Vektor

Probably because the two together are greater than the sum of the individual parts.
MM adds spellpower, which means that the spell (as a whole) is hitting harder, which increases the flat dps contribution from crit% (because it is a percentage dps increase being applied to a spell that now hits harder due to the MM spellpower).

His numbers-per-100-points assume that no other stats change, though. So when you change two of them, you have to take into account the interactions between hit, crit, haste and spellpower.

That'd be my guess at any rate (not having access to his actual sheets)

Edit:
Damn. Beaten to the punch. By like, an hour. I took entirely too long with the reply window open

 

[DRF]Solmyr

With the new +spellpower conversion rates, I've just thought of something horrible. With a internal 45-second cooldown, did Memento just become the best Arcane Blast spam trinket?

 

Solisa

The thing is, AB is now more sustainable than ever. Regen becomes less important when you are able to spam 100% AB on most fights. Not to mention AB needs to be changed in some way such that a one button playstyle isn't overpowering every other spec in the game by such a large margin. Something's got to give.

 

Roywyn

MP5 is garbage when you have JoW/Replenish going around.

Trinket is at most 25 mp5, or 5 mps. That's the same as ~20 intellect would give you, and 20 intellect would add ~8 damage from dmg/crit on top of it.


So, that trinket is as effective as a "54 dmg + 20 int" trinket. Hot? Not.


If you have JoW/Replenish, Intellect is by far the best Mana stat and it adds a significant amount of damage.
Mp5 and spirit are dead weight for mages in the current system.

JoW/Rep are actually bad design, because they make Intellect vastly better than MP5 for healers, and probably better than even spirit for priests/druids. Not sure there, but it's far closer than it should be.

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.

 

Volen

Self buffed on the PTR, I was able to constantly spam Arcane blast for well over 60 seconds, without any raid support, mana gems, or potions. So it's definitely lending itself to even more of a 1 button mash-fest than any other spec, because with the current state of things, it doesn't pay to use any of your missile barrage procs or Arcane Barrage, since you will inevitably lose your entire AB stack.

A potential fix, I believe, would be to allow the debuff to stack more than 3 times, but exponentially increase the mana usage vs damage done. Once that is done, if the AB debuff was made to only drop one at a time (instead of losing the whole stack no matter what), then that could open up tons of possibilities on different rotations, as you could essentially use Barrage or Missiles to drop one/two/etc stacks of the debuff to maintain your mana.. If your truly in one of those situations where you really want to dump mana, then letting it stack up unrealistically (say, 1500-2000 mana a cast for the "topmost" stack) will be a true mana dump.

 

Ivorthemage

I haven't seen a follow-up on the glyph discussion based on newer beta information about glyphs, so I thought I would summarize, insofar as they affect mages.

From what I can tell, reading the sites of those who have played extensively with inscription in beta:

1) There is no longer a cooldown on glyphs. Can swap em as often as you like.
2) using a new glyph in the slot of an old one destroys it.
3) However, glyphs look quite inexpensive, on par with the cost of a potion or elixir. I looked at some of the druid glyphs, which are the most fleshed out, and their high end glyphs required 3 inks, which in turn require one pigment each. You get pigments from milling, and milling 5 herbs nets you 3 pigments, on average. You can always choose to mill the cheapest herb that gets you the pigment you want, which helps.
4) A lot of the glyphs mages are going to want are lower/mid level. Frostbolt/fireball are higher level. I haven't seen fixed ingredients for mage glyphs, but assuming they are on par with the high end druid glyphs they will probably cost a bit more than the cost of 5 of the cheapest Northrend herbs.
5) That puts the price well within range of effective hot-swapping for min-max raiding mages, or for mages who want to switch between pvp and pve quite easily.
6) Glyphs are stackable in lots of 5, so you can stock up on the most situational ones (mage and molten armor, frostbolt, remove curse, etc.).

 

grayrest

It's only slightly better than mp5 in terms of regen unless you're doing something particularly special. Holy priests won't switch due to their aptitude at cheating the 5sr. Druids probably won't, but for disc priests, I'm pretty sure that int is close if not better due to their +15% int talent and ability to triple-dip from it. Crit heal->wand->wait till the tank takes a hit->PWS->Penance gets you Replenish, Rapture, and JoW at the same time. Alas, Int vs Spi doesn't really seem to be a common choice. It's mostly hit vs crit vs haste if the naxx gear is anything to go by.

My estimates show that a 3 stack of AB is going to have to be in the 1500 to 2k range in order to prevent it from being spammable and bring arcane dps in line with fire. It's not that unrealistic.

 

Lhivera

I'm going to assume that the beta server economy is really, really screwed up then -- not surprising, with people transferring whole guild banks over to fund their experimentation. An inscriber told me mats for Glyph of Icy Veins were running about 500g this weekend.

