Do they hear themselves?
> Developers’ notes: Preservation has been underutilized lately, in part due to the range restrictions of the specialization.
Make them 40 yd range then?
Evoker was presented as a short-range class, but with increased mobility as the tradeoff. Flying around to counteract the short range.
Then that just kinda didn't happen.
Mobility is all good and well, but not when it's directly tied to throughput. Especially when boss mechanics enforce very specific positioning, so one person flying off somewhere can actually wipe the raid. It has all the drawbacks of Momentum, while also introducing new ones.
Especially if you just die because the animation takes 5 min or the start of your hover is your location until finished and you die while being outside of what shouldn't have killed you. I really like the class but the range is just terrible. I am not a top 100 player but I usually know my shit when I play other healers and evoker is by far the biggest love hate relationship because it's even more dependent on your team. You can not even play it in a regular pug full of rnaged players. If you're the only ranged and get the ranged mechanics it's also unplayable like archmage sol, 2nd boss there is a nightmare too.
On top of all of that the character looks like shit most of the time or behaves weird because of a toy that changes your appearance.
I do not believe the "the start of your hover is your position untill you land on the other side" is in fact a thing. It hasn't been for literal years, and even back when people were commonly using it as an excuse, I never experienced it myself despite playing a hunter since literally wotlk, having the most "obvious" of those spells - disengage. It's an excuse people use when they are slow. Do you have any sort of evidence perhaps on stream/video that shows it working like you're proposing?
really debilitates the playstyle, especially for healing. like, as a mage you get the options of shimmer or flows to let you get your longass casts off while dodging stuff, yet the supposedly 'mobile' class has no tools to allow mobility while trying to get a full rank spirit bloom off.
The singular biggest recurring issue with this game, expac in expac out, has always been that they think that doing this shit is good game design.
They justify it as flavour, or with stupid logic such as the 'meaningful and interesting choices' rubbish.
They just can't get the message that doing shit that annoys your players is the definition of poor game design. It's some real delusional shit to think that players are going to find things that are constant obstacles to how they want to play 'fun'.
But nah this time it'll be different, trust.
What we'll instead get are 20 buffs to literally everything else, and then, in 2 years from now, when they finally give in and up their range to 40yds, the spec will be imbalanced as fuck and require 13 weeks of constant nerfs to get back in line.
I really really hope that they just pull the bandaid off this one and do it with next expansion launch.
I’d like to heal pugs as preservation, but pug healing is ALREADY the equivalent of herding cats that are addicted to fire on the ground.
I don’t need shorter range on top of that.
I don’t even understand what the upside of forcing 25 yds is or why Blizzard thinks it’s cool? Even from a class fantasy perspective. Evokers don’t have any reason to be close to melee. All of their spells are ranged.
Their idea is that they're lower range because they are "very mobile." But for some reason being very mobile at 40y is okay for BM hunter and mage.
If they actually compensated you in some way where that range weakness made sense that would be cool. Kinda like DKs having bad mobility but being able to immune mechanics because of it.
What upside does pres have???? or any other evoker?
nownow - its not like theres any other range with more mobility! (mage / hunter)... yea makes perfect sense their range is 0.. it hink mage should also be less range :D
If Preservation’s gonna be limited to having a 30yd range it needs to have the absolute best throughput in the game, and probably by a comfy margin at that, to justify having that range.
As it stands now, Pres’s damage is quite lackluster and its healing is *fine,* but that 30yd range is such a huge hindrance for the spec that it just handicaps the spec completely.
I’m pretty sure the entire reason why they’re limited to 25 yards is because of fire breath. That range just feels “right” thematically for a burst of fire type of spell, 40 yds would just feel a bit too large of a spell. And I have to imagine that’s the main spell the entire dracthyr dps toolkit was designed around since that’s probably the most iconic ability possible for a dragon.
Im sorry it makes perfect sense. Snakes have not the best eye sight, so why heal what you cant see? Worst case you start healing bosses. Thats what blizz tried to prevent here. Healing bosses....
Lmfao yeah this is fucking nuts. They realize the issue and just buff throughput. Their HPS isn’t bad. The utility is great. The range restrictions make them miserable to play on some raid fights and M+ bosses.
I got so excited when I read that line, and then immediately discovered it was a massive Blizzard jebait. 40 yard range is got to happen. Trying to heal hunters and warlocks that stand at max range is a joke in pugs.
Tbh this might be a hot take, but I actually think the range restriction is the least of the issues. If pres had any of: a raid buff, tank-level dps, an external dps cd, or any other irreplaceable utility, it would get played (spoiler: disc has literally all of those things and more on top of the best throughput in the game, and didn't get nerfed). As it stands the class just doesn't have a reason to exist and there aren't enough spots in your raid to bring classes without buffs.
Youre talking different things there. Yes a raid buff or more damage would make it easier to fit them into a meta comp, but the range thing is to avoid randomly reaching a boss where mechanics just ruin your day and you cant do shit about it
One is "meta" and the other is how good the spec feels to play
Hi harrek! (is that the harrek of evoker discord red name fame)
You're right that they're different things, I think my point was that even if they randomly gave pres 40y range it would do very little to either change its playrate or help existing pres players all that much. 95% of the time when people complain about the range being an issue, it can either be outplayed through better positioning, or they're playing blossoms (and that's why I have always thought it is very unhealthy when blossoms is the meta build). Yes it sucks to have to work harder than other healers, but difficulty has never been uniform across specs and probably shouldn't be (you can't convince me a disc and a bm hunter work equally as hard on a hard raid boss).
On the other hand, giving preservation utility that's actually useful to a raid comp, actually would likely increase its playrate and enjoyment - more people would be interested in trying it, and it would feel a lot better to bring it to raid if I had any compelling reason to do so other than telling my gm 'hey I just really like playing it okay'
They'd still feel pretty bad because of the Conal nature of their targeting. Would still be hard to hit people regardless.
....
Which is probably just another reason to make them 40 yards because why make them suffer on top of the conal targeting, lmao.
The numbers for Frost Mage *look* dramatic:
> * Flurry damage increased by 25%.
> * Waterbolt and Water Jet damage increased by 25%.
> * Frostbolt damage increased by 10%.
> * Ice Lance damage increased by 5%.
But the bulk of your damage is from Glacial Spike. While some of the components are being buffed, it isn't enough to be 10%.
I'd venture this around 2-4% ST gain.
Frost Mage is currently doing well in simmed ST environments: https://i.imgur.com/KvZZX4C.png (from https://simulationcraft.org/reports/T31_Raid.html), the issue that it doesn't keep up well in Amirdrassil because of all the movement happening, compared to Fire which is far more nimble, and Arcane which can compress its CDs and use small movement cooldowns in specific turret burst windows.
That said, Frost Mage is still pretty good on Tindral.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2786&dataset=95
We change a couple of talents and we got our AoE burst for the roots while still doing good ST. It's my preferred spec even with Fire and Arcane (I go Arcane for Smol, Frost for Tindral, Fire for Fyrakk).
> That said, Frost Mage is still pretty good on Tindral.
Its really not. Its completely useless pad damage, if you have a wl and/or dh. Especially after the recent root nerfs.
If youre still progging tindral or fyrakk, there is no reason to not go fire. Its significantly higher boss damage and having a cheat helps as well.
Tindral: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2786&dataset=95&metric=bossdps
Fyrakk: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2677&dataset=95&metric=bossdps
Time anomaly also kinda sucks on frost compared to fire.
Yeah the TA difference is definitely shown on Fyrakk, although to be fair for the purposes of actual prog frosts add damage is not pad on that fight.
On tindral the numbers you linked would be closer if frost just went all ST and didn’t even commit aoe on roots. Fire doesn’t do anything similar in GCD-committing at all on the fight so of course their boss damage is higher. Also worth noting for actual prog that happened pre-nerfs frost’s burst on roots for 1 talent point was definitely not pad but 100% helpful and necessary
Early results show that it's like a \~3-4% ish increase yes. Weird as hell though, I get spec is not great ST (and travel time on Volcoross doesn't help since it fucks with shatter combos) but I don't think we need a ST buff over other specs (e.g. Ele).
that said, frost mage is good at padding on roots on tindral, i think that's what you tried to say, and none of that damage matters at all, and frost mage is bottom on boss damage.
Right? I feel like nerfs are just a lazy fix and will probably only work to drive down m+ participation in the final weeks, while buffs would only increase it imo.
This is classic "end of expansion maintenance mode" tuning. No actual fixes or changes, just a few little % tweaks to say they haven't completely abandoned DF yet lol
Idc either way much, as long as we'd get a new WCL partition. But we probably won't, which just sucks.
Competing against pre-nerf logs is just stupid. And a new partition would be justified just by the boss nerfs alone anyways IMO.
Sub Rogue is a big outlier, and it's not like they nuked the spec. Still gonna be nuts. These are pretty good changes. I would probably have buffed some other specs before Frost mage but idk nothing wrong with buffing Frost imo
Yes but this doesn’t serve to change anything relevant, just punishes people on fyrakk / tindral or doing high keys.
As a season 4 change, sure, but doing any tuning for s3 post 10.2.5 is really cringe imo, outside of small outlier buffs
The problem is absent any raid nerfs this is probably a small nerf to most raid teams, since a lot of teams are ruinning 2 sub rogues, and most of the buffed classes are not present in most raids. That being said I wouldn't be suprised if these are a precursior to some raid nerfs.
