From a gameplay perspective, it's nice that the damage is decoupled from the application (PvE) or removal (PvP) of the debuff. But from a design perspective, there's some redundancy. Freezing a target and counting it as frozen is rather silly, especially when it costs talent points in a point-heavy tree. Now that FoF duplicates the damage of shatter/frostbite, without tying the damage to the debuff, there isn't much reason to have both shatter and frostbite. Shatter and FoF could merge into "When you freeze an enemy, increase your crit chance for the next two spells cast in 15 seconds by 10/20/30/40/50%" with has a different effect only in edge cases like target-switching (which could be removed by "against that target"), and makes shatter a must more consistent talent overall. FoF started as an interesting addition, but now that it's no longer an addition, I'm not seeing a good reason for it not to be an outright replacement of shatter mechanics.

A few notes of beta experience with this latest build:

Note 1)

Level 72 Flamestrike cast by Level 76 Mage:
Flamestrike's Current Co-efficient:

0 damage: for 950 non crit and 175 (x4) non crit ticks
1239 damage: for 1500 non crit and 400 (x4) non crit ticks

Dragon's Breath:
0 damage: for 1100 non crit
1239 damage: 1500 non crit

Why do i point this out? Because the above is cast in the same time a fireball could've.
Unless i'm mistaken, Firestarter Dragon's Breath/Flamestrike and Blast Wave/Flamestrike(blast wave is untested though) should be a consistent single target dps increase.

Note 2)
Conjured Mana Pies/Strudels seem to have a 1 minute internal cooldown timer, in which if you sit up, or try to eat new food out of combat it won't allow you to, saying you are "To full to eat more now". This is currently apparently limited to those 2.

Note 3)
Mages are currently REALLY hurting on lengthy boss fights. Trying my mage on PTR a week ago on Rage Winterchill with 15 people i was wanding from 50% down, mage armored.

What spec were you? Did you have a mana returner in the group?

Quick post on Focus Magic: tested this tonight quite a bit, and it hasn't been mentioned, but if two mages cast it on each other, nothing happens. That is to say, if you have the 30 minute buff, you cannot receive the 10 second proc. It's still effectively 3%+3% crit; but if you have 2 FM mages, each should cast it on another DPS caster, other than themselves, giving 3% crit to 4 players total. Pick an elemental shaman first (for EO uptime), moonkin second. They crit. Often. I put one on a SW geared moonkin and never went 10 seconds without him getting a crit and giving me my 3% crit back.

A couple of PTR concerns. Firstly, are we given access to r14 fireball? (trainable at 70 according to wowhead, but was never available in live).

Secondly, have our spells been converted to "% of base" on PTR, or do we retain the old absolute cost values? E.g. rank13 fireball can 425 mana (as on live), or 25% of base (which is ~500+ mana if i understand correctly) as on wowhead.

Thirdly, is mage armor on PTR made 50%, or still 30%?

There is no mention of it in the patchnotes, but i'd like to know for sure.

----------

In terms of mana consumption, in order to last through a 6 minute fight, spamming living bombs on every dot expiration, you'll need to use 25 bombs, around 100 fireballs and around 12 scorches. More fireballs and less scorches if you are not the main scorchmastah. Exact numbers may wary, due to haste of course, but this looks like an adequate 0-haste baseline.

25 rank 2 Living Bombs will cost you 775% of base mana. Unless i'm mistaken, 100% base mana at 70 is 2241, that makes LB expenditure equal to 17368 mana.
100 r13 fireballs will cost either 42500 total mana, or 2500% base mana, depending on system used in 3.0 (equals 56025 mana total).
100 r14 fireballs will cost either 46500 total mana, or 2100% base mana, depending on mana system used in 3.0 (equals 47061 mana total).
Finally, 12 scorches will cost either 2160 mana under old system, and 96% base (2151) under % of base system.

So under old system with r13 fireballs, we need 62028 mana before mana talents and 0 haste.
Under % base system with r13 fireballs and 0 haste, we need 75554 mana
Under old system with r14 fireballs, we need 66028 mana
Under % base syswtem with r14 fireballs, we need 66580 mana

If we take 12k mana as baseline, then replenishment over 360 seconds will bring back 10.8k, Mana Tide used twice will amount to 5760 more. Mana Spring over 360 seconds will bring back 4500. BoW yet another 3528 mana. That's 36588 mana before potions, gems, evocation and mage's own talents. So we need to come up with ~30k mana from our own resources.

