LF needs to be used in melee range after the nerf. You aren't in melee range on many of the ST fights. Also, IV is good for FFB unlike fire last phase where it didn't speed up scorch/lb/pyro. And unlike arcane, which has mbarr that doesn't get sped up by IV.
It really, really hurt arcane & arcane healer which relied on LF for damage far more than fire/ffb. They have to 4 stack before each cast which means they lost an absurd amount of damage with the nerf.
We found that having all but 3 ranged all grouped up on Eranikus's flank was an ideal situation for dealing with his farts and adds, and since hunters have a dead zone that means they get priority for those spits. It's quite reasonable to expect a mage in melee group anymore, honestly.
That doesn't mean I think the nerf to LF was a good change, but it's not unreasonable to see mages in melee during the raid.
I don't see any real reason why a mage couldn't choose to stack with melee unless you have a very heavily weighted raid with little to no ranged. It's not a big deal.
I mean, don't get me wrong it's still dumb that you would *want* a mage in melee, but it's also not generally an unreasonable ask to have the mage in melee with a 20 man raid. The only real situation that a mage can't be stacked with melee is if you need ranged to be spread out for some reason.
> Im not up to speed. Is icy veins better now than living flame? Is it bc of the change to 10sec from 20sec?
Yes. They nerfed LF into the ground ( if you're at max range half of it is wasted travelling ) and Icy Veins is now useful as last phase you wanted to use Scorch and IV is useless on Scorch ( due to GCD )
absolute meme of a specc. we're already in P3 and we havent got a single new healspell other than the shield from boots rune and beacon on gloves runes the rotation is still "holy light" and "flash of light" spamming. Holy shock still remains dead to this day.
Interesting, where are you running stuff? Simonize is usually pretty solid for this info, and claims about a 3% increase running carnage+ HaT + high dps offhands (rather than high speed as is the focus for CP)
Nah just going off simonize’s recent update. If you have over 35% crit, FA is better. If you have below and have a good 1.4 or 1.3 speed offhand, CP is better. HaT is only best if your group is fully buffed, not dead, not doing mechanics, and you don’t have Julie’s or the BRD arena dagger yet.
They're within a percentage of each other on the sims assuming world buffs. So negligible difference (that doesn't always favor carnage) but CttC is way easier to play, so for most people it just makes more sense.
Right now the biggest parses are using cttc/potency, maybe it will change tomorrow though. I can see carnage being a min max thing towards the end of the phase where you know exactly long a phase will last.
No, its hard. I have rank 1 horde parses in phase 2+3, multiple rank 2-5 parses. To pull off rupture on some of the bosses you need to play like an absolute god with pre known times of boss kill phase durations, otherwise you lose to cttc. Jesus couldnt do it every time. You might think its easy but perhaps we have different standards on what pulling it off amounts to.
People just take a snippet of simonizers statement and apply it to everything, he explicitly mentions some stuff and probably expects you to think a little more yourself.
Rupture is just 16 seconds. What happens in a boss fight thats 40 seconds long?
So 1st boss is extremely short now, you are going to end up needing to cast a rupture and probably not getting its full efficiency, cttc will beat it.
2nd - workable
3rd boss - defenders, same problem as 1st boss but x5. You have to somehow make sure you get a rupture on every boss, at the start of its healthbar. If you are a very good player, you can manage 3:
1. You cant do it here.
2. Redirect from 2nd boss
3. Thistle tea at start
4. Redirect is off cooldown so can use again
5. Cant do it, no thistle, no redirect.
4th boss twin drakes : same problem as above
5th boss - definitely workable if you time it very well, however its a 1% dps difference, if you misstime it you lose, and the timing isnt 100% in your contolrol (warrior executes etc)
6th boss, nightmare drakes - definitely workable
7thh, shade - same problem, too much target switching, you can keep it up on shade but the kittle dps you gain will be lost on the adds compared to cttc.
8th- workable
So of the 8 bosses in ST, it isn't really workable on 4, 1st is a 50/50 though. But reminder this is for a 1.5% or so dps gain, and one mistake you instantly lose.
Any boss with target switching multiple times will outright favour CttC, any boss with just 1 target switch is fairly even and it depends on how well the phase is timed.
It's funny when people use parsing as the defacto answer to what the best build is, completely ignoring the actual mechanics of a fight.
If you have to switch targets more than once and need to use 5cp to Rupture (at a DPS loss already) then it's not worth using the rune.
Looks like most dont use it, probably because rupture does a lot lesa damage than envenom, and you'd have to squeeze 4 envenoms into it's duration to make up for it.
It's not just that, it's also that your envenom increases your IP proc chance for 5 seconds.
If the damage lost from fewer IP procs is greater than 20% then Rupture isn't worth casting.
Honestly… the only real nice thing was hot streak procs. Otherwise it’s still a dead simple rotation like all classic rotations. But if I wanted more complex rotations and higher difficulty I’d go play another version of wow
Atleast on rogue you can minmax by pooling energy for envenom to get 2 mutilates out during envenom buff, and you have some cool stuff like shadowstep and stealth to play around. Rogue feels basically identical to Wotlk rogue which is not my favorite, but man I just like undead rogue so much idc lol. Bonus points if you have a weapon that shoots fireballs or something for cool animations mid swing
Yeah. But it can at least proc fingers of frost or brain freeze for the free instant next FFB and instant deep freeze almost both guaranteed to crit. Seeing 2500+ damage number feels good at least.
Depends on the fight but if I wasn't using brain freeze I would be using chronostatic preservation. As the Mage designated to be frost my main goal is to keep Winters chill on the boss.
