Amagah! Amagah! Amagah!
RAIDING!
Arcane brings the Ferocious Inspiration buff! 3% more damage for you and the entire raid for 10 seconds whenever you crit with any arcane spell! (Effect attached to our current Arcane Empowerment talent.)
A nice buff for arcane, it spreads out yet another raid buff to allow for even more raid flexibility if somehow your raid doesn’t include a BM hunter or ret paladin.
For my 10 man guild, this is nice, as both our hunters go the survival/marksman style route, and our ret paladin is going to be a full time tank from here on out. He hated ret anyways, so this works out well for everyone. I don’t change anything, paladin gets to tank (something he actually likes doing), and me DK friend changes from full time tank to unholy DPS.
You hear that? Yeah, that’s the sound of me destroying the damage meters. It sounds like hunters and rogues crying.
Fire finally got rid of the stupid that was stacking scorches. No need for the glyph, a single cast and BAM a single debuff provides the full 5% extra crit. Go with the glyphs of Living Bomb, Molten Armor, and Fireball (or whatever your main nuke happens to be) and never look back!
Feel free to even let Scorch fall off for a split second or two. You don’t have to rebuild the stacks, so the punishment for letting it fall is nearly nonexistent. The punishment to your DPS, however, to refresh Scorch early is greater than ever. Don’t refresh Scorch early!
Frost got some massive buffs this patch.
First, you can get a glyph (of Eternal Water) which makes your elemental a permanent pet. It can’t cast freeze with the glyph, hence is useless for PvP, but it’s fantastic for raiding. Remember how huge of a damage boost that elemental is? Yeah, imagine having it out for an entire fight. And, of course, being a permanent pet, all raid buffs apply to it.
To make sure your elemental doesn’t go OOM, the cost of Waterbolt has been reduced by 80%. He should be fine to chain cast forever. Well, as long as you can keep him alove for. Unlike warlocks and hunters, we mages can’t really do anything to heal up our pet. Don’t forget to beg your healers to keep an eye on the dude! I hope you’ve been nice to them…
Speaking of pets, all pets now take 90% less damage from AoE, but this is only PvE AoE. They take full AoE damage in PvP. However, they also now benefit from 100% of your resilience, which will make them more resilient to being nuked down. They’re still going to be nuked down pretty fast, just not quite as fast.
Secondly, Deep Freeze is actually a useful raiding talent now! If it’s used on a target that is immune to stuns (i.e. all raid bosses and a lot of trash) it will simply cause a massive amount of damage. How massive? Try critting upwards of 20k, self buffed, massive.
Thirdly, Fingers of Frost procs at a more better time. Instead of proccing when a spell lands, it procs when a spell is cast.
As it was, because you were chain casting up a storm, you’d already be nearly done your next cast by the time the FoF buff went up. You can’t exactly cancel a cast, so you really had a split second to decide what to shatter with. Depending on your distance from the target, haste buffs and lag, you could easily already be casting the spell that would consume the second charge before you even noticed you had FoF up.
Of course, that was mostly alright, as what else would you use it for, if not frostbolt? Ice Lance? More like LOLance, amiright?
As it’s going to be now, FoF will proc immediately, giving you ample time to quickly check to see if Deep Freeze is off cooldown yet.
Gear wise, GET YOUR TIER 10!
If you are a mage, and you raid, do absolutely everything in your power to get your 4pT10 as fast as you can. To reiterate, when you use your Mirror Images, it gives you 18% more damage for 30 seconds. That buff is independent from your Images, they could all die as soon as you summon them and still have the buff chugging.
MI + AP + IV… I think I just wet myself like three times. I’m gonna need new pants… and a new chair…
Run both versions of ICC (IceCrown Citadel) as often as you can. PuG it every week if you have to. Do at least one heroic every day to get the two badges.
But what if the PuGs are baaad?
Suck it up, princess! This is the best set bonus mages have EVER had in the history of absolutely everything. (Except possibly 2pT5.) Which would you rather be? AWESOME!!!? Or happy?
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
PVP!
Arcane got the Ferocious Inspiration buff, making arcane even more powerful in PvP, and making any of their partners more powerful. You thought RMP was serious business before? Well now that mage could be providing 3% extra damage to his rogue and priest partner the entire arena. Have fun!
Fire gets some pretty huge buffs, all revolving around mana. BW and DB have had their costs slashed by a great deal, and Firestarter now makes that instant Flamestrike cost zero mana as well. Oh, and that 10 second interrupt immunity? Yeah, it’s 20 seconds now, though it only provides immunity to a single interrupt mechanic. You aren’t completely immune forever, just immune to the next one used against you.