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.

 

Ivorthemage

As I understand it, most mats on the beta are currently placeholders. One mageroyal and some parchment. I know if I was playing on the beta server, I would pay good money to not have to run around Loch Modan farming mageroyal.

My assumption is that the mage glyph mats will eventually be quite similar to the non-placeholder mats posted for Druid glyphs.

 

◊ manly

Yes and no. It highly depends on which server you're talking about.
On Lich King / Northrend, you can copy your characters there. As a result of this, grinding any profession is mostly a joke, and gold is more than plentiful. Generally nobody lists anything on the AH because honestly gold is totally worthless (I mean, whats the point to have 50k gold instead of 40k gold when theres nothing to buy anyway?)

On Murmur, all there is is premades lvl 80 players. You can't copy characters there as far as I know. You start with 5000g / player (can create 3 premade per account). The premades also have 0 professions (well, maybe they have like cooking, but who cares). This means that if you want 400 inscriptions, you pretty much need to farm your own herbs (and grinding herbalism). As a result profession stuff is extremely scarce. To add to this, the population on Murmur vs Lich King is like 20x more. This means if you want a raid going (read: pug) you're almost always better off going on murmur.

In any case, I have seen once a glyph of frostbolt (lvl 400) and never seen it again. Molten Armor / Mage armor are high level glyphs, so as such they also are pretty much never on the AH. Ah yeah, farming mana potions sucks a lot too.

I know that as far as I am concerned I was not able to find anything else than glyph of scorch, which doesn't work anyway.

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.

 

Roywyn

Druid glyphs require 1 Parchment and 1 or 3 pots of a common ink.
You can level enchanting by milling herbs of one level into pigments (no skill-up from milling), then making ink from pigments (skill-ups) until it turns green/grey, then turn that ink into (druid) glyphs.
Every 25 points, you get new ink recipies and new glyphs, of which the druid version requires the new ink.

Glyphs for all other classes require 1 Mageroyal, 1 Moonglow Ink and some parchment from vendors.
Moonglow Ink comes from the pigments that you get from lowbie herbs. Ride once over Elwynn and you have a stack or 3.
Mageroyal is a pain because you can ride all through Barrens/whatever and only see other herbs, but no Mageroyal.


When milling herbs, you also have a chance to get uncommon pigments from herbs of that level.
You can get lucky and get 1-2 every time, or you can get none out of 3 stacks.

From Wowhead, it seems they are only used for items (off-hand books), tarot cards, darkmoon cards (?) and vellums - the things you can place enchants on and AH them.

So, unless they change their mind, Glyphs are not likely to require uncommon pigments.
And common pigments will likely end up rather cheap, as has been noticed.


I leveled Herb/Insc on a Death Knight. Basically rode around for 1 afternoon when the Northrend server crashes every 10 minutes to level herbing to 300. I got the rest while leveling through Outland/Northrend.
The herbs you get from leveling herbalism currently are more than enough to level inscription.

There might be some bottle-necks at low level, because Azeroth herbs are 5 levels, whereas Outland and Northrend herbs are 1 level each.

EU has one server (PvE), for all language regions, money is a joke there. 500g? People offer that for portals
Chat however is way worse than Barrens.

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.

 

Batar

I see many suggestions on how to "fix" arcane blast. Longer debuff,increased mana, decreased DPS and many more ideas. What is the end result we are looking for?

perhaps a good solution would be to make all specs as close to even as possible and let individual play determine who does the most DPS.

 

Solisa

The major problem with AB at this point is that it doesn't know its own purpose. Blizzard wants it to be a mana dump for a tree based around mana, but the issue is either it's going to be so powerful it will just be used as a main nuke and rotated with something (See: 2pct5) or it will not be powerful enough and you'd be better off just sticking with a normal rotation rather than lose the dps to ramp it up just to burn that last bit of mana as the boss goes down.

The reduction on debuff time seems to imply Blizzard doesn't want it to be rotated with anything, I can see no other design reason for such a reduction other than to punish Arcane further on movement fights, which seems to run against the homogenization they are working for.

As it stands AB really needs to be made into a main nuke type spell for people to use it on a standard fight, because it's too cumbersome to figure it out as a pure mana dump. The only way I can see it truly realized in its mana-dump-only type use is for the mana cost to be greatly increased, but then you'd only be "dumping" for about 10 seconds before you are completely out of mana and useless. Honestly I'd prefer it to be completely absurd mana cost rather than having the situation you currently have on Beta where it's fantastic dps with a one button play style.

