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.
Sorry.... Pets still aren't inheriting +hit from their owner. I keep putting out releases forgetting to add that.... Crap!
Click through my sig and then look at the SampleOutput wiki page. It contains tons of graphs and a wall-of-text detail breakdown...... and more importantly a link at the top to the config file I used to generate all the data.
Each profile in the config contains a http link that defines the talent spec. Just scroll down to "Mage_Frost".
Thanks Dedmon. Just out of curiosity, have you ever tested Frost with a fire subspec instead of Arcane? This is the build I prefer, it trades away Clearcasting, Torment, and Focus Magic benefits in your build for Ignite, Flame Throwing, and 2/3 MoE. The build was discussed about 10 pages back or so, but thing have changed since then.
To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.
Since Ignite was about 1.2% total extra damage in my target dummy tests, and Focus Magic is 3% crit for both you and another group member, I suspect that build is both lower dps and lower utility and would not recommend it, no matter how Torment of the Weak ends up.
This is the build I prefer, it trades away Clearcasting, Torment, and Focus Magic benefits in your build for Ignite, Flame Throwing, and 2/3 MoE.
I'm curious: what's your rationale for taking Flame Throwing, Burning Soul, and Pyroblast in that build? Without Flame Throwing, Fireball's range is only 1 less than (talented) Frostbolt, which I think is something we can all live with. The pushback resist in Burning Soul is moot since all your Fireballs will be instant, and the 10% threat reduction doesn't really seem warranted. Wouldn't you be better served by something like 2/2 Burning Determination and 3/3 World in Flames? I can envision situations where silence immunity would come in handy (In BC: Gruul's Reverberation, Howl of Azgalor; don't know about WotLK), and the increased crit to Blizzard would probably come in handy as well (provided you could move one point into Improved Blizzard somehow).
Wouldn't you be better served by something like 2/2 Burning Determination and 3/3 World in Flames? I can envision situations where silence immunity would come in handy (In BC: Gruul's Reverberation, Howl of Azgalor; don't know about WotLK)
In both Gruul and Azgalor's cases, the silences are more than ten seconds apart, so even that talent would have no effect on the encounters. There are unlikely to be any bosses that silence more often than every ten seconds since to do so would completely destroy healing on the fight. Burning Determination is a perfect example, to me, of a talent that's ALMOST, but not quite, really good. But that's looking at it through the filter of PvE; I suppose it's much more useful for PvP.
Torment triggering on Winter's Chill seems cool! Which raid boss did you test that on?
I tested on Nalorakk and target dummies, and it looked to me that it triggered.. But now Greyrest says does not work of the Frostbolt's snare.. So i'll try to finde myself a frostmage and a 8 randoms, and this time i'll remember to save the log for analysing. Unless someone in Beta could try since the new bosses could trigger differently then the old in PTR..
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 ?}
I notice no Elemental Precision - will we now see fire-based raid builds not take it due to the move up a tier or simply consider it an 8 point option ?
I notice no Elemental Precision - will we now see fire-based raid builds not take it due to the move up a tier or simply consider it an 8 point option ?
You get 3% from shadow priests misery debuff now so loosing Elemental Precision is not a big deal
Theres that yes, but even if priests didn´t help us with misery it simply nets more DPS for a fireball spec to grab stuff from arcane and get hitrating from gear.
You get 3% from shadow priests misery debuff now so loosing Elemental Precision is not a big deal
You also lose the hit from the totem of wrath so not taking elemental precision isn't a product of having a spell hit debuff available as much as it is a product of the benefit of speccing into the arcane tree being much higher than that of speccing into frost.
Originally Posted by Vontre
Protip: I don't actually raid on my mage, it's more fun to make spreadsheets.
I had considered that, but from the raiding mage perspective, spell hit was considered the best stat (on a one-for-one basis) until hit capped. That said, it is still unclear if the WoTLK raiding gear is itemised with sufficient spell hit to compensate for not taking talented spell hit.
I had considered that, but from the raiding mage perspective, spell hit was considered the best stat (on a one-for-one basis) until hit capped. That said, it is still unclear if the WoTLK raiding gear is itemised with sufficient spell hit to compensate for not taking talented spell hit.
