Enthorn

Frostfire was already anywhere from 8-12% ahead of Fireball, without the 3% ghost hit. Fireball builds having 12% more damage to Fireball doesn't give it necessarily a 12% lead ahead of frostfire, when, in some cases, it's already that far behind. There's an option in Rawr to turn on Slow slave, which is just as good for running the numbers and comparing builds. I'll do that later, using the same equipment list I've been using. Taking the ghost hit out is easy as well. It's built in, so you only need 12% to reach 100% hit for Frostfire, so gearing for 15% hit should model it fine.

As far as Thunder Clap -- I realize what people are saying. Yes, Ghostcrawler did imply that Torment the Weak now works on bosses, since Thunder Clap does work, and it simply wasn't triggering Torment the Weak in the past. However, that makes no implications as to other slowing/snaring effects. In other words, did they simply expand the list of slows/snares that trigger Torment the Weak?

I think it'd be great if they did, but I don't like that Arcane Meditation is being given up for Torment the Weak when Fireball builds can have mana issues without it.

For the record though, Torment the Weak is one of the most powerful PvP talents for 20.0.51 Frost Mages. It was of course triggering off of Frostbolt's chill effect on targets that weren't immune to it, so if your intial Frostbolt crit for 5100, your subsequent Frostbolt would crit for 5700. It's an incredibly powerful talent for chaining Frostbolt/Ice Lance shatter combos back to back (frost nova, then WE frost nova, then a deep freeze, and so forth).

But yes, it does seem... out of place, in a fireball build. Spell Impact works on its own and is far enough down in the tree that I don't have a problem with it (and it's half of what TTW is).

 

Lhivera

I corrected my Fire comments; obviously, two months of inactivity has totally rusted my brain in thinking about this stuff.

I would interpret the TTW change liberally: Ghostcrawler said "any kind of slowing effect," and I assume that's exactly what he means: snares, attack speed debuffs, cast speed debuffs.

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Jarlyn

Some random points:

Mana: The Evocation changes are serious /facepalm. Particularly with no changes in regards to spirit, I take this as a sign that we're never going to get any real overhaul to our mana mechanics.

Precision: I have difficulty imagining why anyone wouldn't already have at least 11% hit as an FFB spec, so I don't see that change as especially relevant. Minor nerf in raids without a shadow priest or moonkin, but (at least in my guild) it's highly infrequent not to have at least one of those classes in our raids, even in 10-mans. Now if you're Fire/Arcane, it's a different story.

Arcane offspecs: I think it's obvious they do intend for TTW to work on bosses. Still incredibly crappy design, in my opinion, but at least now there's room for debate about which spec is best, not just FFB or bust.

[e] FFB vs Fire: Assuming Vontre's sims are right and Fire is a ~1% dps gain over FFB, speaking personally I'd lose most of that gain by having to re-gem for extra hit. There's also the mana situation to consider, and while I'm rarely hurting in 25-mans, I'm not exactly sailing by. Barring some new revelation about TTW specs, I don't think I'll be changing.

Most importantly here, if Fire specs do become fully better than FFB, and mages do start running away on the DMs (especially when HAT rogues and hunters get nerfed), then yeah, we'll be next up for nerfs. I'd say it's a strong possibility at this point, so enjoy it while you can.

 

Anobix

Maybe I am missing something. Why would we use a fireball build instead of using frostfire bolt with TTW? Is that to pick up spell impact as well? Is it due to the lack of double-dipping or the necessity to spread points to thin between the three trees to have a proper level of damage?

 

Duodecimal

If you're getting TtW, you're not getting the frost crit / dam talents that make FFB worth casting.

 

◊ Vontre

Ghostcrawler says: "now works with Arcane Blast and does bonus damage to targets afflicted by any kind of slowing effect (e.g. Thunder Clap)."

There is absolutely nothing vague about this statement.

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◊ Vontre

Magegraf indicates that, in Manly's gear, frostfire bolt and fireball builds are competitive. Fireball has 1% dps lead, frostfire has much more mana. This DOES account for the full rdps benefit of Focus Magic.

