Another undocumented change that I found posted, but haven't seen mentioned here:

Small buff I guess.

Lets see if their wonderful SVN reverted back the bug of ole' where FFB dot did crazy damage. Or if its just a bugfix.

Indeed. Disheartening for sure, we can only hope then.




I believe that was already in game was it not? Or am I just having Deja Vu?

No. FFB DoT scaling was removed before WotLK went live.

Why would you want Frostfire Bolt to have a 2.5 second cast time? They made the changes to Torment the Weak to bring 18.53.0 in line with Frostfire's 0.53.18. Giving Frostfire a 0.5 cast reduction time means that in the time it took you to cast 50 frostfires, you would now be able to cast 60 of them. Assuming 6 of those crit for 12k, plus ignite damage of 4800, is 16,800 per crit, ~3600 per non-crit. That gives 14.4k in non-crits, and 100,800 in crits, for a total of 115,200 extra damage in the same 150 seconds. That's 768 DPS, and that's excluding gains from Hot Streak due to 6 extra crits to work with.

I was refering to the 30% Manareg on Pyromaniac. I do think, however, that the cast reduction of FFB should be added deeper in the frost tree, enough to make it so that a Frost/fire spec would be viable.



Ah, my mistake.

I somewhat agree, but that would certainly raise an eyebrow as to why blizzard would be hell bent upon making fire changes and leaving nothing for true deep frost specs. Something needs to be done about frost lack of fun, lack of rotation of sort.

The 30% in-combat regen makes a lot of sense, when you think about it... not exactly for Frostfire, but for Fireball builds. Fireball is the mana-intensive spec, and losing Arcane Meditation to pick up Torment the Weak is necessary. That's viable in 25-mans where you may have more mana return options, but in 10-mans, class composition doesn't always work out that way. Giving the fire tree its own in-combat regen allows for Fireball to make its necessary catch-up to Frostfire, and still maintain its in-combat regen. It'd be interesting to see the difference between 30% regen and 3% mana reduction though in numbers.

I think the deeper question is why are they so hell bent on not just helping frost spec. We saw it in beta when Lhiv explained the Shatter Combo premise to GC, what did he say 'They aren't sure how they could do it without buffing frost in pvp'? Would it be so OP to bring back the timer rather than charges on FoF? Not sure if I'm missing something but I believe that would atleast give Frost some interactivity.

So how does 20/51/0 shape up with 50% in-combat regen? Can the extra mana be used to make up for losing WiF?

What his response to my explanation thread made clear was that he (and the dev team in general?) didn't actually know what players mean when they say "Shatter Combo." Someone, I forget who, posted (for the umpteenth time) that Shatter Combos in PvE didn't work, and he responded, "What do you mean? You still want to spec Shatter, it's a good DPS increase." When I explained what we actually mean by the term, he said he got it.

So I'm thinking we had some 2-3 months of wasted effort, trying to explain what was wrong with the PvE Shatter Combos and wondering why they didn't see it as a problem, when the real problem was simply that they weren't up on our terminology and didn't understand what we were asking for.

His concern was that Frostbolt spam DPS would need to be nerfed in order to rebuild the spec's DPS with improved shatter combos, because the performance of Ice Lance on the combo needs to be improved relative to Frostbolt in order for it to really matter if you execute the combo or not. He later said, in a different thread, that he does want to get both Ice Lance and Deep Freeze into Frost raiding, but that it's low priority because it's just "not interesting" rather than "broken."

At this time, though, having not done any of the math myself for a couple months, I'm not sure he's right that the spam nerf would be necessary...with the TTW change, I'm not sure how 18/0/53 is going to compare to the other specs. It's possible it could use a straight-up buff from improved combos in order to be competitive in PvE.

Has anyone already done the math on how the New [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] now compares to other trinkets at 18 SP per stack? On a side note, I'm fairly surprised that the [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]didn't get the same treatment. It's proc is said to have a 35% uptime, making it like a straight +200 agility/strength . . .

This is not how Hot Streak works. You will still have the Hot Streak buff when the 3rd spell crits before you use Hot Streak. Hot Streak will never be eaten. You can still use Hot Streak before your 4th spell crits. If your 4th spell crits, it will then "eat" the Hot Streak you didn't use.

1) Not fully understanding why frost mages think the TTW change requires them to give up brain freeze. That isn't true. If you want it, you do have to give up all but one point in frostbite or ice floes. Are frost mages deeming frostbite essential now for its aoe use?

2) Access to torment closes about half of the frost dps gap.

3) Blizzard keeps missing the point about spirit. My time as arcane frost taught me that high dps mana-optimization playstyles are fun. Give specs an unsustainable high dps mana dump, a solid dps mana efficient nuke, and the necessity to balance the two on any fight, and mana regen suddenly becomes fun, and spirit becomes valuable. Arcane now seems to have that, and fire sort of does as well with living bomb. Frost has no mana dump, and no plausible way to recover mana via spirit. An obvious model is the interaction between AB and Abar, only applied to frostbolt and ice lance. Ice lance gets more powerful and more expensive the more frostbolts you cast or something. Would also help solve frost mage healer problems in pvp. Then you just need to do something like make frost channelling a regen talent.

