WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3.3 live) - Page 89

Batar · 09/26/08, 8:47 PM

I would be very surprised if Blizzard were done with the mages. Frost and Arcane falling behind Fire by 600-700 DPS would be unacceptable to even Blizzard. They'll make another pass i bet. I would like to have AB back as a "normal" spell however. Totally changing the spec from its original play style in BC is of course Blizzards perrogative, but unnecessary in my opinion.

[DRF]Solmyr · 09/26/08, 8:50 PM

Originally Posted by manly

Anyway, as anyone that worked in CS department will tell you, generally its the whiniest customers that gets the most service.

That's what I've been trying to do... squeakiest wheel get's the oil!

My greatest concerns are:
*Homogenizing of classes
*Lack of usefulness of spirit
*Arcane Blast, lack of direction in that tree, rotations?
*Kings of AoE, seriously? No one wants to be the kings of aoe/trash
*Ignite munching™, Pyroblast dot munching
*Living Bomb is terrible, Hot Streak is nice (pyroblast needs to scale better)
*I can't comment much on frost, I only spec that way for PvP

Xei · 09/26/08, 8:52 PM

On the PTR, with flask/food/oil and only AI/Mage Armor (Sunwell geared Mage) on the test dummies with no other raid buffs/debuffs I got:

50% frostbolt crit rate - avg hit 2350, avg crit 5000 (no glyph and spec'd for FM but the buff not on anyone)

Ice Lance crits where in the 2.8-3k range.

Frostbolt cast time was 2.1s ... not sure what GCD goes to with ~290 haste.

I guess if you could shatter combo BOTH the FoF procs, but I think if you shatter combo the first FoF proc it eats both charges. I will go back and have a play around.

EDIT

Yes, if you shatter the first FoF proc it eats both charges, but you can shatter combo the second one.

SECOND EDIT

Hmm, the shatter combo doesn't seem to work every single time. Could be my Australian latency though ... but on live I have never had a problem with it.

Celani · 09/26/08, 9:01 PM

Ah, forgot about the terrible icelance coefficient. Guess deep freeze is going to have to do damage if FoF isn't just an RNG buff to frostbolt.

Masaru · 09/26/08, 10:24 PM

Originally Posted by Pasture

Fire mages too are demanding answers at the moment, largely in relation to ignite, but also fire hit being so ridiculously placed in the frost tree. Fire mages don't have the blue posts either.

Fire hit is pretty ridiculously placed from a pure design balance standpoint. Fire is the only tree where hit is drastically expensive. Blizzard should basically remove fire hit from EP and place it on a fire talent, even deep in the tree.

Xentropy · 09/26/08, 10:58 PM

Originally Posted by Celani

Spell Impact still not working.

Known issue. At the moment instead of adding 6% damage, it adds 6 damage. It's a bug that Manly expects to mean it was never intended in the first place, but I believe it was just a typo and will get fixed given they went through the trouble of doing the +6 coding and change the tooltip.

Originally Posted by Celani

Not sure what frostbolt spam DPS is on PTR, but it isn't 2k DPS by itself unbuffed. An icelance crit *is* (mine hit for 2700 to over 3k for a 1.4 second GCD). You get two frostbolts with +50% crit with current FoF. A 3rd frostbolt is unaffected and back to normal rate. An icelance after the 2nd FoF frostbolt does benefit from that 50%, unless there is some latency problem that I could not duplicate.

Originally Posted by Xei

Hmm, the shatter combo doesn't seem to work every single time. Could be my Australian latency though ... but on live I have never had a problem with it.

Originally Posted by Celani

Ah, forgot about the terrible icelance coefficient. Guess deep freeze is going to have to do damage if FoF isn't just an RNG buff to frostbolt.

What you're discussing is exactly the issue Lhivera and I have been so vocal about, and has been discussed on previous pages of this topic. As your calculations show, using one of the two charges on anything but a frostbolt is a bad choice. Meanwhile, "FoF combos" are definitely possible on the second charge, but use an entirely different mechanic than real shatter combos.

