Skallewag

That depends entierly on the DPS of ABar. I see no problems with balancing AM+ABar rotations to be competetive DPS that both trigger MBar. The idea bout AB lowering the cast time of AM is also nice tho. One further way to go about AB not being spammed is to have a mechanic with a stack that has a smaller effect but stacks lots of times. If it stacks way way byond the point of anything sustainable in any situation mages cant fiddle about with tactics on how to maintain the max stack. It would be a matter of how many times you can afford to stack it before you haveto drop the stack in favour of something else. With that kind of mechanic the debuff could also be reverted back to a longer version so you dont loose the stack unintentionally exept from longer interrupts like phase shifts and stuff like that. Perhaps borrowing some from moonkin mechanics by having AB start at 1,5 sec and have each cast increase cast time on AB but decrease cast time on AM. A change like that wouldnt require a huge change in arcane talents at all.

Wouldn´t responding to something you claim to ignore, per definition make you a liar?
If so then what does passing judgement on an idea you claim to not know make you?

 

kadgar

They already did that to some extent.
Missle Barrage is the replacement for the old MSD. It just doesn't work.
AB proccing it isn't useful because building up stacks is very low dmg and full stacked you can't afford to loose the stacks.
ABarr doesn't proc it and casting Frost(-/Fire)ball(t)s with arcane spec to proc MBarr seems odd too.

The potential with Arcane -Missles, -Barrage, -Blast and Missle Barrage is huge there in the Arcane tree, we can just hope that Blizzard puts these talents/spells together in a useful and fun way finally. It isn't hard even 1 or 2 small changes / Glyphs are enough.

(let ABarr proc MBarr / increase AB debuff / reduce ABarr cd slightly for haste / let AM proc stacks for AB / ...)

 

Saruk

It would actually be fun to play Arcane with either Fireball or Frostbolt as your off-nuke. Take ABarr off the GCD and tweak the proc rate of MBarr. Then you are ABarr-Fireball-ABarr-Fireball with MBarr procing at an increased rate to make up for the loss of dps from the off-spec nuke. Just use AB spam for a mana dump when you can.

They need to do something to it. AB spam is mindless.

 

Slander

Isn't the ignite bug caused by two spells fired at roughly the same time wanting to create a new ignite stack resulting in one overwriting the other?
As far as I see with hot streak there will in a chain-casting 'worst' scenario be a 1 sec ignite left when the pyroblast leaves your hand, I not heard anything about 2 spells fired at roughly the same time overwriting each others ignites when an ignite stack allready exists on the target. Anyway if I indeed completely missed how the bug works you still need 4 crits in a row to produce the bug, fb,fb,hotstreak,fb(reactions),pyroblast. The probability of that happening is a lot less than producing it the old fashioned way through 2 crits in a row.

 

Skallewag

Aye, I think the big mistake is making it a three step debuff trying to pull it off as a manadump. As long as max stack isnt blown way way byond whats sustainable (and then a little bit more) mages will be trying to make a rotation of it, and lets face it, the mage community will always be able to try way more methods of testing AB in various specs/setups than the mage dev team will have time to. Their time is limited, ours is not.

And like you said the inspiration from MSD is misdirected since it doesnt encourage you to use AM but rather encoourages you to not use AM with a 5% chanse per other nuke cast to change your mind. The sensible things would be to make all arcane spells able to proc it and then do some changes to AB.

Wouldn´t responding to something you claim to ignore, per definition make you a liar?
If so then what does passing judgement on an idea you claim to not know make you?

 

lucyflawless

Is there a cd on MBar proc and if so how long? Haven't seen that anywhere. Or did you mean ABar? 3 sec minus GCD is already short enough that any spell you could possibly cast in between would finish the cd unless I'm missing something here.

 

kadgar

Sorry was a spelling error, meant ABarr there. Fireblast and Scorch are short enough, with 1% haste you have the ABarr on cd. At 33% haste (IV / Hero) also AB and Frostbolt rotations bring ABarr on CD.

For MBarr there is a theoretical CD of 2,5 sec. - AM cast time, reduced by haste. At least as long AM doesn't proc MBarr.

