Mage Free-For-All Thread?

[Polarthief]

(GC) @ascaniusaflame Still working on Frost mastery and making sure we don't nerf undergeared Fire mages because of overgeared Fire mages.

Such a thing is not possible. How on earth can they manage that when they failed twice at it already? There is not a thing to nerf besides trinkets in 5,4 (and nerfing items for specific specs, e.g., the legendary meta, is a RETARDED way to nerf classes that they fail at balancing)

[Jaylol]

(GC) @ascaniusaflame Still working on Frost mastery and making sure we don't nerf undergeared Fire mages because of overgeared Fire mages.

Such a thing is not possible. How on earth can they manage that when they failed twice at it already? There is not a thing to nerf besides trinkets in 5,4 (and nerfing items for specific specs, e.g., the legendary meta, is a RETARDED way to nerf classes that they fail at balancing)

I doubt that's really going to happen in 5.4. Maybe they'll fix it a little bit so it's not quite as ridiculous as it was this tier (though I don't really know how they'd go about doing that) but they won't really fix it completely.

However, that comment kind of makes me think they'll want to fix it for the next expansion. Whether they actually will or not is another story.

[mrgreenthump]

(GC) @ascaniusaflame Still working on Frost mastery and making sure we don't nerf undergeared Fire mages because of overgeared Fire mages.

Such a thing is not possible. How on earth can they manage that when they failed twice at it already? There is not a thing to nerf besides trinkets in 5,4 (and nerfing items for specific specs, e.g., the legendary meta, is a RETARDED way to nerf classes that they fail at balancing)

It starts with C and ends with ombustion. But seriously there is a reason why I want them to tune down combustion rather than co-efficient nerfs. And that is fire being even more awful on target switching. I mean atm there really only is our ST and combustion and cleave from those. Nerfing anything but combustion makes our viability in progression really bad. I mean Arcane is already in 5.2 better spec on many fights if we would progress them again, simply cause it has way stronger target switching, multitarget and AoE. And still it aint far behind fire on ST aside from combustion... But hey fire is so op right?

[Polarthief]

It starts with C and ends with ombustion. But seriously there is a reason why I want them to tune down combustion rather than co-efficient nerfs. And that is fire being even more awful on target switching. I mean atm there really only is our ST and combustion and cleave from those. Nerfing anything but combustion makes our viability in progression really bad. I mean Arcane is already in 5.2 better spec on many fights if we would progress them again, simply cause it has way stronger target switching, multitarget and AoE. And still it aint far behind fire on ST aside from combustion... But hey fire is so op right?

I like how this is the last tier of the expansion and they can't just leave Fire alone.

If it's really that broken after a few months of 5.4, nerf it in 5.5.

They should be focusing on our now-useless-in-both-PvP-and-PvE spec, Frost.

[Huevos]

(GC) @ascaniusaflame Still working on Frost mastery and making sure we don't nerf undergeared Fire mages because of overgeared Fire mages.

Such a thing is not possible. How on earth can they manage that when they failed twice at it already? There is not a thing to nerf besides trinkets in 5,4 (and nerfing items for specific specs, e.g., the legendary meta, is a RETARDED way to nerf classes that they fail at balancing)

Change critical mass to apply a static amount of crit, maybe 10%. The geared mage sitting at 50% crit gets 5% less, the undergeared sitting at 20% gets 4% more. Certainly not going to completely fix fire, but at least would be a start. Combustion needs work too, but they aren't gonna nerf heroic geared mages without nerfing those in starter gear unless they make a major change, which I really doubt we'll see.

[Polarthief]

Change critical mass to apply a static amount of crit, maybe 10%. The geared mage sitting at 50% crit gets 5% less, the undergeared sitting at 20% gets 4% more. Certainly not going to completely fix fire, but at least would be a start. Combustion needs work too, but they aren't gonna nerf heroic geared mages without nerfing those in starter gear unless they make a major change, which I really doubt we'll see.

Nerfing CM ruins it for the higher geared Mages like it did back in 5.1 and makes us not feel like our gear did anything for HU/HS procs (e.g., ruining it completely)

[Jarion]

Change critical mass to apply a static amount of crit, maybe 10%. The geared mage sitting at 50% crit gets 5% less, the undergeared sitting at 20% gets 4% more. Certainly not going to completely fix fire, but at least would be a start. Combustion needs work too, but they aren't gonna nerf heroic geared mages without nerfing those in starter gear unless they make a major change, which I really doubt we'll see.

I like this solution.

Nerfing CM ruins it for the higher geared Mages like it did back in 5.1 and makes us not feel like our gear did anything for HU/HS procs (e.g., ruining it completely)

I don't think it would ruin it. That's a little hyperbolic. Plus, most people assume it's combustion that is causing all the crazy damage, and it can WHEN YOU GET LUCKY, but really it's all the extra pyros that causes fire's baseline damage to soar. A change like this would help with that.

[mrgreenthump]

I don't think it would ruin it. That's a little hyperbolic. Plus, most people assume it's combustion that is causing all the crazy damage, and it can WHEN YOU GET LUCKY, but really it's all the extra pyros that causes fire's baseline damage to soar. A change like this would help with that.

Sure, lets roll with that, till we count the maximum of pyroblast damage, which in bis is around 170k(+ignite) dps(on average) with fireball+pyroblast chaining at 100% crit. Sure that seems really out of line. What would you want to do? 100k? The fact is that our substained dps outside of Combustion timings is quite meh.. Now I'm not saying that the increase in Pyro's dont do anything, sure they account for us doing more damage in comparison to before, but combustion damage has gone up in comparison to the pyro damage by a lot more than what pyro damage has gone up in comparison to lets say fireball.