A shatter combo involves casting an ice lance while the frostbolt that will break the freeze is in the air. It uses the TRAVEL TIME of frostbolt, a guaranteed full second or longer at max range, with a real, visible indicator (the visual of the bolt in the air) to ensure both spells get to treat the target as frozen.

A FoF combo involves casting an ice lance while the server hasn't told your client you lost the second FoF charge yet. It uses the LATENCY of buff deactivation mechanics with no guarantees of how long you have to react-release the ice lance whatsoever. The charge sometimes goes away near-instantly, sometimes takes a bit longer, and it doesn't seem entirely based on your latency as listed in-game. It's a very unreliable mechanic, and some people seem to be able to do it 100% of the time while others only 50%. In Lhivera and I's opinion, reliance on internet lag is NOT an acceptable form of shatter combos.

A change in the client-server communications behind the scenes could completely break FoF combos, while shatter combos would remain viable as long as projectiles having speeds remains in play. The only solutions would be one of the following:
1) Revert FoF to a short timer and unlimited charges. This pisses off the PvP crowd.
2) Change charge removal mechanics so charges are lost on spell hit instead of spell release. This could have ramifications on other charged buffs throughout the game, so I'm not sure how viable a solution this would be as I don't have an exhaustive list of such buffs. I know one possible effect would be getting a cast time spell and an instant off on each clearcast, for example. This to me indicates this would be a bad plan.

PvE frost mages argue that doing #1 would NOT gimp PvP in any meaningful way; in PvP a frost mage already has numerous other ways of freezing opponents and getting shatters off. Against a boss, Fingers of Frost is the ONLY method of shattering, so Lhivera and I's argument hinges on FoF being fully designed to do what it and ONLY it can do: Allow shatters on bosses. Taking 10% of frost's PvP utility away from a tree that's already the best PvP tree (and has been stated by Blizzard to be considered overpowered in PvP) in exchange for adding 100% PvE utility to FoF (as it currently has none beyond +crit% for frostbolt, which I consider just a dps talent, not a utility talent) seems like a worthy move, and could be all the tree needs to become balanced in PvP while vastly improving the interactivity of frost raiding.

Arazan · 09/27/08, 12:59 AM

Originally Posted by Saphya

I just wrote a small Java program to get my own results. Here is my code:

long size = 100000000;  //test size
double p = 0.5;  //crit value
		
int z=0;  //for counting to 2 and reset
long pcount = 0; //Hot Streak Counter
				
for (long i=0; i<size; i++){
	if (Math.random() <= p) z++; else z=0;
	if (z==2) {pcount++; z=0;}			
}
System.out.println(pcount);  //absolute number of Hot Streak Procs
System.out.println((double)pcount/(double)size);  //relative (to test size) number of Hot Streak Procs

Numbers for testsize = 100,000,000:

10% Crit => 0.00907879
20% Crit => 0.03335293
30% Crit => 0.06920805
35% Crit => 0.09071644
40% Crit => 0.11431595
45% Crit => 0.13971614
50% Crit => 0.16668151
100% Crit => 0.5

So for 100 Fireballs @50% Crit you get 16.67 Hot Streak Procs for example. It would be nice if someone could confirm these results, since I'm not the greatest coder around. And I can't figure out if these numbers even match correctly with those of Arazan, since he gave them in a different way.

That can't be quite right, and as Psybomb pointed out the highest possible Hot Streak usage would be 33%. Remember hot streak doesn't count pyroblast crits, only scorch/fireball/FFB... also note that the program I wrote randomly generated 4,000,000 casts and gave an amount of hot streak procs... so while it's statistically improbable that any number is very far from the true value, it's not impossible.

The way I had to code it was to have the counter increase again on the second crit, given the following instant pyro. I'm sure I could break the logic down to something more convoluted, but the program I wrote just used 2 bool's that reset whenever you didn't crit or proc'ed hot streak, and a bunch of counters for keeping track of the scorch and pyroblast casts and crits.

manly · 09/27/08, 1:01 AM

Originally Posted by Masaru

Fire hit is pretty ridiculously placed from a pure design balance standpoint. Fire is the only tree where hit is drastically expensive. Blizzard should basically remove fire hit from EP and place it on a fire talent, even deep in the tree.

