Only on trash or on new target acquisition. It doesn't do anything for sustained dps. You still have to scorch every 30s.
It helps considerably if for any reason the scorch drops. Which means mages that aren't perfect at scorch rotation may win two ways in DPS - #1 by faster recovery if it drops and #2 by not being as paranoid about it dropping and thus scorching only when they have to rather than scorching too often.
Won't help the elite mages much. Will help the scrubs.
For anybody, no matter how skilled, if scorching alone it is a flat DPS increase measured by the 4 scorches you don't have to cast. What % of your DPS that turns out to be depends on fight length. This bodes well because the days of multiple fire mages on raids helping to maintain the scorch stack are probably even less likely than they were in BC.
Well, I think the glyph is awesome. For one, I think it will help the many mages that tends to overscorch. Worst case, refresh it only when it falls off. Its probably a better alternative than a refresh every 15s.
I think what I find the most ironic about it, is that it only moves us closer to the 1-mage-per-raid reality. I'm not really complaining about it though, fire was really severely lacking in 5-10mans mostly because of scorch ramp-up time coupled with ignite backloaded damage.
------------
Also, something that hasn't been mentioned, you could actually gain a fraction of dps from the glyph if you switch to a playstyle where you fireball spam for 30s, then scorch, rather than 'keep scorch up the whole time'. You can potentially plan for letting it drop, and refresh it later on. The other mages would be basically covering the dead gap if they do the same.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
This bodes well because the days of multiple fire mages on raids helping to maintain the scorch stack are probably even less likely than they were in BC.
This is yet another nudge from Blizzard that they want to try and create diversity in raids. You see it with locks getting a CoE that affects four spell trees, you see it with Imp Scorch and WC being viable for multiple spell types, and you especially see it with them dumping "gotta have" blessings from Paladins' plates. So the vision of 2-3 raid slots per class, with decent representation from each spec, is going to be pushed very hard on us.
You guys think this spec would be able to compete in a raid envirnoment?
Tried reading the starting post of this thread?
Originally Posted by Xentropy
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.
There are 2 problems with spell hit:
1) You're used to drowning in +hit. In T4/5, you played "where can I get +hit" game. In T6, you played "where can I throw away +hit".
With 17% resist chance being definately confirmed now, you'll have a lot of +hit to get. It will entirely depend on itemisation now.
2) The rating conversion at level 80 is really really harsh. Spell hit is bloody expensive when you just hit 80.
At 70 with blue gems, 4 hit rating cost you 4 damage, by going from a runed ruby to a veiled topaz.
When you do the maths with the ranks and conversion and all that, then 4 hit > 4 dmg if you have at least 620 damage, fully buffed that is.
At 80 with blue gems, 2 topazes are actually worse than a ruby and an autumn's glow (yellow). So 16 hit rating costs you 19 damage.
Then consider the new spell ranks and the new conversion formula and do the maths.
For Fireball spam, +hit gems are better than +dmg only if you have 2237 damage.
Think about that for a moment. Spell hit is going to be so expensive that capping it via gems is actually a DPS loss in starter gear. Yes, that takes the two-roll system into account.
That means until you break 2.2k spell power, getting 3% spell hit can actually be a gain of more than 3% damage if you insist on getting near the spell hit cap.
Not capping hit will make you do unspeakable things when you miss 3 times in a row trinketed with combustion under heroism on the equivalent of an evocating curator.
Until you drown in spell hit in later gear and have a huge amount of spell power, Elemental Precision is a very solid talent.
Depending on the bottlenecks of your build, I'd rather drop PWF/Pyromaniac, but they all don't differ that much really.
Be very careful when applying level 70 common knowledge to level 80. The rating scaling is absolutely brutal (but necessary), and everything you used to believe has to be questioned.
To be honest, our DPS tests right now are mostly worthless. Some talents aren't working correctly, some ranks of spells aren't there yet, etc. How things work is usually some designers create the spells, then other designers balance the numbers. We've done most of the design, but very little of balancing the numbers. That is what we're working on now. Initial tests showed some mage builds doing ~8K DPS while our best Rogue was doing ~3K DPS (mostly because of Frostfire Bolt and the % modifiers it currently has access to). So yea, something was wrong there, and in that sense Kalgan is right that the Mage is doing too much damage (and also the Rogue not doing enough).
3) While having a mana battery feels essential in many cases, you can now bring a Shadow priest, Retribution paladin or Survival hunter to fill the role.
Q u o t e:
The implication here is that their abilities will likely not stack. Is this the correct?
Mana batteries are a slightly unusual case because you probably want 1 for a 10-player and 2 for a 25-player raid. Assume that you can stack any 2 of the mana battery classes (2 Shadow priests, or 1 Shadow Priest and 1 Retadin).
