Thanks to you and Jonnymoe.

I'll probably have her go fire to impact, and cram the rest into frost, and skip master of elements.

I don't think I need to maximize the slow effect on everything since I'm sunwell geared and apply the 13% spell damage taken buff on every shot (love that talent) so things will die very quickly.

It was really useful when I was leveling my paladin with her. I'd pull way too many mobs, consecrate and run like hell as they're kited by blizzard.

Now with my druid the plan is to pull way too many mobs and spam stuns on them with starfall and impact, it should be good times.

Yeah the single mindedness on dps can be particularly frustrating to me as a healer.

For example I've argued that ferals should spec into improved leader of the pack, while many skip it in favor of talents that improve their personal dps by about 2%. Improved leader of the pack typically provides about 2-4% of the healing for the entire raid.

As a healer I'd love to be able to spend two talent points to boost the raid's healing by 2%.


People also tend to forget the times where people have been kicked from raids for consistently dying on a fight, or failing to kite or whatever.

All the specs are just listed numbers. Is there a spot I am missing that breaks down each of these specs you guys are referencing. When I work out specs on calculator I never seem to match what you gusy are trying to say is optimal.

I think you're dismissing speed reduction too easily. A 10% speed reduction usually isn't a lot.
But when mobs are moving at 25%, another 10% reduction is actually a 40% speed reduction.
Or, the 10% slow that you skip makes the mobs move 66% faster. I'd say it's even more broken than 85%+ dodge tanking.

The difference between 75% slow from BC and 85% slow from Wrath is really really massive.


Improved Water Elemental
Eyeballing it from other classes' sheets and sims, that extra mana from this talent is worth 5-10% DPS, and a cushion for your healers.
Currently, Frost is so far behind even if we assume Torment working somehow that it's a non-issue.

But if Frost was 5% behind in personal DPS, that talent would make bring it to the top and and a bit further for raid DPS.
The more I keep looking at details, the more it seems that it's flat out imposible to properly balance things.

Intangibles shouldn't be weighted against DPS, although I really don't know what intangibles what be needed to make me not pick frost.
The problem is when intangibles can be transformed into DPS and when it can be measured somehow.

I guess I just didn't realize that all of the chill talents also effected blizzard, thanks for the heads up.

Was told by a gm that fireballs from brain freeze procs get extra chance to crit from shatter if they are fired off while the fingers of frost buff is up.

Does this seem to mesh with what people have been seeing on live?

Anecdotally, yes, I haven't done any tests though. Shatter however is increasing the crit chance of all spells so I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I could not find this information, relative to the current state of affairs (I have seen a post from Roywyn a fair ways back in the thread, but it's a hundred pages back so I assume that information is dated), so I would like to ask the following questions:

Fire/Frostfire fire clone:
1. Hot Streak is a superb talent, but it is good enough to finally make crit a good stat? Do we still stack Hit>Dmg>Haste and avoid crit like the plague?
1a. If crit is finally worth it, does it's usefulness cap out at a certain level of crit chance?
2. What's the current breakdown of stat value?

Frost:
3. Haste. Logically, more haste means more FoF procs which means a higher crit rate as well. Am I right in assuming that haste is now a very good stat for frost? Or is capping hit then stacking spell damage still the way to go?
4. Crit's still useless, right?

Arcane:
5. This spec and it's ideal stats are a complete mystery to me. Now, if you're rotating Arcane Barrage and Arcane Blast with intermittent Mbar procs, it would take you 1.5 seconds GCD and 2.5 seconds cast time for Arcane Blast until the next Arcane Barrage. Is it worth it to try and shave off 1 second from those 4 via haste so you can use Arcane Barrage each time on Cooldown (yes, I am aware that would take 25% haste which even with Netherwind Presence is a ridiculous amount of haste rating), or should you just keep stacking spell damage and damn the haste?
6. Netherwind Presence was multiplicative and not additive with haste rating, right?

The thing with me is that Amplify Magic was a VERY situational. There were only a handful of bosses that I could think of in BC Raids that Amplify Magic was useful. The most commen example was Gruul. The guy provided 0 Magic attack to the raid, so Amplify Magic was useful for that fight. But for say Kil'Jaeden, where there is magic Fire/Shadow damage going all over the place to the entire raid, Amplify Magic was a piece of crap. Dampen Magic would helpful at times, but that would also gimp the Healers healing the raid and you.

@Zandaran.

