I see your point with talents becoming redundant in the case of another class that can fill the same role coming to the raid, but you can level that argument at a lot of buffs/debuffs now considering the cross-over and the fact that only the most powerful (read talented) is applied.

On the flip side, if you and your frost mage buddy are tied at the hip, the redundancy gives you the flexibility to put those three scorch talent points to good use elsewhere. I guess it's a is the glass half full or empty argument depending on your pov.

So as we know, +10% spell crit can only be provided by Mages. I was wondering if this was a problem, if it might not be better to switch perhaps Improved Scorch and Earth and Moon, so that spell crit isn't monopolized by one class. Then I was thinking, well, hm, Warlocks have something like eight different utility functions on this list, Mages have three, perhaps having a unique function is compensation for having so few functions total.

So, an inventory of the functions that can be brought by only a single class:

Physical Vulnerability Debuff: Blood Frenzy, (2nd Talent Spec TBA)
Spell Haste Buff: Wrath of Air Totem
Spell Critical Strike Chance Debuff: Improved Scorch, Winter's Chill
Stat Multiplier Buff: Blessing of Kings
Stat Add Buff: Mark of the Wild
Stamina Buff: Power Word: Fortitude

Interesting that one of those is marked to be expanded, and the rest aren't. In any case, there does not seem to be any correlation between classes having few raid utility functions and having one of those functions be unique. I wonder if they're still working on this list or if it's more or less finalized.

Given this change will result in LESS debuffs being up on bosses in general, I doubt we'll have any issues with debuff limits going forward. In fact, this was likely a secondary benefit of these changes mentioned in-house at Blizzard HQ.

Unless changed, Winter's Chill lasts 15 seconds instead of 30, and scorch can be applied instantly instead of ramping up over 12.5 seconds (haste notwithstanding). This gives scorch two uses even with both a fire and a frost mage present. One is use at the beginning of the fight to speed ramping. Two is use when no-dps phases last too long to keep the very short-lasting Winter's Chill up. In any case, it will be worth it for a fire mage to spend those 3 points and one of their 3 glyph slots on scorch for 5- and 10-mans (where a second mage isn't as likely and it will be very useful to buff yourself fully in just one cast).

I'm aware of that, but it is VERY difficult (impossible, really) to compare 2.4 shadow locks to 3.0 fire locks on a direct percentage-buff/nerf basis, and you can hardly find a fire, afflic, or demon lock in an endgame raid in 2.4. My purpose in making that chart was to compare overall damage changes with 3.0 assuming one stays with the same spec and playstyle, before the guaranteed upcoming dps rebalancing. I know some specs and/or playstyles will end up changing, but in some cases (changes to something that isn't even used today) there's no real delta data since there's no current data to compare the future to. I tried to include every raid-viable caster dps build in that chart. (Granted, even frost mage is considered non-viable by many, but there's definitely a smaller difference between fire mage and frost mage output--magegraf tells me mine is about 1% at the early-T6 gear level, and it expands to no larger than 5% at endgame, less if you can gear to take advantage of ghost hit--than between shadow destro lock and fire destro or affliction lock, as far as I'm aware.)

If wanting the game to be designed well and having changes get it right rather then mostly right is selfish, then hell yes I'm being selfish. I want WOTLK to be a good game, not a game that's less bad. So even mostly good changes need to be looked at, evaluated, and critqued. A mostly good buff could be, and should be better.

Anyone discusing the DPS value of this buff is offtrack, as obviously it hasn't been balanced or considered. AS long as 10% spell crit worth having the debuff (it is), thn it's a desired debuff.

Feeling cheated is totally misrepresenting why I'm upset and ignores the issue. I don't begrudge the redundant debuffs at all. I think that is a good design decision. But in it's curent form, it's incomplete and has problems. If the goal is to limit and reduce stacking and overkill optimization has a weakness.

The fact that debuffs based on talents that have no other function are wasted can create problems. If I can garuntee a frost mage, respec out of imp scorch, and gain a meaningful DPS benefit, that creates a problem. Becuase then it is in the best interest to stack that situation, where there was supposed to be interchangeability. Likewise, you may see that with other classes and their duplicate buffs/debuffs. Do we want a system that promotes people respeccing before the raid if someone else is bringing their duplicate debuff? Do we want a system where people are arguing about who gains more by respeccing out of the debuff, or who loses more by maintaining the buff/debuff?