And, again the point is NOT that you're penalized for having too many Retadins. It's more that you're NOT penalized if you lack a Retadin (because there is some redunancy in buffs and roles).
No mention of the Frost Mage. And I'm not sure what they mean by only bringing 1 or 2 batteries. The only thing holding shadow priests back in TBC is their poor DPS and debuff slots limit - both of those constraints seem to run counter to the WotLK buff/debuff philosophy.
There really isn't any way to allow a raid to stack any two mana batteries if there is a combination that can't be stacked. Unless they're planning to go for some really weird logic, like, Water Elemental and Mana Tide stack unless you also have Vampiric Touch, in which case Mana Tide stops working, but if you remove the Water Elemental it starts working again...
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
Note that we test things in level 80 greens, level 80 blues and level 80 epics. We also do trials with fully debuffed mobs with fully buffed raids. The way the mage from QA was able to do that DPS was through a very specific build, which I haven't seen emulated from the beta testers yet.
You know, I wonder how much of mage issues with dps balancing is simply due to the mage beta testers being a lot better at playing their class than the people testing other classes
No mention of the Frost Mage. And I'm not sure what they mean by only bringing 1 or 2 batteries. The only thing holding shadow priests back in TBC is their poor DPS and debuff slots limit - both of those constraints seem to run counter to the WotLK buff/debuff philosophy.
No penalties to stacking mana batteries? Great, now we can get one tank to tank everything while healers spam him with their most inefficient heals and 10 arcane mages spam arcane blast. Hurray!
Anywho, from reading this thread and generally looking at the talent trees etc I'm starting to have trouble finding a use for deep arcane. Fire brings the damage, both AOE and single target. Frost brings the survivability, kiting, burst damage (thorugh shatter combos) and now utility.
Why frost brings the mana regen through the water elemental instead of arcane...I just can't get my head around. I mean I can kind of see the connection (water=mana), but considering it was originally going to be health I don't really understand what the thinking behind it is other than, "frost needs utility" without any thinking into what specifically frost would make use of. However, arcane would make great use of extra mana and it fits right into the arcane tree in terms of being a magey arcaney thing. It could also just replace slow, which I don't think anyone would miss - and suprisingly ends up pretty much on the same layer of the tree. Therefore arcane becomes utility/support, which most of the other spells in that part of the book (counterspell, polymorph, conjuring, portals, invisibility) seems to support.
While I'm thinking about it too, I still don't get slow. We have frost spells if you want to kite melee and all the caster classes slow is useful against bar one (Shamans) can get rid of it in one way or another...oh apart from other mages. How ironic.
FFB and Permafrost
Okay, FFB has a 9s DoT that ticks after 3s, 3 times total.
If you spec into 3/3 Permafrost, you get a 4th DoT. You also always get that tick if you only spec 2/3, but never when you spec 1/3.
Maybe the ticks are rounded when they fade or something? Doesn't make sense.
If someone can test how mage armour halves dots that tick an odd number of times, it might help.
Maybe you get the last tick if the DoT was up at least half the time of the last tick?
Whether UA ticks 2 or 3 times on Mage Armour would be a good test.
Ahhhh Frost Nerfed
With 0 hit rating, 3/3 Elemental Precision I got (very rare but still) misses of rank 1 Frostbolt against a target 2 levels above me.
That should been that the Ghost Hit has actially been. I would have found if funny if it had survived another expansion :'(
Frostfire Bolt gets -6% mana cost from Precision. Currently trying to get a miss against a target 2 levels above me, no success yet. Server chain crashing doesn't help.
Lots of troll butchering later, I got a miss with Scorch, but still no miss with FFB.
Debunked now, got a miss with FFB too. Took me ages.
Factor Two
Koraa stated in the thread that they were testing and double-dipping FFB was way overboard.
Which isn't exactly surprising, and it has already been fixed/adjusted.
I would've been surprised if Ghost Hit was still around. I suspect it was caused by frostbolt being binary, so the change to partially resistable in my mind implied a fix.
It'll be interesting if FFB is still double-dipping +hit from EP, though. You say it's double-dipping the mana efficiency, but I thought this patch had eliminated all double-dipping. Which other talents are still double-dipped?
That is an important point I want to make. Just because Kalgan says "the mage is doing too much damage" doesn't mean we're going to nerf Frostbolt or Fireball by 10% or anything like that. The issues we have with the Mage's DPS right now is with talents and abilities that do not exist in the game yet.
I think this quote is interesting, and not just because Koraa tries to make people stop thinking about the infamous mage tax. He mentions "talents and abilities" that aren't in game yet. He could of course just be referring to ranks of spells that just became available last patch (ones learned at level 78+). But that issue aside, what talents and abilities that could boost mage damage have we not heard about already?
