andastra

Same here. I'm specced fire right now because of the increased dps. However, if it is negligible (say, 1-3%), I would definitely spec frost. Double ice block is useful on Eredar Twins and Felmyst. Also, frost's crit mechanism is superior to ignite when it comes to adds so it would be superior on M'uru as well.


Another thing is easier rotations. Given competitive dps, the class/spec with easier dps rotation is superior. It gives better ability to pay attention to everything else and is more foolproof when you have to move or do/pay attention to something else.

 

◊ manly

As far as I'm concerned, the only time i value survivability is when I am unable to live without taking survivability into account. For example, if najentus will one shot me without frost ward, then I'll use frostward, if not, I won't.

With this said, its been excruciatingly rare I've put a value on survivability, or even considered the 3% PWF increased taken damage as much to write home about. In fact, as I said a few times, if they made PWF a talent with no cap (ie: you can put as many points in it as you like), I'd gladly dump 10-15 points in that.

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.

 

Celani

That would be fine, if it were only your DPS to consider, as it was previously. Now that the debuff affects the spell crit of every member in the raid, I wouldn't consider anything less than 3/3.

 

Xentropy

So as for the fire spec with double ice blocks, did that spec still outdps deep frost? If so, there's still a flaw there, is there not? You could get extra survivability and still do more dps. And if not, I find it surprising mages didn't respec frost instead of 0/40/21.

The ZA list seems like a flawed argument to me because the fights in ZA are short enough and designed such that I have never while frost not outdpsed fire mages with significantly better gear. Yet, despite frost having all the advantage you list *and* higher dps in this case, I have never once seen or heard of someone leading a ZA raid ask a fire mage to respec frost, or pass on a fire mage over a frost one. I have, however, seen and heard of a plethora of raid leaders require fire for T6+ content.

This really seems like the "grass is greener" tendency coming out because firstly frost does not have THAT much higher survivability than fire in raids. Yes, it's higher, but it's on no more of a level than the extra survivability warlocks and hunters run with as ANY spec. Meanwhile, the dichotomy then exists that if hunters and warlocks "deserve" equal dps for their greater survivability, why shouldn't frost mages?

Personally, I'd like to see fire mages and rogues 3-5% dps ahead of frost mages, warlocks, and hunters, but as long as Blizzard insists warlocks and hunters should pay no survivability tax, neither should frost mages.

I find this pretty funny because I see easier rotations on the part of fire, at least in TBC. Frost requires more thought about when and how to use cooldowns. Fire's cooldowns always come up simultaneously, so you hit one button to activate them all, and the only consideration on whether to use them immediately or hold off is how far away from 20% you are. Frost's cooldowns end up very staggered and more thought has to be given to whether on a given fight you should burn cold snap immediately or save it for a second ice block, cooldowns must be carefully burned just *before* heroism, not after, since otherwise your elemental doesn't benefit, and so on.

Now in Wrath this may change, especially if FoF isn't changed to a method that improves frost's interactivity. The addition of a mana dump in Living Bomb gives fire mages something to think about other than staring at a scorch timer. Scorch may not need to be used with a frost mage around, but fire mages will need to be aware of the status of the frost mage in the raid in that case and be ready to start stacking scorch if something goes awry. Both specs gain a "different spell on proc" addition in Brain Freeze or Hot Streak. Frost's cooldowns remain staggered (perhaps even more so with the glyph of water elemental) and may gain more cooldowns to watch (deep freeze, if it retains a damage component that outdoes ice lance, is best to use while not on cooldown on a FoF combo, if those are made viable). Fire in the current prevailing spec loses a cooldown to track (Icy Veins). Really all told both specs may be similar in the interactivity department, but a lot hinges on how often Living Bomb is usable and how Fingers of Frost and Deep Freeze end up in the final scheme.

 

Arazan

Aye agreed. I never understood why people made such a big fuss about PWF's drawback. If you're taking 5k hits every few seconds, making them hit for 5.15k won't really affect whether you survive or not. I think that's at the core of a lot the problems with how other classes see mages... when mages bring up their survivability it's basically discounted by arguments like "LOLOL ice barrier ice block frost ward fire ward mana shield... yeah mages have NO survivability /sarcasm" when almost none of those are relevant to the discussion in pve. As you pointed out some things like frost ward can be very nice in specific situations, but that whole "our health pool is 20-30% smaller than other classes'" thing seems to be completely overlooked.

