WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3 PTR) - Page 60

Roywyn · 09/14/08, 8:15 AM

Two little updates:

1) Debuff drops on AB misses increase the value of +hit for Blast spam by ~85%.
1 hit = 2.17 dmg, you'd go from 4*AB3 to miss-AB-AB1-AB2)

2) Fire spec damage distribution:
1.2% Pyroblast DoT, 9.5% Pyroblast DD; 6.9% Living Bomb DoT, 6.3% Living Bomb DD; 76.1% Fireball DD (glyphed)
If you keep up Scorch, that would be 3.1% of your total damage and you lose about 1.0% DPS.

Gandalf · 09/14/08, 10:56 AM

PTR is up. I hadn't realised until testing it that Hot Streak remembers the scorch/fireball crits even if you cast other spells in between, and even if the mob dies. So your first scorch crit on a mob can trigger the proc if you had a crit saved up from an earlier mob. Nice for soloing.

aliengrey · 09/14/08, 12:35 PM

deleted, useless post!

grayrest · 09/14/08, 12:42 PM

That's not the blue post. The blue post is just a 'wait and see' post.

Sackobones · 09/14/08, 2:30 PM

So if the patch dropped today, with the changes they have put in, what spec's with t6/sunwell gear would be the best dps?

Does fire still reign supreme or does arcane and frost make a showing?

Roywyn · 09/14/08, 2:44 PM

Originally Posted by Sackobones

So if the patch dropped today, with the changes they have put in, what spec's with t6/sunwell gear would be the best dps?

Does fire still reign supreme or does arcane and frost make a showing?

The DPS pass on talents hasn't happened yet.
That being said, in the current build Arcane would reign supreme right now due to efficiency.

Fire Mages, mind you that [Hellfire-Encased Pendant] is changed to +42 spell power.
The best alternative if you don't have another T6/SP necklace seems to be [Guardian's Pendant of Reprieve].
It has +30 spell power. Be careful not to pick the caster but the healing version.

Unless of course you managed to yoink a [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] for +40 spell power

If you're afraid of replacing them - any of these will likely only get replaced by level 80 epics.
You'll get a guaranteed sidegrade at level 75 from Betrayal - Quest - World of Warcraft though.

Celani · 09/14/08, 7:41 PM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

Fire Mages, mind you that [Hellfire-Encased Pendant] is changed to +42 spell power.
The best alternative if you don't have another T6/SP necklace seems to be [Guardian's Pendant of Reprieve].
It has +30 spell power. Be careful not to pick the caster but the healing version.

With the current reitemization for spellpower, items with the exact same purpose and item level should have equal stats, as should the enchants. Even with this cycle's now relatively short life, regrinding for healing versions of DPS caster items, because the healing items are superior, is not much fun, and I'd imagine it wouldn't be fun for healers in the same boat. There's a lot of this flying around on the test realms forums on various items they now wished they'd rolled on or grinded instead of what they have. Some examples are the guardian's pendant, but what strikes me as most silly is this conversion:

[Loop of Cursed Bones] (item level 133) versus [Brooch of Nature's Mercy](item level 128)

Someone with beta access should point that out as a mistake, post haste.

Alcyon · 09/14/08, 9:12 PM

This whole "healing to spellpower" conversion has resulted in a lot of hilarious changes with items and enchants. The healing enchant gives 43 damage (over 40 damage, but it's more expensive. Only useful if you're arc/frost, otherwise soulfrost/sunfire would be better) and the bracers enchant gives 17 (and is far cheaper to boot than the 15 damage one we've been using). The Gloves enchant gives 19 (less than 20 so kind of pointless). The badge healing trinket is strictly better than Silver Crescent and items like Brooch of Nature's Mercy which were already great for arcane are now ridiculously fantastic.

What other healing items have suddenly become interesting for us?

diag · 09/14/08, 9:21 PM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

Two little updates:

1) Debuff drops on AB misses increase the value of +hit for Blast spam by ~85%.
1 hit = 2.17 dmg, you'd go from 4*AB3 to miss-AB-AB1-AB2)

Does it mean that AB debuff would renew after receiving the server signal?

Lord Loom · 09/14/08, 10:02 PM

Originally Posted by Celani

Sweet. I get to grind out 15k honor because my [Guardian's Pendant of Subjugation] is overloaded with stam and the "healer" version isn't.

It's "only" 2 haste and 2 spellpower you're losing, sure it kinda sucks to have the "caster" neck be inferior to the healer version but it's still totally viable. Both have no chance against the reworked necklace from Akil'zon of course...

Originally Posted by Alcyon

The badge healing trinket is strictly better than Silver Crescent

It seems they're both the same, at least Wowhead lists a buffed version of [Icon of the Silver Crescent] that matches the stats of [Essence of the Martyr] (both with 44 equip and 158 on-use spellpower).

