| Plato | #316371 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 09:39 | |
Arcane mage |
Holy #$%$# they fixed fire! Burn out makes sense! In fact that's exactly what I said it should be in LO chat the other day! Hot streak is amazing you could... you could omg omg if they leave that in I might go fire! Infinite self sustained rolling ignites! HOLY #$%$ @#$@ do they have any idea what that would do? That could actually make me go fire! |
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| Plato | #316379 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 10:07 | |
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Arcane mage |
Ok this is my current plato build #1 http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=oZfEfiRhIuiubIsx I switched from the last one to get the longer range. Still looking at fire but I think a scorch fire build could be insane! |
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| Kahlil | #316396 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 11:05 | |
Old Man |
Hey, Burnout isn't dumb anymore. :P *goes to play with the talent calculator again* --
Korinth, Dwarven Tnak Kahlil, Jumping Mage (Caster Lead v1.0, Lead Emeritus, BR Tank Lead Emeritus, Easterners Charter Lead) "It is well to give when asked but it is better to give unasked, through understanding." - Kahlil Gibran |
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| Plato | #316398 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 11:12 | |
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Arcane mage |
So based on the most recent talents this is what I expect to see: On encounters that are very heavy in incomming aoe damage: Absorption Mages will rule. Frost Mages will be a close second. On "typcial" encounters (were you have to move around or decurse or something other than pure dps) All three mage specs will be fairly close on damage with arcane mages dominating shorter fights ~3-5 min after which fire mages will start catching up. On pure dps races (where you only have to worry about killing the boss even more so when you don't have to worry about threat) Arcane mages will dominate the first 2 minutes After about 2 minutes (depends on crit and luck) a Fire mage will be constantly critting and building a massive rolling ignite 10000+ dps? At this point fire mages will literally burn the world! Both frost and arcane mages will cry. On outgoing AoE Arcane Mages will continue to be king. PvP will continue to be a frost dominated world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So right now I am thinking my first spec will be the one I posted my alternate spec will be some kind of deep fire burn the world spec. For those confused, because it looks like "hot streak" has been in even while people are complaining about the weakness of the fire tree let me explain. Hot Steak says "Any time you score 3 spell criticals in a row, you have a 100% chance the next spell cast within 10 sec will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit." In other words once you crit three spells in a row you will crit forever (or at least untill that sad 1% resist) For those of you who remember back in the AQ40/Naxx days it was popular to stack fire mages for rolling ignites which could easily tick over 10k. The problem was of course that eventually whoever got the first crit in the string would eventually pull agro and die. These days ended when Blizard made each ignite debuff distinct to the mage so mages couldn't roll each others ignites. This talent, however, gives a fire mage the ability to sustain their own rolling ignite. IIRC rolling ignites topped out at 10 (that is even if you kept critting only the last 10 crits factored into the ignite damage). So lets take a fire mage, apropriatly spec'd (especialy with wotlk talents) it would be relativly simple to get a 40% scorch crit rate. Now you spam scorch to get your hot streak started. Once its up you start spamming fireball. Lets say your fireballs hit for 2500 damage (I expect in wrath it will be higher than this). That means they crit for 3750 and the ignite tick (40%) is 1500. 1500 * 10 = 15000 damage every 2 seconds! 7500 dps this in addition to your damage for doing 3750 damage every 3 seconds your looking at close to if not exceding 10,000 dps with typical level 70 gear. What about agro? Well remember that "nerf" to blessing of salvation? Once a fire mage gets a hot streak going you just cast blessing of salvation on them and let them keep going! In this mannar I expect fire mages to finally be the glass cannons that mages have dreamed about being. |
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| kaeble | #316418 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 11:55 | |
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Member |
Grats Fire and Arcane mages. Looks like your trees did well on the polish of the trees. I might be going fire or elemental if I don't change mains. I was hoping that frost would finally have a chance to be competitive raid dps with arcane and fire. Right now our dps relies on keeping our WE alive which on some fights is impossible or out of the mages hand. Winter's grasp would have done that. It was a op in the original form but it could have been tweeked to make it viable. It also gave frost mages a little more synergy. Ugh talk about a bummer to start off my day.
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This had to be my new sig: New and exciting 51 Mage talents! Arcane Garbage, Living Bomb, and Deep Shit. |
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| Aodin | #316422 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 12:10 | |
Human Mage |
"Hot Steak says "Any time you score 3 spell criticals in a row, you have a 100% chance the next spell cast within 10 sec will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit." In other words once you crit three spells in a row you will crit forever (or at least untill that sad 1% resist)" I think for the math reasons listed in your post, this will probably be nerfed prior to going live. It would be too easy for them to add something like "can only occur once every 30 secs". I share your disappointment with frost Kaeble. I was hoping they would balance fire and frost so with the right spec you could set them for pvp or pve builds. I find it frustrating that frost always = pvp and fire/arcane always = pve. I know this is true for other classes but it would be interesting if the talents in a given tree determine pvp vs pve rather than the tree itself. |
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| Plato | #316426 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 12:21 | |
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Arcane mage |
Well you can do that with the arcane tree aodin, there are good pve and pvp talents in both. For example improved blink, cs, prismatic cloak, all the damage absorption talents. I think whats really happening is that frost is the survival tree and fire is the damage tree and it just happens that in pvp you need survival and in pve a survival mage might as well be a lock. If they gave frost fire-level damage they would have to give fire frost level survival. |
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| kaeble | #316444 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 12:59 | |
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Member |
Bleh Arcane tree. Yeah I understand what you are saying but really in a raid environment, frost's survivability is not much more than Fire. The ice barrier is the difference between frost and fire. It only absorbs around 1400 damage. But the difference between frost and fire's damage is much greater than the survivability of frost. And its also depedent on the WE staying alive which sometimes you have no control over. I can't count how many times I have brought out my WE only to have him killed right away. I am not asking for the same damage. I am just asking to be competative. Wish they would quit pigeon-holing the trees. I hate pvp but I am stuck with a so called pvp frost tree. Winter's Grasp would have been an answer to that since right now you can't slow or freeze a boss. It would have given the boss a debuff that would have helped with damage. They just nerfed it too hard. Now you have fire with the possibility of rolling ignites. How is that not op. Yeah Winter's Grasp needed to be adjusted but not nurfed into the ground the way it was. Now its back to hope to keep the WE alive and really not change much in how you play frost from its state currently. Hope elementalist is good because that is the only other spec I really want to play.
