No post yesterday, due to history mid-term today. Apparently, no matter how much you read, how much you cross-correlate to other books, there will always, always be something you missed.
Such a thing as complete knowledge does not exist. Which makes it all the more embarrasing when you spent a day studying something and then it doesn’t even come up on the exam.
This is the best major ever. Screw math, I wanna learn about german economics in the 19th century!
Needless to say, there were a few questions that I just did not know the answer to. You know how sometimes you see a question, but you can make an educated guess or take a stab at it, and usually get close? Yeah. Not even that.
So Rasputin was a famous french romantic painter obsessed with shipwrecks, labour unions are called “le labour unions” in France, and a potato was the cause of the russian revolution in the 19th century.
At least there wasn’t a question on chartism or entarchy. Gaaaah.
Some interesting thoughts sparked by the last post.
Right now, at end game, mages have two truely viable specs: fireball and arcane.
Yes, FFB has fallen out of favour, at least for end game. Essentially, it’s the “I wanna spec fire but don’t have enough hit gear to spec fireball yet” spec, almost always used by brand new 80s. It just runs into scaling issues (shock!) and doesn’t measure up to the big two at end game (mostly).
So I been thinking. Just how many viable specs do mages want, and how many should we have?
We’re right on the cusp of having the Big Three end game viable, that is arcane, fire, and frost. Is that enough? Or do we want to see the dream of an elemental spec become true?
Think back to the LK beta, back when FFB was the new shiny and we were crunching specs like 0/33/37 for end game content. A true elementalist spec, a perfect hybrid of fire and frost. Turns out, such a spec was stupidly bad. FFB didn’t scale nearly as well as we’d hope, and all in all it was far worse than frost.
Then Empowered Fire was brought into being, and the 0/53/18 spec was born. Not an elementalist spec at all, just a fire spec that was kinda blue.
So what if mages had 4 (or more) raiding viable specs?
- Arcane
- Fireball
- Frost
- Elemental
The first two we already have. The third is probably happening in 3.3.
And strangely, the foundation for Elemental exists.
Imagine, if you will. Imagine a spec such as, say, 0/39/32, or 0/24/47 not only existed, but was its own distinct spec and was end game viable.
Imagine a world where elementalist was more than just a gimmick PvP spec that showed up every now and then.
Such a spec would be extremely mana efficient, due to combo of Frost Channeling, Master of Elements and a very high crit rate. As with the current FFB spec, ignite stacked with ice shards will result in very high crit damage, but a true elementalist spec would also make use of shatter combos, possibly greatly lessening the strength of crit as a stat.
Then again, a hybrid spec could very well be using Ice Lance a great deal to get Frozen Core procs, fueling rapid fire frostfire bolts. As in the 0/24/47 spec, it could very well have Brain Freeze, too. Haste, too, could be weakened as a stat.
Could be an interesting dynamic. We could have arcane slavering over every point of haste, fire gemming crit rating into every slot, and elemental cramming nothing but spellpower into everything.
An interesting think, to be sure, though I think we’re a long way off from four viable raid specs.
Seriously guys, three is enough. What kind of precedent are we setting here, if as soon as our prayers are answered for three viable specs we immediately demand a fourth?
Maybe Cataclysm, where talents Fire Power and Piercing Ice won’t exist, we’ll see the advent of more than three viable raid specs.
Imagine:
- Pure Arcane
- Fire TtW (FB))
- Fire IV (FFB)
- Pure Frost
- Frost Ignite (FFB)
- True Elemental
And then we can let the madness flow freely. A deep arcane spec that uses fireball and missile barrage procs?
Nah.
Three’s fine.
I mean I’ll probably only ever play pure arcane at this point. It just feels so good.
And really, just imagine the QQ from other classes if we ended up with more viable raiding specs than we had talent trees.
Then again, druids have four end game specs viable at every tier…
Not to mention DK’s…
That is one of the draws that I have with my mage over say my shaman. My shaman has pretty much one viable elemental spec and there is no breathing room unless I want to go enhance. Mages though have 3 different damage dealing specs that all play differently how cool is that?
All 3 are going to be viable too?? I’m so in!
I would care much less about getting an FFB spec (or two or three) viable if I didn’t think it could be done by adding/tweaking some of the first tier talents.
I feel like your blog is worth reading just so I can keep my finger on the pulse of current spec thinking among mages. I’ve been FFB specced for raiding for a while now, but I have more hit than I used to and you inspired me to check out what a FB spec would do instead. Big DPS increase! Thanks!
Yeah, I’ve been FFB for awhile now and when I came groveling for advice, my self-buffed crit was a meager 31%. Now my fire crit is 39% and perfectly hit-capped at 368.
I break 3k constantly, but I really don’t end up doing much more than that. It’s a little disheartening.
Should I end up switching spec to Arcane or to Fire? Either would likely involve an epic search for haste or hit gear, respectively.
Is it worth the struggle?
Undoubtedly. Big numbers are always worth the struggle.
When I first played around with arcane, I was right around the 2.5-3.5k area. Still mostly itemized for fire, so naturally my numbers were lower than their potential.
Many upgrades later, sporting metric boatloads of haste, it doesn’t even take effort to crack 6k, and I regularly break 7k.
So yes, it’s definitely worth the effort.
Off topic question: Are metric boatloads more than imperial boatloads? ie: 1 kg = 2.2 lbs?
Elementalist FFB specs were the best leveling specs out there for levels 75-80 when Wrath launched. Your main nuke was 70% pushback resistant and proc’ed impact stuns (no need for a fireblast), frostbite, and FOF. You could skip all of the talents that are specific to Frostbolt and Fireball and take all the utility points you can imagine. (E.g. Things like Shattered Barrier and Molten Shields – which was a half decent talent solo because it could also proc impact off of your Molten Armor damage – were fair game.)
Really, I don’t think there’s ever been anything in the game that was as much fun as using impact-ing Blizzard on trash mobs; even if they WANTED to come kill you, they couldn’t because of the chill, impact, frostbite, Water Elemental freeze, and, of yeah, the giant and unending stream of massive crit volleys.
You can’t really say “screw math” and “I wanna learn about german economics” in the same breath. Economics, at their core, are just a system that is modeled using mathematics – specifically set theory (or game theory).
Care to elaborate?
It’s not economics in the way of understanding GDPs and… whatever those other economic terms are.
It’s about the historical perspective. How prudent use of railways led to this, how the rapid industrialization of that led to this other thing, how the Zollverein contributed to unification, and so forth.
Ah, charade you are. j/k
Seriously, that is all just game theory. I think you’d find more interest in mathematics if you found the right area. The reason why prudent use of railways led to X or why Zollverein contributed to unification of Y, and so forth, is all just game theory.
Mathematics gets a bad rap because of the stereotypical fat guy teaching teaching algebra in high school. Once you get in to set theory math becomes less about numbers and more about philosophy. It’s fascinating!
Of all the specs throughout the years the most fun I ever had was my level 60 PvP elementalist spec.
While three is totally enough viable specs for one class to PvE with, I will always want a spec where I can have frostbite, blastwave and shatter combos available.
PS: since you are pulling those kinds of numbers I will now be armory stalking you as the earliest opportunity and perhaps get an idea how big a metric boatload really is
I still miss my 3 minute mage spec, nothing said hello like a Trinket+AP+POM+Pyro