Oh hey, remember that Scorch change I was talking about earlier? Glyph of Scorch is still around, but it now provides a flat 20% boost to scorch damage.
Fire for PvP? I’ll see you on the battlegrounds, good sirs and madams!
Frost got really nothing. Frost is fine L2P or some such.
Other Classes!
Death Knights are basically the same! Unholy got their ranged, Death Coil damage nerfed in exchange for a rather substantial buff to their Scourge Strike damage. A melee class having to melee in PvP? WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO?
Druids aren’t much different either! Ferals can’t really do that whole “stack 5 combo points, cyclone you, then wait for full energy, then crit you for 16k when cyclone ends” thing anymore. Or rather, they can, it’s just not as easy to do now. Cyclone still OP.
Hunters are also nearly the same! Some of their pets can now root targets from further away or something! /lame
Paladins nerfed! No FoL HoT unless your holy spec! Lay on Hands causes forbearance if used on yourself! Cause that was so OP!
As an aside, this marks the first time in YEARS that a change was made to a class for purposes of battleground balance. I have good feelings about Cataclysm.
Shadow Priests heavily buffed! That’s right, you heard me. Shadow Priests got some big buffs. Vampiric Embrace (the one that causes the priest to heal based on shadow damage dealt) is now an undispellable self buff, mana cost of some of their abilities heavily slashed, Mind Flay is up to 30 yards instead of 20, and two of their DoTs now scale with haste.
It’s that last part that’s so scary. Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch tick faster depending on how much haste the priest has. Probably intended to be a PvE buff, this can and will change shadow priests into a force to be reckoned with.
Don’t get it? Well, imagine if you had three DoTs on you, except two of them were ticking much faster. As in twice as often much faster. A shadow priest with, say, Bloodlust up can absolutely wreck a health bar. They don’t even need crit rating at all anymore. Get the haste up there, and just drain health bars with powerful DoTs.
Nothing interesting for rogues and shamans. Lava Burst remains face meltingly powerful.
Warlock burst damage got nerfed. Conflagrate’s damage is the same, but more spread out. The direct damage has effectively been nerfed to 60% of it’s old strength, but the remaining 40% is still there, just as DoT effect now. Hooray!
Prot warriors still haven’t been nerfed. Oh well, next patch maybe!
-=~=-
Right. That’s about everything.
Good luck, kick ass, don’t die alone, take someone with you.
Holy crap. posts like these make me want to return to retail. Especially the spriest part… sounds too good 🙂 It does sound as if they were aiming at buffing spriest pve, but increasing mflay range is definately going to affect pvp. Spriest the new lock, dare I say? Hasted dots sound like huge SP buff returns to me (glyph of shadow is going to face a shortage ;))
“As an aside, this marks the first time in YEARS that a change was made to a class for purposes of battleground balance. I have good feelings about Cataclysm.”
sarcasm? or no… I’m not sure. Elaborate.
Apologies for the double post, but I believe I may have come across rudely. What I meant to say was “Elaborate, please.”
There, a mite bit better.
Not sarcasm.
Since basically the launch of TBC, every single change to PvP (regarding classes, not map changes) has been about arenas and arenas only.
Blizzard says they want to shift the focus back to BGs, which means they would have to start making balance changes around BGs.
Which, as this LOH change shows, they are willing and able to do.
It means Blizzard is actually committed to pushing for competitive BGs, and willing to balance around that, too.
Remember that DoT-going-faster thing? And you know how Corruption does ~30+ percent of afflic. warlock damage?
Guess who got a glyph that makes corruption scale with haste?
Shadowplay is back, methinks. Afflock/Spriest/Resto shammy, I think, is going to see a surge of popularity.
Replace either the lock or spriest with a mage for better control.
The LoH change for Protection Paladin’s really makes me cry. If I know that I’m in trouble & the healers can’t catch up, I’ll throw that down to bide them more time. Normally, I only use LoH if my 50% shield wall is on Cooldown & I have Forbearance. This will really make using LoH Tricky for tanking purposes.
Maybe Blizzard is aiming to have Forbearance up for the most of any high end raiding on Protection Paladins. Timing is going to be everything now…
Damn it.
Oh & To note: My concern is a PvE related one.
Because everyone “knows” that Paladins are OP in PvP 😉
I just don’t really see the use of nerfing LoH for BGs. LoH is a one use per BG spell, so it can only be used once on yourself anyways.
And yeah, RetPals are WAY IMBa in BGs… with all the closing moves, ranged attacks and CCs, having LoH was just ludicrous.
Blizz *IS* aware that the term “lolRet” is making a comeback, right?
And don’t forget about the changes to the Black Magic enchant (because I sure did).
Now that I’m back to a 1-hander I might have to look at that…
Is Black Magic 1-handed only or can it be put on a staff?