Actually I disagree.

If elemental precision was still a 3 pointer, you would literally have no reason to go frost as fire (beyond 3 pt). You don't sacrifice anything to get it. To me, its about as illogical as incineration affecting arcane blast. It has nothing to do with AB DPS. It has to do with the fact that it doesn't serves any purpose to put that talent in there for arcane. Every arcane mage that uses AB will put 3 points in incineration because its a no brainer. But by the same extension, if that was meant to boost AB dps, then why not instead tackle it somewhere directly in the arcane tree ? Or boost AB DPS by the 6% crit that that talent gives you ? Both frost and fire will never cast arcane blast ever unless you meet the mythical fire and frost immune boss. As such, the position of arcane blast in there brings absolutely nothing to the fire tree.

If you want to really put a choice in front of the player, then you need to eliminate those tier-1 no brainers. Things like elemental precision. You want people to feel like they're giving up something in order to get a powerful/required talent. Both of those cases really aren't giving up anything -- its a senseless free dps boost that could be put somewhere else (on another talent). I do applaud the new positioning of EP, but by the same extension I do strongly believe the incineration/AB idea should be scrapped alltogether. If arcane dps is ailing, then putting senseless boost in places that makes no sense definitely isn't the way to patch things up. Theres about a million way to fix things, and I do believe this is a poor way of doing it.

Here is something that not many people seem to agree or, or at least grasp in concept. If you give 10% more dps to all classes, you do not gain anything. In my opinion, the best way to boost DPS is through specialization. What this means is that you always give up something in order to gain something, because if all you keep doing is giving buffs without paying any cost, then you get back to my initial statement: you gained nothing. One could argue that logically then the best way to increase one' dps is through nerfing. Unfortunately, that isn't 100% accurate. If you decrease everyone' dps by 10%, you still haven't changed anything. What you want to do is in fact specialize. You give up something in order to get better at something else. Think of it like the law of conservation of mass/matter; "nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed". If you specialize; by getting surgical buffs while having a matching nerf elsewhere, then you can in fact relatively get better at one specific task.

Much in the same train of thought, I strongly advocate against moving EP earlier in the frost tree.

Malfeas · 09/27/08, 1:43 AM

Originally Posted by Xentropy

Change charge removal mechanics so charges are lost on spell hit instead of spell release. This could have ramifications on other charged buffs throughout the game, so I'm not sure how viable a solution this would be as I don't have an exhaustive list of such buffs. I know one possible effect would be getting a cast time spell and an instant off on each clearcast, for example. This to me indicates this would be a bad plan.

There are certain charge mechanics like this already. The only difference is that they are always target debuffs instead of self buffs; ISB and Stormstrike are good examples. The simplest solution by far is to change FoF to a debuff on the target. This vaguely nerfs FoF because you can no longer consume FoF charges on separate targets, but to be honest, I neither like that particular consequence of the buff nor think do I think it should go live. However, this immediately turns latency Shatters into true game-mechanic Shatters.

Lhivera · 09/27/08, 3:09 AM

The original Fingers of Frost was called Winter's Grasp, and it was a debuff on the target. Problem is this encouraged you to stack Frost Mages for massive debuff uptime and thus an insane crit rate. A timed buff on the caster will also exactly simulate the standard Shatter Crit experience without the stacking issues.

Malfeas · 09/27/08, 3:13 AM

Yes, I realize the original stacked. But ISB's won't be stacking anymore. Whatever change they implemented to make they work, do the same.

Stormstrike, on the other hand is a poor example because while it doesn't stack, the charges can be eaten by the raid. Unless that was also changed and I'm unaware...not up to date on shaman atm.

