +100% bonus. Chaotic may pull ahead then, but it would be interesting to see how much of the possible extra damage is lost to inferior gemming.

Remember that Chaotic is 50% better for Moonkin than for pure casters, because we still get a 209% bonus from stacking Chaotic with the Moonfury talent, while they only get a 206% bonus from using Chaotic with their base 200% crits.