Fire Cataclysm Discussion: OP Updated for Release - Page 28

Aaediyen · 10/15/10, 12:42 PM

We got any stat weights yet? I'm trying to figure out where mastery rates for fire. Seems a lot better for frost when I look at it.

Kyth · 10/15/10, 2:03 PM

Originally Posted by Aaediyen

We got any stat weights yet? I'm trying to figure out where mastery rates for fire. Seems a lot better for frost when I look at it.

The plural of anecdote isn't data, and this obviously doesn't in any way substitute for actual numbers, but everyone doing stat number crunching seems to play arcane or frost and I haven't had any spare time to do it for myself, so:

I've been running with no reforged pieces save the spirit weapon from marrowgar (LK has not ever dropped the caster sword for us, not in normal or heroic) and we had another mage reforge every piece, spirit if it had it, if not then haste, if not then crit.

His gear is noticably better than mine so it's not a perfect test, but the differences are very minor.

You can definitely see our mastery at work: on a multi-target fight with us impact-spreading, fireball is a much higher percentage of my damage, and dots are obviously a much higher percentage of his.

Our conclusion internally as mages has been "reforge if you feel like it, but it just doesn't much matter right now."

We did HLK last night and it was just emphasized to me, again, how really obnoxious pyromaniac is to keep up without being able to choose to LB more than three targets. You can impact-spread a LB and hope it doesn't bug out, or get a crit at the same time as an impact proc (probably hard at 85), but if you're actually trying to maintain LB on three targets to keep pyromaniac up, there's no amount of good play that will keep the buff up since you can't ever afford to refresh LB early like other dots, and you can't have it on a 4th target to cover over the refresh time.

I also continue to despise the behavior impact shows when it spreads LB. I can't tell what's a bug and what isn't at this point, but it seems you might get a guaranteed LB tick off every mob, and then it drops off of most of them? At least some times? We had some pulls where the other mage was getting things like 25% of his damage done in P1 from living bomb (impact-spreading non-combustion dots to the adds in p1 to get the pyromaniac buff. if we spread combustion, we got too high a threat on the ghouls.)

ripcurlksm · 10/15/10, 3:27 PM

Catching up on the last few pages, is anyone noticing Critical Mass randomly falling off? At a 30 second duration after applying Scorch or Pyroblast, it is usually not lasting more than 10 seconds, even less and falls off at random times.

Mardi · 10/15/10, 3:49 PM

Originally Posted by ripcurlksm

Catching up on the last few pages, is anyone noticing Critical Mass randomly falling off? At a 30 second duration after applying Scorch or Pyroblast, it is usually not lasting more than 10 seconds, even less and falls off at random times.

a warlock who overwrites the 5% crit debuff?

Nyoghta · 10/15/10, 5:14 PM

I was trying to figure out the nature of the recent nerf. Oddly, I seemed to be getting different coefficients for fire from arcane and unspec'ed, looking at scorch and fireball, and that the coefficients didn't seem lowered, compared to what I expected. It turns out that fire specialization is 10% rather than the 25% in the tooltip. If 10% is assumed, the numbers seem to add up. I am not sure exactly what the coefficients were before the nerf, but judging from my logs from before and after, the 15% seem to account for approximately the difference. I conjecture that the nerf consists only of that lowering of the specialization bonus. The coefficient of scorch seems around 0.54, and fireball 1.124, which are still higher than the numbers in the first post (probably out of date from the live values before the nerf). That the coefficients of the spells themselves aren't changed might also explain why the tooltips still seem to show the correct damage for our spells, while, I am told, it isn't the case for some of the other hotfixed spells.

inphared · 10/15/10, 5:14 PM

Originally Posted by avelles

But a lot of the high damage is based on bugged pyromaniac (where you can make pyromaniac persist) and the bugged glyphs. I'm kind of dumbfounded that we were nerfed how we were, and our pyromanic bug still persists. And moonkins haven't been toned down, who were able to surpass fire mages even before the mage hotfix.