[e] Arcane is going to take a while to implement.

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andastra

I sincerely hope that if we're next up for nerfs because of the torment the weak change, they target torment the weak for the nerfing instead of other talents. That talent just opens up so many balance problems. There will always be fights where bosses will be immune to snaring effects or it doesn't make sense to use snaring effects and losing 12% of our main nuke's damage just like that is problematic. I'm not too hopeful, though, as it seems they're really, really determiend to balance mages around this talent.

 

◊ manly

Ah yes my lucky gearset with 359 hit rating
In any case Vontre, the real question is whether or not those numbers include TTW counted on bosses ?

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Lhivera

TTW is no longer based on snaring effects. It's based on all types of slowing effects. AFAIK, there are no circumstances under which it's not worthwhile to slow the boss's attack speed or casting speed, so TTW should always be up.

That alone should be a good 10% DPS increase for Arcane since they're no longer spending 10% of their time casting Slow.

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Inoko

Confirmed by GhostCrawler:

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Ivorthemage

yeah, that is far closer to what I see in the Rawr simulations I have run.

I dug into this a couple days ago because for the gearset I was wearing at the time, fire was actually superior to frostfire according to Rawr, once you factored in focus magic. I hadn't seen this discussed anywhere, so I played with better gear sets to see if this was just a quirk of my gear. Fire's benefits marginally decreased as gear improved, but stayed within a percent or two. I gave up on the idea of speccing fire as frostfire had more utility and mana efficiency for its similar dps, and even though I understood focus magic's benefits from a raid perspective, I am just sufficiently selfish that I prefer dps that shows up under my numbers to dps that shows up under someone else's, all else equal.

This is similar to what we see in the dps charts linked to in the theorycraft post, which gives FFB a 5% lead without factoring in focus magic.

But get rid of frostfire double dip, and buff fireball but 12%, and we have a clear winner.

 

Faxmonkey

That's interesting. It will, at least in the short term, make it justifiable to have a full stack just so you can stack all your cooldowns with the +45% damage (arcane power and such). Once all the cooldowns are spent, however, you'll have to find a more reasonable rotation to use.

If nothing else, it'll be a very interactive and hard to master playstyle -- much like affliction is for warlocks. The million dollar question, however, is will it be good enough to be viable.

 

Hoffski

+45% arcane damage that stacks with arcane power = even more people crying about being 1-shot in pvp with arcane barrage. Will certainly mess around in warsong gulch a lot after these changes. Crossing my fingers for +100% damage debuff on flag carrier.

 

Bulgarth

~1% dps increase in my humble opinion does not deem worthy of having to re-gem for more hit and and lose the huge mana efficiency of the FFB build. I bet I'd be finding myself having to use Evocation on Patchwerk using the build and possibly not being able to use Mana gems for the 2-piece T7 in combination with my trinkets/cooldowns.

Fireball will double the cost of FFB in a FFB build because of the lose of EP and Frost Channeling. Sure you gain AC, but it doesn't fully make up for the frost talents lost to reduce mana cost.

 

Dorrinal

The optimist in me feels that the change to Evocation is a great answer to your "I hate to drink" problem. In my experience I only need to drink after an AoE pull so it seems appropriate to be able to pick up and go to the next pull in a few seconds. Perhaps they have decided that mana should be irrelevant to people who aren't monkeys and can use a few mana gems or spec/gear for efficiency (e.g. FFB). That's not worrisome.

The second change is quite alarming. As an Arcane talent to lower the Evocation cooldown in a patch buffing Arcane damage... are they trying to balance Arcane damage around frequent Evocation? The dps lost by Evocation would imply that the damage done while you have mana would be much greater to compensate. This introduces the classic balance problem where your dps varies wildly with fight length, and it's begging to be abused by the same players who figured out how to make Arcane Blast spam work in 2.4.

On a personal note I can't believe they're actually trying to work with a talent that says "+12% damage!" instead of scrapping it for something a little more subtle.

 

Brandox

Is this taking into consideration the Spell Impact talent? Being that Fireball will be our primary nuke once again, we're looking at an 18% damage increase to the spell.

I understand the complaints about evocation, but what are some of the proposed changes? Assuming we would be arguing for a divine plea type of spell?

 

◊ Vontre

Preliminary magegraf analysis is complete. By last analysis of frostfire and fireball was WITH the TTW change. I'm assuming it's always up, because it will always be up.

Arcane IS VIABLE.

It's in fact very evenly matched with frostfire and fireball, but you need a very specific build. If you want to get Improved Scorch, you can only get 2/3. 3/3 Master of Elements OR 3/3 Frost Channeling is REQUIRED to be competitive. To put 51 in arcane, pull 2 points from either Mind Mastery or Arcane Flows, they are the weakest talents in the bottom tiers and relatively even in terms of gain. The 2 minute cooldown reduction on evocation does not have any impact whatsoever on the simulation.

Arcane operates on the two-cycle theorem, with one efficient cycle and one burn cycle. The efficient cycle is Arcane Blast -> Arcane Barrage. The burn cycle is Arcane Blast x3 -> Arcane Barrage. Missile Barrage procs are used when they occur.

I'll be posting the magegraf update live in a few minutes.

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elfhelm

The FB vs FFB question reminded me of this post: WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3 PTR)

I figure the standard deviation of a fireball build will be smaller than those FFB numbers since the crit multiplier is smaller, but how much smaller? Personally, as long as I'm not going oom, if average dps is the same or very close I would rather have less variance. It really irritates me when I lose the crit rolling game and have a bad fight. It's also neat to have the good fights, but I'd rather know about how much dps I am bringing to the table.

 

◊ manly

Unless I didn't get the memo, blizzard wants mages to manage mana. I fail to see how lowering evocation's cooldown does anything whatsoever towards that end. Maybe if spirit had any kind of impact on mana regen, then maybe I would consider spirit on gear and do some basic 'mana management' via gear swaps (not that its ever going to happen, but lets just pretend here).

Or maybe they meant that arcane specs have to manage mana, in which case I doubt many will rejoice at this new gleaned info. Is the overarching goal of the mage changes to be more fun, or more frustrating ?

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Groat

I still wish they would make a serious effort to open up flexibility for Arcane by giving them their own 10% crit debuff (an Arcane variant of Improved Scorch / Winter's Chill). As it stands as only Mages are able to provide that debuff, until they give it to another class, Mages are hurting their group/raid by not having the ability so it absolutely forces which talents the Mage is able to take.

 

◊ nathanbp

I think the big variance problem with deep fire specs is Hot Streak more than the large crit multiplier (not only does it matter how much you happen to crit, but the order matters too).

 

Jonny_Monroe

If this is their aproach to mana management then its clearly unfinished. The first step appears to be making it so that actual running OOM doesn't occur. Only a steep DPS drop from needing frequent evocs. The next step of course is making regeneration effects/stats good enough to be competative against DPS stats from reducing the frequency of having to Evoc. This still has the problem of being completely tied up in the arcane tree and leaving frost and fire to their own devices.

So arcane is competative now? I would imagine being 5% behind is completely viable for a spec that enjoys better mobile damage, lower threat and strong passive defenses. If arcane can keep up with fire then I struggle to see how anyone would justify a fire spec. Maybe we'll see arcane suffering the same old scalling problems down the line with it gaining lower benefit from crit, but then it has strong synergy with spell power which is a naturally better stat for a long time; so maybe arcane is just over-tuned now.

Lets see how it pans out on the PTR.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Putts

I know it's still extremely preliminary, but do you mean that Missile Barrage should be immediately used, no matter when it may occur? Or is it smarter to wait until the Blast buff is burned on Arcane Barrage first?

 

Inoko

I imagine it wont be that great on highly mobile fights due to the "burn" requiring a ramp of 3x arcane blast, which (if I recall correctly) is a very short term "debuff," with a propensity to "fall off" if not used quickly.

Still, viable is good -- and more options for everyone is amazing. I love FFB, but I can see why some don't, and it sucked that they were pigeon-holed in to it for "Best DPS."

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