Since mage problems really seem to stem from scaling, it would be really interesting if they started giving mages a lot more dangerous options (i.e. making PWF a tier2 fire talent but increased damage done/taken by 4/7/10%).

 

andastra

I think the argument is based on WotLK, not TBC. Yes, fire outdamaged frost by a decent margin in TBC, but if frost is going to be equal to fire in TBC, then you won't see that kind of spec anymore.



Again, looking forward to WotLK, fire's rotation would be more complicated. I'm also talking about arcane, spriests and affliction warlocks. I'm not discounting frost's water elemental, it's survivability is one of the drawbacks of the spec. I'm just putting that out there in general and not just a fire versus frost thing.

 

Faxmonkey

I'd suggest Shade of Akama and Teron Gorefiend if your raid DPS was high enough. The faster the fight goes, the better frost performs. Heck, its pretty much hands down better for all of ZA. I think that was an aspect of Frost people tended to overlook because they modeled it on the basis that the fight would last *forever* and so they were finding the % damage difference between the two specs at infinity when it reality frost is a very spikey playstyle and those spikes, at the start of an encounter, are always/usually ahead of Fire. This, believe it or not, matters. Because it means that even when Fire is outdpsing Frost on say Brutallus, its not by the oft-quoted 5%, but rather by an even smaller margin (of course, fire is very RNG based so the highest fire parses are always significantly higher than the highest frost parses -- but the AVERAGE fire parse isn't that much higher than the AVERAGE frost parse).

In short, Frost as a raiding tree was never as bad as players thought it was in BC content. I could always turn in 2100 dps on Brutallus with my gear when a similarly geared Fire mage would put out anywhere from 1950 to 2300 depending on how many crits he got during his cooldown compression phase.

 

Xentropy

I am in full agreement here, and my main issue is that the two specs weren't close *enough* that guild leadership accepted frost as a viable spec. A mage raiding frost got the same exact reputation as a rogue raiding subtlety, even though the sub rogue was paying a MUCH greater dps penalty than the frost mage. Basically the prevailing attitude is "go spec for PvE, not PvP, scrub", which is especially erroneous since the PvP spec loses significant PvE dps in order to pick up improved counterspell. I'm not arguing that a PvP spec should do competitive dps, I'm arguing that a frost PvE spec (which does exist, despite what appears to be the popular opinion, at least among the top guilds on my server) should.

With the changes to fix ghost hit and add partial resists to frostbolts, frost has a lot of ground to make up to even be in the same boat it was in TBC, though. Theorycrafting shows that the gap has widened, not narrowed. This is what concerns me as a mage that vastly prefers the frost playstyle.

 

Faxmonkey

I'm not disagreeing with this, I'm just saying this was primarily a matter of perception vs reality. The reality was significantly different than most raid leaders perceptions. My guild leader once said to me something a long the the lines of "But isn't Fire like 15+% more damage than Forst?" and seemed very skeptical when I tried to explain that it wasn't even close to that much more dps.

Frost *was* close enough, that was the reality. It was just people's perception was otherwise.

*Edit*Also, frost was better on Supremus, he has 215 or so Fire Resist (Blizzard actually published a Beastiary book through Blizzard games that told exactly how much resistance to each school each raid boss had -- so we finally got the answer to how much Resistance Supremus/Rage Winterchill had but no one really paid any attention). Rage, btw, had only 185 Frost Resist -- not sure why the difference. The book came out just before Sunwell so no idea how much arcane resist Kalecgos has.*edit*

 

cerebes

Several mages have argued about the usefulness of Ice Barrier and an extra Ice Block, while that is a semi-viable argument one thing that is not considered is a frost mage burns a gcd to use Ice Barrier which is a dps loss while using it and shouldn't matter if all the healers are already keeping the entire raid alive (including fire mages). The use of a second Ice Block while having a great potential for survivability is not nearly as useful as it seems. A good consideration for the survivability argument is does your raid demand that mages use fire ward for the last Meteor Slash on Brutallus when it is stacked to two? While it helps it is not considered a requirement.

Another point is the fact that a decent percentage of you dps is based off a pet with quite frankly horrid survivability. If the pet AOE survivability issue is not addressed with frost (which it appears to have been completely ignored) then frost will remain a lesser spec. If 10% of your dps is based on a pet that does not survive random raid AOE then it is quite impossible to compete. Another way to consider it is to consider that frost has all the extra survivability talents and takes a dps loss because of these talents. BUT a decent percentage of your dps is based upon a pet that can't survive a basic 10 man AOE environment! This further increases the loss of dps from your pet dying. So we are looking at 10-15% less dps due to "greater survivability" to a potential of 25% or greater loss!

