I was just pointing out that crit increase talents are low in their trees only because they are school specific. Spell Power was moved up the tree specifically to avoid Spell Power and Burnout being used at the same time. This has allowed Burnout to be 2x as good as what it originally was (remember how bad it used to be ? was 25% and took a ton of mana). Untying both talents allowed Burnout to be twice as good.

Personally I don't really care all that much where the deep-tree talents go to. As long as they aren't moved in the sub-25 talents, I'm all for it. Moving any talent from 30+ into 25+ talent has no real impact for deep-tree specs. It does, however, allow hybrid specs to exist, unlike the current model. I am talking here about 30/41 builds that currently mostly don't exist because they pushed the good tree talents deep, rather than (oddly enough) push all the better talents within the 30-40 range, which gives the option for players to consider hybrid builds.

I posted about that there:
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Restructuring the trees to allow elementalist

I agree that putting spell power in tier 3 of the arcane tree would essentially force all mages to put at very least, 8 pts in Arcane. This isn't what I am after.

Arcane needs a lot of work right now, and I think that the biggest issue with the entire tree is that its primary nuke (AM) simply stinks. Its far too long of a cast to be effective in fights that require moving. Its far to expensive to nuke without finishing the cast. Its far to weak to be used as a primary nuke. Why not make it Arcane Missile (singular) and make it a 1.5s cast that works similar to Wrath for Boomkin?

I think the should push the arcane tree to work more closely with Boomkin DPS. Have talents that allow Arcane Blast and Arcane Missile feed off of each other and give each other bonuses based on a number of things. Arcane Blast being our Starfire and Arcane Missile being our Wrath.

Unfortunately 'high instantaneous single target burst damage' and 'able to dps better on the move' are not exactly non-dps related. If they are indeed real advantage, shouldn't that mean higher dps over frost spec?

I wonder if the solution is to do something like this:

scorch-fireball-till-hotstreak-scorch-pyro-fireball till hotstreak

You will probably hot streak in some period of time < 30 seconds. If not use the 8 fireball/1 scorch rotation.

You are overscorching, but your ignites never get munched because you're not going to get simultaneous hits ever. The tradeoff there would be interesting. I'll probably do the math once 3.0 comes out and the talents have stabilized.

They are in some fights. Which are ignored in these discussions sometimes as "gimmick fights". They also are pretty important in PVP. I know warlocks consider themselves to have a significant advantage over mages in fights with mobility because less of thier overall DPS is tied to "hold still and use non-instant spells".

On raids the high burst damage is for me mostly used on trash that escape the tank and are heading toward the healer. But it's also used on dangerous but fragile adds to boss fights. The frost snares are often used the same way, to slow down loose trash or kite dangerous adds in boss fights.

Burst is more useful in 5 and 10 mans than 25 mans, as your individual contribution to raid DPS is higher on a percentage basis, so your odds of killing an elite mostly by yourself before you die are also higher. It is possible the ideal 10 man raiding mage is going to value talents of this sort differently than an ideal 25 man raiding mage.

They're not related to sustained DPS; they will be useful in some fights, depending on design, and not useful in others where sustained DPS and efficiency are more important. In other words, they will occasionally convey an advantage that results in dealing higher damage -- just as Ice Barrier will occasionally convey an advantage by reducing required stam gear, resulting in dealing higher damage. They are all situational advantages, in other words, that should not be weighed against sustained DPS.

I'm stitting at ~1700 damage with all Naxx gear/gems/enchants.

It would take a lock to have ~800 more damage plus totem of wrath to compete with totem of wrath.
I don't see demonic pact being a competitor to TOW till we get at least Tier 9 gear.

For single target burst damage that matters in raids, isn't fire the worst spec because of ignite? That pushes the crit bonus back. Frost also has the advantage of water elemental/cold snap, which rules on very short fights. Arcane can sustain full arcane blast on very short fights. I think fire is actually the weakest burst-wise.

Depends what you mean by burst. I tend to think that even without a crit, a Fireball/Fire Blast combo is going to dish out more pain in 4 seconds than a Frost Mage can. If you can stand close to the target and it's important enough to blow a bunch of mana, you can do even better by blowing some instant AOE's while you're at it. If you're talking about a 60-second time frame, then yes, the Frost Mage is going to put out more damage. This is why I refer to instantaneous burst instead of generic burst: even without any ignite damage at all, a Fireball/Fire Blast combo is going to do more damage than a Frost Nova/Ice Lance combo, even assuming the target is freezable.