 

◊ nathanbp

The way I see it, when we ask for Arcane Blast to be fixed, we're asking for one of two similar but not totally identical things. Either:
(1) Make it so that spamming Arcane Blast and nothing else is not the ideal thing to do for an arcane mage (Make the debuff longer/make Missile Barrage worth using/make Arcane Barrage worth using/some combination of those/something else no one has even thought of yet); or:
(2) Make it so that being Arcane Spec (and spamming Arcane Blast and nothing else) is not the ideal thing for every mage to do. (Make damage/scaling similar to ideal fire and frost specs).

Hopefully both will happen. I suspect that (2) at least, will happen in the promised upcoming number tweaking passes.

 

Xentropy

Greyrest on the beta forums just posted an excellent summary of what the issues with arcane are and what needs to happen to fix it.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Report] Arcane spell rotation testing

Basically arcane blast needs to either be equivalent dps to fireball and frostbolt when spammed OR it needs to cost too much mana to support more than a short time before filling with other spells (mana dump phases alternated with mana regen phases). The former doesn't make much sense to me, since it removes the unique arcane blast mechanic from having meaning, and thus removes the point of the spell. The latter "feels" like the real intention of the spell, but it currently costs far too little mana when fully stacked and is thus indefinitely sustainable (or at least as long as fire's dps is, when taking into account arcane's regen talents).

 

Evalara

Other than the 5% haste, I have to disagree. With cable internet in a major US metro area I rarely dip below 250ms, so I can't imagine that kind of latency is uncommon (it was the same on DSL when I had it). As for encounter mechanics, at least half of the 25 man encounters in TBC, and most of the 10 mans as wel,l involve damage, movement, target switching, or auxiliary duties more often than every 12 seconds.

 

khemael

Hi,

I Know it's quite not the subject here since this post since to have a new line : "How to nerf AB spam", but I'm just not as good as you in math to say anything about it, and it seems Xentropy/Greyrest got some good Ideas.

I just wanted to ask some of view, since a lot of math seems to be done, how does an arcanist should gem is gear from pre-wotlk patch to 80 ?
I know Roywin left here a lots of interesting numbers, but even with that I can't manage to figure out what will be better. Since ShadowPriest/JoW will scale with mana pool, int still seems good, but what about the Spell Power nerf on Int ? And with this "Easy-to-spam" AB, isn't haste/spell better than Int on common fight ?

The fact is, as I'Ve always played since T5 to Brutallus with an arcane spec, gemming int/spi since 2.4, I want to keep an optimal DPS during the pre-wotlk 3.0 month.

Some help will be really apreciated ^_^.

(Sorry for eventual bad english, you got a little french guy here :o)

 

grayrest

I've been posting the same thing for a while now. Here's a post from the third showing why AB spam isn't overpowered as long as it's a mana dump. You can do the same analysis off of Roywyn's naxx gear numbers from this build. In both cases it works out to 1500 to 2k mana per stacked AB in order to keep it balanced, as I mentioned earlier up on this page. I'm hesitant to post it on the official forum because the game designers are hinting that everybody has too much mana, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a regen nerf. A spec balanced around mana consumption is fairly sensitive to that sort of thing.

I don't believe that any other change besides the final dps numbers pass is necessary, though I do like the stacked up/down AB debuff with the current short timer because it makes spell misses less problematic and I want Mind Mastery down to 3 points for increased build flexibility. Mechanics wise, I like the ABr rotations and have since they were first put into place.

@khemael: It's too early to be able to tell you gemming for arcane. We're still expecting a final numbers pass.

 

khemael

What about if it still remain the same about arcane spec during the pre-wotlk month ? My question is only about lvl 70 pre-wotlk gearing, cause I can easily understant there a lot of numbers to get before knowing how to gear at lvl 80.

Anyway, like all arcanist I guess I'll love to see AB being a real mana dump as it is on live. Just can't imagine all these former firebolt spammer become Arcane Blast spammer without even understanding any math behind :/

 

Jarlyn

There's a large pass of all of our talents/spells incoming in the next patch or two (hopefully, anyway). Most discussions about spec and playstyle are premature until our tuning is actually ready to be pushed to live.

 

Solisa

The only problem that might result from this is a large discrepancy in Arcane DPS numbers based on fight lengths. I guess it might be ok though, some specs just have advantages in certain situations, I suppose. But your ideas are quite good. I do worry about what they are going to do with mana...seems like it will make scaling casters vs. scaling melee an absolute mess.

 

Flitwik

What realy bothers me is that we are going to pass from a spam fireball to a spam AB.
I can't see blizzou keeping up with that. They've been saying for months that they want to diversify the game play, and in the end nothing at all ?

Like said above, the differents spec will mayby scale up in certain situations, but something must be done for the mage gameplay to be competitive dps.

