Having read through their recent dev q&a's, I suspect the real answer with Deep Freeze is that they've got a high level policy to minimize the extent to which spells are different in PVE and PVP. If you look at their commentary on Colossus Smash, it sounds like they have to pull teeth to differentiate spells at all, and if that's the case they're probably under pressure to find a way to buff PvE frost without buffing Deep Freeze's damage.
Oh well I'll just keep making melee cry, I don't really have a problem with that.
I was caught up between whether to stack haste or crit as a Fire mage, and have solidified that crit is the bees knees.
Also, haste is so bad that I'd probably reforge it into mastery if you're already hit capped and can't reforge it into crit.
Did they flip flop again? Ive been out of the game for about a month or so, but last time I was playing EJ was saying Haste was just barely eeking out over Crit for fire mages.
So I'd been leveling and instancing and raiding as Fire the whole time, finally decided to add dual-spec and see what else looked interesting. Tried a Frost rotation for a while, thought it was okay but wasn't getting quite as much damage out of it, then looked into Arcane. It's very somewhat different, in a fascinating way, but still trying to figure out what its pros and cons are compared with Fire.
So I'd been leveling and instancing and raiding as Fire the whole time, finally decided to add dual-spec and see what else looked interesting. Tried a Frost rotation for a while, thought it was okay but wasn't getting quite as much damage out of it, then looked into Arcane. It's very somewhat different, in a fascinating way, but still trying to figure out what its pros and cons are compared with Fire.
Well, there's the two raid buff differences:
Focus magic ( a unique 3% crit for yourself and one other player in the raid ),
Arcane Tactics ( 3% damage aura )
Against fire's:
5% spell crit against boss.
Arcane is quite fascinating in that it boils the game down to almost pure mana management. A bit sparse in gameplay, but still sort of cool. I believe it can do potentially more single target damage than fire, as long as the fight requires minimal movement. Arcane really sucks on the move, and can't hold a candle to fire's AoE damage.
Some of that might change with the coming patch. Arcane will gain more possible AoE damage (although probably a little clunky to set up), and even better single target damage. It will still flounder in fights that require sustained mobility though, I'll bet.
I personally use fire for most raid encounters, but switch to Arcane on fights like Chimeron. My group does not have the 3% damage buff aura already accounted for, so it helps alot between boosting my damage and the raid's.
I'm excited about the frost changes. I'm going to see if it's competitive with my fire DPS when that patch comes out.
Well Haste is obviously useful (not bad, I apologize) and I'm aware of addons like Rawr or Simulationcraft, but when I look at tooltips where 137 Haste (for example) decreases my Fireball cast by .2 seconds, and I see where Mastery can increases my DoTs up to 30/40/50%, it seems more logical to scale it Crit > Mastery > Haste. Especially, with Mastery boosting the Living Bomb+Pyroblast+Ignite+Combustion aspect of the DPS rotation and consecutive Crits being required to proc Hot Streak.
There is the extra DoT tick you get from 12.5% Haste, but that shouldn't be much of an issue getting to with let's say Firelord Vestments (Heroic) adding up to 892 Haste (though most people only use 4/5 of the set for a better epic), other epics that come with a Hit/Haste, Crit/Haste or Mastery/Haste combo that you reforge, and raid buffs. At about 12-13% haste stops being very useful IMO since it only reduces your casting time by 0.01 or so.
Also, I'm not entirely sure why people are so negative towards Mastery. I have seen some Mages stack it for Combustion, but you'll probably be turning all your Haste and Mastery into Hit so you can run with two DPS trinkets over a DPS/Hit trinket combo anyways.
.2 seconds off of fireball is huge, though. Although I'm guessing you mean .02 if you're talking about the effect of 137 rating. But 137 points of any of the ratings just adds a tiny number on. Oh, now your crit chance is 40.8% instead of 40.2%. Or now your DoTs (which are still less than half of your damage output) do 33% more damage instead of 31.6% more damage. I made up those numbers, by the way, but they're representative of the sort of gain you get from 137 points of any rating.
