[Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion - Page 70

Rounced · 07/04/08, 1:42 PM

except if they made the boss an ultra-hard target (increase armor from the 7700 a high armored boss currenly runs with to ~10k) so that the melee/hunters were reduced by the same amount of dps as the casters without curses/misery then the encounter design would function with a standard raid make-up.

Lord Loom · 07/04/08, 1:52 PM

I think he was referring to future raids when he made that statements, not "if bosses were shadow immune NOW we wouldn't bring classes x through z" but "in the future if there's was a shadow immune fight they can design it so that you still want to bring the classes currently reliant on shadow-debuffs, and for min-maxing you'd spec out of shadow or shadow-destro like for min-maxing people spec out of fire/frost, elemental and balance"

nonetheless, I think we've established that a) immunity fights suck, b) are unnecessary and c) unfair and d) FFB looks like it might end up overpowered so elementalists would be THE spec for non-immunity fights because no one in end-game will spec for it if pure fire/frost ends up more powerful on specific bosses. Can we discuss other "mage in WotLK" issues or do we have to run in circles, scream and shout?

Jonny_Monroe · 07/04/08, 1:58 PM

Originally Posted by Lord Loom

Can we discuss other "mage in WotLK" issues or do we have to run in circles, scream and shout?

We've pretty much covered everything now. The circles continue untill more info comes out : /

So, how about that arcane barrage co-efficient, eh?

Roywyn · 07/04/08, 2:06 PM

Originally Posted by Jonny_Monroe

We've pretty much covered everything now. The circles continue untill more info comes out : /

So, how about that arcane barrage co-efficient, eh?

Trading [Crimson Spinel]s for information about how "Hot Streak" works, if there is any possible interaction with itself. Yeah, I'm that desperate

Skallewag · 07/04/08, 2:11 PM

Good idea, there seems to be a little arathi basin of set camps who could disagree with eachother forever. (its forum pages like this one that kinda makes all the religious wars throughout history a lot easier to understand. *wicked grin*)

Anyway is there anything that suggests ABr would have any other coef than Fireblast? Both instant cast, single target, no additional debuffs or effects added (cept from talents ofc) and none of them are binary.

What I would really like to know is if netherwind pressence will have a proc sound. I really miss the clearcasting sound and reactiontime is just so much better (at least for me) on an audio notice rather than looking for the right buff to popup. Especially in a raid enviorment. I embrace anything that reduces the visual clutter while raiding as long as it doenst hide vital info from me.

Also Im a bit interested in the Incanters absorbtion. At frist glance it looks really easy to dismiss, but what it could potentially do is make your full range of manashield ranks interesting again. With current numbers it looks like a really hefty price for some extra spelldamage, but if you predict some incoming damage it could perhaps be usefull to pop a manashield of some reasonable amount to get the damagebuff and then pop AP, IV, trinkiet, managem(SCB), destropot for even more insane burst damage than we can dish out now. Any thoughts?

Skallewag · 07/04/08, 2:20 PM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

Trading [Crimson Spinel]s for information about how "Hot Streak" works, if there is any possible interaction with itself. Yeah, I'm that desperate

Well I can give you a tinsy winsy cookie.

"Fixed an issue with the mage talent Hot Streak where it was allowing an infinite number of spell critical strikes."

Thats some wotlkwiki patch notes. Also from what Ive read (dont ask me where cause I dont remember) But I think that HS is supposed to work something like this. Crits build up an invisible stack/buff. If you do three in a row you get 100% crit cahnse on the next one. The stack is reset but that bonus crit counts as nr.1 in a new stack.

So if you get three crits in a row you get a 4:th automatically and if you are lucky and get two more crits on your own you get a 6:th free one and so on and so on. To bad they changed combustion. Sure you get more crits out of it now but it can just as well fail at getting you 3 in a row. But the old combustion could have been cast at any time you allready got two cirts to auto proc two more.

Akston · 07/04/08, 2:21 PM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

They shouldn't, and that's exactly why there aren't any Shadow immune bosses - a Shadow Priest's regular task is DPS.