Jarlyn · 09/27/08, 3:19 AM

As a complete aside, it occurred to me this afternoon that if DPS is being completely homogenized, why should Fire mages be penalized with additional mana costs and additional spell damage taken? Not that I ever think it would be serious issue in the line of "sit the fire mage, he takes more damage than this hunter!", but the whole concept is pretty stupid considering the mantra of homogenization (not to mention completely stupid in general, but whatever).

Getting back on topic, I think it's a strong argument in favor of Spell Impact being temporary that it kills Frost as an off-spec for Fire. It doesn't make a lot of sense for Fire to be the only caster spec with no +hit from talents (unless it's part of the previously mentioned "more DPS but at a cost" crap), and I think we're due to see a +hit talent in the Fire tree or the removal of Arcane beyond Focus Magic as the best option for the Fire off-spec.

For one more completely random thought, it's become clear to me since our shamans are slackers at leveling on beta that the Focus Magic change (dmg -> crit) is not particularly bright in terms of raid class flexibility. Not sure how many of you saw it, but priest iDS was changed to be a flat 60 spellpower, which means that shaman are in sole possession of both of the major +spellpower abilities (Flametongue Totem, 144 and Totem of Wrath, 280). I'd prefer Focus Magic (non-bugged, of course) shifted back to it's original state, not just for mages' sake, but for all classes who depend on spellpower.

Xentropy · 09/27/08, 3:19 AM

Originally Posted by Malfeas

The simplest solution by far is to change FoF to a debuff on the target.

Yes, that would be a third option I didn't think to list. The problem is that would piss off the PvPers, too, because the whole reason they like it now is it lets them Deep Freeze the healer 14 seconds after they proc'd the ability on a totally different target. It also would allow one dispel (which typically removes at least two effects) to remove both the Frostbite and the Fingers of Frost, whereas the current mechanics require dispelling the target and the mage to remove the threat. Basically, I think if given the choice between a 5-second unlimited-charge FoF and a target-debuff FoF, they would likely take the former since they'd at least still be able to freeze the healer/dispeller on a proc. If FoF lost it's "use on a separate target" mechanic, there would be almost no point in taking the talent in PvP instead of just taking Frostbite.

Malfeas · 09/27/08, 3:50 AM

If FoF and Frostbite proc'd on the target in a single roll, one debuff will always remain after a double dispel (i.e. Priest dispel). Rogues and DKs would offer dispel protection on the target from pallies, so only priests would be problematic. I'd personally rather worry only about Priests posing a serious threat to dispelling FoF/Frostbite rather than have to worry about Priests, Shamans, and Hunters removing the FoF buff off of me, especially with Priests and Shamans both capable of double offensive dispels.

Then again, Priests like to dick around out of LoS of you while healing their targets. FoF as a self buff means they're forced to get in LoS for a dispel, but that simultaneously puts them in danger of their dispels taking out the wrong buffs and them eating a subsequent 5 second stun.

Yeah...there really are way too many PvE to PvP implications regarding where the proc appears, for how long, and whether it's charged or not. This talent makes my head hurt.

Edit: I can't imagine a healer with an offensive dispel that's dumb enough to let you run around with FoF up for 14 seconds, though. :P

Searix · 09/27/08, 4:08 AM

Quick tandem list from leveling up on beta/very actively pvping on beta

The most critical issues tandem Manly's last post:

-Arcane Barrage cooldown not stacking with haste
-Fire Aoe not scaling
-Blizzard spell still horrible in pvp(and somewhat in pve)

Also, we still have a good number of critically challenged talents:
Arcane: Student of the Mind, Torment the weak, Incanter's Absorbtion
Fire: World in Flames (Speccing into AoE for an aoe encounter is stupid), Fiery Payback(Needs to be a buffed gained when you get below 35% with a low dura)
Frost: Ice Floes reduces Icy Veins to a weird cooldown

General:
-We are still a HUGE liability if the fight goes to a point where we go oom
-Choosing between a spirit item and a pure damaging item is flawed, and based solely on encounter duration.

