In fact, Xentropy, you have beta forum access -- Please, just post that exact text, totally unchanged, in the thread. It states the problem perfectly.

ETA: Ah, you did! But as an edit, so I didn't see that the thread had changed.

Already done. In fact, I just bolded it so it hopefully won't be missed.

I completely agree with Merena's proposal to fix the glyph: A reduction in the strength of the snare (by 10-20%) rather than removal of the snare altogether. It'd keep frostbite fully intact and remove much of the impact to the other affected talents, while retaining a drawback of some kind to match fireball.

By the way, to add some content to this post: A recent beta forum post points to the hit cap for spells still being 17% rather than 9% as previously reported. A level 77 shadow priest had a miss show up against a level 80 mob despite using ~15% hit gear. Zero resists against mobs under 80, however, across thousands of casts, confirming the 1% guaranteed miss is still removed. That test was performed two days ago, so is now one patch old, but it was unlikely to have changed this push.

TLC and the new TTC and Timbal's and whatever else there is are not affected by spell power at all.
Make a test on Dr. Boom, and show us if you ever get more than the listed tooltip damage.

(Without debuffs or talents that affect all magic damage of course.)


You'll always have some haste - Netherwind, ToW, gear. So you'll always have more than 1.5s between Barrages.
That means you can't fit FiBl between 2 ABars. Either you go ABar-FiBl-wait-ABar, or ABar-FiBl-AM-ABar, or just just skip it.
Same with any other filler - not that there are many to choose.

You want Arcane Barrage and Icy Veins, leaving you at most 4/5 Ignite. You're stuck at 20 yards, terrible DPM and you lose the 10% cost reduction from Frost Channeling that you could get instead.
You seem to be able to get another 2-3% DPS by weaving in Fire Blasts though.

But you'll be very tight on mana and talent points. If Torment of the Weak turns out to be useful, you simply won't have the points for everything in Arcane.

As for the calculation's assumptions, they should be listed in that post or the linked post before:
3k spell power, hit cap, 30% crit including ToW/Molten/Judgement/Moonkin/whatever, 25% average haste including WoA/Ret/Moonkin/whatever.
It doesn't use the 6% damage from ToW, 2% damage from Ret, but doesn't use partial resists either.
(Which has no impact onto balance whatsoever.)


Fire definately looks more versatile now. More choices, more option, more mana management.

But it also is a rather fragile model.
* Drowning in mana due to JoW/IWE? Spam LB under Molten.
* Got the Fireball Glyph and maybe even 4T6? Little reason for FFB even with the mana savings.

Look at Arcane Barrage:
With its strong scaling, the spell is extremely strong in PvP, because it's a near spammable instant.
Increase the cooldown or reduce the damage? No it's useless in PvE.
It's really strong right now with no/low resilience and PoM-Potency abuse.

If its power is brought back in line with PvP gear and a PoM fix, the spell will remain usable in PvE (still not very powerful). It is a very sharp line to balance.

Living Bomb is similar:
It relies on its strong DoT and its strong Explosion scaling. It can be justified by having a 12s timer, being a 51 point talent and only castable on one target.
I don't see a way to abuse the spell really, they only thing that can happen is cleanse-spammer blowing up their own people.
But if it need to get retuned, it might very well lose its usefulness.
If the designer think that it shouldn't be used as single target DPS and have the explosion not affect the initial target.

Especially the last point can be very thin ice for Living Bomb to live on.
The spell relies on it's non-typical scaling to used for an unexpected purpose.
It will likely end up well, but it's a pretty fragile basis for such a core spell in my opinion.

Ice Shards/Piercing Ice/Icy Veins/Frost Channeling to maximise Frostfire Bolt as well.
That build is really tight on the Fire side though, can't get everything there. Skip either Pyro/Payback or World in Flames.

Manly, could provide a link to your proposed 51/20 fire raiding spec? After looking at the current trees, I fail to see why you'd go 51/20 instead of 53/18? (going to Tier 4 only for frost channeling, correct?)

Thanks.

It depends a bit on what you plan for, but roughly the variations are:

if you have >= 30% crit rate:
0/52/19 - well-rounded build (3/3 moe, 2/3 frost channeling, blastwave, no fiery payback)
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

if you have < 30% crit rate:
0/51/20 - well-rounded build (2/3 moe, 3/3 frost channeling, blastwave, no fiery payback)
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

Then from that build, you can tweak some points based upon specific needs. Particularly worthy of note:

You want
-----------------
-3/3 frost chan. is nice, and allows more living bomb spam. dpm is now a top concern for fire spec.
-2/2 fiery payback. If the situation allows, this is the best talent ever.
-2/2 firestarter. If you need stronger AOE, you'd be amazed to see how good this is. Its more a nice to have though.

