Everyone keeps referring to the Arcane mage recasting slow to keep the snare up. Wouldn't an Arcane/Frost mage do more damage than any other arcane build which has to re-apply slow every 15 seconds?

Something like this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...50323102515321

When a patch comes out, I'll usually run a baseline test, and then implement each class one at a time, re-running a sim to compare against the baseline.

I did the Warlock "adjustments" first (so JoW still worked, Living Bomb was still part of the rotation, Enh Shaman weren't gutted yet, etc) ....

You know..... The spread looked really reasonable...... And then things just came all unhinged as I did the remaining classes.

The talent and spell-priority changes to increase Mage DPS were totally dominated around getting Torment and worrying about mana regen.

Other classes, like Shaman, weren't so "lucky" to have off-kilter talent/skills they could exploit..... for now, anyway.

It could very well be that they're not intending TotW to be usable for raid bosses. +2% all damage per talent point is pretty amazing for a talent, let alone one found in just the fourth tier of the talent tree.

When i tested Torment on the PTR yesterday, i could also get it to trigger on the debuff from Frostbolt and Winters Chill and they show up on bosses like slow (or did the last time i tried)..

There is no problem in casting a fireball before using the Barrage, i think it's ready for 6-10 seconds.

I hate to be asking for someone to run some numbers, but I'm really curious what the DPS/DPM comparison would be between these two specs:

Arc/Fire 18/53/0-ish
Spell Impact, Focus Magic, Hot Streak, Living Bomb, using Mage Armor, Fireball as main nuke
Inscriptions: Fireball, Scorch, Mage Armor

vs.

FireFrost 0/51/20-ish
Hot Streak, Living Bomb, Icy Veins, using Molten Armor, Frostfire Bolt as main nuke
Inscriptions: Frostfire, Scorch, Molten Armor

It's on cast. I've had no problem reacting to the procs.

Edit:
It's a 15 second buff. The reason you'd want to react is to not lose the chance to proc from the fireball.

Yes absolutely. Arcane Explosion suffered the classic 'all or nothing' problem. The spell is flat out unusable without all the points in the talent. I'd argue that other talents suffer that, although nothing is close to that. There was corruption too for warlocks, which was mostly the same problem.

Evocation to all builds is just a nod at mages that mana issues are very real, and that they don't want to go in with a full fix.

I actually remember quite clearly that when they made Evocation a trainable spell, they specifically stated that they didn't feel it was right to have 11 points in a specific tree required for all builds.

I've just started a spreadsheet along those lines but I'm having trouble paring the fire stuff down to only 51-53 points. Both are going to have to give up something and exactly what is unclear. (I'm getting into "more DPS vs flame throwing vs mana talents vs threat/pushback talents" kinds of tradeoffs). A consesus on which talents a "lean" 51-53 point fire build should be taking would help a lot.

talents that raise crit or dmg on primary nuke by 1% or more: 41
(frostfirebolt uses incineration and imp fire blast instead of imp fireball, still needs 5 points)
AOE DPS increasing talents: 3
DPM-only talents: 3
threat/pushback: 2
range: 2
pyroblast,blast wave, dragon breath, living bomb: 4

This adds up to 52, 55 if you are taking incinerate in a deep fire/arcane build
Prior posts show people giving up World in Flames, or some of the singature fire AOE spells, or reach,
and one proposed ditching burning soul.

also situational DPS increasing talents
fiery payback 2
firestarter 2

20 points on frostfire bolt is kinda tricky too
5 talent points just to get to 2nd tier
13 talent points that directly affect DPS
3 talent points for DPM
and that's without useful stuff like permafrost and a point of imp blizzard or 3rd point in ice flows or frostbite

If you ditch shatter or the 10% mana/threat talent, you can make a decent 52/19 type build.


I'm also having a lot of trouble modeling hot streak in a way that satisfies me. What I want to do is compare rotations like this:

scorch/pyroblast on proc (this is how my PVP spec is likely to behave, with "proc" including firely payback too)
scorch/fire blast/pyroblast on proc (if you can be within 26 yards, assumes improved fire blast)
scorch1/fireball8/pyroblast on proc
scorch/fireball until proc, then scorch/pyroblast
and similar with frostfirebolt

I'm not entirely sure I can do this without writing code to simulate it and running empirical tests with thousands of spells cast. I'm hoping for something simpler for what will just be a rough rule of thumb, modified by talents in/out and gear changes. I *think* that even with moderate crit on gear (~20%) you can have 50% crit rate and therefore ~1/3 of your casts as pyroblasts, with the rest of your rotation being about 2 scorch to one fire blast. This could be a quite high DPS rotation but at awfully high mana cost....a "mana dump for burst". A spot check with these assumptions arrived at 7 scorches, 4 fire blasts, 5 pyros in the time it takes to cast 8 fireballs+1 scorch. My level 70 calculations show this rotation leaving out living bomb for either does 1.7x damage at 1.5x mana burn (or 1.5 dmg/1.2 mana if fire blast is replaced with scorch). But that seems way too high, so I'm suspicious of my hot streak modeling. (a 10 second cooldown on hot streak would reduce the pyroblasts from 5 to 2, changing things a lot)

I'm working on AOE rotations too, with focus on burst vs sustained, mana burn and threat curve

In order to avoid that spec requirement, would it not be advantageous for Torment of the Weak to instead increase damage done by spells from the Arcane school only (and by a greater amount, or perhaps increase crit instead)? In order to not make it a required buff for moonkin in the raids, it could also only apply to the mage himself or herself.

