Well the WE change solves the issue of it running oom by it's self, though some kind of active regeneration/healing mechanic would really need to be put in. I mean, there must be some more elegant solution than cancelling and resummoning whenever your pet is low on life or mana.
Personally I'm of the impression the WE doesn't need mana to begin with. Warlock pets get mana because they have to juggle several costly abilities and when the spec mandates they use them they can regen via a specific pet-regen tool. The felhound even offers mana to the caster. WE has absolutely no reason to have mana... Summoned without the glyph, his Freeze could totally be replaced by a spell with only a CD and no manacost, and I really don't think that removing the option of mana-draining the WE would impact any Arena at all.
[personal opinion incoming]
Mage T10 belongs on a warlock. or maybe a rogue. or maybe we're wearing gnome rogues on our shoulders who jump out and poison things that come to close to us? Sounds good to me, run in AE spam, poison stabby stabby, win!
[end personal opinion]
@Pintofbrew
I've felt that way even before the 3.3 WE change. When I was playing around with frost, spec'd and glyph'd for WE, there were moments that my WE was just sitting there doing nothing, because he was OOM. With no mana regen (and I can't exactly throw him a mana gem) it was such a waste. I agree that WEs would do fine without mana, but every player and pet in the game (NPCs excluded) has some kind of "energy", whether it be mana, rage, energy, focus, or RP. Putting the WE into a class of its own might just cause more problems than it would fix. I'd be happy with their regen focusing around ours. If we use evoc, they get a benefit from it. We pop a mana gem, they get some mana too. That would keep the current mechanic around, would prevent the "I cant manadrain it!" QQ to a minimum, and would add an interesting facet to the possibility of raiding frost, if they every un-borked it.
By reducing mana cost by 80%, my utterly uncalculated guess would be that passive raid-wide manasources should be enough to keep the elemental casting throughout a fight, shouldn't they?
I am not sure on replenishment, but it was my understanding that pets, as well as players, could get it? That could be one source. The other is obviously getting a blessing from a paladin - the pet is permanent now, after all. With that mp5 alone, shouldn't the pets manapool last for quite a while?
Same goes for its health: With the whole aoe-reduction on pets thing, plus passive healing (or maybe the occasional friendly healer with pets on his UI), I wouldn't be too afraid about the WE dying.
As for PvP, I doubt the impact of any WE-change will be felt compared to the super-hasted frostbolts we will be throwing arround if Frozen Core goes live like this.
Waterbolt is currently 5% of the Water Elemental's base mana. If they're reducing it by 80%, that suggests they're reducing it to 1% of the Water Elemental's base mana. That means, with no mana regeneration of any kind, that the Water Elemental should be able to chain cast Waterbolts for just over 4 minutes (assuming no mana drains, etc.).
Even if it doesn't end up getting access to regeneration (which, as discussed, it should - from blessings, Replenishment, etc.), to say nothing of the amount of additional mana it should (hypothetically) get from standard buffs, having to recast the Water Elemental maybe once during a fight is not going to cause that much of a problem. In all likelihood, once we see how it scales and interacts with buffs, you're never going to have to worry about it.
The water elemental gains enough mana from replenishment alone (with one point in enduring winter) to last for an entire boss fight on the PTR. The glyph isn't available on the glyph vendor, but this is extrapolating from 50 seconds and the mana used during that time.
Waterbolt is currently 5% of the Water Elemental's base mana. If they're reducing it by 80%, that suggests they're reducing it to 1% of the Water Elemental's base mana. That means, with no mana regeneration of any kind, that the Water Elemental should be able to chain cast Waterbolts for just over 4 minutes (assuming no mana drains, etc.).
Even if it doesn't end up getting access to regeneration (which, as discussed, it should - from blessings, Replenishment, etc.), to say nothing of the amount of additional mana it should (hypothetically) get from standard buffs, having to recast the Water Elemental maybe once during a fight is not going to cause that much of a problem. In all likelihood, once we see how it scales and interacts with buffs, you're never going to have to worry about it.
Though I agree with the application, ie: it's unlikely to need mana, the principle remains decidedly bad design.
However, referencing what they suggested with the DoT-Haste interaction: It's likely they're giving the idea a trial in glyph form, with the intent of permanent alteration further down the line.
On a lighter note, does anyone remember during BC Beta when the WE needed 8 Arcane Dust to summon and was permanent, then got changed to 8 Arc Dust and duration, then we spent a month in limbo, wondering if we'd go through with a 1g+ cost each time we pressed the cooldown?
