Empowered Fire is very happy to have renowned frost theorycrafter Lhivera guest post for us on the changes happening in Cataclysm. See, we don’t hate frost mages!

The Frost tree is undergoing some pretty significant evolution in the Cataclysm beta. While there are still significant changes to come, I thought I’d provide an overview of the changes as they stand so far.

Damage: It Doesn’t Matter Yet

Before going into details, I wanted to address this subject that keeps coming up in discussions: it is far too early to start worrying about whether Frost’s DPS is going to measure up to that of Arcane, Fire and other DPS specs. Blizzard has not even attempted to balance the numbers at this point. That’s generally something that happens toward the end of beta, and we’re nowhere near that yet.

What’s going on now is the process of creating a rotation that both works and feels right, using the right number of spells and a set of expected talents. They’re trying to make certain that Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt, Deep Freeze, Frostfire Orb and Ice Lance all fit into Frost’s DPS process gracefully. It doesn’t matter yet how much damage the rotation does, only that all these spells have a place in it.

If a spell performs too poorly to fit into the rotation, that’s a problem. If a spell performs so well that it drives other spells out of the rotation, that’s a problem. Getting them balanced with each other is the current task. Only after that, which may still be weeks away, will they begin worrying about balancing total DPS.

So You’ve Decided to Be a Frost Mage

At level 10, you get to select your primary tree. You immediately receive one passive effect and one active effect. Additional passive effects may be added later if needed.

Frost Specialization: This is our primary damage tuning knob. As of the current build, it is set to 25%, and simply increases the damage of every Frost spell (plus Frostfire Orb) by 25%. As we approach release, this number will almost certainly be adjusted up or down to bring our total DPS in line with that of other DPS specs. It can also be expected to be tweaked up or down over the course of the expansion to compensate for scaling differences.

Summon Water Elemental: You’re probably quite familiar with this spell already. But in Cataclysm, our Water Elemental gets a substantial upgrade: it is now a full-fledged pet. It lasts until killed, it despawns when you mount and respawns when you dismount, it survives transfer through instance portals, it even gets a full pet sheet in your character UI. It appears that Water Elementals will have randomly-determined names, like Warlock demons and Unholy Death Knight ghouls (currently, every Water Elemental is named “RandomPetName”).

Unlike the glyphed Water Elemental we have on the live servers, the new permanent Water Elemental retains its Freeze spell. It also has the new “Go To” command shared by all pets, which allows you to direct your Water Elemental to move to a specific location. All told, the Water Elemental will be a more integral part of our spec than it’s ever been before.

Mastery

In addition to the effects listed above, your Mastery bonus is also determined when you select the Frost tree. Unlike those effects, however, the Mastery bonus is not available until level 80, when you learn “Mastery” from the Mage trainer. This gives you 8 points of Mastery, which is increased by adding Mastery Rating on your gear.

Frostburn: Rather than quote the tooltip, which seems to confuse many people, I’m going to put it into my own words. When you hit a target with a Frostbolt, the Frostburn debuff is applied. The debuff lasts ten seconds. As long as the debuff lasts, every spell you hit the target with other than Frostbolt does extra damage. As long as you hit the target with a Frostbolt at least once every 10 seconds, the bonus will be active.

Many people wonder why Frostbolt doesn’t benefit from the debuff. The answer is that it’s meant to encourage you to cast spells other than Frostbolt. This requires increasing the damage of those spells relative to Frostbolt; Frostburn can’t accomplish that if it also buffs Frostbolt.

Significant Spell Changes

A few spells have changed in significant ways. These changes are partly designed to accommodate the removal of talents that affected them, and partly to make sure each has a place in our rotation.

Frostbolt: Frostbolt’s cast time has been reduced from 3.0 seconds, or 2.3 seconds fully talented, to 2.0 seconds. While coefficients seem to be very much in flux right now, as of the current build it seems to have the coefficient of a 2.5 second spell (71.43%). It will do less damage than it used to, but it casts significantly faster. It was necessary to reduce its per-cast damage relative to Ice Lance and Frostfire Bolt in order to make room for them in the rotation.