The only one I can think of is the missing level 80 spell to replace shatter shield. But assuming we got our DD spell already (FFB), I wasn't expecting the level 80 to be related to damage.
I think they likely test internally with top-end gear, but given their internal level 80 rogue in the same level gear as this 8000dps mage couldn't even outperform level 70 rogues with glaives against Brutallus, some external testing would be nice.
There are also a lot of details about this test that we're not privy to. Certainly encounters vary a great deal on which classes outperform others. Doing 8000dps and not pulling aggro means the test was apparently a fight where aggro mechanics were likely not an issue. Or perhaps the mage died early and they're only looking at burst dps and not sustained dps. Perhaps the target had too much armor, making physical damage classes look worse than they should be.
There are a lot of possibilities other than "mages do too much dps" or even "rogues do too little dps" without more information. We can only hope Blizzard is taking ALL of these things into account.
Koraa later goes on to say that this is with talents and abilities not yet available to us, just with their latest internal build. Excited to see what that means.
Koraa later goes on to say that this is with talents and abilities not yet available to us, just with their latest internal build. Excited to see what that means.
It means that most of those talents and abilities will never make it onto the Beta until they figure out which one (or ones) is (are) pushing things over the top
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.
Another thing to think about is the QA people themselves. Not to get into any ad hominem attacks, but we may be overestimating the skill or at least the insight of internal testers. Something like 8 FB 1 Scorch might be readily apparent, but at what point does a tester say to himself "you know what, I'm going to do a 5-cp SnD followed by a 3-cp rupture..."? And pre-Wrath hunter rotations? I know it's a dead horse at this point but look at SoC and DS. Blizzard has stated that for them the overpowered nature of these 2 abilities came out of left-field, yet now (and practically from the BC-launch) it is fairly obvious that a ranged aoe nuke with more dps than AE and an essentially passive ~15% damage increase are ridiculous (seriously how do you miss that?). I'm willing to bet that whoever was testing the T6 warlock was working in Corruption and Immolate and maybe CoA.
What I'm getting at is this: our class has two spells for use in single target DPS situations. It's pretty intuitive that spamming fireball and keeping up Imp Scorch are good ideas. How much TC does it take to figure out 5s/3r (or whatever the exact combo is) or 1:2. Like someone mentioned before their rogue tester leaves something to be desired; will we see more mistakes like DS repeated?
Ultimately the testing would be done far more accurately if blizzard propositioned a top end PvE player to do said testing for RDPS purposes. Lets face it here, it wouldn't be hard to get one for each class for a small fee (many would do it for free I'm sure). Something like wowwebstats or the like to find player competency.
Another thing to think about is the QA people themselves. Not to get into any ad hominem attacks, but we may be overestimating the skill or at least the insight of internal testers. Something like 8 FB 1 Scorch might be readily apparent, but at what point does a tester say to himself "you know what, I'm going to do a 5-cp SnD followed by a 3-cp rupture..."? And pre-Wrath hunter rotations? I know it's a dead horse at this point but look at SoC and DS. Blizzard has stated that for them the overpowered nature of these 2 abilities came out of left-field, yet now (and practically from the BC-launch) it is fairly obvious that a ranged aoe nuke with more dps than AE and an essentially passive ~15% damage increase are ridiculous (seriously how do you miss that?). I'm willing to bet that whoever was testing the T6 warlock was working in Corruption and Immolate and maybe CoA.
What I'm getting at is this: our class has two spells for use in single target DPS situations. It's pretty intuitive that spamming fireball and keeping up Imp Scorch are good ideas. How much TC does it take to figure out 5s/3r (or whatever the exact combo is) or 1:2. Like someone mentioned before their rogue tester leaves something to be desired; will we see more mistakes like DS repeated?
From what it sounds like, the top mage dps rotations aren't all that easy to figure out exactly for WoLK either (for example, the inclusion of FFB in deep fire rotations). Although that still brings up the point that good mage testers and bad rogue testers can have an adverse affect on class balance.
On that note, has anyone considered including FFB in a deep frost rotation (as in deep fire, for the DOT)? It seems like it could be worthwhile, especially if you're 0/18/53 for improved scorch.
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.
I think this might be an overly optimistic point of view. Things certainly look more open when you don't know the numbers. Eventually, we'll have everything figured out and locked down and then there will really only be one option again. Sure you can argue that things like IWE are variables, but I'd say "probably not". Having the optimal spec, optimal rotation, and optimal group composition are all linked together. People will work them all out as a single problem, and not bother to worry about "what happens if you don't have a frost mage around" -- you simply will, you need winters chill after all. They'll simply figure out which class benefits most from having the frost mage in their group and if its the other mages, then you'll always have one. If not, then you won't. Simple as that.
