I remember reading a post here somewhere, where someone listed the Ulduar encounters and what spec they thought was best for each fight (either TTW/FB or FFB (and of course, frost for vezax) - however I'm unable to find that post at the moment, despite lots of searching.
I remember reading a post here somewhere, where someone listed the Ulduar encounters and what spec they thought was best for each fight (either TTW/FB or FFB (and of course, frost for vezax) - however I'm unable to find that post at the moment, despite lots of searching.
Although it's by no means the only choices (Manly goes frostfire for vezax for example -- presumably with the scorch glyph. I just use fire these days on hodir. etc.)
I pretty much use the same things as Kyth except for using either frost or ffb on yogg+0 and since she didn't list algalon, regular fb/ttw for him. The frost/ffb for yogg+0 are either for 5% crit on all aoe targets or increased aoe dmg/mana conservation. One thing I'd like to note is for many fights it depends how quickly you can kill them, fireball is clearly superior to ffb in most fights, but in a mana-starved environment, i.e. very long fight or your guilds rdps sucks, ffb can take the lead. Also on IC if you are mana starved you can just not LB on the 2nd guy you kill, it will lower your dps for the fight but ensure you can go all out on steelbreaker with no problems, if your guild can kill him in 2-3 tank deaths though this should not be an issue since you have the tools for that. There are many hard-mode fights that respeccing gives you an advantage in progression on but once your guild has mastery of the fight (meaning 1-3 shotting the boss consistently) your spec is somewhat immaterial.
I pretty much use the same things as Kyth except for using either frost or ffb on yogg+0
Yeah it just hasn't been updated for Yogg+0.
No clue why you wouldn't evoc on IC, btw, rather than doing things like skipping LB. First and second mobs aren't a DPS race anyways, we just evoc at 50%.
Well if I'm the only mage I/ll replace LB glyph for scorch glyph, otherwise we usually end up all mages being ffb so theres no real need.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
I just have a quick question about speed and wild magic pots. Which one is preferred under which circumstances. My usual procedure is to use a speed pod when we lust. When I use the speed pod I spam FBs ignoring (i) refreshing LB and (ii) taking advantage of hot streak procs. However, I have noticed that I do not get a sufficient bump in my dps from such use. Please let me know if what I am doing is wrong.
Your armory shows you have 482 haste (14.7%). As far as I know, [Potion of Speed] should add a straight 500 haste (thus, additive) to give 982 haste, which is 29.949%. Factor in 3% from Swift Retribution/Moonkin and 5% from Wrath of Air, and 30% from Bloodlust, gives 1.827 casting speed. That brings your 3 second Fireballs down to 1.64 second casts.
Hotan posted some numbers here regarding Living Bomb, and the summary is: The point at which Living Bomb stops being worth casting is when your Fireball cast time falls below 1.08 seconds (13094/12117).
To reach that point, you would need to receive Starlight (50% haste) debuff from Hodir fight, which would give you 1.095 second Fireball casts. Obviously on General Vezax you would reach this much quicker (IE, without Potion of Speed), but then, I'm not sure why you'd be refreshing Living Bomb on General Vezax in the first place, so that's really an irrelevant point.
Regardless, while the actual DPS difference between [Potion of Speed] and [Potion of Wild Magic] is fairly unnoticeable, I would still use Potion of Wild Magic instead. In fact, it goes without saying that for FB/TTW and Frostfire, Potion of Wild Magic will be better in every way, come 3.2, with the change with LB DoT ticks proccing Hot Streak.
So, the bottom line is, under normal conditions, you're never going to really reach a point where refreshing Living Bomb should be ignored, and Potion of Speed is a slight overkill.
Your armory shows you have 482 haste (14.7%). As far as I know, [Potion of Speed] should add a straight 500 haste (thus, additive) to give 982 haste, which is 29.949%. Factor in 3% from Swift Retribution/Moonkin and 5% from Wrath of Air, and 30% from Bloodlust, gives 1.827 casting speed. That brings your 3 second Fireballs down to 1.64 second casts.