 

Skandranon

I just keep praying Blizzard wises up and puts the AB debuff to 5seconds or more. At 3s, the spell just seems too confusing and clumsy, unless it's a fight with little movement and/or no raid damage. And I really hope the spec stays raid viable, because I've been excited about it since info started being released.

 

Masaru

I've never played a deep frost build, but it sounds like come LK, I'm going to need to educate myself. Is this a full frost build or do you have points in arcane and fire for Ignite, mana regen, etc.?

 

Lhivera

Note that my review is based on my opinion of how Blizzard intends for the spec to be played when they've finished all their balancing and DPS adjustments. It looks to me as if Blizzard intends for the Arcane DPS process to involve a Barrage/Blast rotation with MBAM on procs, rather than Blast spam, and my assumption in the review is that they intend to balance the spells so that that's the way you'll want to play it. Roywyn's conclusions are based on how the spells behave in the most recent beta push. So his are more accurate based on what we can see right now, whereas mine are, I hope, more accurate based on where things are supposed to end up.

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.

 

Pasture

Arcane changes needed to force us to use rotations:


The AB debuff:
It needs to last longer. Be it just a change to the tooltip itself or be it be a glyph. 3 seconds is just too short a time. Arcane mages should be able to choose whether or not to drop the debuff. They shouldn't have that choice forced upon them. At the moment it's either straight AB spam or lose the debuff. No dynamic at all.


Reasons to use AM and Abr:

Currently their damage doesn't make them worthwhile using. We need some incentive.

AM - Have it apply some kind of weak ensnare. That way we can pick up the 6% increase against ensared targets. Have it last 20 seconds or so but be something minor like a 20% movement speed reduction.

Abr - Perhaps have an effect that directly buffs AB. Abr increased the cast speed of AB by 10% for 10 seconds.


---------------

That way a rotation would be something along the lines of AM, [Abr, AB, AB, AB, AB]

Repeat the rotation in brackets but use AM on the half cast-speed procs too keep up the ensare and lose an AB in the cycle that the AM is used.

----------------

They need to force us into using a rotation and that won't happen unless they increase the duration of the debuff and give us a reason to use Abr and AM rather than just straight AB spam.

 

Shadout

Was there ever any doubt about frost being the lvling spec winner? I found frost absolutely wonderful for TBC lvling, the stuff you could pull off with slowing, CC etc was amazing and fun. All the new Frost talents are pretty much made for more of that with a stun, longer WE uptime etc.

 

◊ manly

Have you ever played AM spam at all ? It is by far the most involving spec there is if you want to play it properly.

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.

 

Pintofbrew

No and no. You're confusing RDPS with farming. Even if you get a Brain Freeze proc you (1) probably won't get all the ignite out of it (2) may not see a definite reduction in farm time (3) may prefer more slow talents. Farm specs would prefer talents which you'd otherwise not spec, like Permafrost and Frostbite. At 70 I'd even go as far as not speccing fully in Arctic Winds if that meant I had to skimp on other farm-utility talents.

I don't suspect mana will be an issue as a farming frostie; all you should need is Mage Armor and chain-gemming. Other than that, abusing Frostbite, Deep Freeze, FoF and Nova (possibly even shatter barrier) means most of your hits will be crits.

It was quite obvious from the get-go that Frost would be the superior farming spec. If by the time the (massively slowed) mob reached you a Frosbite or FoF hadn't procced, you've still got the option of Nova, Deep Freeze and WE-Freeze to force shatters. A mechanic which is (excluding FoF) non-existent in RDPS.

"Do not offend the chair leg of truth. It is wise and terrible. Continue."
-Spider Jerusalem

 

grayrest

One thing I didn't see mentioned: do the fire numbers include Molten Fury or not?

A minor point, but I'm showing a non-gnome mage with 1k int at 17988 mana and 20238 with 5/5 arc mind. This changes the mana regen numbers down slightly, but that really shouldn't impact any spec besides arc.

I was also surprised to see AB not be worth it for a 13/3+X/X spec. Is 150 damage, 3% amp, 3% crit, and a 9% coefficient really worth 600-1500 dps?

