Saruk

I'm not in the beta so I am not too sure about this, but doesn't FFB also have a snare? I know it's a longer cast, but in a PvE environment especially, are you going to realistically be spamming FFB to snare multiple mobs if you have the Frostbolt glyph? It seems like this is the perfect glyph for upping frostbolt dmg and FFB is the 'filler' spell when you absolutely need a snare. You are obviously not going to use the glyph for PvP, but it's not like you have no option with FFB there for the few (very few) times you are going to need to snare a mob in PvE.

 

itchytf

It would certainly be nice if you could equip all glyphs and switch the ones you want active at will, however it's probably more likely to work more like how gems or enchants so if you want to replace a glyph you'll have to destroy the previous one. It'd certainly be a complete change in policy if they did implement it your way, but then they've been talking about having multiple specs so anything's possible!

 

Ivorthemage

Locking people into a spec due to their glyph choice would be a major departure for Blizzard. They allow complete respeccing for a max of 50g. They make sure healing gear causes some spell damage to avoid forcing healers to completely regear if they want to do a bit of dps while grinding. They overhaul spell power to make it more generic.

But then they make you choose brand new glyphs, destroying your old ones, every time you want to play a bit differently?

I can't make sense of it. The options I see:

1) Hotswapping of glyphs is allowed, maybe with a cooldown to avoid people changing their glyphs for every different trash fight in an instance.

2) Multiple glyph setups are allowed, similar to what Blizzard is supposedly doing with support for multiple specs.

3) Re-glyphing is required, but its cheap. If re-speccing is 50g at level 70, I can't see many people complaining if they have to spend that same 50g plus another 50g for glyphs when they want to pvp.

4) Blizzard does lock people into being optimized for one part of the game, and a lot of players min max by glyphing for PVE in WoW and deciding that the optimal pvp play is a different PVP MMORPG.

That last point is critical, I think. The last thing Blizzard wants to do right now, IMO, is force players to choose whether they are pvpers or pveers.

 

Prom

I'm one of the few who loves the frostbolt glyph (something I've been expecting for some time) however I must admit that I understand where most ppl are coming from.
This is a great raiding glyph, however many other players farm/pvp outside of raids and this glyph makes frostbolt pretty useless in these situations. There is frostfire bolt but its not the same, and we don't even know if a similar FFB glyph may appear.

I think someone posted about glyphs a few pages back saying that they will be kind of permanent, they will have certain charges and decay/expire over a period of time, or something like that. I'm sure everyone wishes that they were hot-swappable so that you could change them on-the-fly between raiding or farming, however I don't think that Blizzard plans to make it that easy for us.

They must find it difficult....
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
rather than truth as the authority.

 

Lhivera

Typical farming/questing for me is Frostbolt from max range, shatter combo on Frostbite. With snare, I can expect four Frostbolts before the target reaches me if I get unlucky and it doesn't die first. This is the essence of the solo Frost playstyle. I can't remember the last time I used Cone of Cold, because targets should be dead before they get close enough to use it, and if they aren't, I frost nova them and finish them off.

The problem with using FFB instead of Frostbolt for this purpose is that for a deep Frost Mage, FFB only does about 86% of the damage of his Frostbolt, and it does it in 120% of the time.

In any case, those of us who can have made our opinions known on the beta forum and hopefully Blizzard will take them into account.

Regarding the respec issue, I would argue that yes, WoW does need more methods to...well, not lock people in, but discourage them from changing specs so frequently. They are, after all, doing a great deal of work to make sure that you don't need to change specs -- yes, a given spec will still be better for a type of content than another spec, but the performance range should be narrowed considerably. As they said in their raid stacking post, they're taking the view that most people won't worry about a 3% difference in the strength of of a debuff.

