cbags

Hmm, yeah finding that a little difficult to find, if at all.

 

ldyrebel1010

Hm, I was starting to think that would be the case, but thank you anyways. ><

 

epoh

Actually, even the raw combatlog won't show you who cast innervate. I have no idea why it's like that however.

 

cbags

It's a secret. Druids don't want people to know they they weren't the one that didn't share their innervate.

 

Arkonos

Jea, we don't want everybody to know that we didn't concentrate and healed inefficiently

In nax 10&25 I need innervate at 3-4 bosses and the other spirit based healers are sitting on full mana bars as well.
But since I don't like the idea of a wasted cd, I wonder if mages would benefit the most of Innervate or are my informations incorrect?

edit: Eight years of learning English and still I fail at adjectives/adverbs ways to often

 

cbags

I would say that a call like that is at the discretion of the raid leader. If they think it's cool to allow you to drop innervates on Mages, your arcane spec'd mages will love it I would think.

 

ldyrebel1010

I was only asking because the other arcane mage in my raid had 6 innervates in one night and I had none, so I wanted to know who to ask to share the love. :P

 

cbags

Doesn't seem entirely fair. But there is some context too. Was/does that mage have more issues with mana? Are they constantly OOM, and screaming for Innervate? If they are not managing their mana well, with a bad rotation, their going to have mana issues. Do you have the WWS to look at from the 6 Innervate night?

 

Thegoodman

The short answer is yes, mages will benefit the most. However, it all depends on your raid. If you are farming Naxx and the healers are all well geared and typically never go OOM, yes, give it to an arcane mage. Let him know ahead of time so he can plan accordingly and call out for it when he needs it.

Side Note on your English to help out:
Information is a collective noun and is almost never used in the plural form with an s.
"In Naxx 10&25, I only need an innervate during 3-4 boss fights. Myself and the other spirit based healers are typically sitting at full mana bars on the other fights. Since I don't like the idea of a wasted cd, I was wondering, will mages benefit the most of an Innervate or is my information incorrect?" This isn't perfect English of course, but it is much closer to how a first language English speaker would type/say that paragraph. Compare the to to help you understand what you missed.

 

GnomerTerp

I've been trying for a while to build up a fire set (bad luck on hit rating caster drops). But its getting fairly close to nearly optimal. I've been arcane since it became a good spec, and we have another mage putting up the scorch debuff right now. I havn't seen too many people supporting or using the fire spec on these forums though. I havn't tried it out yet so i dont know what the mana implications are - but it seems to be alot more damage than FFB while not having the mana headaches of arcane.
Am i missing something? Is it just because the gear has to be so precise to use the spec effectively?

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Kaymar

Yes, fireball is more DPS than FFB with fewer mana management issues than Arcane. The short answer to your last question is "no." Skill trumps gear once you get close to "optimal." I'll use myself as an example to illustrate.

When Arcane was buffed to become the top DPS spec, I tried it, briefly. I found that the dynamic rotations coupled with the mana management and timing of IV/Evo was more complex than my skill level could handle. I'm sure I could have improved with practice, but my guild is farming Naxx and making serious progression runs, so I didn't really have the chance to get said practice. I went with the Fireball spec (from FFB) because of the increased DPS and more familiar playstyle. My gear is good but not perfect -- I need six items to be fully optimized. However, I still break 4K DPS on Patch every fight; I wouldn't be able to do that with a sloppy Arcane rotation. It was my skill at playing the fire spec that allowed me to maximize my DPS to the limits of my gear. And, this is without being fully hitcapped, as well.

Fireball, for me, is a good balance between DPS and mana management. It enables me to maximize my gear's damage potential while bringing needed raid utility (I'm the guild's Scorch Bitch). Ultimately, your decision to re-spec should be based on your own criteria: need for Scorch, problems with mana management, trading DPS for ease of play, etc. There's no absolute, objective answer.

 

Enthorn

Thanks Nathanbp for answering my question. (Since you've quoted my post already, I'm going to delete that portion here and reply to your reply in its space.)