Finally, I'm not sure why the AB spam for 50/3/18 is 150 dps higher than the 3 stack AB with the same applicable talents.

As for the arcane numbers, they're looking about right if and only if AB is to be used as a mana dump. The MBAM rotations look low, but Blizz has a convenient knob to tweak those in the form of MB proc rate, improving dps without improving efficiency.

Here's an example of how they could balance the spec out just by tweaking the mana cost of AB. At the current sustained ABr level, you'd have to spam for just under 40% of the fight to catch fire. If we wanted to match fire and arcane with Roywyn's constraints, then the balance would be:
114s of AB spam, 216s of rotation
Mana pool: 20238
Total mps sources: 310 (including a guessed 25 mps for mana spring as well as meditation and a magic evo that takes no time)
Mana consumed by Rotation: 216*(325-310) = 3240, 16998 mana for AB spam
Needed AB burn rate: 16998/114 = 149 mps
Needed AB cost ratio: (310+149)/398 = 2.318

Which is 20.77% base mana for an AB.

I'm just trying to show that the arcane numbers are not unreasonable if you're assuming AB is a mana dump, but Roywyn's theorycrafting is showing that fully ramped AB just doesn't cost enough.

I'd rather see the AB ramp cost increased dramatically. Increasing it to 250% per debuff instead of 75% would accomplish the same thing as the base mana increase above while keeping AB as the high efficiency ABr rotation fill. The problem with doing this is that a fully stacked AB with AP up costs 3k mana so firing all your cooldowns in a bloodlust will run you from full to empty in about 9 seconds, which sucks. It'll also make it hard for non-t9 mages to actually use the spell. Balancing at 10 AP casts for 20k mana with frost channeling would put it at 200% per stack, which should reserve it mostly for AP cooldowns and keep it firmly out of indefinite spam territory.

This example also ignores the normal AB spam tricks like tossing innervates/mana tides and I don't think either mine or Roywyn's include the fully stacked cooldown bursts on the ABs. Quick theorycrafted numbers using conservative guesstimates based on my live ratios of spam, AP+IV (1.5x), and AP+IV+Bloodlust (2x) show a roughly 10% damage increase for the 6 minutes if not mana limited and around a 6% if it is.

Thanks for doing the theorycrafting, Roywyn. Is there any chance we can get entry level numbers to see how the scaling changes things?

 

Xentropy

VERY good news for testing purposes! Now the only issue I can see with them is since they're not instanced, possibly having to wait for someone else to finish testing so you don't leech the debuffs they're placing on the target.

We currently can't reset talents at the Dalaran mage trainers, for some reason, but it's still a quick matter to port to the old world and back for testing. We will be very easily able to nail down the exact hit cap for +3 mobs soon.

This was my leveling spec at 70:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Add points to elemental precision for levels 71, 72, and 73. (My gear is raiding gear, so I had the hit rating to cap vs +3 targets anyway if I wanted to solo higher level mobs; adding EP makes up for the hit rating decay as you level. I find hit comes in handy even for leveling since you can "skip ahead" zones more easily if desired, and if asked to go to a higher level instance you won't be gimped nearly as much.) If you like to AoE farm, points can easily be sacrificed (perhaps from shattered barrier; at the moment its freeze is bugged not to count as frozen) to pick up imp blizzard. After 73 it's up to personal choice, I've been adding imp cone of cold now for 74-76, since if a mob *does* get close (due to lack of procs) they're usually low enough that an improved CoC would kill them whereas an unimproved one does not. Imp Water Elemental's mana regen is currently bugged to have about a 3 yard range, so those points aren't very useful except in instances, which if you're walking into the expansion in raid gear will all be undertuned for you until you get closer to 80 and can afford those three points anyway.

