No, frostfire bolt is bad because it relies on huge multipliers(well, doubled multipliers), shifting, in theory, rapidly between OP/UP depending on the scenario, what debuffs are present etc.

Obviously the quote from Kalgan is cause for concern, but only because of past history with his quotes. Raid-wide buffs and double dipping has caused "problems" for them you can be sure. What level do they want DPS at? Only they know. The comparisons done by players are only relative numbers; we can't know what the absolute design target it. If Koraa had made that quote everyone would be much more calm. Because it is Tom "ZOMG DPS" Chilton, everyone panics. I can't say I'm not concerned but I won't panic/switch to an alt until the beta closes and I see the state of mages.

I'll have to disagree here. While it might not be a "factor of 2", here are the latest numbers from Roywyn linked on the first page of this thread.

I only grabbed the top few rotations. While these numbers are only good estimates at this point, there should be no difference between frostfire numbers and frost numbers. (And by no, I mean within a few percent.) We have no idea what Kalgan was talking about because he is such a poor communicator but if his internal testing is showing ~8000 dps with double dipping FFB and ~5500dps from frost I can see him saying that is a problem.

When will Kalgan learn to just keep his mouth shut? Even if Mages are doing twice the damage as any other class (which I guarantee is simply not true) ... just keep quiet and fix it. After the last embarrassing debacle that resulted the last time he tried to speak out against Mage damage, you would think a person would have the common sense to simply shut up. His statement does absolutely no good for the community or the game and does nothing more than set himself up for yet another humiliating quote and stir the hornets nest ... the same nest he kicked during the last Beta.

'Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.'

I think this quote is simply more indicative of Kalgan's ineptitude when it comes to public relations and communication than anything else. Tons of Talents still don't work, Glyphs aren't introduced yet, and he also stated other classes needed to be looked at. It seems that everything is still really buggy right now, and with double dipping and mana cost errors [arcane blast, at least, I hope it's an error] they'll be tuning damage at a much later time.

While I'm perplexed as to why he'd even make the comment in the first place, I think he was just trying to throw out a line to use in the interview, and Mages just had the misfortune of being the subject.

It's Kalgan that is essentially making catastrophically ignorant remarks time and time again. This is undeniable.

He's the one largely responsible for class balance, which is arguably the weakest point of wow. Interpret that how you will.

One part of me me remembers 'Jaw dropping damage' and cringes.

The other (hopefully right) part thinks that since they thought that players were playing at lvl 80 on beta that they've been playing at lvl 80 on their internal builds for quite a while now and they are a fair bit removed form the live beta realms. We saw how well living bomb has evolved between builds so maybe they've added more power to the trees, maybe.

As an aside I've been flicking through some old blue posts and found one on Inscription and specifically about possible pyroblast glyph reducing it's cast time and giving it a cooldown so that it's actually castable. This seems absurd to me. Pyroblast as a base spell should be viable on it's own, a glyph reducing it's initial impact and greatly increasing the DoT would be cool (a la Moonfire) if it had a feasible cast time.

You link two issues together, succeeding in proving nothing. Observe: Whether or not they make a " big DPS pass" or not is not related to the fact that someone really damn high up thinks we have too much of said DPS.

The man is near enough the Voice of Blizzard, whether it's to a not-so specialized magazine or not is irrelevant; He made a specialized remark which bodes exceptionally ill. Just because he didn't post it on the official forums means absolutely nothing. It'd be equally bad if he just thought so and didn't express it. Fact remains we're not at a level which is satisfactory for us, currently, and it's looking to get worse. No chronological aspect of any previous remark changes that.

I just realized, regarding WE's, regen, and stacking... if you want to prevent stupid stacking issues I suspect the only realistic option is to add Manatidebearance to both Mana Tide Totem and Improved Water Elemental. Do you think this is likely, and do you think it's a good thing?

VE and supplements (rejuv, hunting party, etc) are more difficult since they're individual +mana procs rather than a constant aura. They'd have to be redesigned as a temporary non-stacking buff, ie rather than 500 mana make it +500mp/5 for five seconds, stacking like Incanter's Absorption from one player but not between players.