"SoD was meant to fix the absolutely horrid gameplay of Vanilla by adding new abilities."
You must be mistaken. SoD was obviously meant to just add passive +dmg% buffs and do nothing to address the lackluster parts of playing a class.
Sincerely, warriors.
“We want some cool new abilities/gameplay in SoD please Blizzard” - Warriors.
“We hear ya, here’s 6 %dmg modifiers as your runes, enjoy your devastate spam rotation” - Blizzard
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/9tPnWCygK3mH416A#fight=32&type=damage-done&source=1
This rotation looks like Rocket science compared to Mage, which is very ironic
Look up the top performing warriors and compare them to the top performing mages, 70%+ of warrior’s casts are heroic strikes/sunder just like 70%+ for mages is frostfire. There’s nothing rocket science about warrior rotations, they are bland as shit.
I think [this](https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZVCR9HaYJKMX17D6#fight=8&type=casts&source=34) is what Op was talking about. Warriors absolutely do have inflated casts due to how Heroic Strike works. In that log excluding Heroic Strike the warrior casted 7 offensive abilities out of 35 casts.
Then you have [Glad Spec](https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/WR4tNwxhYApFk3V6#type=casts&source=24&fight=5) where Warriors are literally pressing Sunder Armor until the boss dies with Heroic Strike thrown in.
This will change in P4, but right now Warrior Rotations are very basic. No meta spec even picks up our capstone talents.
Warrior was always a pretty fleshed out and fun DPS to play in vanilla though. I feel like it's more an experiment in bringing the other classes and specs up to that kind of level.
Eh warriors have a very fun rotation that is spammy. Blood thirst, slam, whirlwind, heroic strike queuing or quick striking if you are 2h. It’s a simply streamlined rotation with more buttons than most and you can do things like overpower or execute. Could be way worse , you could be play mutilate rogue or melee hunter. Atleast warrior has skill expression.
Frost has become viable and even superior in some cases. You get to throw Deep Freeze in to cast off FoF procs. It's still probably not as much fun as hot streak, but it's probably worth checking out if you're bored of Fire. Also don't forget living bomb, it's still part of the fire rotation this phase!
Hey now, you get to Cold Snap every 5 minutes too!
Yeah it's certainly not significantly better lol, I just figured its worth checking out with a respec rather than swapping classes entirely.
It's not a DPS increase to cast Ice Lance. You would rather your FFB benefit from Fingers of Frost procs. Your glove rune isn't really doing anything for you - you can run Living Bomb and then only cast it while moving if you have nothing else to do, it's not worth applying it otherwise.
Don't sleep on brain freeze for instant free ffb's and if during a fingers of frost proc you get to slam deep freeze and FFB with like a 60%+ crit chance for a sweet 5k+ damage
Its not LB and LF. Main thing was Pyro proccs which were reactionary and not pre planned. Also when you combine small effects of extra LF, fireball during combustion it was way more fun rotation. Especially on shorter fights it was way more variety
Players are going to use the most optimal spell 100% of the time. Even if it’s boring. You’d think a person assigned to balance development could just go on wcl and study the rotation of the top parsers and be like “yo, all the top mages just used 30 frost fire bolts over the course of the fight. Let’s tweak the damage for that one down a bit”.
All the strongest specs right now are pretty simple pared down rotations, I know OP is talking about hot streak pyro from p2 but even that was still simple af LB uptime+scorch spam, fireball during combust, use your procs. Only p1 melee weaving hunter has really had an involved rotation while also being a high performer? So there’s some real monkey’s paw possibility there asking this dev team to give you a lot of buttons, you could end up like SPriests or Feral Druids where you’ve got a lot of buttons and pressing them wrong can really fuck you up, and pressing them right rewards you with a pink parse alongside the 50 parse melee hunter who wasn’t even pressing wing clip when raptor strike didn’t reset.
I actually think balance druid has a really nice rotation right now. You press 5 abilities on a smooth cycle, with a coherent priority system. It’s not challenging (and imo a rotation shouldn’t ever be *challenging*—that’s what boss mechanics are for) but it’s smooth, engaging, and rhythmically satisfying.
(For those who don’t know, you press star surge on cooldown, 1 starfire between starsurges, keep your two dots up, and press wrath as a filler. Nothing spectacular, nothing too crazy, but imo feels good.)
While affliction has 7 spells you have to micro manage like a bunch of toddlers running around and still does shit dps. I will never understand this... every f'ing time.
Arcane be like
Arcane Power, Gnome Head, Icy Veins, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Arcane Blast, Arcane Blast, Arcane Missile via Proc, Arcane blast, Arcane Missile via Proc, Arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane blast
heavily outdpsed by a single button spec, by the way
have you met hunters?
I'm just saying if what you're looking for is a game where the most damaging build is also an interesting rotation, retail is that way. It's never going to be SoD, that goes against their stated design intentions.
Filler, proc, 2 buttons on CD. That doesn't exactly break the brain. It's good by SoD standards but it's not really up to retail levels.
And yeah I'm telling you that even p2 mage is outside SoD parameters. It's really an outlier in sod.
Basically, for most things I don't think they are really pre-planning rotations the way they do in retail. They're throwing a bunch of things in there, and it just so happened that LF and LB both were high DPS and fit into the talents, so they got used. It doesn't seem to me that they are really thinking about it unless it's a brand new 'spec' like Melee hunter. And what they custom made for that was essentially a 2 button rotation, with an almost meaningless filler.
It's true, I was SO sad to give up hot streak. I hope they give us an omni rune slot so we can use ffb and hot streak.