Ice Lance: Ice Lance has changed pretty dramatically. Currently, it does very low damage against unfrozen targets, with triple damage against frozen targets. Both aspects of this spell are changing: against unfrozen targets, it will do roughly twice the damage it does today, making it a more reasonable source of mobile DPS. Its damage is doubled against frozen targets rather than tripled; while the bonus is smaller, the total damage is higher because of the increase to its base damage.

Critical Strike Damage: A more general change is that all Mages (and all Warlocks) now get increased critical strike damage baked into the class. All of our spells now have a 33% damage bonus to total damage on crits, over and above the normal 50% bonus. This results in total crit damage of 199.5%.

The Talent Tree

There’s a lot of debate and strong feelings about the new, smaller talent trees. I won’t go into all the arguments here, but suffice to say that I like them. They still need some work, but they already provide more significant freedom of choice by far than the current, larger trees. Let’s look at the individual talents.

Early Frost: This talent simply reduces the cast time of one Frostbolt every 15 seconds from the base cast time of 2.0 seconds to 1.5 seconds. The effect simply resets every 15 seconds, whether you are casting or not. In PvP, this is probably intended to serve as a replacement for rank 1 Frostbolt (it’s not quite as fast, but it does full damage). In PvE, it’s a modest haste increase. It is not without problems, however; as it causes Frostbolt to hug the global cooldown while active, it can interfere with our casting rhythm, and in PvP it can interfere with closely-timed attacks when it activates at an inconvenient time. Ghostcrawler has hinted that this talent may change or be replaced, but that’s by no means certain.

Piercing Ice: A simple crit chance increase, valuable to every spec.

Shatter: While Shatter still greatly increases our critical strike chance against frozen targets, it now does so through a very different mechanic. Instead of simply adding 50% to our crit chance, it triples our crit chance. If your crit chance is 25%, it has exactly the same value as the live version. If less, then it has lower value; if more, it has higher value. This is an excellent change, as it greatly improves the value of crit rating to Frost.

Ice Floes: All the cooldown reductions from the old Ice Floes plus Cold as Ice are now rolled into a single 3-point talent, with the exception of the Water Elemental cooldown (but it’s permanent now, so that doesn’t matter as much). Cooldown reductions provide situational DPS increases; the fight has to be long enough to squeeze in an extra cast before it ends, but not so long that you would have received the extra cast anyway. But of course, it also provides more frequent use of utility spells.

Improved Cone of Cold: With the removal of Frostbite from the tree, this talent, along with the permanent Water Elemental’s Freeze spell, provides us with controlled ways to freeze targets for Shatter combos. And unlike Frostbite, they are safe in a raid build.

Piercing Chill: The obvious effect of this talent is that it allows you to snare three targets while casting Frostbolts at one of them. The first less-obvious effect of this talent, at least as it works now, is that this gives Frost a DPS increase in cleave situations. Each chill application has a chance to proc Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze. Three targets, three chill applications, and suddenly you have a 38.6% chance to proc these effects on each cast instead of a 15% chance. This may not be intended, and may be changed. The second less-obvious effect of this talent is that the chill effect is applied on cast instead of on hit. This is bad for soloing, because it means you pull your targets earlier than you would without the talent.

Permafrost: In Cataclysm, this talent retains its snare strength increase and its mortal strike effect. It loses its snare duration increase, and gains a healing effect for the Water Elemental, equal to 15% of the damage you deal. We’re not certain yet if raiding Mages will need this healing, and there’s been some good beta feedback suggesting that the healing be burstier (but less consistant) for PvP. And of course some people are not thrilled with the loss of the extra three seconds of chill duration, especially on Blizzard. I suspect, however, that this talent is probably pretty close to its final implementation, as Blizzard has said they want to tone down snares in PvP.