Logging in today our damage is way down, LB damage has been nerfed quite a lot as well. Pretty disappointing to have been adjusted to this extent. And the bugs that inflated our damage still exist, and other not so nice bugs (such as living bomb randomly disappearing from your main target for no apparent reason)

Edited quote to address 2 specific parts.

1) I do not understand how they nerfed us so much while not addressing moonkins. They are absolutely out of control DPS wise. I don't have our logs handy right now but our boomkin was #1 or #2 dps for pretty much every single fight in ICC and on BQL all he did was spam his insta-cast dot (forget the name) and did 33k dps, which obviously isn't too crazy since mages were doing 45k+ this week but consider he was spamming 1 button, instant dot. Also did they address the drain soul bug for affliction locks? Our GM was #1 dps on almost every fight this week due to it being his #1 damage. He was getting 90k+ drain soul ticks on non-gimmick fights and got a 185k+ ticks on BQL.

EDIT: Also to address the pyromaniac part. If they are nerfing our DPS now, what happens when they fix the bug? We will be even lower than we stand now.

2) I haven't been able to test our damage but the LB randomly disappearing is getting incredibly frustrating. We run with 3 mages usually and during this weeks raid we were having our LB's fall off quite a bit and for no apparent reason. As said earlier in the thread, I assume it's because of the 3 target limit, but they need to fix this. I could understand if it is us applying the Impact FB and it removes the current LB to spread to 3 targets, but when it's another mage removing my LB, it becomes a problem.

@Ripcurlskm: It is most likely a warlock overwriting the debuff, like the old Imp Scorch would act when a warlock had Imp Shadowbolt.

Lastly has there been any confirmation that combustion is indeed acting differently than it's tooltip. I'm at work right now so I can't test but I would like to know. I can posts results in a couple hours when I log in if no one has by then.

Pasture · 10/15/10, 5:26 PM

Originally Posted by inphared

Edited quote to address 2 specific parts.

1) I do not understand how they nerfed us so much while not addressing moonkins. They are absolutely out of control DPS wise. I don't have our logs handy right now but our boomkin was #1 or #2 dps for pretty much every single fight in ICC and on BQL all he did was spam his insta-cast dot (forget the name) and did 33k dps, which obviously isn't too crazy since mages were doing 45k+ this week but consider he was spamming 1 button, instant dot.

Not that it is particularly relevant to Fire discussion but almost all casters were heavily nerfed. Boomkins had Insect Swarm *heavily* nerfed along with most their nukes and shadowpriests and warlocks have seen similar nerfs. The casters nerfs were pretty much across the board. It wasn't just mages and it was justified. For the most part we're still doing more dps than we were prior to 4.01.

DeathDefier · 10/15/10, 5:27 PM

quoting from MMOchampion. I would like your guys thoughts on this:

Originally Posted by Eec003

Currently this is what I and For The Horde confirmed to be the right way to go.

At level 80 we still use fireball. We still gem 10int, 10int/crit, and 10int/hit.

Your haste needs to be 35-40% though. This gives you more dot ticks since it scales on haste. Remember your big dot, combustion, is a HUGE ammount of damage so via spreadsheets, this is indeed the way to go.

get 35-40% haste, then stay crit. do NOT get any mastery. Enjoy ! =)

inphared · 10/15/10, 5:43 PM

Originally Posted by DeathDefier

quoting from MMOchampion. I would like your guys thoughts on this:

This seems to be what the majority of mages are doing and what most of the people in this thread have said. If you take a look at a lot of the top parses on WoL, you will notice a majority of mages use the same rotation we had pre 4.01 except now we actually have to pay attention to combustion for optimal use.

Your gems, for the most part, should be the same as the were before except now you gem int/hit in blue sockets and reforge any excess hit + spirit gear into crit or haste if the gear already has crit on it. FFB + Mastery, for the most part, seem to be useless or at least not worthwhile right now, although I'm sure things will change with the expansion.

