Clearly, the inevitable best thing to do is to change Living Bomb into a conjured item that can be thrown. That way, Living Bomb will profit from Glyph of Conjuring, which in turn will solve Fire's mana issues and allow us to keep using Molten Armor as we have for the past couple of years.

On a more serious note, I do think the current armor system works reasonably well and does a good job of accentuating the play style differences between the trees . Mage Armor fits very well with Arcane's theme of really working with your mana, i.e. burning through and regenerating tons of it. Molten Armor fits very well with Fire's theme of really caring about crits. By homogenizing armors, you would remove some of that special feel.

I am cautiously optimistic, though, that instead of making such fundamental design changes, Blizzard will simply lower the cost of Fire spells (in particular Fire Ball) to the point where the regular FB/LB rotation will become sustainable under regular fight conditions. In other words, if you don't screw up your Evos or forget your Mana Gems you are fine unless half of the raid died early and the fight takes unexpectedly long. This was pretty much the Fire mana management model in BC and WotLK during progression times and I think it worked well. Free scorches, Mage Armor, and the like would then be backup tools for snafu situations (e.g., you died soon after an Evo and got battle rezzed, etc.), but they would not be part of your regular repertoire.

Has there really been modeling for Fireblast? Is this purely a design suggestion? Because yes, it might contribute a fun and dynamic ability to the rotation if balanced correctly, but it's currently doing less dps than scorch, much less dps than fireball, for much more mana, in a noticably shorter range. The only thing going for it is 8% crit, and while hot streaks are nice I doubt that crit difference cannot make up for its drawbacks. It would complicate matters further considering impact, which they've designed to be a decision we make. Fireblast in a rotation means every time we use it - as proposed, all the time - we throw caution to the wind regarding fight mechanics such as crowd control, mind control, AoE aggro, stun DR, focus targeting, etc.

Now I have been raiding Beta quite a bit as fire, 6/32/3, been to every encounter, and am not enjoying my third rate single target DPS served with mana shortage and a side of bland playstyle any more than anyone else. Raiding live at the same time is like an extra kick below the belt in a reminder of how fun the spec can be when you're casting quickly and reacting to procs more than once every 30 seconds. However I'm a fan right now of how fire plays and am holding out for a numbers pass instead of heavy mechanics overhauls. Things like increasing T1 hot streak chances, unborking ignite, and fixing mana costs to allow fire to cast for more than 3 minutes at a time with fireball/molten would probably put us in a really good place.

I meant the underlying design, irrespective of how the current numbers are tuned on Beta. As I said, I do think the armors nicely support the different flavors of the trees (Mage Armor brings in tons of mana that Arcane can make good use of; Molten Armor gives crit that is much desired by Fire) and I would hate to see that removed. Obviously, Fire is in very bad shape mana-wise on Beta, and I appreciate all attempts to come up with possible solutions. My main point was just that solving the mana issues by removing Molten Armor and making all mages wear Mage Armor would be a poor solution, because it would unnecessarily remove an interesting play style difference between the trees.

The simplest and most straight forward solution to Fire's mana problems would be to reduce the cost of Fire spells (and in particular the cost of Fireball) to the point where you can sustain your regular Fire Ball & Living Bomb rotation over the course of a 6 minute fight. You can then debate if this should be possible without Arcane Concentration or not, but in any case your mana situation would be comfortable enough that it would not make sense to give up Molten Armor's 5% crit for Mage Armor's mana that you only had very limited use for.

I generally like the idea of making Fire Blast relevant for our single target rotation. One potential problem with that idea, though, is that it would substantially increase our cleave damage because of the Impact mechanic. Blizzard has repeatedly stated that they do not want the regular single target rotations to produce a lot of cleave damage and they have changed abilities like Whirlwind accordingly.

This is exactly my sentiment, too.

This holds for me too. My mage is a fresh 80 and has low crit rating, so most of my fights are really boring.
Moreover Blizzard moved the fire mage into dots (new combustion, mastery, FFB glyph), but of the five dots at our disposal only one can be applied at full strength all the times, LB.
FFB dot depends on the damage done by the nuke, and holds only for mages using it.
Pyroblast's dot could be applied at any time, but the casting time is huge, making it worthy only with Hot Streak and thus related to crit.
Ignite is by far the most difficult to have up with the new rates and short duration.
All of the above diminishes the possibility to have a hard hitting cooldown in Combustion, as the chance to have all the dots up are low.

