There are a lot of fire or frost dmg incomming to justify the power of frostward + IA.
There are a lot of movement and burst dowm moments to get extra dmg, where arcane also shows its powers.
If fights on 3.2 have some what similar situations, either by having a considerably amount of fire or frost aoe OR some "burn down" moment, arcane may still prove it's worth.
There's really not, and that's been proven to be the case on any number of occasions here.
Frost Warding is too small of a mitigation increase (over a normal Fire+MA build) to justify the substantial DPS loss from being Arcane, and the "burst" phases in most fights now are in the 1-2min range, which fully favors Fire builds. Not to mention the long-touted mobility argument for Arcane is actually meaningless, since ABarr is terrible and Fire builds employ a large number of instants (even more next patch).
Unless you're horribly attached to Arcane builds, there's just very little reason to spec Arcane right now, and barring unforeseen changes it's only going to get worse in 3.2.
Well, dps isn't everything. My main argument is Fireball seems better equipped to handle tricky mana situations- because better gear(ilvl= more spirit=more regen) and because the low mana cost of FFB is not as useful if you are casting pyroblast much more often in 3.2 than now.
Better gear will apply to FFB as well, so I'm not sure how that supports your argument. Even if you are talking about the rather lackluster SotM talent, Rawr shows that 2 points in it contributes ~1k mana, wheereas Frost Channelling and Precision saves 16k mana over a 4.5 minute fight. Obviously different gear will have different figures but the gap's rather disparate.
Moreover I'd think that casting more pyroblasts will make the 13% cost reduction on that spell for FFB more useful.
Better gear will apply to FFB as well, so I'm not sure how that supports your argument.
Fireball spec makes better use of the spirit on gear. Double your raid buffed int and spirit values, and the FFB spec will run oom first.
No, not talking about the regen of SoTM.
wheereas Frost Channelling and Precision saves 16k mana over a 4.5 minute fight.
Moreover I'd think that casting more pyroblasts will make the 13% cost reduction on that spell for FFB more useful.
You seem to not take into account Arcane Concentration (aka clearcasting). 10% from there 'pretty much' counteracts Frost Channeling.
So FFB has 3% less mana costs from EP, but Fireball has 33% more regen, which for my gear is about 10k mana over 5 minutes.
FFB is better on mana mainly because of the cost of its main nuke. If this Living Bomb dot crits -> Hotstreak thing does happen, we will cast Pyroblast a lot more. Probably twice as much as we do now. Pyroblast costs a lot of mana. If we are casting pyroblast so much more, we are casting FFB less, Fireball less also. So the main mana argument for FFB is being diminished. That is my point that doesn't seem to be explained clearly, hope this helps.
I just don't think mana will be easy in 25 man hardmodes in 3.2, at least to the extent other casters enjoy. We might be forced into Fireball spec because of mana constraints, which is a fairly ironic turn of events.
Fireball spec makes better use of the spirit on gear. Double your raid buffed int and spirit values, and the FFB spec will run oom first.
No, not talking about the regen of SoTM.
You seem to not take into account Arcane Concentration (aka clearcasting). 10% from there 'pretty much' counteracts Frost Channeling.
So FFB has 3% less mana costs from EP, but Fireball has 33% more regen, which for my gear is about 10k mana over 5 minutes.
FFB is better on mana mainly because of the cost of its main nuke. If this Living Bomb dot crits -> Hotstreak thing does happen, we will cast Pyroblast a lot more. Probably twice as much as we do now. Pyroblast costs a lot of mana. If we are casting pyroblast so much more, we are casting FFB less, Fireball less also. So the main mana argument for FFB is being diminished. That is my point that doesn't seem to be explained clearly, hope this helps.
Good point about clearcasting, I forgot about that.
For my gear at 450 seconds Rawr says I will cast 131 Fireballs and 54 Pyroblasts. The difference in base mana costs between FFB and fireball alone accounts for over 21k. If we double the number of pyroblasts to 104, the extra time taken for 54 globals translates to 27 less fireballs, yielding 17k mana. In this scenario 3% cheaper pryoblasts from Precision will give FFB an additional ~2.2k mana. That comes to ~19k reduction for FFB, whereas with Fire even if you sacrifice range to get to 33% regen that's only 15k mana (for this setup).