I understand what you're saying, and I know how Hot Streak works, but yes, I missed something in my sequence. I will look at it. I know what I'm trying to get across, it just doesn't always work out.

Edit: Alright, I fixed it, thanks for bringing the mistake to my attention.

It is theoretically possible for Hot Streak to be eaten, it simply requires four crits in a row. If you had two frostfire bolt crits, followed by a critical scorch (which you intended to follow up with a pyroblast), and at the same time, living bomb crit, you would lose your hot streak from the first two criticals. That's what I was going for, but the timing just didn't work out in my scenario. It could happen though in a fight that requires moving.

At 180 SP, it's 8% better than Sundial or Embrace. Which is fine, as it's ilvl 213 while the other trinkets are 200.

Illustration also is pure SP, so it doesn't scale up when you get more spell power, only when you get more crit/haste.
Since mage gear progression has always been focused on SP, it'll be replaced when you get a decent Ulduar trinket set, or when you get some more spell power so that Sundial/Embrace take over due to scaling/non-scalaing.


Herbalism

Do [Fire Seed]s actually do something on the PTR, or are they still broken?
There was a wrong report on BB claiming they worked, but it was confirmed not working on live as of now.

It's nice to know that we have options for BW...but if it's sitting on a major glyph, I don't ever see myself getting one. If it's a minor sure, but the other options we have available to us are just too good.

There was a blue post last week mentioning glyphs affecting knockbacks in which is was specifically stated they would be minor.

Besides, mana cost modifiers normally are minor, especially when they have a 'negative' effect.

I'm still not sure i'll glyph this though. I've found several times that the knockback can be excelent utility. Caster not quite in the AoE pack? Blast it in and follow up with a flamestrike on the whole group. Agro on a healer from new adds? knock them away for a quick save. Not to mention the potential when doing solo AoE, and PvP.

If blizzard is still the superior choice for AoE i'll stick to unglyphed blastwave for the utility of being able to force mobs around when they're being bitchy about positioning.

If crit and haste don't carry as much weight in a deep arcane build, I'm curious how spirit will be weighted comparatively? How much of a dps boost does a 2 ABL 1 ABR cycle gain over say 1 ABL 1 ABR, if any at all? Is it at all viable to stack spirit actively?

Perhaps I am missing somethings here... I am not a math guru or min maxer (but i simply adore the insights you guys provide), but... it really seems like these changes which are supposed to help arcane pve actually doesn't do as much as it initially seems and in fact.. seems like a massive boost to arcane's burst potential (45% harder arcane barrage in pvp anyone? And its 30% more than that with AP up).

At first glance i was all atwitter... but then i really stopped to look at it:

Torment The Weak... Now that this will be a guaranteed gain on raid bosses thats great but this is NOT an arcane dps buff! It's a flat out buff to every spec mage but frostfire and any fire or frost mage who wants to maximize their dps will take it. So this talent isn't a specific boost to arcane and can't be counted among those things that are supposed to close the dps gap with arcane and the other specs except for frostfire (which can't take the talent and be optimal). It helps arcane catch up to frostfire but since fire and frost can (and will) take it they stay the same distance ahead in that regard.

Arcane Blast... At first glance I thought this was a good change... and part of it is. The problem I am seeing is this... At 3 stacks this spell costs over 1800 mana... thats insane.. and in my gear when arcane spec hits for around 3900... Somehow at that mana cost the damage seems pretty lack luster compared to other mage specs and it doesnt seem worthwhile to ever stack the buff. So we never see anything beyond a 15% increase to the damage of arcane barrage and Arcane Missiles when MB procs. AB itself never gets to benefit from its own buff because there are never consecutive ABs.

The dps gain on AB from the fully stacked buff never seems to be worth mana efficiency loss... and you may think the evocate at 2 min cooldown can fix that, but wont spending 8 seconds not dpsing to recover from that burn pretty much negate the dps gained from the spam? Essentially there never seems to be a reason to spam AB. And while I know the devs dont want us spamming AB as the end all be all dps... in an unlimited mana scenario is AB spam ever better than doing an ArB/AB rotation? Is it better than any other specs spam of a nuke? Basically it seems like arcane blast wasnt fixed.. it just buffs arcane barrage and arcane missiles now.

I'd love to hear some insights on rotations from you guys to see if I am missing something that makes this all come together and actually lets arcane compete with fire and frostfire in a pve scenario

This is also my opinion... the cooldown on blastwave is just too long to be really used on large hp aoe packs (the knockback doesn't even work on them most of the time) and on low hp aoe packs you can finish them off with blastwave where it doesn't matter if a few survive and get knocked, they are dead in seconds.
And the knockback is usefull to knock some mobs back into the aoe pack should you pull aggro with Blizzard or to save a healer... not to mention pvp

So what you're saying is that the presence of a glyph with a built in trade-off allows you to exercise your preference for one of the aspects of a spell over the other, a choice others might make differently. Sounds like a job well done on the part of the devs, even if the choice is more artificial than with most glyphs.