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[WoW] Mages: the worst part comes AFTER you're sheeped
TL DR
Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
So the old mage thread lived to a ripe age of ninetysomething pages, and it's long past time for a new one!
What are you hoping for in WotLK? Death knight being the only hero class seems silly, we want plate-wearing mages.
Talent discussion: 10/48/3 for raids, (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0VZxgRzfcIoeRt0h), 17/0/44 for PVP (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0y0obZZVVGcofxoVRt), mirite?
New thread go.
What are you hoping for in WotLK? Death knight being the only hero class seems silly, we want plate-wearing mages.
Talent discussion: 10/48/3 for raids, (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0VZxgRzfcIoeRt0h), 17/0/44 for PVP (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0y0obZZVVGcofxoVRt), mirite?
New thread go.
TL DR on
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This discussion has been closed.
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I just respec'd to a 10/48/3 build the other day. I had been fighting the status quo for a long time now. I was Arcane for heroics, but this will work better for kara/ Gruul. I might switch it back up if I ever get a Lightning Capacitor though.
I have the sudden urge to assemble the Blessings deck for my mage. I can see silly things happening with that, Quag's eye and AM spam.
I hear that scorching really shines with the LC. Without that, deep fire is better.
I did love my arcane though. People would be amazed at the dps I could push in 5 mans/ heroics where I could blow 10k mana on a trash pull :P
also, my female troll mage looks rediculous in the spellfire robes
Nothing like downing pots and gems and blasting away a nice 3xAB 1xAM 1xScorch rotation.
What am I looking for in the expansion, weighted by how many points Blizzard would get if this were a 100-point test:
30 pts> Elimination of the coefficient nerf (AKA the nerf to the Improved Fireball/Frostbolt talents) OR the talents improved to such an extent the nerf is justified
20 pts> Group food/water summoning spells (this one is reported as in)
20 pts> Some adjustment to mana stones and evocation to make them more in line with the size of mana pool I have now
15 pts> A graphics option to allow me to decide whether to display my cloth chestpiece as either a tunic or a robe.
15 pts> Wand Specialization and Arcane Fortitude replaced by talents that are actually relevant to the way the mage class is played.
What would I *like* to see but would understand if they aren't?
1> Group portal to hearthstone
2> Some way of setting a second hearth point
3> A percentage-based food/water summon (that restores a percent not a set amount).
4> Better mage enchants for certain slots (boots in particular)
5> Talents for improving my water elemental
For a while I was POM/scorch, but as fun (read: really really fun) as dropping off a mount in midair, slowfall, POM pyro, fireblast, icelance spam until out of range was, it just didn't have enough damage in heroics or raids. My mana was pretty sustainable though, and it was nice to be able to go all night with scorch spam, or step it up with AB and AM on clearcast.
@Daric: have fun. I played fire all the way from 1-70, so i never got to experience the AOE farm. I just saw they had a lot of downtime, and you need to pay attention so you don't end up with 8 slightly chilly, very pissed off mobs and OOM.
Hopes for the future: The promised "muffin basket", as well as FIXED BLINK SO I CAN GO OUT A DOOR OR DOWN SOME STAIRS. Anyone who has played Morrowind will know how sex a mark/recall spell would be. Basically, cast mark at point X, and then any time you can cast recall to teleport to X.
Also, AOE sheep.
If you're putting 59 points into frost, you really can't leave out 5/5 Winter's Chill. That's 10% crit when stacked! I would drop Frost Warding (reflection is only useful against other frost mages, and the benefit to Ice Armor is only ~193 armor. Plus I use Molten Armor in PvP even as a frost spec), drop Improved Blizzard unless you're doing frequent AoE grinding (and if you are, frostbite can mess that up) or at least drop it down to 1/3, and chuck Frozen Core.
30 pts> Elimination of the coefficient nerf (AKA the nerf to the Improved Fireball/Frostbolt talents) OR the talents improved to such an extent the nerf is justified
Agreed, it was retarded then, and it will be even more retarded when they have to recalc the level 80 scaling. Shadowbolt should not scale better than Fireball... even scaling the same is questionable with the crazy damage-per-global-cooldown of DoTs.
20 pts> Group food/water summoning spells (this one is reported as in)
Confirmed in.
20 pts> Some adjustment to mana stones and evocation to make them more in line with the size of mana pool I have now
Agreed on both counts, and I'll add in that I'd like something to aid in mana regeneration over long (10 minute +) fights. I don't actually mind needing a spirit stick for Evoc, but a reduced cooldown on it or even something crazy like a life tap or mana drain parallel that costs dps time but gives sustainability would be very appreciated. It would have to be balanced so that AB spam -> new ability -> AB spam wouldn't be the clear winner in all scenarios, but something to reduce the complete dependency we have on shadow priests would be nice. The potential changes to spirit might help with this, but I'm not holding my breath.
