About new FoF. Now that the login server seems to work, I've been able to try it and the buff doesn't really show charges which is annoying to figure out whether it can double dip but from what I've seen you *can* indeed do so although it's not conclusive.

We now have Burnout. These calculations do not take Chaotic skyfire diamond (hopefully there will be an 80 equivalent) either.

Nuru gains Nuru's Fingers of Frost.
Nuru's Ice Lance hits Magmorth Shaman for 1232 Frost First Frozen Spell
Magmorth Shaman is afflicted by Polymorph
Nuru's Finger's of Frost fades from Nuru
Ice Lance broke Nuru's Polymorph.
Polymorph dissipates from Magmorth Shaman
Nuru's Ice Lance hits Magmoth Shaman for 2521 Frost (Critical) Second Frozen Spell and using Ice Lance's Frozen Modifier
Nuru's Frostbolt hits Magmoth Shaman for 4485 Frost (Critical) Second Frozen Spell, or lucky crit?

This is with a spec basically just having Ice Shards and Shatter with Fingers of Frost. I've also managed to do a Frostbolt/Deep Freeze on the last charge, but I'm pretty sure in that case the FoF charge is being eaten by Deep Freeze, and then Frostbolt is using its Frozen effect for the shatter. So, my results aren't really very conclusive.

It's nice to see Brain Freeze and Shattered Barrier working finally.

Technically it would be the ice lance that is the 'lucky crit' as I'm assuming you did frostbolt + ice lance on the last charge and not the other way around. However, if you this lucky crit is 3x damage you're getting a free FoF charge. I mainly tried it with deep freeze and it's been working quite well, that is with the current lagg the beta server offers, on live servers I am convinced this will be working on a consistent basis, if this is intended or not is not for me to judge though.

It's pretty conclusive, because theoretically you shouldn't be able to cast Deep Freeze at all -- the Frostbolt should have eaten the charge first.

Sure. With Burnout it's 1.75*1.4. With CSD effect and Burnout it's 1.8175*1.4. What it isn't is 2*1.4.

I'm shocked nobody mentioned that maybe FOF procced twice in a row, the refresh not being shown in the combat log being simply the standard case.

Did you see FOF go back to 15s on the second cast?

FoF refreshes are explicitly mentioned in the combat log. You can't miss them because the log now has a "refreshes ____" event. But just to be clear, FoF was not refreshed.

Not quite. Ice Lance's damage would lose the 3x Frozen modifier if that were the case. The order was Frostbolt then Ice Lance.

@Lhivera: True, I was still thinking on hit when I made that post rather than on cast. In that case then being able to DF following the Frostbolt is a pretty strong indicator.

Wrong quote and the reason why ice lance would be the 'lucky crit' is simply because you cast frostbolt, ice lance and not ice lance, frostbolt meaning frostbolt should eat the charge, not ice lance. If you can double dip from it, which is proven that you can by the fact that you can use DF/IL right after the 2nd frostbolt.

If IL/DF would eat the charge while being cast after the 2nd frostbolt my mind would be boggled.

The now-functional Brain Freeze is a 15 second buff only, which generally precludes "saving" the proc for movement phases of boss fights. Given this limitation (and the fact that true elementalist builds will never be able to reach this talent) I would reiterate my argument that the talent should be altered to include FFB.

FFB on Brain Freeze would be too strong, I think. As it stands, the 3 talent points buys you about 3% DPS and a 10-11% efficiency increase -- that's a very strong talent, it's like having clearcasting and playing with fire rolled into a single 3-point talent, without the downside.

Cool. That answered my question that i original had (At what level do the two buffs equal out).

So thats 31.03% crit with talents and gear correct? I guess i understand the whining (see: WoW Mage Forums) a bit more. Either way, 10% crit is still real nice for PvP.

And thanks for the correction about the crit bonus. I always get multiplicative and additive stuff messed up.

Playing my mage for the first time since the frost talents went in. 46ms ping, and I am very consistently getting the three freeze effects out of FB, FB>IL. Lance does "frozen" level damage and that last frostbolt almost always crits.

That or I'm the luckiest lock (edit: mage) in the world.

You have to hit your combo *very* tightly -- even the slightest delay (or clip of the FB, making you have to hit it again) and I missed the 3rd freeze (the icelance would miss it and land first, and then the FB has a freeze-level chance of critting even though it lands second. i.e. it's applying on the casts correctly, even though travel time affects when they do damage.)


It's not wholly surprising: as a lock I can tell you that buff/debuff gains/losses lag behind player actions. We care about this deeply for drain soul and conflag for example. You can't immo+conflag anymore. Nor can you drain soul close to when a mob is dying, the buff needs time to actually land on you.

Well I'd rather they dispensed with the (entirely unnecessary) mana savings (I mean come on, Frost is already the most mana efficient tree, has no mana dump, AND imp. WE returns mana as well) and included FFB or otherwise fiddled with the talent to boost its DPS. My napkin math puts the DPS increase at ~.6% per point which (if you ignore the mana savings, as above) is pretty piddly, especially for a talent so deep in the tree.

