WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3.3 live) - Page 126

Zeldyrr · 10/12/08, 2:51 PM

From MMO-Champion/Blizzcon:

Q: Shadow Priest's Dispersion is lackluster. Any chance for some buffs?
A: Probably not. The Devs are happy with the way it is. It's a partial shield that does not root you. Yeah it's not terribly useful for high-end PvE, but it is beneficial in other way and 51-Point talents are often very situational.

Lhivera has argued strongly that DF must be viable for PvE because other 51-pt'ers are. It would seem Blizzard disagrees. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

Wintersbane · 10/12/08, 3:06 PM

Well there's surely a difference between being not terribly useful and being completely worthless for raiding.

Lemming · 10/12/08, 3:06 PM

I know this was from a couple pages back, but this is in regaurds to my last post which sinless seemed to misunderstand. I was talking about lvl 70 builds, and how living bomb doesn't seem worth the extra effort for the minor dps increase (if any).

Between focus magic + clearcasting/icy veins, I think thats going to be a matter of preference, but you are right, probably focus magic is better.

At level 80 I have also been enjoying 0/53/18, as long as there isn't another mage with LB in the raid.

And concerning LB and its actual increase in dmg, is there actually a cutoff point for frostfire and/or fire builds? Anyone done any math on this?

Sinless · 10/12/08, 3:48 PM

Yes, I understand. I was mistaken about my assumption on LB because I neglected a major detail, the GCD you spend to actually cast the LB. It turns out, it is not that big of a DPS increase @ lvl 80 with naxx10/25 epics.

At level 70, it is a toss up for me between 10-11 points in arcane or 11 points in frost.

Faxmonkey · 10/12/08, 4:02 PM

Originally Posted by Jarlyn

Yeah, I think they're going to have to rebalance things a good bit in the future. Crit is already back to being an incidental stat (you don't dislike it, but you generally ignore it in favor of sp/haste) and my gear on beta is still littered with Sunwell epics. By the time we're in full Ulduar gear crit is going to completely irrelevant, to say nothing of raid tiers beyond that.

The other side of this coin is that the Warlock T7 set (both 10 and 25 man) wastes less on crit than the mage set and, is, imo, a much better set. With the warlock set you more or less trade 120 cit for 120 haste -- which is a HUGE dps boost.

Compare (25 man set):

Warlock set: 86 hit, 94 crit, 230 haste, 434 Spell damage
Mage Set: 81 hit, 218 crit, 102 haste, 443 spell damage

Of course mages aren't limited to tier gear, but I'm afraid the 4 piece bonus is too good to pass up (especially if you want to run with Frostfire bolt) and thus, the ideally geared mage will still be, stat wise, behind an ideally geared warlock. I'd really like to see Blizzard implement some sort of parity in that department.

Xeddicus · 10/12/08, 4:21 PM

Originally Posted by Zeldyrr

From MMO-Champion/Blizzcon:

Lhivera has argued strongly that DF must be viable for PvE because other 51-pt'ers are. It would seem Blizzard disagrees. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

I could have sworn the actual reply to the question was that they agreed it wasn't so hot for PvE and may tweak it some for that, but not redesign the whole talent. May want to watch/listen to the actual Q&A.

solbergb · 10/12/08, 6:59 PM

Originally Posted by elfhelm

MMO is quoting that as a blue post, but I can't find where. I assume it is from blizzcon.

Given the ability to switch like that, has anyone thought if it would be preferable to have an AOE spec and a boss spec?

Right now I have gear for the following situations. Keep in mind I'm bad at arena.