I've found that with arcane, it's been better to base gear around mana regen. While it might sound odd at first, it allows you to use Arcane Blast as a primary nuke. So far, a single AB + ABr simply averages out a low and a high dps attack for mediocre dps. By chain casting AB say 4 or 5 times, you have a consistently high dmg nuke. From there, you can simply use AM on MB or cast ABr to drop the debuff and start over. I feel that the only time AB does less dps is if you manage to get a string of ABr's proccing MB, which is fairly rare.

Well thats one way of looking at arcane. Here´s another, in its curent state do not trouble yourself to much with what optimal arcane stats are. Even full AB spam doesn´t quite compare to deep firespecs, thus what the optimal stats for a sub optimal spec are don´t really matter. Arcane is curently for mobility and for fun. I´m having loads of fun playing around with it till the expansion, after that its each to their own levling with whatever spec you prefer for levling (frost cough cough). Hopefully there will be a nice magepatch a bit down the road, or it could turn out that mobile DPS is far more valuable than any of us have anticipated, (when we´re byond naxx and stuff), personally Im in a kind of wait and see mode. Something is the missing link to arcane and we don´t have it yet. Untill we do then serious DPS specs is the key to serious DPS and fun specs are for fun.

The problem here is that fully ramped AB still has worse DPM and DPCT than ABr, and is also more fragile to maintain. Chain casting 4 - 5 ABs only gets you 2 at maximum stack whereas in that same time you could have done 3ABr and 3 ABs for more damage, a lot less mana and much harder to interrupt (and potentially require 5 less talents in arcane, since very few serious arcane specs take stability.)

Fully ramped AB can compete for damage against ABr but not for DPM.

[edit] Just did the maths and for chain-casting AB to deal more damage than AB/ABr you would need to chain-cast 7+times. Very few encounters will allow you to do this, even if your mana bar allows it.

The mana cost on burnout is not a large amount. If you're noticing problems with it and not without I'd recommend examining other factors. Are JoW/Replenish up in both cases? Fire always struggles without these buffs. Were you critting more frequently on the test without it? If the bones roll in your favour for crits fire can be far more sustainable through MoE.

You didn't even try to test whether the magic damage from the abilities you mentioned is increased by Amplify Magic or not, did you?

0) Most of that this is still more or less valid, at least to get a rough idea of how things are.
What really changed was Frostfire Bolt becoming viable with Empowered Fire, Torment the Weak getting added in its mind-boggling form, and Arcane Blast spam getting stomped on damage and mana.

The JoW Rollercoaster and the general mana cost decrease didn't affect balance between specs or stat value much.

6) Arcane is a big mess right now and will be addressed shortly. Right now, the best you can do is Barrage-Fireball cycles, Blast is either too ewak or too expensive. Or both.
They want to makes use cast Barrage-Blast cycles, with MBAM on procs. They just don't know how yet.

That cycle is 4.0s, and caps at 3.0s. That's 33% haste. With raid buffs and talents, that's 16% from ger to cap.


Which Stat Values?

Check Rawr or Simcraft.

Simcraft undervalues mana, because I can't properly decide whether Mana Potion, Mana Gem, Mage Armour or Evocation are best in a situation. It also undervalues mana because it picks a shorter fight (4m:45s) and has all mana options including Mana Spring and Water Elemental active.

Rawr values mana and time with an exact solver and gives you very accurate stat values.
Simcraft has several classes and specs, and it gives you values for all of them at once.
So you can see whether your spec scales better or wors with a stat than others.

Sorry for shortening, but this point is really what makes the difference. I've been trying to explain how I see this before, but deleted my draft because really way too many factors found their way into my thoughts, trouble being: When you talk respeccing and specc balance, you get into all these details that have been mentioned above. Especially considering or not considering intangibles and PvP/PvE-balacing makes a mess of all the arguments you can bring up, and as has been mentioned by manly already: You will not even find a common setup in which to compare speccs - a common ground with Blizzard, that is.