It follows that they're also taking the view that most people won't worry about respeccing for a small improvement in performance. This frees them up to attach some more expensive penalties to respeccing, such as the necessity to change your glyphs. Especially with gold income skyrocketing at level 80, this allows them to help keep a significant cost attached to respecs without raising the actual gold cost, which would have a more significant impact on lower-level characters who are still finding out what spec they prefer to play.

Now of course I don't know that this is the way they're going with it, but that's my guess.


I've been thinking about this as well. The limitation now is that they can really only prevent things from stacking if they do the exact same thing. However, what if they could make the system more sophisticated so that it could intelligently apply the strongest buff you have access to?

The example I've been thinking of is the new Felhunter aura, Fel Intelligence, which increases both your Intellect and your Spirit by 5% (when talented). If you have 1000 Intellect and 1000 Spirit, it will increase both by 50. It could conflict with both Arcane Brilliance (+60) and Prayer of Spirit (+80).

The way I'd do it, if I could, is that the aura would apply to anyone in range, but they would only get the strongest of the two Intellect and the two Spirit effects. So if you had a Mage in the group, but no Priest, you'd get +60 Int from AB and +50 Spirit from FI. If you had a Priest but no Mage, you'd get +50 Int from FI and +80 Spirit from PoS. If you had both, you'd just get the increases from the Mage/Priest buffs, and if you had neither, you'd get both increases from FI.

A similar deal could be struck with spell damage and crit bonuses. Example: You have +5% crit from Moonkin aura, and you have +10% crit from Winter's Chill. Fire, Frost and Arcane spells get +10% crit only, all other schools get +5%.

I'm not sure how far they want to take this whole non-stacking thing, but if the engine can make some dynamic decisions, a system like this might work.

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.

 

Rouncer

I have another rationale for why I think they will work that way, with only one major glyph and one minor one being active out of three of each. If you look at the Glyph page in the spell book it has space for exactly 3 of each and yet the bonus to being an inscriptor is that you get to have an extra Glyph active. Sure they could have a separate page that activates when you become an Inscriptor but I don't see that as being that likely. Also having 3 Glyphs active at a time would give a lot of issues with respec/replacement costs as well as greatly ramping up the power of each individual class (which would make it much harder to balance them all).

I picture it being like a trinket to activate, ie you click it and it deactivates the current Glyph and activates the new Glyph which starts a 30 second cooldown before it is active and that you can only activate/deactivate a Glyph when out of combat. As for swapping them, I agree they will probably be like Gems in that putting a new one in place destroys the old one, but since you could only have 1 active at a time you likely wouldn't need to replace a Glyph just due to respeccing since you could have Glyphs in place for up to 3 specs that you would normally use. The only people that wouldn't apply to would be Inscriptors (since they get to use 2 major glyphs) but provided the mats are reasonable they wouldn't have too many issues with destroying/overwritting glyphs since they would be making their own replacements.

 

Spiry

I was under the impression that the extra glyph merely appeared in the middle of the circle of glyphs.

 

Masaru

I've been wondering for awhile what the level 80 itemization is going to look like and this might be our first look, some gloves from Heroic Nexus. Not raid gear, but a level 80 epic, at least:

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...icnexus_15.jpg

49 stam
51 int
44 spirit
Red Socket
Bonus: 4 hit
equip: crit rating 36
equip: spell power 68

So it looks like Spirit is alive and well on caster dps gloves. The base white stats are pretty hefty. Does mean we will be walking around with 2x the mana pools we have now? The amount of spell power is fairly significant, too, so perhaps we can extrapolate what bonus spell power really is going to look like at 80.

 

Rouncer

You could be right or I could be right or we could both be completely wrong and it could be something else entirely.

That's why it's retarded to get all worked up over one specific Glyph, until you (referring to the mages in this thread) see the whole system there really is no point.

 

Zeldyrr

Looks like the big difference is in base stats. Compare to one of the best cloth gloves currently available, the Sunfire Handwraps:

[Sunfire Handwraps]

+33 stam
+30 int
2 red sockets
SB: +4 damage
+37 crit
+53 "spell power"

With two red sockets and the socket bonus (using level 70 gems) you can reach +81 spell power.