I guess I don't understand if this is all based on sims and/or recount parses in different gear, but your first paragraph makes it seem like you're just going by eyeball and "feel" as far as the value of the three stats.
Ok, so I finally got a chance to copy my mage over to the Public Test Realm. Since my main spec is Arcane, I haven't paid any attention to the Fire or Frost changes yet.
As you know from reading the patch notes, the +13% straight buff to Arcane Blast was replaced with a reduction of the cast time from 2.35 to 2.00 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not actually reading the notes as I write this, sorry). This comes with a reduction in AB's spellpower coefficient. My AB went from doing ~14K damage, self-buffed with 100% mana (first cast, no AB stacks), to ~10K under those circumstances. Since the AB "debuff" involves a stacking +13% buff to damage, this should have the effect of (probably) increasing our DPS while nerfing our damge per mana ratio since we'll be doing less damage per cast. This should make mana management more difficult, which is probably a good thing since it's kind of a no-brainer right now.
The AB casting speed reduction should synergize well with the buffs to Arcane Explosion and the addition of AE to the AB stacking buff. This should even make Improved Arcane Explosion more desirable, if you intend to do any AOE whatsoever. My only gripe is that I find the duration of the Arcane Blast buff is too short to take advantage of the generous buff to Arcane Explosion. It's alot of work to stack up a buff that only lasts, what 6 seconds?
I think the AB cast time reduction is a more elegant solution than a +13% straight buff. Have any of you been able to confirm that this is definitely an overall buff to arcane single-target DPS? Has anyone been able to confirm the previous post asserting that Arcane is the highest single-target DPS mage spec post-patch? Will the drop in AB's spellpower coefficient and nerfed damage/mana ratio make mastery rating more, or less, desirable compared with haste and crit?
My AB went from doing ~14K damage, self-buffed with 100% mana (first cast, no AB stacks), to ~10K under those circumstances.
I don't get these numbers. How much was the coefficient on AB reduced? I would have thought it would change at the same ratio as the cast speed.
I don't get them, either. I only messed around with the PTR for about 25 minutes. It was long enough to verify that I was at 100% mana with all my gear on, and arcane brilliance. No other buffs active.
I have no clue what was done to the coefficient, in fact I only assumed that the coefficient was reduced because my AB damage was noticably lower. Also, I was looking for it because I hypothesized that the coefficent would be reduced if the casting-time was reduced.
If anyone reading this is running an Arcane spec on both the PTR and live realms, it might be worth looking at that.
I'll also try to take a minute to log back in today and double check it. I'll post my real damage numbers here, but I don't have recount or any other add-ons in the PTR. Not sure if they would even work. Haven't tried yet.
Ok, my real AB numbers are 13,354 w/ 2.12 sec cast time in Live realms. 10,952 w/1.89 sec cast time in PTR.
I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out if this seems right.
I appreciate that they're trying to do something about ignite munching, but the fix seems to have created as many if not more issues than it fixed. I seem to have a lot of trouble setting up combustion now, and aoe seems more problematic without dot ignites, not that fire aoe was entirely reliable anyway.
Also anyone else having combustion and living bomb whiff? Not miss, but hit the button, it goes to cooldown and nothing happens. It's infuriating.
I think I might give Arcane a go or something. I like the mobility of fire but it seems to problematic to make work.
They best way I set up Combustion at the beginning of a fight is to hardcast Pyroblast for the DoT, chain Living Bomb, and Fireball till Ignite procs. Usually, Pyro and Bomb are still up. During a fight if you chain a Fireball with your Hot Streak proc, and Bomb is already up, you can cast max amount of Fireballs while the Pyro dot is up. It's all about chaining casts with instant spells, and if you've got over 20% crit, Ignite should only take a couple Fireballs to proc.
Does Combustion calculate it's damage based on the current duration of every DoT on the target? I figured it worked off of the total damage for the DoT even if there was only a second or two left on the DoT.
