I can't speak for anyone else, but I play WoW to save lives and keep population growth under control. When I look upon a man in the real world, he simply falls over and dies. Women orgasm uncontrollably and spew babies until I leave their sight. To protect the world from this devastation (and unite all peoples within our nation), I entirely avoid human contact unless a girl is really hot or some sort of halfsie.
With that out of the way, I've had a lot of people ask me about why I'm playing 0/38/23 aside from the very obvious reason that I'm gay for Pigvomit. So, here we go:
In 5s
We like to harass mages heavily against most matrices. We put DPS and mana burns on the mage early on and most teams return the favor. While in season 1, most priests stuck to trying to mana burn each other and thus "protect" the rest of their mana using teammates from burns, this doesn't work out too well because the priest runs off gets a few drink ticks and is just back to burning. It seems most teams spread the burns around a bit more or burn DPS classes hoping that if you can get early burns on DPS and outheal their early damage, they'll never really be able to mount a second offensive. (It's generally pretty much true)
While avoiding dieing as Water Elemental in these situations is relatively easy, you don't do very much damage under focus fire, almost zero if a hunter or felguard is involved. Teams have taken to killing Water Elementals extremely fast and the old days where your pet would pump out 10-15k dmg unnoticed are long gone. While a WE mage has considerably better damage than 38/23 untouched, the ability to get mini distance with blazing speed to peck with scorch or get out polymorphs is huge. Generally, I find my CC abilities much easier as 38/23 as it's harder to lock me down. Blazing speed also means that short of entrapment or lucky resnares, I'm going to be tanking significantly less damage than the Water Elemental mage on the other team. A 38/23 mage is also extremely adept at killing opposing WE, either witch scorch-> fireblast-> bwave-> AE (if necessary) or with just fireblast-> bwave -> AEx2. I generally tend to AE to kill Water Elementals, but that a whole separate topic. ^^
Basically, my thought is that when going up against a team with a WE mage, while he's in theory much better suited to 5s than you, you're able to counter his advantages quite well and you practically force them to pursuing a less "optimal" target. (I really think pressuring mages equals win most the time honestly)
As for how you actually play the spec, it's hard to do that in an article format, but I'll just bullet out a few thoughts:
- You're mobile, have fast casts, and can change targets well with decent mini-burst through scorch->fireblast. (Add Bwave or AE as necessary) This makes you very competent at assisting for pet kills or taking out Water Elementals. A lot of teams put this responsibility on their shaman, you should assume this responsibility as 38/23.
- Crowd control more. Remember when you used to play Arcane/Frost in season one and did nothing but sheep for extended periods of time. That works well still.
- Blazing speed is great, but be careful not to outrange heals or overextend chasing with it. (I do a lot still >.<)
- Focus on the team oriented side of the game. Take out totems, control healers, sheep juggle. Again, shift defensive responsibilities away from your ele shaman -- he needs to pick up the slack in damage. (You're really just changing who is doing damage in a sense)
- Imp Scorch is huge, but you clearly can't scorch someone 5 times in a row lol. Get scorches off when you can if only to get the debuff up. Worst case he gets dispelled, no big loss.
- Blastwave snare is extremely good. Use it early to burn trinkets.
- Do not even bind Cone of Cold above rank 1. Only use rank 1 CoC. Mana is a seriously problem with this spec, you cannot afford max rank Cone of Colds. You can tweak the expect to get Imp CoC and MoE, but it's not really a 5s spec at that point.
- When heroism is up, you can actually cast fireball, do not even bother if you're getting harassed or the target can potentially get LoS, but fireball does huge damage especially because it is non-improved on targets with a bunch of scorch stacks.
- If you're assisting on DPS, scorch and immediately fireblast on targets above 80%, then scorch until they're lower saving fireblast for hopefully when they briefly dip to below 20%.
- If you're on a target with MS up and low health but receiving heals, switch to a fireball. While it's tempting to be pumping 1300 scorches into that target at 2500 hp, they seem to miraculously survive a lot -- they won't if they're sub 20% when the fireball lands.
- Combustion is extremely difficult to use effectively. I still am clueless. I pretty much wait till I think we have a good chance of taking down a target and a CS is landed and trinket+combustion, scorch-> fireblast-> bwave -> fireball. Obviously you have to adapt to LoS and the situation.
- The focus meta gem is great for this spec -- I need it. ^^
- Even though the damage output feels pretty weak, 1k scorches do matter and you're a good damage threat on fully stacked targets.
- You have to be meticulous about getting OOC to drink or finding a time to get a good evocate. Always make ruby and emerald and use first stone very early. Mana is a huge issue for this spec.
That's all I can come up with for now. I don't think the spec is as strong as Water Elemental in 5s, but I think its oddly effective against some of the most common matrices and strategies being currently used. I haven't really dueled with it much, although I'm fairly certain that I couldn't win against any top opponents except warriors with much reliability. ^^
In BGs, I play it just how you would have played 28/23 back in wow 1.0 except I find that I don't use r1 frostbolt very much at all. It's refreshingly potent in BGs where you face less resilience (and fuck you to any rogues who think resilience hits rogues hardest); honestly, I find my greatest challenge with the spec in most situations is my inability to survive hypothermia without the 2 Ice Barriers you'd have as frost. If you look at my spec, I play a slightly weird variant of this spec currently, I'm still undecided as to what exactly you "need" from Frost.
15 comments:
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this spec in 3s and 2s. I tried it in 2s and it didn't go very well!
I've started to notice that other teams are learning to kill my WE asap. I'm not sure if I should not bring it out so early and perhaps save it for middle game.
I also heard a rumor blizz is thinking of nerfing the WE to reduce frost pvp burst. I really hope they don't for the very reason WEs are pretty easy to kill.