Hotan posted some numbers here regarding Living Bomb, and the summary is: The point at which Living Bomb stops being worth casting is when your Fireball cast time falls below 1.08 seconds (13094/12117).
To reach that point, you would need to receive Starlight (50% haste) debuff from Hodir fight, which would give you 1.095 second Fireball casts. Obviously on General Vezax you would reach this much quicker (IE, without Potion of Speed), but then, I'm not sure why you'd be refreshing Living Bomb on General Vezax in the first place, so that's really an irrelevant point.
Regardless, while the actual DPS difference between [Potion of Speed] and [Potion of Wild Magic] is fairly unnoticeable, I would still use Potion of Wild Magic instead. In fact, it goes without saying that for FB/TTW and Frostfire, Potion of Wild Magic will be better in every way, come 3.2, with the change with LB DoT ticks proccing Hot Streak.
So, the bottom line is, under normal conditions, you're never going to really reach a point where refreshing Living Bomb should be ignored, and Potion of Speed is a slight overkill.
Thank you very much. This is exactly what I was looking for. My takeaways are:
1. Use Wild Magic.
2. Refresh LB
3. Now that Wild Magic will be used instead of Speed, hot streaks must not be ignored.
No clue why you wouldn't evoc on IC, btw, rather than doing things like skipping LB. First and second mobs aren't a DPS race anyways, we just evoc at 50%.
Yeah I was already assuming a full evocate, if your p3 takes like 4-5 tank deaths for whatever reason you can still go oom even with a full evocation in p2, but if you full evocate and don't LB for part of p2 your basically guaranteed to not run oom on steelbreaker. Haven't had to do anything like that for awhile but I remember it being an issue on the first couple kills.
Yeah I was already assuming a full evocate, if your p3 takes like 4-5 tank deaths for whatever reason you can still go oom even with a full evocation in p2, but if you full evocate and don't LB for part of p2 your basically guaranteed to not run oom on steelbreaker. Haven't had to do anything like that for awhile but I remember it being an issue on the first couple kills.
I'd be amazed if you can do 5 tank deaths on council.
My guess is you had your evo interrupted and didn't notice or something. Between a late P2 evo and a mana gem, even with one more tank death I'm puzzled as to how you'd run OOM.
My potion use has been going along this idea:
Potion of speed, during bloodlust stacked with other procs, in any fight you *won't* go OOM (many).
Potion of wild magic otherwise, or as a failsafe (also during bloodlust).
I feel it's done well for me, but if i'm just 'doinitwrong' holler at me.
Further, I'm not very happy with my results in fights like XT hardmode, Freya, and Yogg. I play (generally) FB/TTW, and I suspect long cast time/flight time + worthless ignites on dead/dying targets (life spark, constrictor, etc) are my downfall. Any small advice toward optimization on these would be appreciated.
Your armory shows you have 482 haste (14.7%). As far as I know, [Potion of Speed] should add a straight 500 haste (thus, additive) to give 982 haste, which is 29.949%. Factor in 3% from Swift Retribution/Moonkin and 5% from Wrath of Air, and 30% from Bloodlust, gives 1.827 casting speed. That brings your 3 second Fireballs down to 1.64 second casts.
Hotan posted some numbers here regarding Living Bomb, and the summary is: The point at which Living Bomb stops being worth casting is when your Fireball cast time falls below 1.08 seconds (13094/12117).
To reach that point, you would need to receive Starlight (50% haste) debuff from Hodir fight, which would give you 1.095 second Fireball casts. Obviously on General Vezax you would reach this much quicker (IE, without Potion of Speed), but then, I'm not sure why you'd be refreshing Living Bomb on General Vezax in the first place, so that's really an irrelevant point.
Regardless, while the actual DPS difference between [Potion of Speed] and [Potion of Wild Magic] is fairly unnoticeable, I would still use Potion of Wild Magic instead. In fact, it goes without saying that for FB/TTW and Frostfire, Potion of Wild Magic will be better in every way, come 3.2, with the change with LB DoT ticks proccing Hot Streak.
