Amplify Magic on ICC Bosses

[Karius]

Hi Guys.

Clearly most of you know by now that its a great Idea to put Amplifiy Magic (AM) on the Tank, while fighting Saurfang and as well on the Dragon when trying to heal the Dreamwalker.

Did you ever think about buffing the Tank or the whole Raid in other ICC Encounters?
Are there any fights that allow to make sensible use of Dampen Magic (DM) in ICC?

What i'd like to do, with your help, is trying to assemble a list of all ICC Bosses and wether you should buff the Tank or the whole Raid with AM or DM.

I'm eagerly awaiting your thoughts and suggestions.


===========================================

[ ] = no | (x) = yes, AM = Amplifiy Magic
(I will list DM seperat as there will hardly be any Encounters that allow for the spells use)

Lower Spire: AM on the Tank [?] - AM on the Raid [?]

Lord Marrowgar [?] - [?]
Lady Deathwhisper[?] - [?]
Gunship Battle [?] - [?]
Deathbringer Saurfang (x) - [?]

The Plagueworks:

Festergut [?] - [?]
Rotface [?] - [?]
Professor Putricide [?] - [?]

The Crimson Hall:

Blood Prince Council [?] - [?]
Blood-Queen Lana'thel [?] - [?]

Frostwing Halls:

Valithria Dreamwalker [Boss] - [?] - [?]
Sindragosa [?] - [ ]

The Frozen Throne:

The Lich King [?] - [?]

[Skarrd]

The thing about amplify magic is usually heals have overhealing on tanks, so there's little to no benefit from it. The reason it's so good on saurfang is because raid healing mark damage is really important and you can't bomb 6 marks with holy light. It's good on dreamwalker for obvious reasons. Every other fight has some sort of magc damage component which will just make your tanks take unnecessary damage, while amp magic will probably do almost no extra effective healing.

[DirewolfX]

It's usually rather hard to tell whether you should amplify or dampen any fight with mixed damage sources. Any time you use dampen magic, you are reducing effective heals. Since we don't really know the coefficients for boss fights, it's hard to say when to use it without hurting more than it helps. For amplify, you can generally use it when all or most of the incoming damage is physical. However, it's usually not an issue, because the problem is rarely that heals are too small; more often the problem is that heals are not coming fast enough, despite massive overhealing.

Lord Marrowgar: If your tanks are really good at avoiding the coldfire, you can amplify to improve healing throughput.

Gunship: Most of the damage here is physical (only the enemy artillery is fire damage), so you can probably use amplify. Using it on the Saurfang tank can make keeping him alive easier.

Saurfang: Amplify on everyone.

Festergut: Big mix of both, but the dangerous damage to the tank is physical. You could potentially amp the tank. Definitely not on the raid.

Valithria: Amplify magic on the dragon.

That's about it. The rest are too complicated a mix or are too heavy in magic damage.

[Somaa]

Amplify magic only affects single target damage sources. You can test this out with multiple bosses auras. Its safe to amp at least the tanks if not the entire raid on near every fight. We do the tanks on every fight.

[DirewolfX]

Interesting. More likely they didn't bother to put coefficients on bosses' AoE spells. I suspect it does affect player AoE. Either way, the fact that so much healing is overheal these days makes it unnecessary. High end healers don't gear for spell power; they gear for haste so they can cast faster. They're already healing for as high as they need to and have no mana issues... they just need to be getting those heals out faster.

[chupatwo]

ya know instead of taking amp/damp magic out of the game they really should have made the effects they have greater, because the only reason they seem so trivial now is because they really don't DO much!

[Pasture]

While I disagree with the removal of the wards, the removal of amp/damp magic in Cata is a good move. The way the abilities work is outdated and confusing in a PvE environment. I hope they give us a cleaned up, holistic version of the two spells, but we'll see if they're just removed entirely soon enough I guess.

[Karius]

..... That's about it. The rest are too complicated a mix or are too heavy in magic damage.

Sounds good.
Funny enough there are many different opinions on that topic as i found out having a discussion on the matter. Most healers seem to fear destroying the benefit through overheal and therefore ignore the buff. Also better equipped Healers tend to ignore it for they have haste and not SP or mana issues. (deriving from blizz killing manamanagement in WotLK)

That makes it quite hard for me as well to estimate good advice on using the buff since one can't really generalize on healer type and equipment.

But after all i think the heals can't all be overhealing. Especially as Healers tend to spam shorter Heals.

From where i stand at the moment it's still number of magicdmg/timeunit to heals per timeunit*overhealfactor.

So it comes down to good data on magicdmg incoming, healernumber on target, castingtime of healspell and overheal ratio.

I don't really like my chances on getting a clear picture on this. Especially considering there are 10s and 25man raids. :P


Nevertheless with your help it could be possible to give a list of empirical data helping with the decision. I found quite some posts suggesting to buff the tank nearly every encounter. (Tankspot)

[DirewolfX]

While I disagree with the removal of the wards, the removal of amp/damp magic in Cata is a good move. The way the abilities work is outdated and confusing in a PvE environment. I hope they give us a cleaned up, holistic version of the two spells, but we'll see if they're just removed entirely soon enough I guess.

Yeah, they should just make it something like 5-10% in either direction.