Most here agree that 4-6+ minute-fights on relatively static opponents requiring more or less reactive movement only (think "don't stand in the fire" or "move when you get x stacks of y") are up to now the standart encounter-design, and thus matter the most to people arround here. Yet, Blizzard has more thinks to worry about, and has so many variables to consider that, as has been stated, they probably will never ever be able to balance it all correctly.
The suggestions-forum is full of ideas for various issues from all over the game which would pretty obviously brake the game, and there are millions more, some of them even pushed out by blizzard, which do the same but not in such obvious ways. Frost low DPS being the main issue round here for example: How would you fix it without really destroying the tree? Acknowledging that it already has superiour DPS for shorter fights, just boosting its damage output would make it completly insane for PvP or any other burst-dependant situation. Changing the way frost deals damage (reducing the portion of the elemental, for example, and then boosting the overall damage again) would kill the flavour of it. There might be ways, but they are intricate and difficult, and might produce new problems.

Instead of really balancing things, Blizzard has tried something else. The way I see it, they pushed out 3 trees with distinct playstyles, visuals, and feels to them. Arcane has its speed and mobility, and all the little parlour tricks to feel like a really versatile weapon, fast, deadly, and quick to escape if necessary. Fire still has its "it hurts you more than it hurts me, but GODDAMN THAT BUUURNS!!!" feeling to it, and just throws out damage in cargo containers rather than handy little bits, but you start to feel REALLY vulnerable once something gets angry at you. Frost keeps its cool, and gives you complete control. You control the elemental, yourself, and the enemy. YOU are the one taking the steps, you are the one dictating the pace. I feel these styles more than ever, and in especially Barrage, Burnout and DeepFreeze are perfect end-tree-talents to emphazise on these strenghts. They did a great job there, if you ask me.
Apart from that, they tried (a bit less successfull there) to generate not only flavour, but also make playing that flavour more interessting, especially by procc-based abilities - really a reoccuring theme throughout many WOTLK-talents. Frost fails because icelance is useless on FoF, and Brainfreeze is no good DPS-wise, but hey, they tried... and it works great for fire and arcane, if you ask me.

So, going from there, Blizzard took these trees and put them out for testing. Their great "DPS tests" were, as they stated many times, only done AFTER the basic tree design was in place. They didn't change all that much from that point on, unless it was obviously broken. That way, they had great, fun to play, interessting talent trees, but faced the same problem balancing-wise that we hit in our discussions about these issues. So they decided not to. They probably had, I can imagine, theoretical data from at least a dozen scenarios (for more then just the mage, obviously) to compare a few of their speccs with. And they probably will have found every specc to perform well in some areas and not-so-well in others. They tweaked some numbers to make it work more smoothly. And they specifically ignored the fact that some of these points (or most of them) don't matter to the raiding-crowd. We might not care that frost is nice for soloing elite mobs (might not care past level 80, anyhow), or that its really awesome for doing short fights in 5-mans, for example. But Blizzard rightly thinks that each of these aspects is just as important to the game and many many of their customers. If they COULD have made every specc perform the same under various conditions without braking it, they would have. But they didn't see the point in changing frosts raid-boss-performance specifically, because if they started with that, they would have to revamp fires soloing-surivial-issues, for example; and they neither could nor wanted to go there.

Instead, they went another direction: They acceppt the fact that there are differences. They might not admit it in every case, but they know it. There are cases where they don't see how severe it really is ("jaw dropping damage" pops into your head...), but these can be fixed. In generally, they have a pretty good idea of what is going on.
So they let you chose what you want. By dualspeccing. Its their way of saying (as also stated above): Ok, so there might be a disadvantage for fire here and there, but you can take frost then, if you want to. They pretend that PvP or PvE is a question to be answered within the same tree, but with some trees, that choice really can't be made; the structural disadvantage of fire in PvP depending on crit can't be solved, and they know that. It works well with other trees and classes, but not for firemages - well, screw it. Why make a fuss over it when you HAVE the choice to change with a few clicks?

See it this way: I for one couldn't care less wether there was a viable arcane pve-specc, or if there was a competetive fire-arenaspecc. I want one viable PvE-specc, and for the rest I don't care (my dualspecc is probably gonna be a fire-boss-specc and some multi-purpose frostspecc, I guess... just a sidenote). There are these viable options at this point, and there are clear winners for "best specc" still arround.