Roywyn · 09/27/08, 5:15 AM

Originally Posted by Jarlyn

As a complete aside, it occurred to me this afternoon that if DPS is being completely homogenized, why should Fire mages be penalized with additional mana costs and additional spell damage taken? Not that I ever think it would be serious issue in the line of "sit the fire mage, he takes more damage than this hunter!", but the whole concept is pretty stupid considering the mantra of homogenization (not to mention completely stupid in general, but whatever).

For one more completely random thought, it's become clear to me since our shamans are slackers at leveling on beta that the Focus Magic change (dmg -> crit) is not particularly bright in terms of raid class flexibility. Not sure how many of you saw it, but priest iDS was changed to be a flat 60 spellpower, which means that shaman are in sole possession of both of the major +spellpower abilities (Flametongue Totem, 144 and Totem of Wrath, 280). I'd prefer Focus Magic (non-bugged, of course) shifted back to it's original state, not just for mages' sake, but for all classes who depend on spellpower.

On the other hand, if your mages were slackers, you'd be lacking the spell crit debuff.
IDS is 80 spi/dmg at level 80, but still very weak compared to the alternatives.

Warlocks also have a spell power buff, one that becomes better than Totem of Wrath when you're getting full Naxx-25 gear.
So I wouldn't see it as that much of an issue. Demonology specs lack some scaling right now, but that should be fixable.

Pets and +hit
Since there was some announcement, I put on my 12% hit gear and let my pet attack a heroic training dummy.
First test - no resists. Second test - one resist. Third test - four resists.

So, yay for inconclusive tests. Does anyone have some set of gear to cap spell hit and test whether pets will get lots of resists or not?

As for trees, DPS and visions.
If frost was competitive DPS, there would be no objective reason to spec anything but frost.
The same could probably be said about Subtlety Rogues.

There needs to be some benefit for giving up slows, stuns, roots, a pet, some mana efficiency and a 5k+ absorption shield.
The current benefit is more damage and maybe better AoE. An alternative could be much more control and survival.

Xentropy · 09/27/08, 5:27 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

As for trees, DPS and visions.
If frost was competitive DPS, nobody would spec anything but frost.
The same could probably be said about Subtlety Rogues.

I seriously disagree. I know mages who loathe frost and would never spec it regardless of dps balance. There are clearly mages out there who absolutely adore arcane and can't imagine even using non-arcane spells as filler for their rotations.

The choice of spec should have everything to do with playstyle and fun and not about certain specs being forced upon us for certain roles. If frost DOESN'T do competitive boss DPS, we're doomed to another two years where raid and guild leaders tell us to "spec fire for raids or sit, those are your only choices". I *hate* fire. I can't stand scorching once every 30 seconds, with cooldowns that always line up exactly evenly because they're all exactly 3 minutes. It's the most boring and monotonous play I've ever experienced. Frost involves cooldowns that DON'T line up (because some last longer than others, and cold snap severely decouples water elemental from icy veins) so you can't just put them all on one macro and IWIN, management of a pet that can be especially challenging in some encounters, management of active survivability talents that also require good timing and decision-making to use properly, and so on.

If a frost mage with the skill to keep his pet alive 100% of the time it should be in a given encounter does NOT do competitive dps, something is very wrong witih balance. If the pet dies, fire comes out ahead. If fights drag on longer, fire comes out ahead. Frost still needs its niches where it comes out ahead as well, or I seriously question why talent trees exist in the first place, since any time one spec does clearly better in a given situation, that's the only spec that will be acceptable to guild leadership.

Roywyn · 09/27/08, 6:16 AM

Originally Posted by Xentropy

I seriously disagree. I know mages who loathe frost and would never spec it regardless of dps balance. There are clearly mages out there who absolutely adore arcane and can't imagine even using non-arcane spells as filler for their rotations.

The choice of spec should have everything to do with playstyle and fun and not about certain specs being forced upon us for certain roles. If frost DOESN'T do competitive boss DPS ...

You missed the two lines that follow your quote, and I clarified what I wrote.
Your rant about what if frost wasn't competitive indicates that you completely missed the point.

The question is whether you can make frost competitive without defaulting it to the be-all and end-all spec.
And how you could achieve that goal.