I think Xentropy's post really brings out an excellent example of frost's inferiority (and is relevant to WotLK as far as it has been seen):
Another major problem is that currently all caster gear has been homogenized which means all frost mages are forced to take large amounts of spirit which has 0 usefulness for a frost mage. Ultimately because a frost mage has plenty of mana and doesn't need to run with mage armor. Also another consideration is that a mage is hit capped much quicker than a fire mage and doesn't need spirit they would utilize spell damage/spell crit/spell haste (not necessarily in that order) above all other stats in comparison to a fire mage. I have been following the slow release of possible gear and the best gear has tons of useless spirit which is about the last stat I would want if frost specced. Adding a usefulness for spirit specifically only useful for a frost mage would help in a great way. Another consideration in this mana usage consideration is the fact that if a frost mage doesn't need as large of mana returns then a spriest is a considerable less dps gain for a frost mage.

One of the largest problems with balancing the mage specs is the problem of different mana usage rates. An arcane mage used to be (until current changes) the ultimate spec of turning mana into dps. Fire sat nicely in the center and frost sat extremely outside of this. A simple way to fix this is make what was useful for a fire or arcane mage but not for a frost mage useful for a frost mage. It needs to be deep enough in the frost tree to make it hard for an arcane mage or fire mage to get (assuming arcane is fixed along these lines as well).

A frost mage shouldn't be exactly equal in dps to a fire mage, but should they be within 1 - 2%? Absolutely, possibly the best way to consider this is consider the times that the survivability actually makes frost spec superior to fire based on lower dps. About 1 - 2% of the time if that. I have never been considered an optimum raider as frost. That survivability issue is not going to change in WotLK. Again all that is going to matter is that I can put out more or less dps than a warlock that already has had a major advantage in TBC.

 

Bulgarth

Roywyn, wouldn't the "raid-wide" Totem of Wrath negate currently hit capped Mages from needing EP? The current problem with Totem of Wrath obviously is that it is a buff where in some fights you won't constantly have it, where as in 3.0 with Totem of Wrath being a debuff on the mob, you will in almost all current day fights have the debuff placed on the mob 100% of the time.

The main comparison between the two specs of 11/50/0 and 0/50/11 was Icy Veins + New Frost Warding or AC + Focus Magic.

Of course, your 0/53/8 suggests getting Living Bomb + 2 points in WiF, but how does it stack with 3.0 raid-wide mana return to support Living Bombs mana dump issue without having AC? I guess abusing Frost Warding is one alternative, but really, how costly is the spec really going to be?

 

maxi

@70 fire 3.0
I recall reading calculations about 5/5 Clearcasting outstripping 3/3 Elemental precision for usefulness in fire specs, hit situation notwithstanding.
Has this been refuted?

@Hot Streak modelling
Is there an explanation of logic behind C^2/(1-C) formula?

The approach i am currently using is a recursive calculation, based on the fact that 1st fireball has 0 chance to proc Hot Streak, and all subsequent casts have C*(C-PreviousHSChance) to proc Hot Streak. Which gives us a HS(n) = C*(C-HS(n-1)) recursion formula.

It gives results, very similar for C^2/(1-C), at least up until 50%, but how did you arrive at C^2/(1-C)?

@frost etc
The problem is not with the spec.
The problem is with raid design.

Frost and fire are basically equally fun and - imo - equally effective specs to play with outside of raids. When all the aspects of the spec - single-target dps, control, aoe burst, sustained aoe, survivability - can be equally exploited, then everything evens out nicely.

Raid design is very limited in this regard.
Enough has been said about having to stand and dps the single target, but there is more to it than that.
Blizzard is actively pushing a philosophy of flexible raiding. They say that they want every class in the raid have a place in it, but also for every class in the raid to ultimately be relaceable.

Thus, they cannot create bosses where a class as a whole can make real use of what makes them different from other classes. Cause that would make this particular class overpowered for this particular encounter, and result in cookie cutter min/max raids stacking this class to unhealthy numbers, as long as the boss is a progression target.