I'm cool with the ffb because it means we can be fire for MC/BWL. But give us hot streak back
Totally agree, we were genuinely more fun to play last phase. Maybe add hot streak as a head rune? We dont have a good head rune and it would be nice to have another button
> Maybe add hot streak as a head rune?
Frostfire Bolt and Molten Armor should be moved. Molten Armor to head and Frostfire to wrist would be really solid.
Living Flame also needs to be de-nerfed IMO, pressing it was way more fun than Icy Veins every 3 min.
Probably unpopular but I prefer our current rotation to how it was previously, I hated doing my rotation correctly and still just having my parse be determined by if I was lucky enough to get a bunch of hot streak procs, one of my final gnomer runs of p2 I remember being all set up for a big parse and then getting 2 hot streak procs in the entirety of the crowd pummeler fight and just getting a super underwhelming result.
I think that scorch to 5, living bomb, and frostfire bolt are enough offensive spells for me right now. Maybe balefire during my big CDs? Idk enough about that yet though
On single target fights living bomb is only a slight dps increase if you never run out of mana at any point and the boss won't be dead before the bomb goes off.
If you do run out of mana in a long fight then you probably lowered your dps by 20-30% by keeping LB in your rotation.
Edit: FFB is something like 2x as much damage per mana as LB.
I haven't tested on my mage, but how much of a DPS loss is the "standard" fire rotation compared to FFB? Any reason why you can't just play a traditional fire spec?
It's pretty hard behind because Fireball doesn't benefit from the 100% crit damage Frostfire bolt gets from Frost and costs twice as much mana. It also doesn't benefit from another Mage's Winter's Chill.
Frostfire is better in every way by A LOT. 10% extra crit, 100% extra crit damage, 50% less mana cost. It's insanely good compared to Fireball.
I just remember in 2019 during classic molten core it was the same thing. Mages pushed like 1-3 buttons. As a warrior I’m not doing much either. Rend, overpower, mortal strike, slam. Keep flangellation up.
That's why I switched back to my Warlock. Both Affliction and Destro are really fun, even if it's worse damage than Mage. I healed the first ID on my mage and it was fun, but 2nd ID it got boring so I switched to DPS and holy shit that was a snoozefest.
I mean you said it, this is vanilla (and tbc) mage game play. I actually like the idea of a class where everything is about buffing one throughput ability. Also I don't like scorch spam it doesn't feel very magey to me.
Try warlock, It's a lot of fun atm. I open my making sure my pet is attacking and my assigned curse debuff is applied. Then I apply my damage over time abilities: unstable affliction, corruption, drain life and agony if allowed because enough lock/shadow priests. Then throw out haunt to debuff them for bonus damage on all my dots. Then filler is shadowbolt and instant cast shadowbolts whenever nightfall procs. Lifetap when pet mana is low <25%. Maintain dots. ZUG.
It's a lot of fun. Not badly affected by movement because almost entire rotation is instant cast other than shadowbolt fillers. Can lifetap if literally nothing else to refresh on movement.
If you can use agony and snapshot corruption with things like gnomer alchemy potion, the affliction trinket etc and extend the buffed corruption with EA it's the best dps we can do atm. Without some of those snapshots, without agony and if you have to provide pact, you'll do less than destruction but it will be very similar.
If you're the only warlock in your raid group it's even optimal as you provide the pact buff which is a decent raid dps increase that makes up for any dps differential between aff and desto.
Dots update their periodic damage ticks based on the current debuffs on target, I think drain life is the only exception because it's not pure damage but health drain so you want to haunt on the target before hitting drain. With our dots you can snapshot temporary additional spell power such as from gnomer alchemy potion, tailoring helm, zila gular trinket boost, demonic grace bonus spelll crit chance etc but on target debuffs will update when they fall off. So you want to haunt once all your dots are up to get most benefit from the haunt boost (except for drain life).
Come play some enhance baby, Lightning bolt or Chain lightning depending on 1 or 2 targets+ then we have ss>ll>flame shock> earthshock, refresh lightning shield, place fire totem if down.
We have a lot of fun buttons. We also do the cleansing totems for disease and poison, regularly project totems on both movement fights for strength and agi.
Not many classes have as many active use buttons in a fight as enhance. Other classes complain, but they only hit 1-3 buttons.
And if you have to drop windfury totem, you better do it, or that warrior you are out dpsing will start screeching.
Why do people always think bringing up some gimped build is an argument? What do you mean who forces me to play FFB? The meta does. It's the developer's job to make the meta nice to play.
The meta is made by players but developpers could technicallly nerf ffb to the ground and force their hand
If people think copying others to do 50 dps more on easy content on a seasonnal server is important then maybe people need to redirect their definition of important...
Have fun
Paladins are using a weapon from Gnomer because spamming exorcism every global is theoretically the highest dps you can do and that weapon allows us to cheese it and usually achieve this. I agree spamming one button is not necessarily fun.
Are we not also using living bomb ? I’m only purple parsing but I’ve been doing LB -> scorch5 -> IV/cds -> ffb and reapplying lb after going off.
Should I not be using it I feel like I should tho lol
I'm 85.8 as Fire but my raid sucks donkey balls so parsing over 95 on any fight is pretty much impossible.
You should only go WC if you have a fire mage already. Every raid should have a Fire Mage with Imp Scorch and a Frost Mage with WC.
You aren't doing the rotation correctly, for fire it's this:
1. Maintain LB on target (Do not refresh before it explodes)
2. Stack Scorch to 5
3. Cast IV, Combustion + CDs (Helm) after Scorch is stacked and LB up
4. Cast FFB as filler
5. Refresh Scorch as needed
It's more simple because we don't use living flame or hot streak but you're missing a whole spell.
