It's of course a matter of opinion. My feeling is that the "flavor" of the trees is centered around the talents that mostly don't just increase the average damage of your primary nuke.
Well, in this sense, I agree with you, but I guess I've just had a different idea of the Fire tree's "flavor." For me, Fire was always about going 'balls to the wall' and hoping to God it dies before you do. Talents like Focus Magic I think actually help reflect that ideal for Fire, so does the RNG of Clearcasts. Frost was about playing with whatever you're attacking like a puppet on a string, especially killing 5-8 things at once before they can even scratch you. Arcane was all about temporal effects and converting mana into win.
Whether I have the right idea of the different flavors of Mage specs, I think Blizz has done decently in producing some consistency within the trees. When those talents increase your DPS, it's all the better.
Bringing in some more data from the testing front!
I may or may not have the time to update the first post this weekend.
Torment of the Weak Doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Focus Magic Depspite the wording, it doesn't affect melee crit and doesn't proc from melee crit.
Did a quick test with a poisone rogue, no procs either. So probably only works on "real" spells.
I didn't actually check whether it works at all.
Dismantle The better Disarm from Rogues. You don't loose your stats when dismantled, so there is no spell power loss. You hit with yout fists instead of staff, and you cannot wand because your wand is not considered equipped.
I heard that hunters can't use shots either.
Not really mage stuff, but the rogue from the first test waned to check the skill, and rogues are the "natural" 2v2 partner for mages, so I kept that in.
Water Elemental Scaling
Water Elemental Pets gain 30% of their master's current stamina and intellect. That has always been the case.
Water Elemental Pets gain about 4.975 mana per point of Intellect, and around ~7.45 HP per point of stamina.
That's 50% pretty much exactly more HP/stamina than mana/intellect, that may be a new change.
Those numbers are inpependent of the player/pet level.
At level 70, a mage with 441 stamina has 7623 HP and his pet has 6379 HP.
If a level 70 mage has less than 6000 HP, then his pet will have more HP than him.
At level 80, a mage with 671 sta / 741 int has 11494 HP / 14103 Mana, hi pet has 9068 HP / 4008 Mana.
That's on average half-enchanted level 80 blue bear, some better and some worse pieces miced in.
The Scaling is the same if you want to extrapolate to higher stamina levels. PvP warriors/death knights in the blue 5-set + weapon plus epic neck/cloak/bracers/belt/boots/ring(s) were at 19-22k HP.
So I'd expect mages to get near 20k sooner or later, and the pet likely will be at around 11k HP by then.
Raid buffed PvE values willl probably comparable, so pet health scaling might be to low. We'll have to see,
Water Elemental Cooldown Glyph makes is 2:00 minutes with talents, tested. (3min-30sec)*(1-20%)
Deep Freeze seems unchanged, I don't remember the damage being changed at all in the last few months.
Exact Spec Discussions I got a few PMs about those, most things worth being discussed are discussed.
The big number pass nas yet to happen, so Arcane spells still don't know what they want to achieve, and Torment is a key talent that we have no idea about at all yet.
On AoE spells I'll come back to that later. My sheet data was pretty old.
Frost Channeling being universal is a good change. Master of Elements is a huge efficiency bonus to all spells but Living Bomb (it's great regardless) and Blizzard. Blizzard is vastly cheaper inherently, probably evens out.
Blizzard has the huge benefit of applying Winter's Chill, making it extremely stoung for prolonged stationary AoE like Hyjal waves.
I'll look up what changes exactly later.
The new caps are a godsent. Even at exremely high gear levels, you can still AoE 15 mobs or more.
You can't pull the whole SM Cathedral and expect full damage though.
It'll take a bit to update all changes there.
Increasing the Flamestrike DoT scaling by a factor 4 is certainly interesting, but might end up as completely pointless.
The one tick between 3s (base) casts would have been a good bonus, you won't have it on FS spam with 2.0s base cast time though.
Bringing in some more data from the testing front!
I may or may not have the time to update the first post this weekend.
Torment of the Weak Doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Focus Magic Despite the wording, it doesn't affect melee crit and doesn't proc from melee crit.