So, the bottom line is, under normal conditions, you're never going to really reach a point where refreshing Living Bomb should be ignored, and Potion of Speed is a slight overkill.
I haven't done the mats but [Potion of Speed] may work better then [Potion of Wild Magic]. At HM Ulduar gear level, you should have high crit chance and while heroism is up more crit force you to use more HS and more GCD which leads you to get less benefit from heroism.
To put things in perspective -- and I did say that the difference is practically unnoticeable -- Rawr has me gaining 35.77 DPS from Wild Magic and 33.86 from Speed. With a little better gear (everything but 25-man Hard Modes), the DPS from Wild Magic is 42.02 and 44.3 from Speed. This is all as FB/TTW. As Frostfire, I gain 27.03 from Wild Magic and 22.59 from Speed. In the better gear, it's 46.94 from Wild Magic and 40.85 from Speed.
From those rather simple examples, two things are clear: the differences are minimal in FB/TTW (as crit increases from gear/raid buffs/amount of spirit, Potion of Speed gradually becomes better and better), and for Frostfire, Wild Magic seems to be preferred by a slightly margin.
The last time we saw a change to the value of Hot Streak was 4P T8 (and LB glyph) and like I had said long before the numbers came out, the value that FB/TTW placed on crit increased a decent amount. It brought it up to haste level at least. I expect no less to happen, perhaps even more so, with the change to Living Bomb DoT crit and its interaction with Hot Streak. As such, I expect Wild Magic to surpass Speed for FB/TTW more often than it already does, more in the line that Frostfire sees.
Ghostcrawler spent a lot of time in a [url=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18680007792&pageNo=3&sid=1#47big Ret Pally thread[/url] last night. A couple things he said struck me as possibly Mage-relevant:
We balance around players in starting gear and the best gear for a particular tier. We put more emphasis on the starting gear because the content is more difficult then. By the time everyone is done with their gear sets, the content is usually on farm.
Could this explain why their opinion of Frost DPS was so much rosier than ours early in the expansion? If they were more interested in numbers produced in heroic blues than in full T7, Frost may well have looked very attractive as they were approaching release.
The point I was trying to make was that we don't consider long ramp up time to be a bad thing. The game could probably benefit from more of it. Yes your dps will be lower when you can't just keep banging on the same boss for 3 minutes. I'm not sure that's a huge design flaw, provided your dps makes up for it in other ways.
And this may well effectively be their answer to the complaints about Improved Scorch.
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.
And this may well effectively be their answer to the complaints about Improved Scorch.
Not really. Scorch is a double penalty: you're not critting as much (aka your dots aren't stacked, you don't have your little paladin thing up), but you're also not applying it with a spell in the normal rotation.
Mages have never said "We need scorch to go away and us to just get 5% more crit", they've asked for it to be attached to, e.g., fireball or Living Bomb -- something they cast anyways. Or failing that, just make it go 5 stacks at once: if it's a good model for shadowbolt why not for scorch?
Warlocks dodge both penalties: the crit goes to full after one shadowbolt, and it's applied with their normal rotation.
Ramp-up designs are good for as long as they refuse to split the pvp and pve rulesets. But mages are one of the few classes that uses a spell solely for that rampup that they otherwise wouldn't use.
Bear in mind that I didn't say it was a good answer -- but I'd bet a beer that if you could get him to answer the question directly, he'd say that, yes, the same answer applies to Fire Mages. He'd most likely say that the reason it's treated differently for Shadow Bolt is that the Warlock is already using more spells in rotation than the Fire Mage, even with Scorch in the mix, and that the issue of having a low-DPS spell in the rotation purely to get and keep the debuff up doesn't bother them, as long as the rotation as a whole produces the desired sustained DPS.
