Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Find out which 8 points you want to lose when you start at 70

Honestly, I am unsure what to say about this.

As a player, I try and ignore my identity. I am, after all, a class more than a spec. As far as gurgthock is concerned, I am a mage. I'm not a fire mage. That means if we need blizzard I better get my ass moving and spec accordingly. I think my talents are but a tool. You take the best tool for the job.

However, thats just me. It doesn't means that things should be balanced around multiple specs. I mean, I can see your point. I'm fine with either design. But if you want to balance around dual specs, then it is the same as saying balancing all specs as one. I'm not sure how that would go. It would imply, as you pointed out, somewhat equalizing all specs in such a way that no spec has a specific perk. In other words, its like removing intangibles altogether -- or equaling them out. Problem is, its an impossible task. The mechanics of the spells are unlikely to change. Since the mechanics are unlikely to change, I don't see how equalizing out all 3 trees would even be possible. I realize it doesn't have to be a perfect match, but I think that before we get there, we would need far more homogeneous trees.

I don't really have an answer. I don't think its possible to ever balance trees around the concept of spec swapping.

That's about where she's at right now at level 69 (Obviously missing a few things there due to level but you get the idea)

Do impact and master of elements work on Blizzard? I'm concerned about her being able to keep up with mana when spamming aoe since it's difficult for moonkin to fully run out if you do it right.

You don't think it's worth it to go into arcane for at least clearcasting and possibly arcane meditation and/or torment the weak? For leveling efficiency is king and things like cooldowns aren't as useful in my experience.

Blizzard gets 1/8th the effect for each wave that contains a crit, so you can reliably get 100% of the effect. If your AoE is mainly on non-elites then mana will not be an issue whatsoever (just remember to gem and evoc to save on downtime between pulls).

Impact works with it too, and helps a lot in keeping the damage low on whoever is tanking it. I've seen balance druids comfortably tank 15mob AoE pulls on the undead invasion just spamming hurricane so I doubt it'll be needed, but its still good to throw in there.

My trash/AoE build will probably be blizzard+impact in Wrath, with arcane being my prefered boss build just for the versatility.

The problem is, with dual specs, bosses are the only thing that matters. You can have a trash spec that you switch off to when the boss is dead, and that spec may very well be frost. But that removes choice from the game entirely. If I'm facing a boss, chances are high I'll be Scorching, whether I like it or not, because having Fire as your spec switch will be expected and demanded by every raid guild out there, even the low-end ones. It's just too easy NOT to expect. To me, bosses are all that matters, because most of the time half the raid could go afk on trash and you'd be fine. Might lose a minute or two of killing speed, but unless the trash is built to be a major part of the instance, like Hyjal, it's only there as a pacing mechanism, not a part of the challenge. If a spec is only viable when there's not a challenge going on, doesn't that point to that spec being underpowered? It just doesn't become as clear that it's underpowered until it faces a challenge to shine a light on its flaws.

There is, to me, a gigantic difference between balancing dps around intangibles and balancing intangibles around dps. Any spec that gains, as a result of fewer intangible benefits, increased dps, becomes the only option. We are a dps class. We're not a PvP class. We're not a tank class. We're not a support class. We're dps. That's what we do. If one spec is higher in dps but lower in PvP, tanking (survivability), or support, it doesn't matter that those things are lower, because we get a spot in a raid for our dps output, not for our water elemental's 50mp5 or our ability to "spend" dps on making the healers' lives easier. If our dps is subpar on the meters, we get benched. It doesn't matter how much we argue "but we cost the healers less mana than a fire mage would", or "but we killed trash better"; if our boss dps parses are a cut below the rest, we're benched. Period. And that's where a mage trying to be anything but 50+ Fire for bosses as currently balanced would be. I said it in one of my previous posts, but it really sums up my entire argument well (and isn't even based on opinion, but based on the real way people have been treating the specs for 2 years now): A Deuce-of-DPS trumps an Ace-of-Utility for any pure dps class, and always will. A spec bringing 5% less dps but 100% more utility loses raid spots to the higher dps spec. That might not be true if the utility were usable in a boss fight, but being usable on trash and throwaway for bosses (like the vast majority of Frost's utility) makes it very true. (When I say utility here, I mean pure utility. "Utility" that improves raid dps is equivalent to a personal dps increase and IS valued. Snares, the mythical survivability that really doesn't come into play on bosses as often as it gets brought up and when used costs us even MORE dps, mobility during a low mobility fight--those sorts of things are the ones that get trumped by any amount of better dps, however small.)