Evocation will cover 9.6k. if you are a mage with 578 int and 277 spi buffed (like yours truly), then Another 6700 comes from int/spi regeneration under 30% mage armor. Three uses of mana emeralds will account for another 7200. Finally, one use of mana potion will bring back 2400 mana on average. 25.9k total. Still not quite enough. We are still ~2k below our lowest mana consumption estimate. And 16k below highest. Well, two more mana potions can give another 4.8k, but i'm not sure if pot sickness is active on PTR yet.

Clearcasting will cover 6-7additional k's. MoE and Pyromaniac, roughly estimated to mitigate 7% of mana cost together, provide another 5kish mana. This puts us safely in comfort mana zone in all scenarios, except the one where we move to % of base mana system, but still use r13 fireballs.

The sad news is that we rely on every single mana regeneration method available to the raid, and according to patchwerk parses we saw before, replenishment uptime can also be as low as 25%, costing us a fair chunk of mana. Mana tides and mana springs might also suffer the same fate.

But - at least in WotLK - it doesn't seem like we'll be hurting for mana TOO much. Well, at least not the those of us who are in lateBT / early SW gear. We might need to swap out all of our haste stuffs tho.

P.S: oh, there also be symbol of hope and resto drums. 3800ish mana total. I am not sure how much we can count on getting those tho.

---------------
On another note, it might be a good time to drop leathering and get alchemy. Are all the WotLK pot-related and alchemy-related changes active on PTR?

Given that 3.0 is the big content patch, the level 70 spells should be on the trainer, just like they were in 2.0.

Fireball will cost 21% base mana. Your highest 3 ranks will, the lower ranks will be 25%.
That's why you see 25% in wowhead because that's what it will be for level 80 players. At 70, it'll be 21% because it's your highest ranks.

Mage Armour has always been 30%, 50% is with the Glyph.

In your calculation, you'd also get about 17k mana from JoW.

Hm, your damage with 1239 seems way higher than it should be. Feels more like 1.8k spell damage.

Anyway, the issue is that AoE spells have large base damage but low scaling.
If you had 0 spell damge, then Blizzard would be more DPS than Fireball.

At the standard 2.2k spell damage kit, we have Fireball at 3364 DPS, 2.0s Flamestrike at 3182 DPS, instant Flamestrike at 4200 DPS, Dragon's Breath + Instant Flamestrike at 3395 DPS.

So, it would be a tiny tiny damage gain and you'd have to sacrifice another 2 talent points into Firestarter.
Unless they tweaked AoE coefficients again or something.

Old news, potion sickness is removed, [Recipe: Haste Potion] and [Potion of Speed] are useable by mage in 3.0 and wotlk every 2 min (or 1 min?).

I know your primary concern is the upcoming patch, and it certainly seems like a legitimate concern, but the 71+ gear seems to be very favorably stacked for Int. Many of the new regen mechanics scale with Int so as our gear increases our mana resources will be all that much more abundant and spell costs will be relatively unchanged.

That being said, it looks like a 10-man that doesn't have the luxury of a Shadow Priest may benefit more from a Frost Mage than a Fire Mage.

Was Potion Sickness removed? I know the debuff was removed, but can you use more than one potion per encounter?

I can confirm that we do have access to the new ranks of fireball, frostbolt and arcane missiles at level 70 on the PTR.

Mage armour glyphs are level 300 inscription (which you will be able to reach in patch 3.0.2) and so I would assume that you can get to 50%, though I haven't looked into doing it myself on the PTR yet.

JoW is becoming the new shadowpriest it seems...

17k mana feels a bit too huge though. Is it the 140 casts' worth of regen from JoW, given by lvl70 SW-geared paladin?

Incidentally, 400 haste feels like way too much compared to the old destropot. Is there any stealth nerf on these things in 3.0 i'm not aware of?

There is an excellent reason to take frostbite and shatter: taking both gives you a near 100% crit rate on blizzard. FoF alone won't do this.

I've tested this repeatedly in both raid conditions (Mt. Hyjal on PTR) and the Theramore dummies. For whatever reason, these two talents are feeding off each other and cause an enormous spike in the crit rate of blizzard, with fingers and frostbite firing off like mad in a target rich environment. It's awful nice seeing a screen full of 1200 pt ticks. (At level 70, mind you.)

I had serious threat issues on PTR with blizzard spam in Hyjal. Threat capped at 6k dps, and could have done much more otherwise. Seed of corruption wasn't even in the same ballpark. I had to invis or ice block or just flat out stop casting on nearly every pull. In raid conditions, my blizzard cast time was sub 6.5s, note.

