◊ manly

edit: new patch

pre early alpha hearsay

-Torment the Weak - Your Frostbolt, Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, Arcane Missiles, and Arcane Barrage abilities deal 4/8/12% more damage to Snared targets.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Lhivera

...wha....whaaaa? Ghostcrawler was talking about limiting the spells that received the boost, not those that applied a workable snare? This kind of boggles the mind.

Heh...so 15% was too low, 20% was too high, but 16% is just right!

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.

 

◊ manly

No actually parsing DBC files by hand kind of sucks and the last rank was not spotted, its still 20%

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

arch

Having our dps balanced around such a situational condition as a snare being present does not make me happy. It needs to be moved further down the tree.

 

PSGarak

Putting such a large boost for all specs in a (relatively) accessible place in the Arcane tree could be their way of walling off Frostfire specs from viability until they're done balancing it .

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

◊ manly

Its really really odd. As-if the talent was not already very dumb, it had serious potential for a frost mage, but no it doesn't work with frostbolt. I'm not sure what exactly they are trying to do with it, but it sure looks like a fiery payback trainwreck.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Xentropy

It's fine in its current position in the tree iff snares are consistently NOT applicable on bosses. It'd make it a solid trash/solo talent with no bearing on boss fights and thus not too bad.

If it works in boss fights even with the requirement of an arcane mage to be "slow bitch", it's pigeonholing every single raider into 18 arcane and taking us right back into raid stacking and careful discussion of who provides what spec, which I couldn't be more strongly against and goes against Blizzard's new buff/debuff designs to boot.

 

Roywyn

Sims vs. Models
I absolutely love sims because they can tell me something that I can't figure out by hand.
I absolutely hate sims because they don't tell me why things are that way.

I actually did make Markov chains for the old Hot Streak, but not for the new one. And the rational number on proc chances at 40/50/60% crit on the simmed results made me think, but I didn't sit down and look for a model/formula until others tried it.

When I actually sat down and found it, I was quite happy because I could hack Hot Streak in my sheet to automatically adjust its proc rate to the triggering spell's crit rate.
Before, I did that by hand. Because I suck at Excel I guess.


Blizzard and MoE
Someone filed a bug report that he got some small amount of mana back from MoE and the reply was that it's intended to get only less back.
He got roughly 30% of 1/8 of the spell cost back at his level.
So, can someone check Blizzard/Missiles/Bomb with MoE when the servers come back up?

World of Warcraft (English) Forums -> [Bug] Master of Elements and Blizzard

Amplify
I think it's value nearly doubled because it seems it adds the +healing value as +spell power, thus giving 188% benefit.
That was just eyeballing numbers though.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Ploppy

I guess what we´re all waiting for now is some kind of talent change that refreshes slow, (a bit of the same idea for spellweaving other classes are seing with their dots), maby having AM refresh it? That along with some buffing to its damage would perhaps be incentive enoughe to start using AM occasionally even outside procs. Perhaps its to late for overhauls this major now, could be that the only tweaks we will se before launch is simple number tuning. But even if it looks really fun arcane will continue to feel a bit awkward as long as the arcane schools base nuke has 13 talent points dedicated to it but is only reasonable to use on procs.

 

solbergb

Actually sims give you something the equation does not. They give you the standard deviation which gives you insight about how much you can count on this "Average" result. Consider that a 3 minute fight is 60-70 spells in a normal fireball rotation

If you take 70 casts at random from my sim, you get things like this for how many pyroblasts proc

16
11
11
10
9
13
8
14
12
9


Get enough of these and you get the distribution, and can predict the range with confidence levels,
do capability analysis and all kinds of other geeky things that we do in manufacturing and business world
to control processes.

Getting 8 pyroblasts vs 16 is going to have a big impact on actual WWS stats for a boss fight. Hot streak
is more random than a lot of other things we count on as mages, although stacking crit helps narrow
the standard deviation quite a bit.

It is far easier to do statistical modeling of this size with a brute force program generating data and
a statistical engine like Minitab than to actually do the math the way we did it in my engineering training.
(back in the stone ages, we didn't even HAVE spreadsheets. If we wanted to plot a curve, we had to write
a program to plot it....before I got real jobs, that was my whole programming experience...oneoff stuff
to plot data generated in laboratory work)

So while the equation generated above is very helpful for theorycrafting and working in the hot streak
formula with all the other math associated with rotation DPS, it may not reflect actual real world conditions
as well as a simulation does. With 65000 castings I had a tight variance, fractions of one percent. With
70 castings....my curve is very wide.

I don't want to downplay the equation. I hated matrix algebra when I had to learn it and forgot it as soon as I could. But my main problem wasn't the difficulty of the math, it was that I set up the problem wrong to solve it that way. I did not recognize that there was a way to look at it to get the dependent variables independent. Very elegant. But it only produces the average easily. I think you can take the curve and do statistical analysis on it too, but it really is easier to just plot the curve and measure it.

