It’s Sort Of Official!

It’s going to be Spirit -> Crit rating, and it’s going to be via Molten Armor.

• Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Glyph of Molten Armor – Your Molten Armor grants an additional 15% (40% total) of your spirit as critical strike rating.

That’s… neat, I guess? Now both major mage armors use spirit; one uses spirit for mana regen, the other for additional DPS. Mage Armor and Molten Armor are mirroring a Hunter’s primary aspects more and more every day…

But whatever. That’s design philosophy rambling. Let’s talk numbers.

Depending on how much spirit you have, this will work out to either be a nerf or a huge nerf. For simplicity’s sake, all the numbers from here on out are assuming the mage is using Glyph of Molten Armor, and is therefore gaining 40% of spirit as crit rating.

A mage needs 45.9 crit rating to gain an additional 1% critical strike chance. The 5% crit mages currently gain from Molten Armor is equivalent to 229.5 critical strike rating.

Therefore, a mage would need (229.5/.4=573.75) 574 spirit to gain the same amount of critical strike chance.

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Violent Pizza!

This is seriously what I’m reduced to. There is no good news for mages on the horizon, merely the faint hope that there will eventually be good news on the horizon.

So PTR testing has been going on for a while now, and I can discuss some of my concerns with a little more detail.

Well… turns out my concern about the whole Evocation thing in Ulduar was perfectly valid.

Let’s be honest here. Arcane is not, and never has been, a mana efficient tree. It abuses mana like angry twelve year olds abuse caps lock.

Nowadays, Arcane depends very heavily on Evocation, and if you miss a tick or two…

Anyone who’s had Evocation interrupted in a raid knows what I’m talking about. It’s extremely difficult to recover from losing Evocation time, and missing even one tick can be devastating.

Testing in Ulduar seems to be indicating that the age of the arcane mage might very well be coming to an end.

Fights are lasting much longer; lengthy fights have never been arcane’s forte. Though it is much better now than it has been in the past thanks almost entirely to Evocate; an arcane mage can, essentially, DPS permanently in two minute gaps via constant Evocation.

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Mana, Healer Changes, and Other Alarming Things

There’s been a great deal of discussion in recent weeks about Healers. Specifically, mana consumption.

The consensus seems to be that healers have reached a point where they don’t need to care about mana anymore. It’s a resource that they graduated, so to speak, abandoning the need for efficiency for raw throughput. Or something. Can’t say I’m too familiar, the only healer I play is a Paladin.

Point is, Blizzard feels it’s too much and needs a nerf… err, needs to be made more consistent.

And that nerf… consistency is slated to come hammering down when patch 3.1 goes live.

Blizzard’s goal is admirable. They want to reach a state where the Healer types have to manage GCD’s, their own mana pool, and the health bars of their assignments all at once.

Some nerfs have already been meted out (Divine Plea, anyone?) and plenty more are being discussed for the future. But what specifically? Weakening Spirit? Making mp5 a more expensive stat? Nerfing in-cast mana regen mechanics? (Think Arcane Meditation.) Nerfing all the mana restore abilities kicking around? (Replenishment, Blessing of Wisdom, Mana totems, etc.)

As I’ve mentioned before, a buff or a nerf to anyone is a buff or nerf to everyone.

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The Oracle of Delphibet Soup

(Shamelessly stolen from Doofy the Paladin, World of Matticus, BigRedKitty, and probably a bajillion other bloggers.)

Not to be confused Alphabet Soup, Delphibet Soup’s younger, insane sibling.

Alphabet Soup has the unique property of spewing gibberish when asked questions.

Delphibet Soup has the unique property of giving highly accurate predictions, whether you ask it or not. 75% accuracy, according to the bowl here.

You have no idea how difficult it was to make the “%” sign with a single noodle. Maybe if I sharpened the spoon…

OH GOD THERE’S BLOOD EVERYWHERE WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

/afk hospital

I’ll let the Soup take over from here, shall I?

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Awake at Last, and I Totally Called It

It’s a strange feeling, sleeping for roughly fourteen hours without interruption. I think this is what time travel will be like. The whole family is up and about doing things… and then all of a sudden, the whole family is up and about doing things.

EXCEPT NOW THEY HAVE DIFFERENT CLOTHES ON.

Feeling much better now thank you. Should be able to function in a virtual world again. Though abrupt camera changes (going underwater, suddenly hitting a tree or something that zooms you way the hell in) still causes Operation Vomit. Movies like Cloverfield are right out.

