I don't understand their logic behind this Mirror Image, specifically:

-If it has 1/3 your hp, it should get one shotted by mobs with aoe abilities (Brutallus anyone?), nerfing your 20% of your dps spell. Also classes with quick aoe (Read: Warriors with Whirlwind, Rogues with Blade Flurry) can kill all of them within seconds
-Weird, random spell choices by images, if you cast an arcane spell, if you slightly desync, they know which one you are.
-An aoe ability on your images will reveal which one you are (the one not at 60% health after one aoe).
-No way to control when trying to sheep your target
-Doesn't Scale, if we're balanced with having it now, in a year's time we'll fall behind.

I don't know, it has a longggg way to go if they want it to function right.

On the plus side, you can probably lag people to death in BG. Imagine, 15 mages all simultaneously Mirroring, with minipet out and a high polygon-count gearset... Instant lag!

The frankly bizarre uses are endless!

I'm more concerned with the MF change in all honesty. Not as much a nerf as a stratification, a normalization if you will. One, however, which isn't in-line with our whole crucible of CD-stacking. Not such a bad thing if you consider too many mages were incompetent at correct CD-stacking, meaning we're less dependent on perfect execution now.

Can someone in the beta test if Living Bomb now works properly?

I think mirror image was just activated to show people the new cool stuff and hasn't been tuned/coded right. Especially the frostbolt casting has to be adressed. IMHO the images should cast spells based on your spec, maybe lowering the base damage a bit, but including your talents like fire power, critical mass and so on.

A major issue for the PvP side of house that I see for Mirror image is that it won't fool anyone with the right addon, atleast not more than a second or so. Using Manlys combat log as an example:

Manlys GUID is 0x000000000005FF65, the Mirror Images is 0xF7300079F00000FB, once you correctly identify the mage initially, a tooltip / unitframe addon could be easily trained to give a big visual cue that the GUID doesn't match when the mirror images come out.

Yeah, Arcane as a huge amount of cool talents, it's really lovely. But the amount/quality of DPS talents is rather lacking.
Even Mind Mastery is isn't good at later levels because it scales not with a primary DPS stat. It's a ~3% increase for 5 points at late levels.

Just for a comparison of the talents:
1889 DPS - Fireball as 0/0/0
2134 DPS - Arcane Missiles as 0/0/0
3325 DPS - Arcane Missiles as 51+ Arcane; a +56% increase
4528 DPS - Fireball as 0/51/20; a +139% increase

That is where the huge disconnect between talent qualities lies. And that is why the whole Arcane tree needs massive overhaul if it's meant to be viable outside of gimmick (ab)use.

"Remove and remake completely" is probably even easier.


Arcane Barrage is a 51+ Arcane spec is actually a few percent (~3%) better DPCT than Deep Fire going all out with Bomb/Veins.
It gets pulled down by its fillers that are needed for proper cycles to fill the cooldown deadtime.

It's quite good actually, the problem is that Blast spam is 1) better DPS, 2) sustainable and 3) better DPM.

It also is or has to be held back by PvP, because a hard hitting instant on a very short cooldown can easily get out of hand.
The PoM-Potency abuse was just the icing on the cake, it can still easily get out of hand.



http://elitistjerks.com/881998-post1092.html
I added a details for the effect of crit with and wihtout Hot Streak.

It's still Dmg > Haste > Crit for raw DPS. Crit is better for mana, while Haste makes you spend more.


Could someone go and check whether Master of Elements works
1) at all
2) also with Arcane Missiles / Blizzard / Living Bomb?

So in order to fix arcane we need to make AB unsustainable os it serves as a mana dump in 'hot phases', make ArBarr procc Missle Barrage and improve a few talents to give more damage.

What about Spellpower? Increasing it from 50% to 75% or 100% and maybe unnerf Mind Mastery to it's original 25%and aditionally change Potent Spirit to something like 10% Spirt to haste rating or crit rating.
Netherwind Presence could be change to maybe 10% Haste.

What do you guys think about those tweaks?

1.) The WE has about the same hit points and yet I see frost as a viable raiding build.
2.) True they should just mimic what you cast.
3.) Yeah at least a stop/attack option should be added
4.) We are still in Beta. I think right now they just want to make the spell work properly. Scaling can be added later.
5.) Well the druids treant are dead asap too after an AoE or two. As to the revealing of the 'true mage', well it'd be silly if it foolproofs the enemy until all 3 are slain don't you think?

Just my thoughts. =)

Oh and what is DPCT? Damage per casting time? If it's that I can't see how it's useful for spell comparisons. Shouldn't DPS suffice for comparisons?

Could be nice if you could order them to target your focus target instead of target. Otherwise, I guess you can solve the sheep problem by making the one you want to sheep your focus target, rather than your target? (assuming they actually attack your target, and not just some random enemy?)

Well we do not have many DoT spells at our disposal. Thanks for the explanation. =)

They fixed the random explosions occuring when struck or when the dot ticks, but the explosion is still coming from the character instead of the target with the debuff.

I'm not sure but the knockup effect seems to be a bit more severe now, comparable to that of blast wave.

Some fire concerns yet to be fixed:

-IGNITE
-Spirit still not useful
-Balanced around using mage or molten armor?
-Flamestrike mechanics and Flamestrike gfx (!)
-Blast wave knocking creatures out of consecration
-Burning Determination not functioning

I really dont get why LB is so hard to code. Cant they just take the code framwork for SoC and change the cast time + make the ticks AoE?