For whatever reason, I was assuming that the ignite damage that should have been lost was the frostfire/living bomb and not one of the pyroblast/frostfire should have both been calculated. Apparently I'm thinking about this all wrong, as I was trying to add up the damage of the spells to calculate the ignite damage that happened, instead of looking at the spell whose ignite damage wasn't calculated.

Oddly enough, the answer was right there in front of me, had I simply calculated the ignite damage for each spell. I suppose how I was imagining this would happen is that, since the game knows the ignite damage of the first two spells' ticks (2613 x2) and it knows the ignite damage of the next two spells (3520.8 x2), then I don't understand why it drops one of the spells. I mean, the game clearly sees both spells hitting. It knows both spells are criticals. Perhaps there should be retroactive ignite damage. For instance, the game would caclulate that there were four criticals and expected ignite damage should be 12267.2 for the 30668 damage that was done. It would then see that three ignite ticks have taken place (for 8763) and it would say, well, we've obviously lost one tick, and it would add the 3504 ignite damage the next chance it gets.

That sounds like a viable alternative to fixing the ignite munching problem. The server would continually be checking if the actual ignite damage caused matches the expected, and it would be correcting if it doesn't match up. Unfortunately, what that doesn't address is when the opposite happens: when benevolent ignite damage occurs.

 

◊ nathanbp

Frostfire crit for 8761 * 0.4 = 3504.4, the exact amount you lost. Seems like the ignite damage was calculated for the Pyroblast based on the ignite on the mob, instead of the ignite on the mob + ignite from the FFB. Seems to match other reports of how ignite munching works: 2 simultaneous crits, you only get the ignite for one of them.

 

◊ manly

Its fairly simple. Try to think of it from a programmer' perspective. You calculate the spell damage dealt at the time of cast. So you code it so that when it calculates the damage dealt, it calculates the ignite damage for your current bolt (and the ignite damage left to be done on the current target). So whenever the spell lands, it will overwrite whatever ignite value was in there with the ignite value stored on the bolt.

So what ends up happening is this scenario.

-The mob has a 1000 ignite on it (to be dealt somewhere in the next 4 seconds).
-You POM-pyroblast a 10000 crit. The game determines that pyroblast will apply a 4000 ignite on its own. Since 1000 ignite was already on the target, then the 'ignite information' stored on the pyroblast spell will be to apply a (4000+1000) ignite whenever it lands.
-You cast fireblast that will crit for 5000. The game determines that the new ignite to be applied should be (2000+1000), considering pyroblast hasn't landed yet.
-Pyroblast lands, overwriting the 3000 ignite with 5000 ignite.
-Congratulations, you just lost the entire ignite of your fireblast.

The reverse case also happens. For example, if you get an ignite tick during the travel time of pyroblast, then that tick will be free damage.

Of course, the actual mechanics are more complex than that, and to the very best of my guesses involves buff/debuff latency more than actual travel time, but the core idea remains the same.

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.

 

Enthorn

I suspect Blizzard has actively been working on the ignite mechanics behind the scenes, but a friend of mine suggested that, in a way, mage damage may actually be balanced around ignites replacing each other. In a sense, Blizzard may know its a problem they cannot easily fix (as they've said) and thus, to compensate, they just increase DPS through another talent by what they suspect is lost through ignite.

From the random calculations I've done, ignite munching hasn't been at all bad. There is the occasional benevolent ignite tick as well (I've seen ticks of 8000 free damage). And that alone may be enough to justify just leaving it alone. However, with Living Bomb being able to crit, I have a feeling we may be seeing a lot more ignite interactions taking place. Instead of the occasional Frostfire/Pyroblast or Scorch interaction bugging, Living Bomb could easily be a culprit. I know this has been discussed in another thread as well.

Another way they could solve the ignite problem is to have ignites constantly rolling, and then apply all of the damage all at once when a non-crit occurs. That is, the server would be looking for a moment when it can deal all of the ignite damage before the next ignite is started.