Whether or not this is working as intended or a bug, I do not know.

Now, if all you care about is single target dps, perhaps you can spend your 3 points in frostbite elsewhere. But deep frost mages probably aren't going to top charts in this department; they should focus on their own strengths, which lie elsewhere. The frost mage is perhaps the true master of aoe in Wrath.

As I posted upthread, this is because if you don't spec Frostbite, FoF doesn't proc at all on Blizzard. It's been reported as a bug. When fixed, FoF alone should work fine for Blizzard crits.

Well, I'm confused about how fof works for aoe spells. Will a fof proc be applied on all targets being cast on? Does it check each individually? Frostbite checks each individual target. Frostbite applies a debuff timer to that target, whereas fof has this funky "next two spells cast" -- what does that mean, eaxctly, in the context of an channeled aoe spell?

So it's not clear to me that fixing the bug means you can just ditch frostbite and be done with it.

This is a best guess, but I'm pretty confident in it.

If you have 10 targets, and a 15% chance to proc Fingers of Frost, each tick of Blizzard should have a 1 - 0.85^10 = 80.31% chance to proc Fingers of Frost. Once it's procced, there is a 1 - 0.1969^2 = 96.12% chance that it'll refresh on one of the two next ticks.

A charge should apply a +50% chance to crit against every target on the tick that consumes it, much as Arcane Potency increases the chance to crit against every target of your next AOE cast.

Now, where Frostbite has an advantage is that the 5-second duration is likely to last more than two ticks with the new more durable freeze durations. But given the high proc rate and higher rate of refresh, it's highly unlikely that Frostbite will add much to the overall crit rate once they fix Fingers of Frost.


On another topic, I've started work on updating the TCOM. I'm only up through single-target Frost spells at this point). And I'm going to continue to recommend Magegraf for most purposes, and link to it from my site; the two main things the TCOM will still be good for are (1) detecting discrepancies with other theorycrafting tools, which can help us all detect errors (which may well be mine, but may not be), and (2) I still find the two-column display comparing the output of different stats to be fairly useful at times.

Question for all you other theorycrafters: What's the current thinking on Judgment of Wisdom? From what I can see, Magegraf/expansion isn't currently accounting for it. Just too early to try and figure a reasonable average?

ETA: I'm also starting to think I've been underestimating the damage required for Frostbolt to outstrip Deep Freeze on the second FoF charge. So far, it's ahead (barely) even at 3000 spell power.

I just did some testing on the PTR. While there is no visible "potion sickness" (or any other) debuff applied when you drink a potion, as soon as you do so, every potion in your inventory has its tooltip changed to say "Cooldown begins upon leaving combat." When you leave combat, a 60 second cooldown period starts ticking on all your potions.

Note that I did not have any haste potions in my inventory. However, I tested this with what I do have (destruction, super mana, mad alchemist's), and they all behave exactly the same way; it does not matter which you drink first, every potion gets tagged in the same way. I see no reason why haste potions should be any different unless it's a bug that we can expect to be fixed.

Can invisibility be used to drop out of the potion debuff? Talented invisibility is an instant cast with a 2 minute cooldown so potentially could be used to ensure we could still chug pots. However, invisibility can't be used on boss fights to allow for drinking. You're still classed as in combat even though you're invisible. Is it the same for the potions debuff?

Are you entirely certain that invis against a raid boss doesn't drop you out of combat for even a moment? I thought that bosses sent out combat "pulses" periodically that made sure everybody nearby was in combat. If that is the case, and invis drops you out of combat, even for a second, that may be a way to drink more potions. I tested against a non-boss mob (polymorphed, invis, cancelled immediately, re-poly'd immediately to put myself back into combat), and the potion timer was ticking down from its 60s cooldown.

edit: Come to think of it, this is not the way it works against bosses. When I think about the times I use invis to try to survive a wipe, I never see the "leaving combat" message until the boss has completely reset. So no using invis to drink more potions.

This is kind of a cool mechanic that really forces mana management on people. It also makes mana gems all that much better.

Fire mages can wait for the Magecute range (now 35%) and at that point decide to blow all of our cooldowns and use either a Haste Pot or a Mana Pot, depending on what we need more.

All it really ends up forcing is us to use non-consumable forms of regen. Blizzard seems to want to move away from consumable farming being a large portion of raiding to a far less heavy necessity. If they do what they say they will do and they make regen for dps casters a very large concern, then mana potions will become an absolute necessity for dps casters at almost all levels of progression. That's the main reason for potion sickness, eliminating differences between players who don't mind farming hundreds of potions and players who just want to raid.

