PSGarak

Most of the information we have on Blizzard's attitude towards respecing is either negative information (they didn't raise the cost), or inferences (you can interpret that post as being pro-respec, if you want to). Lhivera is correct in that it's logically consistent for those posts to have been made by an anti-respec blizzard if you allow for a few other changes in interpretation. I also agree that specs should be some sort of player identity in order not to be completely pointless. A glyph-based "meta-spec" is a thought that had occurred to me as well, in a slightly different form*, but I don't think either of them are particularly realistic. Especially if they make better glyphs on the second pass, there's going to be too many choices of raid damage vs PvP control for you to really share a set.


Mage Armors and Warlock Armors are different, because the classes are different. The warlock armors are a good source to pilfer ideas from, but the the two spell sets don't have to be balanced in isolation, or even share the same design philosophy. Mage armors have problems (note plural), but their inferiority to warlock armors is not one of them. The main advantage that warlock armors have is clarity of design: our armors are separated by roles so that we have a PvE/damage armor and a PvP/survive armor. Mage armors are separated by... enhancing different character statistics that the other armors do not.

You could do the warlock thing and separate them by roles (say, arcane = sustained damage, frost = survive, fire=burst damage). It looks to me like they're trying to make the armors fall out by spec, both implicitly by synergies and explicitly by armor-related talents. This could totally work, with a small number of significant changes. What you would need is for each armor to have both PvP and PvE functions, and further for those functions to be related to that element, so that a mage of that spec would want that armor for most situations, especially if they've talented it. Mage armor (WLK) is a good example: the regen is a PvE benefit and fits both thematically and mechanically with the mana-hog arcane spec, while the anti-caster stuff is a PvP benefit that fits thematically. Mechanically it's a bit assymetric, but anyways. Molten Armor's PvE effect is consistent for fire (even more so with WLK talents), and it's defensive benefit (the thorns, not the resilience) is both thematic, and due to impact, something that benefits a fire-spec mage more than a non-fire mage. Frost Armor's chill effect is well-placed and synergies with frost's control; the AC buff does not, and the spell has no PvE benefits.

If you want mage armors to fall out by spec, you need to give Frost Armor a PvE/damage benefit, and make Mage Armor's defensive benefits less caster-specific. Mage Armor could provide silence/interrupt resistance and be thematically consistent, but arcane has the least need of that of any spec. I don't know what sort of benefit you should tack on to Frost Armor, but the important this is to make it something that the other specs would not want, compared to their own armors. Spirit->dmg could make sense, but would also be desired by the other specs; I would suggest cooldown reduction or an FoF effect.

This would also resolve the question of "are we balanced for extra crit or regen?" by saying that fire mages are balanced for crit and arcane mages are balanced for regen (and frost mages balanced for frost armor's new fairy-tale buff). This does not solve the conundrum of what an elemental mage does with spirit, and that problem is probably the biggest arguement in favor of differentiating the armors by venue rather than spec. In either case, I suggest meditation and clearcasting switch places in the talent tree.


*My thought was two glyphs per talent tree, so you could spec your frost tree for PvP and your fire tree for PvE, so your glyphs define for your character a subset of all possible specs, that you then respec between more fluidly. This breaks down for classes that use spells from off-schools, like how a warlock would want his destro glyph to be shadowbolt while aff spec, but inc/immo while destro spec.

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Etherealz

I'm not 100% sure if dual specs will be released in 3.0, but at the very least in Wotlk I think that one mage always having to have WC is not a huge deal at all. During the raid week you have 1 spec that has wc, and one spec of your choice, likely deep fire with current talents. So rather than a pvp spec and a pve spec, you have dual pve specs. Thusly each boss fight becomes no different then a /roll for wc. It's not much different than rolling for scorch maintenance on brutallus is now.

The one slight side effect of this, which could easily be remedied by a good bar mod, is obviously different abilities for different specs.

 

Deedre

Garak, fel armor has a huge advantage over any mage armor: it scales with stats.

As I said uptopic, +600 spelldamage at level 80 with raid buffs and consumables due to said armor is entirely possible, especially for human warlocks. (My mage on live would be pushing 400 spellpower from said armor.)

This is incredibly better than any of our armors for pve. And it's just going to keep getting better as you gear up. This isn't a trivial difference, it's an enormous elephant in the room and I'm having a difficult time believing that mage talents will make up the difference. Obviously a great deal of cross class theorycrafting needs to be done to confirm this, but my suspicion is that mages are looking at being once again outscaled by warlocks. Not because of talents and raid buffs (this has been fixed more or less) but because of fel armor.

 

◊ manly

By the very definition of elemental spec, moving talents across the arcane tree won't affect them. I'm not sure I follow.