The earliest example of this that i remember would be warrior stacking on original 4 horsemen. Warrior dps specialty at the time was basically high HP. It favoured this periodic damage based fight quite significantly. Thus warriors were stacked.
A more recent example are Twins, who put damaging debuff on three random people in the raid, thus making shaman chain-heal the ideal solution. Result? Out of 11 healers generallyaccepted as necessary for the ecounter, around 4 are normally shammies, and there are always 1-2 dps shammies in raid, making shamans account for 20-25% of the raid's whole makeup.

In other words, it is frost's general utility which makes it unfeasible to give it dps, comaparable to other specs. But it is the encounter design philosophy which makes it impossible to make use of this utility in raids.

Solutions include either giving other specs raid-useless, but otherwise fun utility... Which is and continues to be quite unpopular choice for blizzard. Remember when blizz added Dragoin's Breath and Slow? See what's happening to Deep Freeze now?

Another solution is tweaking the design philosophy, to allow stuff that makes dps classes different from each other to really be important. So that raid leaders wouldn't be able to just arbitraly swipe mages with hunters with rogues with warlocks.
This will result in more headaches on part of a raid leader, though, and clearly goes against the current Blizz design direction.

 

Xentropy

Totem of Wrath does not give spell hit any longer. Your point is still valid at 70, however, since Misery from shadow priests does, and now applies the same +3% hit to the entire raid against a mob with Misery up as Totem of Wrath supplies now to just one party.

 

Bulgarth

Well, even a better reason to not need EP at 70. 80 on the other hand, we shall see.

 

Søndag

Good work Dedmon!

Is it possible to give make another mage build possible? i would like to se how calculations would be for an arcane/frost mage using frostbolt fillers instead of fireballs and with elemtal precission and IV, and then change the glyph to fb glyph and so on.. i was thinking about a build something like:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...50323102315321

Also i would like the option of using the dranaic int pot together with adept's elix instead of the blinding light flask, since i'm not sure what would be the better package, especially in shorter fights.. Perhaps with a different mage armor for mana instead of crit.

 

Roywyn

At +hit and level 70 3.0 builds
Some people have their main gear set tailored for ToW already and would lose more from hitcapping in 3.0 without EP.

At Water Elementals
They recently got around 6k more health at level 80. Not sure if some of that also trickled down to level 70 or not.
Also, Illidan's AoE effects don't damage pets, Brutallus' don't either, not sure about the rest of Sunwell.
Random pet one-shots make or break the spec and are pretty frustrating.

Not sure how it is in Wrath so far? Any experience about pet survival issues in raids?
And Sapphiron still being frost immune is totally awesome.


At SimulationCraft flasks/elixirs
It doesn't have elixirs, oil, food and new flasks in the database.
If you want to play around with it, just remove the flask from the action list and add your flask/elixir/whatever of choice to the gear_stats.
To make another mage with Frostbolt instead of Fireball fillers, copy/paste the Arcane Mage, give them a new name, repair the "Focus Magic circle assignment" and change their action list.
The last couple of entries in the action list are the spell cast priorities.

At Hot Streak calculation
C is your chance to crit, H is your chance on an given hit to proc Hot Streak.
Then C*C = H*C + H
C*C is the chance that your last two spells crit. This means that either you get a Hot Streak now (H), or you got a Hot Streak just before and crit again (H*C, independant). Both events are exclusive and exhaust all possibilities.
Hence C*C = H*C + H, rearrange to get H = C^2/(1+C)

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.

 

dedmonwakeen

I've been in this holding pattern, unable to decide if I want to unlink consumable buffs from the action sequence...... I really want to avoid just inflating stats to get consumable buffs because I hope to have armory import eventually.

I'll get to the consumable buffs reasonably soon.

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

 

Samuel

Depends a lot by what you mean by competetive. I would define competetive as on average doing within 5% in total damage with some fights coming out better than others. If that was the case I have no doubt plenty of people would be speccing fire to get a couple percent extra damage. Also frost damage is very sensitive to the survival of the elemental so fire would still be more reliable at producing good damage under many conditions. In my mind it shouldn't be a forgone conclusion that one spec does better damage in 90% of all encounters.

The game is a lot more interesting, in my opinion, if the top of the damage charts is usually the people that play the best and not those that chose the right class. A mediocre player with the right talent tree or the right class should not be able to do more damage than an excellent player with the proper talents for PvE in whatever tree they choose to play assuming comparable gearing.

 

Bebado

My plan is use 14/47 at level 70 , losing 3 points on burnout and wining 6%more damage for firebal/scorch and 3% more crit with focus magic. I am not sure if its a dps gain, someone have comparitve about it?