I was so bad at getting good Combustions off in the middle of fights. The first one was easy, line up all your trinkets and wait for the crit and watch your DPS spike.
I'm so glad that they buffed frost. I have been really enjoying the return to it. The AoE damage still sucks really badly, but it's wonderful to see the 100k deep freeze crits again and have some control over how your damage will play out. I do miss the extreme mobility of fire. Some parts of fight are just really annoying for frost (IE: Al'akir third phase your water-elemental can't fly with you and so he just disappears into the vast nothingness below you), but I haven't had too many issues. I feel like my damage has improved, which I guess just means I was really bad at Combustion because theoretically I think fire still leads on frost.
ZA and ZG are great for spellsteal fun. The blazing speed buff on the ZA firecaster guys is absurd and I'm amused by doing 35k+ dps just meleeing guys with the stolen tectonic buff from the big zandalari guys in both instances, great way to pull aggro though.
Also Halazzi is just stupid as Arcane, standing in the totem your mana regens so fast it never goes down so just AB forever for epic DPS.
I really don't understand why the spells don't "This spell does x against enemies and y against other players". It just makes too much sense to happen or something?
It's a little dangerous because it can make your game twice as complicated. If you want to keep your game attractive to players you need to keep things simple enough that they can slowly immerse themselves into it.
Already, to be any good at PvP you would need to know the abilities of ten classes, and sometimes the differences between their specializations. To be a good PvE player you need to understand the synergies between your classes. There's a whole lot to learn. I can't imagine how overwhelming the game could appear to a new player. I've played WoW since the beta on and off and have always used such ingrained experiences to guide my perception of the game.
I can understand why one would be wary of such a method. Even though they are slowly creeping towards such tactics anyways.
Posts
Also, haste is so bad that I'd probably reforge it into mastery if you're already hit capped and can't reforge it into crit.
Oh well I'll just keep making melee cry, I don't really have a problem with that.
Did they flip flop again? Ive been out of the game for about a month or so, but last time I was playing EJ was saying Haste was just barely eeking out over Crit for fire mages.
mastery though is complete shit, reforge as much of that as possible off
Well, there's the two raid buff differences:
Focus magic ( a unique 3% crit for yourself and one other player in the raid ),
Arcane Tactics ( 3% damage aura )
Against fire's:
5% spell crit against boss.
Arcane is quite fascinating in that it boils the game down to almost pure mana management. A bit sparse in gameplay, but still sort of cool. I believe it can do potentially more single target damage than fire, as long as the fight requires minimal movement. Arcane really sucks on the move, and can't hold a candle to fire's AoE damage.
Some of that might change with the coming patch. Arcane will gain more possible AoE damage (although probably a little clunky to set up), and even better single target damage. It will still flounder in fights that require sustained mobility though, I'll bet.
I personally use fire for most raid encounters, but switch to Arcane on fights like Chimeron. My group does not have the 3% damage buff aura already accounted for, so it helps alot between boosting my damage and the raid's.
I'm excited about the frost changes. I'm going to see if it's competitive with my fire DPS when that patch comes out.
i'm going to run it since never getting an impact proc when it counts is terrible
There is the extra DoT tick you get from 12.5% Haste, but that shouldn't be much of an issue getting to with let's say Firelord Vestments (Heroic) adding up to 892 Haste (though most people only use 4/5 of the set for a better epic), other epics that come with a Hit/Haste, Crit/Haste or Mastery/Haste combo that you reforge, and raid buffs. At about 12-13% haste stops being very useful IMO since it only reduces your casting time by 0.01 or so.
Also, I'm not entirely sure why people are so negative towards Mastery. I have seen some Mages stack it for Combustion, but you'll probably be turning all your Haste and Mastery into Hit so you can run with two DPS trinkets over a DPS/Hit trinket combo anyways.
I guess I don't understand if this is all based on sims and/or recount parses in different gear, but your first paragraph makes it seem like you're just going by eyeball and "feel" as far as the value of the three stats.