Ice Shards: Since this talent is no longer needed for increased crit damage, it now serves double-duty as a utility talent. For two points, we get 50% snare on our Blizzard and a 40-yard range on our Ice Lance. This is a strictly optional talent; Blizzard no longer benefits from a snare by proccing Fingers of Frost and getting Shatter crits (more on that shortly), so it isn’t useful for AOE DPS. However, on heavy movement encounters, some people may find the extra range on Ice Lance to be situationally useful.

Icy Veins: This talent is unchanged, except for the fact that only a Frost Mage can reach it now.

Fingers of Frost: Beta feedback played a significant role in making pretty major changes to this talent. It now has twice the proc rate (30%), procs one charge instead of two, but can stack to two charges. The only spells that benefit from and consume the charges are Ice Lance, Deep Freeze and Frostfire Bolt. This helps boost the power of these spells above Frostbolt, making them a much more significant part of Frost’s rotation. It also makes for a rotational feel much more similar to that of old-fashioned Frostbite-driven Shatter Combos, like we used while soloing; you cast from a Frostbolt into an instant cast, then start another Frostbolt, rather than casting two sequential instants. It makes for a much smoother, more polished feel to the rotation.

Improved Freeze: We asked for more interactivity with our pet, and we got it: hitting a target with the Water Elemental’s Freeze spell now applies two charges of Fingers of Frost. This guarantees you the opportunity to cast Deep Freeze every time it’s off cooldown. While neat and useful, there are a couple of issues. First, Freeze is a very expensive spell; it remains to be seen if the Water Elemental can actually afford to cast it every 30 seconds in a raid encounter. Second, using a reticule-targeted AOE spell on a boss to proc an effect on the master is kind of a bizarre pet ability. I hope to see this talent revised a bit before release.

Enduring Winter: This talent now combines the previous effect of Frost Channeling (10% mana cost reduction on all spells) with Replenishment. This is a really good talent, both because it’s a sensible combination of a raid buff and a selfish benefit, and because it gives a lot of flexibility in your subspec talent selection. You could go 3/3 Enduring Winter and skip subspec mana talents entirely, allowing you to take more utility or solo points on Tier 1 of Fire or Arcane, or you could go 1/3 or 2/3 Enduring Winter and mix-and-match with either Arcane Concentration or Master of Elements.

Cold Snap: No change. Always a staple.

Brain Freeze: For all intents and purposes, this talent is unchanged. It is more valuable, however, as the power of Frostfire Bolt has increased substantially relative to Frostbolt.

Ice Barrier: No changes to Ice Barrier.

Shattered Barrier: No change. Still a staple for PvP.

Reactive Barrier: This one’s controversial. The basic idea is simple: if your Ice Barrier is not on cooldown, and you take damage that reduces your health below 50%, Ice Barrier automatically casts. The skeptical point of view, which I share, is: how often will this really be useful? Yeah, it saves me a GCD. But how many times will it do so in a single encounter? It seems highly unlikely that it would be more than once or twice. So it’s probably not worth two points for the DPS gained by saving those GCD’s. OK, then, how often will it save my life? Well, our health pools are going way up. It seems unlikely that we’re going to be one- or two-shot from 51% by random raid damage. Yes, it can proc when stunned or otherwise CC’d, but that just doesn’t strike me as a life-saving result in very many situations. I’m hoping this one gets a serious looking-at and reworking, but it sounds like Blizzard wants to see it in action for a while first.

Frostfire Orb: This is a very unusual talent, in that the first point and the second point do almost completely different things. The first point changes the spell to Frostfire damage, which means it benefits from the +25% Frost damage passive bonus on the tree. The second point causes the Orb’s attacks to apply a very brief chill effect (though as it attacks every second, this can keep the effect up throughout the Orb’s duration). As a secondary bonus, the talent also (at two points) brings Frostfire Bolt’s chill effect up to 70%. The value of the second point is up in the air where PvE is concerned; if the spell is meant to trigger talented effects such as Ignite and Fingers of Frost, it could provide a healthy boost to the number of Fingers of Frost procs you see in an encounter.

Deep Freeze: No change. Still freezes things solid if it can, hits like a fast-moving truck if it can’t.