 

Lhivera

1-2% is effectively equal, really. It could be argued that up to 5% is effectively equal, because variations in encounter design will result in greater variance than that, and you'll wind up doing more damage on approximately as many fights as you wind up doing less on.

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.

 

Vand1

Although I am no math/TC expert, it seems to me that you get more extra DPS per talent point from Burnout than you do from (a properly working) Spell Impact. I think the math goes something like this: 5/5 Burnout gives 50% extra crit bonus. Since the crit bonus is 50%, an extra 50% of that is an extra 25%. That 25% then gets multiplied by 1.4 due to Ignite, for a total extra damage on crits due to Burnout of 35%. If you take a conservative raid-buffed crit rate of 40% (I'm pretty sure it's going to be higher come 3.0), you are getting 35%*40%, or 14% extra damage from Burnout, which equates to just under 3% extra damage to all your fire spells per talent point.

Compared to Spell Impact's extra 2% per talent point, but only to fireball, and Burnout is looking a lot better to me.

 

Wrathyr

As a dedicated frostie, (raided as either 10/00/51 or 18/00/43, even 00/00/61 from Morogrim up to Felmyst, only respecced to fire now that due to how mage-unfriendly Sunwell is, spots for mages are scarce enough to risk it and be turned down) I'm having split feelings about upcoming expansion: on the one hand, blizz seems at last to have found a way to enhance frost's raid viability through utility, instead of a mere increase in damage output. (Which, let's face it, would leave little reason to spec fire and sacrifice any of that survivability/efficiency) So yeah, good ideas overall but as per usual with Blizzard, poorly handled.

A raidwide mp5 boost through pet (and an increase of its duration) is spot on, a great idea so frosties bring something unique. But as mentioned above, Blizzard seems at a loss on how to balance the numbers. When it first came out the regen, let's be objective, was well over the top. But after being tuned down it now borders the useless, adding the regen from 3 full summons (which is the average amount of times on a 5-6 minutes bossfight) equals little more than potting once. Not to mention the biggest issue: whether WE regens half your mana pool or just a tick or two is irrelevant as long as its survivability isn't boosted somehow. Giving WE some sort of protection against boss AoE abilities wouldn't turn it into a mean killing machine in PvP, to be fair.

As for FoF, judging by the latest posts it seems it's a 2-charges selfbuff which pops on cast rather than on spell hit. Which leads to the mage consuming one charge accidentally and having just one left. Haven't tested around beta myself, only toyed around on ptrealm but even there Deep Freeze seemed a bit useless from a raidboss perspective, only a 3kish-critting instant. A bit more interactivity could be added by allowing deep freeze's "frozen for spells and effects" component to work on bosses and affecting just frost mage's own spells.

And last but not least, frostbolt glyph seems a bit over the top in my eyes, especially if we compare it to fireball's. Losing fireball's dot is a benefit in most cases due to it taking up a debuff slot, where as frostbolt snare being completely removed renders it absolutely useless for anything but raiding. A good idea, shamelessly stolen to Lhivera's post on wotlk beta mage forums, would be changing the glyph so it would reduce frostbolt's speed reduction by 40% and let Permafrost and Chilled to the bone talents affect it, thus giving it a mediocre (yet better than current 0%) 20%.

 

Roywyn

Burnout and Spell Impact are pretty similar for straight Fireball spam.
Burnout pulls a bit ahead if you have a large amount of crit (T6+ gear), affects all fire spells, but increases mana cost.

Also, Focus Magic is a bit better than Living Bomb if you have gear with a lot of haste, spell power, crit, and have someone to cast it on. Also, it's much easier on mana.

So, if the patch hit right now: 0/53/8 if you are good on mana and lack +hit. 11/50/0 if you lack hit and swim in mana.

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.

 

Evalara

Not really true. An appropriate search on wowhead will reveal there are spirit-less and mp5-less options for every slot, sometimes several, including a few of our set pieces. It won't be any more difficult to avoid spirit and mp5 in LK than it is to avoid suboptimal pieces in TBC.

 

andastra

Yeah. We never did define "competitive" while we argued. If frost's dps is within 3-5% of fire, I would say its added survivability will essentially make it a toss-up within the two. I'm sure most of the people on these boards will still spec fire in that case, but might spec frost while learning certain encounters. I know I've been killed enough by all the burst AE damage on Eredar Twins that ice barrier would be useful.