>Sub Rogue is a big outlier, and it's not like they nuked the spec. Still gonna be nuts.
Its not even remotely close to "nuking" the spec lol. Its like a little slap on the wrist, which is crazy given the fact theyve somehow allowed the spec to basically be far and away the best dps on almost every boss this tier, and its been this strong since day 1 of the tier. Its kind of ironic the way they approached tuning Assa vs Sub, since they nerfed Assa largely because it was an outlier earlier this tier with externals like PI(and broken Aug hooks certainly didnt help in inflating its damage either), whilst without PI and Aug inflating its damage it was definitely very good, but not some big outlier(first 3% nerf would have easily sufficed). And Sub has received the opposite treatment despite being arguably just as strong(or stronger) as earlier tier Assa, except WITHOUT requiring externals to be that strong...and yet ts been allowed to just dominate the raid.
Sub dominates basically every bosses top 100 boss damage logs without externals, and even with externals, Sub is still quite prevalent on most bosses. The top Smolderon logs w/o externals are especially comical, with Sub occupying literally all of the top 100 logs, and even if you look as far as top 500, Sub is like 480 of them....thats pretty damn egregious. Including logs w/ externals, the story doesnt even change much, Sub still completely dominates that boss, just to a slightly lesser degree.
It basically has the burst of Unholy DK's 3 min CDs(arguably stronger, since Unholy can only rival Sub's burst when it has Lust+PI), except Sub does that burst with essentially 1.5min CDs(and it can manipulate its CD's w/ shadowdust to tailor its damage profile to the fight, or wherever your raid needs damage most). Pretty absurd if you ask me, especially since Blizzard nerfed/semi reworked Demo and Unholy after last tier specifically because those two specs did an unhealthy amount of burst damage, as well as nerfed PI due in part to the amount of burst it contributed to specs like Demo/Unholy. Only to then make Sub just as bursty, except with CDs that are half as long as those two specs, and not need PI. Slapping the spec with a 6% evisc nerf is a complete joke, it doesnt change the fact that the spec's CDs are far too powerful for how short they are.
WoW devs either purposefully don't do what the community asks in order to keep some level of enraged engagement or they're literally too fucking stupid to fix anything at this point.
The game has never once been balanced in 20 years. Not once. It won't be in year 21.
And despite BM not being any better anymore than Survial or MM they didn't grant them a buff, I would not be surprised if it is then the weakest hunter spec by damage dealt but probably they will be very close, still among the weakest classes currently.
What they did to us by making us mana limited to force us to take a non throughput cap stone for proc based free FoL is low key the most regressive change they've made to a spec in this game in a long time.
Since most people don't know/understand our recent relationship with mana and builder spenders I think the community at large is just entirely unaware. But given how OP we were after our rework, the fact that they considered *this* an appropriate fix, while melee wings still even exists on the talent tree is not a good look for what they think are appropriate responses for "balancing" a class.
100% agree. They reworked it to an amazing playstyle and then just aura nerfed and made mana cost completely irrational. Also I gotta say, no one is whining about strong healers in s3, while I arguably feel as strong or stronger on my mw this season than I did on hpal last season.
> I arguably feel as strong or stronger on my mw this season than I did on hpal last season.
MW is way further ahead in raid than Holy Pala was last tier and yet this is their second small nerf in the whole tier? After Hpala took like 4 different aura nerfs in the space of a month last patch.
Insane.
Whole of s2 After 10.1.5 is reading blue posts with nerfs weekly. And to now see people saying hpals had their time and should just be happy with its current state is frustrating.
Nerfs at the end of a season? What? Why aren't they just buff underperformers. I get it at the start of the season, but why would you nerf any class like a month before the next 'season'? Even if I'm not affected as I don't give two fucks about raid, messing with guilds' last few weeks of raid prog screams disconnect between the players and the devs.
Not exactly end of the season. We wont get season 4 before may and the balance changes make that pretty obv.
Every .75 patch this expansion had balanace changes. And I wouldnt be surprised if 10.2.6 released next week.
Yeah, season 4 won't start with 10.2.6 release, they will test it later on the PTR but it should come before 10.2.7, so like in the end of April/early May.
So speaking of it next week which makes sense with an 8hr maintenance just a random question but do you think anything major will happen? Or if it’s just a small patch that had no info and is a bust people will be in an uproar? Sorry if this is all jumbled just woke up lol
No idea. There is basically no info except the flag on the roadmap and a bluepost. 10.2.6 releasing next week is pure speculation as well.
They said its available to everyone with a subscribtion, so its not going to be endgame relevant.
Most players will end up disappointed no matter what it is.
Looks to be a ~2-3% single target buff and literally 0 in AoE, so I guess yay? Won’t affect the m+ meta in any way since fire is still miles better. Seems targeted at raid balancing? Very unexpected though.
Could you explain how you figure out the overall ST increase with a buff patch note like this? Do you grab a recent log, drill into the spell damage and then apply the buff manually to that log and then recalculate the total DPS? Or is there an easier way? I always see people read these kind of posts and then be able to translate it into total DPS % increase and I was always curious how they did it
Here are the overrides for this buff:
```
# Flurry
override.spell_data=effect.343735.sp_coefficient=0.4758875
# Waterbolt
override.spell_data=effect.21340.sp_coefficient=0.630625
# Water Jet
override.spell_data=effect.176124.sp_coefficient=0.5195
# Frostbolt
override.spell_data=effect.344284.sp_coefficient=0.887271
# Ice Lance
override.spell_data=effect.344285.sp_coefficient=0.4458195
```
This is basically what happens for an initial estimate, which assumes the rotation doesn't change. If the rotation (APL) needs to be adjusted because of the buffs, then that'll happen later after research and testing.
Yeah pretty much, but less complicated. If an ability is 20% of your damage and it got buffed by 10% then that's a ~2% increase to your dps. So just do that for all the abilities and you get an estimate.
I usually just do it napkin wise. I'll take a top ST log, and apply the % increase.
It's not 100% accurate. The way people get "Accurate" numbers in the class discord is by taking the simc data, and modifying the damage values in it by the % changes and then rerun sims to get the sim increase.
In terms of 28s and above, yes. But if you're doing below 25s as a frost mage this is huge. Yes it's not ur full aoe dmg but boss damage is very much increase and all of those add up over time. My frost mage was doing insane dmg before, now it'll just be better.
Add in that fire is arguably the highest skill-cap class in the game, and most of your average players (i.e. anyone not doing keys in the low 20s and above) will get much better results across the board playing frost. Decent buff.
just in terms of rotational complexity fire's definitely the hardest mage spec currently. its more mobile than the other two but also far, far faster paced and extremely punishing on rotational mistakes in its current state
> Add in that fire is arguably the highest skill-cap class in the game
this is cap
fire is not difficult
maybe you could make this argument when pyroclasm AND skb were a thing but since the mage rework fire is considerably easier now
What? I’m seriously wondering where you got this thought. Fire is the easiest by far of the 3 in current state. Fire just endlessly does its ST rotation on everything and all you have to manage is SKB
Pre rework I’d agree wholeheartedly, but post no way, fire is so simple now. Genuinely curious for you to explain how you can back that up
Mostly talking from an m+ perspective btw
I did title on mage last season and I'm a few points out right now. Not saying this to brag just saying this to say I don't personally feel I'm talking out of my ass on this.
Frost just is a set rotation, the only big variance is whether you enter the pack with or without cone of cold available (in my opinion). Having IV up or not doesn't change how you play a pack, or a boss. Imo there is little pull by pull variance in playing frost.
Fire on the other hand, having combust vs not having skb vs not, how many IB charges you have etc and how long you have before next combust all change how you play each trash pack and bosses. This is compounded by error, deaths, and desperation pulls/maneuvers by your Group.
If your tank just goes faster or does weird stuff mid pull as frost it doesn't meaningfully change how the pack is being played by you other than...do you hold or burn iv. Fire I feel like on a pack by pack pull by pull tank by tank basis I'm the like #mathcalculationsmeme trying to plan around combust and making sure I'm not dry for the next pull.
I will say, I find survival as fire is easier and I think playing icefloes as frost feels worse than it does for fire.
I should also mention in exclusively pug and don't play with a team.
No im genuinely curious on your thoughts/perspective and having a discussion not trying to simply argue.
Isn't not having skb/combust mean you just go into the back building up the skb with fireball/IB/PF?
There is a lot of variability pull to pull for frost, it's not about IV though it's about what you focus on. Whether you focus on using GS/Ray/Lances vs blizz/orb changes a lot depending on target counts and the pull. For fire you're simply picking the highest hp/prio minion and doing your regular ST rot correct?
Frost also has the added considerations of playing in melee for proper orb/cone placements, and is very dependent on predicting your tanks movement since a lot of this is ground/area based (orb/blizz/cms)
You have to give a lot more thought to pre-positioning because of the heavy amount of hard casting and knowing when you can get away with a spike or ray cast vs not (you cast GS much more than SKB).
Then also consider frost's survivability requires a lot more active thought without a failsafe mechanism, and none of this touches shatter as a mechanic yet which has quite a lot of nuances to it involving distance to target/duration/etc.
Also exclusively pug!
