As I stated before, the Essence/Eternal bug does not work with [Forge Ember], [Illustration of the Dragon Soul], or obviously [Sundial of the Exiled].

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Is it just me or has the EP bug been fixed for FFB? Either that or I was very unlucky. WWS has me at a 2.5% FFB miss rate for Patchwerk tonight, and I'm at 10.5% hit rating before talents (+1% Draenei Racial). Anyone else seeing similar numbers?

It will be fixed in the next Patch that is currently on the PTR.

MAybe you can help me out here guys. I am sorry if it was mentioned before but I was wondering if the talents Brain Freeze and empowered Frostbolt were affecting FFB?

(This may not be very interesting for you guys because this is about leveling.)

If so I would specc 10 deep Frost with Ignite for leveling and would use FFB aus my main spell.

It would look like this

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...h=000000000000

Ofc this would only make sense if Brain Freeze worked with FFB.

I really would not understand why Blizzard would make emp Fire(bolt) affect FFB but the same talent in the frost tree wouldn't. You can't specc both talents at the same time so it makes no sense whatsoever

Brain Freeze gives you a free fireball, not anything else. If you want to do a real FFB spec, you have to go for fire with burnout really, if you ignore that just spec deep frost instead, you'll be better off for it.

InFi, Brain Freeze is triggered by frost spells with chill affects, whereas Empowered Frostbolt only says it affects Frostbolt. Frostfire Bolt being added to Empowered Fire was one of the last significant changes to the trees that they made. (It was previously called Empowered Fireball, whereas Empowered Frostbolt hasn't changed in that regard.)

FFB is a fire spell, despite having alot of frost properties.
Changing Brain Freeze to proc from frost spells with chill was required to stop abusing spam IL+FB in PvP.

Couldn't they just change it to prc from spells with chill effects? this way FFB would be included? As it is right now, there is no reason at all to specc Frost for FFB. Would be nice if this opportunity would be given.

That wouldn't work efficiently, since loss of major dps talents in deep Fire, while having practically useless deepfrost talents.

I'm not sure what you like to discuss here. You don't like Blizzard decision, you want some "unique" snowflake specs to make sense. But remember: Blizzard did it for a reason.

I remember a post saying, they wanted FFB specs to require Deep Fire to justify the damage they deal. They didn't want you to have the survivability of frost and dmg of fire in one spec.

In short: If you want to be frost, spam Frostbolt.

Unless they changed it last patch, Brain Freeze DOES trigger off of FFB [I've done it, so at the very least it was a non-intentional bug they fixed recently]. As to the wording, it says frost damage spells, not frost spells, which is open to interpretation since atm FFB is the only non-frost spell that DOES frost damage, meaning it was formerly a pointless distinction to have made.

As to FFB logic: there are better ways to balance FFB builds to allow for deep frost - splash fire much the way the current maximization is deep fire - splash frost. The most significant reason there's an imbalance right now actually has nothing [or rather, very little] to do with Empowered Fire vs Empowered Frostbolt [which, as mentioned, states FROSTBOLT] as it does the way the trees are structured. Splashing 18 points into Frost gives very obvious and powerful benefits to an FFB spec...+100% crit damage, +6% overall damage, +3% hit, 10% mana reduction [with incidental 10% threat and is totally passable to make it just 15 points into frost], and Icy Viens on the lowest possible cooldown. 18 points into fire offers almost literally nothing to FFB. You get Ignite and a choice of 10% stun chance, Pyro + pushback reduction, Pyro + range, range + 1/2 the pushback, or 1/2 the range with the pushback. A slight tree-redeisgn with fire to offer similar benefits for a FFB build with making the requirements within Frost very strict to benefiting FFB would create an alternate, and middle ground. Attaching FFB buffs to Frozen Core, a large buff from Permafrost specifically to FFB, give Imp CoC a change to 'Improved Frost' granting an FFB buff as well, an incidental FFB buff to having the Deep Freeze talent or Imp. Blizzard / Frost Warding / Frostbite, etc.: viola, you have made a deep frost FFB build possible while locking out any Water Elemental or Ice Barrier talents. Assuming this level of change, you would end up with a deep frost FFB build that looks something like THIS...egads, where's all that frosty goodness of blizzard and survivability?! The problem isn't the addition of such things to Frost talents, it's what would be required of changing the Fire tree.

This would also create potential hybrids that can seriously use FFB but do not match the DPS of deep fire or the current FFB because they traded off important points for survival...the trick is making it so losing those points from frost is a significant loss to FFB's potential. Possible? You bet! Too much trouble from a dev perspective? Probably. Trying so hard not to rant about the clear misconception the devs have about balance right now...

