Our Lvl 90 Talents - Why Incanters Ward is Good!

[Malfecto]

Disagree, i find Lhivera to be a very competent theorycrafter, posting in a forum full of poison. As soon as he dares suggesting something that is not a pure buff to mages the hatred is unleashed upon him by the angry nerds.

Lhivera has a tendency to be outright dismissive of context and brings little to no current practical experience to the table. These are my only gripes with him. Yes, he is good at math. Congratulations, but that doesn't make him the oracle for mages.

OT: Does anyone think that Incanter's being off the global would make it more attractive? I'd like to use it with one button push macro'ed to Ice Barrier or some other defensive cooldown. I know, it isn't a big deal to hit a button twice, but still, given the cumbersome nature of these talents, maybe this would help?

[Keiyra]

OT: Does anyone think that Incanter's being off the global would make it more attractive? I'd like to use it with one button push macro'ed to Ice Barrier or some other defensive cooldown. I know, it isn't a big deal to hit a button twice, but still, given the cumbersome nature of these talents, maybe this would help?

It'd be a small help i suppose, i mean really anything off the GCD is a minor QoL improvement, but so minor I doubt it'll happen - you can currently achieve the same effect with Temporal Shield, since TS is off the GCD, so you only use one GCD to pop both IW and TS at the same time. (And they have the same CD)

[DeLos]

Lhivera has a tendency to be outright dismissive of context and brings little to no current practical experience to the table. These are my only gripes with him. Yes, he is good at math. Congratulations, but that doesn't make him the oracle for mages.

He also tends to over inflate advantages. He likes to take a best case scenario as the norm. Partly a problem of doing everything on paper and not really experiencing any of it. I think the other problem is he starts with a preconceived idea and looks for math to prove it. It causes him to miss a lot and come to some very wrong conclusions.

[Dyart]

Please change the title of this thread to be "Our Lvl 90 Talents - Why Evocation and RoP is Bad!"

Reason: this title will only make Blizzard want to nerf IW, that is quite their style.

[Muphrid]

Why don't we ask a different question here: let's say we have these dead-time cycles where we can't get the full benefit of a channeled Invocation. How many full, uninterrupted cycles do we need to make up for that?

The answer is not many. Let's say the overall damage multiplier of Invocation for an abbreviated cycle is 1.15*s/(s+3), where s < 60. The damage multiplier of passive Incanter's Ward is always 1.06. We get a table like this:

Uptime   Invo   IW
5	0.7188	1.06
10	0.8846	1.06
15	0.9583	1.06
20	1.0000	1.06
25	1.0268	1.06
30	1.0455	1.06
35	1.0592	1.06
40	1.0698	1.06
45	1.0781	1.06
50	1.0849	1.06
55	1.0905	1.06
60	1.0952	1.06

Note that the breakeven point is about 35.3 seconds.

Now, how many full cycles N do we need to recover and break even with IW, for s < 35.3 seconds? We can setup a simple equation to answer this question. Let I(s) be the Invo multiplier, and W = 1.06. The equation is then

63 N I(60) - (s+3) I(s) = W (63 N + s + 3)

Solving for N yields

N = [W - I(s)][s+3]/[63{I(60) - W}]

A table of these values is given below.

Uptime	Invo	IW	Breakeven cycles
5	0.7188	1.06	1.23
10	0.8846	1.06	1.03
15	0.9583	1.06	0.82
20	1.0000	1.06	0.62
25	1.0268	1.06	0.42
30	1.0455	1.06	0.22
35	1.0592	1.06	0.01

TLDR: a single abbreviated Invocation cycle almost always breaks even with passive IW after one full, unabbreviated cycle, or two at the most. And that's all before considering haste.

[Decimation2g]

Hunters got all the cool level 90 talents. Give us a machine gun type spell too, a barrage of fire/frost/arcane energy.

[Libretto]

People seem to be forgetting trinket procs with invocation as well. Both last tier's sha trinket and this tier's badge trinket give enormous haste procs. Evocation for me in raid as frost (properly gemmed as int > haste) is 2.21s cast. With the badge trinket proc, it drops to 1.8s cast. The badge trinket ICD causes it to frequently line up with the invocation buff falling off so many of my evocation casts benefit.

I feel that much of the theorycrafting and discussion surrounding the 90 talents is being done by people who have experienced little of this tier's content and did not clear last tier's available heroic content.

I did all 12 boss fights last week with invocation and it was perfectly fine. If evocation was still a 6 second base cast / 25% buff instead of 3s / 15, then I can see IW being considerably better for several encounters where there's too much unpredictable movement. But as it stands now invocation is the go-to talent for both frost and fire on just about every encounter.

IW is probably pretty good on many boss fights and is -viable-, but most of us heroic raiders will be continuing to use invocation, barring today's potential buffs changing something in relation to 90 talents.