Hm, not sure what you mean with "current thinking on Judgment of Wisdom"?

From a design philosophy point of view, one could argue back and forth if it's too strong, too unique or too much class dependance.
It's a very powerful tool, a very significant buff for hunters, warlocks, possibly enhancement shaman and retribution paladins and a looking like a requirement for meaninful mage performance right now.

It has has had two redesigns, from 50% proc and no cooldown to 100% proc and 4s cooldown to normalise it between fast and slow attackers.
It has also had it's mana return changed from a percentage of the judging paladin's spell and attack power to 2% of the attacker's maximum mana to remove the damage scaling of mana.

The current Replenishment was reduced because healers had too much mana.
Judgement of Wisdom only affects attacking characters, so it doesn't affect healing and their mana balancing.

I usually estimate it as 2% mana every 5 seconds. Replenishment is 0.25% mana every second, or 1.25% mana every 5 seconds.
At level 80 in Naxx-10 gear, you should get very close to 20k mana. I once had a bit more in some hodge-podge blues and old gear as Arcane specced gnome.


Deep Freeze
Deep Freeze is a better use than Frostbolt on the second charge until about 2.8k spell power for me.
I'm comparing a 100% FoF Frostbolt with a 100% FoF Deep Freeze plus 40% (1s of its 2.5s cast time) of a 28% FoF Frostbolt there.

The better use of the second charge would be Frostfire Bolt with Ignite. But the new Arcane is better than Ignite, and we still don't know what Torment wants to do.

The best use of Deep Freeze is still by casting it right after the second charge, and will only get outscaled by 10k spell power.
Using Ice Lance in that way seems like a sidegrade in numbers. Partially due to the lower base damage but also because it cannot proc Fingers for the next Frostbolt (so that one has only a 15% chance on FoF from the previous Frostbolt).

Some of the calculation need to go back to the drawing board though, because only Chill effects can proc Fingers now.

Can Deep Freeze trigger Fingers of Frost? It would influence cycles and cycle choices.

Invisibility only removes you from all mobs threatlist. It does not puts you out of combat necessarily, although 'being on nobodys threatlist' is the standard case for being 'out of combat'. However, there probably is an exception case for bosses since you don't go out of combat on the spot.

...

It has also had it's mana return changed from a percentage of the judging paladin's spell and attack power to 2% of the attacker's maximum mana to remove the damage scaling of mana.

...

I usually estimate it as 2% mana every 5 seconds.[/quote]

OK, good, that's what I was looking for. I had heard there was a change to a percentage system, but it didn't seem to be reflected in the wowhead database, so I thought I might have dreamed it.

Wouldn't it be a 15% FoF Frostbolt?

Edit: Actually, I think maybe this is the correct model:


Frostbolt Spam
After first charge: 0 seconds
Second Charge: FoF Frostbolt (+2.5 secs)
Following spell 1: 27.75% FoF Frostbolt (+5.0 secs)
Following spell 2: 27.75% FoF Frostbolt (+7.5 secs)

Deep Freeze on 2nd Charge
After first charge: 0 seconds
Second Charge: Deep Freeze (+1.5 secs)
Following Spell 1: 15% FoF Frostbolt (+4.0 secs)
Following Spell 2: 15% FoF Frostbolt (+6.5 secs)
Following Spell 3: 40% of a 27.75% FoF Frostbolt (+7.5 secs)

At 3000 spell power and 35.03% crit (39.03% for Frostbolt), I get the following average values:

9,297.12: FoF Frostbolt
6,725.58: Non-FoF Frostbolt
6,569.58: Deep Freeze

So the comparison goes:

FB Spam: 9297.12 + (2 * 0.2775 * 9297.12) + (2 * 0.7225 * 6725.58) = 24175.4847
DF 2nd chg: 6569.58 + (2 * 0.15 * 9297.12) + (2 * 0.85 * 6725.58) + (0.4 * 0.2775 * 9297.12) + (0.4 * 0.7225 * 6725.58) = 23767.87494

We can simplify to:

FB Spam: 1.555 * 9297.12 + 1.445 * 6725.58 = 24175.4847
DF 2nd chg: 6569.58 + 0.411 * 9297.12 + 1.989 * 6725.58 = 23767.87494

I put the breakeven point at just over 2450 Spell Power:

FB Spam: 1.555 * 7,988.29 + 1.445 * 5,778.77 = 20772.1136
DF 2nd chg: 5,997.68 + 0.411 * 7,988.29 + 1.989 * 5,778.77 = 20774.84072