15 pts> A graphics option to allow me to decide whether to display my cloth chestpiece as either a tunic or a robe.
Personally don't care, though I prefer the dress version 100% of the time.
15 pts> Wand Specialization and Arcane Fortitude replaced by talents that are actually relevant to the way the mage class is played.
Agreed, though Arcane Fortitude is only almost useless instead of completely useless.
1> Group portal to hearthstone
Eh, being a mage in Org/IF/Shat/Dalaran would become even more annoying with all the portal requests. I use my own hearthstone very rarely and a port to Shatt + 1 min to IF/Org + 2 min to ghetto hearth from stockades/RFC works fine if your hearthstone isn't up.
2> Some way of setting a second hearth point
I suppose this would be useful to all classes, but again mages would find this less useful than most. To really care about this you'd need two locations you frequent that are not easily accessible from Dalaran.
3> A percentage-based food/water summon (that restores a percent not a set amount).
Blizzard won't do that because it would remove the need for any future upgrades. However, they really should make sure the highest level food/water is scaled for a geared 80 mage and not a naked one.
4> Better mage enchants for certain slots (boots in particular)
Boar's speed is fantastic. Not having +dam enchants available in a couple slots is actually kinda nice as you can safely get stam there while still min/maxing damage
5> Talents for improving my water elemental
Sure, why not. Other than reducing the freeze cooldown or the overall cooldown I don't think they would be a gamechanger.
/humor on
This is a MMORPG, made my Blizzard. It ain't "confirmed in" until the expansion is on my machine and I can cast the spell :P
RE: Spec Advice. Respectfully declined. I had full Winter's Chill before and was underwhelmed by it. I really would rather have those 3 points spent as jokes than in this talent. If nothing else, it'll make my first 3 talent points *real* easy to spend in the expansion
At my peak, with Lightning capacitor, I was beating Affliction warlocks who had way more gear than I did.
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Incinerate isn't a bad loss, but not putting 5/5 in Imp Fireball is a TRAVESTY for a raiding deep fire build. If you have a shadow priest, you can probably take those two points out of Master of Elements. Otherwise, take the two out of Playing with Fire. Imp Fireball is about 50% better point for point than Playing with Fire, with no downside of extra damage taken. Really though, if you have a raiding fire build you're going to suck in PvP, so might as well maximize for PvE and respec for PvP.
Raiding I can understand, especially w/o a shadowpriest, but an arc/fire or deep arc build is really set up to own heroics. Arcane is the king of both threat and the mana dump, and you can unload your full mana bar on each trash pull, and do it two->three times on bosses (with evoc + gems, and pots if you really want to wave the epeen). None of the fights are long enough that sustainability is a big issue, and absolutely nothing beats AB->AB->AB->PoM Pyro->AB spam on short fights. Scorch is your backup spell when you need to reset the AB stack, not your primary nuke.
Actually I should have asked for clarification first. Are you raiding at all? You're right, as a solo/small group talent Winter's Chill is very meh, though it does have value in PvP simply as another debuff to cleanse :P However, for a sustained boss fight, you're giving up 10% of your DPS by skipping it, assuming you can't leech off of another frost mage.
Jasc, can you expand on the statistics a little bit? Or better yet, post a couple of WWS parses? Arcane can definitely compete or exceed deep fire, but the power of the build comes from the arcane side (hello two piece T5), not the fire side, and everything that I've seen indicates that 40+ arcane will outperform 33/28. With deep arcane your general cycle becomes ABx3, AM, Scorch, which really maximizes the lightning capacitor. If you're doing ABx3, Fireball x2 as your primary cycle your fire damage is up but capacitor is down, and ABx3 Scorch x4 helps the LC but is less fire damage.
Also, can you explain the mana thing a bit more? I know about the two cycle theorum, starting pot/gem cooldowns as fast as possible, and ending the fight OOM... am I missing anything?
Thanks
I don't play the game anymore, so I don't feel like going incredibly in depth with it but...
I don't know what the "two cycle" theorum is. I assume that's referencing mixing in AB's into scorches, I write this off.
The advantages of 33/28 go beyond the statistical (yes I know I said statistical previously, sue me) and farther into the realm of
1) Predictable threat curves which allow you to commence damage sooner than other people
2) Agile (read:fast casting) primary damage spell which equates to reduction in "lost time" from mobs moving out of range, and reactionary movements made in combat.