I've worked my way up to getting the "FoF-combo" down, but still miss the window about 25% of the time. The problem is that this timing is SO tight compared to the usual shatter combo that people with especially variable latencies (I've been on connections before that would fluctuate between 100-300ms cast to cast) are going to basically take a dps hit with this spec. A reversion to the timed buff would help alleviate the issue by at least letting people with variable latencies gear more heavily for haste to give themselves a larger window of opportunity for the instant. An issue that can be geared around is much better than an issue that's completely based on latency and client/server timing artifacts without a viable solution.

Then we have to consider...how good does a prospective frost mage have to be to take advantage of this mechanic? We'd have to do math on the lost dps for one miss (i.e. an unfrozen ice lance that costs a GCD) vs the gained dps for a properly executed FoF-combo, and determine how perfect your timing must be to be worth even caring if the mechanic exists on a boss fight. How many extra frozen ice lances must work to make up for one failure?

Some back-of-the-envelope math at level 70, being lazy and using DrDamage's consumable-buffed numbers from my character...
Frostbolt average total damage 3023
Ice lance average total damage (unfrozen) 606
Ice lance average total damage (frozen) 2545
Baseline dps for my ~2.3 second frostbolts = 1314 (this ignores water elemental dps and plenty of raid buffs--just to give a baseline to compare the dps increases below to)

So instead of 60% of a frostbolt cast during the GCD (1814 damage) we do either 2545 by hitting the window or 606 by missing the window. This gains us 731 damage per success and loses us 1208 damage per failure. If you succeed 62.3% of the time, you break even. For succeeding 3/4 of the time, you gain an average of 246 damage per FoF proc. For succeeding 9/10 of the time, you gain 537 damage per FoF proc. If you play perfectly, never missing the window for a fight, you gain 731 damage per FoF proc. If you succeed only half the time, you lose 238.5 damage per FoF proc.

If FoF procs about once every 22 seconds (not out of line with raid haste and a little personal haste), the dps gain/loss can be approximated at the above damage gain/loss divided by 22. The instant itself (not including the dps gain of two frostbolts @ +50% crit) adds a maximum of 33dps (~2.5%) at perfection, 24dps (~1.8%) at 90% success, and 11 dps (~0.8%) at 75%. (If you're overconfident or hit an inordinately large number of lag spikes, only succeeding half the time, you LOSE 0.8% dps.) I think this is far from unbalanceable (the two frozen frostbolts add about 8% dps on their own), so I doubt Blizzard made this change based on considering shatter combos overpowered in PvE. Why, then, buff it for PvP and nerf it for PvE? It seems odd.

The biggest issue is that those with variable latency will pretty much have to forego using this mechanic unless they can guarantee a personal success rate of 75% or better. There is probably already some signfiicant dps loss attributable to lag, and this adds 2% or more to it. Poor direction to move in in my opinion.

Given how many changes have moved forward, then back for one patch, then forward again, I wonder if Blizzard has two builds in-house rather than one, and works on them separately, merging changes every other patch. If so, perhaps the build they fixed FoF to actually work in was two patches old instead of one, and the NEXT patch will also merge in the timer-vs-charges change. I can hope.

I'm in the processing of updating my spreadsheet.
Since I have to change and edit just about anything, I'll also take the time to fix some design mistakes.

I just want to check that I've got most things covered.

High gear sets:
Intellect: 1000, Spirit: 700; Values pre-BoK, but with AI/Spi/GoW. I'm being probably too generous towards Arcane specs there, but it shouldn't matter for too much other than mana/regeneration.
Crit: 20% from intellect and gear only. Hit: Capped. Haste: 15% from gear.
Spell Power: 3k fully raid buffed. Cast delay: 50ms.

Raid buffs/debuffs:
Blessing of Kings, Gnome racial (on top of the values above; adds a little amount of crit and damage for Mind Mastery and regen); It's mostly because I calculate some stuff a bit oddly.
Crit: 10% WC, 3% ToW, 5% Moonkin, 5% Molten Armour (glyhed)
Haste: 5% WoA, 1% ToW (glyphed), 3% Moonkin
Damage: 3% Ferocious Inspiration, 13% CoE

Spell hit (cap) and spell power buffs are assumed to be rolled into the gear listed above already.


Level based penalties: Those are a bit shakey.
I'll use the usual -3% crit depression we're seemingly seeing right now. Quasi-confirmed from the long and exhaustive D
I'll also use the 6% damage loss from partial resists. It's been confirmed at level 77 in the combat rating thread.
(That's after the excessive amounts of partial resists have been fixed.)

Relevant Glyphs:
+5% Fireball; +5%Frostbolt
+2% Molten Armour; +20% Mage Armour
-30s Water Elemental cooldown;

5 stacks per Scorch is good, but it doesn't appear in any of my spam DPS calculations. (I'm very looking forward to that glyph! No more headache from stacking it on trash.)
+10% mana from gems is +14 mp5 in a long fight. I am most impressed. (A -40/60s cooldown would be interesting, get more mana but spend time making gems.)

Unless I'm missing something, all other glyphs are not relevant for raid DPS in the majority cases.