 

Roywyn

That is kind of nice for someone who absolutely wants to level as arcane.
It's high enough in the tree that it can't be taken by someone who levels as frost or fire (needs level 77 for 18/0/51+X).

The condition is that is must not work on bosses ever.
Also, why no Arcane Blast on that? Someone pushed the button too often?


On the value of mana
It's been a while since the post about values of mana if burnt via Living Bomb. Since then, a lot happened.
The spirit-regen coefficient was reduced.
Replenish was reduced.
Talents increased the damage of Fireball.
Living Bomb has a bug that gives it a downranking penalty.

That means that
A) we get less mana from our mana stats and
B) we get less extra damage per point of excess mana.

That actually makes mana stats even less valuable than they were before.


JoW also has become meaningless, but that is probably a bug (bug report was replied to with a request of independant confirmation.
I'll have a closer look at mana once we know how things are actually supposed to work.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Jarlyn

They just don't get mages right now. It's really sort of sad. The majority of the changes lately have all either been head scratchers or just flat bad.

 

sz123

Why would they add FFB to it? Casting FFB with that many points in arcane? Doesn't make much sense

 

Copernicus

At this point, the only thing I can assume is that's it's designed as a PvP talent and they don't expect it to be useful in PvE raiding.

 

◊ manly

MMO-C reports slightly different (keep in mind mine was very preliminary)

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Searix

And the question remains: Is there anything in frost that works on bosses that would proc Torment the Weak? Or is Slow still the only spell?

 

grayrest

In fairness, it was 15% without ABr and 20% with. I'm curious how they'll fit 16% in 5 points...

There was a guy on the official forum that corrected me when I said MoE wasn't working on AM and said that he was getting 66-67 mana per missile crit. 66.66 is exactly 30% of 1/5 of the base cost of AM. Didn't get around to checking it personally.

 

macbeet

It seems to be a four pointer now.

 

PSGarak

Actually, you can get the Variance from most methods, which is the square of the standard deviation. Statistics tends to use standard deviation because it's in the same units as the mean, probability tends to use variance because it has certain linear properties (doubling a random variable doubles its variance). It's generally harder to get because it permutes strangely so it has a lower threshold of me reaching for a keyboard instead of a pencil, but it tends to be less useful so I guess that evens out.

The difficulty with the variance of markov chains is that you have a list of probabilities but no values. In this particular case, we're interested in the binary question "is this cast a hot streak" so we can assign utility values (0,0,1) to (x,y,z). Then using the formula (E stands for expectation, same thing as mean or average), some arithmetic leads to

I hated probability with a passion, so I'm not very good at it. I suppose this goes against what I said earlier, but I would be interested in verifying that this looks like the square of (non-normalized) standard deviation that people have gotten from sims.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Tamraine

This is actually kind of strange, but it does allow some interesting (and, unfortunately, nearly mandatory) synergy between mage specs. Slow becomes Arcane's Imp Scorch/Winter's Chill. I suppose now you will want a mage for Improved Scorch (and/or) Winter's Chill, and a second mage that primarily keeps Slow up for the aforementioned Imp Scorch mage ((who has chosen to go deep enough to get Torment, which isn't unreasonable -- Magic Absorption, Clearcasting, Focus Magic make the bullet fairly easy to swallow..and 52 points left over are plenty to get all you need in fire).

It's interesting, but it reminds me too much of the days when you had to go into Arcane to pick up Improved Arcane Explosion. 12% damage is a lot. I figure it'll probably be changed, or possibly even scrapped. That or they'll make bosses immune to Slow, in which case it'll live a dull life as a pvp talent.

Edit: Meh, smarter, faster people have already posted this.

 

Cabrian

I'm assuming this was a typo as the proc rate for missile barrage in the previous build was:

3/6/9/12/20%

so

4/8/12/16/20% would make much more sense.

 

CHeeSY-CrAfT

I don't know where people are continuing to get the notion that slow works on bosses; every raid boss I have encountered CANNOT be slowed, they are immune. This is a PvP talent as it's currently implemented.

 

Talq

If a frost mage is soloing and has Glyph of Frostbolt, then they would need to use FFB to apply the snare. Slim reasoning, I know. Still another reason to detest Glyph of Frostbolt.

 

Arazan

I don't think it was ever supposed to be usable on raid bosses. It just didn't make sense as a pve talent. However, it makes PERFECT sense as a pvp talent, as it completely reinforces the mage style of pvp in kiting and hitting really hard.

What's interesting though is that most dungeon and heroic bosses can be snared, which makes mages absolutely batshit insanely amazing as 5man dps'ers... but we'll still fall far behind in the raid situation...

 

grayrest

You mentioned Malygos but it's possible that he's immune due to being a blue dragon. There was a request for checking on the Naxx bosses and I didn't ever see a response to that. Are you saying that you've checked it on a bunch of bosses and it doesn't work? This isn't me wanting to see torment working on bosses, just to get the mechanics down.