3) The ability to step on the gas with improved Fire Blast to quickly erode excess mana at the end of most fights for a reasonable DPM in comparison to three-stacked Arcane Blast.
I'm sure that in some labratory somewhere, somebody has concluded that a particular Arcane build can be better, on paper, if you X, Y, and Z in meticulous order, but the fact is that most people aren't interested in that.
33/28 is elegantly simplistic and it's passive advantages (read: the kind that don't show up on spreadsheets) outweigh any raw benefit, which is undoubtedly minor, that an advanced Arcane strategy may provide.
Especially with the Lightning Cap, which I'm sure that the calculations you've read will not account for.
I was able to achieve some impressive stuff as a mage with a very conservative gear setup that prioritized HP/Mana and +Hit above +Damage, and to a lesser extent +Crit. If I had gone full crit/hit I probably would have done even better.
My armory, unbuffed: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Muradin&n=Jasconius
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I will reiterate the fantasticness of a 33/28 build. It did me just fine in 5 mans, heroics and first bit of Kara (then I respec'd to give Arcane a try).
As a 0/5/56 frost mage, Winter's Chill doesn't really work outside off dungeons/raids. Non-elite things die so fast anyway.
(And my mage is an alt now; if I'd raid with her again I'd go an arcane/fire PVE build.)
Yes it's very underrated in 5 mans, but I would never take it over a frost build for strictly 5 man content.
I've done heroics with three frost mages.
Ode to Joy was playing in the background.
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Do the ignites get added together or something?
It does exactly what it says now, which is give you a 40% DoT over 2 ticks. If ticks overlap, the damage is dealt in a single tick so it appears to be more.
However, Ignite can no longer be exploited to "refresh" the DoT for extra damage.
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To clarify slightly, any owed damage on a previous ignite is rolled over onto the next ignite, so that the total damage is maintained.
For example
0 sec - crit for 1000 (400 ignite owed)
2 sec - ignite tick for 200 (400/2, 200 left)
3 sec - crit for 1000 (400 + 200 owed)
5 sec - ignite tick for 300 (600/2, 300 left)
7 sec - ignite tick for 300
There used to be a race condition where if you get two ignites within a very short period of time (ie fireball->fireblast) you only got credit for one of the ignites and the other one was lost. I think it was fixed but honestly I'm not sure.
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Here's my problem. Most of the other mages in my guild are fire-specced and, well, outdamage me consistently. In kara, at least, I often find myself at the bottom of the damage charts. This cannot stand. My pride as a mage and a responsible raid member is on the line! What can I do?
Well, the obvious answer is respec to fire, but this has its problems:
- While frost doesn't seem to be cutting it for raid damage, it does mean I never pull aggro and hardly ever die. Moreover, it makes for a damn good soloing build.
- Even if I do spec fire, I'm a shadowweave tailor, and a significant portion of the gear is frost stuff, only some of which has epic replacements on hand.
- Ice Barrier, Frost Bite, Ice Block! How can I live without them?
In any case, I'm at least respeccing to get rid of improved arcane missiles - it'd be good to know if I should change more than that.
I don't know why raiding frost mages think that this is negotiable.
Winter's Chill bridges the crit disadvantage versus fire.
End of story.
Get Winter's Chill and report back in two weeks.
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The real question here is "What the hell was I doing expecting soloing build to work well in raiding"?
Shit.
Edit: The fix is in.
GOGO
So here's my mage.
Here's my hat: http://wowhead.com/?item=28193
And here are my pants: http://wowhead.com/?item=28594
Question: I have both the patterns for the Spellstrike hat and pants. Is it worth the 1500-2k gold I'd need for cloth and primals, not to mention the nethers I'd lose out on selling, in order to get the set bonus?
Or should I hang onto the Mana-Etched and replace my shoulders with http://wowhead.com/?item=27796 ?
Much appreciated.
Spellstrike set: http://wowhead.com/?item=24266 http://wowhead.com/?item=24262
I love the set, very nice gear. It was totally worth it for me.
This is hard.
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I know you probably aoe grind, but for raiding its allll about the multipliers! Grab arctic winds, since it was recently changed to add an extra 5% damage! 5%%%%%%%%
Also, im not sure if thats your raiding gear, but more hit! hit! hit! hit the cap and you get an extra 8% damage from what you currently do! 8%%%%%%
sorry... too much coffee...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cXp_jFvlfMA
Which is basically any tier 4 fight and beyond, so yeah.
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I've got a scryer's bloodgem, I'm fine for hit.
Dunno where I'd take the points for arctic winds, though. I do like them snares.