If he tries to DPS as Holy, his DPS is likely to suffer so much it'll be much better to just bring a different DPS.
If he tries to heal as Holy, he isn't doing his regular task.

That's what I've been trying to say all along.

Shadow priest is a spec not a class, just like a fire mage or frost mage or elemental shaman, last i checked.

I proposed what I think is a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon on the last page -- namely, that caster raid balance depends upon having a certain set of buffs from the shadow school (curses, misery, spriest regen) available. This is not true of any other spell school.

Who's to say a shadow immune boss wouldn't be tuned to account for the loss of those debuffs? Or give casters something other than just boss dps to do during the encounter? The vast majority of immune bosses really aren't tuned very tightly to begin with. There are lots of things that could be implemented on a shadow immune boss to make up for the lack of vt/miser/cos/coe/cor.

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 3:04 PM

Not to throw a wrench into the FFB discussion, but I realized something while working on something for frost mage PvP on the main mage forums (WoW Forums -> "Double" Shatter Combo @ 96 Haste (VIDEO)) that might be of interest regarding WG.

Lhivera, Vontre, et all doing the modeling for this, its worth considering that while you're effectively doing shatter combos under WG using Frostbolt->Ice Lance combos on procs, the timeline of casting will allow the ice lance to be potentially significantly shorter than the 1.5 second expected time since the GCD will start client side as soon as the spell cast request is sent, not when the spell cast actually happens. I've been able to observe this up to 300 msec from the end of the frostbolt cast (meaning the Ice Lances 1.5 second effective cast time really was 1.2 seconds for all intents and purposes).

What the average return on it is I'm not really certain, and will be incredibly variable depending on latency and such, but compressing the DPS cycle by sneaking that GCD in early could theoretically result in an unrealized gain compared to perfect world modeling.

mkultra55 · 07/04/08, 3:38 PM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

No, shadow immunity means immunity to VT/Misery/curses/shadow embrace. That means they run with no/one (for buffs/utility/whatever) mages, warlock, shadow priests, then no elemental shaman or moonkin (the classes that these hybrids are missing).
It'll just be tanks, healers and melee/hunter comps.

That's the whole point with shadow immunity.
No one cares about fire/nature/arcane immunity - immunities suck, but those three schools don't matter.
Holy - means no ret paladin, and if your MT is a paladin he'll enjoy his night off.
Frost - no one cares right now, but it might mean that your Deathknight main tank will level his fishing that night.

Shadow means that the lack of curses, misery, vampiric touch and shadow embrace will make a minmax raid to run a cleave comp without casters due to the lack of damage debuffs.

As a raid leader, I wouldn't care about sitting out an SP and having some locks respec.
I would care about having to sit 1/3 of my raid or more because they become subpar DPS compared to physical DPS.
(Loss of CoR is ~7% compared to 18% misery/CoE and another 5-10% from VT.)

....and as I said it is inherently poor design if a high end Raid NEEDS Lock and Shadow Priest DeBuffs to be effective. No class should be required for any fight. This has been a cornerstone complaint of Mages throughout TBC. By your own statement you would never dream of a Raid without Locks or Shadow Priests but it's not a big deal of you don't have any Mages. Do you see how ridiculous that is?

Blizzard Buffed Locks/Spriests and Hunters so much for TBC to make up for their low numbers in the old 40 man world they created this imbalance.

◊ manly · 07/04/08, 3:42 PM

That certainly wouldn't be the first case of mechanics that aren't fully well understood. There are many casting mechanics that aren't even well known or agreed upon. I strongly believe all buffs/debuffs are delayed. I have some pseudo proof, but nothing really conclusive. If we knew exactly how the cleitn and server interaction works for every cast, it would be a tremendous help for min/maxers.

While this is tangential, this would have a direct impact on the works of the TC involving any instant casts. This means barrage and icelance amongst other things. If the GCD is managed client-side, does that means that you end up gutting yourself out of dps because the fact the GCD is client-side means you pay one latency extra time to your dps ?