I’ll post the Mage stuff below. They were already working on some nice changes to the Water Elemental and to Ice Lance. Now it looks like Blizz is looing at our 51-pt talent too. It looks like they're putting a lot of effort into making Frost Mages viable in PvE again. There’s even some small buffs there for Fire and Arcane Mages. I should probably toss out the disclaimer that these are all changes that are in place on the current PTR. Noting is official yet.
Mages
Talents
Arcane
Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
Fire
Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.
Dragon's Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.
Improved Scorch: The debuff from this talent no longer stacks, and instead can apply the full effect from a single cast of Scorch.
Frost
Deep Freeze: This spell now deals a large amount of damage to targets permanently immune to stuns.
Frozen Core: This talent now also causes Ice Lance critical strikes to reduce the cast time of the mage's next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 seconds.
Pets
Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
Mirror Image: Health on the mirror images has been increased.
Water Elemental: Waterbolt mana cost reduced by 80%.
Glyphs
Glyph of Improved Scorch: Renamed Glyph of Scorch. This glyph now increases the damage of Scorch by 20%.
Glyph of Eternal Water: This glyph allows for a summoned Water Elemental to last indefinitely, but it can no longer cast Freeze.
So for Arcane Mages they’re getting the same raid buff that BM hunters and ret paly’s had. Nothing huge here, but any ability to get buffs easier is probably a good thing.
For Fire/FrostFire mages there are a few nods to PvP and some slightly better AOE, but the big change will probably be to PvE. They are essentially getting something that used to take up a glyph spot for free. Fire Mages used to have 3 good glyphs and one that they all had to carry around just in case no one else had the imp scorch glyph. Now they get the glyph built into the spell for free so they can all take the glyphs they want without fear of loosing the buff. This also means that there’s no excuse for a Fire mage not to keep this buff up full time (just like Frost Mages and Warlocks with imp shadow bolt do now).
Frost Mages are getting 3 significant changes – all designed to make them viable in PvE again, and they even come with a nice PvP boost as well.
The base damage on Deep Freeze is 1469 to 1741 (it's currently 0). This will make it stronger than Pryoblast in terms of damage, but it’s an instant (with a 30 second cool down). We essentially get a new spell added to our rotation. This is in the neighborhood of 2x as strong as a standard Frostbolt. So instead of getting ~ 21 Frostbolts per 30 seconds at 10k each, we’ll get 20 Frostbolts at 10k and 1 Deep Freeze for 20k. Napkin math puts that at about an increase of 300-400DPS or 5%.
The change to the glyph of water elemental (now glyph of eternal water) and the reduction to the mana cost of his waterbolts means that he'll be with us full time now. The way it is currently, if fully talented and glyphed, he stays up for 1 min and has a 2 min timer for recast – i.e. he’s up 50% of the time. If you have a short fight you can cold snap to recast him after 1 min, but that messes up your ability to sync all the other 2-min cool downs. It was estimated that the Water Elemental did about 1k DPS for the time he was up (slightly better than 600DPS over the length of a typical ToC fight) and that meant he was about 9% of our overall damage. So this change will be in increase of about 400-500DPS or about 6-7%.
There’s still a lot of Theory crafting going on for the changes to Frozen Core and how it will impact PvE (if it goes live at all). It may look super sexy, but Frost Mages are already pretty close to hitting the point of diminishing returns on haste. When you have a spell that goes off every 1.4 seconds, trying to reduce the cast time by 1 second just isn’t possible (blizzard doesn’t let the global cooldown go below 1.0 seconds). Casting Ice Lance itself is a DPS loss to begin with – even as an “instant” cast spell. So there’s some trade off involved. In cases where you can use the reduced cast time (not under blood lust or icy veins) it may be a very slight PvE DPS increase if you execute it flawlessly in combination with Fingers of Frost "ghost charges". Best case we’re looking at about 100DPS more or about 1%.
Overall the changes to Frost currently look like they are good for as much as 1000DPS or about 14%. The current theory crafting numbers had Frost more than 20% behind Fire and Arcane. So this may not make everything totally equal in terms of pure single-target DPS. But Frost is still the king of AOE DPS (although they are going to place limits on AOE damage). Frost is the most mana effient Mage build. And Frost can be a little more durable with ice barrier, and more ice blocks. If all this actually makes it into the next patch I’ll be pretty happy and you may even see a few other Mages raiding as frost again.
Anyone else looked some theory crafting numbers for the DPS changes?
(Admin note - The 3.2 Raiding as Frost thread is locked. When/If these changes go live I can repost the thread. But for now it's pretty speculative to make judgements based on PTR notes.)
Simcraft places a WE with a 100% uptime at 1034, so the glyph of eternal water would provide a 413 dps increase. If your brain freeze calculations are correct, and the dps increase is in line with 500 dps, this brings Frost Mages to 9106, close to the dps of a BiS geared ele shaman with his buff totem out.
