1) Some ranks of Flamestrike have a 2.0s cast, the ranks above level 60 have 3.0s.
Since the higher level ranks are unchanged, we don't know if the scaling coefficient is supposed to change or not.
We basically know nothing about what Flamestrike is supposed to do.

Blizzard as 11/50/0 is pretty mediocre from a pure DPS standpoint.
As frost subspec you can get Ice Shards, but it needs Imp. Blizzard, Frostbite (if mobs are slowable), Shatter and preferably Fingers to shine. You can get most things without Fingers in some stitched 0/51/20 compromise.


2) Flamestrike has a small radius and is terrible to aim.
In most situations where I wanted to AoE in in groups/raids in beta, it was simply too clunky to use.

Flamestrike may work in a disciplined Hyjal raid.
But it simply didn't work in any of the situations where I had to AoE something in Wrath.
It's the mix of casting time and small radius. You can Blizzard fine in most situations, just recast early if the mobs get pulled away.

It's like a free 6 second Holy Light that heals for 30k. It's awesome, but I just can't get it it to work in practice.


3) Haven't checked Rawr what the "Amplify Factor" is supposed to be.
In the test, I used Amplify Magic on a party member and then dueled her and let my pet attack her to get the Waterbolt data.
Nothing changed, it's not a raid buff or something.

Sorry if that sounded unclear. Too many changes these days


Hm, when or how do you use Blastwave?

It's an honest question, I've been thinking about it pretty often, but I just can't find anything.
I can think of some generic "Blastwave isn't bad there" situations, but nothing like "Blastwave would be cool now".

I like Dragon's Breath to get mobs off of a healer or myself.
Blastwave there feels like more chaos instead of more control to me there.

Ahh the joys of patch day. Yeah I myself spec'd 11/50 (from the 5 mins I was able to log in) and went with 2/2 BS like you had mentioned earlier in the thread. I haven't had the chance to test it as 0/2 and 2/2 to see if its needed with the changes to the pushback mechanics. As for frost yeah it looks amazing but my question is what fights in SWP will kill the elemental? Burn from Brut? Gas Nova from Felmyst? The ridiculous amounts of raid damage on Twins?

I was also very curious to see the meaning behind this. I tried applying it to a test dummy and it didn't do anything for me. Am I able to apply this to myself and then get a buff from it?


Secondly, I've been having some pretty sketchy mana management issues. Was up against the test dummy today, 36% crit self-buffed (with molten armor) 33% w/ mage armor. mana gem glyph + scorch glyph. specced 11/50/0

My rotation was to put up scorch, fireball spam until HS procced, throw a pyro, and continue (Refreshing scorch when i needed to of course). I was running oom with both specs in less than 2 minutes (approximately 1:40-1:50) after about 3 tries with each. A few points to note, this was using SCB + Mana gems, I did not evocate (which would effectively double my approximate dps time when it gives me back about 85% of my mana [4pc/2pc t6 bonuses included]). I did not mana pot, so that would put me right around 2 minutes if I would do that, I just wanted to see how far I could get by my own means.

Even with a guildy spriest (bt geared) there I was oom in 2:10 (putting focus magic on him, which stayed up quite a but surprisingly) with molten armor and oom in 2:40 with mage armor.

Is this to be expected of us, or am I doing something wrong (outside of mana potting at cooldown).

It it a better idea to go all out, hit mana gem around 70%, go back up to full, go down to about 75%, mana pot, go all out, get low, evocate, by that time mana gem will be up?

Sounds like a stupid mana management issue, but I want to make sure that I'm not screwed for brutallus etc.

To be honest, in my experience it's been quite the contrary. I loathe dragon's breath for the same reason I loathe flamestrike. The small radius is really kind of killing it for me. I do totally ignore the pushback and stun factor for both of theses spell; in my experience it almost never made a difference. Its been exceedingly rare that I would get to use dragon's breath for the stun factor; in almost all the cases frostnova can do the job. Point being, I wouldn't value the DB stun over 0.33% dps increase. As far as dps goes, I rarely get to use DB much, whereas I do get plenty of BW damage in. I view blastwave as a pure dps talent for 2+ mobs. In my experience the pushback was mostly nonfactor for single-target dps mobs (read: when the tank is tanking few mobs), and it was awesome for large aoe packs. In other words, its more convenient than it is inconvenient. I rarely had the pushback been a negative.

I guess its a matter of preference, and that it depends on how youre used to play; how your tanks tank the mobs (position-wise).

So I remember that early on there was some speculation that with the hit rating being combined, the spell hit cap was going to be reduced to 9% and the unmitigatable 1% miss chance was being removed.

I believe this was not entirely the case, but I have yet to see any hard info supporting either way...

Is the spell hit cap still 17% for raid bosses / 4% for pvp?
Has the 1% chance to miss been removed?
What new effects /enchants should we take into account when thinking about spell hit?
-Shadow priest adds 3%?
-Ele shaman no longer adds hit
-Moonkin's FF (does this stack w spriest debuff)?
-Surefooted is now a viable enchant
-Is there anything else to consider?

I'm just trying to get a handle on how we should be managing our gear and regemming.

Yes 17% hit for bosses, 4% for PvP
Yes the 1% chance to miss has been remoevd
Yes Shadow Priests and Moonkins both add 3% but they DO NOT stack
Yes Surefooted is a viable enchant

Last night against Felmyst, I don't think I went below 8k mana the entire fight. I switched from mage armor to molten after the first AOE pack. I'm currently specced 11/50. Mana was a non-issue at Brutallus, for all the bosses, really. We started AOEing the trash packs down.

I used blastwave a few times last night to knock the trash back away from me to the tanks. I saw some weird aggro issues surrounding the knock back though. I got gibbed a few times after one blastwave when there should have been no way for me to pull with the druids new infinite swipe mechanics.