Did a quick test with a poisone rogue, no procs either. So probably only works on "real" spells.
I didn't actually check whether it works at all.
Tested Focus Magic with three different subjects. Did not work at all when tested on a Fury warrior. Proc'd a handful times with a Prot Pally (he wasn't even sure which of his spells count as spells now). Proc'd frequently with a shadow priest spamming the new Mind Flay. Strangely enough it seemed to "stick" sometimes. The timer would tick down to 0 but it stayed up.
Missile Barrage on the other hand is next to worthless. After attempting a rotation of AB-ABar I saw exactly 1 proc. My sample pool was all the mobs in Shattered Halls. I then attempted a rotation of talented Frostbolts-Abar through all the mobs from the beginning of Kara through Moroes. It proc'd approximately 5 times....well under the alleged 15%. I'd love to see Missile Barrage proc off of Arcane Barrage rather then Arcane Blast...but that might be a tad too much burst dps.
This was all tested on the latest PTR at level 70.
Sadly I still love Arcane. If Torment of the Weak were to work on Frozen targets and slowed targets (to me the use of the word "snared" is vague) Arcane COULD be a mana hungry but interesting raid tree. But right now Arcane is built around using Arcane Blast and Arcane Blast is currently useless to raiders.
Water Elemental Scaling
Water Elemental Pets gain 30% of their master's current stamina and intellect. That has always been the case.
Water Elemental Pets gain about 4.975 mana per point of Intellect, and around ~7.45 HP per point of stamina.
That's 50% pretty much exactly more HP/stamina than mana/intellect, that may be a new change.
Those numbers are inpependent of the player/pet level.
Back at level 60, I extrapolated 5 mana per point of Intellect, and 7.5 health per point of stamina (by buffing the Elemental directly with Int and Stam and seeing how much it changed). You (or I) probably ran into some rounding errors which can skew it a bit. So I'm pretty sure this is unchanged.
Last edited by Lhivera : 09/19/08 at 5:25 PM.
Reason: Because 60 is not 70.
At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.
According to Roywyn's Naxx gear numbers (1000 Int, 600 spirit), that converts to roughly 698 MP5 OOC (edit-thanks grayrest for the constant). This is ~210 MP5 while casting with arcane meditation or mage armor, 420 with both, 560 glyphed.
Base mana at level 80 is 3268; fireball is 21% of base mana (686). Shaving 13% of that cost (EP and FC) saves 178 mana per five seconds at the haste needed for 2.5 second fireballs (10% from WoA, rest gear, or around 20% static).
Clearcasting would shave off an extra 665 mana every 25 seconds (10 fireballs), for an additional savings of 133 mp5. That's with just using fireball (with Pyromanic reduction); instant pyroblasts or living bombs that win the clearcast "lotto" save more. All told it's a little over 350 extra mana to spend every 5 seconds with either mage armor or arcane meditation, and while more haste will increase the savings of EP/FC, it will never reasonably catch up to arc med/CC.
The FM/IV arguments aside, every seems to agree that they're pretty close. However, with mana sources drying up, would you rather run mage armor as fire or glyphed 5% crit molten armor and have the exact same in combat regen? I'd rather have 5% extra crit if it comes to that. We'll have to wait and see on the final replenishment numbers. Maybe some mages can also get by without it by getting innervates and getting put in a 2-3 priest group (hymn mana) - edit - and Water Spring totem which is group specific but stacks. But given that the DPS difference for fire with arc talents or frost talents look to be pretty minor, the in combat regen of arcane looks superior right now.
Last edited by Celani : 09/19/08 at 7:05 PM.
Reason: found the constant
According to Roywyn's Naxx gear numbers (1000 Int, 600 spirit), that converts to roughly 900 MP5 OOC. I say roughly because I can't find the level 80 base regen constant
It's 698 mp5, the constant is in the 80 combat values thread and I have a post on regen just below Roywyn's dps numbers on the same page.
So at the moment 18 points in Frost or Arcane seems to be pretty interchangeable (leaving the mana regen advantage out for a moment).
But was is for lvl 70? What will be the optimal raid specc for mages after 3.0 hits?