EDIT @ Pasture: I know it's not 100% on topic but I have read both WoWInsider + MMO and did not see any blue posts addressing nerfs to either Boomkins of Affliction locks. I saw searing pain spam nerfed and ferals.

Kyth · 10/15/10, 6:01 PM

Originally Posted by DeathDefier

quoting from MMOchampion. I would like your guys thoughts on this:

Seems accurate, although I don't think it's a huge difference, based on our week of raiding (standard anecdote versus data disclaimer), so if mastery excites you for some reason I don't think it does a lot of harm.

To add some specific numbers relative to the post I made earlier, it was me with ~35% haste on my gear, 39% crit, base mastery, 3300 spellpower, the other mage with 37% crit, 20% haste, 22% mastery, 3500 spellpower -- all unbuffed, including no molten/AI.

Our damage was similar other than fights where one got very lucky on a combustion or where the 30% buff fell off. Pre-4.0.1, he had about 10% crit and ~200 spellpower on me and I had 5% more haste than he did.

Given that ignite and the pyro dot will both be less of a factor of our total dps at 85, it seems fire's mastery may continue to be unimpressive unless the FFB is somehow much stronger at 85 than it is now and can make up for those two decreasing their frequency.

Hibbo · 10/15/10, 6:25 PM

You just have to follow the Topic in the Damage Dealer Board inphared, there Ghostcrawler updated the Blue Post.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010

2. Re: Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010 10/14/2010 07:37:25 PM PDT

Here are some more recent changes:

Shadow Priests – we lowered the damage of Shadow Word: Death, except when the target is at the 20% wounded state, at which point it will do full damage. We also fixed a bug where the energize from Masochism was causing too much threat. (This is just a clarification on the above note -- we have not nerfed it twice.)

Balance Druids – we lowered the base points and coefficients of several Balance spells, especially Insect Swarm.

Affliction Warlocks – we lowered the damage of Drain Soul slightly.

Shaewyn · 10/15/10, 7:52 PM

Zaldinar/Trel:

Sim data looks good. Trel, your formula looks to match precisely - I was getting confused by treating the hot-streak pyro differently.

Explicit formulas:
$K(c)=-2c+0.85$
$P_{HS}=cK(c)+ \frac{c^2}{1+c}(1-K(c))$
Here's the part that was getting me hung up: c is the crit chance of a spell that can proc hot streak, and this formula gives you the proc chance per cast of those spells, not of all the spells you cast. Notably, living bomb is not included in this list.

It'll be a tough one to test, but we're still unsure if "Pyroblast!" (the HS Proc spell) contributes, interacts or resets with either the T3 or T4 talents. As choachy points out, and as I suspect given how the spell interacts with other talents, Pyroblast! may not interact at all with Hot Streak procs... which lowers the value of the talent slightly, as casting a procced Pyroblast! forces you to cast a spell that cannot proc Hot Streak.

Maje · 10/15/10, 8:32 PM

Pyroblast! doesn't contribute or resetHot Streak, also the c in K(c) is different than your crit as it shouldn't include debuffs (and probably glyph buffs).

Bashram · 10/15/10, 9:50 PM

Another one for the list of differences between Pyroblast! and Pyroblast: Pyroblast! does not appear to be benefiting from Glyph of Pyroblast. Out of 100 Pyroblast! casts on a twenty-minute target dummy test, exactly 50 were crits and 50 were regular hits--and, with Molten Armor and Critical Mass, my crit rate would be about 50%. Not sure if this is a bug or intended. If it is intended, I have to wonder why Glyph of Pyroblast is a Prime Glyph.

However, for whatever weird reason, the ticks of the Pyroblast! DoT did appear to benefit from Glyph of Pyroblast. Strange things are afoot at the Circled K.

redkatana · 10/15/10, 11:37 PM

Post hotfix, has anyone noticed that the Living Bomb explosion is doing less damage than the ticks, or is my Recount having issues?