Conclusions

Frost’s rotation is shaping up to be considerably more interesting than it has been. We’ll likely be using:

• Flame Orb once a minute
• Frostbolt at least once every ten seconds to maintain the Frostburn debuff
• Water Elemental Freeze whenever Deep Freeze comes off cooldown
• Deep Freeze when Fingers of Frost is up and Deep Freeze is not on cooldown
• Frostfire Bolt when Brain Freeze is up, whether or not Fingers of Frost is up
• Ice Lance when Fingers of Frost is up and Deep Freeze is on cooldown
• And finally, either Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt as a filler, depending on how the numbers eventually work out

On top of this, Blizzard has put into place some significant tuning knobs that can help ensure that Frost’s DPS is competitive with other DPS specs throughout the expansion. We have good reason to be optimistic about playing Frost in PvE for the first time in a few years, and the way things look now, we should have a lot of fun doing so.

© Lhivera for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: frost, frost-beta, frost-cataclysm, frost-mage, frost-mages, frost-talents, Lhivera

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The forums are designed to be friendly and inclusive: all mages are welcome and any sort of discrimination or slurs are not permitted. (Well, we do make fun of warlocks.) I know I’m already loving the opportunity to converse with other mages I’ve followed and respected from everything about theorycrafting to keybinds to the ever-changing Cataclysm mechanics. Hope to see you there!

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mage-forums, mana-obscura, mana-obscura-forums

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So the Blizzard finally lifted the NDA it has had on the Cataclysm beta, and that means the Empowered Fire can finally start talking about all the things you want to know about. We’re currently trying to get Metaneira in the beta with me, since I was lucky enough to be in alpha.  Sorry that we haven’t been immediately on top of ALL of the information coming out of the various WoW media sites – updated talent trees, new spells and mastery, etc.  There’s a lot of stuff to sort through and test but I figured out an awesome thing that we can do in the meantime and for the next couple of months – live beta streaming.

I set up a video account on Justin.tv, which will allow us to stream stuff that I do in beta and will be streaming at random times during the week, but mostly on the nights when I don’t have raids or during the day. If you want to know when a stream is going live, just go to our Twitter (@empoweredfire) and watch for updates on when and what is going on. If you want to ask questions or suggest something you want to see, use the hashtag #efdoesbeta or chat in provided stream page. This is all a new experiment so bear with me as I try to figure out how this all works!

First official stream event will be Tuesday, July 6th at 7 PM Eastern Standard time – Goblin Starting Zone.

I will be rolling another goblin mage and going through the first 10 or more levels so people can see how the starting zone looks.

Hopefully this is as exciting for you guys as it is for me, and cross your fingers that this works as intended. Be sure to check Twitter and the stream at random times to see when I’m just random streaming from Cataclysm Beta.

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cataclysm-beta, cataclysm-mages, empowered-fire-beta, mage-changes-for-cataclysm

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The two fights in question are Lady Deathwhisper and Saurfang hardmodes. Why do I go arcane for these fights instead of fire? FOR THE BURST, MON! Lady D and Saurfang both have adds or add phases that are critical to DPS down as ranged, and arcane definitely helps with that. While fire, in my gear, does better damage overall, you really can’t be some of the cooldowns that arcane has available.

Lady Deathwhisper Hardmode: One of the reasons I initially switched to arcane on LDW is just because having Living Bomb do splash damage on Mind Control targets was not cool, and omitting that portion of my spells from the fight was a huge waste of DPS. This fight really brings every mage skill into question, no doubt. What might you be doing besides DPSing?

Spellstealing – There’s a buff that goes up on a lot of the adds you will be DPSing down (Fanatics) and that is not only a boost to your spellpower, but also makes the adds easier to DPS since they won’t be healing themselves. You might also be spellstealing buffs that get applied to Lady Deathwhisper by her mind-control targets in your raid. Fun ones are things like Earth Shield, or Power Infusion. I’ve even stolen Focus Magic off of her.