1. Boss killing (DPS, spell hit and DPM)
2. Trash killing/solo play/battleground play/2 man arena (burst DPS and moderate survivability)
3. 5 man Arena and "mage-tanking" situations (survivability over all - whether I win is based on whether I outlast the incoming damage long enough to do enough damage to end the enemy. "damage before dead" rather than "damage per second)

I've also got two specs that I use

1. Raid spec (DPS, threat and mana efficiency)
2. PVP spec (survivability, mobile fighting and as much DPS as I can squeeze in)

With WOLK talent trees I will probably tune my two "specs" to match my gear situation for #1 and #2 and just rely on gear to bridge the gap with #3 situations (using the "non-boss" spec if it isn't a boss fight, and the "boss spec" if it is a boss fight)

I'm weird and use a fire spec to PVP, which works better in battlegrounds and world PVP than in arena.
My so-called PVP spec in Wrath will be really my "soloing/leveling/trash-killing/battlegrounding/arenaing" spec and my other spec will be a cookie cutter deep fire or frostfire spec. They'd have glyphs to match.

This ability to switch specs into two DPS modes is one of the nice things about NOT being a hybrid class. My paladin will probably have a tank spec and a holy spec and that's it. If I'm past the leveling/5man stage and into progression raiding with my mage I might for example create a "long fight" spec and a "burst fight " spec - a more extreme version of the mage armor vs molten armor idea. Such specs might also have gear swapped in and out, just as I swap in and out hit and survivability stuff today to tune for a particular battle.

Roywyn · 10/12/08, 10:13 PM

Originally Posted by Faxmonkey

The other side of this coin is that the Warlock T7 set (both 10 and 25 man) wastes less on crit than the mage set and, is, imo, a much better set. With the warlock set you more or less trade 120 cit for 120 haste -- which is a HUGE dps boost.

For Fire specs that are tight on mana for living bombs, crit and haste are on par.
For Frostfire specs, crit is a little bit better than haste per rating point par before even taking Living Bomb (because we don't know how it'll end up) and Mana into account.

The old "crit is oh so terrible" mantra was never true to that extent and has become very much obsolete with 3.0 talents.
Even in 2.0 terms unsing Rawr, the difference between 120 haste and 120 crit at level 70 is about ~19 spell damage.
Considering that mage set has 9 spell damage more, the difference is 10 spell damage on the whole set.

That's a 1% loss in offensive power in 2.0 terms, and most likely even a gain in 3.0 terms.
I would still prefer it for the the gain of 103 stamina though, business as usual

Originally Posted by solbergb

My so-called PVP spec in Wrath will be really my "soloing/leveling/trash-killing/battlegrounding/arenaing" spec and my other spec will be a cookie cutter deep fire or frostfire spec. They'd have glyphs to match.

If you don't mind a piece of honest advice: Level as frost. Just try it, and trust me, you'll never look back.

Dragonrhonin · 10/12/08, 11:42 PM

Question: I noticed that in the linked post on the first page, the simcraft used a Mage_Arcane_Frostfire rotation similar to what I have been thinking lately. What I don't understand, however, is that the spec/rotation was only used in the Unrealist-Slave category, and not the other two. Is there a reason for this, or was it overlooked, maybe something obvious that I'm not seeing? Just thought that a 53/10/8 spec might be higher DPS than 53/18. What am I missing?

Faxmonkey · 10/13/08, 12:06 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

For Fire specs that are tight on mana for living bombs, crit and haste are on par.
For Frostfire specs, crit is a little bit better than haste per rating point par before even taking Living Bomb (because we don't know how it'll end up) and Mana into account.

The old "crit is oh so terrible" mantra was never true to that extent and has become very much obsolete with 3.0 talents.
Even in 2.0 terms unsing Rawr, the difference between 120 haste and 120 crit at level 70 is about ~19 spell damage.
Considering that mage set has 9 spell damage more, the difference is 10 spell damage on the whole set.

That's a 1% loss in offensive power in 2.0 terms, and most likely even a gain in 3.0 terms.
I would still prefer it for the the gain of 103 stamina though, business as usual

I think you're way off base here. It's been exacerbated by 3.0 talents, not "made obsolete" -- for several reasons.

Yes, there is burnout. But there is also a huge proliferation of crit, crit has natural diminishing returns, the far higher base crit at level 80 significantly devalues crit -- and as for 120 haste vs 120 crit being only 19 spell damage difference, I strongly question the validity of that.

