WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3.3 live) - Page 220

tecate · 10/14/08, 8:31 PM

Could a new simulation be shown with the recent changes to SPs?

We need to fix two problems with Shadow priests. One is that their damage is too low, especially at epic level. The second is that stacking Vampiric Embrace from too many priests probably represents a balance problem. These changes will go live before Nov 13.

Vampiric Embrace -- we need to nerf it, but we don't want it to be terrible for priests in small groups or solo. So we are going to make it 5% healing to your group (not raid) but 25% healing to yourself. Assume the talents that affect it get it up to this level.

Vampiric Touch -- we're adding some of the damage adjustment to this spell, by doubling the coefficient (from 0.2 to 0.4).

Shadowform -- we're adding the rest of the adjustment here. Your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch do an additional percentage damage equal to your critical strike chance. Basically if your crit is 25%, your SW:P does 25% more damage. This has the side effect of making crit a little more useful for Shadow priests.

Since Affliction locks and other classes with many dots might ask, we think long term that a good thing to look at is making dots crit. We're not sure yet if we'll do this by just making them actually crit or adding more talents that do neat things with your crit rating, but it is definitely something we're looking at.

Rhayn · 10/14/08, 8:47 PM

Originally Posted by tecate

Could a new simulation be shown with the recent changes to SPs?

This only increases the duration in which we can DPS, correct? I don't think that effects the simulations much at all (except the haste one had a little bit of downtime).

Kelfar · 10/14/08, 8:57 PM

Can anyone give your opinion on the best glyphs for raiding mages? I have glyph of improved scorch already but what should the other major be? Glyph of mage armor seems the best, maybe glyph of mana gem too.

Docjowles · 10/14/08, 9:17 PM

My plan is to initially run molten armor, with glyph of mana gem and improved scorch. If it turns out that I don't have the mana, I'll switch from mana gem to glyphed mage armor. With increased DPS and a flat 30% raid mob HP nerf, I can't imagine having major mana problems, hence my preference for molten armor to start.

I think this is a factor that is going to vary significantly from raid to raid, and I'd recommend just trying it for yourself.

Cabrian · 10/14/08, 10:06 PM

Glyph of Molten Armor requires Northrend herbs and won't be available until the expansion.

On a separate note, has their been any attempt by those on beta to try and persuade Blizz to take mana gems off the shared cooldown? If not, I think I can string together a few sentences about how crazy this particular issue can make me.

Edit: Second point

Anedris · 10/14/08, 11:30 PM

That would be why Doc said he was going to glyph his mana gem and improved scorch, and use unglyphed molten armour, unless he has mana issues, in which event he'll switch to glyphed mage armour (taking the glyph away from the mana gem)...

Docjowles · 10/14/08, 11:35 PM

Yes, exactly. If I was not clear, I meant using unglyphed molten armor at 70, because the glyph can't be obtained

. At 80 Molten is clearly a fantastic glyph choice, but we don't have the luxury for another couple months.

Sinless · 10/15/08, 1:51 AM

I'm having trouble understanding the sudden increase of crit rating in value relative to other combat ratings. Before Burnout, just with Ignite, we were doing 216.3% crit damage with CSD. Now, with ignite + burnout we are doing 254.45% crit damage with CSD. So we are doing about 40% more crit damage. This roughly corresponds to a 20% increase in value for crit rating point for point. Considering 1 haste equals roughly 1.2 spell damage for a sunwell geared mage and 1 crit equals 0.6-0.7 spell damage, I don't think the gap between haste and crit could ever close. Is the effect of Hot Streak THAT significant?

Falorian · 10/15/08, 1:51 AM

Just finished my initial testing on the target dummies in Theramore, using Arcane, Fire and Frost specs @70 on live. Toon is 5/8 T6 geared, not a lot of Sunwell loot. Testing was done hit capped for each spec (17% without talents, or very close to it) altering gear.

Arcane rotation was ABar, ABla, Miss Barr on procs (arcane power used on each test)
Arc/Fire rotation was ABar, FB, Mis Barr on procs (arcane power used on each test after 1st Mis Barr proc)
Fire rotation (with scorch glyph) was scorch (till stacked), FB, Instant Pyro on procs (combustion used on each test)
Frost rotation was frostbolt, instant FB on procs (water elemental used once on each test)

Molten fury and water elemental timing will vary on boss fights of varying length of course. DPS was calculated by using a stopwatch and using Recount to capture total damage done (results were close to recount's dps calc).

Certainly not a statistically perfect set of tests, but eight tests with each spec yielded the following results:

Fire (13/48/00, Molten Armor) 1501 dps (Std Dev 177), oom in 100s (Std Dev 17s)
Frost (00/00/61, Molten Armor) 1419 dps (Std Dev 80), oom in 112s (Std Dev 7s)
Arc/Fire (52/09/00, Mage Armor) 1400 dps (Std Dev 129), oom in 73s (Std Dev 6s)
Arcane (58/03/00, Mage Armor) 1298 dps (Std Dev 34), oom in 116s (Std Dev 25s)

To see the general level of gear used: The World of Warcraft Armory

Bottom line, frost was 5.5% behind fire, arc/fire was 6.8% behind and arcane was 13.5% behind. Fire went oom 13.3% faster than arcane, and frost just 2.9% faster than arcane. I was surprised that Arc/Fire (with mage armor and mage armor glyph just added) went oom 37% faster than Arcane spec and was the worst performing when it comes to mana by far.