Counterspelling – Interrupting her casts in Phase 2 when she’s throwing out Frostbolts and Frostbolt Volleys is pretty important and might give your melee a break if no one is on the boss.

Polymorphing – Being on top of crowd control in Phase 1 when your raidmates get mind controlled is very crucial. Polymorph is a strong CC for members of the raid who aren’t directly in melee range, as I’ve found most of the sheep get broken if they are anywhere near the melee blender on adds. So stick to things like your ranged or healers, melee if you absolutely have to stop that rogue with all their cooldowns up from ganking your priests mid-fight.

Blink and Frost Ward also come in handy for getting away from bad things (Death and Decay, Vile Spirits in P2) or reducing damage in P2 when she Frostbolt Volleys. Never hesitate to use secondary abilities.

Secondary abilities aside, arcane’s DPS just won out here just due to the fact that we were having some problems with splash damage injuring our mind control victims. When  you are learning a fight, this is pretty important and killing off folks early usually means a wipe later on, if not immediately. So switching to arcane didn’t feel like a big deal. And considering the fact that we needed a lot of burst on adds, it made it the optimal choice. While the heavy movement of the fight means I do suffer a little bit, overall, the benefits to the raid are immense. If you’re not having problems with splash damage, it might be alright to stay fire.

Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang – I’m almost positive some raids could swing mages being fire for this fight  but I opt for arcane just because I routinely tear up add DPS as arcane. Most strats that raids suggest for this fight have ranged taking individual Blood Beasts as their focus before splitting off to help other range. I tend to stand near the back of the semi-circle on the left hand side because it is fairly easy for me to grab aggro on my beast and do a lot of DPS before it ever reaches me. I then switch and help the other ranged on my side. Arcane is very, very useful in this because if you save your cooldowns for beast phases, you can pump out a ton of damage on them and make this fight got a lot smoother. Having access to more channeled casts and high damage quick casts makes this optimal as arcane. What I try to do is watch the cooldown timer for the Blood Beasts and stack up Arcane Blast so that I have as much DPS for the one or two casts I can get off on the beasts before they get pushed back and then continue on DPSing them down once they are back in range. This means I have threat on them right away and they don’t go snarling off at a healer or a closer DPS. Don’t be afraid to pop off arcane missles or even an Arcane Barrage to polish off Beasts that are on someone else and have little health left. Beasts hitting a raid member just makes the fight harder for your healers, as Saurfang gains more runic power and the raid member might die from the melee swings.

So now that we’ve discussed why switching to arcane as FireTTW spec on certain hardmodes is beneficial, let’s discuss why fire is so useful elsewhere in ICC.

MOAR Damage?: Fire tends to scale a little better with 264/277 gear, but it really is a toss-up. However, the stats on a lot of the good 277 tier gear and off-set pieces favor Fire in terms of hit/crit budgeting. Well-geared arcane and fire come very close to eachother most of the time though.

Range: This is a big reason why I love fire on most fights. Arcane just doesn’t have the range of fire, especially if you stick with 1/2 or 2/2 Flame Throwing in your fire builds. There’s really no substitute for having options in where you stand because your primary spells can hit from the 35 and 41 yard range. This comes in handy on things like hardmode Putricide and Dreamwalker.

Mobility: Given that fire has more and higher DPS instant casts (Living Bomb/Fire Blast/Pyroblast where applicable), the mobility aspect comes into play on fights that require a lot of movement. You just have better DPS uptime when you’re not in fear of losing your Arcane Blast stack, or clearing it off with Arcane Barrage in an attempt to gain some DPS during high movement portions of the fight.

Splash Damage: This is mostly in regards to Heroic Gunship (lol) and Lich King. Living Bomb’s damage on adds (such as Shambling Horrors, Valkyries) is pretty amazing and not only churns out more Hot Streak procs but does quite a lot of collateral damage on ghouls and other adds that are in range. What I like to do during LK is keep Living Bomb up on him as well as Horrors (which has a lot of splashing on Drudge Ghouls), and also use my trusty Living Bomb macro to DoT up all the Valks so that they splash onto eachother as they are travelling along the same vector. You get a lot of instant damage (including Pyroblasts) this way. And that can be crucial going into Hardmode LK attempts.