Epic red gems at level 80 give +23 spell power, so that means the level 80 gloves are

+16 stam
+21 int
+44 spirit
+10 spell power
+4 hit
+2 crit

Of course, if you put two +23 gems in the handwraps, you get +103 spell power, so the level 80's would be -12.

To me the striking difference is that spell power, crit, hit are all "about the same", and +stats is through the roof. Of course, level 80 raid items can be itemized completely different.

I do think this means we might see a repeat of leveling to 70 in BC. Raiders will keep there gear for a long, long time but be glass cannons with the lack of stats. When they finally do switch to WotLK gear, they will see a huge increase in health and mana pools, but modest increases in damage.

 

Raglu

This do-able, and probably the intended way of "preventing" stacking.

The reason I say this with some confidence is because this is how elixirs worked before the Alchemy changes (the same changes that made "Battle" and "Guardian" elixirs). When you used Arcane Intellect and Elixir of Sages, the Arcane Intellect's stronger Intellect buff worked, but you received no additional Intellect from the Elixir--you did, however, receive the Spirit from Elixir of Sages.

 

ebbv

Don't forget that going from T3/Naxx gear to KZ/T4/Gruul gear was a similar gain in stats but drop or break-even in spellpower on most items. From then on we got a slow increase in stats but a drastic increase in spellpower going from T4 up to Sunwell gear. I'd guess that it's going to be the same story at 80 from the looks of things.

 

Ivorthemage

Lhivera said:

1) You have long argued that Blizzard should make respeccing harder. While I disagree with it, that isn't the issue here. Instead, its that Blizzard itself disagrees with you. Locking people into one spec is directly at odds with everything else they have done in the game to date. You might like it if they changed, but I am highly skeptical that this is something they are going to change lightly, given their track record and lack of statements saying they want to hurt respeccing.

2) Avoiding a respec for small performance changes is one thing, but if they continue to have talents which are great for pve but suck for pvp (elemental precision, playing with fire) or are great for pvp but inferior for pve (magic absorption, improved blink, shattered barrier, blazing speed), people will want to respec, and are likely to have significant pvp or pve performance issues if they don't. For instance, a frost mage who wants to go 18 deep in fire for improved scorch can only do so at the expense of a lot of solid pvp frost or arcane talents, or keep the pvp frost talents at the expense of pve mana efficiency. That hasn't changed.

I would agree that it would be ideal if you could spec however you wanted and your pvp and pve performance would be identical, but I think that is a very unrealistic goal, if those spec differences are supposed to be meaningful in any way.

Given that, I don't see how Blizzard can square the circle of:

A) Giving people flexibility for different aspects of game play (raiding, pvp, solo pve)
B) Disallowing that flexibility for glyphs.

Either respeccing becomes useless (great, I can respec frost for pvp, but my glypyhs are all for fire pve so I am owned by pvp glyphed players), or glyphs have to be flexible. Since Blizzard has gone out of its way to allow flexibility, I am betting on glyphs being flexible. Again, you can do that while still disallowing hot swapping. Just make the glyphs cheap.

If Blizzard locks people into one spec by either forcing suboptimal play in another spec or the outpouring of huge amounts of gold to change, Lhivera might be happy, but Blizzard would have a widespread player revolt on its hands.

 

solbergb

So...the windup time on the first bolt doesn't matter much, so frostfirebolt should be ok as it is only .5s longer and the mob isn't even aware of you yet. It isn't like we're talking pyroblast-level time increases.

Frostfirebolt is longer range, so that's good for an opener too. If it's too long range for chaincasting, choke up to frostbolt range.

Frostfirebolt will also proc frostbite as often as frostbolt.

Your additional frostbolts will hit harder, including shatter combos.