 

Math.Pirate

AFAIK, you're right about how the Ignite bug works - it applies when two fire spells crit simultaneously. Therefore, it would only happen if your reaction fireball and Hot-Streaked Pyroblast both crit. However, the probability of this happening *on a given Hot Streak proc* is almost the same as it always has been on a Fireball/Scorch+Fireblast (which was really the only time we used to see it), with a slight variance due to the extra crit from Incineration. Given that you have a Hot Streak proc up, you've already crit the first two spells, and therefore the probability of DPS loss due to Ignite bugging is just the chance that you'll crit the next two. So, as a percentage of the additional dps that Hot Streak provides that is lost due to the bug (which is what we should be looking at when evaluating the talent), we should be looking just at the odds of critting two spells in a row.

 

dedmonwakeen

SimulationCraft updated based upon latest Beta news. In some cases this means that it does not match current Beta push:
(1) Some talents are implemented as described rather than how they are working (or not working as the case may be)
(2) Some of the "homogenization" has hit yet, but it was implemented anyway: Judgement of Wisdom, Earth and Moon, etc
(3) Blue posts have stated that Mind Flay is getting completely retuned. My implementation matches that of Arcane Missiles.

I also generate Google Chart output now.



The Fire Mage is unfairly dropping down the charts because I've been having sustainability issues with him (under my possibly flawed assumption that Replenishment does not stack). The Enhancement Shaman in the chart below is not waiting on mana.... but cooldowns.



A quick overview of the relative gear used to create these charts:



There are a variety of other charts listing DPCT, sources of regen, up-times, procs, etc......



Now if the mechanics of the game actually stand still for just a little bit I might actually be able to add support for the next class.....

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

Roywyn

All spells depending on specs have a "cooldown" multiplier that I pulled by experimenting with Rawr.
I used a Sunwell Kit with Skull/Sliver, 1 Heroism, and DPots/FCaps if appplicable I think.

I then entered a spec - like 2/48/11 Fire with an additional 2 points in Spell Power to emulate Burnout.
I looked at it's total DPS with and without its cooldowns - Combustion, Molten Fury (behaves like a cooldown) and Icy Veins.

Those 3 accounted for 7.5% DPS I think, so I gave 0/51/20 a 7.5% modifier on top of everything, to account for these talents combined with optimised cooldown stacking.
Of course, Wrath changes things, but those should still be good estimates for cooldown multipliers.

The mana numbers are a bit off, it doesn't really matter when those are just ballpark estimates for what is sustainable and what is not.
We don't even have the slightest clue how gear budget will be mid/late game.

Arcane Blast off-spec
Empowered Arcane increases the coefficient from 71% to 80%. That at 12% relative increase on scaling.
The crit talent is another 10% more total damage. There are also no othe specs that have both 6% talents (Impact/Incineration).
It doesn't seem much, but these 3/4 talents add up enough to push off-spec Blast spam down to the other nukes in other specs.
I was quite sceptic there too.

50/3/18 has Icy Veins over 50/21/0. Not much, but it adds up, that's about the 3% more you see.


I'll need to clean up some more things before putting up something similar for lower gear.


Hm, what do you mean? Waiting on Stormstrike/Shock/etc. cooldowns?

For the mana issue: I think the best bet would be to just pour more mana into the raid.
As far as I know, Replenish and JoW are separate, so you get mana from both. (I did a few days ago.)
That might help, not sure.

I'm guessing FFB pulls ahead of fire because it's so much more mana efficient?

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.

 

Saruk

What I would love to see from these theorycraft calculations is a reasonable idea of the dps spread based on proc and crit rates. While 'average expected dmg' is good to know, it's not what you are going to experience on any given boss fight. I think this is important as when comparing specs, it's useful to think about what top-end and bottom-end I am bringing to a raid.

The more procs we rely on, the wider this spread is likely to be between specs. With crit rates approaching the 40%-50% area the deviation from the mean crit rate is also going to be higher. The spread will also be higher on Fireball than Frostbolt as your 'sample' on Frostbolt in any given raid situation is higher due to the reduced casting time. Higher 'sample' means less variation from any sampled variable - such as crit rate.

For example, my gear has about 33% crit on it as a fire mage. Given a 6 minute fight and say about 120 fireballs, 80% of the time my actual crit rating on the boss fight will be anywhere between 38.5% and 27.5% - that is a huge spread and a significant top-end.