Incidentally, I just had an idea to increase dps for all casters by a technique reminiscent of stopcasting. But it would be stupid to do so without even knowing precisely how casting works. I'm not even sure if there is a mini server side 'queue' that will auto chain your spells of not. I have seen evidence of it existing, as well as evidence showing it couldn't exist.

chase · 07/04/08, 3:48 PM

I'm sure most of us here are more than willing to spec any way necessary to help ease beating a progression fight.

It is like having three arms and having one hacked off and people saying "You still have two arms!". I agree to an extent. I would just like to see more encounters focus on the fact that we have three arms, not that we can still be viable if we have some of our limbs chopped off. *

Again, many have stated that currently FFB is pretty much under a two condition scenerio. A) Grossly overpowered B) So weak that switching specs will be better to beat the immunity boss.

I'm of the oppion that FFB will be what we use to farm immune mobs, and beat immune farm raid bosses. (e.g. Frost elementals as frost spec, and A'lar 2.0)

*It does not take that large of carrot either. Think trash with shifting immunity like Botanica trash, the arcane mobs in Alcatraz, or heck even the bog lord type vulnerability in SSC. (None of these favor stacking classes by school, you just want diversity or at least the potential for diversity)

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 4:01 PM

Originally Posted by manly

That certainly wouldn't be the first case of mechanics that aren't fully well understood. There are many casting mechanics that aren't even well known or agreed upon. I strongly believe all buffs/debuffs are delayed. I have some pseudo proof, but nothing really conclusive. If we knew exactly how the cleitn and server interaction works for every cast, it would be a tremendous help for min/maxers.

Are you refering to things such as popping IV? Later in that thread I observed that doing IV->Frostbolt gave a frostbolt cast time that reflected the IV, but a GCD that did not. Buffs as far as I have observed are always directed server side.

While this is tangential, this would have a direct impact on the works of the TC involving any instant casts. This means barrage and Incidentally, I just had an idea to increase dps for all casters by a technique reminiscent of stopcasting. But it would be stupid to do so without even knowing precisely how casting works. I'm not even sure if there is a mini server side 'queue' that will auto chain your spells of not. I have seen evidence of it existing, as well as evidence showing it couldn't exist.

The change in 2.3 seems to just be that you can always send spellcast requests as long as you don't have an active GCD, which will start your GCD client side, and if the server thinks it isnt time for you to be casting yet it just sends back "Stop dummy and wait a while", as observed in the Quartzless thread (WoW Forums -> 2.3 "Quartzless" spellcasting mechanic)

◊ manly · 07/04/08, 4:16 PM

I know that, but that 'temp GCD' can cost you DPS. Imagine you have no haste gear and spam scorches. If you press infinitely precisely at 1.5s, then theorically they all go through. However, if for one of them you press at 1.48s, then you will suffer a client-side GCD of 100ms (figurative number, actual number should be latency * 2). As you noted, it waits for the answer from server. That means your next cast is at 1.58s. That costed you 80ms of dps time. Because you spam casted.

My idea for a mod was to basically silently 'kill' all casts prior to 1.5s, so that you don't trigger randomly local-side GCDs which can end up costing you dps. Of course, this would only work well in a case you spam extremely agressively (ie: faster than gcd). In a way its extremely similar to fastcast.

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 4:28 PM

Originally Posted by manly

I know that, but that 'temp GCD' can cost you DPS. Imagine you have no haste gear and spam scorches. If you press infinitely precisely at 1.5s, then theorically they all go through. However, if for one of them you press at 1.48s, then you will suffer a client-side GCD of 100ms (figurative number, actual number should be latency * 2). As you noted, it waits for the answer from server. That means your next cast is at 1.58s. That costed you 80ms of dps time. Because you spam casted.

GCD bumping spells can't experience that, you can't send out spell requests with the GCD active. However definitely the mini-GCD issue is one to be considered spamming spells that have a pause between GCD clearing and the precast window

My idea for a mod was to basically silently 'kill' all casts prior to 1.5s, so that you don't trigger randomly local-side GCDs which can end up costing you dps. Of course, this would only work well in a case you spam extremely agressively (ie: faster than gcd). In a way its extremely similar to fastcast.

I'm actually curious if button mods can ignore presses based on things like that.

