With so many of the new raid buffs focusing on upping crit rate, it seems to me that fire/frostfire mages will easily exceed 50% crit in raid situations. Has anybody run any number as to how much less valuable this makes Combustion?

Out of curiosity can anyone answer this question? A moonkin friend of mine says he can use shadowmeld in combat to get out of combat just long enough for the potion sickness delay on pot usage to go away so the potion cooldown passes normally and he can use another potion after it cools. Does using invis allow us to do the same thing?

My views on mana:

1) A competent mage in full spam mode, burning all gem and potion cooldowns, and using evocation, should be doing dps within a couple percentage points of competent players of other classes on single target boss fights.

2) The choice between molten and mage armor creates a problem here. Are mage's normalized for dps and mana contraints around having molten or mage? Normalize around molten, and mage armor becomes useless on most fights, as your mana pool is good enough. Normalize around mage, and molten becomes impossible to use, as you don't have enough mana.

3) Having spent a few months playing a 40/0/21 spec, making on the fly decisions about spell choice, remaining mana, and likely remaining length of the fight, is a lot of fun.

4) As such, mana and dps should be normalized around molten armor allowing for simple nuke spam, or nuke rotations. Mage armor would have the role of situational use on AOE intensive fights, and for mages who want a slight increase in their average single target dps through smart mana management combined with more inefficient but higher dps spell selection.

5) This would involve having high dps but high mps spell options available for all of the major specs, with testing to ensure that extremely well done dynamic play only gets you a limited edge over the nuke spammer. 5-10%. That's enough for the top players to shine, and be worth grabbing for the top guilds, but doesn't make it impossible for lesser mages to find a home, and for their guilds to progress.

6) Similar flex options should be available for all dps classes. Top dps should be a reflection partly of skill in spell and resource management.

It also occurs to me that Blizzard is very close to doing this. Living Bomb and Arcane Blast are good mana dumps. What is lacking right now, from what I can tell, is a mana dump for frost, and the lack of good dps normalization across specs and classes for either "easy mode" dps, or "high quality smart" dps. There also seems to be a problem between 10 man and 25 man, as mages are heavily impacted by whether Blizzard normalizes mana consumption around 25-man raid mana regen, or 10-man.

But I do see Blizzard being on the right track here.

re: boss/raid.
Invis will not allow you to use another potion. It'll drop your threat to 0 but you will still be on the mob's threat list and still in combat. Similar to trying to eat/drink when invis.


Below \/\/\/ I certainly hope I'm wrong and you're right

Last time I tested it, yes, Invis allowed us to get around the potion sickness thing.

Have you tried it?

At 50% base crit, you'll get roughly 1 more crit using combustion than without it. Timing issues could make that more or less than 1 crit on average.

The 35% damage modifier is a bit high. I wouldn't expect them to go over 30% and 25% is more likely. I've been campaigning for 25%/150% mana for a while now.
Evo added to arc stability would be nice but I wouldn't consider that expected.
Instant invis has worked since ~8926 iirc.
I don't expect torment to continue working on bosses despite the spell selection being very much pve oriented.

Unless they changed it, whenever a boss is engaged the entire zone is thrown into combat whether or not they have any aggro on any mobs.

1 extra crit every 3 minutes is a pretty lack-luster use of a talent point, unless you really want DB.

Yup, I've considered dropping it. Unfortunately, I can't think of anywhere that I could put the point into. None of the specs I see in this thread seem to have a place that point could go into that would be a good use of that point. It's still worth roughly 1.5% crit, after all.

I posted this in the Beta Forums, under the Mana comment from GC, but I know that it'll be lost.

After raiding in Naxx 10, and 25 a few times this weekend, here are my impressions of mana management, while running a 0-53-18 build(low +hit requires precision, which cuts Clearcasting from the build:-/ ), I was also running on Murmur with the premade gear, but most of the gems were changed to +6 hit gems, as well as the OH from Faerlina or Maexxna(can't remember who), which equated to 7.5% hit on the gear:

Rotation - scorch to 5, FFB, Pyro on proc. I attempted to use Living Bomb, but it was too mana intensive, and I only used it on Noth and Maexxna to help with the adds. I had to scorch early because of the +hit, which meant that I was scorching at 10 seconds due to possible resists.