The change also gives raids basically two chances to get [Shadowcaster's Drape] - from the first chest and from Hex Lord, because [Cloak of Ancient Rituals] gets the exact same stats. [Ring of Calming Waves] could be nice too, but not overwhelmingly so, on the other hand Rawr likes the 3.0.2 version of [Shroud of the Highborne] very much for my mage. Overall, most healing items aren't so hot because they only rarely come with other useful caster stats (many are loaded with MP5 or spirit, precious few with crit or haste).

Nastre · 09/14/08, 11:54 PM

Brooch of Nature's Mercy
Binds when picked up
Neck
+24 Intellect
+19 Spirit
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves haste rating by 33 (2.09% @ L70).
Equip: Increases spell power by 40.

compared to

Loop of Cursed Bones
Binds when picked up
Neck
+19 Stamina
+20 Intellect
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves haste rating by 27 (1.71% @ L70).
Equip: Increases spell power by 32.

The real problem with this is that the Item Level of Brooch of Nature's Mercy is only 128, while the Loop of Cursed Bones is 133, but it is inferior in every way.

Blizzard need to go back and look at the consequences of the spellpower change more carefully.

Muphrid · 09/15/08, 12:28 AM

The problem here is not necessarily with the spell power change, but rather with Blizzard's poor consistency with item levels and stat point allocation.

Using the item point formula...

$I = \left (\sum_n (i_n u_n)^x \right)^{1/x}$

Where each i_n represents the stat weight and each u_n the quantity of a particular stat. If we take the various i's to be 2/3 for stamina, .855 for spell damage, and .455 for +healing (and all the others just 1), then we get [Loop of Cursed Bones] at around 50.3 stat points, compared to [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] at 63.1 stat points.

(Note, however, that these stat weights are very approximate; for spell damage and +healing, the numbers are particularly disputed, it seems, but it suffices to say they are all "in the neighborhood" of the values I used. At any rate, the precise values would not change the conclusion in this case: that the Brooch has substantially more item points to use than the Loop.)

In short, Brooch has more stat points, and the stats are spent in a similar distribution, so it's naturally, well, better.

Malfeas · 09/15/08, 2:02 AM

Just a quick question: was it determined that Torment of the Weak affects boss mobs?

Roywyn · 09/15/08, 3:09 AM

Originally Posted by Malfeas

Just a quick question: was it determined that Torment of the Weak affects boss mobs?

Qucik reply: Check the first post.

On [Brooch of Nature's Mercy]- it's been stated by healers that this thing is way over budget.
So that's a mix of issues.

Originally Posted by diag

Does it mean that AB debuff would renew after receiving the server signal?

Hm, what do you mean exactly?
What I wanted to say is that if you get a full resist on AB (= spell miss), your debuff won't renew and you'll lose it unless you're above 66% haste (so that you can cast AB in less than 1.5s).

arch · 09/15/08, 7:37 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

Hot Streak
This talent works like a counter that counts how many critical strikes with the listed spells you have just had in a row.
When it reaches 2, the counter resets and you gain the Hot Streak buff for one instant Pyroblast.

It seems that the counter continues to count anew even if you haven't cast your Pyroblast yet.
It might be that it only happens in certain lag/delay cases.

It happens everytime you crit three spells in a row, you can even crit four times assuming you use fireballs and stand on 41 yards range. Crit1, Crit2, +hot streak, Crit3, cast pyro, Crit4, +hot streak.
You only lose hot streak if you crit four times in a row without using up the first hot streak before the 4th spell lands and crits. Has nothing to do with lag.

Prom · 09/15/08, 8:39 AM

With Lich King less than 2 months away I wouldn't waste too much time caring about lvl 70 gear.
We'll be replacing our SW items very soon.
While questing I found a green quality wand from a 75 quest, which was better than the SW equivalent.
By the time you're 78 you'll start finding SW-equivalent rewards from quests.
So yeah, stressing over 1-2 items that you'll replace within a week of Lich King is a waste of time in my opinion.

Instead take time to think about what professions you may be rerolling and gathering the required mats for those.

Anaram · 09/15/08, 8:43 AM

Originally Posted by Nastre

The real problem with this is that the Item Level of Brooch of Nature's Mercy is only 128, while the Loop of Cursed Bones is 133, but it is inferior in every way.

Blizzard need to go back and look at the consequences of the spellpower change more carefully.

Brooch of Nature's mercy is just itemized wrong. Even before the conversion it's (arguably) better than loop of cursed bones. As such this is not an artifact of the spell power conversions but just a mistake with itemization well prior to that.

Brooch of Nature's Mercy beats Sunwell amulets for druid healers due to being overbudgeted and having a superior stat distribution.