Living Bomb complicates the issue in crazy ways, but yes, the basic rotation of:

Scorch to 5 debuffs, Fireball until HS or 8 fireballs scorch if needed, Scorch->Pyro on HS

Will result in a greatly reduced volume of lost ignite damage, and an as yet undetermined average gain of ignite damage. This will be very difficult to model whether scorching pre-pyro will damage your DPS in any significant way compared to the damage caused by lost ignites. We need a better way to model expected loss / gain of ignite before we can accurately describe whether or not scorching to avoid it will be better or worse.

So, uh, in a shameless plug... Download zit, and upload the bug files to me, and I can have a better picture of how this works, and maybe provide a system for predicting loss / gain.

LOL@Lhiv
Suddenly the burst advantage becomes not so clear cut eh? ;p
You gotta show me the math man...in 4 second if we take into account all the talents like FoF, Brain freeze, hot streak, ignite etc...does a fire mage really out do a frost mage?

Even then, I'm sure it's less ambiguous if you compare survivability between frost and fire

I'm sorry, is "zit" a WoW addon that shows Ignite damage lost? If not, where can I get an add-on that will track this. I can't imagine it would be terribly difficult.

FWIW, in my rather limited testing of ZIT over a few naxx half runs, it seems I am zeroing-in to 0 damage gained/lossed. I really wasn't expecting that. Over 3 million ignite damage total, I've had it stay in the -10 -20k ignite range for 2 days, then on the next day it jumped back from there into +8k gain.

Seriously, I don't disagree with you that sustained dps needs to be balanced among the trees.
Someone mentioned 'specialization'. I like that word and I hope to see each tree has a specialization that gives it a distinct and practical advantage - and that the mage class has at least 3 viable raiding specs. But that's in the ideal world which I'm not sure if Blizzard can deliver. I'd only be too glad if they could just balance the mage class against other classes.

Oop, forgot to link it.

http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/zit/zitv04.zip

http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/zit/parse3.php

There will be a v0.5 out probably tuesday night or wednesday that records more information and hopefully I'll be able to fix the combat structure issue that Living Bomb tends to incur.


Manly, when you get a chance, would you mind passing your bug file up to me? I'll be working on the gantt chart and analysis stuff tonight and tomorrow, and would love some data outside of my own.

This will naturally become expected. Proper balance should tend us towards that direction. Every build will have intangibles in the forms of what you listed for example. While I classify them as 'intangibles', in reality I do value them highly. Off the top of my head:

-Mobility (damage on the move, usually determined by amount of instant casts, casting time of spells, and range up to some point)
-Range
-'Burst' damage (I do believe that sub-1min bursts are a myth, but then theres always the azgalor exception)
-Dependency on other players / buffs (this can include your pet)
-Ramp-up time (scorch, AB stacking, etc.)
-Pushback protection
-Mana consumption rate (while minor most of the time, being able to stretch your mana for a long while can be interesting. Anyone doing KT in wotlk naxx will know what I mean)
-AOE
-Survivability (this can include your pet)

With this said, while those 'intangibles' have no direct dps value attributable in TC, a mage should recognize the strength and weaknesses of each of those. With this said, I do believe some of those intangibles should be somewhat mutually exclusive. For instance, I believe that burst damage and mobility should not be together. A build having poor mobility should have good burst damage to make up for it (assuming you want to balance 'mobility' dps of course, which isn't a requirement per-se). Some of those intangibles are linked together as well.

Two not so informative blue posts in beta forum, though he does confirm frostfire bolt was added with resistance/immunity fights in mind.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> If you don't hear us....

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Mage problems consolidated! Need a Blue!

I believe the reason for this is

#1 - there is a PVP board
#2 - solo play is assumed to be trivially easy by Elitist Jerks regardless of spec or gear

It bugs me sometimes that trash killing efficiency is often discounted entierly in favor of boss fight performance as I have been with groups that are great on bosses but wipe on trash, and in timed situations where execution on trash is a big part of the reward (ZA is the most obvious current one, but there are others going at least as far back as Strathholme)

Progression raiders spend most of their time wiping on bosses. Farm raiders spend most of their time trying to get past the trash as efficiently as possible. Neither really worry much about survivability, but things like mobility, burst DPS and AOE let you pull faster so some raiders do care about that. Fortunately having good single target mana efficiency and DPS often translates into being pretty good at that other stuff.

