March Blog Posts

Well, the much-anticipated "benefit from spirit" is here. GC wasn't quite true to his word.

He said that the goal was that we wouldn't have a DPS loss by taking gear with spirit on it, but we also wouldn't see a dps gain. He's correct we don't see a dps gain...

But it's definitely still a loss to take any gear with spirit.

The changes are:

• Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Molten Armor glyph increases that by 15% (to a total of 40%)

It requires about 380 unbuffed spirit for glyphed Molten Armor fully-raid-buffed to still provide 5% crit.

It's a good move from a gear-homogenization perspective (how good that design is I won't go into here.) It's a "...what?" move from a mage perspective, since it doesn't really address anything at all with the class, and just brings us closer to parity with what the other cloth classes have had with itemization up until now.

Most interesting is what isn't in this patch:

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I recently switched from Arcane to Fire and I've been asked "why" a lot.

First off, realize that I rarely hold myself to a single spec. We have a loot system that encourages offspec gear, so I'm always gathering up unneeded gear in case I need to respec some day.

I still have my arcane gearset and if, for example, Sarth3D were still hard, and I wanted the burst of damage for Tenebron, I'd be arcane. That said....:

DPS

The thing is, on paper, Fire and Arcane do about the same DPS (arcane is ~50dps higher). Arcane can whore innervates and do more, of course, but the specs are pretty balanced on paper -- and that's the problem.

Designing a spec so it does more DPS with more effort? Awesome design. Changing that spec for pvp reasons one patch later so it doesn't actually provide more DPS but still requires better timing and more effort? Not so much.

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How to be good PTR testers:

• Try various ways to break the encounter to find bugs
• Experiment with all fight mechanics
• Wipe liberally -- it's PTR who cares
• Try to find enrage mechanics
• See what the hard modes look like
• Do crazy things

How to be a bad PTR tester:

• Rush to get a "world first PTR kill" and don't learn enough to give feedback beyond "my epeen is soooo big!"

Pro-tip: you're on the PTR to try stuff that will improve everyone's experience on live.

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Obviously as a US raider I've only been able to do Hodir and Iron Council. But there's three "outdated"-feeling mechanics that stand out on these fights that worry me about mages in Ulduar and future content:

Summary

With all fights in Ulduar so far being in the 8-10min range and having high amounts of raid damage/spell pushback, Evocation is simply too fragile. Evocation is the only mechanic that can "fail" in a raid context due to situations beyond your control and leave the player out of mana, relying solely on inherent regen, for multiple minutes.

Furthermore, the lack of a +hit talent in Fire pigeonholes it in gear in a way that no other caster in WoW is. All casters are being normalized to +3% hit from talents...except fire.

Finally, our threat reduction tools are minimal relative to what every other class has: as TPS becomes more of a concern (a design goal per GC), it will be more and more of a concern -- but only for mages/warlocks. Our DPS potential is irrelevent if, in order to do that DPS without pulling aggro, we require a pocket prot warrior and paladin (vigilance and salv) per mage/warlock on most fights. Because otherwise the only option is to stop doing damage -- which means we won't be able to actually perform at the same DPS levels of the other classes no matter what our on-paper design says we're capable of.

Overall problems

1. Unlike every other caster, fire does not have the same access to a +3% hit talent (they're changing warlock trees to give them this, but haven't said mages are on the radar also)
2. Other mana users either don't run OOM (low cost or high regen) or have resilient, mobile, and/or spammable mana regen (AotV or Lifetap or Divine Plea.) This is especially an issue on trash, any AE fight, and any fight with periodic raid damage, forced movement, or over 8 minutes.
3. Mage (and warlock) threat reduction tools are outdated and not up to par with what other DPS classes enjoy.
4. Arcane and Fire are especially bloated: things like 5-point anti-interrupt talents that don't "play nice" (other talents are 70%, working well with concentration aura) and inability to get any toys in Fire are inelegant.

Proposed solutions

1. Add a +hit talent for fire in first-tier arcane (they already totally waste 5 points to go deeper there) or on Improved Scorch

2a. Change Evo to a buff (Innervate/Divine Plea style), remove the channeled requirement outright.

2b. Increase Master of Elements to 60% mana return on crits.

2c. Knock Fireball's mana cost down to 500-550 mana at level 80.

2d. Reevaluate mage AE mana costs in light of the cost of Mind Sear

3. Increase the inherent threat reduction of mages/locks to -30%, or give Mirror Image a "You deal only 25% threat while active" component as well

4. Trim trim trim. Arcane Concentration is but one of several examples of talents that could be trimmed down between those two trees. The result wouldn't be substantially more DPS, but it'd be more pleasant.

Details below the cut.

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