It's only one page behind.

How about balancing with changing the armor mid-fight? This would give MP5 / Spirit or manaregen in general somewhat more value due to increasing average crit-rate.

My initial guess is that one might want to use Mage armor for the first 65% of the fight and change for Molten armor for the last 35% to get full benefit of the extra crit or something like that.

Um, I'm packing 1385 spell damage at level 70 without buffs or anything and have only 3 sunwell items (bracers, belt, leggings).
Getting the level 80 blue PvP dagger and level 80 blue gems would get me to 1600 spell power already.

I'm not even considering the new echants yet.
But 1500 spell power sounds way too low for a Naxx-10 kit. Especially because the listed items are definately not weaker than my current kit.


The thing with spell hit is that gemming for hit actually lowers your DPS until you reach ~2.2k spell power buffed.
So, if we're really that low on spell damage, then the maximum DPS in our gear would be reached by getting more damage even if you get more and more misses.

My only argument for spell hit in that case was keeping up scorch, but that point is mostly moot now with the 5-stack glyph.


Oh, and at Naxx gear:
There are a lot of cloth items, wands, and off-hand items with mp5. Funny how all those are aimed at classes that want spirit instead of mp5. (Shaman/Paladin being supposed to take shields instead of OH frills).

Reminds me that someone should tell Blizzard to give paladins/shaman a Meditation talent/skill/buff and scrap mp5 as a stat.


1) You'd need to spend 2 glyphs on armour then.
2) It costs you mana and a precious GCD.

It may work, maybe. But it's very unlike.


Master of Elements
1) Does it work for Living Bomb with this patch?
2) Does it work all in beta right now?

If someone manages to answer the first question, I'll have a look at how crit compares to haste for Fire specs in light of possible mana issues.

Roywyn, I did not fully account for enchants or gems, mostly because I'm not sure how that's going to play out with the hit situation. 1500 is a conservative estimate pending more info on that. I don't see the top end going over 1800 even if you go enchant and gem exclusively for spellpower.

If you are used to Sunwell gear, Naxx 10 loot is going to see your haste drop considerably, too. Nobody is going to be walking out of there with 20% haste or whatever. (To be sure, your Sunwell loot won't contribute anything like that amount of haste at level 80, either.)

Edit: and not to nitpick, but part of the reason your spellpower is so high on live is because you've skimped on hit. 113 is unacceptably low for my taste.

Master of element works, but not with AM and LB.

But plenty of enough to get one hitcapped with alliance elemental shaman (ToW 3% hit + 3% from talents + 1% from racial aura).

Edit: Or seems to be 0.04% under the hitcap, last hit-rating on top of that is much less of an upgrade than one more +dmg.

1 GCD is around what, somewhere between 4500-6000 damage for a mage pre-execute? One extra 'execute range' crit will compensate for that already (145% increase from crit), so if your execute range is going to be longer than ~50 sec, changing the armor starts to be beneficial. This is very crude not-even-back of napkin-math, but illustrates that changing armor is not atleast far from being a dps-increase when you are atleast somewhat mana-limited.

If it were the intention for mages to switch armours in-combat, then it either wouldn't be on the GCD at all, or the buff would contribute a larger value to our final performance (as hunter aspects do).

Looks like the threat dump is intentional:

Effect #1 [Apply Aura]: Mod Total Threat (Fade)
Value: -90000000

Effect #2 [Trigger Spell]
Mirror Image

Effect #3 [Apply Aura]: Periodic Trigger
Interval: 1 second
Spell #58836


Which basically means Mages now have an instant 100% threat dump in addition to Invisibility (which is also instant if talented), with both on a 3-minute cooldown.

The hit cap at 80 is higher than the hit cap at 70. Roywyn is considerably further from the +3 hit cap than just an alliance elemental shaman. And besides, as was said, hit is now apparently not as valuable as damage until you reach 2.2k spell power. Very interesting.

You should be able to rely fairly consistently on an outside hit buff, assuming Blizzards new raid strategy works anyway.
In 25 man raids it would be unlikely not to have someone with the spellhit buff. Its a lot less unlikely in 10 mans of course, but balance druids right now bring so many specific raid buffs that they seem to be a fairly strong contender for a 10 man spot, and if not, spriest is still an option too.
Sure, all guilds might not be able to rely 100% on spellhit being available, but any reasonably serious raiding guild should be able to imo.

Is it a temporary threat wipe (it says fade after all - and aura)?

Could be, although when Nimh tested it, even after all the images died, the target went after his Water Elemental before it came back to him.

In PvP, an Arcane Mage might have fun casting Mirror Image and then immediately going Invisible.

The Mirror Images attacking, or being attacked would very likely drop you out of invisibility. Just like the WE currently does.

I do feel strongly that Blizzard should look to change what they cast (relative to spec/what you cast/etc), how AoE should effect the mirror images/you while active, and how the switching process works.

Totem of Wrath no longer gives +hit% in WotLK. Also the reported change from 16% to 9% hit cap was tested a while back, and I thought the outcome was that you still need 16% hit to cap vs +3 targets. (Could someone in Beta please confirm how much +hit is needed to cap on +3 targets?)