I'm aware that this is a simplistic take on the question but I find it doubtful that even a dramatic increase of Pyroblasts (double seems a lot) would make a big difference.
I'm not so sure clearcasting is a clear-cut 10% reduction in mana cost (no pun intended).
One thing I've noticed with clearcasting is that hotstreak pyros and living bombs don't often get to use the proc. Because the proc is generated when the spell lands, if you are queuing up an instant after a cast-time spell, chances are that that instant cast will be cast before the buff is generated
Neither the hotstreak nor the living bomb were able to take advantage of clearcasting procs. It doesn't always happen like this, but from my observation, my main nuke consumes clearcasting most of the time rather than my less mana-efficient instants.
Last edited by ash2ash : 07/21/09 at 7:01 AM.
Reason: Failure at double negatives
I'm not so sure clearcasting is a clear-cut 10% reduction in mana cost (no pun intended).
You provide a scenario where Clearcasting does not return 10% of your mana, because it procs on a small spell instead of a big spell. Now, provide all of the other scenarios. All of them. Weight them by the number of times they occur. This might take awhile.
A simpler way is to examine how many of each kind of spell you cast during a fight. Now weight the 10% return against the ratio of each spell's cost. The longer the fight, the closer the return will get to 10%.
Now, factor in the Burnout talent. This increases mana consumption by approximately your 5% of your crit rate.
Now, provide all of the other scenarios. All of them.
His theory is that the delayed appearance of the CC buff after it procs means that you'll never get a free instant spell after a long cast spell.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but seems worth testing. I don't suppose you could prove it from combat log because the 'buff fades' is also affected by client-server lag. So you might have to write an ingame mod to watch casts and mana consumption.
He understands his point. The counter point is that there is a decent amount of situations where you are moving around and didn't instant queue the next spell, so that it does take advantage. Or, where it procs on scorch (which has zero 'flight time') and then you get a free a LB/fireblast, resulting in an higher than 10% average savings due to scorch's low mana cost.
It'd be pretty hard to accurately test exactly how much savings you get from clearcasting by yourself, due to the dynamic nature of spell rotations on different fights, would need to compile a large sample size of logs and average it out. My gut says it ends up being slightly below 10% on average, but not as big of a problem as Ash might be suggesting.
If I ever run into a situation where I'm extremely low on mana, and evocation/mana gem has a little bit of time left on cooldown, I often switch to spamming scorch and hoping for a clearcast to apply LB. Scorch having a slightly higher crit chance for MotE, and low mana cost, just 'feels' like the better DPM in that situation. More importantly, it lets me use more of the mana I have available. If I have 500 mana, I can't cast a fireball, but I can cast scorch a couple times (with mana regen factored in).
I realize that's EXTREMELY subjective, and I've provided no math to backup my claim, but I think it makes sense logically.
There's really not, and that's been proven to be the case on any number of occasions here.
Frost Warding is too small of a mitigation increase (over a normal Fire+MA build) to justify the substantial DPS loss from being Arcane, and the "burst" phases in most fights now are in the 1-2min range, which fully favors Fire builds. Not to mention the long-touted mobility argument for Arcane is actually meaningless, since ABarr is terrible and Fire builds employ a large number of instants (even more next patch).
Unless you're horribly attached to Arcane builds, there's just very little reason to spec Arcane right now, and barring unforeseen changes it's only going to get worse in 3.2.
You don't use frost warding as mitigation, even though it works that way too. You use it as a way to get mana back and be even more agressive on mana dumping when the right time comes.
That's currently the only strength of arcane: The controlable dps.