Hit trinkets are DPS trinkets, by the way.
lb+ignite+pyrodot is around 45% of my damage, it's bad but not "entirely worthless"
Yes it is.
As you know from reading the patch notes, the +13% straight buff to Arcane Blast was replaced with a reduction of the cast time from 2.35 to 2.00 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not actually reading the notes as I write this, sorry). This comes with a reduction in AB's spellpower coefficient. My AB went from doing ~14K damage, self-buffed with 100% mana (first cast, no AB stacks), to ~10K under those circumstances. Since the AB "debuff" involves a stacking +13% buff to damage, this should have the effect of (probably) increasing our DPS while nerfing our damge per mana ratio since we'll be doing less damage per cast. This should make mana management more difficult, which is probably a good thing since it's kind of a no-brainer right now.
The AB casting speed reduction should synergize well with the buffs to Arcane Explosion and the addition of AE to the AB stacking buff. This should even make Improved Arcane Explosion more desirable, if you intend to do any AOE whatsoever. My only gripe is that I find the duration of the Arcane Blast buff is too short to take advantage of the generous buff to Arcane Explosion. It's alot of work to stack up a buff that only lasts, what 6 seconds?
I think the AB cast time reduction is a more elegant solution than a +13% straight buff. Have any of you been able to confirm that this is definitely an overall buff to arcane single-target DPS? Has anyone been able to confirm the previous post asserting that Arcane is the highest single-target DPS mage spec post-patch? Will the drop in AB's spellpower coefficient and nerfed damage/mana ratio make mastery rating more, or less, desirable compared with haste and crit?
I don't get them, either. I only messed around with the PTR for about 25 minutes. It was long enough to verify that I was at 100% mana with all my gear on, and arcane brilliance. No other buffs active.
I have no clue what was done to the coefficient, in fact I only assumed that the coefficient was reduced because my AB damage was noticably lower. Also, I was looking for it because I hypothesized that the coefficent would be reduced if the casting-time was reduced.
If anyone reading this is running an Arcane spec on both the PTR and live realms, it might be worth looking at that.
I'll also try to take a minute to log back in today and double check it. I'll post my real damage numbers here, but I don't have recount or any other add-ons in the PTR. Not sure if they would even work. Haven't tried yet.
I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out if this seems right.
Also anyone else having combustion and living bomb whiff? Not miss, but hit the button, it goes to cooldown and nothing happens. It's infuriating.
I think I might give Arcane a go or something. I like the mobility of fire but it seems to problematic to make work.
I was so bad at getting good Combustions off in the middle of fights. The first one was easy, line up all your trinkets and wait for the crit and watch your DPS spike.
I'm so glad that they buffed frost. I have been really enjoying the return to it. The AoE damage still sucks really badly, but it's wonderful to see the 100k deep freeze crits again and have some control over how your damage will play out. I do miss the extreme mobility of fire. Some parts of fight are just really annoying for frost (IE: Al'akir third phase your water-elemental can't fly with you and so he just disappears into the vast nothingness below you), but I haven't had too many issues. I feel like my damage has improved, which I guess just means I was really bad at Combustion because theoretically I think fire still leads on frost.
Also Halazzi is just stupid as Arcane, standing in the totem your mana regens so fast it never goes down so just AB forever for epic DPS.
I've got max Combustion with both Pyro and Ignite almost ticking off.
Already, to be any good at PvP you would need to know the abilities of ten classes, and sometimes the differences between their specializations. To be a good PvE player you need to understand the synergies between your classes. There's a whole lot to learn. I can't imagine how overwhelming the game could appear to a new player. I've played WoW since the beta on and off and have always used such ingrained experiences to guide my perception of the game.
I can understand why one would be wary of such a method. Even though they are slowly creeping towards such tactics anyways.
but hey gotta keep them melee strong or else we'll have another s8 with balanced representation
resto shaman buffs are especially galling
If not it's a bit on the silly side
nope
It IS based on damage, however, so a big Ignite is always better.
well, it's a good short cut to gear up to 346 on heroics fast and then go do Zandalari and Raids.