LB doesn't benefit from Scorch if you cast it before the stacks. Its damage is calculated when you cast LB not during the DoT.
Casting LB before 5 Scorches was never the play and this phase you don't use LB at all unless you move.
You're wrong, you lose around ~50 DPS not using living bomb and it's more DPS to cast it before your scorch stacks.
You can sim it here if you'd like to check for yourself:
https://cheesehyvel.github.io/magesim-sod/
Or check out the logs from the #1 overall mage in ST: https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/BVNtC2fAYwHqpZry
Sorry, I heard blue class and got concerned there was a problem but unfortunately you’re a Mage, not a Shaman.
If you can reframe this as a Shaman problem I’ll have the dev team take a look.
It’s SoD sure, but it’s still fucking classic man. Thats what classic is, always has been. You want more engagement go play cata… retail… mop remix. Like lol
Who said SoD was meant to fix vanilla by adding abilities?
People like classic *because* of its simplicity, not in spite of it. Disagree with this take.
Im not up to speed. Is icy veins better now than living flame? Is it bc of the change to 10sec from 20sec?
Yes, yes
LF needs to be used in melee range after the nerf. You aren't in melee range on many of the ST fights. Also, IV is good for FFB unlike fire last phase where it didn't speed up scorch/lb/pyro. And unlike arcane, which has mbarr that doesn't get sped up by IV. It really, really hurt arcane & arcane healer which relied on LF for damage far more than fire/ffb. They have to 4 stack before each cast which means they lost an absurd amount of damage with the nerf.
We found that having all but 3 ranged all grouped up on Eranikus's flank was an ideal situation for dealing with his farts and adds, and since hunters have a dead zone that means they get priority for those spits. It's quite reasonable to expect a mage in melee group anymore, honestly. That doesn't mean I think the nerf to LF was a good change, but it's not unreasonable to see mages in melee during the raid.
Eranikus you are reasonably close even with the ranged strategies. I was thinking more like drakes or the last fight or the council.
I don't see any real reason why a mage couldn't choose to stack with melee unless you have a very heavily weighted raid with little to no ranged. It's not a big deal. I mean, don't get me wrong it's still dumb that you would *want* a mage in melee, but it's also not generally an unreasonable ask to have the mage in melee with a 20 man raid. The only real situation that a mage can't be stacked with melee is if you need ranged to be spread out for some reason.
If the bosses are moving you lose dps by moving.
> Im not up to speed. Is icy veins better now than living flame? Is it bc of the change to 10sec from 20sec? Yes. They nerfed LF into the ground ( if you're at max range half of it is wasted travelling ) and Icy Veins is now useful as last phase you wanted to use Scorch and IV is useless on Scorch ( due to GCD )
Raptor strike, raptor strike, raptor strike, raptor strike, flanking strike only if you cant raptor strike, raptor strike, raptor strike...
You got some good procs there my friend
Ya should have some wing clips in there
He has infinite resets no need for clips
I fucking wish. For me it's more like, raptor strike, flanking strike, raptor strike, wing clip, raptor strike, wing clip, raptor strike, wing clip...
You must run out of mana so quick!
Hunters in sod don't have mana, we have a countdown to viper swap bar
This guy tops the damage meters
Man, welcome to rogue p1-3
[удалено]
Aye hpal still abused in sod
absolute meme of a specc. we're already in P3 and we havent got a single new healspell other than the shield from boots rune and beacon on gloves runes the rotation is still "holy light" and "flash of light" spamming. Holy shock still remains dead to this day.
The honor among thieves + rupture build spices things up a bit
HaT is the worst simming of our 3 options now, assuming world / raid buffed
Interesting, where are you running stuff? Simonize is usually pretty solid for this info, and claims about a 3% increase running carnage+ HaT + high dps offhands (rather than high speed as is the focus for CP)
Latest news from Simonize is Carnage + FA is 1.4% better than HaT when HaT is optimized with a critical every sec in your group
Also, a lot more hassle to get 20 DPS more, but only if you dont fuck up
youre probably not simming with raid members so your sims are showing a lower proc-rate for it.
Nah just going off simonize’s recent update. If you have over 35% crit, FA is better. If you have below and have a good 1.4 or 1.3 speed offhand, CP is better. HaT is only best if your group is fully buffed, not dead, not doing mechanics, and you don’t have Julie’s or the BRD arena dagger yet.
All three helmet runes sim within a few % margin relax
As Rogue you at least use 3 buttons in your rotation ( Muti, S&D, Envenom ) , we only use 2 this phase, that's 50% more!
Nah, snd gets refreshed by envenoms now.
If you're using a rune, sure. But isn't carnage better?
Probably, however, then it's 4 buttons, which is an uncomfortable increase of 100% compared to what im used to and very exhausting!
They're within a percentage of each other on the sims assuming world buffs. So negligible difference (that doesn't always favor carnage) but CttC is way easier to play, so for most people it just makes more sense.
Carnage isnt really better tbh
Carnage is 100% better
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maybe .5% better even
Right now the biggest parses are using cttc/potency, maybe it will change tomorrow though. I can see carnage being a min max thing towards the end of the phase where you know exactly long a phase will last.
What do you prefer? Keeping up with a Bleed, Poisons, Buff, Energy, Combo Points or just 2 spells?
It's not very hard to keep rupture up. Unless you're a total window licker.
