greyberger

I think I understand the argument that haste is only worth its itemization at the point where it provides you an additional fireball between scorches. But there are a couple of problems with this idea.

First off it assumes you're the only fire mage in the raid, or at least the only one responsible for maintaining fire vulnerability. This is probably atypical but I'm usually grouped with 2 other mages and all three of us are 10/47+1/3 atm. Whoever applies the fifth debuff maintains it, and the other two of us get to chain-cast fireballs. Maintaining scorches isn't all that difficult and doesn't really require a rotation or systematic approach, just communication.

And even if you are the only provider of fire vulnerability, any amount of haste still means you complete your eight or nine fireball rotation faster. I don't see how looking at it in rotation units makes haste seem any less valuable.

It is true and a good point that if a fight only allows for two minutes worth of fireball casting, and your 10 points in haste don't allow 61 fireballs instead of 60 in that two minutes, they are in a sense wasted. But then again haste doesn't usually come in small increments, and it only takes 25 spell haste to reach that 61st fireball. Saying that you shouldn't bother with haste if it doesn't drop a tenth of a second from fireball is like saying spelldmg > crit but you should at least stack crit to 30% or 35% or 40%. It's not true, it's arbitrary, its not sensible.

That's too small of a unit too fret about whether your haste gear affords you 3 extra spells on boss encounter X or only 2 and therefore some of it is 'wasted'. I can't imagine that much difference between ideal benefit from haste vs. actual benefit, at least on any of these counts.

 

◊ Vontre

Actually undervaluing it I think, as faster spells are blatantly better for avoiding damage loss by interruption, pushback, and all manner of nasty things that make you stop casting spells.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

galzohar

The 2 minute fight argument can be used in the exact opposite way. If the fight is 2 minutes and 2.99 seconds long (starting the count from the first fireball hit to make it simple) 1 haste rating will probably mage a huge difference, just like a decent amount of haste rating would make no difference in a 2 minute fight. If you look at the AVERAGE increase in fireball DPS, assuming the fight length is not known to an accurate level (usually not to the "seconds" level of accuracy and definitely not to the "small fractions of a fireball cast time" level of accuracy), especially when you consider that for this modeling the fight starts on the first fireball hit and not on the pull, you can consider the "but I could/couldn't get an extra fireball" argument completely invalid.

For fireball spamming, assuming fight length is random at least at the accuracy level of <3s, going form 0 to 1% haste will increase DPS by 1% on average. Just like going from 0 to 30% crit will increase DPS by 33% - on average. Even if you have "DPS periods" you usally don't know their length to the accuracy level of numbers beyond the decimal point due to many factors, bringing be back to "1% haste => 1% dps increase"

And due to a very slight effect on interruption reduction (as I assume statistically 1% haste will give MUCH MUCH LESS than 1% interruption reduction making the correction needed rather small), if you take into account haste only affecting fireball and not scorch, you're actually slightly undervaluing haste.

 

xiaoxin21

This is wrong,even if you push it to 2.95 you still can't chain cast fireball as the pushback will happen during the 0.05 sec of the second fireball.

Spellhaste is good, what I dont like is current itemization giving mostly only haste +spell damage with no hit/crit and no sockets. With how itemization points is allocated this will mean less bang for the buck for haste only item, when compared to item with 3 stats in hit+crit+spell damage..

 

◊ pewsey

Or - I can start my second fireball after the interrupt occurs. Think hunter weaving with steady-shot/auto-shot.

Yes, again I'm being contrived, but the point remains. A shorter spell is less prone to interruption. How much value you place in that, and what encounters that becomes more useful in, I'm not 100% sure, but to dismiss haste out of hand seems somewhat short-sighted to me.

Please make the point that the itemisation is not what you want then, not that the stat/mechanic is of limited value.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
Nemesis: "Pewsey is single-handedly turning around every guy in the BB that didn't want to have kids."
Viator: Because I had a baby so I'm better than non-breeders.