The debuffs being interchangeable and not stacking is absolutely a good thing. But there should be incentive to play the same way whether your debuff is also being provided by someone else or not. Otherwise, there are situations where one of the debuffs becomes favored over something that it's supposed to be interchangeable with. That defeats the whole purpose of this major change. Likewise, the incentive should be to spend your talent poitns in the same way regardless of whether or not its provided.

Wanting those incentives is not a matter of resentment. It's not a matter of being ungrateful for a mostly positive change. It's about recognizing a problem that will come to light in the future, and wanting it noticed before balancing is done so it's easier to fix. We can revel in the glory of a mostly good change, but does that accomplish anything?

One last note on scorch:
I absolutely love the design decision to have a spell that we absolutely have to cast to maximize our dps, but want to do so as rarely as possible. It's implementation may be overly simplistic, but I like it.

My point was just that there's probably no reason (and indeed it may be somewhat misleading) to include the Shadowbolt spec on the chart at all, because it's an extinct spec in 3.0. Showing its delta implies that its delta matters -- it implies an impact on the spec that will require addressing as Blizzard works on DPS balancing. When in fact, the delta doesn't matter, and the spec won't require any work, because the spec is a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.

If you hadn't put it in your chart, it'd be pushin' up the daisies by now!

Etc., etc. OK, I got carried away.

That begs the question, though...do shadowlocks NEED to be dead? Could shadow dps be balanced such that both shadow and fire are valid options?

This is getting off-topic for the mage thread, but until the dps balance pass is made, I'd hate to point at *any* spec and call it dead as a parrot in a Monty Python sketch.

Edit: As for the TBA debuff, I suspect that'll be some kind of rogue poison, given rogues were as much as promised more raid utility and haven't seen it yet.

With these changes to buffs (changes I most certainly support), has anyone looked at the ability to optimize group compositions for (especially) 10-man instances?

Something I'd like to point out is that, right now, in any 10-man group that has several magic casters, a Mage is required. This can be said because the number of 'raid buffs/debuffs' for a caster in 10-man content is now achievable. This is another bonus to buff consolidation.

Re: the more general picture, I will be looking into developing a linear (possibly nonlinear) programming model of the 10-man question, and see if Blizzard's approach will indeed 'work'.

Slightly off-topic but does anyone know if they have fixed Fingers of Frost yet?

AI and Divine Spirit (Especially imp divine spirit) are still better than the Fel Buff. While they are not exclusive, they are more powerful, nor are they dependent upon a pet surviving splash damage.

On a different note, is it known how fingers of frost stacks yet? With multiple frost mages in a raid, having a nearly consistent +50% to crit paired with the 10% from winter's chill seems like it could be extremely powerful.

Not really an issue. So you get 50 Int instead of 60; that's just not worth worrying about. Unique utility functions are a reason to make sure a specific class/spec is in the raid; slightly better versions of the same buff really aren't.

On a different note, is it known how fingers of frost stacks yet? With multiple frost mages in a raid, having a nearly consistent +50% to crit paired with the 10% from winter's chill seems like it could be extremely powerful.[/quote]

FoF has long since been changed to a personal buff, not a target debuff.

There hasn't been a patch in about a week. The same broken talents are still broken. FoF procs but has no effect (it also seems to last less than 4 seconds, but I need to pay closer attention to see exactly; I think it may be showing up on my client after the frostbolt hits the target, but the buff is considered active by the server when the frostbolt leaves my hands, so I get 2-3 seconds of useful decision-making instead of 4). Brain freeze never procs. Imp WE adds a brilliance aura style blue-circles-effect (like Jaina has in Hyjal) to the ground under the elemental but does not apply any actual regen effect.

As an amusing (to me anyway) aside, at level 80, talented MotW adds 64 to all stats, AI adds 60 to only intellect. MotW *is* supposed to stack with individual-stat buffs, as well as Kings.

FoF is a self-buff, NOT target debuff; there is no "stacking" between multiple frost mages as was theorized in alpha.

1) I wish. Even if it was a talent that cut the buff duration in half and/or lowered their effectiveness. Really the answer a lot of us want is a true no-doubts-about-it PvE armor with some combination of haste, regen, or crit.
2) To the best of my knowledge, WC procs off any frost spell. Since you're not limited to a single spell applying a debuff, it's easy to assume you'd be doing some form of frost damage at least once every 15s. Unless Wrath is filled with more of the run&gun fights that we've come to loathe.
3) I got nothing. Technically it almost already is a core class feature, just that Arcane provides a damage buff instead of crit. But all three trees give a DPS increase, so yeah.