Edit: removed anything about Frozen Core. Unless there are more changes, I don't see frost as being terribly competitive in PvE.
For my math on Deep Freeze, I've just really looked at base damage and cast time. There seems to be a lot of discussion about what does and doesn't effect deep freeze damage on the PTR (i.e. it may not get shatter bonus at all).
Deep Freeze is 1469 to 1741 base damage and Frostbolt (rank 16) is 799-861. Assuming they both recieve the same buffs (and that's a big assumption), then it should be ~2x as strong as a Frostbolt.
I think my normal "rotation" had frostbolts averaging about 1.4 seconds each. The Deep Freeze should be instant with a 1.0 seconds GCD. So for 30 seconds of fight you would get 21.4 frostbolts (no Deep Freeze). With Deep Freeze you'd get 20.7 frostbolts and 1 Deep Freeze. If we cound the Deep Freeze as 2x frostbolts in terms of damage, that's 22.7/21.4 = 6% DPS increase.
If your Frostbolts are close to 1.6 seconds then you'd have 18.75 frostbolts per 30 seconds with out deep freeeze or 18.125 with it. Counting the DF as 2x FB again that's 20.125 / 18.75 = 7.3% DPS increase.
Because the instant is already effectivly "haste cap'd" then we will see dimishing returns from the value of deep freeze as the average frostbolt gets closer to its haste cap. It we take it to extreme where the frostbolt becomes haste capped as well. Then we end up with 31/30 = 3.3% DPS increase.
If the new WE glyph is 1034 DPS and that's an increase of 413. That means it's currently 621 DPS average. So if we take 8193 Mage_T9_18_00_53 and subtract out the current WE we're at 7572 for just Frostbolt spam currently. A 6% increase is worth ~454 DPS or a total of 8026. Then you can add the WE back in (with the new glyph) for a total of 9060 DPS.
The other thing to note is that the new glyph of Eternal Water will currently make anything more than 1 point in the Enduring Winter (Improved Water Elemental) completely wasted. This frees up 2 talent points. If the Frozen Core change ends up being worthwhile then we'll probably put 1 point there. The other point will got Deep Freeze. I don't see a reduction of more than 0.4 seconds being very useful unless your gear is really lacking haste. But you're also limited on better options (Brain Freeze, Student of the Mind or Icy Floes?). I think Frost Mages will still have at least 2 talent points that are completly optional and don't really impact DPS noticably
We still haven't really gotten into the math behind the frozen core above. I don't see it being a big thing though. It will probably make ice lance that much better to cast in cases where you have to move. Beyond that we're probably back to the whole "Ghost FoF Shatter" debate - marginally useful if you pull it off, but not a big deal either way.
Hey guys, keep up with patch notes: the Frozen Core change was reverted last week and likely won't make it into the patch. Lhivera and Vontre have been doing a lot of math on the changes which you can see in this thread and compare with your results.
Anyone feels that Pyro (fire biggest fire ball) is falling behind? I currently have TTY/FB and on all logs from the raids Pyro is way behind FB. It dosnt seem usefull other then Instant cast from HS. Should this be a concern for fire mages going on in 3.3 or should we not expect any tweeks from Pyro?
On another note who, I am currently undead and I am looking for suggestion on switching to Troll or Orc (Orc when is available on 3.3 hopefully). Any thoughts? (I looked at rawr and it seems to put Trolls ahead) Base on my current gear. My partner in crime is also undead so I dont have any insites.
Oh I am not, I just dont understand why Pyro keeps falling behind on dmg and it was or it should be our biggest dmg output.
Originally Posted by maldocom
Anyone feels that Pyro (fire biggest fire ball) is falling behind? I currently have TTY/FB and on all logs from the raids Pyro is way behind FB. It dosnt seem usefull other then Instant cast from HS. Should this be a concern for fire mages going on in 3.3 or should we not expect any tweeks from Pyro?
I do not understand your question. Please elaborate.
On another note who, I am currently undead and I am looking for suggestion on switching to Troll or Orc. Any thoughts? (I looked at rawr and it seems to put Trolls ahead) Base on my current gear. My partner in crime is also undead so I dont have any insites.
Clearly Orc for mages is the superior choice.
<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 see FB always on top on dps, I always have the assumption that Pyro was our biggest bang for the buck, I know by now is just wishful thinking. But I would have expected more dmg output from this spell then any other spell from my arsenal.
Originally Posted by manly
Clearly Orc for mages is the superior choice.