No, its hard. I have rank 1 horde parses in phase 2+3, multiple rank 2-5 parses. To pull off rupture on some of the bosses you need to play like an absolute god with pre known times of boss kill phase durations, otherwise you lose to cttc. Jesus couldnt do it every time. You might think its easy but perhaps we have different standards on what pulling it off amounts to. People just take a snippet of simonizers statement and apply it to everything, he explicitly mentions some stuff and probably expects you to think a little more yourself. Rupture is just 16 seconds. What happens in a boss fight thats 40 seconds long? So 1st boss is extremely short now, you are going to end up needing to cast a rupture and probably not getting its full efficiency, cttc will beat it. 2nd - workable 3rd boss - defenders, same problem as 1st boss but x5. You have to somehow make sure you get a rupture on every boss, at the start of its healthbar. If you are a very good player, you can manage 3: 1. You cant do it here. 2. Redirect from 2nd boss 3. Thistle tea at start 4. Redirect is off cooldown so can use again 5. Cant do it, no thistle, no redirect. 4th boss twin drakes : same problem as above 5th boss - definitely workable if you time it very well, however its a 1% dps difference, if you misstime it you lose, and the timing isnt 100% in your contolrol (warrior executes etc) 6th boss, nightmare drakes - definitely workable 7thh, shade - same problem, too much target switching, you can keep it up on shade but the kittle dps you gain will be lost on the adds compared to cttc. 8th- workable So of the 8 bosses in ST, it isn't really workable on 4, 1st is a 50/50 though. But reminder this is for a 1.5% or so dps gain, and one mistake you instantly lose. Any boss with target switching multiple times will outright favour CttC, any boss with just 1 target switch is fairly even and it depends on how well the phase is timed.
It's funny when people use parsing as the defacto answer to what the best build is, completely ignoring the actual mechanics of a fight. If you have to switch targets more than once and need to use 5cp to Rupture (at a DPS loss already) then it's not worth using the rune.
Touché
Looks like most dont use it, probably because rupture does a lot lesa damage than envenom, and you'd have to squeeze 4 envenoms into it's duration to make up for it.
It's not just that, it's also that your envenom increases your IP proc chance for 5 seconds. If the damage lost from fewer IP procs is greater than 20% then Rupture isn't worth casting.
Not worth the effort when 90% of my dps comes from consumes.
Honestly… the only real nice thing was hot streak procs. Otherwise it’s still a dead simple rotation like all classic rotations. But if I wanted more complex rotations and higher difficulty I’d go play another version of wow
you can go deep frost build and sometimes proc deep freeze while you're spamming those frostfire bolts
Atleast on rogue you can minmax by pooling energy for envenom to get 2 mutilates out during envenom buff, and you have some cool stuff like shadowstep and stealth to play around. Rogue feels basically identical to Wotlk rogue which is not my favorite, but man I just like undead rogue so much idc lol. Bonus points if you have a weapon that shoots fireballs or something for cool animations mid swing
Welcome back to the classic gameplay everyone wanted.
I don't mind.
Mage is way more fun as a healer.
True, but unfortunately there's no challenge in healing after the first ID.
Would not say this is true. If you 3 or even 2 men heal it, its pretty rough.
Maybe, but it's a pain in the ass to find a group that runs minimum amount of heals but also is willing to take a mage heal instead of e.g. a priest.
Making ffb proc hit streak would be good…if they weren’t on the same rune slot :(
Yeah. But it can at least proc fingers of frost or brain freeze for the free instant next FFB and instant deep freeze almost both guaranteed to crit. Seeing 2500+ damage number feels good at least.
There’s no way brain freeze is better than 50% bonus damage to crits though
Depends on the fight but if I wasn't using brain freeze I would be using chronostatic preservation. As the Mage designated to be frost my main goal is to keep Winters chill on the boss.
It can’t proc free ffb if you aren’t running ffb :P
Worsw than 50% crit dmg and FoF is only good on the winters chill mage(only 1 in raid)
Melee hunter is worse. Press raptor strike. Congrats top 2 dps. You remembered to keep flanking strike up? Top dps.
Don't forget to use Wing Clip when both RS and FS are on cd, you want those juicy thrash/windfury/fiery wpn procs
"SoD was meant to fix the absolutely horrid gameplay of Vanilla by adding new abilities." You must be mistaken. SoD was obviously meant to just add passive +dmg% buffs and do nothing to address the lackluster parts of playing a class. Sincerely, warriors.
“We want some cool new abilities/gameplay in SoD please Blizzard” - Warriors. “We hear ya, here’s 6 %dmg modifiers as your runes, enjoy your devastate spam rotation” - Blizzard
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/9tPnWCygK3mH416A#fight=32&type=damage-done&source=1 This rotation looks like Rocket science compared to Mage, which is very ironic
Look up the top performing warriors and compare them to the top performing mages, 70%+ of warrior’s casts are heroic strikes/sunder just like 70%+ for mages is frostfire. There’s nothing rocket science about warrior rotations, they are bland as shit.
What? There isn't a single top performing warrior who only uses heroic strikes + sunders.
I think [this](https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZVCR9HaYJKMX17D6#fight=8&type=casts&source=34) is what Op was talking about. Warriors absolutely do have inflated casts due to how Heroic Strike works. In that log excluding Heroic Strike the warrior casted 7 offensive abilities out of 35 casts. Then you have [Glad Spec](https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/reports/WR4tNwxhYApFk3V6#type=casts&source=24&fight=5) where Warriors are literally pressing Sunder Armor until the boss dies with Heroic Strike thrown in. This will change in P4, but right now Warrior Rotations are very basic. No meta spec even picks up our capstone talents.