[royals]

People seem to be forgetting trinket procs with invocation as well. Both last tier's sha trinket and this tier's badge trinket give enormous haste procs. Evocation for me in raid as frost (properly gemmed as int > haste) is 2.21s cast. With the badge trinket proc, it drops to 1.8s cast. The badge trinket ICD causes it to frequently line up with the invocation buff falling off so many of my evocation casts benefit.

I feel that much of the theorycrafting and discussion surrounding the 90 talents is being done by people who have experienced little of this tier's content and did not clear last tier's available heroic content.

I did all 12 boss fights last week with invocation and it was perfectly fine. If evocation was still a 6 second base cast / 25% buff instead of 3s / 15, then I can see IW being considerably better for several encounters where there's too much unpredictable movement. But as it stands now invocation is the go-to talent for both frost and fire on just about every encounter.

IW is probably pretty good on many boss fights and is -viable-, but most of us heroic raiders will be continuing to use invocation, barring today's potential buffs changing something in relation to 90 talents.

I consider myself a heroic raider. I play fire and I most often use Invo as well (Obviously not haste stacking). As you can tell by my signature I did not complete all content on heroic last tier but I did finish a lot of it previous to 5.2. I didn't start this thread as a call to everyone to switch or anything but I did start it for people, like myself, who maybe weren't thinking about its quality if used correctly. My first thought for this tier is Tortos. So much incoming damage constantly makes it a valid choice. When used correctly it can be as good if not better than the other choices. As you know as well, when lined up with cool downs for fire, the massive SP boost is even better for our AT/PoM/Combustion stacking.

[Alameda]

OK... could somebody explain to me why the pro-incanter's ward arguments don't work for Arcane? Probably a silly question, I'm not much of a theorycrafter. I've been playing arcane with RoP since MoP came out and it was working fine for me, although I'm sure I wasn't a top performer. Since 5.2 came out though, I've been finding myself moving too much for RoP to be as effective. I started reading this and thinking incanter's ward might be worth a try, but there are a few comments in here that indicate it's not so good with arcane?

[Firebert]

OK... could somebody explain to me why the pro-incanter's ward arguments don't work for Arcane?

The vast majority of Arcane's damage comes from the Mage standing still. If he's standing still, he may as well throw down RoP as it's better than IW in no movement situations.

As with all the talents they're supposed to be fight based and personal, and relatively equal in power. Try IW and see what you think.

[Heartfrost]

? i don't get this how could you have anything less then 100% up time on invo. i don't see how anyone could mess it up i mean 1 min that's easy as hell to keep up.

[Firebert]

? i don't get this how could you have anything less then 100% up time on invo. i don't see how anyone could mess it up i mean 1 min that's easy as hell to keep up.

Movement without instants is effectively downtime on Invocation.

[Anomlety]

First of all, thumbs up to this thread, it was a good read. However the original poster was assuming semi-pro skill-level. In other words, he was assuming that players would not be attacking with the buff for the full duration, and also calculated in the time required to cast or channel a spell to activate the buff. While we are all human and may not perform perfectly at all times, I am not going to make my decision on which talent to choose based on assuming I'll be making mistakes. Planning to fail is never a good strategy imho. So below is the math-craft rehashed and assumes Pro performance (ie attacking with the buff the entire time, counting the time spent casting or channeling to activate the buff).

Since I did not see this explained, however it did appear in at least one reply:
Average IW Buff w/o regard to time spent activating or skill.

Incanter's Ward Buff Average over 25s = [ ( 15 * 1.3 + 10 * 1.0 ) / 25 ] = 1.18 multiplier (18%)

For the purpose of keeping all values standardized it is assumed below that the player leaves no down-time between the buff ending and re-applying the buff.

Average IW Buff with regard to time spent activating, and Pro skill.

Incanter's Ward Buff with regard to 1s GCD to activate [ 25 / ( 25 + 1 ) ] * 1.18 multiplier = 1.135 (13.5%)

Invocation and RoP with regard to time spent activating, and Pro skill.

Invocation Buff = [ 60 / ( 60 + 3 ) ] * 1.15 = 1.095 (9.5%)

Rune of Power Buff = [ 60 / ( 60 + 1.5 ) ] * 1.15 = 1.122 multiplier (12.2%)

*EDIT: Post 5.3 IW*

New Incanter's Ward Buff Average over 25s = [ ( 25 * 1.15 ) / 25 ] = 1.15 multiplier (15%)

New Incanter's Ward Buff with regard to 1s GCD to activate [ 25 / ( 25 + 1 ) ] * 1.15 = 1.106 multiplier (10.6%)

The benefit being now IW should have %100 upkeep, and it doesn't matter where you stand (whereas you may have to move out of your RoP circle). I still like it better, much more versatile as long as you can handle another timer to eagle eye in your priority/rotation.