pocketmage

I keep seeing this mentality and I get confused. A pure pve dps frost spec, that goes for gold does not have the "hard to kill" factor. The glyph removes the snare, and the survival talents are not taken. This is especially true with the PTR changes where a defacto 18 is a requirement in the arcane tree.

All it really has going for it is that it is extreme mana efficiency, but honestly it needs to be so. There is a softcap on crit for frost dps (16-20% depending on raid makeup), and for frost to put out some nice numbers, it heavily relies on haste as a secondary stat. Icy Veins ends up being a huge mana dump at this point. The mana efficiency advantage goes away in high quality gear (I've pushed over 550 haste prior to going ffb). The mana efficiency advantage ends up equalizing, and hell I'd go on to state that in Uldaar scaling and beyond, frost would be LESS mana efficient than FFB.

In that light, I think a full fledged PvE frost dps build should have a DPS output on par or very near to ffb spec.



Blizz, to me at least, seems to be partially taking care of this. By requiring 18 points in arcane, it ensures both fire and frost trees can only dump a max of 53 in their respective trees. I'd wager that the next big patch, either 3.1 or the one after, will further bring the two trees inline DPS-wise.



Yes, there are PvP factors to consider, but PvPers will forgo 18 points in arcane for the survival goodies in frost.

 

dedmonwakeen

Your understanding is correct.

Very poorly I believe. I've had a hard time accepting the fact that Arcane Blast is no longer the beast it once was...... and so I'm constantly surprised by its poor DPET numbers relative to MBAM/ABar.

As one of my least favorite managers once told me: "Well, Nathaniel, after all..... it's just software."

But in this case...... it is a very easy conditional to add.

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

Mynak

It appears that [Sundial of the Exiled] cannot stack with the matching Wintergrasp trinket Flow of Knowledge, as they both give the same buff Now is the time! - Spell - World of Warcraft. One of them can overwrite the other however and reset the buff timer, but the two trinkets are on seperate Internal cooldowns.

 

Physicist

I'm not convinced {ABx3-ABr} is a rotation that is sensible without the glyph of arcane blast (which nobody has seen...). See the earlier calculations by Kel S'jet and myself. I'd be interested in hearing why you think (or the simulations show) the huge mana cost is appropriate for a dps gain of about 20dps.

 

Gediablo

They made Evocation independent of spirit due to PvP. I know your suggestion isn't nerfing PvP evocation, but I doubt they will make that change, since if mages got mana problems in PvE they will probably have bigger mana problems in PvP.

 

jdpowers19

The Pyromaniac change is replacing one mana conservation mechanic with another (spell cost reduction for passive regen) so that spirit has some value for Fire/FFB builds. It is not a 'mage regen is broken' type fix. The Evocation change is more of a comment on Evocation itself than mage mana issues in general. To me this change says 'Evocation is weaker than it should be to warrant a 5 minute CD; lets make it 4 minutes and 2 talented.'

Yes its POSSIBLE in certain raid compositions to go oom on some of the longer fights. But a few things have to be true for that to happen. First, your raid has to have no replenishment. Second, your raid has to have low overall dps. If both of those are true, then its possible with a Max dps rotation (LB 100% up time and using all HS procs), you will go oom. But to be perfectly honest, you can still do quite competitive dps, especially in a 10 man setting, without Living Bomb and even Hot Streak in order to conserve mana should you find yourself low. If later in the fight it seems youll have plenty of mana to finish up with, you can reincorporate them into your rotation for higher dps.

 

◊ manly

Simply put, I disagree.

First, I do believe the 30% mana regen given to mages was the balancing act that had to be done after nerfing JOW. A talent giving -3% mana cost, +3% crit and 30% passive regen would be quite a bit over the top (not to say that in its current incarnation it somewhat is, but again, the mana regen should have been somewhere else than the tree, like on molten armor for example). So anyway, remove the 3% cost reduction and replace it with 30% passive regen somewhat offsets the JOW nerf, leaving us around the same place we were otherwise. It also just so happens that the numbers almost match and end up close.