Wasn't part of the warlocks gross overpoweredness due in part to all the ways they synergized with other shadow damage dealers? I was under the impression this would help even them out with everyone else.

Havent done any model, but Ive tried making a table showing which specs can bring each buff type. Its quite a puzzle :O Seems like 7-8 players could bring virtually all the buffs (but thats probably not an optimal setup, and gives you a few more spots anyway).
Beside, its difficult to bring in the fact that some spec might not be that interested in bringing a specific buff, even if it theoretically could do so (due to getting a suboptimal skill/spell rotation or having a harder time keeping it up, than another spec or maybe just having to spec very specifically to get the buff), if that made any sense

If they want to encourage people to bring all classes to 10 mans (so we dont end up with a few classes having nothing to offer in most setups) it might surely be a good idea to either add more versions of the same debuff/buff to some classes, or switch them between classes.

1 mage surely feels like a pretty safe bet for 10 mans with that buff (well, unless you stack melee of course, but then you will surely lack other buffs, and its not like you can simply take casters out of the picture and thus ignore the caster buffs, since a few of them help the healers too).
Balance druids bring an awful lot of various buffs to the table which you would need multiple other classes to get.
Shaman seems very secure too, just by giving Bloodlust.

1) Dumbing down gameplay may look good in the theorycraft, but everyone holds at least some semblance of importance in entertaining gameplay. I'm sure many Mages here have Warlock alts that admittedly could outperform their Mage if they were to swap mains... but the idea of doing literally nothing but casting Shadowbolt is not worth it. That being said, I wouldn't consider the scorch debuff an aspect of entertaining gameplay either, but development regression to even less reactive cast sequences is not the direction I'm hoping for; it is the direction towards mindless gameplay that worries me more about changes like this than any actual change.

2) Scorch rarely is the culprit with Ignite bugs, the issue is almost always with Fire Blast. With Hot Streak essentially requiring chained crits to be worth the talent points, Ignite bugs are only going to be more prevalent and troublesome. Removing Scorch from a rotation doesn't affect this.

I see many people missing the point of concern here by saying, "A Mage will be desired in every raid, why would any Mage be upset?" and "You lose 15% damage but give the raid 10% crit which is much more than 15% individual damage, so you should be glad."

Both statements are entirely naive and try to dress up a skunk in dog clothes.

First of all, a major concern isn't that one Mage is desired in a raid.... it is that two Mages are desired. 10 classes for 25 raid slots means at least 2 of each class should be part of an ideal matrix, the Developers make it clear that this isn't a secret.

Secondly, with reference to that 2nd quote, people just aren't realizing that it isn't just "Fire Mages" bringing this 10% crit debuff like it is some new found utility. I often raid with a Frost Mage and in my perspective it is his WC debuff that just gained a lot of utility. What do I, the second Mage, have to offer the raid?

I heard arcane has this great new buff that increases damage and isn't the same as fire/frost.

You have your DPS, and that's all that matters. You don't need to bring "synergy" to the raid anymore, you just kill shit.

There is a small step between having classes sharing the same buffs and having every class do pretty much the same.
On one hand blizzard said when introducing the DK class that they had to be careful not to take out of the game the uniqueness and roles of each class. But the more we go into the beta the more class buffs and spells are looking the same. Not just the mages.

From everyone having similar debuffs, buffs, to mechanics. Spread into other classes and also within the classes talent trees.

They can do 100 changes nerf our debuff needing to the ground, but if they then when the DPS sweep comes, pump our damage up from other sources like spells base damage and what not it will be pretty much the same for a mage. Bonus is that then mages wont be so dependant on other classes to "work".

Still i am like pretty much all the mage community dieing to see the next Beta build...

Also the question remains which mages would rather stay as they are with no utility to the raid appart from the "poly", and the AI buff, or have a mage that can bring other kind of buffs to a raid envirnoment. Also when answering this one comes another question if you have more utility should you have less DPS?

My only remaining concern with all this changing is the DPS requirement of DPS classes. If, after all buffs are covered, the only real defining factor between 2 classes is the damage they bring; then the DPS classes all MUST be balanced to perform the same DPS (within a a reasonable window, say ~4%). The only exception to this rule is for a class (any class) whos buff is UNIQUE to that class. In which case that class is either garunteed a raid spot or can have their DPS performance nerfed and hell, even have that nerf justified. For this reason I support the idea posted upthread about swapping the effects of earth and moon with that of scorch/WC.