If I were to dual wield could I put it on both? =P
My server seems to be down at the moment… but I seem to recall that Black Magic enchanted a “melee” item so it should apply to both 1 handed and 2. It was just calculated that for a 2-hander the spellpower enchant was a better bet.
But what in the world would you be able to equip in your offhand that can be enchanted?
A melee weapon…
This may or may not be for my deathtard ^.^
All good it seems.
Except thinking of changing from undead to the prettier blood elf now that wotf is nerfed.
Ret isn’t OP. I mean, they’re annoying, yes, but look at it this way:
— Ret is (i.e. can be) face-rollingly easy to play. Doing damage isn’t hard and staying alive isn’t hard, and that’s what PVP, at its most basic level, is about. Four buttons, one proc, nothing particularly interesting.
— as a result, most Retadins … kinda suck. They don’t use Hand of Sacrifice or Hand of Protection or Cleanse or resist auras or anything! They just toss Repentance, run in, and start doing the golden whirlwind thing that we all know and love, breaking Polymorph and Sap and Gouge left right and center. The majority have awful tunnel vision, blow cooldowns without thought, and think the word “subtlety” refers exclusively to a Rogue spec.
— On top of this, the straightforwardness of typical Ret play works against the class. Retadins are actually quite easy to defeat. You just can’t fight them ON THEIR TERMS. You will be hard-pressed to beat a Retadin if you fight his fight. Don’t. Kite, spellsteal, silence, slow him, run around, CC, Evocate if he heals himself during the bubble. Don’t outdamage him, just make him useless until you’re in a winning position.
— All Horde Rets are BElves, which means they don’t really count anyway.
Of course, I still applaud the LoH change. Why? Remember that article several months back about DK’s in battlegrounds? The hypothesis was that the side with the most DKs wins, because DK cooldowns are better or shorter than most other classes’. Thankfully this is no longer the case, but I’ve noticed a similar thing with Pallies.
Sure, LoH is once-per-BG, maybe twice. Sure, it shouldn’t matter in the long run. But when you combine it with Divine Shield, you have to kill a Pally three times. If your opponents are willing to do this out of the gate, in the first few skirmishes, the side with more Pallies is virtually guaranteed to take an early lead. In some battlegrounds (particularly WSG, but also IoC or Strand), this can be very difficult to overcome. It doesn’t help that most people don’t understand how to fight Retadins.
Just preventing the one-two LoH/bubble works for me. I don’t know if Forbearance was the right way to go about it, but you will forgive me if I lack sympathy. I still remember the days of 20-second BoF in the 69 bracket.
You suggested the Glyph of Molten armor over Evocation…
What rationale could you have for that? Unless your wearing part PvE gear, your going to have very little spirit.
With my current set, I have 179 spirit without any buffs.
Assuming you were glyphed…
179 * .55 = 98.45 critical strike rating gain
98.45 / 45.91 = 2.14% crit chance
So 2.1% crit or 60% health over an X seconds (haste effects this, mine is down to 6.88 seconds).
PvE recommendation.
The only glyph I mentioned in the PvP part of the post was Glyph of Scorch.
Ah yes, teaches me for readign at 4am.
Anyway, I found out something worth mentioning during my random heroic crusades-
if you don’t have another magic user in the party, slap that focus magic on squirtle. He’ll do you good.
I actually gave up my fire spec to do some heroics for a bit, though I am already feeling the inner pyromaniac cry for attention.
Forbearance on paladins is tricky but as a healer I seldom use it on myself- rather a party member whose damage intake is greater than I can keep up with.
I dont’ mind the hit to PVP but it will really hit tanks the hardest and I don’t know why you would want to hit tanks at all.
You crazy raiders probably don’t care, but the new cross-server LFG tool is The Best Thing Ever. Half the problem with running an instance was getting a group in the first place. Ran the first Icecrown 5-man this way. It put together a group of mostly melee (one hunter) dps and my happy little resto self, so I was just giddy.
Teleport in, crush instance, pop right back to where you where. No muss, no fuss. Amazing.
Took 3 minutes to form a group at 5:30 am EST. That alone is ridiculous.
Shamans got some buffs too; our elementals are on 10 min cooldowns, down from 20, and they’ve replaced the less-than-awesome Fire Nova Totem with a spell, Fire Nova, that you can blast out of whatever fire totem you happen to have up at the time.
The music in the Frozen Halls is just wicked, btw. The throbbing pseudo-rock that plays in the first dungeon puts a whole new level on the boss fights. 🙂
I have a question, with all of these changes, what is the pecking order of dps specs in PvE in 3.3?
I tried Trawling EJ but that place is so pretentious I came over with illness trawling it.