Edit in response to the below: "In the end, balance wise, all that really matters is that the four pure dps classes have at least one specific spec that is very near to the optimal single target dps..."

That's exactly the attitude that I and those who agree with me are AGAINST the game becoming. One viable spec per class means if that spec has an aspect of gameplay you dislike, even if another spec is a lot of fun to you, you have no option to respec, only to reroll another class. That's a rather large thing to ask people to do. It's time-consuming and far more expensive than a respec. The advantage of being a pure dps class instead of a hybrid should be that we at least have choices in the WAY we do damage, the rotations and methods used to do so. Having just one viable spec for each type of content is, to me, no different from removing talent trees entirely and just automatically as you zone into a given piece of content being handed a different toolbox. That's not what I'm interested in. I want my choices to matter, instead of my choices being, "Good enough," the spec everyone's forced to use, or "Not good enough," any other spec I might prefer because I don't find the ONE spec that's actually good enough very fun.

Agreed. I finally got in some PVPing in battlegrounds and I had a blast. No pun intended.

Although going from nearly zero to something not zero is easy. Fire still isn't the very best mage pvp spec, and it might be the worst. But you can do fun stuff in PVP with fire.

Impact (the only good BC talent really) remains effective.
The dragon breath disorient lasts longer
The blast wave knockback+daze is very helpful, it's in many ways better than a second frost nova
Burning Determination actually comes up and actually surprises people. No, I can't be interrupted twice.
The 1.5s pyroblast isn't so useful but the 20% less damage taken is.
Blazing speed is still "meh".
Living bomb is....the bomb. It's a long range instant and is amazing for finishing off wounded runners.

your 1.5s rotation is scorch-scorch-fireblast-pyroblast(on hotstreak)-scorch-fire blast. It works better than it used to, with considerably more talent support for all three spells than in BC. Only the pyroblast leaves a streak back toward you pinpointing your location but hey...you have a GCD to move after you launch it at your soon to be dead target.

your instant rotation is living bomb-fire blast-dragon breath-flamestrike-blast wave-flamestrike-frost nova-fire blast-arcane explosion. You've to to be close, but it's a fairly good burst rotation and of course works well on multiple enemies and does a lot to mess up your opponent while you're working through it.

Blink, ice block and frost nova all remain as useful as they always were. Invisibility is slightly more useful. Ice lance and arcane explosion are better, because impact works with them, as does the scorch debuff. Mirror image will add a little more.

The things you mentioned work. MoE return fractions of mana per wave on Arcane Missiles/Blizzard, so that you get 30% back if every wave contains a crit.
You can make a fire off-tree via Inci/WiF/Impact/MoE and some fillers. Burnig Determination as well.
Yon can also make an arcane off-tree via Clearcasting/Focus Magic/Torment. Focus Magic makes for a lovely partner talent too!

The problem is that you have a lot of fillers. The good talents are deep in the tree, you won't get them before 80.
You need 50+ Frost to maximise Blizzard slow. So you'll have to bend over backwards and sacrifice fun to get off-tree talents.
I used 18/0/53 with Torment when questing at 80. It's good and efficient for kiting elite mobs, but it felt bad as I had to scrap most fun talents.


You'll be having a lot of fun as a Full Frost spec together.
No sacrifice. No compromise. Your game. Your freedom. Full frost and you won't ever look back.

A mage who is telling a Moonkin about talent bloat. Oh, the irony!

Targeting just takes a little practice. It's actually easier on a raid than it was solo when I was working it. Just position yourself with the dragon breath arc in mind, have your mouse hovering over the center of the blast and spam your click sequence with the other hand. The flame strike circle and the blast wave cone are fairly harmoneous areas when you get used to them, and if you've maintained cone positioning, the blast wave knocks all the mobs in only one direction, so they don't scatter and avoid the followup flamestrike.