The side effect of all these changes that doesn't seem to have dawned on a lot of people here is that DPS from the pure classes must be very tightly balanced, otherwise raid stacking gets out of control in a hurry.

If any "pure" class (rogues, hunters, mages, whatever) starts to outperform the other classes by any sort of substantial margin, you eliminate the viability of the other classes. At present in BC raiding, it's not realistically possible to bring say, 10 rogues, due to group constraints - most of those rogues would be inferior groups and thus not worth the raid slot. But in WLK, it would be possible to bring a raid of 10 rogues without gimping any of them.

That sort of stacking might be pragmatically silly, but it's not out of the question for a bleeding-edge progression guild. If Blizzard wants to maintain any semblance of raid DPS balance, it means that DPS classes have to be tuned such that no class is ever substantially better than any other class. Mages are not going to be a full "utility" class, we're going to be a DPS class, and that means our DPS will be adjusted accordingly to make sure that our spot is never wasted.

If anything we're in one of the best positions of any class because Scorch/WC can't be replicated by anyone else, and that's without seeing what Focus Magic is going to be.

The utility vs. damage argument seems to be somewhat inappropriate in the new raiding model. They appear to be moving almost every class to have some (typically redundant) buff, some form of AoE, and even some form of CC. I would expect from this that we can expect classes/specs we typically think of as being "support" to see a DPS boost up to near the level of "pure dps" classes, because their utility is now being shared, at least in some part, by everybody. (Not sure how this will play out with rogues).

This does detract a little bit from the "Shamans buff the raid, mages blow stuff up" ideal, but frankly that hasn't worked out too well for us in TBC. And even if boomkins start coming close to mages in theoretical DPS, I'm frankly ok with that, because I'm still going to top the charts. It's just that now I'll be at the top not because of rigid game mechanics, but because I'm a damn good mage. I'm looking forward to telling people who whine about player X's damage that, no, the class isn't OP, that player is just better than you.

That wasn't the point, the point is that you can't justify the loss of Imp Scorch's multiplier with an argument of providing utility when you may not even provide the utility, and any additional Mage doesn't provide the utility. The same can be said about any class and spec that is losing exclusivity to unique utility; you can't offset the utility with downgraded performance anymore if you can be unable to even provide the utility. You can justify it in other ways like balancing Fire with the loss of other class' multipliers from the same mechanics changes (Shadow Weaving), and that it wasn't really a 15% nerf as much as a 2-5% nerf, because the old Imp Scorch likely wouldn't have stacked with CoE anyways. The point is that it wasn't a tradeoff of a damage multiplier for debuff utility, the multiplier reduction was independent of the purpose for the talent change.

On another note, has there been any announcement regarding spell modifiers for melee abilities that deal spell damage like Ret Pallies and Hunters Explosive Shot? Are they reverting back to spell crit now that crit rating is a single stat?

I just did a little personal exercise to try to build the smallest group possible that covers all buffs. I was going to post the entire line of thought, but it'd make the post very long, and it's only slightly on-topic in this thread.

Note I'm basically ignoring, for these reasons:
Melee attack slow debuff -- Ignored because every tank has a way of applying this for themselves
Bleed damage increase -- The classes with the most bleed damage are the ones that apply their own buff
Armor increase percent -- Applied as a proc by holy priests and resto druids, no real change from current, is just a "nice to have" at best and cannot be counted on staying up

Everything on the list except the three above is covered by the following group:
Paladin (18 prot, rest could be anything, covers BoK and imp devotion aura)
Paladin (retribution)
Shaman (elemental)
Shaman (enhance)
Druid (feral)
Druid (balance)
Mage (frost or fire)
Priest (disc)
Warrior (arms)

That covers every meaningful buff with just 9 people. It's probably possible to go lower (I read 7 somewhere) if you have some people split specs in odd ways to cover two different trees simultaneously, but the above allows for those 9 people to go as deep in their respective specs as needed for improved personal performance as well. This may very well not be the only way, either.

Note this includes only one healer (disc priest) and one tank (feral druid), plus an 18-prot paladin that could be either a second healer or second tank, so to make a ten-man out of this your tenth would need to be tank or healer, depending on the BoK-paladin's spec. Of course, as someone mentioned up-thread, you may be best off building ten-man raids with either a fully melee focus or a fully caster focus. The above 9 would provide all buffs, but a bit of a mishmash of damage types, 3 casters and 3 melee.

Interestingly, our three most versatile hybrids still earn themselves two spots each in this exercise, and none of them are even forced into healing spec.