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Brew Disciple
Group: Guild Members
Last Login: Today @ 9:07:00 AM
Posts: 790, Visits: 4,215 |
| Fire heavy: 11-50-0 - focus magic-burnout: about the best you can do. Not really an AOE build: better to have 3% more crit most of the time for dropping focus magic on another fire mage than having dragon's breath AND blastwave. Burnout gives you 2.45 critical damage compared to 2.1 without Burnout. With a 50%+ critical rate, this is far better than losing that bonus to grab +6% damage unless aggro capping makes burnout infeasbile (which might actually be the case) - then you'll have to grab spell impact instead.
Arcane heavy: 58-3-0 - uh...yeah. Fix. Arcane. Now. Half of the talents look cool but cost too much and/or are total trash and nothing substantially buffs arcane blast, arcane barrage, or arcane missles like the super treatment fire picked up. Plus, short compared to all other dps casters with only 50% addition to crit dmg, and the only arcane-specific buff is too easy to fire mages to grab. Example: +15% int for 5 points (when you get 12% spirit for 3), +15% of int at dmg for 5 pts (nerfed from 25%...), a 15% proc that fire gets for 3 points and frost gets for 2 points. Nice job dummies.
Frosty: 0-0-61 Maybe. Might grab subtlety depending on need to use arcane explosion and/or random raid dispells.
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Parissa - 80 Mage
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Brew Disciple
Group: Guild Members
Last Login: Today @ 9:07:00 AM
Posts: 790, Visits: 4,215 |
| | Looks like Arcane is in for some retooling/fixing of it's damage scaling...well and damage period. Here is an interesting note comparing some talent trees: There is a pretty major imbalance in the talent count. For the sake of a larger sample size, I'm including Warlock trees in this count of the total number of talents in each tree:
81 points: Arcane
76 points: Destruction
74.83333: Average
74 points: Frost
73 points: Demonology, Fire
72 points: Affliction What a train wreck. Arcane needs to drop about 5-6 talent points ttp://www.manoutoftime.org/staticpages/index.php/wotlk_mage
So given that and some rough comparisons - here are some changes that look good/viable/interesting. Please note I've not run lots of numbers on these so some of the talent modifications can get changed as necessary
1) Change Arcane empowerment - Bump the arcane blast bonus from spell damage to 12%, add arcane barrage and give it 12% as well. Why? - if blast scales better the arcane barrage then you're effectively killing arcane as high end raid viable in the future. These need to scale at least as well as frostbolt or fireball to compete in damage. Further, if arcane barrage doesn't scale with arcane blast then there will be no reason to cast the spell.
2) Change Spellpower to 50/100 and make it arcane-only to compete with the critical dmg bonus of all other dps specs. - arc-fire mages will skewer me, but really this is necessary to allow a pure arcane build to have scaling remotely close to any DD mage, warlock, druid, or spriest spec. Also raid damage buffs are heavily focused on critical strike - which exacerbates arcane's scaling issues.
3) Reduce Missile Barrage to 3 points. Increase Proc rate to 20% - Frost gets essentially two free criticals from a proc that takes 2 points, fire is going to proc about 25% of the time if not more from a proc that takes 3 points (if you don't see how your fire mage won't have 50% crit rate when these new talents hit stop reading this now)
4) Remove Arcane mind and mind mastery talents: Why? this forces use of student of the mind which appears to be the intent of the developers for mana regen. Also, both of these 5 point talents add to the bloating of arcane. Don't worry, new talents are being proposed to add things in.
5) Add arcane barrage to spell impact; add arcane barrage to Incineration
6) Change prismatic cloak and frozen core to 2 pts - primastic cloak is then 1.5/3% per point, frozen core 3/6
7) Change netherwind presence to add 0.33% spell dmg with each point along with the 2% haste (so change from 3/3 = 6% haste to 3/3 = 6% haste, 1% dmg)
8) Add a twisted-faith type damage from spirit talent in place of mind mastery. Maybe something in the area of 5/5 points for 2/4/6/8/10% of spirit like the spriest and then something along the lines of "when you have a focus magic proc up increases damage of arcane barrage by 2%" This also gives arcane mages a reason to be arcane as a fire mage can grab about every meaningful mana regeneration talent at 80 if they so desire (check out how silly 20-51 is...) Even at 70 if some fire mage really felt like it they can sacrifice burnout to get spell impact + most of student of the mind + focus magic. This gives mages a reason to get spirit other than "ooo regen"
9) Make arcane blast a normal nuke and get rid of the gimmick - the "what about the damage scaling" problem is "fixed" by the proposed scaling, the "no lawl AB spam builds" addressed by #8 and the .857 barrage coefficient as compared to .7043 for arcane blast along with otherwise equal scaling for the two spells. It is VERY important to scale barrage properly or the arcane raiding spec falls apart.
Feel free to give some general comments or thoughts - but this seems like a much better step in the right direction and puts some real meat into the arcane tree in terms of damage scaling.
Note: re fire mages, yeah, there is arcane power, but an arcane mage will run about 6-7% less critical strike than you will so arcane power basically replaces the 6% critical talent in fire that is passive.
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Parissa - 80 Mage
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