This needs qualification. Spell hit RATING is the best stat on a one-for-one basis than any other stat. A spell hit TALENT gives the easiest stat to make up for on gear because spell hit rating translates to a percentage at the best ratio of any stat.
Think of it this way: Elemental Precision is giving you 79 hit rating for 3 points (arguably 8 since the first 5 points are basically meaningless). Focus Magic's 3% crit is 137 crit rating. Check Roywyn's posts for some general info on the relative scaling values of 100 of each type of rating and do the math yourself if you like. I did the math in a previous post and found it wasn't even a very good value for the points if you couldn't otherwise hit cap with your gear, much less if you can and can trade the hit rating for something else like haste.
To show the math again -- this is data from Roywyn's Naxx-10 theorycrafting that's about a month old, but I doubt new data would change the conclusion very much:
Originally Posted by Roywyn
3) Fire spec, fully ability use
100 dmg = +122.3 DPS
100 int = +25.9 DPS, +0.27 MPS from MoE/Hot Streak, +23.29 MPS from Pool/Evo/Replenish/JoW
100 crit = +81.2 DPS, +0.85 MPS from MoE/Hot Streak
100 haste +101.8 DPS, -6.75 MPS
100 hit = +127 DPS
So Elemental Precision is worth 100.3dps on its own, 80.4dps if you can otherwise hit cap and convert the 79 hit rating to 79 haste rating, 112.5dps if you can convert it to 92 spellpower (usually a difficult proposition given the root-mean-square method of the iValue formula and the fact spellpower's already present on most of the gear you'd be trying to convert; mostly possible via gems).
Focus Magic is worth 111.2dps straight up. I won't mention conversion rates since it's unlikely any mage would stack crit whether or not they had a talent to improve it.
So a 3% crit talent is by and large better than a 3% hit talent because of how easy it is to make up the hit on gear whereas haste and crit are more expensive. Each specific case and set of gear is different, but as a general rule, the "which rating is best" stuff doesn't carry over to "which talents are best".
List of all current raid-grade epics (ilvl 200+) with hit and spell damage on em. Items - World of Warcraft
335+ rating just on ilvl200 items.
You need 368 hit rating to get 14%. The remaining 3% can come from whenever.
In short, there is plenty of hit on epic gear, even before you start gemming for it.
Not much of that list has Spirit on it (try adding that to the filter), and those with spirit have only hit and spell power. The pieces with no spirit get haste or crit instead. There's a catch 22 if I ever saw one.
This needs qualification. Spell hit RATING is the best stat on a one-for-one basis than any other stat. A spell hit TALENT gives the easiest stat to make up for on gear because spell hit rating translates to a percentage at the best ratio of any stat.
Think of it this way: Elemental Precision is giving you 79 hit rating for 3 points (arguably 8 since the first 5 points are basically meaningless). Focus Magic's 3% crit is 137 crit rating. Check Roywyn's posts for some general info on the relative scaling values of 100 of each type of rating and do the math yourself if you like. I did the math in a previous post and found it wasn't even a very good value for the points if you couldn't otherwise hit cap with your gear, much less if you can and can trade the hit rating for something else like haste.
To show the math again -- this is data from Roywyn's Naxx-10 theorycrafting that's about a month old, but I doubt new data would change the conclusion very much:
So Elemental Precision is worth 100.3dps on its own, 80.4dps if you can otherwise hit cap and convert the 79 hit rating to 79 haste rating, 112.5dps if you can convert it to 92 spellpower (usually a difficult proposition given the root-mean-square method of the iValue formula and the fact spellpower's already present on most of the gear you'd be trying to convert; mostly possible via gems).
Edit: I should point out that pretty much all of this has been discussed earlier in this thread.
Focus Magic is worth 111.2dps straight up. I won't mention conversion rates since it's unlikely any mage would stack crit whether or not they had a talent to improve it.
So a 3% crit talent is by and large better than a 3% hit talent because of how easy it is to make up the hit on gear whereas haste and crit are more expensive. Each specific case and set of gear is different, but as a general rule, the "which rating is best" stuff doesn't carry over to "which talents are best".
And that doesn't even mention the 3% crit that you are giving to someone else with focus magic or any of the other efficiency and dps boosts you get as fire sub-speccing arcane over frost.