The long and the short of it is that while there are mage specs suited more for some of the fights, I’d opt to say that arcane and fire do roughly the same damage in the hands of people who play the class well and there is no substitute for gearing and speccing as you feel more comfortable with, especially this late in the expansion. However, the things I outlined are just some of the ways you can get a little bit of the edge on some of the fights you may encounter while doing ICC hardmodes. Hope you enjoy!

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arcane-mages, arcane-vs-fire, fire-mage, fire-mages, icc-hardmodes, icecrown-citadel-mages, icecrown-hardmodes, icecrown-mage-strats, Icecrown-raid-instance

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In game, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my tanks: my 80 prot warrior and my 80 prot paladin. Maybe it’s just making up for years of being squishy, but I love standing in front of bosses and protecting my raid. There’s still a lot of pressure in tanking: blowing your cooldowns at the right moment, making sure you’re positioning the mobs in the best possible way (I like to face them towards Ais’s boyfriend so he gets cleaved), and pushing buttons frantically to stay on top of the DPS who are just dying to rip aggro off of you. (Okay, the paladin tanking isn’t so much frenzied button pushing as lazily hitting them in order. I love my pally but warrior tanking is much more interesting and dynamic.) And yet, I don’t feel as stressed while tanking: no one’s going to spam Recount after a battle and point out how I did compared to everyone else. I can focus on being a member of a team, and working with everyone to achieve a certain goal. It’s a nice change of pace from DPSing on my mage, where I’m almost secretly hoping a rogue stands in fire and dies so I’ll beat him on the charts. I’m more than happy to give up ten-man raiding on my mage in favor of doing it on one of my shield-wearing girls.

But I do love my mage, and ICC has gotten better for Ais and me lately. I think the ranged DPS in our raid have really started working together to point out how we can make the fights a bit easier on us, and we’re beginning to function as a team. Tensions were high for a while, but I think our melee have finally realized that it’s not that half our raid is bad, it’s that the fights and our strategies for them were vastly favoring their playstyle. We’ve adapted some strategies, aired our frustrations, and I think we’re back to being a fairly laidback, happy group. (Until I watch someone keyboard turning to run out of Sindragosa’s death-grip, that is. RAGE.)

Enough about what I’ve been up to. Here’s a few of my thoughts about mage raiding in ICC:
1) Incanter’s Absorption is still worth it if you can get shielded reliably. In my raid, we’ve done crazy things where I’ll get fed shields on Rotface while I’m standing in the slime to DPS. The numbers I put out are nuts, but it just seems so gimmicky and stupid. I am actually looking forward to the nerf: too many mage mechanics are already dependent on very particular and often dumb things (Torment the Weak, I’m looking at you), and IA has always felt cheap to me. Is it fun to get shielded and watch your spellpower shoot up? Sure. But I don’t like sucking up to a disc priest and then standing in fire just to do more damage. (Note: this is no longer relevant after 3.3.3: IA is not nearly as valuable as it was since it only procs off of your own frost/fire ward and mana shield.)

2) Once you get two piece mage T10, your rotation may change slightly. The top DPS rotation still is stacking Arcane Blast to four and then using Arcane Missiles when Missile Barrage procs. However, the haste boost from consuming MBAM means that your less mana-intensive rotations aren’t that far off from the highest DPS rotation. If mana is a problem for you, don’t feel bad about using MBAM when it procs after the second, third, or fourth AB.

3) Four piece mage T10 is the most ridiculously awesome set bonus in the world. Other set bonuses look at mage T10 and weep, for they will never be so amazing. It’s especially fun when we do our weekly raid quests in Naxx and have a fight that lasts only 45 seconds—you just can’t touch a mage who blows Quad Core, Arcane Power, Icy Veins, and trinket(s), and who doesn’t have to worry about mana. I am actually really surprised it hasn’t been nerfed yet.

