I think that is an excellent point. The big philosophical change we are seeing is that Blizzard is trying to eliminate "mandatory" classes. Hard to do that if mages and locks are the only aoe kings, but it is hard to see how chain lightning can really substitute for AE and seed spam on a fight like tidewalker, or on the Hyjal waves. Dropping aoe numbers down to 3 is an elegant solution to both problems. Still worthwhile for mages and locks to aoe, hunter and shammy aoe is viable, warrior and druid aoe tanking is more possible, and in an emergency 3 adds can be single-targetted to death by rogues.

Really, is +10% to 1 raid members and <5% to another enough for raid leaders to start enforcing it? Razorice might be an overall raid damage increase if there happens to be a frost mage in the raid to enjoy it, and runeforging hardly compares to the cost of a respec in that situation; but can you really see a situation where the fire mage in a raid and the DK say to each-other; 'Hey, i'll go spec frost and you swap to Razorice and we can push the raid DPS up by 2%!'

Its a flavour buff, its not even close to being considered raid essential and it won't have any effect on raid make-up for 99.9% of guilds. I agree it might end up being considered 'a relic of the raid-stacking era', but its not such an extreme case as windfury or vampric touch that it demands, requires or even merits raid presence.

[edit] Unless, of course, said frost mage is your raid leader and is obsessed with meters.

Is it really worth it for mages to AE with 3 targets? Probably not: We'll be oom faster for very little extra damage, basically. If anything, we want 1mob, 2(potentially to sheep or OT), or 5+.

Don't forget about mass cleansing/dispelling fights like Kalecgos, Felmyst and M'uru (and ye olde Chromaggus).

This, I think, remains to be seen. Much will depend on the duration/mana cost of said buff. If it is the same mana cost/charge system as it is in it's current form, its utility will be questionable as you will have to recast it mid-fight at great expense.

I think dampen magic is bad, I can't imagine what would happen if this thing needs to be recast even more often.

Focus Magic - Spell - World of Warcraft (50 charges, 150dmg / charge, 1min duration)

Assuming your raid uses the full benefit, it's currently a 50*150dmg=7500dmg instant cast for 1k mana. If it's worth casting in raid situations depends on your personal DPS. Haste makes it a ~5000-7500dps instant cast depending on your haste-rating.

If your personal dps is higher than the hasted dps for focus magic, it's a raid-dps reduction.

No, its not. Its 150 dmg that works roughly like spell damage. ie: spell cast time affects the returns from every focus magic charge. Scorch gets 1.5/3.5 out of focus magic. 7500 dps is a best-case scenario, assuming all of them gets consumed. Currently on beta almost everything eats a charge, including most DK attacks.

But since the new post, it seems like now its more like 50 personal buffs on all raid players. Probably lasts 1 min. However, it doesnt seems like its going to be stacking with totems giving spell damage. Put it another way, its roughly a mage-version of totems. It lasts 1 minute. 50 charges should be mostly impossible for any caster to burn through within one minute. So your effective limit is 'lasts 1 minute' under that scenario. As I said, its roughly like a mage totem.

Another Flaw with thinking of it as 150x50 is that you're not really getting +150 damage worth of utility out of the mage buff, you're only getting 150-79 damage, since that's what you gain over the Shaman Flametongue totem (recall that they will not stack).

It's probably worth the global cooldown still (not for yourself, but for the raid considered as a whole) but still seems rather tedious. We'll have to wait and see how they implement it.

I can't see Focus Magic ever being useful if they do indeed rebalance Demo lock DPS to be competitive. Demo locks have 1500+ spell damage right now at 70, and 10% of their spell damage at level 80 will be certainly be greater than focus magic's benefit (or the totem's, for that matter), and the buff will require absolutely no thought or GCD use to apply, and have near constant uptime at high gear levels as pets will scale with master crit. Maybe in a few situations where the felguard can't reliably stay alive, it might be useful to spec FM, but those situations are supposedly extremely rare in WotLK, and worst case the shaman can drop a totem.