When it comes down to it, elemental precision just isn't worth it with all that you give up to get it, even if you can't hitcap without it.
Originally Posted by Vontre
Protip: I don't actually raid on my mage, it's more fun to make spreadsheets.
Not much of that list has Spirit on it (try adding that to the filter), and those with spirit have only hit and spell power. The pieces with no spirit get haste or crit instead. There's a catch 22 if I ever saw one.
Epic caster gear has 5 stats:
Sta/int/dmg and 2 out of spi/mp5/hit/crit/haste.
You're always going to take the piece with 2 DPS stats if you have one available at your tier or one below.
It takes two tiers difference for a mana/dps item to be competitive with a dps/dps item.
And that doesn't even mention the 3% crit that you are giving to someone else with focus magic or any of the other efficiency and dps boosts you get as fire sub-speccing arcane over frost.
When it comes down to it, elemental precision just isn't worth it with all that you give up to get it, even if you can't hitcap without it.
Eyeballing the numbers, it's "Bomb + Precision > Focus" at 70 and "Focus + Impact > Precision + Veins" at 80.
Frost is looking potent at 70 - it doesn't lose significant DPS talents from 80, the Water Elemental has a lot more health.
Big unknown is spell hit for the Water Elemental, last I checked WE missed a lot while hunter/warlock pets got master's hit.
The big thing is the huge nerfbat on mob health.
If a PuG raid with bad specs, too many healers and early deaths can zerg Brutallus in 3 minutes, you should be able to kill him in 2 minutes which means 100% pet uptime.
Which is quite huge as Frost can sustain its burst DPS through the whole fight.
List of all current raid-grade epics (ilvl 200+) with hit and spell damage on em. Items - World of Warcraft
335+ rating just on ilvl200 items.
You need 368 hit rating to get 14%. The remaining 3% can come from whenever.
In short, there is plenty of hit on epic gear, even before you start gemming for it.
I just tried making a "gear set" from your list, and calculating the medium hit on each slot. There was absolutely no problems at all reaching 500+ hit rating, so a lot of items could be swapped for dmg what stat there is needed.
This change to the trees however makes you wonder if its intended design to not give fire a +hit talent within reasonable range. The change is also looking a bit odd from the arcane point of view. The fire and arcane tree both have talents boosting specific fire and arcane spells and in most builds these are simply to important to overlook. Blizzard has stated that they want arcane mages to weave in firespells in their rotations. It can be debated if GCs comment meant a bit of all spells but fireballs were definetley mentioned. But if arcane mages are meant to cast fireballs they will definetley want fire talents as well meaning EP is out of reasonable range of this spec as well. That in turn makes Arcane Focus and awkward talent wich in turn starts to mess upp all of tier 1 of the arcane tree.
Untill we get some statements of blizzards intentions regarding this the only guide is math. But regardless what´s most efficent it can still be odd design. With EP on tier 2 Arcane Focus only makes sense if arcane is meant to use either 100% arcane nukes or if its meant to weave in frost nukes. Giving EP a fire hit component makes no sense at all for anyone but elemental mages as long as lower arcane has such stong fireboosting talents. If blizzard are to make any more changes to +hit talents it seems they need to chose if they want multi function talents or single function talents. The best design imo is to have a school specific hitrating talent at tier 1 of each tree. That simply means mages have acess to +3% hit of all schools of magic they decide to focus on. Having EP be multischool or changing Arcane Focus to include more than one school would both just be alernatives that reduce freedom of choise. Offcourse we do ultimatley have freedom of choise but it´s plain annoying to have talents in places that makes it a mistake to take them. People who do know math are annoyed by it and people who dont know math are lured into suboptimal specs.
Eyeballing the numbers, it's "Bomb + Precision > Focus" at 70 and "Focus + Impact > Precision + Veins" at 80.
I thought that we had come to the conclusion that Impact + Focus + remaining points in fire was the optimal fire build @ 70 as things stand.
Originally Posted by Roywyn
The big thing is the huge nerfbat on mob health.
If a PuG raid with bad specs, too many healers and early deaths can zerg Brutallus in 3 minutes, you should be able to kill him in 2 minutes which means 100% pet uptime.