Other stuff:
Ignite: They should work preoperly most of of the time. I'll have instant-Pyro will lost its Ignite of the spell before it crits. I'll try to find a formula for the average amount of Pyro ticks you acually get.
Fingers of Frost: I'll have it send a Deep Freeze or Ice Lance to get a 3 cast out of it, since people are getting the hang of it.
Water Elemental: I'll give it, hm, 6% base crit from intellect? I'll assume it survives the whole fight.
I'll also assume they stick to their vague announcement of giving pets their master's hit and hit-cap the pet. That might leave them 3% short since we get 3% from a talent instead of gear.
Just saying what I use for now.


Mana:
Mana won't directly enter calculations, but we'll get some DPM figure and an MPS figure, mana spend per second that we somehow have to match with regen/pool.
There is the Replenish thingy, 0.5% max mana per seconds on up to 10 members.
They stated that you're likely to run with 2 Replenishers, granting the while raid replenish, so I'll assume 100% uptime.
It was stated that JoW is to remain in game too I think, which adds a ton of mana for offensive casters.

See title.

What's the base tooltip damage of Pyroblast at level 80 (last rank is taught at 77)?
Without gear in a 0/11/0 spec and no buffs if possible.

Direct damage and damage over time damage are needed for the calculations.

Actually, now that I've recalculated for somewhat more modest (2500 spell power and 20% crit before talents) and the debuff changes, this talent's DPS gain is virtually nil. DPM gain is still substantial, and I'm not really convinced it's meaningless given the changes to mana regen effects and potions. At the very least it may make the difference between using Mage Armor and using Molten Armor. We won't really know until people start testing raids, though. However, it does look to me as if from a PvP perspective, it needs to be viewed purely as 3-point alternative to spending 10 points in Arcane for Clearcasting.


It's a small thing, but I would assume that the glyphed ToW would not stack with the 5% from Wrath of Air, as both are Spell Haste-specific.

So I ran the Nexus tonight with an arcane mage.

Focus Magic buffs the entire party at once (probably entire raid if we had more than 5), and shows 50 charges on its tooltip, but never consumes a charge. The spellpower shows up on my character sheet, so I assume it's working, just that the charge mechanics aren't. It still has only a one minute duration; I'd like to see this increased significantly and charges simply removed, as it's a fair amount of mana (and GCD's) to be burning every minute during a fight, in situations (like 5-mans and perhaps 10's) where it may be the best buff available.

Frostbite wasn't breaking as quickly as it does in live, but was still breaking before the five second duration lapsed. Generally 2-3 seconds. It could be there is a cap on amount of damage (not just percentage) that can be absorbed before breaking. How long it will last in a 25-man raid has yet to be seen. They definitely broke faster in the Drak'Theron Keep run I did right after the Nexus one, which included a level 78 blood DK and level 79 shockadin vastly outpacing my dps. So either the higher level difference (I'm 72 at the moment, most mobs were 75-76) was causing early breaks, or the higher dps being done to the mobs was. I did notice several times my Deep Freezes were NOT lasting the full 5 seconds on mobs in DTK (the spell would hit, do its damage, and stun, but the mob would release within 2-3 seconds). There may be a level-based early break opportunity on that stun, or it may have a reduced effect against elites; it may have even just been mobs with dispel or a stun-consuming ability being used by the other members of the party (DK abilities especially are largely unknown to me). Need to test more to see what was happening there. It won't be much of an issue at 80 anyway, since anything with a 3+ level disparity will tend to be stun-immune.

Edit: Added for clarity in response to the post below this one. In one instance, I pulled aggro and frost novaed, stepped back, and deep froze the mob I had aggroed. It broke and began running toward me again about 2 seconds after the Freeze. Since the mob went immediately back to moving, it wasn't a stun-replacement.

I did have misses on level 75 targets (+3) with exactly 10% spell hit, so more confirmation (if we needed any) the number is likely still 17%, not 9% as previously posited. Felt like LOTS of misses, though enough 76's were strewn in there that without a mod to count my miss rate per-target I can't make a guess beyond that I definitely wasn't capped. I was also able to personally confirm for the first time frostbolt's ability to partially resist. Goodbye, +6% damage from binary mechanics. You will be missed. It's much less spikey, though, since instead of occassional 50% resists due to bad luck, it was mostly just half unresisted and half 10% resisted, with a very rare 20% resist.

Presently, it seems that any stun effect will overwrite Deep Freeze and cause the frozen effect to be removed. You can test with Impact pretty easily, and in a 5 man it's possible it was simply being removed in that manner.

This guy's got a good idea about Fingers of Frost:

WoW Forums -> [Suggestion] Fingers of Frost back to timer!

Make it a timed, uncharged buff, 8 seconds long, that has a chance to expire early based on the same damage rules that regular Freeze effects can break early on.

From a PvP POV I'd much rather have the current 15 sec + 2 charges version over any other previously implemented or mentioned one, for obvious reasons.

"Make it a timed, uncharged buff, 8 seconds long, that has a chance to expire early based on the same damage rules that regular Freeze effects can break early on. " make it 15 seconds, so you can time DF/burst better without any effect on PvE.