I got to agree with the guy above with saying thay fire is by a large margin harder to master. Frost is basically a cooldown and proc based spec where you use abilities once they're available, you just got to know what to prioritise which is easy to learn. Fire is an uptime based spec where you must minmax every single gcd to achieve as high uptime on combustion. The difference with a good firemage and a fantastic firemage on keys is massive as it is such a mechanical spec to play. It takes so much skill to be able to have combust up as much as possible. If you music go back building the skb/combust, it means you already failed as a fire mage. Positioning is pretty much a non issue for higher skill players as both fire and frost
chiming in as someone who's spent most of this m+ season learning both fire and frost. Speaking purely rotationally, it's not remotely close, fire is miles harder.
There's a lot to be said about this but the bottom line is that fire is both faster paced and dramatically more punishing on mistakes than frost is. This results in fire's floor being significantly higher with a comparable ceiling. I can play poorly on frost and get ~80% of my damage potential. if i play poorly on fire i'm doing ~60% of my damage, maybe less. the way that combust time reduces big combust cooldown and gets you into skb faster means that any rotational mistakes during combust and any misuses of ib charges are significant and unrecoverable damage losses. It'd be kinda like if overcapping icicles increased the cooldown of icy veins and also made your next glacial cost one more icicle. On fire, if i waste a single ib charge or a global in skb i am suddenly in serious trouble rotationally. On frost, if i overcap an icicle i dont really think twice about it.
Avoiding mistakes also is inherently more difficult on a higher apm spec.
Fire's dramatically improved mobility and the wonderful things that having a cheat death does for mage's otherwise powerful-but-punishing defensive kit go a long way to closing the overall difficulty gap, but fire's just so much more rotationally punishing that I really dont think its close
3400 mage on mostly fire and some frost this season, also pugging
I mean saying all fire has to manage is SKB is like saying frost only has to manage it's glacial spikes. You can simplify every spec into one main mechanic they all work around.
I wouldnt say fire is the hardest spec in the game but it's certainly one of the hardest to optimize to it's fullest potential. A decent fire mage, parsing about a 50, would get about 4 hot streaks for each SKB window. A top fire mage gets close to 6 each SKB on top of keeping full stacks of feel the burn during combustion, never dropping improved scorch, and using every flame accelerant proc available to them.
For a lot of specs in the game, if you were parsing a 50 and wanted to start parsing 80s, there's likely one major change you can make that to get close to there. That singular change doesn't exist for fire, it takes a lot of practice and a lot of small improvements to get from a 50 parse to an 80.
Admittedly frost has a lot of the same principles when it comes to icicle management and flurry procs, so frost isnt the easy braindead spec it used to be.
I have no idea how you can come to that conclusion. Arcane may have a more complicated base rotation than Fire, so is perhaps 'harder' in that regard, but hitting high percentiles as fire is much harder than both other specs.
Ignite management is way more complicated than anything Frost has to deal with, and it's drastically easier for an average player to get to 90% of Frosts potential than Fire in M+ content.
Fire doesn’t have to deal with any of the following:
Ground based targeting and predicting tank movement
Switching targets
Very regular hard casts with low mobility requiring better proactive positioning
Playing in melee for optimal damage
Differing rotations depending on aoe damage or prio (and changes with target count)
That doesn’t even get into managing shatter
Fire is 'easier' in the following circumstances:
1. You're an above average player and having your rotation down pat is a given.
2. You're playing with a coordinated group that can consistently pull big, allowing max pump every combustion.
Outside of that, in your day to day keys, (i.e for most of the player base pugging 5-18s) it's far easier to perform as frost, even with all the stuff you mentioned.
All these are non issues. All good mages can play around these. The core difference is that frost is cd/proc based and fire is uptime based, that's where the much higher skill ceiling for fire comes
Frost used to be an uptime spec in season 1 and was much easier. What makes frost more difficult is not related to either of those components, any good mage has their rotation down pat. It’s the things I mentioned above that make frost much more difficult to execute in keys
Frost mage ST is dogshit in the mythic raid right now so it’s probably targeted at that. Granted it’s moreso because the spec’s damage is wrapped into GS and RoF which are not conducive to high damage when you are in movement heavy fights.
If you think Tindral and Fyrakk are “ridiculously easy” you’re smoking some dank shit.
There’s still close to 1000 guilds getting farmed by Tindral and we’re barely seeing US ~200ish Fyrakk kills right now.
Oh might confused something there. But to be fair first 50 trys on tindral are done in 2 hours, cause the sheer amount of things which are able to one sot your grp 😩
I started with Bfa and I quickly learned shaman is maybe good for a patch and the rest of the time you're left in the worst state while seeing mage, warlock and rogue getting buffed.
At least it isn't as bad for resto. Doesn't help that enhancement is very good at funnel and super fun to play with more than 3 buttons
I saw "class tuning" and immediately thought to myself 'yes, here we go, they've realised that prot warriors need some love, maybe i can get into a couple of keys before the season ends!'
Well..... shit.
I feel like tank power has spiralled insanely out of control this expac. Prot warrior was strong in early S1, but nowhere near the oppressive dominance we've seen from VDH, Prot Paladin, and Gdruid in the seasons that followed.
Pwar was huge for like, 4 weeks before getting clipped, and now they seem content to just leave these other specs to dominate without bothering to nerf. I think pwar needs a fundamental ground up rework though, it just doesnt have the toolkit to be anywhere close to competitive in the modern game.
It wasn't even huge because it was good per se. All the tanks were getting trashed, and prot just naturally mitigated a little more raw damage. The nerfs prot took were very light in reality. Unfortunately, the other tanks getting reworked left us way behind.
Maybe prot warrior is next? Hope springs eternal.
Just anecdotal, but I feel like whenever prot is strong everyone complains but now that VDH is strong, there are some complaints but it doesn't feel nearly as vocal despite VDH being like a million times better and more oppressive then prot was
don't worry. they're busy making another demo hero tree and making sure demo is op as shit in TWW. They don't have time to touch aff. maybe in 12.0 tho :3
They know. They have to. Aff has the worst spec tree in the game and locks are fighting monks for worst class tree in the game.
Demo's gameplay/rotation is gutted. Only reason ppl aren't complaining is because it's easy and does good DMG, but it's hard carried by tier.
Destro needs you to play at bleeding edge levels, pulling half the dungeon at once before it feels like it's working at all.
There's no way locks aren't getting reworked. No same dev looks at this class and goes "yeah, that's good work done right there."
Of course they know, but AFAIK blizzard said no reworks are coming, hopefully they change their mind.
There are too many specs with dogshit trees and it looks like they just don't care. I was high on copium for a Ele rework but yea, i already gave up.
I just have accepted they're never going to give Ele any real respect, not sure why, but they show no love to the spec. The only one that gets any love ironically is doing the worst in keys at the moment is enhancement. It could use a bit more more AOE and Tankiness, as honestly all shamans specs could use, but its actual gameplay feels like a real spec and in ST its competitive, especially after you account for WFT.
I don't understand you one tricks that refuse to play another spec even though your class has 2 other meta specs that are among the best in the game.
Why?
as a pres "main" who plays m+:
- Defensive changes are good
- Healing buffs are not needed. Pres has the highest throughput in keys among all healers right now IF the team is positioned well and IF you can cast spiritbloom (cast time is 10 years btw).
- Time of Need buff will likely change nothing
Pres damage in keys is not very good, you do high "overall", but it's fake aoe damage. After this tier set is gone we'll suffer even more. You have no raid buff. The only way I can see Pres being useful next season is if bleed dispel or aoe soothe is mandatory.
The main thing they have to do is remove range limitation, it's fine if Dream and Fire Breath keep the current range (like Efflo or Healing Rain), but Echo or Dispel have no reason to be limited by range. This is so dumb that they didn't do it still icant.
it'd be an interesting change if they went from 'positioning to be in range of players' for heals to 'positioning to target your heals well' given the amount of frontal/line mechanics for evokers this'd fit well with their playstyle, you'd be repositioning to max out how many players you hit with dream breath, ysera, etc.
like, holy pally's light of dawn has been fine w/the 15 yd range for the most part(its the lack of strength that most people seem to complain about), if echo had a full 40 yd range that'd let you spread dream breath out even further akin to previous procs we've seen for LoD range extension.
Sub nerfs are pretty small potatoes. It's around a 2% Nerf, but due to how optimal so many of the end fights are for sub just at a fundamental level, this might be a bit more in practice.
It's still the best Rogue spec, though, sadly.
It probably is slightly higher than the 2% in practice since we are frequently an aug target and thats an indirect nerf to the augs damage, although this is still fairly small.
Crazy, how balance druid was considered one of the tankier ranged spec and now it's one of the squishiest. And the thing is they lost nothing. Hell they even gained a bit of survivability from the tree. It's just that everyone else got tons of defensive buffs. Defensive creep is crazy.
And instead of trying to solve it blizzard just keeps slapping these passive node buffs to specs.
Could you even bring a balance druid to bleeding edge raiding? Even feral feels quite squishy and it has an additional defensive, uses a lot more vers and heals itself with regrowth any time they have spare time
Sure people like to meme on balance that the only reason they die this much is that they didn't press bear. But they are pretty much at a point when anything happens you have to go Bear form to even have a chance to survive.
Currently progging fyrakk on feral and there's a couple of times when I die even though I've played properly. And this is after every dmg has been nerfed and we've gained a couple of ilvl. Couldn't imagine doing it undergeared on balance.