I believe the real hint we should be getting here, is that mage armor is intended to be the 'pve' armor. Think about it. 50% base mana regen with the glyph. 60% regen, for arcane mages, was enough to make spirit a stat to actually consider. 50% ought to, at least, make the other specs make a meaningful use out of it. I'm really unsure at this point whether or not, as fire spec, I should be considering it seriously. Keep in mind here, its not only the mana regen changes, but additionally 1-potion-per-fight I'm taking into account. I am not saying necessarily that we should just all switch to mage armor (which obviously is totally retarded from a player' perspective), but that it seems to be the 'justification' of spirit for non-arcane players (by the fact that fire/frost get 50% regen vs arcane which used to have 60% which was good enough to make spirit 'work').

Whether or not that turns out to make any sense whatsoever is entirely up to blizzard. I doubt it will, probably because of raid-wide mana regen mechanics, which I expect to vastly outdo what the armor provides. This has always been the problem of fire/frost spec. Theres no point using mage armor, or hell, even mana potions (and generally even mana gem ffs) because the boost provided by our own mana regen mechanics are far worse than external sources -- so why bother?

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PSGarak

Deedre: First: So what? The spells are on different classes. If the armor scales better and the rest of the class scales worse they balance out. Druids don't even have armor-type spells, and priests don't have a choice, it's not like that makes them have scaling issues. Second: Not really. 3% crit could scale comparably to 30% spt->dmg depending on how much warlocks actually like spirit.


Manly: Poor choice of words on my part. By "elementalist" I was refering to all mages that are either deep-frost or deep-fire, not those that are fire/frost hybrids. There is the assumption that those specs could spare 10 points in arcane more easily than 18, albeit at the possible cost of icy veins or improved scorch, which I would consider "fair."

You're correct that the first pass of mage and glyph ideas seems to put mage armor as the sustained-DPS armor buff. I suppose the defensive benefit is consistent in that a PvE mage is much more likely to take magic damage than physical. I still think that mages are going to get a second polish pass (one that's more polish that the gut-and-replace "polish" pass you saw previously), and that the current armor designs and improvements are something that could get scrapped. In other words, by-venue armors is what they had in mind a few weeks ago, but it's only half in and that's something they could change their minds about.

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Deedre

Do warlock spells in fact scale worse than mage spells? Leaving dots aside and looking at nukes only, if they are roughly equivalent (and the talent structures of the trees suggest this, at least destro versus mage trees) then it's going to come down to stats. Warlocks will also get a non trivial amount of damage from their pets now that they are all raid viable.

3% flat crit is horrible compared to 30% spirit converted to spellpower. Are you seriously suggesting that you'd prefer this trivial amount of crit to several hundred spellpower? If warlock gear on live were itemized the same way as mage gear is, warlocks in raid conditions could be rocking 400-500 spirit. I expect all caster classes to be pushing 1k spirit by level 80 and possibly more. That's 300 spellpower right there, just from spirit.

Again, this topic deserves a considered examination by number crunchers taking into account Wrath itemization, but I think there's grounds for concern here. These are very large numbers we're talking about.

 

Lhivera

I think trying to compare scaling right now is futile, because Blizzard's said flat out that they haven't even tried to balance the numbers yet. But PSGarak's larger point is correct: comparing the scaling of individual spells (be it Fireball vs. Shadow Bolt or Fel Armor vs. Molten Armor) is largely futile, because all that really matters is the scaling of whole specs. If the specs as a whole are out of whack, then you start looking at spells that are maybe out of whack as likely points of adjustment.

Now, I really do expect that if Warlock and Mage scaling prove to be out of whack when testing begins, the Armor spells will be a very obvious starting point for balance. But it's a bit premature at this point to start asking how much our armors need to be improved by when we don't even know how the two classes are really going to be performing after the DPS passes.

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◊ Vontre

Warlock armors don't scale anyway. The spell damage bonus is static, and the spirit -> spell damage is effectively static, as if you seriously think we're going to see massive improvements to spirit on dps caster items between tiers of raiding gear I have a bridge to sell you. I mean seriously, you might get like 100 more spirit for the set if the item designers are absolutely insane, that's 30 spell damage? Who fucking cares?

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[DRF]Solmyr

I believe this is the correct thread for this question: What will the raiding numbers for mages look like for the brief period of time between the "Pre-Patch" and the Expansion?

The first thing that comes to mine on a personal level is the reduction of scorch by 5% fire vulnerability. Will we be seeing a nerf running two mages, should we look to take on the Imp.WE spec mages now?

 

Deedre

Vontre, I think that we are going to see rather more than 100 spirit increases between, say, a tier 7 caster and a tier 9 one, all things put together. 10-15 spirit increases on average per slot adds up. And those increases in gear become magnified by raid buffs like kings and racials. Call it a 250 spirit increase over 3 tiers, or better than 80 spellpower.

A fully raid buffed human tier 9 warlock is going to be pretty impressive.

 

Copernicus

A working PTR build would be a requirement before any of those questions can be answered.

 

Prom

I don't really understand why many of you insist on comparing Mage and Warlock armors.
The important thing is that we get the useful armors that contribute to our playstyle and in my opinion Molten armor is seriously lacking as of now. I would really like to see some passive mana regen built into Molten armor because as of now it is quite weak (even using the glyph).