Just using Lhivera's TCOM for a quick check in 2.4 terms, I get this using my gear as the base:
1.00 Damage: 0.68 Hit Rating, 1.34 Crit Rating, 0.88 Haste Rating
1.00 Hit Rating: 1.47 Damage, 1.97 Crit Rating, 1.29 Haste Rating
1.00 Crit Rating: 0.74 Damage, 0.51 Hit Rating, 0.65 Haste Rating
1.00 Haste Rating: 1.14 Damage, 0.77 Hit Rating, 1.53 Crit Rating

If that's to be trusted, at level 70, in 2.4 terms, 120 haste vs 120 crit with a deep fire + IV build is the same as a GAIN in +47 damage for the haste. That's fairly significant. Remember, at level 70, we're talking about 7.6% haste vs 5.5% crit when both are at 120. Even if 1% crit was just as good as 1% hit and vice versa (which is true if your crit rating is low enough, but not when its higher) you're still already 2% behind.

That's with like 25% crit rate from molten armor + my base crit. You can imagine crit will lag behind even more if I already have 50% base crit after all the various raid buffs are factored in -- burnout not withstanding. The only place where crit rating MIGHT compete with haste is in a FrostFire build.

Xentropy · 10/13/08, 12:22 AM

I believe the biggest reason Roywyn is saying crit scales better than it ever did is Hot Streak. Hot Streak procs about twice as often with 60% crit than with 40%, which helps make crit remain significant even after you have fairly high amounts.

Faxmonkey · 10/13/08, 12:42 AM

Originally Posted by Xentropy

I believe the biggest reason Roywyn is saying crit scales better than it ever did is Hot Streak. Hot Streak procs about twice as often with 60% crit than with 40%, which helps make crit remain significant even after you have fairly high amounts.

You make a good point. I don't really know if that's enough to change the haste vs crit status quo, however. It takes a 40% more crit rating than haste rating just to get a 1% increase in either. That's a hard hurdle to overcome. Conceptually, haste also has a multiplicative effect with your crit rating. The higher your crit rating the better haste is as a stat. The more crit you have, the better haste becomes -- and you already have quite high crit rates so haste is going to remain a fairly strong strong stat. I am rather skeptical that crit is going to be good enough to overcome that 40% hurdle when its really, despite what Roywyn said, not even close in 2.4 -- which was the main point I was objecting to.

We'll also have to wait and see how mana issues are at 80 once everything is in its final arrangement. If mana is tight, crit might well compete with haste just on the basis of how much better it is for your DPM -- not even factoring in Master of Elements. So I guess it's a wait and see situation . . .

Drayerina · 10/13/08, 12:50 AM

Also, the crit is probably not that good for arcane or frost mages, even if it's fine for fire/frostfire. They could just design a second set with haste and let us choose what we like. Some classes even get 3 sets, so it wouldn't be that hard imo.

But even if it's sad to see old things happen again, complaining won't change it.

Out of interest, has anyone run some hypothetical numbers comparing scaling between classes? Just courious if we'll see some classes outscale others again.

solbergb · 10/13/08, 1:13 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

If you don't mind a piece of honest advice: Level as frost. Just try it, and trust me, you'll never look back.

I did. For 60 levels. Then I switched to fire and never looked back. I had more fun going from 60-70 than I had going from 1-60. I've got a hordeside that never was frost and the low levels also play pretty well with pure fire.

I just prefer the style of fire. Frost is too slow. No adrenaline rush. Also I am absolutely terrible at getting anything useful out of the elemental. If I wanted a pet class I'd have played warlock or hunter.

I have friends who feel equally strongly about arcane. I do like frost better than arcane, for what it's worth, although I'd probably do a better job at getting the most out of arcane than I would out of frost.