Well, once a minute isn't too tiresome. It's certainly a great improvement over the "once every 10 seconds" some people were predicting. The only problem I could see with it is interfering with AB rotations, if those come in style. I'm still rather lost over what Blizzard expects arcane to do for normal dps; it's got lots of tools on proc and cooldown, but no decent dps main nuke.

whilst demonic pact doesn't have 100% uptime (last I looked), its likely more powerful while its up; further diminishing the gains of focus magic. Its looking likely that flametongue+demonic pact will be prevailant in 25-man raids, and focus magic will only see light in 10mans. Of course, we'll find out more on this tomorrow.

I'm trying to get a simulator together than can clock AB DPS at varying frequencies of interuption. Its not too hard to model but i'm still tweaking my noobesque code. If AB gives ok returns for anything above 15second interupts I can live with it as a main nuke and write-off anything with greater interupt frequency as simply being a rare 'arcane-unfriendly' fight. I don't like to call 'run and shoot' fights as interupt-heavy because Arcane claws its way back on those with nice ABar damage during movement. Assuming an interupt causes all specs to stop casting for an equal amount of time, the loss for arcane is only really the loss of the AB debuff, which is effectively a loss of 1.5 unbuffed ABs per interupt assuming the interupt breaks a full 3-stack and you have the chance to re-ramp it (WTB a glyph that ramps AB 2debuffs per cast). Of note is the interaction between MBAM and AB ramping. I'll go into the whole thing in more details when i've got some numbers to back it all up.

Fun aside; Arcane in WotLK seems to really like spell haste for the sake of improving the casts:interupts ratio (getting in more ABs per ramp-up).

It's not really the final amount of RDPS gained by that talent that bothers me.

It's just that it's really terrible design, particularly when you look at the upcoming changes:
1) It's a unique debuff that only a Death Knight can bring.
2) It has to be brought by a DPSing Death Knight, because a tanking Death Knight would pick 4% parry or magic deflection as Runeforge (unless they outgear the fight and don't die, or are seriously concerned about threat that they sacrifice survival stats for it).
3) It benefits roughly 50% of a Frost Death Knight's damage, maybe 5% of Blood/Unholy Death Knight's damage, and 100% of a Frost/Frostfire Mage's damage.

Now, here is the dumb part: The tanking DK is likely to be Frost, maybe with some/a lot Unholy. The DPSing DK, more likely some Blood/Unholy combination.
(I'm aware that Frost is extremely powerful right now, that DKs change a lot, and that the Devs want all trees to tank/DPS.)

So, for a tanking Death Knight, if threat and survival (avoidance) are an issue, they require a second Death Knight to bring a unique mob debuff.
For a DPSing Death Knight, the debuff is mostly useless for themselves.


That's just totally terrible design.
Make a Fireball Glyph that causes the Fireball DoT to increase Pyroblast and Shadowbolt damage by 10%.
It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.


For mages, Razorice makes FFB slightly better DPS than glyphed FB in Living Bomb specs.
With the vastly better mana cost, you could scram in more Bombs, or gear/talent out of regen.
The gap to Frost specs might also get bridged.

It can change your gearstyle and playstyle completely. Just like doing a long fight with or without a Shadow Priest.



You can easily get more than 150 damage from one charge. Talents, debuffs, crits all can increase the damage beyond 150.
An average Fireball would get around ~350 damage per charge for example.

The charges are currently bugged. Melee/ranged attacks eat up charges, just like Hemo charges in 2.2 (2.3?) were eaten by spells. Have a fury warrior attack a focused target and watch the debuff stack fly away.

DoTs do not consume charges, but still gain the benefit. Like ISB/Stormstrike.