10 man - mage armor, pop mana gem as soon as possible, reuse when it's back up again, use Evocation when you're at low mana, I had to use a Mana Potion a few times. If you have a replenishment class, and they die, you're pretty much SoL, I ran out of mana a few times, even with when I removed Living Bomb from my rotation. As the only decurser during Noth, I had to cut my DPS because I found myself at 0 mana right before the curses arrived...woops, curse hit us :-/.

25 man - molten armor, use a gem when possible(picked up the mana gem Inscription at this point). We cleared Spider + Abomb wings, I only had mana issues on Gluth due to the AoE that was needed, we had a few Ret Paladins + 2 Shadow Priests + a pair of Hunters.

On fights with a lot of splash damage, Evocate sucks, getting hit and it interrupting your Evocate SUCKS!

If your replenishment class dies, heh, you're stuck without much regneration.

If it's a fight that calls for a lot of AoE, good luck, you'll likely be OOM, it was tough on my mana pool.

In this gear, and using these rotations, I put out the following DPS, please note that the Heroism calls were close to the start of the fight, which led to less cooldown stacking during the Molten Fury <35% range, I might surmise that this will happen more often:

Faerlina - 2,700
Patchwerk - 3,000 #7 in our group behind a lot of higher geared raiders, the other mage was 2,700 dps with the same gear and spec, the hunter led with ~4,030 dps
Gluth - 2,700
Thaddius - 4,040

Here is the issue as I understood it. I originally suggested on really long fights that it might make sense to swap in some armor with spirit in it. I was told the int was always "far better" for mana and that the mana recovery from intellect "completely dwarfs" that from spirit. Of course after wading through the numbers we saw that it really wasn't that clear cut as the theoretical minimum mana from spirit (assuming you have all the talents) is only a little less than the theoretical maximum for intellect.

The int numbers depend on 100% uptime of JoW, improved water elemental, getting a shaman with mana tide, 0% outside the FSR, maximum use of evocation. Some of these assumptions would see to be mutually exclusive. Clearly they will be less than the theoretical maximum but it depends a lot on the composition of your raid, the skill of the players and the fight just how much less. We don't know if it is 10%, 20% or even worse in specific fights.

The way i-levels are calculated you can sometimes pick up quite a bit of spirit for a smaller amount of int and sta and so if you are having mana problems on a particularly long fight you can't just discard the idea of swapping in a few pieces of gear with spirit. Given a long fight where you know you have mana problems, might it make sense to trade 15 int and 15 sta for 40 spirit assuming the other stats are equivalent? It kind of depends on your glyph and your talents but it will likely improve your performance if the alternative is standing around without any mana.

I think I can be categoric in saying a mage should never gem for spirit or get spirit enchants when a comparable int enchant is available. What I learned, that I didn't know before hand, was the overwhelming advantage int has in short fights. I mean I kind of knew it but hadn't really run the numbers from WotLK where int has been really buffed in terms of the mana you get back from it. Probably the easiest thing to do is just make sure your entire raid is so overgeared that spirit becomes a non-issue because all the fights are short.

I don't. As I said, too many things about arcane is uncertain at this point. The key to arcane, has always been about mana management. What Blizzard wants to do will affect arcane more than anything else. But assuming I go by the spirit of what they want. Then arcane, fire and frost DPS should be quite similar. This means that even fire, with all its DPS and crit talents, should come close to frost and arcane DPS when everything has been accounted for.

But the thing about arcane is that its never so straight forward enough to model even on a spreadsheet. Because every fight is of a different duration. And arcane remains one of the only specs that has a mana dump in the form of AP-AB. Its DPS is directly affected by how much mana it has the luxury to dump. Blizzard would never balance arcane specs based on assuming 100% AB spam uptime. It is unrealistic and unintended.

But let's say Blizzard doesn't try to do that. They balance arcane based on some AB/Arcane barrage rotation. Then, any excess mana that can be channeled into AB spam is “extra DPS” that arcane specs will then have. While this seems odd, its easier to balance than trying to assume that the arcane mage will be able to spam AB say 30% of the fight. (30% of the fight could be anything from 1 minute to 3 minutes depending on fight length).

Hence, everything depends on the mana costs and length of AB spam uptime. As long as Blizzard intends to keep arcane competitive, they have to work with arcane blast. And as long as they want arcane blast to be relevant, then true arcane specs will be very difficult to model. How do I compare arcane talents at this point anyway? Based on 50% AB spam uptime? 30%? 10%?