And yes, I completly agree with you in the end. There isn't really a reason for someone to specc into a harder specc to play (correctly) and at best you dish out the same numbers (with the eternal risk of really going OOM if something messes up)
To be honest, I've been thinking of a way to test my theory, but even parsing thru a night of attempts is extremely painful - There's no surefire way for me to count which spells consume clearcasting other than by matching the aura fade timestamps with spellcast timestamps, and even that is tedious since I haven't figured out a parsing script yet.
For anybody interested in trying to do this, the filter I was using on WoL was:
I'm pretty sure Clearcasting is gained when a spell does damage and it is consumed upon spell cast finish. It is impossible, as far as I've tested (pretty extensively) to "chain" it like Combustion/Shatter/FoF, because it is lost immediately upon a) fireball finishing a cast or b) an instant cast. Thus, when a fireball lands, you will gain Clearcasting. Your next spell finish will consume that Clearcasting, which will most likely be the next Fireball in the chain.
You should see Clearcasting procs gained right after spells deal damage in the combat log, and the clearcasting proc consumed shortly before your fireballs deal damage.
That's currently the only strength of arcane: The controlable dps.
Increasing your dps from 'below par' to 'barely par'(+8%) at the cost of double your mana per second is hardly controllable. You might as well just say "well Arcane has Arcane Power", cause that's pretty much the only advantage it has.
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
I'm interested to hear what others think are the major issues with mages in PVE right now / in the next patch.
I'll start with a few that have been bothering me lately:
* Weak at 10man - at least fire and FFB (and surely frost) feel very weak in 10man compared to melee or some other casters (like warlock). Didn't try arcane. Even when you get most of the caster raid buffs, it just doesn't perform as well as it does in 25man compared to other classes.
* Glass canon -
Melee have way more hp (some melee in my guild have over 30k hp raid buffed, i barely have 22k). This is something blizzard has been doing for long time since melee may take more damage in some fights. So lets look at the casters:
Mages - ice block and blink. can't use heatlstones. fire take 3% extra damage. magic absorption in some specs. low hp.
Shadow priests - can shield themselves , take 15% less damage (shadowform), dispersion, can heal if they shift form.
Warlocks - extra hp, drains, deathcoils, soul link, teleport.
Elemental - can self heal, have more hp , take a bit less damage (elemental warding).
Boomkins - barkskin, can self heal (requires shift - rare), a bit more hp.
In fights with a lot of raid damage (like Mimiron and Algalon) mages are at a big disadvantage to most of the other casters since you major advantages (blink and iceblock) are not enough to survive the massive raid damage you take throughout the whole fight. I guess a good way to sum it up is mages have some nice tool to avoid damage, however when they do take damage, they are the most squishy of all classes. Massive raid damage is added to challenge healers, and this damage is therefor often unavoidable, which leaves the mages at a big disadvantage in which we need to spec/gear for survival at the cost of dps.
Comments and feedback would be appreciated for the purpose of improving its accuracy and making sure it's complete. (PM me, no need to clutter the forum with that stuff.)
Edit: Note that the scale factors tables are currently out of date; the simcraft mage model has been greatly improved in the past week. I'll be updating them a bit later this morning.
Edit again: Scale factors should be up to date now.
Last edited by Lhivera : 07/22/09 at 2:36 PM.
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.
Improved Shadow Bolt now give your Shadow Bolt spell a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to make the target vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5%. (up from 3%)
This statement is from the latest patch notes on MMO Champion. Is this a typo? Could there be an indication for Improved Scorch for the future?
Improved Shadow Bolt now give your Shadow Bolt spell a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to make the target vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5%. (up from 3%)
This statement is from the latest patch notes on MMO Champion. Is this a typo? Could there be an indication for Improved Scorch for the future?
I doubt that this note heralds a change for imp scorch. If you think about it, it's making a partially specced ISB almost as worthless as partially specced improved scorch. I've seen some locks spec partially into ISB to be able to provide a crit debuff. With proper management, they could refresh the stack right as it was about to run out. Now, if they don't spec 5/5, they are going to risk the stack falling off with no guarantee that the next shadowbolt will refresh it.