That is correct, I noticed the exact same thing. My guess is that the old code was checking specifically if the code did fire damage, and since it does frostfire damage it probably isn't triggered to reflect. However, this is the kind of thing that I wouldn't use as any solid indication of anything. There is a good reason. From a programmers perspective, they very likely use bit flags to signal what type of damage is being dealt, and if I recall correctly, that information is embedded directly in the bits on which damage is stored on (this was proved on PTRs when you could see the limits of spell damage not being the expected 2^31, but was closer to 2^26 if I recall). Point being, the code used to assume that spells could only be one school of magic, and now it doesn't. As such, I expect the old code to do sloppy checks, something along the lines of:
Whereas newer code would be coded with multi-school of magic in mind, ie:
The difference here being that the old code would end up not reflecting frostfire damage because frostfire is NOT fire as far as the damage type signature goes. And new code would properly spell reflect it as intended.


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Also, corrected the formula shown on the first post for the dps calculations.

The SpellID and/or SpellType will also be embedded in there as spell reflects do not trigger with AoE and that when Icelance was first introduced, it would bypass Blazerunners' immunity shield, probably due to some poor logic. Whilst I recognise that WoW is far more sophisticated than the CircleMUD I used to code in, the basic game mechanics are unchanged, even to the extent that bosses and mobiles are tuned in a similar manner as they were then.

Returning shortly to the MI issue with threatmeters, isn't it just a matter of time until someone merges 2.0 and 3.0 omens for mages? Since you can see your "actual" threat now, it should be pretty straight-forward to map damage done to blizzards internal threatcount.

That way you can just use the calculated threatlevel whenever you were under the effect of MI.

On the note of MI and threat I've seen this note in the recent omen update:
* Set a player's threat to 0 (for display purposes) if the player's threat is less than 0. This occurs on Fade and Mirror Image, which gives the caster a temporary threat reduction of 410057408 (or 4.1m threat in Omen's terms). Previously Omen ignored players with negative threat.

What I am not certain about is whether the blizzard threat API actually adds threat to the -4.1m you have and supplies the information and if yes it should be a very simple job to show the imaginary threat i.e. the real one -4.xm + 4.1.

With Pyromaniac granting 30% in combat regen in 3.0.8, can we safely drop Frost Channeling? Seems to me with the one or two tier spirit pieces we end up wearing and stat raid buffs the 30% regen will beat 10% discounting (or rather, 13% because Pyromaniac loses that effect in exchange for regen), or at least be reasonably close. This would allow a complete 3/3 WiF, your DB/BW back, or even Shatter for slightly increased AoE damage (in conjunction with the 2/3 or 3/3 frostbite we take). I know there is a haste break point for this but I am having a hard time solving for it.

In fact it's likely that you're losing something.

You need about 450 spirit to make the 30% in-combat equal the loss from JoW, but that's not taking into account that Pyromaniac no longer contains -3% spell cost (I never bothered to estimate it to know how much spirit to add.)

I don't raid with 450 spirit, so even with the change I'm still looking at a net mana regen loss.

I posted a good update to the first post. I am still unsure about a few formulas (specifically blizzard coefficients and crit multipliers; also living bomb explosion). I even started a rough xls spreadsheet where you can see all the spells dps. The goal is to have a good idea of what the spells dps are, and then from that (once I got all the numbers confirmed), I<ll post another update on the first post so I can have a much simplified priority casting list (or rather, that xls spreadsheet would explain how the spell priority was determined).

Ah yeah, before anyone asks, the spreadsheet is mostly just applying the formula as shown in the first post. It really doesn<t do much outside of that.

For Pyros coefficient, it is unchanged frontend ( World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Proven Beta Stuff ) atleast as of Beta, backend I never recorded, but that's extremely simple to check.

Edit: Strike that, I did check pyros DoT ( World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Proven Beta Stuff )

Blizzards crit modifier I'm not sure what you mean by this? Each event crits as a normal frost spell, so a 1.5 modifier without Ice Shards, a 2.0 with, the math to calculate its damage after crits is the same as any other spell, it just averages out the RNG faster with more events. I've got a massive log file growing from the PTR for FoF testing that has a lot of untalented frost crits from ~475 damage events doing ~710 damage on crits.

Unfortunately I don't trust my coefficient tests at level 76 with the downranking penalty effect, I might get tainted results, but once I hit 80 (hopefully soon if I get time to play) I'll be doing a round on the ones that havent been recorded recently.

Blizzard ticks every second, not every 2 seconds. Formula is correct otherwise. ~14% scaling per tick, 114% over 8 seconds.

Not sure what you mean with "crit multiplier spread across the 4 dots".
Every single hit can crit individually, and crits like any other frost spell for 209% with Ice Shards and CSD.
Crit chance goes through the roof with FoF, and Frostbite is just icing if the mobs are rootable too.

Living Bomb is indeed fixed damage on the explosion, no range.

Razorice is 5% frost (and frostfire) damage, not sure why you think it's 4%.
The number "5" inside the icon of Frost Vulnerability - Spell - World of Warcraft means that it stacks to 5 in-game, which is also what others report. The tooltip text is just a text string and thus meaningless. And outdated.