From the wording in the official post, I'd expect some significant changes when they want to make it a buff.
My personal gripe with it is that it doesn't scale at all. Not that Imp. Spirit scales with a great mage stat, but it is something at least.
Demonic Pact will either be retuned or be the best choice for the buff even at the cost of Demo DPS.

Since Focus Magic is being turned into a buff( which competes with Improved spirit), I think it would be logical that it turns into a Dampen/Amplify Magic type spell.
However this wording "Focus Magic: Now buffs raid instead of debuffing monsters", sounds to me like it's something like an aura type spell, i.e. cast once to affect all raid members around you, for a set time ?

Oh well new build out, maybe we'll know the answer soon enough :P

Indeed; for this reason i'm laying off on FM discusion untill we see what it plays like. the only thing I can say on it is i -hope- it gets taken off global or doesn't need re-casting in-combat since an arcane mage more than any other mage spec really can't afford to piss away GCDs.

Improved Scorch/Winters Chill? the same argument applies. Not that I agree with these effects being mage only, as I have stated upthread.

This further re-inforces my point that it won't be considered raid-essential. In the situation that you already have a DPSing deathknight and a frost mage, the death-knight has the choice to potentially grab razorice for the sake of very minor raid DPS buffing (this goes on the assumption that blizzard acheives their somewhat lofty goal of making all 3 DK specs competative DPS).

Its not quite 50% of a frost DKs damage since he's sacrificing another weapon enchant to use it; although its probably fairly close.

I'm probably jumping to conclusions here but I'd assumed frost DK tanking is balanced around the buff -not- being present. If it's assumed that a frost DK is using the debuff and the class is balanced around it being present then frost mage DPS would equally need to be balanced around it being present; in which case I completely agree that its ass-backwards.

If the rDPS gain is about equal to their own DPS loss then its a total flavour buff, a situational one at that.

It probably does bring a bit too much to FFb builds but the difference it makes between fire and frost isn't significant to justify a respec unless you know for sure that its present in every raid and it really does buff frost to something substantially ahead of fire. Even then, the overall impact on rDPS isn't something most raid leaders would cast a second glance at.

Personally, I'd nerf it down to 5% stacked and call it at that. Frost DK damage needs a tuning anyway. Its still looks like pure flavour to me. What it does to mages might not be point-for-point optimal, but what it does for raids overall is a drop in the ocean.

I've spent way more time than I planned replying to this post though, back to the grind.

Hmm... I have to say that idea for FM intrigues me. And honestly, you are correct that It does seem to sound like an aura, and you wouldn't hear me complaining about a +Spell Damage aura, or anyone else for that matter. It would also be nice if they Glyphed/Talented a "Brilliance Aura" like buff to it too, but that's probably hoping too much.

EDIT: My mistake, it was like that before

I would say it is very good as tt syncs well with Combustion in that you can fireball, fireball, instant pyroblast, fire blast, instant pyroblast assuming you get 4 crits in a row. I have concerns a cooldown or some other restriction could be placed here because of pvp implications. Ignoring that, this should greatly increase the use of pyroblast for a fire mage; especially with the potential high crit rates that can be obtained.

I just took a look at the talents, went down the fire tree grabbing what I wanted for dps and a few aoe talents, and fire can still easily pick up focus magic, sacrificing at worst icy veins or cold snap. It seems odd to me that focus magic is still so low in the tree and any mage can pick it up without too much pain, it strikes me as a "baseline" talent that they have tried to avoid in builds past.

Oh, and I like the new hot streak a lot, it seems a lot less exploit-ish than the former one; but it seems to me like fiery payback still has very strange pve implications, especially now that it kind of conflicts with hot streak.

Arcane Blast is down to 9% base mana now, probably other changes as well; I'll update my reference page tonight.

How does the Hot Streak mechanic work exactly? I've never experienced this particular kind of proc... does it put a Presence of Mind type buff on you that is permanent until you cast a Pyroblast?

The talent says "within 10 seconds" so I'd imagine it's much like clearcasting.