 

Idyar

I have a quick question about a choice I make constantly during my days as FFB/Fireball. When you are in the situation that living bomb has just exploded off and it has activated hot streak are you better served to use the hot streak first or to re-apply LB or is the difference to trivial for me to worry about. Personally I have been prioritizing using up the hot streak to avoid "wasting" it if the fireball I have in the air while making my choice happens to crit. But I can see that reapplying LB asap might actually serve me better (especially after the glyph).

 

◊ manly

My favorite fix solution has always been the one I proposed.

1- Make every crit generate a new ignite dot
2- To avoid debuff cluttering, make ignite deal its damage over half the duration. One tick every second.

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.

 

Enthorn

Idyar, you can find a lengthy discussion on Living Bomb versus Hot Streak starting with this post. Note, the post I linked you to isn't the answer, it's the start of the discussion. I would suggest reading through the discussion and forming an opinion from it, because it largely comes down to personal preference.

 

Daenerys

Is there a simple equation to determine how much of a DPS increase a given amount of spellpower is? Discussing the value of Totem of Wrath with a Mage in my guild and to me this seems like something that should be pretty easy to determine by someone who knows how to do Mage maths. So if he's got about 1800 base SP, what would be the DPS value of an extra 115 spellpower (Totem of Wrath - Flametongue Totem = 115 SP) in a raid setting? Thanks!

 

Muphrid

The percentage DPS increase is a weighted sum of the % increases across all the spells he uses. Figure out how much spell power he would have after buffs (all but the difference between flametongue and totem of wrath) and call that d. For each spell he uses, take the base damage of the spell and divide that by the spell power coefficient. Call each of those p_i.



Where N_i is the % of his overall damage that comes from the ith spell. You can cheat and just grab this off of WWS, or you can calculate it yourself based on a given rotation. All the coefficient and base spell damage values you need are in either the arcane or frostfire bolt threads. The fraction is the % DPS increase of the ith spell, and the N_i's weight this by the % of total damage that spell contributes.

Is this "simple"? Your mileage may vary.

 

PSGarak

There is an equation, but it's not simple. If you write down a literal, symbolic equation of mage damage it ends up being one hard-ass partial derivative. Some of the terms are very hard to get into a closed-form solution (see: hot streak). So, no, there isn't an equation as such. There are spreadsheets, however. Plug in different values of spellpower and see what the answer is. Note also, it depends on haste/hit/crit.
[e] Ok, Murphid has a point, you can cheat by using WWS to get some of the infoz. I suppose technically that counts as an 'equation' but it's hardly a closed-form or analytic solution. It also ignores breakpoints of spells going in or out of favor based on relative scaling, and is only viable for spellpower scaling in specific, as everything else messes up proc chances and cycles.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Daenerys

Thanks for the help, both of you! The equation seems to work decently well, but I guess I should try out the spreadsheets, too, just for completeness. Can you recommend the best/easiest?

 

◊ nathanbp

I'd recommend just using Rawr. The Rawr dps numbers are more like the maximum dps possible, but it's still a reasonable estimate of how much more dps you'll get from swapping buffs.

 

LiquidHAL

I'm wondering if FB or FFB would be better for sarth10+3. FB has better single-target DPS for getting drakes down a bit faster, but we're getting swarmed with adds and FFB's blizzard would really help with that, especially if I go with 3/3 frostbite 1/3 blizzard 3/3 shatter. I think the huge AOE DPS difference might outweigh the smaller single-target DPS difference, but I can't decide.

 

Shurik

As you want to kill the first drake before he spawns a second wave of hatchlings I'd suggest using FB. Depending on your group's damage this might not be necessary but can definitely help it. Those adds are going down after one or two Blizzards anyway (depending on your group's AE capability) and aren't the biggest threat if your "add collecting tank" knows what he's doing.

Conclusion: Depending on your group's capabilities and strenghts you should try to compensate the weaknesses. If the damage is fine anyway it's just a matter of personal preference.

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
- Arnold H. Glasow