I do actually like some of the lower tier frost stuff, so I may go frostfire and have my cake/eat it too. Even with a pure fire build I do use frost nova, ice block, frostfire "chill" effect and ice lance when moving and fire blast isn't up. It's not like I don't use some of what I learned playing frost all those levels.

solbergb · 10/13/08, 1:22 AM

Originally Posted by Faxmonkey

You make a good point. I don't really know if that's enough to change the haste vs crit status quo, however.

It may depend on your rotation. In a scorch/fireball or scorch/frostfire rotation you do fewer pyroblasts than in a scorch/fireblast rotation for the same amount of crit. The latter scales better with crit. Any random proc that isn't up against an internal cooldown also benefits from the faster rotation.

I'm going to do some hard number crunching on this once the patch goes live and we're sure that we are seeing "final" level 70 numbers for the various talents and spells and itemization scaling. And then again when Wrath goes live, scaled to 80.

In my "trash killing/pvp/mobile fighting" mode it could well be that I rate crit higher than haste. Or in my "really long fight" mode, I might rate crit higher than haste for mana reasons. (crit is dps and dpm improvement, haste is just dps improvement).

In BC the math was fairly easy and I only really had one rotation to worry about for fire. Crit was worth about 65-70% spell damage at my gear levels and haste floated between .95 and 1.05 spell damage.

In Wrath and 3.0, I'll need to do the math for at least 3 rotations and for the two main specs I'm using, since it's easy to switch them. Given my behavior in BC, when I switch spec I'm likely also swapping gear.

Docjowles · 10/13/08, 2:32 AM

Originally Posted by solbergb

I did. For 60 levels. Then I switched to fire and never looked back. I had more fun going from 60-70 than I had going from 1-60. I've got a hordeside that never was frost and the low levels also play pretty well with pure fire.

If you play the game purely for fun (whether there's any other reason to play a game is a tangent for another thread

) then yeah, by all means, pick what you enjoy the most. But also give consideration to the fact that the "most fun" spec may have changed. I essentially played 1-70 as fire, raided frost at 60 because my guild was mostly in MC/BWL, then went back to fire out of comfort to level to 70. I've been fire since the week I zoned into Kara in early 2007. Fire is absolutely my comfort zone.

On beta, I love frost for leveling. You essentially have a 100% crit rate from shatter, and between all the snares and Ice Barrier you never take damage. In instances, I bring utility beyond sheep (although to be honest every instance I've been in "aoe it down" has been the best strat...and Blizzard is very strong in 3.0). I was deeply disappointed when they took the damage off Deep Freeze because it was one less spell to fit into my rotation, but trying to maximize shatter is still more engaging than fire for leveling.

My point is, play the game how it is most fun for you. But also, for me, "most fun" changed in 3.0 and I highly recommend giving frost a few days trial to see if you enjoy the change.

Lhivera · 10/13/08, 2:40 AM

Originally Posted by Zeldyrr

From MMO-Champion/Blizzcon:

Lhivera has argued strongly that DF must be viable for PvE because other 51-pt'ers are. It would seem Blizzard disagrees. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

Note that when he says "51-Point talents are often very situational," what he really means is, "Deep Freeze and Dispersion are very situational." I don't really understand the ramifications of Shadow Dance, but as far as I can tell, out of all the other 51-point talents, 23 of the 29 are useful for performing the spec's primary function in a boss fight, and 4 of the remaining 6 are at least useful for performing one of the spec's secondary functions in group PvE (generally AOE tanking and/or DPS).

Originally Posted by Faxmonkey

Just using Lhivera's TCOM for a quick check in 2.4 terms, I get this using my gear as the base:
1.00 Damage: 0.68 Hit Rating, 1.34 Crit Rating, 0.88 Haste Rating
1.00 Hit Rating: 1.47 Damage, 1.97 Crit Rating, 1.29 Haste Rating
1.00 Crit Rating: 0.74 Damage, 0.51 Hit Rating, 0.65 Haste Rating
1.00 Haste Rating: 1.14 Damage, 0.77 Hit Rating, 1.53 Crit Rating

If that's to be trusted

It's not, if you're talking about 3.0 talents, which have changed the equation dramatically. I will be taking the TCOM down as soon as 3.0 is released, and will leave a link up to Magegraf in its place. The TCOM should be considered obsolete at this point. At this time, I am not planning to resume development (I stopped work when it became clear that Frost's playstyle issues would not be addressed; I will reconsider if they are someday in the future).