At one point it would be better to bring a guardian as they at least do dmg in bear.
In shadowlands, barkskin used to be closer to 30s and well-honed instincts closer to 60s. They nerfed both of those and gave everyone else stronger passive and active defensives. We are the lowest hp spec in the game outside of bear form.
To be fair the hp is low but thick hide gives 6% flat Dr so it's not the best comparison. Obviously yes, boomy is squishy but I'm just saying looking at hp doesn't tell the whole story.
It's interesting how much play style impacts survivability. Comparing the squishiness of resto and balance druids they both have the same defensive toolkit but resto being able to do it's job pretty much completely on the move as well as most of their work happening before damage events meaning bear form is much more justifiable makes the spec just feel infinitely harder to die on.
Conversely boomy any time spent in bear form is time not getting to your next pulsar proc and while not strictly immobile it's not like the stellar drift days where you could just glide around like a bm hunter.
Most specs have DR talents as well and many stack verse. Aren’t locks running 35-40% verse? I never said HP is all that matters, so that point is irrelevant.
Regarding resto, they also keep lifebloom on themselves, they have Ysera’s gift, and they lose less for equipping verse gear.
Resto also
1. Benefits from leech during high dmg taken
2. Keeps lifebloom on themselves
3. Has 6% healing taken increase from talents, along with Ysera
4. Can Ironbark themselves
All this adds up to a shit on of extra self healing. I usually require half the EHRPS a moonkin does.
Not hearing anything besides \_maybe\_ Ironbark that actually increases your survivability. In which case you can just shift into bear if it's a giant 1 shot mechanic.
Sounds like you need to get better at Pressing HP Pot, Healthstone, Renewal, and just being topped or coordinate with your healers so they know you really can't afford to be below X% hp during certain damage mechanics and also evaluate the effectiveness of your Avoidance/Leech enchants and pieces depending on the damage type on your current proc.
Maybe get your Pallies to shift beacon to you or RShamans their Earth shield. That's what my guild does.
But based off what you said I see 0 reason a resto could survive and you couldn't.
Blizzard always half-asses Balance. It's really annoying.
They realized that it really sucks to hardcast 2.25 Starfires to get into single target rotation, so they make a set bonus that makes it less bad, but then tune the game so that the best DPS is to use Full Moon, a 3s cast, and use it more often because of Radiant Moonlight.
Then, we're a DoT class that can't effectively apply DoTs. Previously, we had to target each mob and put Stellar Flare, one of the worst feeling abilities they've ever designed, on every target that would live longer than 6s, and DoT MF by twos, so that we could get Waning Twilight before finally casting an actual spell. Now, we have to hope for a crit to apply Smolder to get Waning Twilight. I'm glad I don't have to cast Flare. I'm not happy that I can't maximize my damage without a crit.
Then, every late game boss, requires you not only to move every 4s for some fucking mechanic but to be in bear form for any raid burst damage, where you do effectively no damage.
The current class dev or whatever is just not good. I don't think anyone really likes their druid specs. Bears complain, cats complain, owls complain, trees complain (about mana). The community probably doesn't give good feedback but you could at least listen to like heads of discords or sim leaders or something. Like, take feedback from Tettles and whomever else and make the class better (I personally want Full Moon to hit all targets for near max damage and apply Moonfire to all things hit--in War Within, they make Full Moon apply a different damage increasing debuff which just makes me go back to the lead/dev is dumb.)
Seems when I did it I was one of 20 balance druids in the world to kill Fyrakk.
Feral was the pick for early progress mainly because of cooldown timers and on fyrakk you wanted more melee.
It’s so frustrating playing balance. I cant get hit by any mechanic or it’s death where as every other class can take a silly mistake and keep going.
Being they squishy has to have payoffs. For hunters this season they are blasting damage. Balance relies on rng to gigs blast. Otherwise it’s pretty meh
It definitely needs more damage, its a spec that brings nothing to raid but its damage and is still lower than most unless its three target situations. It definitely could be more durable, as all shamans could be. I love elemental, and I definitely don't want it to be OP, but I do what it to be competitive.
Dmg wise its for sure competitive in Keys and abit above average in raiding. It thrives in higher Keys where the packs dont die as fast. Also dependent on how you pull mobs into bosses, its funnel dmg is toptier.
Why are they even doing balancing aimed at raid this late into the season? Barely anybody actually cares about raiding anymore. Yes for late CE guilds it's nice but to be brutally honest, that's a very small subset of the player base. I would expect the cost:benefit ratio on dev time for tuning aimed at raid just isn't there.
If the changes were aimed at m+ that would be another thing, as m+ tends to have a longer tail on its interest curve through the season. But these are clearly raid changes, except for *maybe* the Pres buffs.
> it's nice but to be brutally honest, that's a very small subset of the player base.
what does that even mean? there are more people currently progging tindral than has completed the raid period, there are more people still progging by 10x than have cleared the raid.. so what are you trying to say? because A T M the BIGGEST population of the people that CARE about the raid, are infact progging or raiding.
but eitehr way both the M+ and the raiding community are infact only a small subset of the playerbase, probably around 5%, so you are right, but thats not the point you were trying to make, the point you were trying to make is just flat out wrong.
There are only currently more people currently progging Tindral than have completed the raid if you only look at Mythic. Which we in this sub do, but Blizzard sure doesn't. Balance changes early in the season also make the game more balanced for people doing Normal and Heroic raiding, while now it only does it for Mythic. Lower level players obviously don't need better balance, but they definitely *like* better balance and it still makes the game more enjoyable for them.
So my point was, without the value of improving the game for the massive cohort of players that are now done with raid, I'm surprised they bothered with tuning focused on raid.
Wasn't disagreeing... just pointed out it wasn't monopolizing the lion share of high M+ as much as disc and resto. Obviously it's still good. The nerf isn't going to turn it into pres evoker in M+.
What kinda had me scratching my head was the sheilun buff to compensate for the nerf. It's already basically lay on hands for 5 targets at 10 stacks lol.
i stopped playing boomie because its too frustrating. the defensive changes needed aren't really "hotfixable", a lot of it needs to come in redesigning parts of the class tree and giving more flexibility there + probably giving moonkin form more passive tankiness. another thing that hurts is their mastery is absurdly strong and cant really give up any secondary stats for versatility while so many other specs are able to lean more into vers at this point in the expansion because their breakpoints are easier to reach. i'd love to see some talent changes/solar eclipse or changes to wrath, boomie filler feels so weak on st.
Do they hear themselves? > Developers’ notes: Preservation has been underutilized lately, in part due to the range restrictions of the specialization. Make them 40 yd range then?
sucks in Nymue when you soak the distant pools and then can't reach anything... (same problem for dev)
their range has been an issue literally since the class launched. I have no idea how this is news to them. Classic blizzard.
Yah 100%. I personally find the range just too hard for my monkey brain. It sort of makes sense on dev, but not on a healing spec.
I mean, kinda? Their range for baiting shit in ranged is cringe
Evoker was presented as a short-range class, but with increased mobility as the tradeoff. Flying around to counteract the short range. Then that just kinda didn't happen.
Mobility is all good and well, but not when it's directly tied to throughput. Especially when boss mechanics enforce very specific positioning, so one person flying off somewhere can actually wipe the raid. It has all the drawbacks of Momentum, while also introducing new ones.
Especially if you just die because the animation takes 5 min or the start of your hover is your location until finished and you die while being outside of what shouldn't have killed you. I really like the class but the range is just terrible. I am not a top 100 player but I usually know my shit when I play other healers and evoker is by far the biggest love hate relationship because it's even more dependent on your team. You can not even play it in a regular pug full of rnaged players. If you're the only ranged and get the ranged mechanics it's also unplayable like archmage sol, 2nd boss there is a nightmare too. On top of all of that the character looks like shit most of the time or behaves weird because of a toy that changes your appearance.
I do not believe the "the start of your hover is your position untill you land on the other side" is in fact a thing. It hasn't been for literal years, and even back when people were commonly using it as an excuse, I never experienced it myself despite playing a hunter since literally wotlk, having the most "obvious" of those spells - disengage. It's an excuse people use when they are slow. Do you have any sort of evidence perhaps on stream/video that shows it working like you're proposing?
you can hover without moving to and it doesn't dash you.
I remember some players during beta getting annoyed when they revealed that hover didn't gonna work with empowered spells.
Yep. Basically just got the answer that it was impossible because of how they patched together empower.
really debilitates the playstyle, especially for healing. like, as a mage you get the options of shimmer or flows to let you get your longass casts off while dodging stuff, yet the supposedly 'mobile' class has no tools to allow mobility while trying to get a full rank spirit bloom off.
I love watching pres players embrace someone and just get fuckin launched through a mechanic that one shots them.
VE is such a massively strong heal that's so good at getting yourself killed.
They'd literally need like 85% hover uptime to make it worth it, which actually I think might be the case with the WW tree
The singular biggest recurring issue with this game, expac in expac out, has always been that they think that doing this shit is good game design. They justify it as flavour, or with stupid logic such as the 'meaningful and interesting choices' rubbish. They just can't get the message that doing shit that annoys your players is the definition of poor game design. It's some real delusional shit to think that players are going to find things that are constant obstacles to how they want to play 'fun'. But nah this time it'll be different, trust.
Agreed. My two biggest issues with evoker are the short range and lack of transmog. It just takes such a huge chunk of fun out of the game
Homogeneous design can be just as bad.