What I do believe is that any modeling that shows AB spam 100% of the time being lower DPS than any other mage spec means that that other spec is overpowered. Because AB was never intended to be spammed the entire raid fight while other spells are. So, if a fireball or frosfire spamming mage can equal an AB spamming mage the entire fight, then something is wrong somewhere. And this is with both sides having all relevant DPS talents and raid buffs.

Agreed. Naked, mages have roughly the same spirit as int. It took a huge discrepancy, 700 int to 300 spi, for spirit to be around equal on mana starved fights. Right now, unbuffed, I have roughly 500 int and 350 spirit while not gearing for either stat. I think we need a mana regen mechanic, similar to AotV or life-tap that scales with spirit for the stat to be sought after. That and make mana dump talents better.

They could lower the cost of Mage Armor and Molten Armor (make them on par with Hunter aspects) and then allow us to use them reactionarily.

Mage Armor
Increase mana regeneration by 200%, decrease spell cost and damage done by 50% while active.

This way we could use it when we need it, and use Molten Armor while we don't.

What scares me with SimCraft LastReports is that :



Frostfire is JUST under Fire. But Fire and Arcane are assuming TotW working, with Mage_Arcane_Slow as a snare-Refresh slave.

But if TotW won't work on Bosses, it seems frostfire is our only way to real compete with other classes ?, since it doesn'T assume TotW.

Is Blizzard Really balancing Mage fire/Arcane dps around TotW, which require some snaring which there is like 0% chance will work on bosses ?

Cause 4999 dps fire would be 4464 dps only without Totw working, which place it under Balance Druid... That'S would be far far away Warlock Affliction or even Frostfire. Arcane would be only 4123 dps, which place it with Frost spec...

Makes me really sad.

Or maybe Am I misunderstanding something here ?

See how a couple pages back people are talking about adding the 3% crit of focus magic to the mage on the sim it has left me a question. What if the person your buffing is a healer (single priest to keep inspiration buff on tank) or a low dpser? Then the contribution of 3% extra to the mage makes little seance since if the other person does not do as much dps as the mage.

Also I agree with the above poster about this Torment the Weak talent not working on bosses. I dont know many bosses that can get snared.

hi there, think ive missed a few post somewhere along the line, doesnt focus magic get overwritten with better buffs, meaning it will never get used in a raid scenario?

1) Don't put it on a low DPSer then? You're partially right in that (Frost)Fire Mages get the highest benefit from crit
In a normal raid composition, you should have enough casters available though.
2) Take a random raid boss. Shoot it with Arcane Missiles. Then cast Slow and shoot it again. Realise that you just did 12% more damage.

It works on Sartharion at least, best I could do with solo play.

Um, no? I don't think so? Never happened to me at least.

Ah ok, I assumed following implied Focus Magic would get overwritten.


Patch 3.0.2 - On Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking
..

Increased Spell Power Buff: Focus Magic, Improved Divine Spirit, Flametongue Totem, Totem of Wrath, Demonic Pact

The point is that... is any arcane mage really going to serve as a slave in order to refresh Slow ? Look at the dps of Mage_Arcane_Slow. No one want to be at this place.

The fact is TotW actually requires One person to constantly nerf 10% of his dps in order to give +12% dps to 2 maybe max 3 person in the raid ! Whereas Balance Druid for Example doesn't nerf their dps to give +13% dps to ALL casters.

Class serving as refresh-slave for 3max player is not something Blizzard does habitually.
Balancing Dps around something like TotW is not something Anyone can agree. Remember when Evocation was a talent and Arcane Points where compulsary. I thought Blizzard didn't want that anymore :/

And for now, Only Frostfire build can bypass this TotW-around balancing. That's why I'm sad.

If at least it worked with FB/FFB...but no. It isn't the case.



Look : I have just taken Mage_Arcane_Slow away to be more realistic :



Boom !

The only thing is I don't know why FrostFire is loosing 120 dps without Mage_Arcane_Slow since it doesn't use TotW :/ [EDIT : Problem Solved]

It's even worse in realistic situation where no frost mage is here and that one of the fire/Frostfire Mage has to refresh the Scorch Debuff.

EDIT : Idea : Has anyone tryed to modify the Lag= setting from simcraft ? It's quite interesting that some spec benefits more than others from lesser lag. At 0.1 Lag down from 0.2, DestroLocks are just under Affli. The others remain quite the same. Also, at High Lag= values (e.g. 0.5) Fire and FrostFire, like all Proc Spec are destroyed. It seems any laggy man would have to go with Frost-Like specs.