Anyway about your baller spec. People are constantly saying how fire is gimped in pvp but it definitely has a place in 5s if done correctly. Seems like it would be worth a go.
Unfortunately, Blazing Speed's benefits dont last. When people realise its whats keeping you hard to kill, and if you are as much of a threat as you say you are (which I think is actually doubtful, no offense intended) they'll assist you the same way people assist priests - purge/dispel heavily to remove blazing speed, and all of a sudden you're tanking as much damage as any other mage without imp blink, without ice barrier, etc etc.
That, plus, as you mentioned, mana is such a huge issue with the spec that you get rendered pretty useless if you take some early mana burns, which you will if you try to do your job with any degree of effectiveness.
If you want to go fire just go AP/fire raddy, anything else is just not baller :<
The issue is not so much that you're going to always have blazing speed up or anything. It just gets you a few steps that can often be an enabler in polying that warrior off you or getting back out of LoS. I also think that there's a bit of a blessing of freedom "metagame" (lol) that Blazing Speed is very advantageous within. Normally if you keep poly off your war, while he's freedomed, he's doing considerable damage to his target, but on a mage with B. Speed, the mage potentially escapes wasting a lot of the freedom time. Also, in 5s, mages, even when you focus them are not the easiest class to purge/dispel due to range issues.
As for the whole mana burn thing, I'd argue that 38/23 is way more potent when oom than WE. Blazing speed to stay alive when you don't have mana to blink, impact to potentially reduce the damage you're taking from that freedomed warrior, and the ability to still go good damage with what little you have to targets in execute range.
I think the challenge really is how to use combustion effectively to get good "burst" out of the spec and whether this is really even possible. You're definitely right that 38/23 isn't as much an offensive threat at other specs and that alone might make the spec unsuccessful at the highest levels of play.
I've tried using combustion a little early than I needed and hoping to get a non-crit scorch or two so that I'd more "reliably" get good on demand burst...but this is bad as you often just waste one of the charges on one of those casts.
"As for the whole mana burn thing, I'd argue that 38/23 is way more potent when oom than WE. Blazing speed to stay alive when you don't have mana to blink, impact to potentially reduce the damage you're taking from that freedomed warrior, and the ability to still go good damage with what little you have to targets in execute range."
My point wasn't that WE spec outperforms 38/23 when OOM, it was that its much harder to get a WE specced mage to the point of being OOM in the first place. And frankly, the majority of the time you dont really need to get distance to sheep a war off you, you just need to fake cast it right and abuse trinket properly.
That and I honestly think if the other team doesn't instarape your elemental you do more dmg when under pressure via the elemental alone than with 38/23.
Anyway my main point was. GO AP/FIRE OR YOU ARE NOT BALLER K. THINK OF MAKOPLUX. And me.
makoplux died in round 1 of emoing out and quitting wow. we are now in round 2.
Shouldn't you be working rad? I see a lot of blogging.
Thanks mom. I can multitask. Besides there's huge drama afoot, that's top priority!
You know I love you kzn, but I think DB is WAY more baller.
There is a control aspect that I really dig with this spec (spec'd it last night to do some BGs as EVERYONE in my arena teams on my mage have quit the game recently), and I'm gay for your blog like you're gay for pigvomit. Control as in, no reliance on a pet for burst.
I pretty much went with your strat with using Combustionm I'd drop a Scorch, then trinket+Combustion, Scorch, Scorch, Fireblast, Blastwave and just kind of look longingly up at my buff bar to see if those charges were still there.
Killing warlocks in this spec, or rather dying to them, is much more frustrating. But every time I hit release I just remind myself that everyone is dying to them.
The Skyfire diamond is a definite must, dropping that beast halfcast fireball during my Combustion series is a lot of fun. Need to make some gratiutous videos of halfcast Pyroblasting undergeared players in BGs...
Did you max Ice Shards for Icelance use on nova'd targets when you're on the run? I decided to go the Frostbite route now that whenever you're using CoC it's always Rank 1. And Rank 1 FB is still leet.
OK I'm biased :<
I think 0/40/21 and variants thereof are a scourge upon mages and should be avoided by every good mage. Dont sink to PV's level -.-
baller spec posts like these are why i prefer to read radikalnoise over any other wow-related blog. that, and all the other blogs are too fat and spanish looking.
I run in the mid 1800's so terrible, but we often have a UA lock with us. When we have seen fire mages(or one's not running Ice Barrier), we usually get JoJ up on him and UA. Have you found in the top brackets that they are dealing with your blazing speed by that combo? Is it working right now more because no one expects it.
just seems like a flawed build to me but keep up the interesting articles about it.
Totally sweet. I've kinda stopped with the taking arena pvp seriously because it's kinda getting old, so I'm probably going to go in with 50/11 raiding pve spec with SLOW. Yes that's right. I want to use Slow and pom pyro on my 5s team. Well we don't play much anymore, but still. If anything, it'll be good survivability practice, I tend to get sloppy in that regard going game after game with no one trying to focus me.
I was briefly toying with the idea of using a UA lock to not only deflect focus fire from my arcane-ish self, but also to protect Slow casts so I can fuck with their team. Then I remember Slow can only be on one target. Whyyyy? Oh well, it should still be fun.
Come expansion I want to spec into Mortal Slow, and slow a whole GRIP of bitches.
40+ fire owns in bgs (especially if you have pocket heals) no need for shatter combos or 3 min pet for dmg. I spec it when I get bored and use my BALLER lightning capacitor with all those crit / fireblast scorches. GG btw frost still pwns fire though :(
"To protect the world from this devastation (and unite all peoples within our nation)"
Haha.
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