Vhad · 09/27/08, 6:37 AM

The reason frost is not competetive is because of the extra things you get by speccing frost. PvP viability and added survivability, this makes sense. The best way to make frost competetive is by having the tree set up in such a way that 1 specialization within the tree is more pve focused, giving up pvp talents and possibly some survivability in order to do more dps.

Much like arms warriors, when you spec for PvE, you are drastically reduced in pvp performance even though you spend more or less the same amount of points in each tree. I doubt we'll see a such drastic change -- most frost dps improving talents has a pvp use too -- but it would be great if the specs were alot more interchangeable and you could play what you desired in all aspects of the game.

Considering their goal towards homogenizing dps across the board, it would be great if all the pure classes trees were changed into 3 seperate entities just like the hybrids. It should be possible to spec for Arcane/Frost/Fire dps and be competetive in raiding content, it should also be possible to spec Arcane/Frost/Fire to be competetive in pvp content, but it isn't. This is due to blizzard being a bit confused about what to do with the pure classes, it has felt like they've used the hybrid approach to the trees, so that you have 1 tree that's deominant in pve performance for the class, same for pvp and "utility". It just doesn't work.

Saphya · 09/27/08, 7:00 AM

Originally Posted by Arazan

That can't be quite right, and as Psybomb pointed out the highest possible Hot Streak usage would be 33%. Remember hot streak doesn't count pyroblast crits, only scorch/fireball/FFB... also note that the program I wrote randomly generated 4,000,000 casts and gave an amount of hot streak procs... so while it's statistically improbable that any number is very far from the true value, it's not impossible.

The way I had to code it was to have the counter increase again on the second crit, given the following instant pyro. I'm sure I could break the logic down to something more convoluted, but the program I wrote just used 2 bool's that reset whenever you didn't crit or proc'ed hot streak, and a bunch of counters for keeping track of the scorch and pyroblast casts and crits.

I figured out were the difference was: it's just a different way to see it. I viewed the probability of each Hot-Streak-capable spell to proc Hot Streak, where you looked at a rotation of Fireball & Hot Streak-Pyros and gave us the % usage of Pyroblast.

If you add the following line my programm gives pretty similiar results:

System.out.println((double)pcount/((double)size+(double)pcount));

Critvalue -- Chance of getting Proc per Cast* -- %Usage of Procs
10% crit - 0.00908034 - 0.00899863
20% crit - 0.03335010 - 0.03227377
30% crit - 0.06923382 - 0.06475087
35% crit - 0.09080456 - 0.08324549
40% crit - 0.11428154 - 0.10256074
45% crit - 0.13967344 - 0.12255567
50% crit - 0.16667160 - 0.14286077
55% crit - 0.19515917 - 0.16329136
60% crit - 0.22497382 - 0.18365602
100% crit - 0.5 - 0.33333333

*capable of proccing, that is. Note that Living Bomb can't proc HS.
Accuracy seems to be fine for about 4 positions after decimal point.

We got a discussion going on at the german WoW forums about this, and some guy came up with this equation:
y = x²/(1+x²)
Where y = chance of getting HS Proc per capable proc and
x = chance to crit.
The idea goes like this: HS will proc if two consecutive casts crit, but the first one did not proc HS.
y = x*x*(1-y) (solving for y gives us the equation above).
I think there is an error somewhere in this line of thought, but I can't figure out where (50% crit with this equation gives us 0.2 for example instead of 0.16667; 100% crit is fine with 0.5). Any ideas? Or maybe it's just the Math.random function giving non equal distributed values...

Roywyn · 09/27/08, 7:30 AM

Originally Posted by Saphya

We got a discussion going on at the german WoW forums about this, and some guy came up with this equation:
y = x²/(1+x²)
Where y = chance of getting HS Proc per capable proc and
x = chance to crit.
The idea goes like this: HS will proc if two consecutive casts crit, but the first one did not proc HS.
y = x*x*(1-y) (solving for y gives us the equation above).
I think there is an error somewhere in this line of thought, but I can't figure out where (50% crit with this equation gives us 0.2 for example instead of 0.16667; 100% crit is fine with 0.5). Any ideas? Or maybe it's just the Math.random function giving non equal distributed values...