Without a huge overhaul, I'd like to see some talent tweak, like merging the two hot streaks and making a fixed perchentage on any non periodic hit or 100% on two crits in a row, and adding an improved ignite, with a lower percentage of damage added on normal hits and maybe extending the duration a bit for Combustion purposes.

Fireblast was simmed out to a 6.6% dps increase at 85 in this thread, which is why I asked Tyrian about it. Whenever we get Zaldinar back, or some other sim up and running, it would be good to do as he said: look at the DPS and OOM time of a variety of scenarios (changing up armors, adding fireblast, changing around mana regen points.)

I understand the hope that Blizzard will fix the mana issues, I just think they're irrationally optimistic (though I'd love to be proven wrong.) Lots of spell costs have been adjusted but not ours. We may not like how the spec plays with scorch, but it's disingenuous to say the spec runs out of mana: it doesn't, you just can't actually do burn-rate DPS with it for more than ~half the fight. But I'm not sure Blizzard sees that as a problem.

Frost may get its spell costs adjusted, because frost actually does have no option other than to use mage armor if its spell costs aren't correct. But the intent might be for frost mages to take 100% of their available mana management talents, and the mages who have been complaining about it haven't taken them fully.


I feel fire mages are better off arguing why scorch is not a solution to the mana problems, rather than arguing we have no solution, because Blizzard's response (I think) is just to say to themselves "okay, they don't 'get' that they have scorch yet and/or are still pining for the old days. Let's ignore them until they really give it a go, because there's no point in listening now."

(I'd love to be wrong, but the fact is that having free scorch 100% satisfies the letter of the law with respect to the blizzcon statement and the statement that DPS casters shouldn't hard OOM if they play properly. I just find it perplexing that lifetap has been made so marginalized with free mana procs for locks when it's the best example of a good, mindful mana regen system in the game -- to be replaced by something as inane as minutes of scorch spamming is a massive design step backwards.)



(edit) I forgot that I wanted to comment on the "Molten Armor as a cooldown" crowd:

I think that's very much the wrong direction. Our mana costs are high because Blizzard wants us to use scorch. If they wanted us to not use scorch, they could reduce the costs. There's nothing magically fixed about the mana costs here that say "the only solution is to use mage armor and make molten a cooldown". Odds are decent that if they care enough about us using mage armor and can come up with a way to bar its use they will. Or they'll double spell costs, then say "in molten armor, fire's spells costs 50%."

The problem isn't molten versus mage, it's that currently we have a (probably unintended) loophole to dodge the "mana management" Blizzard thinks is a good idea.

Turn molten into a cooldown and they'll likely just increase costs so it's just as bad in mage armor as it is now in molten, if the current design of fire+molten+scorch is indeed their goal. (and if it's not their goal, there are better fixes than removing fire's armor as an option.)

Molten armor *shouldn't* be removed, and, personally, I think the spells should be redesigned so we can use molten for 6 minutes with evo on a 4 minute cooldown. Or for 4 minutes with evo on a two minute cooldown. But the day Blizzard does what I think is the day it snows in hell.

If napkin math serves me right you're getting 6.6% by using the values for coefficients found in the mage resources page and wowhead tooltips. The tooltips match to in-game, and the fireblast coefficient is accurate, but the scorch coefficient right now is more in the 0.53 to 0.54 range, seen by swapping gear in and out and comparing. In the heroic dungeon level gear I have on this premade scorch has already outscaled fire blast 4009 to 3621 (over 10%), which is why I questioned the modeling of fire blast at all. I see no advantage to fire blast in the rotation.

Sorry if I've burst this bubble, but delving into the theory of a fire blast mage armor rotation bothered me enough to set this straight.

Filed under the category of "general musings about cata raiding..."

In the tanking thread, GC is talking about tanking and healer mana and comments:

(emphasis added)

I presume for arcane that is Prismatic Cloak, -6% damage taken for three talent points.

Frost has ice barrier, about ~6k at level 85 from what I read -- operates differently from prismatic cloak, but presumably your average damage taken is ~3333 incoming dps, then you match cloak at the cost of 5% dps (1.5 second cast every 30 seconds.)

Fire has... is that the space cauterize is supposed to fill? No damage reduction, but if we die, you can heal us for our full health just a few seconds later as long as it's no more often than once a minute, and we spend a GCD (mage ward)?

For those who have raided beta, has there been any issue with damage taken so far, or is it pretty marginal a concern? (for fire specifically, and for mages in general -- 6% isn't tons relative to some of the abilities out there like shadowform.)