The trick with blastwave is to have a discussion with the tank ahead of time and promise not to use it except when the stuff he loses aggro on will be dead before their dazed movement rate gets them to anyone else. If you then behave the way you pitched it he'll begin to trust you and not freak out when he loses aggro as the blastwave goes off.

In 5 mans I've had no issues with this at all - I do the firestarter rotation and stuff is dead before I get down to the arcane explosions. In the harder 5 mans heroics and 10 mans you need a second AOE person in the party to get away with this behavior without waiting a bit before indulging in the fire AOE, to ensure they die fast enough. Or alternately you position yourself so they push back into a wall or terrain and thus don't move. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. It'll be interesting to see how this scales. Probably you'll have to hold off on blast wave except as a finisher, as I thinkour AOE is overtuned for the content. Too much stuff can just be burned down now with little consequence.

Just out of curiostiy - Have you firestarter mages been stacking 2 ranks of flamestrike to stack the DoT or just slamming into mobs with max rank and letting it over-write? From a maths perspective I think stacking it should be giving higher numbers but practical experience rarely cares what maths has to say.

How about Heigan?

You run into him, up to the platform. Do your Scorch/FFB/LB/Pyros.
When the dance phase comes, you switch to Arcane. Cycle Barrage and Fire Blast, keep up Scorch.
When it ends, back onto the platform and back to Fire!

There will probably be means to prevent that.
But it illustrates pretty well that the very concept of being a "Fire Mage" is getting more and more lost.
For some, that concept has never existed. "After 50g at the trainer, we're all equal."
But for some, it was and still is a very strong bond to their character strong that they want to preserve.


That's why Magic Attunement is such a great talent!
It gives your healers +127 spell spower. They obviously don't need that from gear then, so you can give prioritise spell power gear for casters over healers.
So you can get a benefit of 127 spell power for all your offensive casters!
An amazing talent, isn't it! *cough*

You can probably twist the same argument for Mana Tide Elemental.
And the extra mana is actually real extra DPS for a handful of classes.


There's always more to a player than the length on the meter. Much more.
Particularly the seemingly omnipresent credo that raid survival, healing, longvity are completely irrelevant for DPSers.

Take a rogue who disarms a Horseman every transition.
Is he a boon who improves tank survival? Is he a burden because he lowers his DPS for utility and safety.


"Survival is not an issue because it gets healed anyway!"
"DPS is not an issue because the boss dies anyway!"
It is really really hard to compare them. But insisting on one's opinion is the last thing that helps.

Actually, I think this means we are in complete agreement. I don't think it is possible, either. Blizzard is (unwittingly, I think) making a huge huge change to raiding with the the dual spec system. Something they implemented to make it easier to switch between say raiding and pvp is going to be applied completely to raiding.

There will no longer be such a thing as a "fire mage" or a "frost mage". You will be expect to know both specs, how to play them, what rotations to use, when to hit cooldowns and trinkets, etc. Certainly every boss fight and potentially on trash, mages will be asked to switch spec appropriately. That is much much different than a fire mage getting really good at knowing when to scorch, when to living bomb, and watching for those hot streak procs.

(Off topic, but the changes to hybrids are more severe. That resto druid everyone knows as a great healer, someone that will save the tank when all seems lost had also better know how to feral-it-up and bring the kitty DPS on encounters that don't require his healing skills.)

I don't know how I feel about the change--I am going to miss being a frost mage, that is for sure. I'm more amazed that nobody seems to see the change coming. Posts on the WoW forums about it fall off the first page almost immediately--and they did in beta as well. I do think once people realize the implications there will be more attention on the issues. Maybe Blizzard will make changes before they implement the dual spec system once people start to discuss it more. Because as it is, it changes everything. Even here, with theorycrafting, you really shouldn't be calculating what is the top DPS spec. You should be calculating what is the top DPS spec _on each boss_ and figuring out which two specs allow you to maximize your damage throughout the night, across a range of encounters.