 

Searix

Actually if you get pushback .05 into the next spell that's -.05 seconds off the cast time, vs. 1.00 seconds off the 2.95 second fireball.

Btw, mage forums people are saying we get rank 14 fireball/frostbolt if you use premades, going to test this and find out soon once my transfer completes

 

Doroteasenjk

This is the key point of pushback mitigation. Increased haste decreases the "cross section" of the spell.

 

galzohar

In fact, with haste being the best stat per itemization point, and hit rating being so common on gear that is found in the same instances where you find haste gear, having no crit/hit on the haste gear can actually be a good thing as you can hit cap from sockets instead if you're not capped already from the rest of your high-end gear, gaining more DPS per socket and more DPS for the haste item, ending up with an increase. Then again I didn't look at the actual ILVL of the haste items as that matters as well as the fact that stats get cheaper itemization cost on items that spread their budget over multiple stats.

 

Darknebula

I can confirm that premades are getting Rank 14 of fireball on the PTR currently, just logged on a few moments ago to confirm it.

http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/7253/lolfh2.jpg

 

galzohar

Speaking of rank 14, until it's in the game make sure your spreadsheet isn't using it as it is the max rank showing on wowhead, yet rank 13 is the highest available in the current patch. I think AM and frostbolt also have this?

Also another thing to be aware of is that spells learend under 70 deal more dmg at 70 than they did when you learned them, so don't use their wowhead base damage value. wowwiki seems to have the correct dmg for a lvl70 character at least for the spells I checked.

 

◊ manly

If theres one thing I learned when you find something good, its best to shush about it.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Muphrid

This is most likely like how premade warlocks got the mob version of Seed of Corruption. Any character can have any "spell" as long as it's in their database of spells available. This is a case of the premade makers not having a clue, if you will.

There is a table of these values in the original post. I should know: I spent gold to unlearn my talents to produce this table.

 

◊ Vontre

I would totally write an Oracle query to pull out all available spells, instead of manually pulling 20+ spells for 9 classes.

Some things are just dumb, yes, but you guys are really hard on programmers.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Muphrid

To be honest, a really surefire way to go about it would be to not give the classes any spells beyond their level 1 spells and just give people the gold to train. The training interface automatically weeds out any extraneous spells that the premades should not have.

Yeah, it shifts the burden from the programmer to the player, but it's a lot harder to botch.

 

Bendelat

Just be kind to the players in the situation and set their hearth in front of a trainer for their class. Log them in at that spot too on creation.

 

• Arawethion

The "does +haste really gain you anything" argument really smacks of those "is +hit worth as much as you think it is" threads that I ragged on a while back. The answer in both cases is "yes."

People basically made the point above--the duration of a fight is unknown in advance (more specifically, the duration (modulo cast time) is uniformly distributed). Hence a 1% in increase in haste, in a fight long enough to cast about 50 spells, will give you an extra spell 50% of the time. This is no different from the way we say that a 1% increase in hit will give you a extra spell hit in that fight, 50% of the time.

There's no need to resurrect the "but this is only an average!" nonsense from those stupid hit threads. Whether you realize it or not, this is what you're implicitly doing when you keep pointing out that there are a number of instances in which your +haste didn't get you anything. Yeah, there are a portion of fights where your last 1% of +hit didn't get you anything either, but you still wear it.

1% hit and 1% haste on average both improve your DPS by about 1% (pedantry to ward off nitpicking: 1% hit is slightly better because the extra spells from haste can still miss).

--------------

Yes, there are certain times where the amount of time you can stand and chaincast is completely fixed to a known amount (fights with fixed phase durations, for example). This doesn't change the situation at all. If you amalgamate all of these situations together, they're not going to show any particular bias towards a certain duration. You're not going to re-gear your character for every distinct situation, to have precisely the right amount of haste for one extra cast and no more (you can't, because slight variations in casting lag would blow your efforts out of the water). Ex ante, you stand to gain the same 1% damage on average, from 1% haste, over all fights.