Is it something like
1) Fireball
2) Arcane
3) Frost
4) FFB?
Does anyone know how far behind frost will be? I know this is a kinda gear-dependent question but I want to know if I will be frowned upon for returning to my fave spec!
Great blog by the way….
On paper, Frost does about 85% of Arcane’s damage and 90% of Fire’s. Depending on the fight, it’s about even with FFB.
The thing about Frost though, especially with progression raiding, is that it’s a facerollingly easy “rotation” (heck, you don’t even have to roll: just put your nose on the Frostbolt button and shift slightly to hit Deep Freeze when it’s ready). Because of this, you can be far more situationally aware when you’re not watching things like Living Bomb, Arcane Blast stacks, and Scorch.
Add in the survivability from Ice Barrier, a second Ice Block, Magic Absorption, and Arctic Winds and you have a spec that can be quite attractive for learning new content.
Unless we see further buffs to the spec though (which could very well happen), it will fall out of favour again when things start going on farm.
But heck, if you want to play it, play it. I know I am.
[…] Euripedes does it as well, if not better than anyone else with his Your Patch 3.3 Survival Guide. […]
HOORAY for shadow priests ❤
Great post Euri, you rock!
Great post Euri…couple questions about frost pve.
Someone mentioned how faceroll easy frost is to play. Basically just spam frostbolt and hit deep freeze when it is up. But I was wondering, shouldn’t you be casting brain freeze fireballs or icelance’s when deep freeze is on cooldown for the extra fingers of frost proc?
For example, fingers proc, you cast two more frost bolts followed by a deep freeze if its available, if not then brain freeze fireball if its available, and if not that then an icelance so you get two frostbolt crits and an extra crit from one of the three I just mentioned.
Does that sound right or is that just a waste of time?
Also, glyphs for frost are frostbolt, water ele and molten armor?
Thanks in advance and frost is fun for pve for sure, having a permanent pet, huge deep freeze crits and basically never runnning out of mana is very fun.
On a side note, I kind of wish deep freeze had a spell animation to show it flying through the air. Its kind of odd to just see a huge number pop up when you hit the spell instead of seeing the spell hit the target. I feel like it actually used to have a frosty trail animation but I could be wrong.
A few notes:
Ice Lance
Using Ice Lance on the second charge of Fingers of Frost is a large DPS loss. Using it on the “ghost charge” as you described above is viable until a certain level of gear. I know that my DPS got better from Frostbolt spam through FoF around mid-Ulduar. The reason for this (I believe) is because of the GCD that Ice Lance triggers (which gets progressively closer to Frostbolt’s cast time as haste rating increases) as well as it’s inability to proc Fingers of Frost itself. More Frostbolt = more Fingers of Frost uptime.
Brain Freeze
Until you can get 2 piece T10, this is pretty lacklustre. It’s DPS neutral to DPS loss when used on-proc, a small DPS increase when used on the “ghost charge” of Fingers of Frost, and a DPS increase when used during movement. Same issue here as with Ice Lance: it causes a GCD and doesn’t proc Fingers of Frost.
Glyphs
You got it right: Frostbolt, Eternal Water, and Molten Armor. Looking at the lack of spirit on the Mage tier pieces though… Hmm…
Fun
Oh heck yeah. Being a gattling gun during Heroism and giggling with glee at the huge Deep Freeze crits is very fun.
Deep Freeze animation
I’m actually glad it doesn’t have a travelling animation: allows it to easily be slapped onto the Fingers of Frost ghost charge. However, I’d love to see it have some sort of impact animation ala Arcane Blast or Icy Touch. A big explosion of ice would be sweeeet.
Hm hm hm… While all these changes are oh-so-exciting for myself and my magey friends (I mean, seriously, they actually made frost viable in pve? /flopfaint), I’m curious about what you think of arcane vs fire as a raidspec now. One of my mage-mates (who’s always on top of the meters goddamn him, no matter how I spec, gear, gem, glyph etc) is hailing fire as the new top choice. What are your thoughts?
The for the reply Euri…that def helps clear things up for me. Since I’m in mostly toc gear it looks like I won’t be using icelance ever and only brain freeze on movement.
And yeah I think thats a great idea for the deep freeze animation….I just feel like it needs something. For it to be our single hardest hitting spell and not make any sort of visual que to let us know it even hit is a bit lackluster.
Anyway its pretty funny I’m not specc’d arcane for pvp and frost for pve. Who would have thought?
Should have read over that before I submitted, but I meant I am NOW specc’d arcane for pvp and frost for pve.
Where can I find a 3.3 guide to creating the best possible Raid mage? I want to know about spec, professions, etc…
Great notes!