Apologies for the change in topic but I’d like to raise some observations about the Arcane theorycrafting that’s been done so far, and perhaps raise a few ideas that (I can’t seem to find at least) haven’t yet been thought of.

The bulk of what I’ve read so far suggests that Arcane Blast can no longer be used as a primary nuke (i.e. spamming 90% of most boss fights). People have stated that the mana cost is simply too great to chain cast it, which is partially true. Simulations have been done that seem to demonstrate that arcane is doing significantly less dps than fire or frost.

I’ve noticed that most simulations have assumed some things about gear and spec, which is reasonable given the need to have some sort of measuring stick by which to measure the specs but impractical given the different idea behind the arcane spec. Arcane has been based around turning mana into damage, something that still holds true now in 3.0. The sticking point is that people have assumed that arcane mages would value the same stats as fire or frost, when in it might benefit more from a gear-set favoring mana regen. In live, it is possible to have arcane mages with 30-45% more mana than their fire or frost counterparts, in addition to having several hundred mp5 while casting.

Given the much higher amounts of mana and mana regen that is currently available, it is quite possible for a mage, geared for mana regen, to chain cast Arcane Blast while stacking debuffs. Not indefinitely, but long enough to (possibly?) make a difference in the dps results that have been demonstrated so far.

I’ve been using the following rotation while running at 15.6k mana + about 900 mp5 while casting (raid buffs + replenishment + totems, not including JoW), with fairly good results so far.

ABr opening

Stage 1:
ABx(2-Y), where Y is a number depending on fight mechanics/length
if MB procs sometime during the AB rotation go to stage 2, else go to stage 3

Stage 2:
AM, ABr
if MB procs, repeat, else go to stage 1

Stage 3
ABr
if MB procs go to stage 2, else go to stage 1

On pure dps fights about 3 minutes long, it generally runs at around 2500-2700 DPS.
While this number is not exactly spectacular, I don’t think that it is a rotation that should be overlooked. What I’m curious is, is this a spec that is only “viable” at level 70? Does it suffer from scaling issues? Am I simply being stubborn for trying to hold on to the old Arcane system (perhaps…)? Does this do more or less dps than other arcane rotations?

The whole discussion about having a "trash" spec and a "boss" spec and losing the uniqueness of mages if one spec is frost and the other is fire and everyone plays both seems rather moot to me. It may turn out there won't be a cooldown on the spec swapping feature, and that this will be possible -- but it doesn't seem like a safe assumption to leap to.

They have already stated there wont be a cooldown, because that is counter productive to the point. I dont remember the exact wording of the post, but it was a few weeks back.

In reality, you won't probably see trash specs. Trash in Naxx didn't seem to be on the same difficulty level as bosses, and so what you're more likely to see is 2 different boss specs - e.g. maxdps/dps+survivability or shorttermdps/longtermdps.

Flamestrike DOT does not stack. If I recall correctly, they never did. If they did stack, even without Firestarter, we'd all be spamming it.

Different ranks of Flamestrike did stack, and when I log on my mage i'll test it again.

Edit: Yes, multiple ranks still stack. I got 3 different ranks of Flamestrike to tick on a mob at the same time.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole 'losing identity' with dual speccing is rather moot. I believe blizzards vision is that you play a class rather than a spec. It is also how raid leaders view their raid team. Sometimes it could happen you may need to respec going into a fight that favors more healing, or more dps. It isn't required, it just is more convenient both for designing content (less restriction on how bosses work) and for more balanced raids. It also simplifies building your raid.

I am not saying it is right or wrong of blizzard. Personally I think we give up something rather small for the long term benefits it gives. I can understand the arguments made both sides, but I simply don't see any real good reason going against it, given it was already possible. The only difference is that it is now more convenient.