--------------

Slight tangent:
1% hit gives better than a 1% DPS increase (as it gives 1/(your current hit rate), which will be slightly higher than 1).
1% haste gives exactly a 1% DPS increase (as it directly multiplies everything you do).
1% crit gives substantially less than a 1% DPS increase (as it gives something like 1/(1+(your current crit rate)), which will be much lower than 1).

But hit is the cheapest per point, followed by haste. Wonder what gives.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Muphrid

To be pedantic, haste decreases in value much the same way hit and crit do.

That is, the value of 1% haste is proportional to 1/(1+haste_decimal).

For example, if you already have 100% haste, going to 101% haste (adding 1%) increases DPS by 201% (casting speed)/200% = .5%, which is diminishing in the same kind of way as crit and hit diminish.


I would speculate that Blizzard makes the benefit of hit so great so players can "easily" cap it and not feel like they're always going to be losing DPS. This is a mostly psychological thing: players don't like losing DPS, even though all DPS stats increase your DPS.

In addition, it also smacks of Blizzard's mathematical cluelessness, but then again, what doesn't. The norming Blizzard uses to determine item level (and thus, to constrain how much of a stat or stats can be placed on an item of a given level) is completely arbitrary hogwash. How do you balance classes and abilities when average benefit as a function of item level can be disastrously non-uniform?

 

Anedris

Hit is probably cheapest because it's useless against non-73s (since you will hit cap against them very very easily). Crit is probably the most expensive both because of its potential for PvP burst and because many classes have on-crit procs that increase its value (this is not to say that crit is more valuable than say +damage for any caster class, but Blizzard is probably wary of bizarre situations that might be created by cases of 75% crit rate or something similar).

 

• Arawethion

Yeah, that's important. I should have been more specific. Haste is linear in that the value of 1% haste is always equal to 1% of what your DPS was with 0 haste. Hit is linear in that the value of 1% hit is always equal to 1/83 of what your damage would be with 0 hit.

But since you usually care about relative DPS increases compared to your current stats, and most people hover near the hit cap and near 0 haste (for a while, at least), the value of 1% of each is nearly equal.

The point is basically the same though--there's no set of current values for which 1% faster casting would net more damage than 1% increased chance to hit.


I suppose this has really been the underlying issue for a long time. Admittedly, far worse things have happened in this game, but it's very strange that the basic stat weighting for a class with such simple theory is so wrongheaded.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Muphrid

This is one big problem with having stats with caps. As item levels rise, the cap becomes increasingly important in determining how items must have their points allocated. We see this with the difference between tier 4 and tier 6 level gear--tier 6 gear is swimming in hit, so much so that it can even be a challenge to get under the cap.

It is for this reason I have continued to advocate that all caps should be abolished--+hit should become a DPS stat and grant equivalent amounts (by benefit) of other DPS stats when over the practical cap.

In terms of bizarre situations like 75% crit rates, in terms of raw DPS having a 75% crit rate for 200% crits is no different than increasing your DPS by 75% through other stats. Obviously it breaks balance to have proc abilities proc more often than they used to--this necessitates an anti-crit stat (which we have, and more, in resilience) that should be available in equal quantities for the same item level.

 

galzohar

For pvp does have the increased benefit of randomly bursting damage being harder to heal than consistant damage, therefore even if you're doing less dps, if you have more crit you're more likely to eventually do the "burst that the healer can't handle". Then there is resillience to do the exact opposite, reduce the maximum burst and the chance for such a burst to even happen in the firstplace.


relative effects of linear stats
Obviously *any* stat that scales linearly will have its relative effect have diminishing returns. Say dps = a*X+b where X is the stat, the relative increase of increasing X by dx will be (a*dx+b)/(a*X+b) and this number goes down as you increase X. Spell dmg, crit rating, hit rating (until cap) and haste rating all have their value drop (very slowly) as they're increased more. The "very slowly" is because in general dx<<x and thus (a*dx+b)/(a*(x+dx)+b)~=(a*dx+b)/(a*X+b).
In a less mathematical way you can say that the relative DPS increase from 1% haste when you're at 0% is 1% DPS increase, and when you're at 1% haste you get 1/101=0.99% DPS increase, which is practically 1%. Crit obviously starts at a value that's not close to 0 so you should assume a starting point close (or exactly at) your current value, but again if you have 30% crit, using the same math, the relative dps increase of extra crit is nearly the same as if you had even 35% crit.

