Presumably we'll get an Upcoming Classes Changes post later today with more details, but for now we know that Warlocks are going to get an Improved Scorch like crit debuff:
Originally Posted by Eyonix
Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch).
Edit: Removed speculation on changes to Improved Scorch. Also news on mana regen changes below: Upcoming Mage Changes in 3.1
(I'm sorry about the speculation and mostly I just thought we should have a new thread for 3.1 changes instead of having 1 uberlong thread for all upcoming changes. It probably should have waited until the preview for Mages was up though.)
Given Earth and Moon, Malediction, etc., it's probably fairly safe to assume that ISB's debuff effect is being added to the talent, rather than replacing the old effect; a nerf to Imp. Scorch and WC will probably also include the addition of personal effects to those talents.
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.
Without anything being announced yet, I'm simply making an educated guess along the lines of Lhivera.
Due to the change to sunder armor, it seems likely that a single scorch will apply the scorch debuff for a full 5%. If I were to guess, I might actually guess that the Glyph of Scorch will change so that any fire (or frostfire) spell apply the scorch debuff without actually casting scorch.
With this change, there will never be a reason to cast scorch until fire destro overtakes affliction for DPS. That in and of itself is a minor mage buff. It also means you can be arcane without carrying 6 stacks of glyphs for raid comp, regardless of dual spec. I'll wait on comments regarding the crit debuff and our potential talent changes until I see them.
I dont think they want scorch out of our rotations.
Probably the will leave scorch like 10% debuff and the lock one 5% or something alone the lines...
Could be possible that they nerf our scorch too to 5% as i readed somewhere some blue that told that scorch as raid debuff was too powerfull...
I dont think they want scorch out of our rotations.
Probably the will leave scorch like 10% debuff and the lock one 5% or something alone the lines...
Could be possible that they nerf our scorch too to 5% as i readed somewhere some blue that told that scorch as raid debuff was too powerfull...
They will never leave one at 10% and one at 5%. It's completely against their currently stated design philosophy of shared raid buffs. They may have a way to keep scorch in the rotation, but I do not think it will be for an additional 5% crit above and beyond the warlock buff.
I'm interested to see where mages will go now. Perhaps the nerf to "Arcane PvP burst" will allow for a more mana-friendly PvE Arcane spec. It seems that Blizzard wants Arcane to be viable, and right now it is, but you definitely need to be more "group cautious" trying to manage your mana pool. However, it could go either way. These changes, to me, seem pretty drastic. They may even give fire and and FFB a "rebuff" to make it more attractive now that Scorch [the debuff anyways..] won't be needed.
Without anything being announced yet, I'm simply making an educated guess along the lines of Lhivera.
Due to the change to sunder armor, it seems likely that a single scorch will apply the scorch debuff for a full 5%. If I were to guess, I might actually guess that the Glyph of Scorch will change so that any fire (or frostfire) spell apply the scorch debuff without actually casting scorch.
The consensus on the sunder armor change seems to be that it will now be 5 stacks of 4% each, for a total of 20% armor reduction. Note that what it says is "is now a single rank" (this makes since since it's percentage based now instead of reducing armor by a set amount which had to increase as armor values went up).
It seems likely to me that everything will stay the same as regards applying scorch and each stack of the debuff will only increase crit chance by 1% instead of 2%.
Just glanced at how some warlocks are currently specced, they don't seem to pick up Improved Shadowbolt anymore, I wonder how this will effect that. I certainly don't see myself ever casting scorch again in a raid if warlocks can just apply the effect with their primary spell. I'm very curious to see how Blizzard will be addressing the Scorch issue.
For future reference, EJ has rarely been keen on threads based on speculation. Wait for things to be (edit: more) final.
Last edited by manly : 02/05/09 at 1:51 PM.
<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
Improved scorch changed form 10% Debuff to 5% Buff.
That is purely speculative.
<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
It's totally speculative. It may be likely, and a logical conclusion. But it is absolutely, 100% speculative. It's hard to wait for information. I personally hate the phrase "Coming Soon". But we have to wait. It's going to be enough of a challenge with everything thats being announced being very subject to change, we really dont benefit from having speculation posted prior to that, no matter how logical that speculation is.
Technically speculative, but by far the most likely situation, given what they've said and done before about various raid (de/)buffs being equal among classes. Having one version be clearly superior destroys the point of multiple classes having the buff.
However, we have said everything non-speculative there is to say on the topic of 3.1 until the mage changes get posted.
Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch).