But if I really care deeply about my specc - I can still chose. This is what my original quote by Zeldyrr somewhat got: Blizzard expects people not to stay frost because frost can raid as well as fire can. They expect people to stay frost because they want to. They expect people to respecc not for 5% of DPS, but for more fun in the game. And I cannot agree more with them than on this point: Fun should dictate your gameplay.
What most of us forget is that fun does not equal DPS for everyone. We chose to make DPS our main goal in raiding, but others might not. I often find it hard to understand why anyone shouldn't want to perform optimal in a raid, but once I sit back (and talk to my casual playing girlfriend for example) I remember: There is more to this game than raiding. Some people might not see 5-10% less DPS on a bossfight as something terrible for them. And those that do care about these 5-10% DPS generally don't care too much about what specc they are using.
Don't get me wrong: I know that people like faxmonkey care LOTS about their specc, but still want to compete. But blizzard has something different in mind: The specc can compete in the way that it will probably suffice to kill each and every boss in the game. It might just not compete as in being the best specc their is to kill it as a world first. If you really want to achieve that, you pay with going cookie-cutter. If you don't want to pay that price and don't see any more fun in the game: Quit it, obviously. If you want to play your specc in a raiding enviroment: Don't worry, you will be able too. Including WE-manaregen for example, frost turns out to be a decent raiding specc for most guilds anyway. And I dare make the prophecy that no mage will get benched anymore regularly only because he chooses to stay his specc.

As a raidleader, I wouldn't have brought a frostmage into high end content like Sunwell, obviously. But now, I just might. I might because as long as he does his job right, it will be enough to kill the boss. For one thing, this is because the encounters are tuned less to the extreme right now, so you can do with a little less and still get away with it, as long as nothing goes wrong. But funny enough, I also might do so because blizzard has stated that they want such things to happen, that they want every specc to go everywhere, and that I trust in them to make it work some way. So far, I haven't seen proof that you can't kill Arthas being frost specced (there was no such proof for Brutallus, either, obviously, but the view has changed, in raidstacking, composition and tasks for the raid to perform).

So... sorry for getting carried away a lot there. Its 4.30am by now, dammit. But I'll try to summarize again, in just a few sentences, what I really meant:

Blizzard doesn't mean every specc to perform equally, they just mean every specc to perform well enough to work on every boss, and work well enough to be brought even to the firstkill of your guild. There will always be the perfect solution to a given problem, and this solution might include stacking 14 rogues, or 18 holy paladins. But as you gradually move away from these extremes, you will get down to the fact that you can easily kill everything with less optimal solutions. And more importantly: That devotion to your specc and your personal skill might be enough to egalize any disadvantage you might have through being specced that way. Hardcore raiders will never see it that way; they will either strive towards the optimum or become frustrated by the impossibility of doing it. But most other people, including less hardcore raiding guildes, will take whomever they consider a good player - and they will be sucessfull with that approach.

Unbuffed I have almost 30% crit on my fire spells. Our pally's always make sure JoW is up, and I'm pretty sure replenish is always up. I may give Burnout another go In our last raid this week.

I'm currently specced full frost and I've been pushing my passive haste over 200 and I have some of the short proc items/meta also.

Blizzard + Haste + full frost = awesome..... when Brain Freeze was working with Blizzard I found the combo Blizzard + free fireball - repeat was beating Frostbolt spam and most other mage specs.

... Crit was never useless its just never been as high yield point for point as the other stats... and its still not.

FrostFireBolt benefits from talents which affect frost, and from those effecting fire.
Does FFB gain the threat-reduction from Frost Channeling and Burning Soul at the same time? This would mean 20% threat-reduction which would be very nice.

I apologize if this question has been answered before, but 165 pages are a lot to read.

That's why there's a search function

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t30655-m...47/#post949323

While it's true Haste will give more FoF procs, it will also use the 2 charges faster. Regardless of how fast your frostbolt hits, every frostbolt has the same chance of having FoF up. So unless I'm missing some mechanic, Frost crit rate will not scale with Haste.

Crit does nothing special for frost mages outside the damage increase, so you are probably right that it won't be a good idea to stack crit.

Some simple maths. Crit rate does increase with Haste

Taking crits rate as crits per min.

Case 1 with 0 haste. You cast 24 frostbolts a min. Assuming that 50% crit you have 12 crits making your crit rate 12/min.

Case 2 with 25% haste. You cast 30 frostbolts a min. Assuming that 50% crit you have 15 crits making your crit rate 15/min.

"Crit rate" is generally thought of as the number of casts that crit, not the number of crits per minute. It's understood that haste will increase casts per minute and thus crits per minute at the same crit rate. (50% in your example is the crit rate, not 12 or 15 "crits per minute".)

Using rate will imply a time denomination. Whether it is seconds, mins or hour. 50% of the time will mean the crit chance. However based on your definition, it will not increase the chance of crit which is pretty much implied.