Also remember for haste that it does not affect scorch, so the dps increase is actually slightly less than 1%. Again assuming the change of the rotation is negligible to non-existant when you increase haste by realistic amounts, it means X haste rating is actually [24/(24+1.5)]*X/15.7 % DPS increase, so it actually gets 94% of the effect for a fire mage with a 8:1 rotation. More if you share the scorch duty with other mages (does anyone actually do that to have a 16-17:1 rotation?), less if the fight forces you to scorch earlier to avoid a risk of having it fall off during a random movement element. Frost mages probably gain even less from haste assuming the elemental is unaffected by it (as afaik he's only affected by your spell dmg, HP and max mana (or was it sta and int?)). It would obviously still come out way on top compared to crit rating and most likely spell dmg as well.

 

Muphrid

If being "bursty" is defined as fluctuation in damage done--that is, variation--then crit over 50% serves to make you less bursty, as the variation decreases.

Regardless, with a stat to counteract the increased abundance of crit rating, so that crit rates remain the same at all gear levels (more or less), this is a non-issue.

I'm always skeptical of arguments that suggest burst due to crit chance is a substantial benefit, though. How often will you land a crit string that bursts down the enemy? How much more likely are you, instead, to hit a bad streak without crits at all? A string of crits can let you win one fight, but you play many over the course of a season. All the crit really serves to do is introduce variation.

 

greyberger

I think the relatively low cost of 1% hit was a necessary choice given the difficulty of capping out before the T6 level. Classes and specs that rely on the player collecting a fair amount of hit would have a lot of difficulty competing with those that didn't if the itemization value of hit were halved or reduced to 75% of what it is now. As it stands now it's unrealistic to expect mages to have more than 10% hit or so upon entering kara, and that 10% will likely include sub-optimal gear like the Scryer's Bloodgem or socketed hit rating. Even at a T5/ZA level reaching the hit cap without settling on lower item-level gear can be difficult... i imagine it was a balancing issue as much as anything else.

 

kralizec

I have a suggestion for the initial post in this thread : the aoe part of the post could explain what the best aoe choices are in different situations, for the two cookie-cutter raiding builds (deep fire, deep frost).

I have seen respected mages on these forums swearing by all kinds of aoe, therefore I am not so sure about what advice to give to my fellow mage guildmembers.
I see two distinct aoe situations :
-fully tanked mobs : this is hydross adds, and I have heard about Hyjal trash. Flamestrike seems to be an excellent choice in these situations.
-partially tanked mobs : a small initial aggro lead is given to tanks, and then aoe goes all out. This is how we do solarian, morogrim. (SoC before, ofc). Mobs won't be so packed, they will move, and mages are better off with ultra-low threat Arcane Explosions or dazing BW.

Are there other valid options ? What about deep frost builds, are Cone of Cold (on nova'ed mobs) and Blizzard right choices ?

 

LiquidHAL

If they're tightly grouped, a FN>CoC is pretty good. If there aren't any ranged mobs or significant interrupts, blizzard is the next best choice. It helps control adds if they switch aggro (if you're 0/0/61 that is, any less and the points in blizzard are usually the first to go). Blizzard is only a bit less DPS than AE, but has twice the mana efficiency since it has a much much higher +dmg coefficient. Here are a few numbers from Lhivera's script for a full frost build with 1100 frost damage, hit capped. (against the default 5 targets)