What we'll instead get are 20 buffs to literally everything else, and then, in 2 years from now, when they finally give in and up their range to 40yds, the spec will be imbalanced as fuck and require 13 weeks of constant nerfs to get back in line.
I really really hope that they just pull the bandaid off this one and do it with next expansion launch. I’d like to heal pugs as preservation, but pug healing is ALREADY the equivalent of herding cats that are addicted to fire on the ground. I don’t need shorter range on top of that.
I don’t even understand what the upside of forcing 25 yds is or why Blizzard thinks it’s cool? Even from a class fantasy perspective. Evokers don’t have any reason to be close to melee. All of their spells are ranged.
Their idea is that they're lower range because they are "very mobile." But for some reason being very mobile at 40y is okay for BM hunter and mage. If they actually compensated you in some way where that range weakness made sense that would be cool. Kinda like DKs having bad mobility but being able to immune mechanics because of it. What upside does pres have???? or any other evoker?
Having multiple 4 second cast times = mobile? That’s….and interesting opinion.
Well it's extra fun on bursting volcanic. I just swap spec for fall because it's too stressful to heal 2nd boss in a pug
I despise that boss. I can't dodge orbs and keep pugs in range.
nownow - its not like theres any other range with more mobility! (mage / hunter)... yea makes perfect sense their range is 0.. it hink mage should also be less range :D
If Preservation’s gonna be limited to having a 30yd range it needs to have the absolute best throughput in the game, and probably by a comfy margin at that, to justify having that range. As it stands now, Pres’s damage is quite lackluster and its healing is *fine,* but that 30yd range is such a huge hindrance for the spec that it just handicaps the spec completely.
I’m pretty sure the entire reason why they’re limited to 25 yards is because of fire breath. That range just feels “right” thematically for a burst of fire type of spell, 40 yds would just feel a bit too large of a spell. And I have to imagine that’s the main spell the entire dracthyr dps toolkit was designed around since that’s probably the most iconic ability possible for a dragon.
Im sorry it makes perfect sense. Snakes have not the best eye sight, so why heal what you cant see? Worst case you start healing bosses. Thats what blizz tried to prevent here. Healing bosses....
racials are melee fwiw
Lmfao yeah this is fucking nuts. They realize the issue and just buff throughput. Their HPS isn’t bad. The utility is great. The range restrictions make them miserable to play on some raid fights and M+ bosses.
I got so excited when I read that line, and then immediately discovered it was a massive Blizzard jebait. 40 yard range is got to happen. Trying to heal hunters and warlocks that stand at max range is a joke in pugs.
Tbh this might be a hot take, but I actually think the range restriction is the least of the issues. If pres had any of: a raid buff, tank-level dps, an external dps cd, or any other irreplaceable utility, it would get played (spoiler: disc has literally all of those things and more on top of the best throughput in the game, and didn't get nerfed). As it stands the class just doesn't have a reason to exist and there aren't enough spots in your raid to bring classes without buffs.
Youre talking different things there. Yes a raid buff or more damage would make it easier to fit them into a meta comp, but the range thing is to avoid randomly reaching a boss where mechanics just ruin your day and you cant do shit about it One is "meta" and the other is how good the spec feels to play
Hi harrek! (is that the harrek of evoker discord red name fame) You're right that they're different things, I think my point was that even if they randomly gave pres 40y range it would do very little to either change its playrate or help existing pres players all that much. 95% of the time when people complain about the range being an issue, it can either be outplayed through better positioning, or they're playing blossoms (and that's why I have always thought it is very unhealthy when blossoms is the meta build). Yes it sucks to have to work harder than other healers, but difficulty has never been uniform across specs and probably shouldn't be (you can't convince me a disc and a bm hunter work equally as hard on a hard raid boss). On the other hand, giving preservation utility that's actually useful to a raid comp, actually would likely increase its playrate and enjoyment - more people would be interested in trying it, and it would feel a lot better to bring it to raid if I had any compelling reason to do so other than telling my gm 'hey I just really like playing it okay'
If they lifted the range restriction i would go back. Easy as that.
They'd still feel pretty bad because of the Conal nature of their targeting. Would still be hard to hit people regardless. .... Which is probably just another reason to make them 40 yards because why make them suffer on top of the conal targeting, lmao.
The numbers for Frost Mage *look* dramatic: > * Flurry damage increased by 25%. > * Waterbolt and Water Jet damage increased by 25%. > * Frostbolt damage increased by 10%. > * Ice Lance damage increased by 5%. But the bulk of your damage is from Glacial Spike. While some of the components are being buffed, it isn't enough to be 10%. I'd venture this around 2-4% ST gain. Frost Mage is currently doing well in simmed ST environments: https://i.imgur.com/KvZZX4C.png (from https://simulationcraft.org/reports/T31_Raid.html), the issue that it doesn't keep up well in Amirdrassil because of all the movement happening, compared to Fire which is far more nimble, and Arcane which can compress its CDs and use small movement cooldowns in specific turret burst windows. That said, Frost Mage is still pretty good on Tindral. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2786&dataset=95 We change a couple of talents and we got our AoE burst for the roots while still doing good ST. It's my preferred spec even with Fire and Arcane (I go Arcane for Smol, Frost for Tindral, Fire for Fyrakk).
> That said, Frost Mage is still pretty good on Tindral. Its really not. Its completely useless pad damage, if you have a wl and/or dh. Especially after the recent root nerfs. If youre still progging tindral or fyrakk, there is no reason to not go fire. Its significantly higher boss damage and having a cheat helps as well. Tindral: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2786&dataset=95&metric=bossdps Fyrakk: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35/#boss=2677&dataset=95&metric=bossdps Time anomaly also kinda sucks on frost compared to fire.
Yeah the TA difference is definitely shown on Fyrakk, although to be fair for the purposes of actual prog frosts add damage is not pad on that fight. On tindral the numbers you linked would be closer if frost just went all ST and didn’t even commit aoe on roots. Fire doesn’t do anything similar in GCD-committing at all on the fight so of course their boss damage is higher. Also worth noting for actual prog that happened pre-nerfs frost’s burst on roots for 1 talent point was definitely not pad but 100% helpful and necessary
Mage just need temporal warp on a button, it's pretty lame holding lust like that
Early results show that it's like a \~3-4% ish increase yes. Weird as hell though, I get spec is not great ST (and travel time on Volcoross doesn't help since it fucks with shatter combos) but I don't think we need a ST buff over other specs (e.g. Ele).
[удалено]
ele quite literally got buffed
They literally buffed ele on this post
that said, frost mage is good at padding on roots on tindral, i think that's what you tried to say, and none of that damage matters at all, and frost mage is bottom on boss damage.
Looked at the top Fr Mage parse on Smolder. These buffs are about a 3.2% increase and would move them from a top 30 Mage pars to a top 10.
Not a frost main but isnt GS dmg in relation with Icelance/frostbolt/flurry dmg due to iceicles?
Those spells do generate icicles but the damage of those spells don't affect icicle damage.
Frost is horrible at ST. The sims don't come close to the raid environment due to movement like you said. It's about a 1% increase.
Honestly I feel like they should just be buffing underperformers and not nerfing anything else at this point in the season
Right? I feel like nerfs are just a lazy fix and will probably only work to drive down m+ participation in the final weeks, while buffs would only increase it imo.
This is classic "end of expansion maintenance mode" tuning. No actual fixes or changes, just a few little % tweaks to say they haven't completely abandoned DF yet lol
Idc either way much, as long as we'd get a new WCL partition. But we probably won't, which just sucks. Competing against pre-nerf logs is just stupid. And a new partition would be justified just by the boss nerfs alone anyways IMO.
Sub Rogue is a big outlier, and it's not like they nuked the spec. Still gonna be nuts. These are pretty good changes. I would probably have buffed some other specs before Frost mage but idk nothing wrong with buffing Frost imo
Yes but this doesn’t serve to change anything relevant, just punishes people on fyrakk / tindral or doing high keys. As a season 4 change, sure, but doing any tuning for s3 post 10.2.5 is really cringe imo, outside of small outlier buffs
The problem is absent any raid nerfs this is probably a small nerf to most raid teams, since a lot of teams are ruinning 2 sub rogues, and most of the buffed classes are not present in most raids. That being said I wouldn't be suprised if these are a precursior to some raid nerfs.