From listening to the 29 minute Buffed.de interview on mp3, from reading between the lines I get the impression that Blizzard is reasonably satisfied with the playstyle of most classes, and that there might not be more than one revamp left for each class before Wotlk. (“We’re going to be doing some passes on warrior, warlock, mage, etcetera, a lot of different classes that we’re still going to do another pass on before it goes live.”)
Chilton also revealed that right now they're really starting to look more deeply into the damage numbers of the classes, so Kalgans remark at this crucial time in the development cycle doesn't bode well to me.

I don't think stacking is the issue. The issue is that people are imagining a "formula" where a spec's value is a the sum of personal contribution and utility. This is too simple a model. A spec under this model where:

DPS + utility

is fun to play. The spec where:

DPS + utility

is quite horrible to play for 99% of the people out there, even if it adds the same value to the raid. And making it a carrot where the utility is so huge that the net value is obvious greater than the personal DPS spec just saddles someone with taking one for the team.

In actuality the DPS contribution (or healing, or tanking) has to be close. Rogues can be the king of personal DPS, but not by 10%. Arcane can out damage frost, but not by 10%. And so on.

There's also a problem with the non-stacking line of thought. Let's say, for example, that you make Imp. WE and Mana Tide put a shared 5-minute "cannot be affected by improved water elemental or mana tide" debuff on the raid. Well, the result of this sort of thing is that you now have mutually exclusive classes, rather than required classes, and that's nearly as bad. You're still very much limiting possible raid compositions.

The issue of CoE not stacking with Ebon Plague doesn't present this problem, because in that event, the Warlock just switches to a DPS curse and his personal DPS increases to compensate for the loss of utility. But in other cases, it will result in a situation where instead of saying, "We need Specs A, B and C to succeed," you have a situation where you're saying, "We need to exclude Specs X, Y and Z because their utility is redundant."

The fact that you may avoid a negative raid-stacking by not going to a raid in the first place is like saying "don't bother balancing Arena, you can just do BG instead". It's irrelevant.

Having options in 10-mans and mutual-exclusivity in 25s are not necessarily tied together. The CoE/Ebon example clearly demonstrates this.

You're discussing a non-existent change which solves one hypothetical problem and creates one very real one.

Classes and specs are not going to be excluded because their utility is redundant. Consolidation of utility means that 5-15 spots in a 25-man raid are going to be decided without reference to utility. Frost will have a handicap compared to other mages (possibly rogues and destro warlocks) because their DPS is balanced against the utility they're not effectively bringing, but that barrier is much easier to bridge than the current situation where your raid slot for most classes must be justified almost entirely in terms of your utility.

While a mage can't drop an arcane elemental instead of a water one, a shaman has other water totems to drop. If you want to stretch it further, the Mana Tide talent point does nothing for them besides Mana Tide, unlike imp WE, so a frost mage could give them a free talent point.

Er, since I play a Shaman, what other water totem are you going to drop? If Mana Tide is not needed, then Mana Spring certainly isn't. I can't imagine that Healing Stream is all that useful, and the rest are all situational. (Poison Cleansing, Disease Cleansing, Fire Resistance... did I forget any?)

Now, the concern about the WE aura is certainly apt. As some have suggested (I believe in the prior thread), having it an activated ability of the WE with cooldown (rather like Consume Shadows of the VW) would give a dps/utility tradeoff continuum to the ability.

Another option that could be given to Arcane mages is to make Evocation group- or raid-wide. Again, giving you an option along the dps/utility continuum.

Something else that I thought they could do to help the Slow/Torment the Weak 'combo' in Arcane would be to increase the duration of Slow (to, say, a minute), but have it break after moving a certain distance. If we assume that bosses under the effect of Slow trigger Torment the Weak, this would give a long duration during 'sessile' stages, and it might break frequently during motile stages. However, given that Arcane damage seems to be the most resilient to dps drops through movement, this would seem fairly balanced overall.