About the evocation change, I am pretty sure it wasn't directly aimed at mage mana regen for bosses. Realistically a fire mage will still use no more than 1 evocation per fight, 4 or 8 minutes notwithstanding. What it does change is allow us to much better handle chain-pulling and solo content. Has nobody else noticed that mages on most servers were dead last to get a class server first 80? Mana is a limiting factor to mage play, and it does severely puts us behind on anything that involves chain pulling. This change helps greatly alleviate this. Then they moved some arcane talent to give them 2min evocation; well, thats obviously intended for bosses (and indirectly trash).

With all this said, I don't think the goal of either or those changes was to fix the (fire/frost) mage mana issues on bosses, since neither change really does anything to help for that one case.

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.

 

Kel S'jet

You do not specify which spec you are speaking about. If you mean the standard fire/frostfire or even frost spec, then yes, I agree, they will not be having that much use for Evocation (perhaps only 1 per fight). However, there is a reason for this.

The inherent strength of the Arcane spec (since the introduction of AB) has been its ability to manipulate its mana usage far more drastically than perhaps any other spec in the game. To this effect, even though a fire/frost mage would have little use for having > 1 evocation during the course of a boss fight, since, unlike arcane, they cannot 'on command' choose to 'dump' all their mana asap (nb. I am not saying that Fire/Frost do not have high dps low dpm rotations, I am just saying that if a fight said "Be at 0 mana in 5 seconds otherwise you will die" the frost/fire mage will die, and the arcane mage will live).

Furthermore, as others have stated, arcane is also naturally a more mana intensive spec. Putting all this together we can see that Arcane most certainly has use for multiple Evocates in a single fight. In fact, I would be surprised if dumping your mana at 2 min intervals just to evoc it back up (with IV and gloves as support) is not useful on some boss fight.

So in the end, I agree, the evocation change will be of little use to fire and frost mages on boss fights (since they have no relatively easy way to dump mana for dmg immediately), but to arcane mages, it will be of great use.

 

◊ manly

I disagree because the way I judge it, whether or not you're arcane a 4min cd on evocation doesn't change the fact that under most fights you'll use no more than 1. As such, it wasn't a buff to arcane.

However
"* Arcane Flows now also reduces the cooldown of Evocation by 1/2 minutes."
this would be a buff to arcane. I consider both changes separate.

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.

 

Kel S'jet

Then we are simply arguing semantics (which is unnecessary). I would not consider any arcane spec that does not have arcane flows.

Again, I restate, the overall changes to Evocation, both in the inherent spell, and the talented version of the spell, are of immense use to arcane, since both will be present in the spec of any arcanist worth his DKP.

edit: Even so, I believe even if Evocation had a 1 min untalented cooldown, my original point would still stand. That being that the real reason it is of no use to Frost/Fire specs on boss fights is because they cannot burn their mana fast enough to actually be able to use it at such a short cooldown, where as the arcane spec can.

 

◊ manly

Burning 10k mana in 1 minute wouldn't be very hard with blizzard.

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.

 

Kel S'jet

Haha! Indeed.

Though I know you didn't just suggest blizzarding a single target boss to be a viable playstyle, did you?

I think you know what I mean with my posts on this subject and are instead just being funny, but, just in case...

I believe the idea is that given normal play (i.e single target boss fights) as arcane you can gain benefit (DPS) by using very high mana burn rotations, whereas with frost/fire specs burning all your mana for the sake of burning all your mana will not lead to gain.
Furthermore, with fire/frost specs you have no way to actively increase mana usage and gain DPS since you have no tools that can accommodate such an act, where as arcane has Arcane Blast.

So in short, yes, you could potentially burn 10k mana in 1 min on a boss fight as fire/frost, however, on the same fight, the arcane mage who will have burned 10k mana in 1 min would not only do far more DPS than you, but he would do more dps then he would normally be doing using more 'conservative' rotations.
And this ties into the original point being, since arcane mages can achieve a gain through burning more mana, having a mechanism at their disposal to the regain all that burnt mana at a (relatively) short cooldown, will be of great use to them, since they can cycle "burn-regen" with more proficiency than other specs.

