Mage Nerf Question

[respawn]

Does anyone have any information on exactly what this means?

• Blizzard: This spell is now affected by area damage caps. Its bonus damage coefficients have also been increased.
• Frost Nova: This spell is now affected correctly by area damage caps.

I am assuming this means no more rounding up 13-15 undead in WPL and blizzarding them all down. AOE grinding nerf. What exactly is the cap now? If I frost nova 15 mobs, will only 5 get hit? And the bonus damage, that means blizzard will now get +spell damage now? So essentially you cant get as many mobs, but you can kill the ones you do get quicker?

Anyone with some solid information?

[aznthecapn]

Damage cap just means that you can only do a maximum amount of damage with a single spell. The spell will hit like normal until you get enough mobs that its hitting the cap. At this point it takes the cap amount and divides it by the number of mobs you are AoEing. There's videos out there of 30+ mobs being hit with blizzard for 30 or 40 damage each.

The only Frost Nova nerf is the damage cap. If you FN 50 mobs, it won't hit for maximum damage but will still capture them all (barring resists of course).

edit: From my guild forums.

Basically, an AoE damage cap is a HARD cap on the amount of damage any single aoe spell can do. At low numbers of mobs, you get the max damage capable of the spell including spell damage gear, pots, trinkets, etc. However, once the mob numbers increase to the point you start hitting the cap, the Damage cap number is divided evenly among the number of targets. That is why you will see Seed explode and hit for a range of 1300 to 1400, but once you hit the damage cap EVERY hit will be very close, like 849, or even as low as 600 as I have seen sometimes in Illhoof.

It is important to note that once you hit the damage cap, it doesn't matter if you trinket, pot, pop arcane power, or get naked. The damage cap prevails over all and is inflexible. The exceptions are crits---(the extra crit damage does NOT go towards the damage cap) and any debuffs that might be on the mob like Curse of elements.

Cone of Cold ~ 6500
Maxed DPS without crits ~ 4330

Arcane Explosion ~ 6800
Maxed DPS without crits ~ 4530 (12.5 DPM)

Flamestrike ~ 7800 (*no clarification given if Dot effect is itself effected)
Maxed DPS without crits ~ 2600

Seed of Corruption - near 12,700
Maxed DPS without crits ~ 6350 (14.4 DPM...plus whatever you get on the DoT effect--usually zero in a raid situation)

[respawn]

Wow. Thanks.

So basically I can still try to aoe a lot of mobs, and they will all be trapped and taking damage, but at some point the damage they all take will be reduced and thus take longer to kill them.

Any idea on how many mobs is max? Say you are level 58 and trying to aoe grind (blizzard) the 56-57 undead in WPL. How many should I stop at? I usually can get 13-14 no problem pre-patch.

[aznthecapn]

Wow. Thanks.

So basically I can still try to aoe a lot of mobs, and they will all be trapped and taking damage, but at some point the damage they all take will be reduced and thus take longer to kill them.

Any idea on how many mobs is max? Say you are level 58 and trying to aoe grind (blizzard) the 56-57 undead in WPL. How many should I stop at? I usually can get 13-14 no problem pre-patch.

The number of mobs isn't maxed, its total damage. Take the average tick from your blizzard (add top and bottom, divide two) and then divide the damage cap by that number. That is the number of mobs you can AoE at once and not suffer from the cap. Now due to the liquid nature of the damage, you will have some ticks that hit cap and some that don't. One less will be no cap, one more will hit cap all the time. You get the idea. Its just something you will have to play with until you get a feel for it.

[Pyrostemplar]

It is a lousy thing because it [the damage caps]doesn't scale with spell power - meaning that as you improve your gear, your AOE doesn't.

Regarding FN is irrelevant - does anyone uses anything but R1?

mmmh - although I remember criting a mob with a FN for 13k or so :P


But the whole mechanic of damage caps is a bit "broken" imho...