That's not to say I know for sure one way or the other how Crit compares to Haste. Your conclusion may be correct. I just urge folks not be using the TCOM for anything remotely related to 3.0 at this point.

Søndag · 10/13/08, 3:54 AM

Originally Posted by Dragonrhonin

Question: I noticed that in the linked post on the first page, the simcraft used a Mage_Arcane_Frostfire rotation similar to what I have been thinking lately. What I don't understand, however, is that the spec/rotation was only used in the Unrealist-Slave category, and not the other two. Is there a reason for this, or was it overlooked, maybe something obvious that I'm not seeing? Just thought that a 53/10/8 spec might be higher DPS than 53/18. What am I missing?

I'm not sure i understand what you ask.. There is a Frostfire build in the realistic builds list, setup to run without torment and doing it's own scorching together with a fire mage.

Roywyn · 10/13/08, 8:18 AM

Originally Posted by solbergb

I did. For 60 levels. Then I switched to fire and never looked back. I had more fun going from 60-70 than I had going from 1-60. I've got a hordeside that never was frost and the low levels also play pretty well with pure fire.

I just prefer the style of fire. Frost is too slow. No adrenaline rush. Also I am absolutely terrible at getting anything useful out of the elemental. If I wanted a pet class I'd have played warlock or hunter.

I leveled to 60 as frost spec and used quite a lot of fireballs because they did more damage (or at least it seemed to me, back then). Especially on some levels where you just got your fireball and had a very old frstbolt.

Leveling from 60-70, I used fire almost exclusively. I leveled one level as frost to try it.
Dear god. It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. The mobs just wouldn't die at all.
I leveled a whole level as frost, hoping that it might get better at some point.
But it wouldn't. I swore to level as frost never to that again.

And now I'm here, preaching the opposite of what I used to say. The question is why.
First it doesn't feel slow any more.
Second, you'll slow mobs by 60% and randomly freeze them. You also have Ice Barrier which gets quite a boost at level 75.
Mob damage goes up, quite significantly I think. The usual fire tactic "two-shoot it when it reaches your feet" may last a level or two, but not longer. You'll end up face-tanking a lot of mobs and get a lot of ranged damage.
Hunter mobs doing Aimed Shots for about 2k at level 75 (some where overtuned and did 4k at 73).

As fire, you'll end up taking a lot more damage and you have no emergency shield besides mana shield.
You'll end up eating a lot, just because you run out of health.
Frost doesn't have that issue because melee mobs are not going to touch you and you have a good shield for emergencies like adds, respawns, overpulls.

Bear in mind that during solo-play, you have a lot less crit and spell damage, which holds fire back more than frost.
And Ignite isn't all that for stomping mobs either.
And as frost you also can do the majority of 2-man and 3-man group quests alone which makes leveling much smoother because you have a lot less points where you actually need other people.

It's just a piece of really well-meant advice. I would have totally worn a "FROST - NEVER AGAIN" shirt at level 70.
But it really really feels completely turned upside down while leveling to 80.

Originally Posted by Faxmonkey

I think you're way off base here. It's been exacerbated by 3.0 talents, not "made obsolete" -- for several reasons.

Yes, there is burnout. But there is also a huge proliferation of crit, crit has natural diminishing returns, the far higher base crit at level 80 significantly devalues crit -- and as for 120 haste vs 120 crit being only 19 spell damage difference, I strongly question the validity of that.

Simple examples are often not the best ones, but they are very good at illustrating.