Of course, YMMV.

(edited to include Arc/Fire 52/09/00 spec).

Elysianfield · 10/15/08, 2:30 AM

Apologies if this is the wrong place but can someone explain the current idea behind arcane rotations, or give a rough ballpark area where in this thread those discussions arose? I'm slightly confused by this line that I keep seeing on the "code" pages

action=arcane_power/arcane_missiles,barrage=1/presence_of_mind,pyroblast/arcane_barrage/fire_ball

Does this mean going deep enough into fire to make fireball a secondary nuke?
Is a rotation using Arcane Barrage and Arcane Blast not as good?

At the moment I am 58/3/0 using an Arcane Blast x 2, Arcane Barrage, with Arcane Missiles on Missile Barrage rotation, which has fairly decent mana management (up to three minutes with evocation) and dps, and can be cycled down to a ABx1, ABr when mana runs low. Are there better rotations / Does this rotation become obsolete by level 80?

EDIT: Well, the post above just clarified a bit about rotations but, is ABx1 only being used because of mana constraints? When geared for mana regen and given raid buffs, x2 would (in my mind at least) be sustainable and would up the dps a bit.

Xentropy · 10/15/08, 2:32 AM

Originally Posted by Falorian

Fire (13/48/00, Molten Armor) 1501 dps (Std Dev 177), oom in 100s (Std Dev 17s)

Were you stacking scorches for the 10% extra crit? If so, I can see you have above 40% crit buffed (32.26% base Fire crit, plus 10% from imp scorch). Math on previous pages of this topic showed that past 40% crit, 5/5 Burnout is superior to 3/3 Spell Impact and 2/5 Burnout, so your 13/48/0 test is gimping Fire as compared to a x/5x/x test (10/51/0 or 11/50/0 or 0/50/11, for example). Basically at the crit levels most people will have in raids, 5/5 Burnout is a must for maximum Fire dps.

Originally Posted by Elysianfield

Does this mean going deep enough into fire to make fireball a secondary nuke?
Is a rotation using Arcane Barrage and Arcane Blast not as good?

This is correct. Arcane Blast doesn't live up to Fireball as filler for ABar rotations due to Spell Impact applying 6% extra damage to Fireball. Before the Spell Impact change, the best filler was Frostbolt. Arcane Blast in its current state just isn't a button you tend to press. Basically something like 53/8/0 or 54/7/0 is a good start for a level 70 Arcane spec.

Lhivera · 10/15/08, 2:56 AM

Originally Posted by arch

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Frost fails for bosses, but who cares ?

GC pointing out why Frost has to be slightly behind fire in terms of dps. Though he should probably have mentioned the increased survivability and better control over certain boss adds rather than just "trash fights".

I think you're misunderstanding GC. As I posted on the Beta forum, I think GC's question was, "Won't some Mages complain if they do equal damage, and other Mages complain if they don't?" He was pointing out that the original poster, who is telling Frost Mages not to complain if their damage is sub-par, would very likely be complaining himself if the circumstances were different.

We already know from his earlier statements that all three specs are meant to do equal damage.

We also already know from his earlier statements that we aren't yet playing a DPS-balanced build, so we can't really make judgments about relative DPS from what we're seeing.

We also already know from a more recent earlier statement that, presumably in internal builds we haven't seen yet, both Fire and Frost are doing around 4500 DPS in whatever gear/situation it is they're testing.

GC wasn't commenting on Mage performance, he was commenting on forum poster performance.

maxi · 10/15/08, 3:15 AM

Hmmm, fiery payback intrigues me.

If i drop to 35% i basically get a slightly fatter version of fireball for half the cast time.
So 2 Payback procs over 100 fireballs will result in a rough 1% dps increase. More or less, depending on state of pyroblast dot and mage's spell power at the time.

I think i just might take 2 points in Payback over 2 points in Playing with Fire.

Akston · 10/15/08, 3:33 AM

As far as I know you have to visit the trainer in Dalaran in order to train the mage armor glyph. I looked it up while I was playing around on the ptr and it said that the trainer that teaches it is in Dalaran.

Stormhole · 10/15/08, 3:55 AM

Originally Posted by Lhivera

I think you're misunderstanding GC. As I posted on the Beta forum, I think GC's question was, "Won't some Mages complain if they do equal damage, and other Mages complain if they don't?" He was pointing out that the original poster, who is telling Frost Mages not to complain if their damage is sub-par, would very likely be complaining himself if the circumstances were different.

We already know from his earlier statements that all three specs are meant to do equal damage.

We also already know from his earlier statements that we aren't yet playing a DPS-balanced build, so we can't really make judgments about relative DPS from what we're seeing.

We also already know from a more recent earlier statement that, presumably in internal builds we haven't seen yet, both Fire and Frost are doing around 4500 DPS in whatever gear/situation it is they're testing.

GC wasn't commenting on Mage performance, he was commenting on forum poster performance.

As I mentioned in the post, the power of frost comes from snaring, rooting and now stunning. I like those mechanics, but for balance reasons they will never work on bosses ( I list the rare exceptions in my original post ). Probably gluth in Naxx-60 was the best example if you used mages for kiting purposes.

As long as I don't get to use those mechanics in boss fights, I could care less about frost PVE DPS as long as I have a competitive DPS spec, which we do have in the form of fire/frostfire.