3) Yes, we’ve heard about proposed fire changes. I think that with the IA nerf, the combustion change (down to two minutes from three, thank goodness), pyroblast now benefitting from TtW, and the Glyph of Fireball change (instead of 5% crit, the cast time on fireball is reduced by .15 seconds), fire might be more in-line with arcane mages. Maybe. Arcane gives you controlled burst and amazing single-target DPS, which are both crucial in ICC encounters. Fire does well with multiple targets, but so far that’s only Gunship. (Dreamwalker has lots of adds, but they need to be burst down quickly and a lot of them won’t be up long enough for living bomb to explode.) But we’ll see: I know Ais is itching to get back to blowing stuff up with fireballs.

4) I hate trinkets so much. So very much. I lucked out and got a Muradin’s on my first ICC 10 run, but my guild has seen exactly one Reign drop in our TOC runs. Another one dropped on a pug Ais and I were in, and it went to a warlock in our guild—who then picked up the first (and only) DFO we’ve seen. I was trying to move away from the years-long feud between mages and warlocks and instead unite ourselves against rogues and DKs, but, man. *shakes fist at our warlock guildmate* I just know I’m going to be using Talisman of Resurgence until Cataclysm. (Of course, that’s not the worst of it: if I want to go back to fire for a boss fight, Rawr tells me I should use Dying Curse. *twitch* I’ll stay arcane, thanks.) Trinkets can suck my non-existent junk.

But, all in all, WoW has been treating me well lately. I love that Ais and I got Starcaller on our alts (especially since, uh, I might have been drunk at the time); I managed to get a Blood Queen’s Crimson Choker in my Sack of Frosty Treasures, which netted me quite a nice chunk of change; and we’re working on getting another mage friend of ours a Tiny Voodoo Mask trinket so we can do a voodoo gnome parade with -wait for it- 24 voodoo gnomes. (We’ll be glyphing for mirror image, of course.) Ais and I have done it with just the two of us and I will say that 14 pygmy gnomes RP walking through Dalaran will turn heads. I highly recommend it. I’m meeting new people, having fun goofing off on alts, and raiding doesn’t feel quite so tedious lately.

I hope our mage readers are faring well! How is Icecrown treating you?

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arcane-mages, arcane-talents, arcane-trinkets, arcane-vs-fire, combustion-change, Icecrown-Citadel-raid, Icecrown-raid-instance, incanters-absorption, mage-tier, mage-tier-10, mage-trinkets

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To take advantage of it, you’ll need to change your frostbolt to this following macro:
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt

Unlike /petattack, this command will not cause your pet to stopcasting and start over with every keypress (something I personally discovered doing Vezax hard mode, heh). So macro up, frost mages, and make Splashy work for you.

(And don’t tell Ais I helped you out. Getting punched by a gnome isn’t fun.)

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: frost-mages, patch-3.3, PVE-frost, water-elemental-macro

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Goodnight, everybody!

© Metaneira for Empowered Fire, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mage-tier, mage-tier-10, mage-tier-9, set-bonuses

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I don’t know about you guys, but I think we’re going to change our raiding guide to just have this video. As this is all you ever need to know about playing a mage. Ever.

Guki of Eldre’thalas – I don’t know who you are, or what you do, or if you even still play. But I salute you. We salute you.

I am going to finish crying with laughter now.

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best-mage-ever, how-to-play-a-mage

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He asks: “What’s up with Incanter’s Absorption?!”

Both Meta and I are pretty big proponents of this talent. Most people only heard of it back when it got nerfed during Naxx content due to the insane soloing a mage did in the Military Quarter by spell-stealing Bone Armor – the talent effectively allowed the mage to gain boss-level spell damage due to absorption mechanics from the armor. It’s been hotfixed since then to cap your effective SP gain to no greater than 5 percent of your health.

Still, why is this noteworthy? In light of recent changes bringing more arcane mages into raids, as well as how the boss mechanics in ToC/ToGC work, this is an amazingly useful little talent that can effectively work as an extra trinket proc or overall SP bonus on certain fights.