Imagine your baseline DPS is 100% without critting at all. Now imagine you had 100% crit chance.
Then in 2.4 your DPS would be 216.3%. +116.3% damage from +100% crit.
In 3.0 with Burnout added, it would be 254.45%. +154.45% damage from +100% crit. That's 32.8% more gain from crit.

Now add Hot Streak. Assume that Fireball and Pyroblast do the same damage for simplicity. Talents changes, Ignite bugs should bring them close.
Then you'd have 3 casts go off in the time of 2.5, Fireball, Fireball, Pyroblast. That's 3/2.5 = 1.2 = 20% haste.
So you'd go up to 305.34% of your critless DPS. +205.34% damage from +100% crit, that 76.6% more than in 2.4.

Now of course it isn't that simple. You'd have to analyse the gains of 1% crit or 1 rating at a a given gear level.
But this examply gives you an average value of what happens from 0% to 100% crit.
So somewhere more or less in the middle, the scaling has to go up by a value like that.
And Hot Streak is very top heavy, it becomes strong when you have medium to high crit chances.

The other thing that Rawr takes into consideration but neither TCOM nor my sheets (to that extent) do is mana.
You can't chain pot for mana for one, and also the alternative to a mana potion is now [Haste Potion] which is a lot stronger than a Destruction Potion.
That's where haste costs you a significant amount of mana while crit is mana neutral. In the abve example, crit grants you 20% haste and returns 25% base mana, so it's a little gain overall even.

Now I'm aware that mana doesn't matter at all when you just zerg down Brutallus in two minutes.
But it will become at least something to think about when the current JoW gets fixed.

Toejam · 10/13/08, 9:05 AM

I've always played as fire, but after experiencing a large number of corpse runs in beta, I'm looking at going frost for the 70-80 run.

Sorry, if I've missed it somewhere, but do we have a suggested frost levelling build?

arch · 10/13/08, 9:15 AM

Just put all your points in frost. Avoid imp.blizzard and frost warding and you'll be fine.

I'm planning on getting 7 arcane for the reistance though.

xiaoxin21 · 10/13/08, 9:19 AM

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000
will be my leveling spec.

Most likely I will max out imp blizzard followed by Brain Freeze,then imp CoC. With Blizzard, mobs seldom get near enough for me to use CoC and brain freeze although nice is not really required as mobs normally die in 2-3 hits of frostbolts.

Zorkulon · 10/13/08, 9:20 AM

@ Crit vs. Haste

At Level 80 32,79 Haste Rating are 1% Haste or 1% more Dps. 45,91 Crit Rating = 1% Crit or 1,5445% more Dps (Don´t taking Hotstreak / LB into account). So you need 29,72 Crit Rating for 1% more Dps.

So a crit gem should be a bit better than a haste gem. Atleast it should be if you take dpm into account. (please corect me if im wrong)

And of course 1% Crit is far better than 1% Haste.

♦ Seonid · 10/13/08, 9:36 AM

Originally Posted by arch

Avoid imp.blizzard and frost warding and you'll be fine.

Improved Blizzard (in conjunction with Frostbite) is only really an issue if you plan on doing heavy AoE sessions as re-herding the fragmented pack is annoying. If however you use Blizzard situationally, then it's usually fine.

Edit : Actually, thinking about it, given that Blizzard will crit would not not make sense to talent it anyway for shatters ?

Jonny_Monroe · 10/13/08, 9:38 AM

After my time on the Beta I'm quite sure I will be arcane for leveling. I find instant invis to be far more effective an escape tool than Ice Block (I'm spec'd for 1 second invis on beta; is instant still bugged?). The burst damage provided by MBAM is sickeningly good and opening a fight with Fireball+ABar+Slow, if you're fast, will get all 3 to hit about the same time and under the benefit of TtW; its a very potent opener.

I also have a macro for escaping a ganking in PvP which works out nicely for me:
/cancelaura ice block
/cast invisibility

Invis straight out of iceblock - the mage answer to rogue's vanish. On a PvP server this is invaluable for leveling.