Well haste is been very attractive at the moment, I am keeping my self TTW/FB, but SP (with no static number) every 2min from Orc really sounds that it might out wait the 30-10% berserking of trolls every 3min?
Well haste is been very attractive at the moment, I am keeping my self TTY/FB, but SP (with no static number) every 2min from Orc really sounds that it might out wait the 30-10% berserking of trolls every 3min?
Torment the Yeak?
Regardless of which of the troll or orc damage buffing racials are the best, the troll racial ability to actually be a mage pushes them significantly ahead.
I see FB always on top on dps, I always have the assumption that Pyro was our biggest bang for the buck, I know by now is just wishful thinking. But I would have expected more dmg output from this spell then any other spell from my arsenal.
Hot Streak pyroblasts ARE your biggest bang for the buck. This does not mean it will be your highest source of total damage done in a fight, which seems to be what you are expecting. The two are mutually exclusive.
edit: actually Living Bomb is your best DPSC spell, but Hot Streak is still better than Fireball (I assume this is what you mean by biggest bang for the buck?)
Last edited by BusinessTime : 10/29/09 at 6:36 PM.
* Deep Freeze now deals 1469 to 1741 damage to targets permanently immune to stuns.
* Frozen Core no longer causes your Ice Lance criticals to reduce the cast time of your next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt
Not sure how much of a news that is but I did some extensive testing on live and PTR on what effects [Reign of the Dead], apart from the known information like CoE, Sanctified Retribution, crit debuffs, your spell crit, meta gem;
Even made a wierd build on PTR and took both talents for 6% damage increase to the proc. I'll conjecture that any talent that mentions generic increase in spell damage should effect it.
Following testing on the PTR with both Mages and Warriors, the best model I could come up with for Ignite (and Deep Wounds) munching and rolling was this:
The calculations to determine how much the current spell crit will add to the Ignite DoT happen not when the spell is cast but when it lands (unlike the description on the wowwiki), however for each such crit a SPELL_AURA_APPLIED or SPELL_AURA_REFRESHED happens after a further delay which does not appear to be related to travel distance or speed (the same duration can be seen with both a Mage casting from distance and a Warrior meleeing). It is when this SPELL_AURA_* event fires that the calculated Ignite tick damage is applied.
Thus, Ignite "munching" happens when the second spell to land does so before the first spell's corresponding SPELL_AURA_APPLIED or SPELL_AURA_REFRESH occurs because the current Ignite tick hasn't yet been updated with the first spells damage.
Ignite "rolling" happens when the an Ignite tick happens between when the second spell lands and when its SPELL_AURA_REFRESH event happens (which is roughly a 600ms window on average it seems). In this situation the second spell doesn't see that a tick is about to happen and so it calculates the existing Ignite damage as having 1 more tick than it actually does when SPELL_AURA_REFRESH happens. This means you will get 1 extra tick with the damage amount from before the second spell's damage is added in.
In terms of tick deferment, it is triggered by the SPELL_AURA_REFRESH. When this event occurs it cancels any pending tick, resets the number of remaining ticks to 2 and schedules the first tick for current time + 2.0 seconds.
In summary, unlike the current model we have for how Ignite works, my testing indicates that the calculations for tick damage occur when the spell lands, not when it leaves the caster's hands and that it is the SPELL_AURA_REFRESH event which occurs around 600ms later that applies the tick damage etc.
Dedmonwakeen and I have added Ignite rolling to the latest SVN build of SimulationCraft although by default it is disabled as it relies upon the variable "aura_delay=<X seconds>". The default value of 0 implies no rolling or munching will occur and setting it to 0.6 will show both rolling and munching. When we set it to 0.6 we're seeing roughly twice as many "rolls" as "munches" and a net DPS increase.
If anyone has any comments or results of their own testing etc. about how Ignite works I'd love to hear from you.
SimC already supports travel-time, etc. We just needed to specify a travel_speed for Fireball and Pyroblast. It should also be noted that there is a RNG component to both the aura_delay and the time_to_travel.
To keep the change dps-neutral, I had to either make the avg aura delay 0.35sec (which is far lower than Althor's tests) or add an extreme amount of variance to aura_delay and time_to_travel (again, far more than Althor's tests are showing).
The net result is that SimC's position of Ignite munching and rolling would "cancel each other out" seems to be incorrect and we were underestimating Fire DPS by 200+.
What we would specifically like to see are parses from different locales to see how much latency (etc) might affect this. If you are unsure how to make controlled tests to exhibit this, please PM Althor for details.
Looking at the various logs on WoL expected Ignite damage is often lower then what it's supposed to be. Very easy to calculate with the way WoL shows damage by spell.
10/17/09, 6:44 AM
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