The problem is that the events are not indepedent. Thus you can't find the probabilities of the events by muliplying.
In particular, the event "first cast crits, chance x", and "first cast doesn't trigger Hot Streak, chance y" are not independant.

The also isn't a universal "chance to proc Hot Streak". You have to calculate all the different "chance to proc Hot Streak on the n-th cast". I did that with a very long Excel chart.

dedmonwakeen · 09/27/08, 9:04 AM

New version of SimulationCraft (r559) available:

* General
o Change mana from intellect method to only return 1-for-1 for the first 20 intellect
o Change health from stamina method to only return 1-for-1 for the first 20 stamina
o Changed method for base pet 5% crit such that it may be modified with "gear" in the config file if necessary
o Cleaned up method pet uses to inherit attributes from owner
o In raid_wotlk.txt, Spirit on gear increased from 250 to 500
* Druid
o Fix initialization order of Treants such that they take advantage of Brambles.
* Mage
o Add arcane_brilliance to Mage action lists
o Mage_Arcane now able to use Molten Armor with increased Spirit on gear (but no longer uses Arcane Power)
o Arcane Barrage no longer procs Missile Barrage
o Arcane Blast benefits from Incineration
o Arcane spells get cost reduction from Arcane Focus
o New Pyroblast mechanics for WotLK
o Change to 2pcT5 for WotLK
o Critical Mass provides 2% per talent point, up from 1%
o Mind Mastery reduced from 25% to 15%
o Update base attribute values
* Priest
o Clean up initialization order of Shadowfiend
* Shaman
o Level 80 Totem of Wrath increased to 280 Spell Power
* Warlock
o Change stacking passive damage-enhancing talents to be additive instead of multiplicative.
o Clean up initialization order of Warlock pets

Saphya · 09/27/08, 9:28 AM

A friend of mine came up with a slighty different equation for Hot Streak and I think this time it's actually right

HSC = C² / (1+C)

HSC= Hot Streak chance per cast capable of proccing Hot Streak.
C = Crit chance of this cast (like Fireball)

With this we get:

10% Crit => 0.00909090...
20% Crit => 0.03333....
30% Crit => 0.069231
35% Crit => 0.090741
40% Crit => 0.114286
50% Crit => 0.166667
100%Crit=> 0.5

If you want to get numbers like Arazan (%usage of HS Procs) it's HSC / (HSC + 1)

So if this equation could be verified you can use this for modelling Deep Fire (use different values for C if necessary for Scorch and Fireball).

arch · 09/27/08, 10:03 AM

Did anyone stop to consider what profession combination we benefit the most out of? I realize Blizzard are doing their best to make every profession equally valuable to all classes, but there might be a select few professions that lean towards our class more than others. Personally I'm looking at enchanting/inscription but the alleged removal of the extra glyph slot for inscriptionists made me hesitate.

Roywyn · 09/27/08, 10:06 AM

Originally Posted by Saphya

A friend of mine came up with a slighty different equation for Hot Streak and I think this time it's actually right

HSC = C² / (1+C)

Fits my Excel chart really really well. Was suspecting some kind of formula due to fractional values, but didn't try too hard looking for something.

Originally Posted by arch

Did anyone stop to consider what profession combination we benefit the most out of? I realize Blizzard are doing their best to make every profession equally valuable to all classes, but there might be a select few professions that lean towards our class more than others. Personally I'm looking at enchanting/inscription but the alleged removal of the extra glyph slot for inscriptionists made me hesitate.

Stuff is in motion and things change back and forth quite often.
It's also not clear what does or is supposed to stack or not.
Check the WotLK profession thread The WotLK profession thread

JC with 3 prismatic gems, LW with bracer enchants, Enchanting with ring enchants, Inscription with shoulder enchants and BS with 2 sockets (unclear whether they stack with enchants or not) are the top contenders currently.
Exact numbers change from build to build as well.