CSD, I'd write it as "3% total crit damage increase" or something, to distinguish it from the wording on 4T7/BO/IS/SP.

Pyromaniac - did you check it on the PTR whether it actually adds 3% to all crit?
The wording claims it does, but I'd suspect it's just a mistake from sloppily remaking the tooltip for 3.0.8.
If you have 6% more fire crit than spell crit on your PTR char pane, it does add 3% crit.
If you have 9% more fire crit than spell crit, it adds only 3% fire crit and the tooltip is badly rewritten, which Kavan suspects too.

1 Flame Cap is better than 1 Mana Gem when compared in a vacuum and with truly infinite unlimited mana.
Mana Gems get much closer when you include cooldown stacking. In particular Heroism, Icy Veins, and a haste/crit proc.

Note that you usually can't trade 1 cap for 1 gem due to the different cooldowns.
For example, in a 4 minute fight, you can use 2 gems or 2 caps, or 1 of each.

If you hit Molten Fury range after 3 minutes and then use Icy Veins and Heroism, Flame Caps should beat Mana Gems.
At least according to my rough calculations, Rawr doesn't use Flame Caps for me at all despite me trying every option to do so (I even disallowed Mana Gems, so Rawr doesn't use anything at all instead of Flame Caps).


In most fights lengths however, you can only replace 1 Mana Gem with a Flame Cap. Otherwise, you lose applications, like only getting 2 Caps for not using 3 Gems, which then is a loss.
That's still completely ignoring mana, which is not realistic in most fights.


I'd love to offer a new question with that in mind though.
Is it worth reconjuring Mana Gems in long Fights?

In a 12 minute fight and 2T7 with some mana limitation, it should be worth it to reconjure Mana Gems after 6 minutes to reuse all 3 of them, because it's pretty quick (3 seconds) and nets a lot of mana and gives a good chunk of damage.

According to some napkin math, even only the damage gain of 3 procs compensates for the cast time loss.
But how is it without 2T7 later on? Is it a better source of mana than say Evocation? Or is it better to Evocate and use Flame Caps after the first 3 Mana Gems are used up?

What about when you are very tight on mana, but only have time to use 2 or even 1 of the 3 gems?

regarding the recating managem question:

I was often wondering if this is a good thing to do, but when you actually experience fights that last this long, you will find out that they hardly are standstill fights---if they were, the would be over fast enough to make your mana last. These fights often require running, phase changes and other stuff, so if is often possible to sqeeze that 3 second cast in, without losing any damage. Perfect example is the former Illidan: took up to 10+ mins but you had to wait for his speeches, wait for the tank to grap aggro again, etc.

Hey guys, i attempted some calculations the other day to try and get my personal stat equivalency points, but the results i got were so surprising i think i may have messed up somewhere, so i will post how i got to them and you can tell me if it makes any sense. Note: i'm not a big fan of complex mathematics, so i tried to keep it simple.

1. I tried to figure out how spell power(sp) affects frostfire bolt, so i went about harassing the target dummies in IF. First i recorded their damage with no gear on, so 0sp. Then i equipped just my weapon, which adds 511sp, recorded the change for average hit and crit damage. Then i equipped all my gear, and nuked ffb again, and again with all my gear except the weapon. Compared the 511sp difference between average hits and crits again. Both figures came out very much the same, i repeated all tests with 100 ffb's, so it should be pretty consistent. The end result i got was that 1 point of spell power adds 1.24dmg to a regular ffb hit, and 2.64dmg to a critical.

2. I looked at the Recount results from a recent naxx25 i did to get my average results for ffb, and the numbers were 4200 average hit, (9500)13300 average crit with ignite, 53% crit. From these numbers, if you consider a fight during which you cast 100 ffb's, 1% more crit would mean that you get one more crit ffb, and one less regular hit, for an increase in dmg of the difference between the two figures, so (5300)9100 more dmg. Now it takes 45.9 crit rating to get 1% crit, so you would get (9100/45.9)=198 more dmg from 1 crit rating. Another 1% haste would mean you can squeeze one more ffb cast in there, which will theoretically add (0.47*4200)+(0.53*9500)=7009 damage. 1% haste = 32.7 haste rating, so 1 haste rating will get you (7009/32.7)=214 more damage. Back to spell power, 1 extra point of sp would get you (47*1.24)+(53*2.64)=198 extra damage.

3. Dividing by 1.98 to make 1 crit rating be worth 100dmg as a nice base number, you get:
1 crit = 100dmg
1 haste = 108dmg
1 sp = 100dmg
I didn't do any calculations with hit rating, since that will always be a priority and i have to be hitcapped before thinking about these other stats.

(These results are totally not what i expected though, since i always thought stacking crit was the way to go, but now it looks like it's by far the weakest stat in my current situation. So where did i go wrong? I also didn't bother with other spells, since ffb and ignite ticks are over 70% of my dps.) FIXED

edit: adding ignite to the calculation gives reasonable results, edited values in bold