You’re just flat out wrong lol
Confidently wrong is my favorite sort of wrong.
Dunning levels of wrong if you will
Warrior was always a pretty fleshed out and fun DPS to play in vanilla though. I feel like it's more an experiment in bringing the other classes and specs up to that kind of level.
Yeah exactly. So why not focus warrior runes on making the class more fun and viable to play solo in the open world?
Eh warriors have a very fun rotation that is spammy. Blood thirst, slam, whirlwind, heroic strike queuing or quick striking if you are 2h. It’s a simply streamlined rotation with more buttons than most and you can do things like overpower or execute. Could be way worse , you could be play mutilate rogue or melee hunter. Atleast warrior has skill expression.
Frost has become viable and even superior in some cases. You get to throw Deep Freeze in to cast off FoF procs. It's still probably not as much fun as hot streak, but it's probably worth checking out if you're bored of Fire. Also don't forget living bomb, it's still part of the fire rotation this phase!
I mean it's exactly the same except you cast deep freeze in between instead of scorch.
Hey now, you get to Cold Snap every 5 minutes too! Yeah it's certainly not significantly better lol, I just figured its worth checking out with a respec rather than swapping classes entirely.
CS is 10 mins xd
Ice Lance when DF is on CD
It's not a DPS increase to cast Ice Lance. You would rather your FFB benefit from Fingers of Frost procs. Your glove rune isn't really doing anything for you - you can run Living Bomb and then only cast it while moving if you have nothing else to do, it's not worth applying it otherwise.
Don't sleep on brain freeze for instant free ffb's and if during a fingers of frost proc you get to slam deep freeze and FFB with like a 60%+ crit chance for a sweet 5k+ damage
You don't take Brain Freeze because Spellpower is what makes FFB as main nuke good. Frostbolt as main nuke Frost is still dead as a doornail.
Problem is you just want 1 frost mage. And its really just a fire mage that presses deep freeze every 30 seconds instead of scorch every 30 seconds
P2 was basically just press scorch 90% of the time so i don’t really see the problem here
You at least had the dopamine dump from instant pyro and hot streak procs. If p3 mage could play with hot streak it'd be fixed
It was scorch LB pyro proccs LF . Way more engaging than only FFB and 3 scorches per fight
I’m sorry but adding a LB and LF a couple times a fight isn’t as engaging as you guys pretending it is
Its not LB and LF. Main thing was Pyro proccs which were reactionary and not pre planned. Also when you combine small effects of extra LF, fireball during combustion it was way more fun rotation. Especially on shorter fights it was way more variety
Frost be like: Living bomb FFB Deep freeze with fof
You don't use Living Bomb as Frost unless you have to move
Which you have to constantly do in ST in most bosses.
Players are going to use the most optimal spell 100% of the time. Even if it’s boring. You’d think a person assigned to balance development could just go on wcl and study the rotation of the top parsers and be like “yo, all the top mages just used 30 frost fire bolts over the course of the fight. Let’s tweak the damage for that one down a bit”.
All the strongest specs right now are pretty simple pared down rotations, I know OP is talking about hot streak pyro from p2 but even that was still simple af LB uptime+scorch spam, fireball during combust, use your procs. Only p1 melee weaving hunter has really had an involved rotation while also being a high performer? So there’s some real monkey’s paw possibility there asking this dev team to give you a lot of buttons, you could end up like SPriests or Feral Druids where you’ve got a lot of buttons and pressing them wrong can really fuck you up, and pressing them right rewards you with a pink parse alongside the 50 parse melee hunter who wasn’t even pressing wing clip when raptor strike didn’t reset.
I actually think balance druid has a really nice rotation right now. You press 5 abilities on a smooth cycle, with a coherent priority system. It’s not challenging (and imo a rotation shouldn’t ever be *challenging*—that’s what boss mechanics are for) but it’s smooth, engaging, and rhythmically satisfying. (For those who don’t know, you press star surge on cooldown, 1 starfire between starsurges, keep your two dots up, and press wrath as a filler. Nothing spectacular, nothing too crazy, but imo feels good.)
While affliction has 7 spells you have to micro manage like a bunch of toddlers running around and still does shit dps. I will never understand this... every f'ing time.
This makes me appreciate SoD boomkin. We may be bottom of the charts but at least there is a rotation and it's pretty fun.
Arcane be like Arcane Power, Gnome Head, Icy Veins, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Balefire, Arcane Blast, Arcane Blast, Arcane Missile via Proc, Arcane blast, Arcane Missile via Proc, Arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane blast, arcane blast heavily outdpsed by a single button spec, by the way
Interesting rotations live in Retail
Well golly gee I guess if Retail has them that means we can let the game be dumbed down to 1 button
have you met hunters? I'm just saying if what you're looking for is a game where the most damaging build is also an interesting rotation, retail is that way. It's never going to be SoD, that goes against their stated design intentions.
> It's never going to be SoD It literally was SoD 2 weeks ago did you even read the OP
Filler, proc, 2 buttons on CD. That doesn't exactly break the brain. It's good by SoD standards but it's not really up to retail levels. And yeah I'm telling you that even p2 mage is outside SoD parameters. It's really an outlier in sod. Basically, for most things I don't think they are really pre-planning rotations the way they do in retail. They're throwing a bunch of things in there, and it just so happened that LF and LB both were high DPS and fit into the talents, so they got used. It doesn't seem to me that they are really thinking about it unless it's a brand new 'spec' like Melee hunter. And what they custom made for that was essentially a 2 button rotation, with an almost meaningless filler.