Flamestrike is still as hard to use as ever. Just being able to have blizzard's targetting circle on the ground before the spell is done channelling makes it so much easier to use than Flamestrike.

The demon in the Kalec fight was immune to the improved scorch glyph. I had to stack scorch five times on him. Did anyone else notice that?

Good to hear about the non-mana issues you are having in SWP. That was my main concern heading into 3.02. Couple questions:

Did you use Mage or Molten armor for most of the night?
Did you have the mage armor glyphed or use glyphed mana gems?
Did you pot or evocate? If so how many times during a boss fight (on average)

Just trying to get some things clarified as I havent been able to log on yet.

Also, frostbolt is no longer binary, and thus the old ghost hit is a thing of the past?

Yes ghost hit is finally gone

I just got the new RAWR installed (yay for rawr) and I'm looking at arcane (the 58/3/0 spec) and it seems to prefer +Int to +spell dmg. I had always though +Int had deminishing returns and that it was better to stack dmg even as an arcane mage. Something like Hit > Dmg > Haste/Crit > Int ?? How exactly does +Int help more than +Dmg?

I specced 11/50/0 last night on live and can verify that Focus Magic now procs off of healing spells. I'm not sure if this is news but I do remember a time when this was not true. I ran heroic mgt with a prot pally, ret pally, rogue, and holy pally (wrath of the hybrid anybody?) with Focus Magic on the healer and it was going off like gangbusters. It never procced when I put it on the prot or ret pally. I didn't try the rogue. I also tried it on the random people around the training dummies. Hunters never procced it but elemental shaman and locks also set it off for near 100% uptime.
Also it is pretty annoying having it put that glyph over your head and play the noise every 2-3 seconds.

For aoe spells I'm still using the old caps. Does anyone know if the new level 80 caps apply to level 70 as well?

Amplify in the tooltip is just a combined effect of all percentage damange increases the spell receives, it has nothing to do with Amplify Magic.

For my setups I'm seeing int way below haste and spell power and even lower than crit. Are you sure you enabled all the relevant buffs? It sounds like you're severely mana limited in your setup.

That ought to do it

In all seriousness, I do look at the first page, religiously by the way. It's a great service to the mage community and thanks for the time you put in to keep it up to date. Also, sorry to pester, but since it's on the front page... Torment, slow and bosses? Is it truly bad design that I'll have to live with, or just a bad dream I can wake up from?

Given the proliferation of discussion here of non-Torment based specs, I'm assuming that I'm just dense, and missed something along the way that confirmed bosses are immune to all snare effects (including slow), and thus unaffected by Torment of the Weak.

Thanks in advance.

The cap should be loosened I think.
Try Blizzarding 1 mob and then the first 5 rooms in The Stockades for a quick test.

Rawr:
1) Hot
2) <3 <3 <3
3) Under Buffs / Spell Power, you list "Demonic Pact" as 10% Spell Power.
However, I *think* it is 10% of the Warlock's Spell Power from the talent wording.
You'd require some user input there if it worked like that. Will try to test it if others aren't faster.

Thanks

Torment currently works seems to work on bosses. But seemingly only with "Slow".
< Note: If you think it would be easy to keep up with ability XYZ - don't post, TEST FIRST. >
It's now open beta kind of We haven't had a PTR patch in a while.
There are still mana changes to come, and Torment or Slow will very likely change. Hopefully.

It's not a big deal at 70, unless you insist on a tight 18/43/0 spec with a Slow slave, which will likely be less DPS than 2 non-slw specs.

Rawr 2.0 gems in Sunwell Gear

Cap hit first. Then with raid buffs and enough mana (i.e. Judgement of Wisdom), it'll likely look like this for Fire specs with LB:

1) 12 Spell Power (16.98 DPS)
2) 10 Crit Rating (16.80 DPS)
3) 10 Haste Rating (13.38 DPS)
4) 10 Intellect (10.12 DPS)

That's because the spec is partially mana limited.
Rawr chooses Mage Armour, 3 Mana Gems, 1 Mana Potion and a partial Evocation to sustain Living Bomb.

But even in a spec without Living Bomb as mana dump, the ranking above essentially doesn't change.
The only change is that is omits the Mana Potion for a Haste Potion and uses a smaller fraction of Evocation.
Numbers fluctuate by less than 0.5 DPS.

I used molten armor exclusively once I saw how high my mana bar was staying with mage armor. i didn't have any mana problems with molten armor up.

I had the scorch glyph and the mage armor glyph.

I didn't pot or evocate on any of the bosses. I rarely even used a mana gem. Mostly just to keep pace while we were AOEing the trash packs.

I wish WWS was working so I could look at my parses and look at my mana income more closely.

Well that is very good news to hear. Looks like Ill go with improved scorch + mana gem then for my glyphs and rock molten armor.

Heres a question no one has asked: Does the Mana Gem Glyph + Serpent Coil Braid stack?

If you mean by no one, at least 1 person per page, then yeah. And yes, they stack.

Here's a full list of the glyphs that are available pre-wotlk, this assumes a maximum skill level of 365 Inscription:

[Item not found!]
[Glyph of Frost Nova]
[Item not found!]
[Glyph of Icy Veins]
[Glyph of Ice Block]
[Glyph of Arcane Explosion]
[Glyph of Arcane Missiles]
[Glyph of Blink]
[Glyph of Evocation]
[Glyph of Mana Gem]
[Glyph of Mage Armor]

Assuming you mean pre wotlk, and unfortunately water ele doesn't make it =(

In other news, has anyone ever attempted to list the boss fights / mechanics that do or do not kill a water elemental?
For instance, will he survive kalecgos's aura or sbolt volleys, a meteor slash, or felmyst's aura?