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◊ manly

I guess in the twisted world of blizzard class balancing, 30% mana regen = 3% crit, so proportionally it makes sense that the glyphs turn that into 50% mana regen / 5% crit.

*cue in to photoshop picture of blizz dev team throwing darts on a billboard*

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Prom

In that sense, could we have a Molten Armor glyph that gives 20% regen? (or a Mage armor glyph that gives 2% crit ? :P)

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Ushtarador

What do you think about this build for the time between patch and WotLK?

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I'd do it like that I guess to get as much dmg as I can out of deep-fire, as long as FFB isnt implemented
But since none of us stacked crit (obviously), maybe deep ice or even deep arcane might prove better?

 

Elut

5% crit is pretty awesome for an FFB spec, and given the efficiency of the spell may be better than 50% i5sr mana regen.

 

Slander

First off, I couldn't give a rats ass about warlock armours, however new fel armour serves as a good example on how they made spirit universally useful for warlocks to have. This has yet to happen to the mage class. Only 1 out of 3-4(?) raiding speccs will utilise spirit at it's base. Now if they intend to make spirit useful by balancing the mage class around always using mage armour we do run into an armour problem. Ice Armour, is the default PvP armour, mage the PvE armour and molten is left in the middle ground useful in some akama fashioned fights where you essentially can't go out of mana or a small selection of PvP scenarios.

So basically, either some speccs never or sometimes utilise spirit or molten armour gets pushed off the map in a sense. The selection of mage armours is a mess at the minute unless they intend to make spirit desired through a core ability, accessible to all speccs.

Then of course you can balance mages around having mage armour x% of the time and molten armour y% of the time(x+y = 100) but then you also have to balance the mage class around utilising spirit x% of the time and y% of the time, it does become more messy than it needs to be. It is also quite irritating to run around with a stat that is only usable a fraction of the time, it becomes a similar scenario to the one we're in at the moment.

 

Bruscha

Not saying that this is right but it might be a possibility.
Judging from the trees pets are supposed to be important to the lock now but don't scale with haste or crit.
Would it be possible that they are giving the warlock scaling on Fel armor to make up for the lack of scaling from haste and crit for the imp and felhunter?

 

Pintofbrew

You'd be rather insane to think that much of 5% crit's mana efficiency.

5% crit can't come close to 30% regen while casting to start with, not taking into account Burnout's drawback which partially negates the MoE mana gain.

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solbergb

Actually, in BC, molten armor is pretty much this way for fire spec.

For raiding you go molten armor for the extra damage
For PVP (if you are a weirdo like me who pvp's fire) you want it to proc impact (both melee and ranged with molten shields)

Making molten armor not dispellable was just huge for me in PVP.

It's frost armor and mage armor that are flawed in BC. Prior to molten armor, you would do mage armor for raiding and frost armor for PVP/soloing. Period. Each provided no real advantage to the other, and the frost and arcane talents didn't do much to make it significantly better. to use the "on spec" armor in either situation.

If all 3 armors were for each spec (arcane/frost/fire) what molten armor is for firespec today, I think the mage armors would be pretty cool. IE, you normally use the one associated with your element but might deviate in unusual circumstances - as I today switch to mage armor when I'm in very mana-intensive raid situations, or to frost armor when I'm in the raid spec am in a PVP-like situation (my raid spec loses impact/molten shields/blazing speed to get the fireball boosting talents, and picks up frostbite/permafrost on the way to icy veins just to give me some kind of impact-like option if focused by anything affected by chill)

 

Grai

Outside of the Warlock vs Mage armor argument, has anyone noticed that with the filtering of new cloth items from the beta servers, that there a distinct lack of spell hit on any of them? I see many stats, spell damage, spell crit, and haste as well. Thankfully, no penetration.

I wonder if this a function of sharing some early drops with healers (due to the spell power changes) or just a sign that things are not completely itemized as of yet.

 

Nurru

Cloth Armor - Items - World of Warcraft
Cloth Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

There is no "Spell Hit Rating" anymore. The change was made to support hybrids and Death Knights who use both spell and melee hit in the same build.

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Roywyn

Spell hit is mostly useless until you get to raid.
So spell hit has only very limited use while leveling.

That's why none of the blue drops/rewards have them.
A few quest greens have them so that you can stitch together a hit-capped set while leveling.

Staves tend to have +hit, to allow you to keep a small and controlled amount of hit on your gear from one/few slots.

In BC beta, I remember blue dungeon drop in the sub-75 range that had their hit changed into something else exactly because you need only very little hit.


I expect a healthy chunk of hit gear from level 80 instance, and particularly heroic (and raids of course).

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

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Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Doroteasenjk

Well, two fire mages will feel the decrease, but if you have one fire & one frost, then your total damage output just went up.

 

Raglu

Thankfully? I seem to be reading a lot that partial resists are all over now that it's in increments of 10s rather than 25s. You should be looking for penetration, as even small amounts should make a noticeable difference.