You can spare
-----------------
-2 pt Firestarter
-1 pt Imp. Scorch If you use the scorch glyph, I could see doing this move. I don't think I would though.
-Pyroblast / blastwave. If you cut those, make sure to cut firestarter first.
-2 pt Piercing Ice. This is somewhat an extreme measure, but if you want to put an extreme focus on DPS and ignore DPM, this is a real alternative. Keep in mind you will be slightly hurt on hot streak/combustion though.
-1-2 pt Playing with Fire. Its still one of the lowest DPS contributer. This is a most dire case; something you never want to sacrifice, but if you really really want to keep blastwave at all cost, you have the option to cut up to 2 pts in PWF.

To note: 3/3 MOE is favored over 3/3 frost chan. if you have 30%+ crit rate. This should apply to any build. Hence the weird 0/52/19 vs 0/51/20. Both builds are the same, just that you get a better deal DPM wise depending on crit rate.

------------------------------------------

If you want to plan exclusively on a FFB spam build (for greater DPM at the cost of some DPS loss, to allow for higher Living Bomb uptime, which might in itself allow Molten Armor over Mage Armor);

0/51/20 - FFB-only build. (possible alternative: 2/2 fiery payback -> 2/2 firestarter)
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

In regards to these deep fire specs, it may almost be sacreligious to mention it, but I'd actually add Elemental Precision to the list of droppable talents to free more points. Hit is easiest to make up for with gear since it requires less rating per point than anything else, and EP is only functionally 1% dps per point at best (less if you consider what you'd get for your buck on the gear instead of the hit rating you'd have to gear for). With 1/3 EP you could get 3/3 frost channeling, all the FFB-helping frost talents, and still have 53 left over for fire. I'd personally at least go 2/3 EP and 3/3 frost channeling in Manly's first spec above. 1% hit is easier to make up than the approximately 30mp5 gained from a third point of FC. I suppose it'd depend on your raid's mana restoration availability and how you're doing for mana in your current raiding situation.

My main *is* a Frost mage actually. And I most likely wouldn't slot that glyph come WotLK either if I stay Frost... I like Frostbite and Shatter too much and I'm well aware of how good they are for soloing/trash killing. (Well, actually, I'm really eyeing that newly viable Arcane tree since I've always wanted to be an Arcanist, but that's another story.)

I'm just saying that if the goal of the glyph is to remove the snare and the snare penalty, from a purely mathematical standpoint, the glyph achieves that (it's actually slightly *better* than just increasing the coefficient back).

Whether that's a tradeoff worth making is a different issue that may depend on your play style (and on your spec -- if you're Arcane/Frost and don't have Frostbite and Permafrost the glyph may be worth it).

Well, I'm taking into account lvl 80 stat downscaling. I do not expect the gear to drown in hit rating like it did in TBC. They seem to vary stats a lot more (read: more spirit and stuff), which means every stat tends to be lower. They are also more open to weird stats allocation, stuff like gear with no + dmg but an absurd amount of crit. All of which makes 'dropping EP' a less likely scenario.

I already brought this up on a previous page, complete with charts on the chances of each amount of stacks for 1/3 and 2/3 improved scorch. Personally I think at least going 2/3 scorch for a deep frost + scorch utility build (0/17/54) is an option, since the chances of losing the stack on a refresh are nearly zero at 2/3, and there are a lot of nice places in frost to put that freed point.

What? The chances of losing the stack at 2/3 are 33%, unless you are giving yourself a lot of extra time in case of a failure, in which case you are cutting into your DPS pretty heavily by Scorching a lot more often than you need to.

edit:

The assumption that it will make 5 separate attempts and 5 separate rolls to see if each attempt goes on is pretty silly, it will still only do 1 roll and if successful give you all 5 and if failing give you 0. I could be wrong and you could be right, but I highly doubt it. The purpose of the Glyph is pretty clearly to eliminate the "scorch stacking" penalty, rather than to allow 1/3 Imp Scorch. If it were the latter then it would be more like "Increases the chance for your Improved Scorch debuff to apply by 66%."