There's no question it penalizes the spec on fights with target-switching, but his response to the pallies pretty clearly indicates that they don't have a problem with some specs having more trouble on fights with target switching.
As I say: there are certainly ways to argue that he's wrong, but I'd put money down that that's his position on the matter. Perhaps someone should put the question to him directly. I'll see if I can get a friend to post it.
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.
Could this explain why their opinion of Frost DPS was so much rosier than ours early in the expansion? If they were more interested in numbers produced in heroic blues than in full T7, Frost may well have looked very attractive as they were approaching release.
Yes, it must be part of how they see it. Frost has a scaling problem, but the low end is fine. When you have a scaling problem, you should fix the scaling and part of doing that is adjusting the base damage. Reducing the base frostbolt hit a little and then removing the 5% snare tax is long overdue and something that wouldn't affect low end frost or PvP frost. They just don't seem to make adjustments like that for some reason.
The other part is how players see it. The general mage opinion is that frost is absolutely worthless for PvE, so mages level with frost and then often go frostfire. So, even if frost is OK at the low end of the spectrum for raiding, it doesn't matter, because the general opinion drives players away from it.
Frost is also by far the most popular leveling spec, so from Blizzard's point of view, it's the leveling spec and the PvP spec... That's two jobs done well enough, so they are probably very afraid of either making it too good for those jobs or not good enough (although I have to wonder how that would be possible).
Perhaps someone should put the question to him directly. I'll see if I can get a friend to post it.
If we're going to get a discussion going about scorch, I'd love to see it widen beyond just the 'debuff mechanic' issue. Scorch is a fire spell you can spec to improve (along with other spells) but never really have a use for outside of the first 10 secs of a fight and once every 30secs after that.
Considering all the points you spend in Fire to up Fire dmg, having a next to useless spell in the tree seems kind of strange.
I'd love to see a move to the old arcane style of main nuke doing large dmg but costing more and using filler spells to get mana back. That seems like a classic way to adjust mage dps to be truly unique and at the same time place more importance on filler spells such as scorch and ice lance.
Hell, we might even have to deal with threat again in a serious way, god forbid!
This makes sense for both "ignored" PvE specs. As a frost running heroics, I had great AOE damage with a ton of control / mitigation. Even my frostbolt spam hit pretty hard.
As Arcane raiding @ early 80, short encounter lengths meant the numbers were inflated due to:
1.You could get a good deal of heroism uptime
2. Greater personal CD uptime
3. Less chance that spamming/fishing would run you dry (with potentially no DPS downtime from Evocating)
4. Really no hit gear required
I guess they are happy that it fulfills a role that is important to them, and delegate FB as the top-tier DPS spec.
I have asked a warlock to spec into improved shadowbolt and use it on Hard Mode hodir (all other fights me and the other mage are fine with scorching). She told me NO and further specified that the crit increase only applies to her dmg and not the raid's. I have looked at the description of both talents (scorch and improved sbolt) and they seem to say the same thing in terms of the spell crit increase to the target. Please let me know if what she is saying is correct.
Yeah that warlock is wrong, the 5% crit increase provided by imp SB is occupying the same debuff slot with the same effects as both winters chill and imp. scorch
At the moment warlocks are going affliction because of many dotable targets and because they can do dmg while not facing yogg in the last phase of the fight.
Kyth is this also true for 3.2? I heard that affliction is getting buffed a bit and is not far away from destro. Since affliction pushes our dps too wouldn't it be good for Raiddps to have at least one lock switching to affliction on every fight?
Kyth is this also true for 3.2? I heard that affliction is getting buffed a bit and is not far away from destro. Since affliction pushes our dps too wouldn't it be good for Raiddps to have at least one lock switching to affliction on every fight?
I haven't talked to our warlocks yet about 3.2.
Scorch is only something like 70 dps loss per mage, the problem with it is more the annoyance factor rather than the DPS loss per se, which isn't exactly the best of arguments.
We'll see though. DP vs ToW also will need to be reevaluated.
07/26/09, 3:34 PM
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