Kinda seals the case, for me. We will see, but under the premise of the thread I can speculate a little no?
I do fully agree it is likely to be changed towards 5-6%. Will shadowbolt be a separate debuff to scorch/wc ? Will it allow scorch to provide extra crit ? We don't know. But most importantly - it doesn't matter.
I understand the majority of readers dont have access to the benefactor's bar, but one thing you see in there is that times and times again any thread that was speculative ended up in bad shape, usually closed. People posting speculative stuff, with a more firm intent to actually 'believe this is the truth', people do get frustrated by those because ultimately it opens up to more (needless?) whining. Personally I don't mind at all, its just that usually it has a snowball effect and then other people think its true and feel the urge to add more to the conversation despise the fact all of it is based on nothing.
Is it really too much to ask to wait a day or 2 at most and see the mage changes ?
<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 do fully agree it is likely to be changed towards 5-6%. Will shadowbolt be a separate debuff to scorch/wc ? Will it allow scorch to provide extra crit ? We don't know. But most importantly - it doesn't matter.
I understand the majority of readers dont have access to the benefactor's bar, but one thing you see in there is that times and times again any thread that was speculative ended up in bad shape, usually closed. People posting speculative stuff, with a more firm intent to actually 'believe this is the truth', people do get frustrated by those because ultimately it opens up to more (needless?) whining. Personally I don't mind at all, its just that usually it has a snowball effect and then other people think its true and feel the urge to add more to the conversation despise the fact all of it is based on nothing.
Is it really too much to ask to wait a day or 2 at most and see the mage changes ?
Alright, your convinced me. Sorry. That and it's just realy slow today, normal it takes all my time just reading and not posting. LOL
As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.
Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.
* Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
* To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
* The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
* Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
* In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
* We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
* 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.
* These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.
<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 do fully agree it is likely to be changed towards 5-6%. Will shadowbolt be a separate debuff to scorch/wc ? Will it allow scorch to provide extra crit ? We don't know. But most importantly - it doesn't matter.
I understand the majority of readers dont have access to the benefactor's bar, but one thing you see in there is that times and times again any thread that was speculative ended up in bad shape, usually closed. People posting speculative stuff, with a more firm intent to actually 'believe this is the truth', people do get frustrated by those because ultimately it opens up to more (needless?) whining. Personally I don't mind at all, its just that usually it has a snowball effect and then other people think its true and feel the urge to add more to the conversation despise the fact all of it is based on nothing.
Is it really too much to ask to wait a day or 2 at most and see the mage changes ?
Totally agree man, when I first saw this thread on these boards I was curious when it was going to be deleted. Soon to be 2 pages of worthless drible with no concrete anything. Speculation is for the futures markets, not the Mage forums.
The changes manly posted regarding mana regeneration are hopefully a sign of more change to spirit mechanics to come. If the regen aspect of the stat is decreasing, albeit keeping our regeneration the same due to talents, we may see another use for it in the near future.
This entire thread needs to be wiped out before this forums loses its reputation for providing information that is specific to the mechanics and improvement of the class (instead of random drivel).
* The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
Emphasis mine
So despite their intent to not change much for DPS casters, mages will have 2 rather important talents and a core spell affected by this change. Obviously we won't feel the OOC regen changes except on trash which will be no different than currently since we are drinking between every (AoE) pull in Naxx already.
* We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
I feel as DPS this would be a pretty significant buff to us. Healers might feel the pinch a bit more, but a change like this would be huge for mana starved specs like Arcane (Fire/Arc to a lesser degree).
So despite their intent to not change much for DPS casters, mages will have 2 rather important talents and a core spell affected by this change. Obviously we won't feel the OOC regen changes except on trash which will be no different than currently since we are drinking between every (AoE) pull in Naxx already.
I feel as DPS this would be a pretty significant buff to us. Healers might feel the pinch a bit more, but a change like this would be huge for mana starved specs like Arcane (Fire/Arc to a lesser degree).
Assuming they correctly do the changes as stated, I don't see how it would affect mages at all (except that they might have to change the Mage Armor glyph if Mage Armor + Arcane Mediation is >= 100% regen while casting after the changes). Although we'll have to wait and see if the Clearcasting changes result in us having more or less mana than before. It sounds like the goal is that if you aren't a pally and are never out of the 5-second rule (exactly like dps casters), your mana regen will be exactly the same after these changes.
02/05/09, 11:32 AM
That and it's just realy slow today, normal it takes all my time just reading and not posting. LOL
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