Aye, I have no argument with that. These intangibles are valuable, it's just that their value is...erratic, shall we say, ranging from utterly worthless on many fights to nearly indispensable on others. Their chief value is in distinguishing the specs, giving your mage an identity beyond the colored balls he hurls around. They are, in short, like the recently-flattened raid buffs and debuffs: Warlock Buff A might be very useful in this fight, or maybe you've got a Death Knight and it's not useful at all; that extreme variability of value means that by definition, you can't really factor it into balance. You just have to figure that it'll be useful roughly as often as somebody else's occasionally useful thing, let them cancel each other out, and balance the DPS.


I figure since we're talking about raid DPS balance, we're talking in context of PvE raid fights. Blizzard's already made clear that they don't any longer (if they ever did) consider it a good thing to balance PvE performance against PvP performance. Class/Spec A and Class/Spec B should be pretty much equal in both PvP and PvE. If they're equal in PvE and unequal in PvP, the solution is to try to make them more equal in PvP, not to make them unequal in PvE. This isn't really up for debate; it's implicit in Blizzard's goal of making all trees viable for both types of content, and for all DPS specs to produce roughly equal DPS.


Au contraire, they were very informative indeed. The claim that we all seem to be pretty happy with the general design of our talents and abilities is extremely enlightening.

I don't think it's highly situational. For a huge portion of Hyjal/BT fights, frost's water ele/cold snap/water ele burst is already or almost the entire fight, like Faxmonkey pointed out. That and arcane mages didn't have trouble sustaining arcane blast during those fights.

The 4 second burst that fire has is really good, but that almost never comes into play in a raiding environment. Whereas the ignite penalty on killing adds does come up quite often. Manly once said that fire is the worst spec on killing trash mobs. Most adds on boss fights are generally trash-mob like. Just a listing of encounters from T5 to Sunwell in TBC with trash mob like adds include Hydross (if you choose single target), Lurker Below, Vashj, A'lar, Solarian, Kael (if you choose to single target the weapons), Anetheron, Shade of Akama and M'uru. I don't have experience with Kil'jaeden yet. 9 out of 30 fights isn't highly situational. In these cases, with exception for immunities, ignite penalty is pretty hefty.

Also going to Manly's list of intangibles. Fire isn't well represented there while arcane seems the best. If all specs do similar sustained dps, fire would need more advantages in the realm of intangibles.

Ah, but the Water Elemental is a double-edged sword, isn't it? Yes, it's true that the Frost Mage's DPS while the Water Elemental is up is considerably higher than the Fire Mage's -- but while the Water Elemental is not up, it's considerably lower. The Frost Mage's performance is therefore more sensitive to encounter length than the Fire Mage's, with its average damage output fluctuating between points lower than Fire and higher than Fire. Saving the Water Elemental for extended burst damage is indeed very occasionally useful (very occasionally), but doing so means sacrificing average DPS due to wasted cooldown time -- so it evens out (roughly).

Remember that the Water Elemental is not an average DPS advantage for the Frost Mage -- he needs maximum uptime to break even (or should, once DPS balancing is complete). It does provide sustained burst on demand which is an advantage on a fight like Shade of Akama. But just as often, it puts 10% of your DPS at risk of being ineffective on a fight like Gorefiend. So once again, it's going to roughly balance out.

Molten Fury is another of those very situational flavor abilities. Usually, we quite correctly just count it as an average increase of no special value, but there are occasional fights where higher DPS at the end of the encounter is particularly valuable, and on these encounters, Fire has an advantage.

I believe you'll find that most people felt that killing parasites on Illidan was actually quicker and easier as Fire spec than Frost spec, just for one counterexample. Two GCD's had them both dead, vs. 3-4 for a Frost Mage.

So again, what it continues to boil down to is that each tree has some distinctive advantages that come into play on rare occasions, and most of the time they don't. DPS is the only reliable constant, and it's what needs to be balanced if we're not to have people forced to respec over and over as they raid.

That was precisely my point.
That was also the reason for the argument that fire should be compensated by higher dps. But you cannot argue with dps, so fire came on top of all raiding builds.