If anyone's interested Blizzard *is* proccing FoF and from my observations 1 blizzard tick eats one charge. If it's been covered before I am deeply sorry, if not I'll try to see what the combatlog says when I don't feel too lazy.
Yes, sorry it just dawned upon me that I used the wrong statsconversion between spellpower and hitrating.
Still, I keep holding into the opinion that a talentbuild with more mana efficiency and survivability should not do equal DPS. Else there is simply no point for any PvE'er to spec deep fire anymore. If frost has an extra ice block and ice barrier and mana efficiency than fire should have something extra which is useful on raidbosses too. That is pretty simple I think?
Because if not, and you don't agree with it, then tell me why should any raiding mage spec fire?
I'm a bit late replying to this but I cannot agree. Ice barrier is useful, but to be honest I avoid using it if I think the heals are coming which I almost expect in many encounters and it wastes a gcd that I would rather use for a frostbolt. In a way using that gcd is costing you dps just to use it and it may not be needed. Frost has "some" extra survivability in Ice Barrier and a 2nd Ice Block, but I think people forget that part of frost's biggest problem is the fact that you have to keep you EXTREMELY squishy elemental up to get your a decent portion of your dps. If TBC is any example there is constant raid aoe dmg that just destroys a WE. This has not changed. As well as the point made that frost's extra "CC" is in fact absolutely useless in a raid most of the time. Specifically raid bosses which is all that PVE TC revolves around. If I cared how much dmg I did to trash I would be raiding Arcane in Sunwell. Also that mana efficiency is pointless if it can't be turned into DPS which frost has no mana dump to accomplish this.
Another point I'd like to make is that if ToW is working (which from what I've read has not been) and it worked on bosses then frost would probably forgo ignite. For example the bosses are "snared" but don't actually become rooted/slowed then the ideal build I would think is 18/0/53 for frost and in that case you can't even get Ice barrier. I think the 3% crit for self and the 3% crit for another make Focus Magic extremely useful and worth the points. If I give it to another class/char and their dps increases by X%, that X% is fully what I brought to the raid.
In testing on the PTR I found that FoF is consumed by spell hits so for example if you cast arcane missles or blizzard with FoF up two hits will treat a target as frozen and then FoF is consumed. There was a lot of lag and now the world server is down so I'm not certain my logs were correctly showing what was happening. Does that agree with what other people have seen?
This would make sense within the context arcane missiles, where each missile *does* count as a spell cast. It doesn't sound like it would be right for Blizzard, however. I would expect one FoF proc to last for every target within the entire 8 seconds of one Blizzard.
AS I said earlier, one point into Imp Blizzard so that it can proc FoF should be the same as giving it a permanent +50% crit. Sadly, I do not have time to test this atm.
Edit:
Originally Posted by Slander
If anyone's interested Blizzard *is* proccing FoF and from my observations 1 blizzard tick eats one charge. If it's been covered before I am deeply sorry, if not I'll try to see what the combatlog says when I don't feel too lazy.
That makes me sad. Still, as long as it affects all targets in each wave, 2 waves per proc probably still means it'll be up for *most* waves if you have any significant number of targets. With 5-6 targets it should be hard to go 2 waves without proccing FoF at least once.
Now if its one charge PER TARGET PER WAVE, then we're in trouble.
Back at level 60, I extrapolated 5 mana per point of Intellect, and 7.5 health per point of stamina (by buffing the Elemental directly with Int and Stam and seeing how much it changed). You (or I) probably ran into some rounding errors which can skew it a bit. So I'm pretty sure this is unchanged.
At 70, I always got 199 mana from 40 intellect. That never made any sense at all to me, why not make it 200 mana, 5 mana per int.
If health was 7.5 HP/sta before as well, then the only thing that has changed is base stamina, or base health.
It's a good buffer against random damage, but I'm not sure it they can last thorugh all (most) content in Wrath.
FoF, FB, Charges - from playing around with it, it seems that charges are fine on non-snarable targets.
FrF, !FoF, FrF-FoF (1st charge, it was already being cast), FFB-FoF (2nd), DF-FoF (3rd instant charge) seemed to work fine even with FB specced and a non-slowable/non-rootable mob.