 

◊ manly

Well then, I have a question for you. Mind you, the answer is not obvious, and I definitely don't have a clear answer for it myself.

You're giving me the rogue argument. Basically, if you can only dps in slices, and that your dps has times where you cannot dps, be it because you have to regen mana (mage), or because of the boss cleave mechanics/move out of range (rogue), then your dps should be higher for the times you are dpsing.

Then explain me why it isn't that way it works with rogues.

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.

 

Herbo

Sorry to interject between you two, but a semi-answer to the rogue question is that rogues don't have control over boss aoe/run-away mechanics other than boss timers. An Arcanist would have that control to use at their discretion (in theory).

 

Kel S'jet

This is strange because I was about 'this' close to actually writing in my previous post "This mechanism of Burn-Regen is very rogue-like". It's almost as if you read my mind!

That being said, it is actually the same way for rogues, except the time frame in which the fluctuation between 'burn and regen of their resource mechanism' happens so fast that it seems almost unnoticeable when we mages look at it.

If you ever look at a rogue's energy bar when he is in full flight (i.e. tank and spank boss, no cleaves, no running out, etc), you will see the same behavior, albeit in shorter time frames. Their energy bar will go from full to zero in seconds, and then it will regen, and then it will be burnt again in seconds and so on and so forth.
They burn energy at an alarming rate, getting their combo points up and then unleashing a finisher, and then spend the next few seconds (and GCDs) using 'white attacks' while their energy regens. This is why if you look at a rogues damage parse, 'white damage' will will be present in fair amounts (it is also why "keeping up slice and dice" has been a rogue mantra for a while now, since it is directly buffing the amount of 'white damage' they are doing in this 'regen' phase).

Now granted the spread is different, i.e the % of total damage that the rogue does during his "regen" phase is much more than the % damage an arcane mage would do in his 'regen' phase, but the rogues are balanced around that. Even so, if you look at rogue damage only when he is within the few seconds of the "burn" phase of his rotation, it is alarmingly high, it is his "white damage - energy regen" phase that brings his overall dps down. (spec permitting)

It is the same idea for arcane mages, though the spread between their "regen phase DPS" and their "burn phase DPS" is far far larger.


So in effect, even without cleaves and the rogues having to run out (which, yes, does stop their DPS, but it is not the real limiter to their burst. The real limiter is the mechanics of their energy resource), the basic rogue resource, energy, actually works in the same way from a dynamics standpoint. They burn, energy goes to 0, they regen, they burn again. The only difference is that the rogue does not need to 'manage' this regen where as the mage does, as well as the fact that for rogues this "burn-regen" cycle happens very very quickly in comparison.
Instead, the rogue needs to maximise the DPS of his 'burn' phase (through the use of proper skills at proper energy levels) as well as maximize his DPS during the 'regen' phase (through the use of good weapons/fast weapons etc).

But at their core, at least where regen is concerned, they are very very similar.

 

galzohar

Keep in mind lifetap's primary cost is the GCD, not the damage, which is really a side effect most of the time and is nowhere near as severe as evocation's vulnerability.
I wasn't at all suggesting lifetap-like mechanic. It would just be nice if clicking evocation would be good enough to not make you say "Right now I'd really wish I was a lifetapping warlock...". If warlocks spend X times net mana/sec as mages, they should get quite less than X times of evocation mana by lifetapping for 8 seconds. Could use more accurate numbers, but 8s of evocation seem to give somewhere around 1/2 the mana of 8s of lifetap - are warlock spells really twice as expensive? I doubt it, but if they are, then another fix could be to increase the global raid mana regen, which would be more effective for mages (and balance it for other casters accordingly - yeah it's not simple but fixing balance while making mana matter can't be simple).

