Saturday, August 2, 2008

Suggestions: Iteration Two

Arcane:

Spell Impact - Leave as Damage increase instead of Critical Strike chance increase. Two of the six spells get marginal improvement through additional crit. Consider adding Barrage to this talent.

Arcane Shielding - Mana Shield need revision; it's hard to really discuss this talent, but the secondary component does not scale particularly well. (the +20 resists)

Improved Blink - Consider changing to a flat reduction in damage instead of chance to miss. Trim unnecessary RNG where you can or you create superfluous randomness in PvP. This talent in general isn't optimal and could stand to be improved further.

Magic Attunement - Add Blink as a spell to benefit from this talent.

Arcane Potency - Clumsy and generally odd talent. Players tend to dislike the "one shot" aspect of PoM Pyro specs, but more than that, the current incarnation has odd mechanics where you can simply leave PoM up and cast only instants and channeled spells. I'm not sold on this talent not being a subtalent to Clearcasting -- I think Clearcasting just needs to cost less points.

Mind Mastery - 15% for 5 talents is too little. If this talent's effect is going to be reduced, convert to a 3/3 and at least let the 2 other talent points provide some additional utility.

Slow - Talent still needs significant improvement to be worthy of being a 41 point talent. Consider making a targettable AoE, improve in some other way, or replace. Deep Arcane looks primarily to be a raiding talent tree -- most of the PvP specs terminate 28 points or 33 points deep in the tree and if Arcane is to become a more viable PvP tree, it's going to take improvements to this talent and some additional survivability deep in the Arcane tree.

Incanter's Absorption - I'm at a loss on this talent. It's generally unusuable with Mana Shield due to the huge mana cost of Mana Shield, but with Shatter Shield gone and the inability to couple this with Ice Barrier, this talent just isn't likely to be fueled by absorption effects. Granted, we do have Wards, but these are of only mild utility in both PvP and PvE. Even in a raid environment where we are taking a predictable source of Fire or Frost damage, the damage return for spending a GCD on a Ward in conjunction with this talent is generally not worth it. (Unless we would have used the Ward anyway) I think at 20% for two points with some significant improvements to Mana Shield this might have legs, but right now, it's a hard talent to sell to players.

Missiles Barrage - Is there a reason why both Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage cannot proc this? It would simply things a bit...

Barrage Coefficient - Unsure what to think. I would say to consider a weak secondary effect if you want to bring this talent out more in PvP. (Deals additional damage to targets with Mana Bars, anti haste, ignores immunities, etc) However, I like the purity of this talent as just a damage tool -- If Arcane Blast debuff became 4 seconds instead of 5, this would indirectly perhaps solve the PvE side of the problem with this spell.

Frost

Tier 1 Frost - The new Ice Floes is appreciated and helps Elementalist specs feel like they're dumping fewer points into pointless talents. Read next though...

Improved Frost Ward - This talent, while it continues to be moderately improved, is only taken in very Deep Frost PvP specs despite being a Tier 1 talent. Even 44 Frost PvP specs will not take this talent as there are simply other talents more necessary. This should thus be moved further down the tree and a new talent can quite safely occupy its position. (Put this on Tier 4)

Improved Blizzard - I still feel this should be 1 point for 60% reduction. This talent would be a great asset in more specs, but normally, there are simply not the points to spend on it.

Cold as Ice - This should be rolled into Ice Floes and Ice Floes can simply read -20% off all Frost Cooldowns. It's kind of ridiculous to spend 5 talent points on all of this and doesn't feel like a "fun" or efficient way to spend talent points. (Especially because you hardly feel the effect of talents like this unless you're min/maxing in PvE)

Shattered Barriers - Hard to know without testing, but this must not break CC, and should not be on Frost Nova DR.

Fingers of Frost - This is a REALLY disappointing change. Winter's Grasp was an awesome mechanic. Consider bring it back in some form. WG really made the class feel much more fun to play as you reacted to WG procs and used a greater variety of spells. Consider old WG at 4 seconds duration?

Improved Water Elemental - This doesn't really feel like it fits the class very well. Mages have no healing abilities, and all of a sudden we get this strange raid heal that depends on our very fragile pet? This is perhaps a fine talent if the WE gets some increased survivability, but as it stands, it's just weird and sort of bad.

Frozen Core - Still terrible and needs to go. Pushback prevention please! Icy Veins is not enough and even with dispel resistance in Arcane Tier 1, can be pretty easily removed. Frost Mages NEED anti-pushback.

Brain Freeze - Allow FrostfireBolt in addition (or instead of) Fireball. Change the name! (It makes no sense with what it does) FFb also has some nice synergy with Chilled to the Bone that Fireball totally lacks. (And would allow the two talents to work at least sort of with each other)

Fire

I don't know where to begin with this tree. =p

Incineration - Why these four spells? I'm just not seeing the connection. And why is it called Incineration? This is pretty much a PvP talent even though Elementalist PvE specs will take this and enjoy the modest benefit to Scorch.

Burning Determination - I don't like this talent. If you're trying to cast a Polymoprh and are interrupted, you can't cast it again for a few seconds anyways, and when you can, your opponents probably won't have an interrupt for it. (Barring Shamans) Moreover, most classes have a secondary non-interrupt way of interrupting spell casting. (Gouge, Kidney, Spell Reflect, Bash, Scatter Shot, it goes on) I'm not really sure how you improve this talent and keep it in the same vein as the current iteration.

Impact - Trim to few points.

Pyroblast - This is an important 11 point talent that has failed to be meaningful since release. This talent has depended on 21 points in Arcane forever and while there have been some attempts to make it more useful with strange (and bad) Deep Fire talents, the spell remains a novelty. The solution for this spell is simple: Short Cast time. Medium Cooldown. Think Mind Blast. Ditch the gimmick talents and archaic ridiculous cast time.

Blastwave - Keep the small knockback. It doesn't particularly complicate AoEing.

Playing with Fire - 2/4/6% or bust.

Blazing Speed - A lot of people want a 2s immunity to new roots/snares on this. I'm not sure I really care. I'd like to see this become 20% chance for 2/2 for 4 seconds. (Reduce the impact of RNG)

Combustion - I've always felt this was far and away the weakest of our 31 point talents. It is extremely clunky in PvP (and easily dispelled once you get it going) and while this was more like a 2.5-3% DPS improvement in PvE back in Vanilla WoW, it is approaching sub 2% now. Consider some marginal improvement. (All fire spells cost no mana while active perhaps)

Fiery Payback - This is just dumb. A fire mage below 35% is a soon to be dead fire mage. If you want to add some marginal survivability to fire, this has to be more Cheat Death-ish. Something like: When below 35% health, all damage taken is reduced by 50% and increases your chance to resist dispel effects by 60% for 6 seconds. (1 min CD) Change the name obviously. Basically a fire mage would wait for this to proc, get a safe IB (with dispel resistance), and instead of trying to live out hypothermia to his second IB, he'd be trying to live till this 1min CD reset. Or something.

Firestarted - Make it any fire spell not just Flamestrike.

Burnout - Needs improvement. Maybe tweak it to take advantage of or increase the damage of Ignite.

Living Bomb - Nobody wants a 51 point talent that's used for gimmick PvE encounters and for clearing trash.

This is just a copy of my latest whining which can be found on the Beta forums.

1 comment:

Sancus said...

I'd just like to know which changes are real and which are web dev screwing up again.