◊ manly · 07/04/08, 5:04 PM

Originally Posted by Zaldinar

GCD bumping spells can't experience that, you can't send out spell requests with the GCD active. However definitely the mini-GCD issue is one to be considered spamming spells that have a pause between GCD clearing and the precast window

Ah yeah, definately. How did I not see that one.

But my original point was that the TC done on barrage and ice lance totally ignores that. This mostly affects the new builds with deep arcane or deep frost builds. If you can't send casts during the GCD (not the temp one, I'm talking 1s), then if your cast at 1.01s has a huge latency on it, then you wouldn't be able to have had casted it earlier to avoid a latency cost.

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 5:16 PM

Originally Posted by manly

But my original point was that the TC done on barrage and ice lance totally ignores that. This mostly affects the new builds with deep arcane or deep frost builds. If you can't send casts during the GCD (not the temp one, I'm talking 1s), then if your cast at 1.01s has a huge latency on it, then you wouldn't be able to have had casted it earlier to avoid a latency cost.

The precasting phenomenon definitely complicates otherwise simple timelines. Until instants are a regular part of rotations mass data collection will be tricky, since basically instead of it being observing what is really happening and reacting accordingly, we'll be creating test environments to do it, which with this is slightly problematic.

What is nice is that basic combat logs hold most of the information we'd want to know. You can see the "Not Yet Recovered" messages in the combat log for when you are requesting things and bumping the GCD, and "Another action in progress" messages for when you get told you can't cast yet.

Edit: Strike the further reflection, protected function.

◊ manly · 07/04/08, 5:33 PM

Well, you can do a call to an addon like you typed in a macro. I don't know if you can call stopcasting in a mod (maybe you can since it does not trigger a gcd), but I know that thanks to the ChatEdit_HandleChatType exploit you can know every time a macro is ran, and 'remove' some lines that were meant to be executed. Like /cast fireball. Imagine that all your casts go through that method, and that method isn't allowed under any circumstance to add new stuff, or type new stuff (since it would be trivial to code conditional macros). However, theres conveniently a method that you can call at that level that removes the current active line. If I recall correctly its something along the lines of 'escape()'.

edit: and if that doesnt work, I have a really scarily crazy idea. You could 'prevent the game from casting' by intentionally having your code loop for the duration. Imagine the scenario you outlined. You have a macro that casts a mod function. The mod function calculates the time it can begin casting (ie: same as red bar in quartz). then since it cant stop the cast from happening, it could possibly do a "while(now() < time_to_unlock);". This would totally freeze the entire UI/game. However, it would also give you precisely timed casts without having to pay a tax for the temporary GCD. Yes I know that this would not work very well with pushbacks, and has severe limitations, but nevertheless theorycally it shoudl work.

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 5:37 PM

Originally Posted by manly

Well, you can do a call to an addon like you typed in a macro. I don't know if you can call stopcasting in a mod (maybe you can since it does not trigger a gcd), but I know that thanks to the ChatEdit_HandleChatType exploit you can know every time a macro is ran, and 'remove' some lines that were meant to be executed. Like /cast fireball. Imagine that all your casts go through that method, and that method isn't allowed under any circumstance to add new stuff, or type new stuff (since it would be trivial to code conditional macros). However, theres conveniently a method that you can call at that level that removes the current active line. If I recall correctly its something along the lines of 'escape()'.

/script StopMacro(); spits back "hey dummy, stop using protected blizzard functions", so thats a nogo, since to call it in the addon function you'd need it to be executable in this fashion. That'd be a loophole that would get fixed anyway once it hit mass consumption.

Thats a nasty loophole in the ChatEdit object though, basically bypasses the no conditional macros system, since you can just have a macro with a list of actions and selectively remove them on execution.

◊ manly · 07/04/08, 5:45 PM

Thats correct. Hence why its been in my signature for a while now. For what its worth I edited my previous comment to add on another way to code it -- but its not very clean, but should work.

Zaldinar · 07/04/08, 5:55 PM

Edit: Choosing to remove this post due to its implications. Promoting loophole abuse isn't smurfy.