It's easy to see many possibilities when people haven't had as long to shoot them all down. If blizzard really wants to create variety of that sort, they'll really need to do it in the design of their encounters. Different encounters will have to *force* you to play in different ways, or you simply won't ever have a reason to.
FFB and Permafrost
Lots of troll butchering later, I got a miss with Scorch, but still no miss with FFB.
Debunked now, got a miss with FFB too. Took me ages.
I'm not sure of this, but it was my understanding that a spell could get a 100% resist just like spells currently can get 25%/50%/etc., and that in the Combat Log these would show up as Misses. Do you have a WWS or something showing the number of casts it took for the resist to happen?
Originally Posted by Celani
Koraa later goes on to say that this is with talents and abilities not yet available to us, just with their latest internal build. Excited to see what that means.
My guess is that these won't stand out as AMAZING, but some set bonus from a Tier set will probably push it overboard kind of how the Warlock T6 made Shadowbolt spam the end game raiding spec.
Originally Posted by Etherealz
Ultimately the testing would be done far more accurately if blizzard propositioned a top end PvE player to do said testing for RDPS purposes. Lets face it here, it wouldn't be hard to get one for each class for a small fee (many would do it for free I'm sure). Something like wowwebstats or the like to find player competency.
I think that this is probably the most important statement that has been said:
"We've done most of the design, but very little of balancing the numbers. That is what we're working on now. Initial tests showed some mage builds doing ~8K DPS while our best Rogue was doing ~3K DPS (mostly because of Frostfire Bolt and the % modifiers it currently has access to). So yea, something was wrong there, and in that sense Kalgan is right that the Mage is doing too much damage (and also the Rogue not doing enough)."
Basically what has been said is that, 'We have not done all of our tests and Kalgan's numbers were possibly construed out of context, BUT there is a lot of testing/etc that will be happening that could change this.'
I would like to also add that Manly's post:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t30655-m...13/#post864144
Exemplifies an example of a very considerable expansion on the "Fire" style of playing. If there is one any thing that he has expressed in this post are the possibilities of playing style that exist to an end-game raider in the Wotlk expansion. I personally think this is (and this is entirely opinion based) that this is a perfect example of the fact that the playing styles of a mage in TBC are NOT the playing styles of a Wotlk mage.
Well cerebes, I think someone needs to point out the obvious here:
Initial tests showed some mage builds doing ~8K DPS while our best Rogue was doing ~3K DPS (mostly because of Frostfire Bolt and the % modifiers it currently has access to).
This is very very scary to read. First, they said 'our best Rogue', which implies they have more than one Rogue tester. Second, having had the opportunity to try FFB spam on the beta server, I can assure you that 8k DPS from it is like a very very far stretch. To get there, its obvious they were testing with the top top gear. Even with double dipping. However, its not the 8K dps that is scary. I can understand that it just scales absurdly on crits with double dipping debuffs. No real surprise there.
What is really scary is the fact that they have rogues at lvl 80 doing the same dps a rogue of level 70 can do.
I just don't know what testers they got for rogues, but I'd be fairly pissed knowing that if I were a rogue.
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4 more blue posts ! All about raid stacking !
Of particular interest:
"Without getting into too many specific examples, the 5 warlock stacking for Sunwell is exactly the kind of thing we'd like to avoid. Warlock 1 boosts Shadow damage, so warlock 2 does more damage, and warlock 3 does damage and... hey why did we bring a mage, we'd do more dps with another lock!"
Last edited by manly : 08/23/08 at 4:15 AM.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
I like what they're doing with the fire tree in general, if I'm not mistaken at a certain point a deep fire spec would prefer critrating over any other stat to increase it's DPS the most. It's new and refreshing and i'm sure alot of crit-addicts will find their way to a deep fire tree for this reason, but what worries me is... What about the ignite-"bug"?
I mean, it's very interesting and all to have a talent build that relies on crits for DPS, but how smart is that really when multiple crits in a row overwrite eachother's ignite and most often ~30-15% of the damage of the previous crit gets lost everytime you make a new crit. I personally think this is the main reason why for fire mages our theoretical maximum DPS in spreadsheets (like Rawr) often is much much higher than what we can get ingame.
Hopefully Blizzard will notice this concern soon so they can fix it. *cough*
08/22/08, 5:24 PM
And I'm not sure what they mean by only bringing 1 or 2 batteries. The only thing holding shadow priests back in TBC is their poor DPS and debuff slots limit - both of those constraints seem to run counter to the WotLK buff/debuff philosophy.