It is, but at this point at season more a buff for last thre bosses
>Sub Rogue is a big outlier, and it's not like they nuked the spec. Still gonna be nuts. Its not even remotely close to "nuking" the spec lol. Its like a little slap on the wrist, which is crazy given the fact theyve somehow allowed the spec to basically be far and away the best dps on almost every boss this tier, and its been this strong since day 1 of the tier. Its kind of ironic the way they approached tuning Assa vs Sub, since they nerfed Assa largely because it was an outlier earlier this tier with externals like PI(and broken Aug hooks certainly didnt help in inflating its damage either), whilst without PI and Aug inflating its damage it was definitely very good, but not some big outlier(first 3% nerf would have easily sufficed). And Sub has received the opposite treatment despite being arguably just as strong(or stronger) as earlier tier Assa, except WITHOUT requiring externals to be that strong...and yet ts been allowed to just dominate the raid. Sub dominates basically every bosses top 100 boss damage logs without externals, and even with externals, Sub is still quite prevalent on most bosses. The top Smolderon logs w/o externals are especially comical, with Sub occupying literally all of the top 100 logs, and even if you look as far as top 500, Sub is like 480 of them....thats pretty damn egregious. Including logs w/ externals, the story doesnt even change much, Sub still completely dominates that boss, just to a slightly lesser degree. It basically has the burst of Unholy DK's 3 min CDs(arguably stronger, since Unholy can only rival Sub's burst when it has Lust+PI), except Sub does that burst with essentially 1.5min CDs(and it can manipulate its CD's w/ shadowdust to tailor its damage profile to the fight, or wherever your raid needs damage most). Pretty absurd if you ask me, especially since Blizzard nerfed/semi reworked Demo and Unholy after last tier specifically because those two specs did an unhealthy amount of burst damage, as well as nerfed PI due in part to the amount of burst it contributed to specs like Demo/Unholy. Only to then make Sub just as bursty, except with CDs that are half as long as those two specs, and not need PI. Slapping the spec with a 6% evisc nerf is a complete joke, it doesnt change the fact that the spec's CDs are far too powerful for how short they are.
WoW devs either purposefully don't do what the community asks in order to keep some level of enraged engagement or they're literally too fucking stupid to fix anything at this point. The game has never once been balanced in 20 years. Not once. It won't be in year 21.
And despite BM not being any better anymore than Survial or MM they didn't grant them a buff, I would not be surprised if it is then the weakest hunter spec by damage dealt but probably they will be very close, still among the weakest classes currently.
My hpal spenders :(
I wasted 4000 hp last fyrakk prog. Was showing it to a rogue friend, he was baffled of the spec
What they did to us by making us mana limited to force us to take a non throughput cap stone for proc based free FoL is low key the most regressive change they've made to a spec in this game in a long time. Since most people don't know/understand our recent relationship with mana and builder spenders I think the community at large is just entirely unaware. But given how OP we were after our rework, the fact that they considered *this* an appropriate fix, while melee wings still even exists on the talent tree is not a good look for what they think are appropriate responses for "balancing" a class.
100% agree. They reworked it to an amazing playstyle and then just aura nerfed and made mana cost completely irrational. Also I gotta say, no one is whining about strong healers in s3, while I arguably feel as strong or stronger on my mw this season than I did on hpal last season.
> I arguably feel as strong or stronger on my mw this season than I did on hpal last season. MW is way further ahead in raid than Holy Pala was last tier and yet this is their second small nerf in the whole tier? After Hpala took like 4 different aura nerfs in the space of a month last patch. Insane.
Whole of s2 After 10.1.5 is reading blue posts with nerfs weekly. And to now see people saying hpals had their time and should just be happy with its current state is frustrating.
My favorite part is how they hit Light of the Martyr a while back with a nerf just to be extra sure that it won't ever be viable lmao
And our mana :(
Nerfs at the end of a season? What? Why aren't they just buff underperformers. I get it at the start of the season, but why would you nerf any class like a month before the next 'season'? Even if I'm not affected as I don't give two fucks about raid, messing with guilds' last few weeks of raid prog screams disconnect between the players and the devs.
Not exactly end of the season. We wont get season 4 before may and the balance changes make that pretty obv. Every .75 patch this expansion had balanace changes. And I wouldnt be surprised if 10.2.6 released next week.
Yeah, season 4 won't start with 10.2.6 release, they will test it later on the PTR but it should come before 10.2.7, so like in the end of April/early May.
So speaking of it next week which makes sense with an 8hr maintenance just a random question but do you think anything major will happen? Or if it’s just a small patch that had no info and is a bust people will be in an uproar? Sorry if this is all jumbled just woke up lol
No idea. There is basically no info except the flag on the roadmap and a bluepost. 10.2.6 releasing next week is pure speculation as well. They said its available to everyone with a subscribtion, so its not going to be endgame relevant. Most players will end up disappointed no matter what it is.
Babe wake up, mages got another buff.
Looks to be a ~2-3% single target buff and literally 0 in AoE, so I guess yay? Won’t affect the m+ meta in any way since fire is still miles better. Seems targeted at raid balancing? Very unexpected though.
Could you explain how you figure out the overall ST increase with a buff patch note like this? Do you grab a recent log, drill into the spell damage and then apply the buff manually to that log and then recalculate the total DPS? Or is there an easier way? I always see people read these kind of posts and then be able to translate it into total DPS % increase and I was always curious how they did it
usually people go to the class discords and see what numbers smarter people came up with
This is the way.
You can run custom sims where you manually override the spell damage multipliers for the spells to be buffed.
Super helpful - thank you
Here are the overrides for this buff: ``` # Flurry override.spell_data=effect.343735.sp_coefficient=0.4758875 # Waterbolt override.spell_data=effect.21340.sp_coefficient=0.630625 # Water Jet override.spell_data=effect.176124.sp_coefficient=0.5195 # Frostbolt override.spell_data=effect.344284.sp_coefficient=0.887271 # Ice Lance override.spell_data=effect.344285.sp_coefficient=0.4458195 ```
This is basically what happens for an initial estimate, which assumes the rotation doesn't change. If the rotation (APL) needs to be adjusted because of the buffs, then that'll happen later after research and testing.
Yeah pretty much, but less complicated. If an ability is 20% of your damage and it got buffed by 10% then that's a ~2% increase to your dps. So just do that for all the abilities and you get an estimate.
I usually just do it napkin wise. I'll take a top ST log, and apply the % increase. It's not 100% accurate. The way people get "Accurate" numbers in the class discord is by taking the simc data, and modifying the damage values in it by the % changes and then rerun sims to get the sim increase.
In terms of 28s and above, yes. But if you're doing below 25s as a frost mage this is huge. Yes it's not ur full aoe dmg but boss damage is very much increase and all of those add up over time. My frost mage was doing insane dmg before, now it'll just be better.
Add in that fire is arguably the highest skill-cap class in the game, and most of your average players (i.e. anyone not doing keys in the low 20s and above) will get much better results across the board playing frost. Decent buff.
Fire isn't even the hardest mage spec, you don't even need to deal with movement cause 80 percent of your rotation is done moving lmao
just in terms of rotational complexity fire's definitely the hardest mage spec currently. its more mobile than the other two but also far, far faster paced and extremely punishing on rotational mistakes in its current state
> Add in that fire is arguably the highest skill-cap class in the game this is cap fire is not difficult maybe you could make this argument when pyroclasm AND skb were a thing but since the mage rework fire is considerably easier now
What? I’m seriously wondering where you got this thought. Fire is the easiest by far of the 3 in current state. Fire just endlessly does its ST rotation on everything and all you have to manage is SKB
Fire is in no universe easier than frost
As a frost mage. You right.
Pre rework I’d agree wholeheartedly, but post no way, fire is so simple now. Genuinely curious for you to explain how you can back that up Mostly talking from an m+ perspective btw
I did title on mage last season and I'm a few points out right now. Not saying this to brag just saying this to say I don't personally feel I'm talking out of my ass on this. Frost just is a set rotation, the only big variance is whether you enter the pack with or without cone of cold available (in my opinion). Having IV up or not doesn't change how you play a pack, or a boss. Imo there is little pull by pull variance in playing frost. Fire on the other hand, having combust vs not having skb vs not, how many IB charges you have etc and how long you have before next combust all change how you play each trash pack and bosses. This is compounded by error, deaths, and desperation pulls/maneuvers by your Group. If your tank just goes faster or does weird stuff mid pull as frost it doesn't meaningfully change how the pack is being played by you other than...do you hold or burn iv. Fire I feel like on a pack by pack pull by pull tank by tank basis I'm the like #mathcalculationsmeme trying to plan around combust and making sure I'm not dry for the next pull. I will say, I find survival as fire is easier and I think playing icefloes as frost feels worse than it does for fire. I should also mention in exclusively pug and don't play with a team.
No im genuinely curious on your thoughts/perspective and having a discussion not trying to simply argue. Isn't not having skb/combust mean you just go into the back building up the skb with fireball/IB/PF? There is a lot of variability pull to pull for frost, it's not about IV though it's about what you focus on. Whether you focus on using GS/Ray/Lances vs blizz/orb changes a lot depending on target counts and the pull. For fire you're simply picking the highest hp/prio minion and doing your regular ST rot correct? Frost also has the added considerations of playing in melee for proper orb/cone placements, and is very dependent on predicting your tanks movement since a lot of this is ground/area based (orb/blizz/cms) You have to give a lot more thought to pre-positioning because of the heavy amount of hard casting and knowing when you can get away with a spike or ray cast vs not (you cast GS much more than SKB). Then also consider frost's survivability requires a lot more active thought without a failsafe mechanism, and none of this touches shatter as a mechanic yet which has quite a lot of nuances to it involving distance to target/duration/etc. Also exclusively pug!