Another oddity, I very often had Brain Freeze proc 1 or 2 spell apart.
It's probably just imaginatin and me trying to link that with a model where FoF and FB only happen similtaneously.
(And that is he most common comnination too, although just marginally.)
Originally Posted by Gneeze
So at the moment 18 points in Frost or Arcane seems to be pretty interchangeable (leaving the mana regen advantage out for a moment).
But was is for lvl 70? What will be the optimal raid specc for mages after 3.0 hits?
At 70, you chose 10% CC (+decent utility from tier one) vs. 3% hit, 3% dmg.
You don't really need anyone who'd tell you that.
Which one ends up better depends entirely on how the classes and buffs will be after the big tuning sweep.
At 80, it'll depend on the above and how Torment the Weak gets implemented.
The lack of clicky trinkets is interesing, in 3 ways:
* You' not likely to have 2 clickies to manage/macro.
* The clicky pats lose a bit in value. Not everything was easy/intuitisve to stack and stagger anyway.
* There is only one caster proc trinket that good for its tier, and that's a blue from a heroic. It's in fact so good that it's 6th-best-in-slot for Frost even, easily beaing a large amount of epic.
* The good thing about Euip+Clicky trinkets is that they are always in budget, while the quality/worthines of proc trinkets tends to end up pretty randomly.
Shiffar's Nexus-Horn got changed 7 times total, even when it wasn't worth using after he first 1-2 changes already.
At 80, it'll depend on the above and how Torment the Weak gets implemented.
The lack of clicky trinkets is interesing, in 3 ways:
* You' not likely to have 2 clickies to manage/macro.
* The clicky pats lose a bit in value. Not everything was easy/intuitisve to stack and stagger anyway.
* There is only one caster proc trinket that good for its tier, and that's a blue from a heroic. It's in fact so good that it's 6th-best-in-slot for Frost even, easily beaing a large amount of epic.
* The good thing about Euip+Clicky trinkets is that they are always in budget, while the quality/worthines of proc trinkets tends to end up pretty randomly.
Shiffar's Nexus-Horn got changed 7 times total, even when it wasn't worth using after he first 1-2 changes already.
That is interesting. Maybe the lack of clickies is a balance check to keep classes without high burst capabilities in line with those without? Rogues with AR/BF, hunters with rapid fire/BW, mages with IV/AP do better when the trinkets are burned then, whereas classes like destruction warlocks and moonkin have no such burst cooldown other than a bloodlust (which was always optimized around other classes). They added a shared cooldown to skull/hex so we couldn't stack as much; they know it's more damage and maybe this is the reason we don't see many. That could change in later tiers.
That said, I can foresee addons that track the internal cooldowns of your proc trinkets. If your burst cooldown (AP/IV, whatever) is close to up, and you have 5-10 seconds left on your proc trinket, you might be better served to wait the few seconds and line up the whammy, depending on fight length. Whether or not this would be worthwhile would be dependent upon the proc rates of these trinkets and their effects, and how much health is left on the boss.
This would make sense within the context arcane missiles, where each missile *does* count as a spell cast. It doesn't sound like it would be right for Blizzard, however. I would expect one FoF proc to last for every target within the entire 8 seconds of one Blizzard.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard does, in fact, work almost exactly like Arcane Missiles. There are two Blizzard spells for every rank in the spell database, one of which is channeled and applies:
[Apply Aura]: Periodic Trigger
Interval: 1 second
Blizzard
Is it just me or is anyone else annoyed with the placement of Elemental Precision on tier 2 of the frost tree? I think that change single-handily makes deep fire builds 11/52/8 appear funky and less than optimal when you're choosing talents that benefit a spell you won't even use "IV".
Plus, it limits your ability to add a little creative flavor to your spec. (e.g., do I want to improve my survival and get Fiery Payback, along with Magic Absorption, or do I pick up some poorly designed talents AOE talents -- which still happen to be better than being forced to pick up Ice Floes and Frost Warding just to get to my EP.)