Assuming permafrost, the chill effect from frostfirebolt will last till the monster is dead when soloing. So it doesn't matter that frostbolts don't extend it. Worst case you do a point blank cone of cold to re-establish the chill (because if it has worn off, the mob is in melee with you).

I'm sorry, I just don't see the issue here. I've done enough frost to know that it takes a number of frostbolts to kill level appropriate stuff solo, and that will mean the extra glyph damage from the several bolts will overcome the damage loss by using frostfirebolt as the opener. You're no worse off than you were before in solo kills, and you're doing more damage on everything that can't be snared (which is most group content).

Lets say it takes you four frostbolts to kill a typical mob. That means it takes 10 seconds of real time, 7.5 seconds in combat. Using your numbers, with a frostfire bolt and three frostbolts it is taking 10.5 seconds of real time, 7.5 seconds in combat. .86+1.05+1.05+1.05 = 4.01*frostbolt damage - same damage exactly, except shatter combos do more, same amount of time in combat. If it takes more than 4 frostbolts, the glyph+frostfire is strictly superior.

(iirc, chill from frostfirebolt lasts 9s, 12s with permafrost. There is no need to refresh the chill with bolts, the mob will be dead, or it will be in melee and cone of cold will refresh for whatever time you need)

The numbers don't match your argument.

If frostfirebolt did not exist, you might have a point, but it does exist.

 

grayrest

Does Mage Armor double channeled spell dps (3 Mind Flay ticks in 1.5s) or not affect it at all? I'm guessing the latter but it doesn't hurt to double check.

 

◊ Vontre

In regards to respeccing:

Variety is the spice of life. Indisputable.

Hybrids get fucked over into not-hybrids. Hi hybrids.

Players enjoy trying new things. Give them the opportunity to change their playstyle more often and it'll take them much, much, much longer to get bored of the game.

Many players, not just hardcore, like to be optimal in game. They want to do what is best for their particular task at hand.

All of these things are enjoyable for the player. There are a few valid reasons to try and discourage 'respeccing' of all sorts, but they're far outweighed by the negatives.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

◊ Vontre

On leveling and killing mobs: if you're ice spec, opening with nukes kinda silly now. Freezes have been changed to a reliable break-after-x-damage model, so you can abuse this fact to maximum killing potential. Here is how it works (and I'm doing this in leveling greens, btw):

Step 1: Frost Nova
Step 2: Ice lance. If it does not crit, throw another ice lance.
Step 3: You should've dealt around 2000 damage to your frozen target by now. Deep Freeze it.
Step 4: Ice lance, 3 of them. All on the deep freeze. If you've had any luck at all with crits, this should kill it.
Step 5: If it's still alive, fire blast. If you're really unlucky, frostbolt.

Now that deep freeze is on cooldown for another 25 seconds, you need a new plan for the next mob. Try this:

Step 1: Summon Water Elemental
Step 2: Freeze the mob. DO NOT SHATTER COMBO. Ice lance instead.
Step 3: Now do your shatter combo. This always works, because the ice lance + waterbolt will never be enough to break the freeze.
Step 4: Seriously it should be very dead. Frostbolt/fireblast to finish the job if you have to.

Now you can DF the next mob, pet nova the next one, DF again. Eventually you'll have to do some good old frostbolt nuking, but the water elemental comes back before too long anyway.

Oh and if you really want to hammer on the damage (almost never necessary), frost nova, frostbolt, then frostbolt into a DF and spam lance. Though it'll probably be dead by the time the first ice lance hits.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

solbergb

^^^----why we should not cry too much about stuff until we've really tried it in WOLK.

I approached the argument using the poster's own numbers and strategy depicted as the "frost mage playstyle". He can keep his old playstyle with glyph, and get identical results.

Vontre approached the argument by saying "Why would you want to do that at all? There is a new playstyle that is more efficient for deep frost."