 

cucal

Mana shield
7% of base mana
Instant cast
Absorbs 500 damage, while the shield holds 20% of the mana spend by the mage increases the amount absorbed. Lasts 1 min.



You cast Mana Shield, cast a ABar (cost 1000 mana points) on a warrior. Your Mana shield will absorb 700 and so on. It can be purged so you have to recast and start over again. If you recive more damage than the absorb value acumulated it gets destroyed. You have to recast and start again.

With this simple change to the spell you have fixed mana shield drain. Arcane mages can use Incanters Absorbtion and Arcane Shielding can be changed to "Increases the absorb value per mana point spend while Mana Shield is active by 15% and increases the resistances granted by Mage Armor by 50%."


Of course you can change values to adjust it. Put a max absorb value or only increase the absorb value from the mana costs of damaging spells. A cd or something.

In short: The more mana spend the better Mana Shield. If you are super ofensive your Mana Shield will be better and no more selfdrain.

Sorry for my english

If you have a beta key and you like this mana shield idea post it in the arcane tree feedback thread in the beta forum. Thx.

PD: I love this threat. Keep it up!!

 

Thegoodman

You are assuming tank/spank fights. With the addition of a more versatile tanking class, what makes you think the encounters will be cookie cutter? Diversifying gameplay doesn't necessarily mean creating amazingly complex spell rotations for every class. Many things about the game will change, and spell rotation may not be one of them.

What happens if many fights force you to move around? How viable will Arcane Blast spam be then? What if kiting and/or sheeping is a part of an encounter? Or spell stealing? Or spell vulnerabilities?

My point is that everyone is screaming "The sky is falling!" without knowing how things will end up. Mages were perfectly happy spamming Arcane Missile back in the day before MSD and TLC were nerfed, why was that so great when all we did was spam AM? I know its impossible to make everyone happy, and I am sure Blizzard will not be able to do it, but at least give it a chance before you condemn all mages in 3.0.

Also, since many many fights already require a certain amount of movement, I wouldn't be surprised if most do in WotLK too. That being said, at what point does movement disruption of the AB timer does AB fall behind a Fireball/LB/Scorch/IV/Combustion spec? 3 spell and 2 Cooldowns doesn't seem overly simple to me.

Survival hunters, Ret Paladins, and Shadow Priests are not exactly falling off of trees; what if Mages are needed as a mana battery given that we are a dime a dozen? Then we are put into a spec that has Frostbolt, Deepfreeze, Fireball, Water Elemental, and Icy Veins. That doesn't sound boring.

I for one and excited about WotLK and interested to see if we can finally have some spec diversity in raids, and to me it looks very possible.

 

Pheroz

I can't imagine AB spam will hit the live servers in it's current form. It just doesn't fit with all the other changes they've been making with the other trees/classes.

I think I understand why they changed the Arcane Blast mechanic from TBC to WotLK. I think it had everything to do with the last cast as the debuff was expiring, that got the stacked cast time but the base mana cost. I don't think Blizzard liked that 'expert' mechanic and that's why they changed the spell.

I really think Blizzard needs to sit down, reevaluate the Arcane tree and how they want the arcane playstyle to work, then implement changes that push it in that direction. The talent tree is filled with either boring talents (Increase stat by X%) or gimmicky talents that don't increase DPS. Gimicky talents are well and good, but they have to be few and far between. Is arcane missiles a main nuke for arcane? And if it is, what does it say that even fully talented, it's only worth casting on a proc that cuts it's cast time in half. You could probably scrap 90% of the tree and start fresh and be better off for doing so.

The fire tree makes sense. It does a lot of damage in alot of ways and is willing to take more to do it. Playing with Fire is a very emblematic talent for the tree. Talents like Dragons breath fit the theme, having to rush headlong into melee to use it's stun, and doing a lot of damage while doing so. Even Fiery Payback, while gimicky, makes sense.

The frost tree makes sense. It's filled with slows and snares. The 'weaken, then exploit the weakness' nature of the tree is evident in the shatter mechanic and all the othe Deep Freeze/Ice lance style opportunities. The safety created by the snares is combined with some survivability talents of the Ice Block, Ice Barrier and even Arctic Winds and you have a tree that makes sense.

The Arcane tree does not make sense. There is some inklings of ideas there, but its not cohesive, it doesnt make sense, and that's why it struggles. Arcane mages have better stats. Ok. Their mastery over the arcane arts make them better and so they have more intellect and spirit, more haste and higher spell damage. Apparantly, they take less damage, have more armor and resistances and sheild themselves in ways that suck slightly less... And thy bufff other peoples spell damage and pick on the ensared and um,... Well, I think it's pretty clear. The tree just sems a mishmash of "neat" ideas that they wanted to implement that they couldnt fit into the trees that they understand.