Walking is no longer an issue. Normally. My sense of balance is (to put it nicely) totally frucked up. If I stand up straight and close my eyes, I immediately start tipping to the left in order to compensate for an imbalance that doesn’t exist. Tipping fast. I’m talking my torso is at a 45 degree angle in a second or less.

Don’t worry, I’ve had this several times before. It usually passes in a few days.

One time in Biology class, right at the end of the day, mere minutes before class ended, the room started spinning extremely fast. There was no warning. No compromise.

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Fixing Spirit, Part Three

The Marmalade Method

Taking what we have, and discarding it entirely in favour of something else.

Consider warriors, rogues, and death knights. What do these three classes have in common, from a DPS perspective.

If you answered “melee”, you aren’t thinking very hard.

No, I’m talking about infinite resources.

These three classes, if they had a mana pool, would have a little infinity symbol instead of an actual number. These classes don’t have a maximum limit on their DPS resource. They don’t run dry at the four minute mark, or the eight minute mark, or even the eight hour mark.

If need be, one of them could start DPS on Thursday, and still be providing the same level of DPS the following Tuesday. The player might have died by that point, but the class itself would still be going strong.

The idea of an infinite resource is an interesting one. How does one balance a class with a finite resource, like hunters, against a class with infinite resources, like rogues?

Short answer: one doesn’t, because it isn’t possible.

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Fixing Spirit, Part Two

The Margarine Method

Taking what we have, and warping and changing it beyond recognition.

Spirit, at it’s core, is a stat meant for mana regeneration purposes. That’s all it does for mages, it’s what it does for priests of all kinds, it’s what it does for warlocks via Life Tap, it’s what it does for Resto druids. Even moonkin can get some regen from it, if they use Innervate on themselves, the selfish pricks.

What other mechanic do mages have that restores mana?

Master of Elements works very similar to how a Holy Paladin’s Illumination works. Whenever the caster crits, they get back a portion of whatever mana they spent. This has traditionally given Paladins extremely good efficiency.

An option is to do roughly the same thing for mages. Rather than having passive mana regeneration, via Mage Armor and friends, have all mage related mana regeneration based off of crits.

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Fixing Spirit, Part One

So then. Some ideas and stuff on how to get spirit from something largely annoying and frustrating to something useful.

As was mentioned last time, spirit needs to be beneficial to all mages, regardless of spec.

The Butter Method

Taking what we already have and spreading it around.

One idea is to simply make Arcane Meditation base line. Sort of.

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Spirit and Mana Regeneration Revisited, Again

Why am I talking about spirit again, you ask?

Several reasons.

First, Blizzard’s almost asinine propensity to putting spirit on nearly all cloth gear. Sure, this makes sense, if every cloth wearing class could make good use of it. Priests and warlocks of all specs, for instance, can make ample use of spirit.

At the very least, a percentage of spirit is turned into spell damage, and then worked into core mechanics from there. Life Tap, anyone?

Mages, then, are the unique one. The only benefit spirit provides is to mana regeneration, and then only when the mage is using glyphed mage armor or has invested at least 18 points into the arcane tree. Preferably all at once.

And… well, actually, that’s it. Just mana regeneration. Albeit a higher percent than other classes get (holy freaking crap 80%?!) it still only caters to a group of mages, rather than all.

That’s the second reason.

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Spirit Changes? /sadpanda

“Spirit-Based Mana Regeneration: This system has been adjusted so that as your intellect rises, you will regenerate more mana per point of spirit.”

Well, this isn’t exactly what I expected to see be announced about Spirit this patch. Sweeping changes to spirit? Well… kinda sorta not really.

First off, a quick recap of how spirit works.

Essentially, spirit is out of combat mana/health regeneration, combat here defined rather loosely. More accurately, it is mana/health regeneration that only occurs once you have not completed any action that costs mana in the last 5 seconds. For example, say a Priest uses Flash Heal. They will not regenerate any mana by spirit for 5 seconds. If they cast another heal spell right after that, then another, and another… they get no mana whatsoever. However, if they stop their cast of the spell before it finishes, then the mana was never spent, hence the timer keeps going to active spirit regen. This is what healers call the “5 second rule”, of which you can all go bugger off and read about elsewhere. Try here . I’m sure you can find some excellent info there that makes my eyes bleed.

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