I do think it is useful to look at old rotations in the new model, as expecting people to change what they're comfortable with may not be their route to fun, and the old style may be better suited for some pulls.

 

Math.Pirate

This is speculation, but it seems to me that there has been a consistent tendency for effects altering the behavior of all schools of magic to interact differently than effects altering the behavior of specific schools. Since Arcane Intellect is a +int modifier, and Elixir of Sages is one +spi modifier and one +int modifier, it's relatively easy to make them work out correctly (the +spi modifier from the Elixir of Sages applies, but the +int modifier collides with the pre-existing stronger one from the AI, and doesn't apply).

However, it's historically been trickier with effects that apply to specific schools of magic vs. effects that apply to all schools of magic. For a possible indication that the same trend will continue in WotLK, see, for example, the earlier discussion in this thread (~pg. 9) about FFB's original double-dipping behavior on Imp Scorch, Winter's Chill and CoE vs. on Shatter. To recap, if you have multiple mods all affecting the same specific value (+%fire crit, +int, +%frost damage) it's relatively simple to prevent them from stacking - you just take the stronger one. But it gets trickier when you have a global mod and a specific mod (e.g., +%spell dmg and +%fire dmg). I'm not saying it would be impossible for Blizzard to make them not stack, but it seems that they haven't done the work necessary to define which stat mods should be considered subsets of other stat mods. Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything!

 

Ivorthemage

Since I am not in beta, I won't disagree that the playstyle Vontre describes is the most efficient one, but it doesn't quite seem like it. My first reaction is that it sounds like there is way too much moving around to get into frost nova range. One of the things I always liked about frostbolting was that you could pick a spot where you could pull 5 mobs, start nuking, and they would all die at your feet. Force me to open with a nova, and I now have to run around a lot more, and be careful about how my nova may hit multiple mobs on pulls.

It also occurs to me that nova/deep freeze followed by elemental pulls isn't a permanent rotation, as you will run out of elemental cooldowns.

It strikes me as likely that novas and deep freezes would make for a lot of fast kills when the cooldowns were available, or as panic options, but I can't quite see how it avoids the common use of frostbolt as a nuke where its chill effect comes in handy.

 

◊ Vontre

Every spell in that rotation is instant, so you can move however you want during a pull to set up for the next once. Or just pull the next mob to you with ice lance.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Muphrid

I think what should be taken to heart most about Vontre's rotations there is that, due to the nature of the new Frost Nova mechanics, one can get a lot of extra effective crit chance by setting up spells properly. Using an Ice Lance, rather than a Frostbolt, to lead off on a Frostbite proc or a Frost Nova essentially gets you 1 frozen Ice Lance with +50% crit, compared to .6 Frostbolts with 0% extra crit. The new mechanics change the most optimal spell sequence.

That said, I think it's an open question whether we should view this as a counter-balance to not having a Frostbolt chill with the glyph (as a way to compensate), or merely the consequence of the new freeze mechanics. It would strike me as somewhat ironic if, to make up for not having a Frostbolt chill, we simply didn't use Frostbolt or used it much less in a non-raid situation.

 

◊ Vontre

The frostbolt glyph is phenomenally stupid. Whereas the fire one is a straight out buff in every conceivable way, frostbolt suffers a huge disadvantage for the same benefit. Parity?

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Lileith

It already works with resistance aura and motw but in the case of Winter Chill and Moonkin aura it may be a bit more difficult to code, Winter Chill beeing a debuff and Moonkin aura a buff. But they have to provide much closer value if they want us to be able to swap between players and keep around the same value of synergy, even guilds which aren't running for first kills will be able to see the difference between 5% and 10% crit.

 

AShadowyMage

Unless I am wrong, the fireball glyph is a nerf to some pvp tactics (like using the dot to keep rogues in the open) and it won't work with trinkets and such that triggers off DoT effects anymore. Saying that however, this pales to the disadvantage that the frostbolt one gives.