The main gripe I have about the "AOE" or "Semi-AOE" talents (Spell Impact, Incineration, and World in Flames) is that they all appear redundant and poorly thought out. If anything, Incineration and World in Flames should be replaced by talents to make FFB half decent in a deep fire build for optional mana efficient filler damage that doesn't suck.
I don't know what to do about Spell Impact. It's weird, and spawned the crap-tastic talents Incineration and World in Flames.
I honestly do think fire could use some love in terms of +hit talent, at current it's a bit of the black sheep when it comes to that. The least they could do is at least incorporate a +hit element to one of the talents existing within the fire tree. Just making Elemental Precision easily accessible or make the 'ladder-talents' have direct synergy with fire would work as well.
* New spell - Polymorph - Black Cat
* New spell - Polymorph - Serpent
* Arcane Potency now Increases the critical strike chance of your next damaging spell by 15/30% after gaining Clearcasting or Presence of Mind.
* Spell Impact now also affects Scorch and Fireball
* World in Flames now also affects Pyroblast
One floating point in Arcane tree (Magic Absorption or Student of the Mind). These latest changes more than settle the debate between Clearcasting and Icy Veins. New build gives:
6% damage increase to Fireball from Spell Impact
6% damage increase to Scorch from Spell Impact
6% critical to Pyroblast from World in Flames
6% critical to Living Bomb from World in Flames
Heh, so much for a reasonable balance between low arcane and low frost as fire spec? Not sure I understand Blizz.
Its nice for fire of course, maybe they did it due to early dps tests between the classes?
This probably also make World In Flames too good to pass now? How much of a total dmg inc does the talent represent?
Ill be a bit sad if I cant incorporate Dragon breath and blast wave into a fire build, it doesn't feel much like fire then. Will depend on mana usage again, and how much of a benefit 30% regen turns out to be.
The changes to spell impact will put an end to any Fire builds that included Focus Magic and EP.
The spell impact change is pretty awesome, however it does bring up the question of why we should have EP in tier 2 and waste 5 talent points on something useless especially now with a very useful talents in Tier 3 of the Arcane tree.
They must find it difficult....
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
rather than truth as the authority.
6% damage increase to Fireball from Spell Impact
6% damage increase to Scorch from Spell Impact
6% critical to Pyroblast from World in Flames
6% critical to Living Bomb from World in Flames
And now Arcane and frost Specs are definitely out. And Mage rolled fire. Again.
Is this build a new profit somehow for arcane spec ? It seems that you now could use Scorch+Fireblast as Arcane spec fillers, but you loose MBAM... Or Fireball filler, but Fireball is really weak without the whole fire tree, even with Ignite, and allow even less ABar than an AB filler, and less chance to proc MBAM than AB... for somewhat equal dps.
If MBAM would proc with ABar or Scorch, this build could have been a real up, since Scorch+Fireblast filler are way better than AB filler and allow more ABar.
Interessting changes, but that really doesn't sound right, not at all.
Even though I strongly advocated 18 points arcane just a few pages above, I really wouldn't like it to become the ONLY option for a firemage. The choice between: "need mana, go arcane, use more LB" and "don't need as much mana, go frost, get some utility/more damage via EP/IV" should have been there. Now its just a no-brainer, adding strictly more mana and even more dmg, including situations where mana is a non-issue.
What strikes me as weird is: Why affect Scorch AND Fireball, but not affect Frostbolt? Why make 18 arcane mandatory for Fire, but give Frost the quite questionable freedom to spend their talents more freely?
The whole thing is looking odd, really. Why the forced specc? If you ask me, right now they are just trying to get people to specc Fire + Arcane for some testing, then they'll see where that goes, and then they will either just put us back to old "speccable evocation"-times and make 18 Arcane to good for any specc to pass up, or - more likely- they will pull out some sort of change that makes the other options more viable/undo this change again.
Personally I don't like the new changes. I do strongly believe that you want all trees to be equally interesting, this just single handedly made deep-fire/arcane (offtree) far far outdo frost offtree. It also further killed any hopes of FFB being good.
I would have been more happy if they made hot streak pyroblast free of mana than theses changes.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
09/19/08, 4:17 PM
Not sure I understand Blizz.