Jonny_Monroe · 09/15/08, 8:56 AM

having spent some time on the PTR playing with AB I ca say that right now, the buff is so horrendously delicate that the extreme power of the spell feels balanced. The overall playstyle doesn't feel intuitive, but the spell certainly doesn't seem to pull ahead in most situations outside of gimmick patchwork encounters. 'out-of-the-box' arcane blast is completely vulnerable to lagspikes, latency, a single occurrence of spell push-back, the slightest need to move, and so many other effects that are completely commonplace in any raid or dungeon. To overcome a lot of these problems you can gear into haste, which skews the spell more to favour haste than what the stat comparison posted above shows.

Dependencies for a reliable AB:
a cast-bar mod
some haste (the 6% in arcane acts as a starting point at best)
reliable connection

Given those things, I would be surprised if blizzard didn't change AB in some way. They've never liked players to need mods and they've never before punished bad connections (on the PTR it was more down to server loads, but its the same result for folks who live rurally). I think the obvious thing is a longer debuff with a greater mana cost. The current version feels like a main nuke with an experimental playstyle rather than a mana dump. Given that its arcane, a mana dump spell makes more sense; other wise why are there all those mana based talents?

Enthorn · 09/15/08, 9:04 AM

I had the opportunity to spend a few hours on PTR yesterday, and after getting over the huge graphical improvement that comes with 3.0, I took a look at the fire talent tree. I ended up testing my talents and spells though on alliance, because 60+ players testing on dummies in Ogrimmar made it extremely difficult to track everything.

First off... this is 3.0.2.8926, and a number of talents/spells have no functionality. I think a sound was playing whenever Hot Streak procced, but with so many things going on, I couldn't tell if that's what it was coming from. Hopefully there will be an add-on, perhaps rolled into Scorchio, to keep track of Scorch/LB/Pyroblast. On top of that, there seemed to be no indication on whether I was below 35% health, other than doing the quick math myself. It would seem beneficial if there was some kind of indicator/buff to let you know you're taking 20% less damage and your pyroblasts have lower cast times.

Firestarter was completely bugged. With 2 talent points, it never once gave me the buff for an instant flamestrike from either DB or BW. I know it worked in some previous builds, so it's odd that it doesn't work now. Burning Determination is, as I suspected, incredibly situational. I'm really not sure it's ever worth putting 2 points into it, unless they're just floating, or there is a specific fight where that 10 second window is highly important.

Living Bomb is indeed bugged still with the detonation. It will always explode from the caster, but sometimes it appears to explode from the target, only because it has a 10 yard range, and it isn't like a blast wave, where it radiates out. It can be difficult to see then which target the explosion is coming from. The knock up is very miniscule as well. Blast Wave, on the other hand, is one of those spells where, when you hit anything with it, you'll know.

I tried to use Hot Streak, but even the smallest of lag was a problem. More than once I saw a Pyroblast and Fireball land simultaneously and crit. Combustion also seems to be oddly bugged, and not just with Living Bomb not consuming charges. On one occasion, I got popped combustion, got two critical hits, and then it continued to climb up to 6 charges. At that point, I started using only Living Bomb, to save my third crit. The oddity came when I did another fire blast, and that crit, and the charge wasn't consumed. This happened again with Blast Wave. I will get a combat log of this later if I can repeat it, as there was too much going on at the time, but Combustion was definitely using far more crit charges than it actually has. My only guess was that LB had somehow reset the combustion count, at which the other fire blasts and blastwave used another three charges.

Xentropy · 09/15/08, 9:29 AM

Originally Posted by Jonny_Monroe

having spent some time on the PTR playing with AB I ca say that right now, the buff is so horrendously delicate that the extreme power of the spell feels balanced. The overall playstyle doesn't feel intuitive, but the spell certainly doesn't seem to pull ahead in most situations outside of gimmick patchwork encounters. 'out-of-the-box' arcane blast is completely vulnerable to lagspikes, latency, a single occurrence of spell push-back, the slightest need to move, and so many other effects that are completely commonplace in any raid or dungeon. To overcome a lot of these problems you can gear into haste, which skews the spell more to favour haste than what the stat comparison posted above shows.

Dependencies for a reliable AB:
a cast-bar mod
some haste (the 6% in arcane acts as a starting point at best)
reliable connection

I believe your premise overstates the issue a bit, and/or the PTR is just so heavily overloaded and lagged that your experience in no way matches what would be the case long term in Live play. Even with no haste at all on gear and one pushback every time you cast arcane blast, you have about 140ms of lag made up for by Netherwind Presence. And if you look at Roywyn's theorycrafting, Arcane Blast spam remains competitive dps even when you're losing the stack once every 12 seconds. That's far more often than most players in most fights are ever going to have to worry about. If a player has no access to >5% haste on gear *and* a latency >250ms *and* takes damage or moves more than once every 12 seconds, then they should spec something else, or fall back on an ABar/filler rotation for those encounters. I think that's likely to be a rather small subset of the playerbase and encounter mechanics, though.