I'm sorry to say but, I simply don't agree with the general meme going against allowing dual specs. My reasons are many. First, and most important, not everyone enjoys starting over when you mess up your spec. I definitely don't. I strongly recall being highly frustrated when I played diablo I and diablo II and had to remake my summoner (was that the name ?) many times to try a bunch of builds. I remember having to regrind over many times my players for the same reason when I played Hellgate London. As the game evolves, the talents are changed. If the talents are changed over time, then you can't predict ahead of time how to properly prepare. Maybe if the game never evolved I would agree that dual speccing would be possibly detrimental to the game. But the fact is, evolution of the game without the ability to equally evolve your player is a bad premise. Also, disallowing respeccing, leading to more 'rerolling', ends up costing you to lost players (less players means lesser quality of content, and worse server economy). It also means that things are a real clusterfuck when trying to design bosses. How can anyone design bosses when you can't accurately gauge or have any real expectation of what your raiders will be able to push out ? As I said, I believe respeccing allowed WOW to greatly evolve against many of its competing game, and served well many many more casual and hardcore players. Dual speccing is just a matter of convenience.

With this said, it ties nicely into a nice conversation about why racial are really really stupid in essence, since you couldn't have had made the right choice when you made your players because racials evolve over time. Please blizzard, hear me out, in the name of all min/maxers and pvpers: allow (paid?) racial changes !

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While I am on the subject, I think the interesting debate is to come. Is the dual speccing, as a way to dodge the intangibles related vs a fight, what blizzard eluded to when they said the dps meters are to be won by the most skillfull players ? Will the dual speccing feature allow a certain class to stay on top of meters because it has now the tools to adapt on any scenario ? This is what i personally wonder most. What will happen of class positioning on dms ? Will 'flexibility' by way of multispeccing be the ultimate ace-in-the-sleeve, or is it really being skillfull/knowledgeable of your many class specs what will end up truly setting a player apart ?

Well, this kind of sucks but I just fell on this blue post I had read a while ago, and I had totally forgotten about it. It kind of resumes the last 2 pages, and covers everything about dual specs, and why is trash dps balancing affecting your boss dps

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> The restrictions "dual-spec" needs to succeed
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Actually reading it a few times over, I realized something that GC seems to mean to say across the lines without actually saying it.

"The different needs, for example, of PvE and PvP combat were putting a lot of constraints on the design of talent trees. Every talent needed to be very useful in both modes, which also tended to make them overbudget. "

If you read that line carefully, and think about it, it has deep implications. It is somewhat like admitting that dual-spec allows them to ignore any kind of cross balancing for any given tree. In other words, it means a bit 'frost is the pvp tree, and now we don't have to attempt to make it work for pve', and ditto for fire. It also means that boss design assumes your raiders to spec for optimal pve dps.

I don't think the move is bad. Quite honestly making a tree work well for both PVE and PVP is a balancing nightmare. I somewhat welcome the fix, but at the same time the implications are rather radical and drastic.

Thanks for finding the post, Manly--it was the one I kept referencing without having the link. A few quick comments:

(1) I don't think it is as bad as implying 'frost pvp, fire pve'. What it means is 'fire long boss fights, frost short boss fights'. Or it means 'fire for tank and spank fights, arcane for mobility fights'. Mages trying to maximize boss dps are going to stay fire 100% no more than they are going to stay frost 100% of the time. Given the types of boss encounters and the distribution of them, a mage is more likely to be fire more than frost but they still have both specs ready for whatever the boss encounter requires.

(2) If they did take is to the extreme of one spec pve, one spec pvp they have huge problems with hybrids. Telling the community that feral druids tank therefore resto druids are pvp only would go over like a lead balloon. Or saying holy priests raid, shadow priests arena would again cause QQ of epic magnitude. And if they can balance three druid specs that fulfill different rolls for pvp and pve, surely they can do it for mages.

(3) In reading GC's text again I did gather one more intention. The (incorrectly) feel that if the difference between fire and frost on one particular boss is only 5% that only hardcore people will 'respec'. That was true when it cost virtual gold and the time to respec. With a button press respec option I fail to see who won't press the button.

The other thing to bear in mind that with all this talk of balancing spec's etc, GC et al are also balancing the entire WoW player-base. The majority of posters here are Raiders which in total is still a small minority of the world-wide WoW players, same as those that like the hardcore PvP. Even combined, those two groups are still a minority as a whole compared to the 11 million or so players that the game has and that's what they have to factor into the balance.