At the end the way I'd like to see it is mages gaining the most DPM*mana per time spent not casting due to the cooldown and vulnerability, while still gaining the most out of mana regen that comes from having other classes in your raid. All while keeping it so you can always last through a fight by losing more time evocating, yet keeping it rather hard to last through a fight without evocating at all.

 

Dagmagi

Just did some testing on the 3.0.8 PTR with [Illustration of the Dragon Soul]. It no longer stacks with out of combat effects like mana shield, slow fall, or blizzard. And it no longer applies multiple stacks with Imp Scorch + Glyph. It does apply multiple stacks with AoE, 1 stack per target affected. And it applies 1 stack per blizzard wave that hits a target.

With the decrease in damage per stack and the slower stacking, it's not so far ahead of other epic trinkets.

 

◊ manly

Hah. Well, it was essentially dodging the ilvl formula by allowing us 100% uptime. In any case, I can't deny that I have been the most vocal opponent to the way the trinket worked, much in the same way I always grinned at the unbeknown abusability of [Shifting Naaru Sliver].

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.

 

Faxmonkey

In case this hasn't been discussed yet, there seems to be a new mirror image threat mechanic in place on PTR. Without a threat meter and someone to taunt, I have no good way to test exactly how this currently works -- however, it *seemed* that Mirror Image now reduces your threat to 0 and that all images have 0 threat as well.

I say it "seemed" that way because I noticed that the mob I was fighting, on which i had a great deal of threat, ignored my images and only turned to attack them once they had dealt some damage to the mob. I, on the other hand, stood still and did no damage and it took the images roughly 3 seconds (Frostbolt cast/travel time) in order to get aggro off of me.

It could just be the same as the old mechanics, however, but with a failure to switch targets to highest threat right away. Someone's going to have to test it in a more precise manner to figure out what's going on -- but its definitely changed.

 

◊ manly

It ought to be changed. The bug did cause a rather embarrassing wipe due to my mistake. It seems like doing a macro that does "/cancelaura Invisibility /cast Invisibility" (was trying out new macros after the post on the subject) caused every one of my invis casts to be immediately cancelled. Maybe its because of the massive 2k+ mal'ganis lag. In any case, yeah, its a really stupid bug.

For what its worth, I did confirm that using eternal earth is an awesome way to increase dps. Cool thing it also works for melee. I did not do it because it was laggy enough and could very well contribute to worse lag, but I would much rather have the word come out so it can get fixed rather than get a bunch of people doing it, potentially furthering lag.

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.

 

Mynak

Just tested on the PTR test dummies, and Living Bomb on AoE will proc Hot Streak when it crits on multiple targets.

 

• Seonid

But it could be an effective way to try and model it - in this case the time slice is 2 minutes for an Arcane mage.
Pure TC, excluding encounter mechanics, you could work from a base premise that Evocation + Mana Gem + I5SR regen gives you a full mana pool every 2 minutes. With all other [arcane] CD's also on the 2 minute mark, you work out what you can do in those 2 minutes and cycle that until the fight will be over in less than 2 minutes when you switch into simple "burn" mode.

The Mage theme song.

 

Gediablo

Torment the Weak

According to this post earlier in the thread Upcoming mage changes the old Molten Fury bug still kills TtW.

But what I'm more interested in is whether TtW actually work on bosses with skills besides Slow. The official words are:
I keep reading that players are assuming it does, but I am not convinced it actually does yet. Has anyone actually tested this on any Skull level bosses yet on the PTR? I couldn't find any test results on this here yet.

 

Flitwik

Heuu ... but the rogue still makes dps during his "regen phase", and are the "burst phase" comparable ?

 

• Praanz

I have been using this (and a similar one for Iceblock) for well over a year now and it indeed takes some getting used to at first. Even though I used to stopcast fireballs it was sometimes easy to doublepress the macro. But it's a great macro in the start, still lag can make it really annoying at times - I've stopped counting how many times I've canceled an iceblock instantly.