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This had to be my new sig: New and exciting 51 Mage talents! Arcane Garbage, Living Bomb, and Deep Shit. |
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| Plato | #316448 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 13:18 | |
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Arcane mage |
normally I don't even look at the frost tree but ill see if I can find something good in it for you ;) [edit] hrm perhaps I don't recall correctly but isn't Fingers of Frost Rank 2 Gives your Frost damage spells a 10% chance to apply the Fingers of Frost effect, which treats your next Frost spell cast on the target as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 10 sec. Essentially a nerfed winter's grasp? |
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| Vemika | #316451 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 13:21 | |
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Member |
Any time the wording can be construed in such a manner that it could lead to infinite loops, odds are it is written poorly. In the case of Hot Streak, I would presume that to mean that 3 crits gets you one auto-crit, and then the counter goes back to 0. Repeat ad nauseum. And with Master of Elements refunding mana on every crit, Burnout is by and large negated. O_o; As for warlocks, it would appear that the neutering of Demonic Sacrifice has been reverted; the damage bonus for sac'ing imp / succ just dropped by 5%. Expected, but not 'end of the world'. The vexing thing is even with the extra ten points, Demonic Sacrifice and Chaos Bolt remain mutually exclusive. --
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| Plato | #316458 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 13:31 | |
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Arcane mage |
On the subject of the nerfing/poor wording of hot streak I don't agree, they combination is actually rather hard to start up, with a 40% crit chance there is still only a 6.4% chance of a given string of scorch spams to start it up. That gives you an expected value of 70s into a fight for triggering Hot Streak. With best use of combustion you can get it to 50% by casting it right after the first crit. But that is only once per 3 minutes. Once its up in order to get the damage I described you need to be completely uninterrupted to spam fireball and keep ignite up. If you even have to stop to move your likely to lose your ignite stack and the main component of the advantage goes away. Not to mention the 1% resist I guarantee you will annoy many mages to death by coming at the worst time. Essentially, I see this as under ideal conditions this talent will make fire mages damage king with major agro constraints. (if you drop agro through invis its another 70s to get the streak going) Under average conditions the talent will be useful but not overpowering. This talent also does not suffer from being op in pvp because no one is ever going to let you spam scorch at them for 70 seconds. I believe this talent makes sense but will also finally fulfill many mages dreams. |
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| Aodin | #316476 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 14:30 | |
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Human Mage |
quote: Originally posted by Plato: If they gave frost fire-level damage they would have to give fire frost level survival. Agreed - that is essentially my frustration. In Aodin's world, each tree could be speced pve or pvp to suite tastes. Survivability (ice barrier - IBlock used to be the big draw) along with control (chill/freeze effects) is what makes the frost tree a "pvp" based tree. However, if Blizzard were creative, they could build a pvp path in the fire tree around stuns rather than root (frost). That way someone like Kaeble who wanted a frost pve spec could spec those talents in the frost tree but not get the pvp benefit of improved roots/snares. The same would hold true to fire, you could build a pvp spec which allowed for stuns or a pve build that gave up control for raw DPS. |
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| Plato | #316477 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 14:37 | |
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Arcane mage |
Aodin, how is "Fingers of Frost Rank 2 Gives your Frost damage spells a 10% chance to apply the Fingers of Frost effect, which treats your next Frost spell cast on the target as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 10 sec." not winters grasp retooled? I am not a great understander of frost but it seems to be essentially the same to me except for the hit loss (so I don't see the difference) |
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| Aodin | #316480 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 14:49 | |
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Human Mage |
quote: Originally posted by Plato: Aodin, how is "Fingers of Frost Rank 2 Gives your Frost damage spells a 10% chance to apply the Fingers of Frost effect, which treats your next Frost spell cast on the target as if the target were Frozen. Lasts 10 sec." not winters grasp retooled? I am not a great understander of frost but it seems to be essentially the same to me except for the hit loss (so I don't see the difference) I think you are correct in that it is WG retooled. I dont know the exact math but on the surface (when combined with shatter) would give you about a 5% increase in your overall crit rate. However, based on your math above, I think one will need to spec fire in order to not gimp raid DPS. It remains to be seen, but I think ignite/DoT effect you outlined above will cause fire to pull further away from frost in a sustained fight. |
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| kaeble | #316503 Tuesday July 29, 2008 at 15:48 | |
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Member |
The biggest difference in it before was that is was a debuff that lasted 5 seconds so you could get a frostbolt/ice lance combo followed with another ice lance in that any other mages with shatter or death nights could have leached off of. Now its a personal buff for one frost spell so a big loss of damage right there. It is a retooled very nurfed version of Winter's Grasp. So not only did we lose some synergy with other mages but also death nights. That was our best way to actually do some damage and change our rotation a little. Like I said very disappointed about the change. --
This had to be my new sig: New and exciting 51 Mage talents! Arcane Garbage, Living Bomb, and Deep Shit. |
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