And beside's luck has nothing to do with getting all your procs on pulls, which is by far the largest damage contributer for fire.. You can only really have bad luck and not crit with 90% crit rate, which makes your combustion damage somewhat lower every 10th pull or so.

[Deleted]

when should roll fire mage ATM I am 32 crit percent

[Huevos]

when should roll fire mage ATM I am 32 crit percent

When you learn to search for and read the countless threads that already have that answer.

[Jarion]

Sure, lets roll with that, till we count the maximum of pyroblast damage, which in bis is around 170k(+ignite) dps(on average) with fireball+pyroblast chaining at 100% crit. Sure that seems really out of line. What would you want to do? 100k? The fact is that our substained dps outside of Combustion timings is quite meh.. Now I'm not saying that the increase in Pyro's dont do anything, sure they account for us doing more damage in comparison to before, but combustion damage has gone up in comparison to the pyro damage by a lot more than what pyro damage has gone up in comparison to lets say fireball.


And beside's luck has nothing to do with getting all your procs on pulls, which is by far the largest damage contributer for fire.. You can only really have bad luck and not crit with 90% crit rate, which makes your combustion damage somewhat lower every 10th pull or so.

All of this great discussion had me seeking some data and it's really hard to do any kind of controlled testing in game. Blizz needs to make us a testing chamber with a target dummy and an NPC that we can talk to and set our stats. To the point, I ended up working with SimulationCraft to try and get a feel for how fire's damage really scales and how different spells contribute to our DPS. (it scales far more linearly with crit that I thought, btw) Every time I simed, pyroblast DPS was the major contributor to the damage and as crit increased it's damage increased far faster than any other damage source, which makes sense. Combustion's DPS was a surprisingly small % of the overall DPS. That IS simulation though. I'd love to look at some real data from average players and do some more analysis, I just haven't had time.

Edit: I just reran the Sim with heroic BiS T15. Here are the results it spit out.

[Huevos]

All of this great discussion had me seeking some data and it's really hard to do any kind of controlled testing in game. Blizz needs to make us a testing chamber with a target dummy and an NPC that we can talk to and set our stats. To the point, I ended up working with SimulationCraft to try and get a feel for how fire's damage really scales and how different spells contribute to our DPS. (it scales far more linearly with crit that I thought, btw) Every time I simed, pyroblast DPS was the major contributor to the damage and as crit increased it's damage increased far faster than any other damage source, which makes sense. Combustion's DPS was a surprisingly small % of the overall DPS. That IS simulation though. I'd love to look at some real data from average players and do some more analysis, I just haven't had time.

I think that makes sense to a degree, at least the pyro linear scaling. I think if it had value over 100% you might see something more exponential, but obviously it becomes less and less useful after a certain point. Combustion doesn't end up doing more than pyro in current gear on single target fights, so I'm not surprised that it shows up relatively low. It isn't until we get the Amp trinket that it really gets out of hand - SimCraft hasn't been terribly useful for us in MoP, I wonder how well it will model the Amp proc. I'd expect to see a massive jump when you add that in.

[Polarthief]

@Jarion: That's pretty overevaluated. SimC isn't too reliable until they finally fix that profile.




(If anyone really thinks that SimC isn't broken for Mages, legitimately explain to me how the fuck Frost is #3)

[Jarion]

@Jarion: That's pretty overevaluated. SimC isn't too reliable until they finally fix that profile.

(If anyone really thinks that SimC isn't broken for Mages, legitimately explain to me how the fuck Frost is #3)

Ah. I was unaware that the fire simulation was broken. I guess my quest for some data will have to continue then.

[Polarthief]

Ah. I was unaware that the fire simulation was broken. I guess my quest for some data will have to continue then.

ALL 3 are broken, btw, not any one specific spec.



Btw guys, we just got some bad QoL annoyances.

PoM no longer gets reset by PoM

Combustion glyph "nerfed" to 50% damage/cooldown/duration (why they did this, I'll never know; do they want us to not use Alter Time with PoM?)

[Methusula]

PoM no longer gets reset by Alter Time

Fixed that for ya.

[Lorahalo]

Is it changing the way PoM works or is it changing the way the cooldown works with Alter Time?

[Methusula]

It's changing PoM to be unaffected by Alter Time. AT isn't being touched. While PoM and Combustion are likely to lessen the impact AT has in them.

[Polarthief]

Fixed that for ya.

LOL omg that's hilarious, I was half asleep when I wrote that XDDDDDD

Yeah, I meant AT.

So is PoM even still worth getting now for Fire?

PS: Front page is wrong. It never reset the cooldown, it was the buff that got reset.



Also, a small change that almost no one caught: Double Blink is now a 15s charge timer. The ONLY penalty is the CC remover, and thus, this glyph has become significantly better, BUT, it's a Major now (and apparently it wasn't before).


ALSO FIRE ELEMENTALS YAY.

[TacTican]

LOL omg that's hilarious, I was half asleep when I wrote that XDDDDDD

Yeah, I meant AT.

So is PoM even still worth getting now for Fire?

Might even be a gameplay buff. I get that sinking feeling whenever my final PoM Pyroblast doesn't crit, tanking the ignite damage and killing the banked Heating Up! proc.