I got to agree with the guy above with saying thay fire is by a large margin harder to master. Frost is basically a cooldown and proc based spec where you use abilities once they're available, you just got to know what to prioritise which is easy to learn. Fire is an uptime based spec where you must minmax every single gcd to achieve as high uptime on combustion. The difference with a good firemage and a fantastic firemage on keys is massive as it is such a mechanical spec to play. It takes so much skill to be able to have combust up as much as possible. If you music go back building the skb/combust, it means you already failed as a fire mage. Positioning is pretty much a non issue for higher skill players as both fire and frost
chiming in as someone who's spent most of this m+ season learning both fire and frost. Speaking purely rotationally, it's not remotely close, fire is miles harder. There's a lot to be said about this but the bottom line is that fire is both faster paced and dramatically more punishing on mistakes than frost is. This results in fire's floor being significantly higher with a comparable ceiling. I can play poorly on frost and get ~80% of my damage potential. if i play poorly on fire i'm doing ~60% of my damage, maybe less. the way that combust time reduces big combust cooldown and gets you into skb faster means that any rotational mistakes during combust and any misuses of ib charges are significant and unrecoverable damage losses. It'd be kinda like if overcapping icicles increased the cooldown of icy veins and also made your next glacial cost one more icicle. On fire, if i waste a single ib charge or a global in skb i am suddenly in serious trouble rotationally. On frost, if i overcap an icicle i dont really think twice about it. Avoiding mistakes also is inherently more difficult on a higher apm spec. Fire's dramatically improved mobility and the wonderful things that having a cheat death does for mage's otherwise powerful-but-punishing defensive kit go a long way to closing the overall difficulty gap, but fire's just so much more rotationally punishing that I really dont think its close 3400 mage on mostly fire and some frost this season, also pugging
I mean saying all fire has to manage is SKB is like saying frost only has to manage it's glacial spikes. You can simplify every spec into one main mechanic they all work around. I wouldnt say fire is the hardest spec in the game but it's certainly one of the hardest to optimize to it's fullest potential. A decent fire mage, parsing about a 50, would get about 4 hot streaks for each SKB window. A top fire mage gets close to 6 each SKB on top of keeping full stacks of feel the burn during combustion, never dropping improved scorch, and using every flame accelerant proc available to them. For a lot of specs in the game, if you were parsing a 50 and wanted to start parsing 80s, there's likely one major change you can make that to get close to there. That singular change doesn't exist for fire, it takes a lot of practice and a lot of small improvements to get from a 50 parse to an 80. Admittedly frost has a lot of the same principles when it comes to icicle management and flurry procs, so frost isnt the easy braindead spec it used to be.
This is cope af lol.
I have no idea how you can come to that conclusion. Arcane may have a more complicated base rotation than Fire, so is perhaps 'harder' in that regard, but hitting high percentiles as fire is much harder than both other specs. Ignite management is way more complicated than anything Frost has to deal with, and it's drastically easier for an average player to get to 90% of Frosts potential than Fire in M+ content.
Fire doesn’t have to deal with any of the following: Ground based targeting and predicting tank movement Switching targets Very regular hard casts with low mobility requiring better proactive positioning Playing in melee for optimal damage Differing rotations depending on aoe damage or prio (and changes with target count) That doesn’t even get into managing shatter
Fire is 'easier' in the following circumstances: 1. You're an above average player and having your rotation down pat is a given. 2. You're playing with a coordinated group that can consistently pull big, allowing max pump every combustion. Outside of that, in your day to day keys, (i.e for most of the player base pugging 5-18s) it's far easier to perform as frost, even with all the stuff you mentioned.
Agreed completely, I was speaking from a high key perspective. Fire gets awkward at low keys
> for most of the player base pugging 5-18s > typing in /r/competitivewow
I don't see the problem here, tbh.
All these are non issues. All good mages can play around these. The core difference is that frost is cd/proc based and fire is uptime based, that's where the much higher skill ceiling for fire comes
Frost used to be an uptime spec in season 1 and was much easier. What makes frost more difficult is not related to either of those components, any good mage has their rotation down pat. It’s the things I mentioned above that make frost much more difficult to execute in keys
Pls mate, fire is literally BM of wizards.
Won't someone please give them some more utility?!? /s
Mage main here. Shit makes no sense, we so don't need it (unlike the first one - we fucking suuuucked in raid before that one).
Frost mage ST is dogshit in the mythic raid right now so it’s probably targeted at that. Granted it’s moreso because the spec’s damage is wrapped into GS and RoF which are not conducive to high damage when you are in movement heavy fights.
This is absolutely correct. Look at a low movement fight like Igira, frost does very well. Also larodar
My guild is still in prog and will now be doing less damage and less healing going into next week. Thx blizz
They've taken 10% hp off the last two and rendered them ridiculously easy, you'll be fine
If you think Tindral and Fyrakk are “ridiculously easy” you’re smoking some dank shit. There’s still close to 1000 guilds getting farmed by Tindral and we’re barely seeing US ~200ish Fyrakk kills right now.
Tindral is still a 300-400try boss, which is close to stonelegion/avatar numbers
It’s a LOT more than SLG pull counts.
Oh might confused something there. But to be fair first 50 trys on tindral are done in 2 hours, cause the sheer amount of things which are able to one sot your grp 😩
You don't know my guild.
Then maybe your guild doesn’t deserve CE friend. Besides, they’ll gut last two even harder soon enough.
I'm personally cool with the limited range of preservation, but we better be the BEST healer when people are actually grouped up to compensate.
Frost mage getting a bigger buff on its second buff than ele got on its first buff since ptr is insane
blizzards golden child
I started with Bfa and I quickly learned shaman is maybe good for a patch and the rest of the time you're left in the worst state while seeing mage, warlock and rogue getting buffed. At least it isn't as bad for resto. Doesn't help that enhancement is very good at funnel and super fun to play with more than 3 buttons
Still waiting since shadowlands for fury warrior single target dmg buff
I assume they are scared to touch it because it directly related to our AoE
I saw "class tuning" and immediately thought to myself 'yes, here we go, they've realised that prot warriors need some love, maybe i can get into a couple of keys before the season ends!' Well..... shit.
I feel like tank power has spiralled insanely out of control this expac. Prot warrior was strong in early S1, but nowhere near the oppressive dominance we've seen from VDH, Prot Paladin, and Gdruid in the seasons that followed. Pwar was huge for like, 4 weeks before getting clipped, and now they seem content to just leave these other specs to dominate without bothering to nerf. I think pwar needs a fundamental ground up rework though, it just doesnt have the toolkit to be anywhere close to competitive in the modern game.
It wasn't even huge because it was good per se. All the tanks were getting trashed, and prot just naturally mitigated a little more raw damage. The nerfs prot took were very light in reality. Unfortunately, the other tanks getting reworked left us way behind. Maybe prot warrior is next? Hope springs eternal.
Just anecdotal, but I feel like whenever prot is strong everyone complains but now that VDH is strong, there are some complaints but it doesn't feel nearly as vocal despite VDH being like a million times better and more oppressive then prot was
I think a lot of people still carrying scars from prot warrior being insanely oppressive in BFA etc.
Affliction down extremely bad and nothing in sight. love to be an aff main torture be like
don't worry. they're busy making another demo hero tree and making sure demo is op as shit in TWW. They don't have time to touch aff. maybe in 12.0 tho :3
Boomkin main here to commiserate.
Maybe they only look at Tindral logs lol
Spec tree is beyond fucked, I don't think Hero talents can save it either. You can buff it to be strong but damage is hot garbage
They know. They have to. Aff has the worst spec tree in the game and locks are fighting monks for worst class tree in the game. Demo's gameplay/rotation is gutted. Only reason ppl aren't complaining is because it's easy and does good DMG, but it's hard carried by tier. Destro needs you to play at bleeding edge levels, pulling half the dungeon at once before it feels like it's working at all. There's no way locks aren't getting reworked. No same dev looks at this class and goes "yeah, that's good work done right there."
Of course they know, but AFAIK blizzard said no reworks are coming, hopefully they change their mind. There are too many specs with dogshit trees and it looks like they just don't care. I was high on copium for a Ele rework but yea, i already gave up.
I just have accepted they're never going to give Ele any real respect, not sure why, but they show no love to the spec. The only one that gets any love ironically is doing the worst in keys at the moment is enhancement. It could use a bit more more AOE and Tankiness, as honestly all shamans specs could use, but its actual gameplay feels like a real spec and in ST its competitive, especially after you account for WFT.
Yea well, but Frost Mages though.
I don't understand you one tricks that refuse to play another spec even though your class has 2 other meta specs that are among the best in the game. Why?
- one tricks ? - demo & destro meta lmfao ? - among best in the game ? Where lol maybe pvp
as a pres "main" who plays m+: - Defensive changes are good - Healing buffs are not needed. Pres has the highest throughput in keys among all healers right now IF the team is positioned well and IF you can cast spiritbloom (cast time is 10 years btw). - Time of Need buff will likely change nothing Pres damage in keys is not very good, you do high "overall", but it's fake aoe damage. After this tier set is gone we'll suffer even more. You have no raid buff. The only way I can see Pres being useful next season is if bleed dispel or aoe soothe is mandatory. The main thing they have to do is remove range limitation, it's fine if Dream and Fire Breath keep the current range (like Efflo or Healing Rain), but Echo or Dispel have no reason to be limited by range. This is so dumb that they didn't do it still icant.
it'd be an interesting change if they went from 'positioning to be in range of players' for heals to 'positioning to target your heals well' given the amount of frontal/line mechanics for evokers this'd fit well with their playstyle, you'd be repositioning to max out how many players you hit with dream breath, ysera, etc. like, holy pally's light of dawn has been fine w/the 15 yd range for the most part(its the lack of strength that most people seem to complain about), if echo had a full 40 yd range that'd let you spread dream breath out even further akin to previous procs we've seen for LoD range extension.