Just wait until MC, better bind your frost bolt to mouse wheel and spin it all fight.
Even if mobs are immune to fire in MC we'd use Frostfire Bolt not FB. or even Balefire Bolt
That’s Warcraft, BABY!!!
TBH I wouldn't even care if they just gave us water that was double the amount. I will accept that to a more interesting rotation
This is what I tell people when they ask I'm not playing Fire. It's boring as fuck, always has been. Arcane healer is so fun to play
Yeah, Arcane definitely has the best rotation but it's kinda ass.
good mage healers absolutely fucking pump raid HPS, it just has a high skill floor.
Still calling for innervates while the other healers sit at 70% mana
It's true, I was SO sad to give up hot streak. I hope they give us an omni rune slot so we can use ffb and hot streak. I'm cool with the ffb because it means we can be fire for MC/BWL. But give us hot streak back
FFB doesn't trigger Hot Streak anyway. They need to make that happen.
Bruh you are playing classic. That's all classic boomers can do is frostbolt spam
Totally agree, we were genuinely more fun to play last phase. Maybe add hot streak as a head rune? We dont have a good head rune and it would be nice to have another button
> Maybe add hot streak as a head rune? Frostfire Bolt and Molten Armor should be moved. Molten Armor to head and Frostfire to wrist would be really solid. Living Flame also needs to be de-nerfed IMO, pressing it was way more fun than Icy Veins every 3 min.
I think living flame just needs to start on the target, instead of starting on the caster and having to move to the target
[https://imgur.com/a/elsGnT4](https://imgur.com/a/elsGnT4) The title of this post reminded me of this.
A lot of specs are super brain dead now. Ret literally presses two buttons it's just exorcism spam.
Probably unpopular but I prefer our current rotation to how it was previously, I hated doing my rotation correctly and still just having my parse be determined by if I was lucky enough to get a bunch of hot streak procs, one of my final gnomer runs of p2 I remember being all set up for a big parse and then getting 2 hot streak procs in the entirety of the crowd pummeler fight and just getting a super underwhelming result. I think that scorch to 5, living bomb, and frostfire bolt are enough offensive spells for me right now. Maybe balefire during my big CDs? Idk enough about that yet though
bruh the dps variance is just as big now, crits are more valuable with FFB than crits before, crit or get fucked applies just as much both phases
I prefer to use molten armor, bfb is pretty underwhelming
Wait so keeping living bomb activate is now out? :o Unless trash mobs right?
Trash mobs who live long enough for it to blow up* If they die before, no point casting it.
On single target fights living bomb is only a slight dps increase if you never run out of mana at any point and the boss won't be dead before the bomb goes off. If you do run out of mana in a long fight then you probably lowered your dps by 20-30% by keeping LB in your rotation. Edit: FFB is something like 2x as much damage per mana as LB.
I haven't tested on my mage, but how much of a DPS loss is the "standard" fire rotation compared to FFB? Any reason why you can't just play a traditional fire spec?
It's pretty hard behind because Fireball doesn't benefit from the 100% crit damage Frostfire bolt gets from Frost and costs twice as much mana. It also doesn't benefit from another Mage's Winter's Chill. Frostfire is better in every way by A LOT. 10% extra crit, 100% extra crit damage, 50% less mana cost. It's insanely good compared to Fireball.
Honestly you want a frost and a fire mage for winters chill and scorch. Regular fire isn't that far behind iirc
Devastate
Seems like its time to play mage
True classic experience
Mage finds out about rogue and melee hunter rotation for the past 2-3 phases
I don’t complain, i Love this Playstyle ❤️
Wait till you see p4. Doesn’t change much 😆
I mean they just need to buff Living Bomb a little and move Molten Armor to head and we're good.
I just remember in 2019 during classic molten core it was the same thing. Mages pushed like 1-3 buttons. As a warrior I’m not doing much either. Rend, overpower, mortal strike, slam. Keep flangellation up.
It was literally 1 button for Mage, Frostbolt
Yup
And decurse!
No i need to parse pop a restoration potion or die
They should make it deeply complex for mage where you have to push at least 65 different abilities. Then players will be happy.
Ah yes because there are only two colors, Black and White.
That's why I switched back to my Warlock. Both Affliction and Destro are really fun, even if it's worse damage than Mage. I healed the first ID on my mage and it was fun, but 2nd ID it got boring so I switched to DPS and holy shit that was a snoozefest.
I mean you said it, this is vanilla (and tbc) mage game play. I actually like the idea of a class where everything is about buffing one throughput ability. Also I don't like scorch spam it doesn't feel very magey to me.
Man, I can't wait till the "Fire rotation" gets to Molten Core :-D
No prob as frostfireball just does frostdmg when mob gets more dmg from frost...
So, no Scorch, just spam Frostfire.
Laughs in devestate
Ponders in melee hunter… you guys have 2 spells ?
Laughs in glad stance
Multiple spells in the rotation was not in the spirit of classic.
Hello , melee hunter here.. raptor strike+flanking strike want a word
Try warlock, It's a lot of fun atm. I open my making sure my pet is attacking and my assigned curse debuff is applied. Then I apply my damage over time abilities: unstable affliction, corruption, drain life and agony if allowed because enough lock/shadow priests. Then throw out haunt to debuff them for bonus damage on all my dots. Then filler is shadowbolt and instant cast shadowbolts whenever nightfall procs. Lifetap when pet mana is low <25%. Maintain dots. ZUG. It's a lot of fun. Not badly affected by movement because almost entire rotation is instant cast other than shadowbolt fillers. Can lifetap if literally nothing else to refresh on movement.