You're right on the water totems, to an extent. I'm still hoping they can finally make something useful out of Healing Stream, myself. Being on the level of (new) Judgement of Light wouldn't be out of line, since, y'know... Judgement of Light is that powerful. Unless they somehow make those two not stack, which would be difficult but unsurprising. What a tangled web this new utility is!

I gotta be honest, I would be fine with less raid damage and more utility if I could raid frost and pull my weight and help kill bosses. It would be a really nice change from having to respec every time I want to pvp, having to have multiple gear sets (for fire and frost and pvp), etc.

That being said, it looks like it is just a moot point. Fire just looks horrible to me, and I am in the beta.

Aldriana, most people agree with your point that some people have gone totally overboard with their bitching in this thread. Thank you for handing out infractions to the idiots.

Mages have been mishandled, particularly in this exact same situation in BC, and we were left in a broken state for quite a long time. So there is legitimate concern here as to where it is going, and whether we can determine what Blizzard is basing their figures on, etc.


To get back on topic, I am trying to be optimistic and assuming Blizzard has an internal build where all the shit that is currently broken on live beta is fixed, and basing their "too much DPS" on that. It seems likely given that live servers contain no raid encounters (to judge DPS on) and no level 80 Mages to test it with.

(Yeah whoops, didn't realize Aldriana was a moderator. Duhr.)

Just some casual observations: The threshold of freezes (Nova and Frostbite) breaking seems to be between 40-42% of a target's HP. The behavior I noticed this on was the frequency of being able to 2x Frostbolt -> Deep Freeze instead of just Frostbolt x1 -> Deep freeze with lower HP mobs (I knew that they had changed the way Freezes broke, but I haven't seen anything on it). With the former, the idea is you leave some small amount of damage before the nova breaks and put a full damage spell in the air, with the crit modifiers, and then toss a Deep Freeze. Everyone's favorite shatter combo, upgraded. Pretty straight forward. I find that at my level, if I don't have a damage proc or buffs on, I can usually 2x FrB, Deep Freeze. These were on level 74/75 mobs with 10282 and 10686 HP respectively. FrB Crits non-procced are around 4k to 4.2.

However, I noticed that at my gear level, and depending on what procs I had up (Band of Eternity), I can crit high enough to push over, only getting 1x FrB and Deep Freeze. Adept's and Basilisk food also put me above this threshold regularly, bumping my crits to around 4.3k. Nova -> 2x Frb, Deep Freeze pretty much gibbed mobs, and seemed quicker than FrB from range. If I do this with zero spellpower, and I'm quick on key spamming, I can get Frbx1, ILx1, FrBx1 and Deep Freeze all on one Frost Nova. I'm a PvP scrub, and this doesn't really apply to raiding, so I'll leave the conclusions, if any, to others.

This is potentially going into derail territory, but I'm putting this in a post instead of a PM because I suspect you're not the only person to make this mistake: Aldriana is a moderator. He doesn't report people, he infracts them himself. His post is not a suggestion, it's a warning. It's not as blunt as Kaubel and Praetorian's occasional (and deserved) "STFU before I start handing out permabans" posts, but it should be taken to mean the same thing.

We ( at least some of us ) are asking for more information for context, since so far we have seen subjective statements while the objective testing / number crunching that we as a community have done is out of sync with the what the devs say.

Also for what it is worth, if it bothers you, you don't need to poke around in the mage forums and your problem is solved.

You may want to read the last few posts. Normally I don't poke around the mage threads. But when I'm reading the Administrative Reports forums and see about a dozen posts in the past page and a half of a thread have been reported, it seems like a reasonable time to stop by and ask you to settle down before I have to ban everyone in the thread for a week. I'm not saying that there isn't stuff to discuss - I'm sure there is, and by all means do so. That was just your friendly warning to do a little more discussing and a little less whining. If future warnings are needed, they will be... less friendly.

Frost Nova (and other CC) will have different break thresholds for PvP vs PvE.

WoW Forums -> Maim does not stop auto-attacks is a Blizzard semi-post on the subject, but it's also from almost a month ago. The numbers might also be changed, but 40% sounds like a good guess for now (based on your testing). Thank you for the information.