The change is solely so they can maintain the current buff priority system without causing issues for a raid. Currentlly, a warlock spec'd 4/5 improved shadow bolt applies a 4% (not 5%!) crit debuff when any shadowbolt lands. This debuff is *overwriting* 5-stacked scorch and winter's chill due to debuff priorities, despite being less powerful. Even worse, a 1/5 spec does the same thing. Overwrites 5% crit debuffs with a 1% crit debuff.
The change merely assures anytime the shadowbolt debuff is on the target it's a full 5% crit. That's all.
Yeah, it's a change that theoretically opens up some options for Demo and Affliction 'locks. Currently they must put 5 points into that talent to avoid the problems described by Xentropy, so unless they want to blow more than 15 points in Destro, their only options are 5/5 Bane, 5/5 ISB, 5/5 Ruin. This makes maybe 2/5 ISB a reasonable option -- you'll still get 100% uptime since the duration is nice and long, but they'll have three points to spend in something on Tier 2, which may be more effective than the 3% Shadow Bolt damage they'd be giving up.
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.
This makes maybe 2/5 ISB a reasonable option -- you'll still get 100% uptime since the duration is nice and long, but they'll have three points to spend in something on Tier 2, which may be more effective than the 3% Shadow Bolt damage they'd be giving up.
It's also reasonable because, unlike scorch, warlocks want to cast shadowbolt. Mages put off scorch as long as possible so wouldn't want to risk a drop.
Where a partial spec would cause problems would be sub-25% where warlocks are like mages: not wanting to cast the spell that provides +crit because they'd rather spam another spell (Drain Soul in this case.)
(all academic since warlocks will stay destro anyways. But still interesting that Blizzard is looking at the debuff still, even if they're ignoring the issues with scorch.)
Am I the only one that views Incanter's Absorption as an annoyingly dumb mechanic? It seems like it was never actually designed with pve in mind. I keep thinking the sooner it gets nerfed the better off arcane mages will actually be in the long run.
Am I the only one that views Incanter's Absorption as an annoyingly dumb mechanic? It seems like it was never actually designed with pve in mind. I keep thinking the sooner it gets nerfed the better off arcane mages will actually be in the long run.
It's already been through the chopping block after mages used spellsteal on the death knight mobs in Nax-25 to solo half the instance. After those shenanigans, they capped it at 5% of max health and also made the naxx DK bone shields un-spellstealable.
Edit: Okay I'm dumb. My spellsteal preferentially targets a focus target followed by target and I have a sheep>setfocus macro for the first warbringer in the arena. This entire time I've been mashing my spellsteal key trying to spellsteal a buff of the evoker when it was actually targeting the warbringer. Apologies for the misinformation.
Last edited by ash2ash : 07/25/09 at 7:57 PM.
Reason: This thread made me realize my epic fail
It's already been through the chopping block after mages used spellsteal on the death knight mobs in Nax-25 to solo half the instance. After those shenanigans, they capped it at 5% of max health and also made the naxx DK bone shields un-spellstealable.
Oddly enough, when Ulduar first came out you could spellsteal the evoker shield in the Thorim encounter, but the ability to do so has since been removed, thereby nerfing arcane synergy in that encounter.
Till last week, you could still spealsteal those shields. So unless it's a very recent nerf, spellstealing the shields of the evokers still work very well.
That wasn't exactly what I was getting at. There are three things that bother me about this talent.
- It encourages players to "stand in the fire" and we know how they felt about that with Owlkin Fury. Although the mechanic is a bit different and they did keep owlkin fury as it was in the end. But it still seems a bit counter-intuitive.
- The advantage can be a lot more potent when you're relying on another class (disc priest).
- And most importantly, it can skew damage too much for such a gimmicky/situational mechanic. Plenty of mages complain about being so strong on things like hodir/vezax because they detract from our "real" dps and make us harder to balance--I don't see how that's much different from frost/fire ward absorbing fights.
I just think it'd be better if arcane could be balanced around how it performs on regular fights, not gimmick absorption abilities to inflate our dps. It could be pretty easily fixed by making IA only work with mana shield.
07/21/09, 12:32 AM
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