With the changes to hot-streak in fire and MBarr in Arcane, there are two other proc % spreads that will feed into this. I feel like a reasonably expected high-end dps for fire may be pretty big.

 

dedmonwakeen

Exactly. Mostly CDs.... and some totem refreshes.

Switching to Mage Armor works...... but unlike BlastSpam the trade-off isn't worth it.

Perhaps I'll just dump some MP5 around.....

I simply assumed that JoW was still around because they just hadn't gotten to it yet....... but you expect JoW to exist in addition to a Ret-based Replenishment? I figured they could allow the Water Elemental regen to break the rules because it isn't a huge factor..... but JoW is pretty strong even with the 4sec CD.

Easy enough turn on in the config file for now......

Exactly. When I run with infinite_mana=1 Fire sits on top..... well, second after AB-spam but I just can't imagine that getting to Live in its current form.

EDIT: Fireball only -barely- pulls ahead.... perhaps because I am using less spell power than you...... (Only 2k spell power from gear alone). The interesting thing is that FFB doesn't even have to Evocate on 99% of the iterations of a 5min fight. So..... that means in order for FB to really differentiate itself, it needs to pull in enough mana to not only keep from being idle, but obviate the need for Evocate.

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

Vektor

Are you assuming the FFB cost on live (with double-dipping on EP and Pyromaniac) or what it probably "should" be.

Does using a 9s FFB rotation help any?
Tradeoff for going 18/51/0 +2?
Enabling JoW?

(I can't test any of this on my own right now... the latest simcraft build just exits with errors on this machine)

 

Xentropy

dedmonwakeen: I'm curious, why does your assumed arcane gear have 200 more haste rating than your fire/frost gear, with no other changes?

And what does simcraft assume is being done on FoF procs? Simply continue casting frostbolts straight through (giving two frostbolts +50% crit), or that plus a Deep Freeze (if not on CD) or Ice Lance as a "FoF-combo" utilizing the third "ghost charge"? (Actually I see from the output running it locally that no damage is attributed to Deep Freeze or Ice Lance so it appears to not be using combos. This should be modeled to improve frost's real final numbers. I tried to edit the actions line to make it do this, but what it seemed to do, instead, was replace frostbolt/frostbolt on procs with frostbolt/icelance on procs, which just reduced output rather than increasing it as it should have. It also didn't like me adding deep_freeze to the actions line at all with the fb_priority=1 requirement, which would perform better than ice lance when available.)

Also, the configuration file for WotLK assumes frost will have 18 fire for imp scorch. This is obviously out of date with the new raid buff changes.

Correcting the frost spec and increasing fight length to 360 seconds (which benefits frost greatly due to elemental uptime) balances fire and frost somewhat. Of course, a 360 second fight also increases fire's downtime to 9%. We'll definitely need to see where mana ends up really being in level 80 raids. (I find it surprising arcane blast spam is basically permanently sustainable, in fact more-so than fire! This goes counter to how I felt the spell was intended to be balanced.)

Also curious why Simcraft puts frostfire above fire and frost, but Roy's testing puts it below both fire and frost. Where is the disconnect on assumptions?

Hmm, also, you're only giving two glyphs to everyone. There are three major glyph slots. Switching fire over to using mage armor and giving it the mage armor glyph made it sustainable up to 10 minutes and beyond without affecting its dps overly much. Giving frost the molten armor glyph gave it a little more oomph while remaining fully sustainable because frost continues to be very mana efficient. Your fire spec is *completely* missing improved scorch, which is unlikely to really happen often since it would gimp you quite a bit in 10-mans and 5-mans where a frost mage wouldn't be present. I suppose you may be in the "respec every 5 minutes, it's no big deal" camp, but I prefer to find "one spec to rule them all" and avoid changing. (My respec cost was still sitting at 5g as of a month or so ago.) Overall I find the default assumptions a little "off" in a few ways.

 

Leialyn

nvm.

 

dedmonwakeen

In general, I've coded up things they the way (i think) they "should" be..... and this includes the double-dipping.

Can you PM your errors / stack trace? I got some weird errors during my windows build...... I didn't have time to follow up.... I'll track them down tonight.

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft