Abnell

You mean like our water elemental?

 

◊ manly

I think 3 classes providing replenishment ought to be enough ?

It seems like the general direction is that any buff/debuff is shared by 2 classes. Replenishment is an exception due to its necessity - as a result they gave it to 3 classes. Any buff/debuff being single-class only seems to be viewed as a mistake and on the way to be fixed.

I think that is separate. WE was, oddly enough, left out many times in blue posts when talking about mana regen mechanics. My own conclusion was that it was meant to be changed eventually and possibly removed. In any case, it stacks with replenishment, and as such, acts independently. I believe that conceptually it is bad, much in the same way that I grin at BOW/mana spring being the exact same thing, but yet, they are allowed to stack together (why?). Personally I believe it would be an acceptable compromise to let WE apply replenishment -- however, it would be fair to buff WE dps as well after doing that.

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

 

Prom

It will only be a global nerf if Blizzard feels that it should be so.

Key word here is about. It all depends on the new numbers for creature armour. It can either be a nerf, a balance or a buff for caster dps in comparison to physical dps. It all depends on the readjustment of creature armour. Don't be quick to jump into conclusions, especially since all class changes have not yet been announced.

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Lons

Ok, let me know if I am missing something here. From beta to present day TC this is what happened to the scorch buff.

In the beginning it was 10% damage to fire only, then fire and frost, then frost fire and arcane. Then they changed the mechanic to 10% crit to all spells and now it look like we are just gonna be fine with it being 5% crit if that is the change.

Then they put the same effect on a warlock main nuke in a talent they is a no brainer already to take in the first tier of a talent tree.

Just not seeing where they are going with this. Unless scorch / winters chill is gonna be moved to tier 1 talents and merged with tier one improved talents this is pretty incredulous. Or am I reading this all wrong?

BTW Manly, loving the fireball spec!

 

◊ manly

It was 15% fire damage. (not that it really matters anyway)

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Lhivera

(Etc.) I think what you're missing is that our info is far from complete, and you're listening too closely to your pessimistic voice. Tell that voice to go sit in the corner for a while and wait and see. This change is not happening in a vacuum; there will be other changes happening alongside that are pretty much guaranteed to give you a very different picture than the one you're imagining now.

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Pheroz

Looking at things in a vacuum is a good way to totally misunderstand things.

 

Lhivera

And also a good way to have your eyeballs freeze and your lungs burst.

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.

 

Lons

I don't mean to look at things in a vacuum at all. I try to just not let everything that happened in the past cloud my judgment, but it creeps up from time to time.

 

Nyuu

Except it is only 3 specs that currently provide replenishment, and if they are balancing around the assumption that everyone has it, groups have to be constructed a certain way. Seems to go against what they wanted for stacking groups. While it might not effect 25mans because of the number of people you can bring, it does seem to hurt 10 mans.

 

◊ manly

Well, if you give it to 4-5 classes because its a mandatory buff, then why not just remove the damn thing alltogether and give it base to all classes ? You know, a bit like what they did with blessing of salvation.

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dscop

* We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.


Maybe they should...

 

Nyuu

Maybe only to dps classes? I dunno, the changes they made to salvation and tanking really seemed to be the right thing to do. Healers are a different story.

 

Quirkie

I was mainly worried when they said that replenishment was going to be assumed because the 10-man groups I run unfortunately do not always have replenishment so if they're gearing battles to expect it, that's going to suck. In a sense replenishment seems to turn into something like Heroism/Bloodlust. Right now content isn't really challenging enough that it's a necessity, but I can definitely see that in harder content, replenishment will be a must unless you're over geared for it.

About water elementals doing replenishment, I agree like Manly said that it's separate, but also there aren't that many viable raid frost specs when you need to really push out the DPS. Also there are too many encounters where your water elemental would just die right away. It'd be almost comparing some really deep shadow fiend talent that gives the raid mana.

 

Lhivera

Anyone else find it curious that whenever they mention the crit debuff nowadays, they refer exclusively to Improved Scorch and never to Winter's Chill?

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Rayeth

You mean there are frost mages in raids still? /sarcasm

If for whatever reason Frost was the dominant spec instead of Fire I can bet the situation would be reversed. Also WC (again for another reason I don't understand) is a whole two tiers deeper in the frost tree than Imp Scorch is in the Fire tree. So it stands to reason that fewer instances of WC would show up. Or perhaps Blizzard intends to merge the two and be done with it like everyone here has been saying?

 

Gediablo

Is it just me seeing the water elemental change as a nerf to frost in PvE raiding? Since you cannot have it up all the time you need another stable replenish source instead anyway and the new version as I read it doesn't stack with replenish. Nice for 5 man content I guess, but in raids I actually think the current version is better (although the "hidden" mana buff is stupid). Or maybe they increased the duration of the elemental to the same as the talented cooldown? The other announced changes are pretty boring - nothing they haven't said since before the WotLK beta. I don't take as a good sign that they stopped talking about ignite. Overall this preview doesn't provide any useful information.

Looking forward to some more concrete info.

Edit: To Swindley. My whole point was that I don't read the change as added raid utility, but quite the opposite (unless the uptime of elemental is changed to 100% in raids).

I just noticed the 3.1 thread instead of this thread I had deeplinked as a bookmark so I'll let this thread die. Someone should lock it.

 

Swindley

No need to be so pessimistic. First of all, it never said the replenishment would even be brought by the Water elemental, it just said the the talent would be replaced by it. Also, as mentioned in the other thread, I think they'll replace it with a 3 point talent that gives replenishment and some sort of a dps benefit. If they also can make shatter combos work (for a dps increase, if not, what's the point?), then that means frostmages are probably looking at a dps increase with added utility on top of that.

 

Lhivera

The Elemental's uptime almost certainly has nothing to do with the utility. As I mentioned in the other thread, if the Replenishment were linked to the Elemental, why replace Improved Water Elemental? Why not simply keep the talent and change the regen to standard Replenishment? Replacing the talent implies that it will not be linked to the elemental in any way.

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Pintofbrew

This is extremely likely. uncoupling what will become a critical mechanic (offering Replenishment) to the spec would not make sense coupled to a summon which has literally no mechanics of survival except Frost damage Immunity.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the new talent is uncoupled from requiring WE all together.

Perhaps they'll kill two birds with one change and make us Replenish whenever we do a shatter combo? Link the Replenish to Ice Lance?

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Arafela

Before you know it, Arcane mages that Evocate create a "wild magic" area effect for the duration equal to what happens when those arcane-elementals died in Nexus / Karazan.

And scorch becomes a 5x1% crit buff on target and also stacks up to 1% aditional crit-damage on the caster as a stackable buff to be consumed when the caster crits.

Still speculation again. It is nice to know they look at the mage class, but sofar it is very speculative regarding the provided information compared to other classes they gave information about.

 

Lhivera

I was just about to write something like that in a post to the Frost Raiding thread. They could easily solve the "Shatter Combo" problem without buffing Ice Lance simply by making us want to execute the combos for some other reason. Tying the Replenishment buff to Ice Lance crits would be just such a reason; you'd want to use Ice Lance on the second charge because that's your best shot at activating Replenishment.

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.

 

Soul

But that doesn't solve the problem of dps with Ice Lance... you make a large dps sacrifice for Replenishment, unlike, say, Ret Pallies or Shadow Priests. If I were to go for a "two birds, one stone" solution, I'd aim it at Deep Freeze: make Deep Freeze do a large amount of damage (that can crit) when cast on targets immune to freezes or stuns. FoF becomes a prereq for Deep Freeze.

 

jdpowers19

I have always wanted to see Frost base FFB specs, and I think this is a great opportunity for Blizzard to make them work. Supposing FFB was added to Empowere Frostbolt, and the new Replenishment talent linked to Ice Lance in some way, change Incineration to allow Ice Lance to do 'Frostfire' Damage and thus benefit from Ignite the way FFB does. So now Ice Lance crits are doing 200% damage + 40% more in the form of ignite. Ice Lance is now (probably) a worthwhile part of the rotation without really changing pvp balance as most Frost PvPers are 20/0/51 anyway.

 

Lhivera

Doesn't really matter, as long as they balance the total DPS around the mechanic. Then you have a situation much like pure DPS classes that sometimes bring utility: if the Fire Mage needs to maintain the crit debuff, he sacrifices a bit of DPS for that utility; if the Warlock needs to provide Curse of the Elements, he doesn't get to use Curse of Agony. If your replenishment isn't needed, you revert to Frostbolt spam for a bit of extra DPS.

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.