How Do I Work This Into My Own Talent Tree?

Arcane does have a certain number of “free” points, but when I made the switch to having Incanter’s Absorption in my build, I did so by dropping the two points out of Student of the Mind. I don’t have a ton of mana problems that Frost Warding (a pretty nice talent to have in combination with IA) and Arcane Meditation don’t fix.

Okay, So I Have It, Now What Do I Do?

Stand in fire. No, really.*

Joking aside, taking incoming damage and absorbing it is what drives IA. This means on fights where you know you could be taking possible frost or fire damage, taking a GCD to pop Fire or Frost Ward can reap benefits.

The overall usefulness of this talent skyrockets when you have a capable disc priest and a Val’anyr-equipped healer (may be the same person) in your raid. I so happen to have both (my wonderful raid leader is a holy paladin with the mace) and therefore have communicated with them that bubbling me when I take damage or are about to take damage increases my SP and therefore, my DPS. Having a raid that takes little things into account is beneficial and drives talents like this forward.

The caveat to having IA in your spec means that you do have to be a lot more mindful of how using wards or what the healers in your raid do. It can be a loss if you’re  not casting a ward on the move. Not having a disc priest or Val’anyr consistently in your raid also does decrease the usefulness as well. Using Mana Shield also tends to not be as effective given how much of you mana can be eaten through as well but I often bubble myself during “OH CRAP” moments so this is again something to consider.

However, if you do have all these things, it’s quite nice.

Quick and Dirty Cheat Sheet for IA:

Because I know you just want to know what to do on certain bosses. A lot of IA uptime will come from a competent disc priest or Val’anyr proc, however. This is all stuff you can manage yourself.

Northrend Beasts -
If you get hit with a flame patch on Gormok the Impaler, pop Fire Ward and move. This becomes a lot more important on hard-mode beasts, since there’s a DoT that stacks on you.

I’ve also popped Fire Ward on the one or two times I’ve ever gotten hit with Burning Bile as well.

See Also: Razorscale, Ignis the Furnace Master, hardmode Mimiron.

Lord Jaraxxus –
There’s a lot of random fire damage during this fight. If someone near you gets targeted for Legion Flames, you can always pop Fire Ward and take advantage of it.

See also: Sartharion.

Faction Champs –
I only really ever get IA from this fight if I Mana Shield to save my pathetic mage-y behind. Take that as you will. Key concepts in this fight are more survival-oriented rather than max DPS.

Twin Val’kyr-

Honestly where this talent shines the most. I came upon this little dissertation from Euripedes (love him!) of Critical QQ for the best breakdown of how it works:

“With an AoE hitting you, and getting completely absorbed by you, for 1500 every 2 seconds, this means your spellpower is being increased by 225 every 2 seconds. Effectively, you will hit the IA cap 10 seconds into the fight, and remain at that cap for the entire duration of the fight.”

The natural absorption mechanics of Twins makes both normal and hard-mode versions the best for Incanter’s Absorption out of all the bosses in TOC/TOGC. If you are one of the people designated to take Dark Essence, you can grab an extra few seconds of IA uptime by Fire Warding yourself from incoming “Light” at the beginning of the fight since it is actually fire damage.

I’ve had 98.7 % IA buff uptime on this fight and gained over 1K SP. It’s pretty intense.

Anub’rekhan -
If you’re paying attention, you can Frost Ward yourself from Penetrating Cold.

See Also: Hodir, hardmode Thorim

*Disclaimer: While having a SP boost is nice, do not stress your healers on high-damage fights by taking uneccessary damage by intentionally standing in fire or other things. Most of these suggestions are for incoming damage you’d already be taking by the very nature of the fight. The first rule of magecraft is that you don’t do any DPS if you’re dead.

Other than that, have fun with IA!

© Aislinana for Empowered Fire, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arcane-mages, arcane-talents, fire-ward, frost-ward, incanters-absorption, valkyr-twins

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