Which is quite huge as Frost can sustain its burst DPS through the whole fight.
Is this something I missed? Will Brutallus be nerfed this much in patch 3.0.2? Or are you referring to something else?
I thought that we had come to the conclusion that Impact + Focus + remaining points in fire was the optimal fire build @ 70 as things stand.
Is this something I missed? Will Brutallus be nerfed this much in patch 3.0.2? Or are you referring to something else?
1. At 80, yes, arcane is the way to go. At 70, since you can't get Living Bomb and Focus Magic at the same time, you're better off getting Living Bomb and then going for EP since you can't get to the meat of arcane anyway.
2. Brutallus like all TBC raid trash and bosses has had his health slashed significantly for 3.0. In addition, dps classes in general are doing more dps in 3.0 than they were in 2.4. The combination means downing most bosses in half the time.
2. Brutallus like all TBC raid trash and bosses has had his health slashed significantly for 3.0. In addition, dps classes in general are doing more dps in 3.0 than they were in 2.4. The combination means downing most bosses in half the time.
Healing throughput of healing classes is also being increased with the new talents and according to mmo-champion bosses' melee damage is also being reduced so not only do bosses have less health with dps classes doing more dps but less healers are needed which means that more dpsers can be used, not to mention it being virtually impossible not to have every possible raid synergy regardless of group composition. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see 3 minute brutallus kills on average with top guilds pushing it down to around 2 minutes.
Although, with all these changes it is sort of ridiculous to even discuss the best spec for the few weeks at 70 when everything will be an absolute joke.
Originally Posted by Vontre
Protip: I don't actually raid on my mage, it's more fun to make spreadsheets.
With JoW change rolled back, and Mage "Torment" working as listed on tooltip:
Graph
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.......
Ok, a few things:
How can not putting even a point in Arcane Power not be worth it?
How can changing one talent point over to Slow cost you dps? Who says you have to Slow on cooldown, why not just before you pop Arcane Power?
21/50/0 fire spec and no PoM...?
The Curveball that is Activateables
I see this, constantly, where people do not correctly model cooldowns, just applying their damage buffs as just some flat increase in dps for a certain amount of time. This is wrong.
Activatables build off each other if they are in different catergories (spell damage vs. spell haste buffs for example).
What this means is, if you get a cacophony of different high powered effects at the same time, the result can be a multi-hundred dps increase.
Idea: Keep imp scorch up. Fireball/Barrage/AM procs normal rotation.
The cooldown kicker: If blizzard continues to make insane "random proc" damage trinkets, your best dps is obtained by casting Slow right as the internal cooldown expires, casting Arcane Power/trinkets/Fire Seeds/Mana Gem trinket from gear, casting your best dps spells, wait for proc (shouldn't take long), then PoM Pyro for an almost guarenteed crit.
Before anyone just dismisses this, try it. I'm fairly certain i've stumbled upon something
Regarding the Deep Freeze nerf:
Was Deep Freeze too powerful because of its damage or because it could be used with such versatility?
I didn't manage to get on the PTR until the patch where Deep Freeze was dealing no damage at all (was at that point considered a bug, but if you ask me it was Blizzards way of checking how players managed with the zero damage DF)
Since the first time I used a Deep Freeze in a duel I realized how strong this spell is in PvP, and I could already imagine how OP it would be with the damage component aswell, the bursts would be just not fair towards most classes. Allowing DF to deal dmg under the effect of FoF would be a way to make it viable in a PvE situation, however it would still be insanely strong in PvP whenever you have FoF procced, too strong if you ask me. I noticed that most of my DF's came from FoF proccs as well. It would just make the RNG in the Frost tree even more powerful than it already is.
Also making FoF a target debuff rather than a player buff would lower the versatility of DF in PvP, since you would be "forced" to use it on the target with the debuff rather than freely decide.
Although, with all these changes it is sort of ridiculous to even discuss the best spec for the few weeks at 70 when everything will be an absolute joke.
Yes, I had obviously underestimated just how much effect the new talents + nerf to bosses would have. It looks like I'll spec anyway I like for patch 3.0.2 because that extra bit of dps in one spec compared to any other will matter so God damn little.
10/03/08, 1:04 AM