I'm being a bit flippant with my cauterize description, but I hope that GC is not, in fact, correct, that damage reduction abilities become extremely pivotal for DPS. There's a wide disparity between classes for damage taken (who can forget early Algalon, and considering sitting classes who couldn't take good enough damage reduction abilities.) Or perhaps concerns will be mitigated enough by mage ward being fire/frost/arcane (nether ward is 75% higher base and all spells, but only available to destro.)

I think in most situations, we're going to find that intelligent use of Mage Ward is going to be enough to cut it, and with Molten Shields it's hardly even noticeable to cast it on CD. All of this is pure conjecture, obviously, since we haven't seen any heroic raid encounters, but I think Iceblock and Cauterize are also factored in here somewhere, as well as ranged generally taking less incidental than melee in many situations.

Based on what we can assume about Cataclysm raiding, mostly inferred from what Blizzard has told us about survivability and whatnot, I think the ideal setup is going to be having a second spec (like, say, Frost) that may sacrifice some damage for superior survivability, that could be utilized on a fight where DPS is less important, and survivability and control are at the forefront. (Blood Prince Council Heroic is a good example of such a fight)

I suppose the only issue one might take with that scenario is that if Frost is dealing the same competitive damage as the other 2 specs, and is seen as having superior survivability, it's going to be labelled the best of the 3, though I recall a blue post a long while back that said something along the lines of specs like Subtlety paying a small price in damage for their superior survivability; I'm not sure if that's still the design intent or not.

EDIT: I also think it's worth adding, that I think intelligent play in terms of avoiding damage, like void zones, fire, AoEs and the like will play a much larger role in healer mana conservation than reductions from talents or abilities, and mage's mobility plays into that nicely.

Mana shield? Of course then you'll have to be better at mana management (=spam scorch harder), but some find this fun and interesting, having to spam scorch erm... manage their mana. So Kyth, the answer you were seeking is "Mana Shield". I know, it's not even close to being a good joke, sorry.

Seriously now, the lvl85 Fire Mage seems to me as a spec with a lot of tools that could make dealing damage and avoiding/mitigating damage fun and effective. But our current mana issues (at beta) make tools like Mage Ward and Mana Shield look like something we should be using only when we are desperate about not going too low in HP and not something we could be frequently using in order to do our part in terms of helping raid healing to be somewhat less demanding, because that would only magnify our already existing mana problems. And I am not saying that we should be able to be casting those spells on CD without any thinking involved (even when we don't expect incoming damage), still using them shouldn't be as taxing to our DPS as it is now. But of course there's always PvP and I don't think that damage mitigation tools are being balanced keeping PvE in mind, but PvP. Additionally, Molten Shields is a talent that could provide fun use in PvE, but it's one that we certainly can't afford getting if we end up in live about as we are in beta at the moment.

Finally, Cauterize is a very good tool to have, especially for unknown content or specific encounters, but Pyromaniac becomes pretty good under specific circumstances as well. So I can see enough Mages changing their specs depending on the encounter in order to be optimal. This is not something new, but depending on what encounters and in what order we'll get, a constant re-specing might start taking place. And it will be that or feeling that you are missing important tools in order to to do your part in a specific encounter, which is not a good feeling or acceptable for most raiders. Additionally, Cauterize and Pyromaniac are not the only talents that may drive Mages to be respecing often in order to be optimal. I don't care about the extra gold, but I think that enough other classes/specs don't have to get into such a situation, having to spec depending on the encounter or being worried about missing important tools when assigning their talents.

I'd just like to help clarify some of the assumption that were made on the previous page about ignite munching. There is no internal cooldown on ignite, it simply works as Mysteltainn said.


Here is a diagram of a typical Fireball -> Fireball -> Fireball -> Hotstreak -> Fireball snippet and how ignite acts around this (sorry if the colours are hard to read for some people, I only thought of it after I made it):

EDIT: I should also mention that the bars are durations of ignites not the cast times (I can see how that could be confusing), we are assuming the spell impacts at the beginning of the bar for the amount of damage in brackets (ie 3000). Also the impact times and damages are only estimates used to help emphasis the way ignite works.




Considering this I would argue one of the best ways of tackling combustion would be:

~ -> FFB -> FO -> Hotstreak -> Fireball -> LB -> Combustion -> Impact

Assuming your Fireball and Pyroblast crits this should net you one of the biggest Combustions you can get without worrying about ignite munching. That said its a pretty risk big to assume crits on FB and Pyro when we first get to level 85 so you need to make sure you arn't too trigger happy and blow it if you don't have those ignites.

Is combustion modified by haste? I didn't think it was.