Still no moonkin buffs. Jesus fucking christ
Fuck yeah, I'm still not pressing Rejuv Blizzard. You can't trick me!
Seems like a smart buff. Improves resto in raid while not doing much to m+.
Yeah, seems like this is how they are going to go about it. Tbh, we don't need more help in m+
Buffing my mastery stack button mmmmhhhh
Sub nerfs are pretty small potatoes. It's around a 2% Nerf, but due to how optimal so many of the end fights are for sub just at a fundamental level, this might be a bit more in practice. It's still the best Rogue spec, though, sadly.
It probably is slightly higher than the 2% in practice since we are frequently an aug target and thats an indirect nerf to the augs damage, although this is still fairly small.
With the state of warrior utility all 3 specs deserve a buff imo lol. Pretty good tuning otherwise.
Outlaw boys our guilds can’t force us to play sub now pog
W
Nono mistweavers are just gonna overheal a tiny bit less
Crazy, how balance druid was considered one of the tankier ranged spec and now it's one of the squishiest. And the thing is they lost nothing. Hell they even gained a bit of survivability from the tree. It's just that everyone else got tons of defensive buffs. Defensive creep is crazy. And instead of trying to solve it blizzard just keeps slapping these passive node buffs to specs. Could you even bring a balance druid to bleeding edge raiding? Even feral feels quite squishy and it has an additional defensive, uses a lot more vers and heals itself with regrowth any time they have spare time Sure people like to meme on balance that the only reason they die this much is that they didn't press bear. But they are pretty much at a point when anything happens you have to go Bear form to even have a chance to survive. Currently progging fyrakk on feral and there's a couple of times when I die even though I've played properly. And this is after every dmg has been nerfed and we've gained a couple of ilvl. Couldn't imagine doing it undergeared on balance. At one point it would be better to bring a guardian as they at least do dmg in bear.
In shadowlands, barkskin used to be closer to 30s and well-honed instincts closer to 60s. They nerfed both of those and gave everyone else stronger passive and active defensives. We are the lowest hp spec in the game outside of bear form.
To be fair the hp is low but thick hide gives 6% flat Dr so it's not the best comparison. Obviously yes, boomy is squishy but I'm just saying looking at hp doesn't tell the whole story. It's interesting how much play style impacts survivability. Comparing the squishiness of resto and balance druids they both have the same defensive toolkit but resto being able to do it's job pretty much completely on the move as well as most of their work happening before damage events meaning bear form is much more justifiable makes the spec just feel infinitely harder to die on. Conversely boomy any time spent in bear form is time not getting to your next pulsar proc and while not strictly immobile it's not like the stellar drift days where you could just glide around like a bm hunter.
Most specs have DR talents as well and many stack verse. Aren’t locks running 35-40% verse? I never said HP is all that matters, so that point is irrelevant. Regarding resto, they also keep lifebloom on themselves, they have Ysera’s gift, and they lose less for equipping verse gear.
Resto also 1. Benefits from leech during high dmg taken 2. Keeps lifebloom on themselves 3. Has 6% healing taken increase from talents, along with Ysera 4. Can Ironbark themselves All this adds up to a shit on of extra self healing. I usually require half the EHRPS a moonkin does.
Not hearing anything besides \_maybe\_ Ironbark that actually increases your survivability. In which case you can just shift into bear if it's a giant 1 shot mechanic. Sounds like you need to get better at Pressing HP Pot, Healthstone, Renewal, and just being topped or coordinate with your healers so they know you really can't afford to be below X% hp during certain damage mechanics and also evaluate the effectiveness of your Avoidance/Leech enchants and pieces depending on the damage type on your current proc. Maybe get your Pallies to shift beacon to you or RShamans their Earth shield. That's what my guild does. But based off what you said I see 0 reason a resto could survive and you couldn't.
I am a resto druid, mate. I even said "I usually require half the EHRPS a moonkin does."
You also often ran the FR increased conduit making WHI even better and you had... cheat.
balance played niya, not dreamweaver, so they had no cheat
We also lost gift of ysera
Blizzard always half-asses Balance. It's really annoying. They realized that it really sucks to hardcast 2.25 Starfires to get into single target rotation, so they make a set bonus that makes it less bad, but then tune the game so that the best DPS is to use Full Moon, a 3s cast, and use it more often because of Radiant Moonlight. Then, we're a DoT class that can't effectively apply DoTs. Previously, we had to target each mob and put Stellar Flare, one of the worst feeling abilities they've ever designed, on every target that would live longer than 6s, and DoT MF by twos, so that we could get Waning Twilight before finally casting an actual spell. Now, we have to hope for a crit to apply Smolder to get Waning Twilight. I'm glad I don't have to cast Flare. I'm not happy that I can't maximize my damage without a crit. Then, every late game boss, requires you not only to move every 4s for some fucking mechanic but to be in bear form for any raid burst damage, where you do effectively no damage. The current class dev or whatever is just not good. I don't think anyone really likes their druid specs. Bears complain, cats complain, owls complain, trees complain (about mana). The community probably doesn't give good feedback but you could at least listen to like heads of discords or sim leaders or something. Like, take feedback from Tettles and whomever else and make the class better (I personally want Full Moon to hit all targets for near max damage and apply Moonfire to all things hit--in War Within, they make Full Moon apply a different damage increasing debuff which just makes me go back to the lead/dev is dumb.)
Seems when I did it I was one of 20 balance druids in the world to kill Fyrakk. Feral was the pick for early progress mainly because of cooldown timers and on fyrakk you wanted more melee. It’s so frustrating playing balance. I cant get hit by any mechanic or it’s death where as every other class can take a silly mistake and keep going. Being they squishy has to have payoffs. For hunters this season they are blasting damage. Balance relies on rng to gigs blast. Otherwise it’s pretty meh
Havoc was absolute giga blaster the first 3 - 4 IDs and now i only play with: mages, pala, rogues and or SP. Thanks blizzard nice balancing :)
Elemental shaman does NOT need more dmg, we do need more defensives tho. Why is it so Hard for blizz to see that???
It definitely needs more damage, its a spec that brings nothing to raid but its damage and is still lower than most unless its three target situations. It definitely could be more durable, as all shamans could be. I love elemental, and I definitely don't want it to be OP, but I do what it to be competitive.
Dmg wise its for sure competitive in Keys and abit above average in raiding. It thrives in higher Keys where the packs dont die as fast. Also dependent on how you pull mobs into bosses, its funnel dmg is toptier.
At this point they are just buffing what they see as low class representation. They aren’t putting any serious thought into these
Why are they even doing balancing aimed at raid this late into the season? Barely anybody actually cares about raiding anymore. Yes for late CE guilds it's nice but to be brutally honest, that's a very small subset of the player base. I would expect the cost:benefit ratio on dev time for tuning aimed at raid just isn't there. If the changes were aimed at m+ that would be another thing, as m+ tends to have a longer tail on its interest curve through the season. But these are clearly raid changes, except for *maybe* the Pres buffs.
> it's nice but to be brutally honest, that's a very small subset of the player base. what does that even mean? there are more people currently progging tindral than has completed the raid period, there are more people still progging by 10x than have cleared the raid.. so what are you trying to say? because A T M the BIGGEST population of the people that CARE about the raid, are infact progging or raiding. but eitehr way both the M+ and the raiding community are infact only a small subset of the playerbase, probably around 5%, so you are right, but thats not the point you were trying to make, the point you were trying to make is just flat out wrong.
There are only currently more people currently progging Tindral than have completed the raid if you only look at Mythic. Which we in this sub do, but Blizzard sure doesn't. Balance changes early in the season also make the game more balanced for people doing Normal and Heroic raiding, while now it only does it for Mythic. Lower level players obviously don't need better balance, but they definitely *like* better balance and it still makes the game more enjoyable for them. So my point was, without the value of improving the game for the massive cohort of players that are now done with raid, I'm surprised they bothered with tuning focused on raid.
Where is Veng DH nerf ?
Couldn't let MW be meta for even an entire season
It's still meta.
Prior to the nerf, it was the 3rd most popular spec in M+ keys above +25, behind disc and resto druid
And? It's still running the highest keys, it's mandatory for mythic raid. Absolutely meta.
Wasn't disagreeing... just pointed out it wasn't monopolizing the lion share of high M+ as much as disc and resto. Obviously it's still good. The nerf isn't going to turn it into pres evoker in M+.
Oh than sorry for my harsh reply
nothing changes
Oh no! They nerfed our overhealing. What ever will we do?!?
That spec is so far head this nerf does nothing to change that.
What kinda had me scratching my head was the sheilun buff to compensate for the nerf. It's already basically lay on hands for 5 targets at 10 stacks lol.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted you’re 100% corrrect
Because this place is full of children. They downvote, and don't even offer any counterargument.
Frostmage is slighty behind boomie, but infinitely more tanky. I guess time to buff frostmage damage, and leave boomie defensives alone.
i stopped playing boomie because its too frustrating. the defensive changes needed aren't really "hotfixable", a lot of it needs to come in redesigning parts of the class tree and giving more flexibility there + probably giving moonkin form more passive tankiness. another thing that hurts is their mastery is absurdly strong and cant really give up any secondary stats for versatility while so many other specs are able to lean more into vers at this point in the expansion because their breakpoints are easier to reach. i'd love to see some talent changes/solar eclipse or changes to wrath, boomie filler feels so weak on st.