With this, Frost mages and Fire mages would abscond the talent in favour of other things, while it would be a required talent for the raiding Arcane mage. Of course, the duration of Slow would have to be extended unless the Arcane mage was working FFB or Frostbolt into the cast priority.

I'm sitting in org and shooting dummies as different classes hit them.

Blade Twisting - triggers
Mind Flay - triggers
Icy Touch - does not trigger (though ebon plague being 13% threw me off for a minute)

As normal, no clue about it working on bosses.

Theres currently only 1 fireball build, and one FFB build as far as I'm concerned.

The main difference between both is that one needs spell impact, while the other needs piercing ice. This in itself makes it so that both builds are mutually exclusive. You can still cast FFB as deep fire build (18/53/0), but you wouldn't want to cast it because you would be missing piercing ice, as well as glyph. Same for the reverse case.

15/51/0 -- fireball build -- 5 spare points. Depending on Torment of the Weak, either {3/3 TTW, 2/3 arcane meditation} or {3/3 arcane meditation, DB, 1/3 WIF ?}
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000


0/53/18 -- FFB build -- no spare points. Particular note: no flame throwing. no imp. fireball since you'll never cast one due to lack of spell impact.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

Further Torment testing:

Does not work on Frostfire Bolt
Does not work on Desecration
Does not work on "just" winter's chill

Hmm my FFB build was including Flame Throwing--does it not affect FFB? (I thought it would since FFB is in the Fire tab on the spellbook, and Flame Throwing unlike the Frost range talent says it affects all fire spells rather than a specific list.) I was basically giving up World in Flames for it; it's not in the Fire build, so I don't see why it's any more of a requirement for FFB.

Edit: Well, just tested for myself, and was surprised to find Flame Throwing does not affect FFB. Flame Throwing may still be of use for a FFB build to add range to Living Bomb and Scorch, however. I think I'd take it over WiF for the situations where being able to stay beyond 30 yard range comes in a lot of handy.

No, FFB is not affected by flame throwing, but it already has an extended range.

If the two specs that Manly listed are truly competitive with each other, the ffb one is looking very attractive to me. With blizzard being the new best AoE spell, it receives some very nice buffs from the ffb build between the 6% extra crit from WiF plus Ice Shards and Piercing Ice.

Like most people, I would not spec "for AoE," but the ffb spec is looking like you can have your cake and eat it too.

I don't think that anyone has posted this yet, but GC just answered a ton of burning questions in a many-question Beta forum post response. (Source). Among other things, he stated that:

1) Water Elementals will, in fact, inherit hit from their casters
2) Mage mana issues are to be addressed, we're running OOM too quickly atm.
3) evocation might be changed to assist in these mana issues, but it's not certain
4) Yes, they know the Ignite Bug exists. No, it is not an easy fix
5) The "numbers pass" is actually in-process now. All patches within the past couple of weeks have contained changes to this effect.

there are a couple of other things, too

Wouldn't you need at least one point in Improved Blizzard in order to take advantage of Frostbite/Shatter?

You'd probably want to drop one from World in Flames for 1/3 imp. Blizzard. Regardless of how exactly Frostbite and Blizzard interact, it has to be more than 2% crit.

With JoW change rolled back, and Mage "Torment" working as listed on tooltip:



Toss out the top two using Drain Soul and the spread doesn't look too bad. Of course, the player behind Mage_Arcane_Slow is feeling a bit used.......

Seems like blizzard is doing a decent job but still has some work to do. I'd love to see where the physical dps lies.

Nice work Ded.

Thanks again for the DPS charts, Dedmonwakeen. Out of curiosity, how does your sim account for spell hit on the Water Elemental? It was recently confirmed that all pets will be treated the same, so it'll be inheriting rating from the caster. Were you already doing this? If not, then the frost mage is going to gain a decent chunk of damage. Also curious about what your frost spec assumption is atm.

Regarding the Deep Freeze nerf:

I was reading Lhivera's post on the Beta forums (Methods of Fixing Fingers of Frost for PvE) about potential FoF fixes for PvE, and I started wondering if using one of the suggested FoF changes - a short window to weave in a Shatter combo, with no charges - would warrant a come-back of the original damaging Deep Freeze, an ability nerfed based solely on its PvP value, no doubt.

In other words, they may have had it right in the first inception of both talents.

Iirc, Fingers of Frost, then known as Winter's Grasp, created a mob debuff that made any spells consider mobs affected by it Frozen.
The only problem was that it benefited any mage with Shatter, having exponential returns as the number of mages capable of proccing Winter's Grasp increased in a raid setting.

But the new versions of shaman's Stormstrike and priest's Shadow Weaving tell us that there is the possibility for FoF/Winter's Grasp to be again a mob debuff and coded to apply only to the mage proccing it (this was mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe).

Would this be a pvp nerf? Absolutely.

But I question the logic, or rather game aesthetics, of the current FoF that allows getting a proc from casting a spell on one target and then spending those FoF charges on a completely different, secondary target.

The extended 15 second duration even allows killing a target, proccing FoF in the process, moving on and doing a Shatter combo on someone new that just came along.

This current FoF situation was even more overpowered from a PvP perspective when Deep Freeze could be used to stun and damage that "secondary target".

Was Deep Freeze too powerful because of its damage or because it could be used with such versatility?


So imagine a "nerf trade" if you will (in reality, this is closer to the original talents):
FoF becomes a short duration mob debuff with no charges, decreasing its versatility for PvP but allowing true shatter combos, but return the damage component to Deep Freeze.

Would this be an acceptable trade for PvPers and PvErs alike?