I agree, the mechanic seems to be aimed at not having to cast it 5 times at the beginning, but you are still going to need to have 100% chance for it to be useful. Which makes a lot of sense as it brings scorch somewhat in line with other caster buffs that generally get applied while actually doing max dps rotations and not off-spells like scorch.

Hard to say if it's really worth it in a raid, 3 mages put up scorch pretty fast. Awesome PvP talent though!

Looking thru the talents back when Burnout bonus was lower, i played a bit with the tree and came up with this build.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...00000000000000

Now the question is back then the bonus from burnout was so low that missing Hot Streak (imo the most idiotic Tier 9! talent) and Burnout was my goal.

This spec differs from the full fire builds with the inclusion of quite some goodies.
-Lower IV cooldown
-Coldsnap with lowered CD
-Winter's Chill (10% crit)
- Artic Winds (5% dmg increase)
- FoF
- Ice Barrier *this one is not a direct dmg spell you may choose to drop it for Playing with Fire)

My idea was a FFB spamming build using the FoF for some FFB FireBlast Shatter combos.
Since burnout has been buffed i would pose the question if:
50% crit bonus + HotStreak are better then all the above goodies.

You guys think this spec would be able to compete in a raid envirnoment?

Also another thing is the possibility to drop Combustion + Molten fury for the Water Elemental(not improoved). At this point with the 20% CD reduction plus the new Glyph if it would be more "valuable" dps wise then the Combustion+MF combo.

Anyways just a share of toughts not even sure if its any good.

Yes, I agree. It will simply increase the number of stacks applied per Imp. Scorch proc from 1 to 5.

Further regarding the Imp. Scorch glyph, I can see it as a major trash debuff applier. It will also be generally strong in Fire PvP.

It doesn't say "when successful" because only dumb dumbs put fewer than 3 points in it.

edit:

To be more serious, I think it's pretty clear. If it were simply trying to affect the chance of application, then it would be talking about that. It says nothing at all about the chance to apply, it's talking only about the number of applications.

I think this is the correct assumption. It seems to me that the Glyph would just change the talent to 33/66/100% chance of applying a 10% debuff, instead of applying the 2% debuff 5 times, and rolling on every single application attempt to see if it's successful or not.

I never thought we would ever get this answered, but alas, we did !

How Blizzard does class balancing

WoW Forums -> GOOD LORD, stop crying. It is a broken build.

I called your assumption silly, not you. And the dumb dumbs thing was a general statement, so don't take offense. I do think you are taking a huge leap of logic, though. Sorry if I inadvertently insulted you. I was merely attempting to keep the tone light.


Thanks for the blue post manly. That's pretty much what I imagined they were doing, but it's good to read it from the horse's hooves, so to speak.

Scorch: Y'all are making the assumption that you are allowed to take the Glyph without maxing the talent. I would argue that's an unreasonable assumption. Especially since it would solve all these silly problems.

Blue Post: That doesn't answer the most pressing questions we had about their TCing, which is what type of TCing do they do? Do they run spreadsheets at certain value levels, or do they run symbolic calculations formulas that can tell you scaling at arbitrary gear levels? Do they do it at given levels of hit/crit/etc, or do they run iso-DPS curves to figure out how a class scales with optimally-distributed ilvl? Is the testing only done with gear that's planned in the game or do they make magic gear with inflated ilvl to run those things too?
The whole Linus' Law thing is a given, and I totally excuse them for that. But I didn't find out what I really wanted to know about their testing process.

Well, of course its light on details, but at least its good to know they test theorycraft and low/top gear levels.

The obvious loophole here is that they do not allow users to test in top end gear.

I doubt they could run symbolic calculations on a lot of this stuff. I've tried my hand at optimization of their stat-point allocation function, and even under simple conditions, the answers are horrendously complicated. This is one of the primary reasons why I have campaigned for simpler mechanics; there is no way to see any grand scaling trends from the math. You can pick out a couple things, but they are almost always in isolation, and it's very difficult to get a sense of "the big picture."

In the end, if we can't get an answer to your question (which I too am curious about), I think the very nature of Blizzard's mechanics speak volumes about the degree of theorycrafting they do (or rather, don't do).

Mh, might be that I forgot about that. I'll check it on Dr. Boom this weekend.

Well then Muphrid, if we agree that it is unlikely they properly test mathematically the scaling of spells/talents, then we implicitly agree that a major part of the tweaking will come from actual in-game testing. Now lets assume for a second that we have a better confidence in the bulk of beta testers over the few blizzard testers, that means that the very fact they do not let players test with end-game gear will lead to end-game being out of shape.