Furthermore, in encounters where arcane loses its stack once every 12 seconds, frost and fire are losing significant dps to movement and pushbacks as well, while ABar is purpose-built for movement fights. As of today, arcane "does it all" and if the long-awaited dps balancing pass doesn't significantly change arcane's output, mages with bad latencies get to be the "scorch (or winter's chill) bitch" while the rest will be expected to raid arcane. Simple as that. It's not even the 5% difference that led frost mages to lose raid spots in TBC, we're talking a 20% difference in arcane's output vs fire, 30% vs frost. And that's in 10-man Naxx gear--Wrath's closest analogue to Kara; arcane also scales better, so the gap will widen as gear improves.

Saruk · 09/15/08, 9:57 AM

Originally Posted by Xentropy

Furthermore, in encounters where arcane loses its stack once every 12 seconds, frost and fire are losing significant dps to movement and pushbacks as well, while ABar is purpose-built for movement fights. As of today, arcane "does it all" and if the long-awaited dps balancing pass doesn't significantly change arcane's output, mages with bad latencies get to be the "scorch (or winter's chill) bitch" while the rest will be expected to raid arcane. Simple as that. It's not even the 5% difference that led frost mages to lose raid spots in TBC, we're talking a 20% difference in arcane's output vs fire, 30% vs frost. And that's in 10-man Naxx gear--Wrath's closest analogue to Kara; arcane also scales better, so the gap will widen as gear improves.

I can't imagine Blizzard settling for this as a final mechanic for Arcane mages - if you have good latency you spam one spell for top dps? After going to lengths to change Locks from single spamming of SB, adding considerable variety into the fire tree (with LB and procing type talents), adding similar variety into Frost, stating clearly in posts that dps classes/specs should be putting out comparable dps... after all of this arcane mages are going to be single spamming AB for 20-30% more dps?

It just doesn't add up.

inana · 09/15/08, 10:02 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

---------->8 Snip Snap 8<-------------

1) Arcane Spec, Blast spam without 2T5

100 dmg = +132 DPS
100 int = +51.37 DPS, +2.67 MPS from 30% spirit regen, +26.79 MPS from Pool/Evo/Replenish/JoW
100 crit = +60 DPS
100 haste = +123 DPS, -10.02 MPS
100 hit = +154 DPS
100 spi = +10 MPS with 30% Meditation, +24 MPS with 80% Meditation/Glyphed Mage Armour

Noticed this a few pages back

Improved Divine Spirit should add some dps to 100 spi, not much, but everything counts

And are you sure about the 100 int being +51.37 DPS ? It seems a bit high compared to 100 dmg at first glance, doesen't it ?

Xentropy · 09/15/08, 10:22 AM

Originally Posted by inana

Improved Divine Spirit should add some dps to 100 spi, not much, but everything counts

And are you sure about the 100 int being +51.37 DPS ? It seems a bit high compared to 100 dmg at first glance, doesen't it ?

Improved Divine Spirit does not stack with Flametongue Totem, Totem of Wrath, or any other spellpower buffs, and I believe Roywyn's assumptions were that the best raid buffs were present, so Totem of Wrath's 280 spellpower is going to trump IDS in any realistic situation.

The 100 int scaling sounds too high, but my math at least comes close. With Kings, Arcane Mind, and the Gnomish racial (which he mentioned he uses in his calculations), that's 132.825 effective int, which is 0.79695% crit, or 21.951dps based on 100 crit rating's listed value, plus 26.299dps from 15% mind mastery's 19.92375 spellpower, for about 48.25dps total. Roy, what was your math on that?

inana · 09/15/08, 10:57 AM

My bad on spirit, sorry!

Roywyn · 09/15/08, 11:44 AM

Originally Posted by arch

It happens everytime you crit three spells in a row, you can even crit four times assuming you use fireballs and stand on 41 yards range. Crit1, Crit2, +hot streak, Crit3, cast pyro, Crit4, +hot streak.
You only lose hot streak if you crit four times in a row without using up the first hot streak before the 4th spell lands and crits. Has nothing to do with lag.

Thanks for testing, I've only had some vague tests before. Updated.

As for intellect scaling, I did the calculations "by hand". Meaning that I manually changed the values in the gear and some derived thing.

Xentropy's math seems okay. There is the additional effect that by increasing your spell power, the value of +crit goes up a little bit well.
I had to adapt a few things in the sheet because the int-crit adaptation is only half-automatic, might have missed something there and counted some intellect multiplier twice.
That's probably why you have +48 while I have +51.

It's approximately correct, I'll have to redo the calculations on the next big change patch anyway. Hopefully.