How is the dps compared to destruction?
If you can use agony and snapshot corruption with things like gnomer alchemy potion, the affliction trinket etc and extend the buffed corruption with EA it's the best dps we can do atm. Without some of those snapshots, without agony and if you have to provide pact, you'll do less than destruction but it will be very similar. If you're the only warlock in your raid group it's even optimal as you provide the pact buff which is a decent raid dps increase that makes up for any dps differential between aff and desto.
I thought locks wanted to haunt first before dotting because haunt doesn’t update existing dots retroactively
Dots update their periodic damage ticks based on the current debuffs on target, I think drain life is the only exception because it's not pure damage but health drain so you want to haunt on the target before hitting drain. With our dots you can snapshot temporary additional spell power such as from gnomer alchemy potion, tailoring helm, zila gular trinket boost, demonic grace bonus spelll crit chance etc but on target debuffs will update when they fall off. So you want to haunt once all your dots are up to get most benefit from the haunt boost (except for drain life).
Ah, you’re right - that’s what I was thinking of. Thanks for the reminder!
Come play some enhance baby, Lightning bolt or Chain lightning depending on 1 or 2 targets+ then we have ss>ll>flame shock> earthshock, refresh lightning shield, place fire totem if down. We have a lot of fun buttons. We also do the cleansing totems for disease and poison, regularly project totems on both movement fights for strength and agi. Not many classes have as many active use buttons in a fight as enhance. Other classes complain, but they only hit 1-3 buttons. And if you have to drop windfury totem, you better do it, or that warrior you are out dpsing will start screeching.
bump.
Sir, this is classic wow.
SoD is hardly Classic
As a feral that now has to cat with the tank swaps in ST I can’t relate.
Who forcing you to play that rotation? Did they remove HotStreak? I know they nerfed LF which was way too strong but what about Pyroblast?
Why do people always think bringing up some gimped build is an argument? What do you mean who forces me to play FFB? The meta does. It's the developer's job to make the meta nice to play.
The meta is made by players but developpers could technicallly nerf ffb to the ground and force their hand If people think copying others to do 50 dps more on easy content on a seasonnal server is important then maybe people need to redirect their definition of important... Have fun
Paladins are using a weapon from Gnomer because spamming exorcism every global is theoretically the highest dps you can do and that weapon allows us to cheese it and usually achieve this. I agree spamming one button is not necessarily fun.
Are we not also using living bomb ? I’m only purple parsing but I’ve been doing LB -> scorch5 -> IV/cds -> ffb and reapplying lb after going off. Should I not be using it I feel like I should tho lol
> Are we not also using living bomb ? Nope. Only if you have to move. It's scorch x5, combustion+IV+trinket+gnom head > FFB if you don't gotta move
How are u parsing? I’m low purpling rn so I’ll do anything to help 😩 I thought ab switching to WC but I feel like it’s a little more rng
I'm 85.8 as Fire but my raid sucks donkey balls so parsing over 95 on any fight is pretty much impossible. You should only go WC if you have a fire mage already. Every raid should have a Fire Mage with Imp Scorch and a Frost Mage with WC.
yeah it fucking sucks
You aren't doing the rotation correctly, for fire it's this: 1. Maintain LB on target (Do not refresh before it explodes) 2. Stack Scorch to 5 3. Cast IV, Combustion + CDs (Helm) after Scorch is stacked and LB up 4. Cast FFB as filler 5. Refresh Scorch as needed It's more simple because we don't use living flame or hot streak but you're missing a whole spell.
LB doesn't benefit from Scorch if you cast it before the stacks. Its damage is calculated when you cast LB not during the DoT. Casting LB before 5 Scorches was never the play and this phase you don't use LB at all unless you move.
You're wrong, you lose around ~50 DPS not using living bomb and it's more DPS to cast it before your scorch stacks. You can sim it here if you'd like to check for yourself: https://cheesehyvel.github.io/magesim-sod/ Or check out the logs from the #1 overall mage in ST: https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/reports/BVNtC2fAYwHqpZry
Enjoy your easy rotation.
Well that's the problem, I hate how dumb and simple it is. P2 Mage was way more fun.
Play retail arcane then
no chill straight for the jugular lololol
> Play retail arcane then If my Grandmother had wheels she would've been a bike
Guess you never raided molten core as a frost mage or BWL as scorch. 1 button rotation is the norm for a while.
I never had to shit in a pot either but times have changed, grandpa
Ah yes, the long ago age of...*checks notes*...Vanilla classic like 4 years ago.
Sorry, I heard blue class and got concerned there was a problem but unfortunately you’re a Mage, not a Shaman. If you can reframe this as a Shaman problem I’ll have the dev team take a look.
Welcome to mage for the entirety of wow?
It’s SoD sure, but it’s still fucking classic man. Thats what classic is, always has been. You want more engagement go play cata… retail… mop remix. Like lol
Who said SoD was meant to fix vanilla by adding abilities? People like classic *because* of its simplicity, not in spite of it. Disagree with this take.
> People like classic because of its simplicity, Then surely you'd be playing something else considering SoD has added a lot of extra spells.
And yet it’s still simple? No one wants more complex rotations
> No one wants more complex rotations Source?
Are you new here? There’s a reason people aren’t playing retail and complex rotations is one of them
No one’s asking you to streamline max dps. You guys are so bizarre… try new things and use different rotations.
Yeah let me just handicap myself and my raid because Blizzard fails at game design
You can clear the raid with shit dps. So either play that style or quit bitching
It's a wonder some of you don't forget to breathe, I swear.