tier-10
Mage T10 is Powerful Ugly, No One Surprised
What is this?
MMO-Champion just released some addition PTR info for 3.3, including tier set models for warlock and mage tier 10. Right now I’m rather flabbergasted at how ugly this is. I know that Icecrown is supposedly emulating some of the things we’d be fighting up on the glacier and indicate some level of camouflage, but this is just silly. We look like beat up a bunch reject Blood Princes and stole their clothes. It’s also is the same color palette as death knights. I’m hoping that other set colors get released because it’s a double insult to not only have a horrible set AND have the same horrible colors as another class. Least it isn’t purple, but knowing Blizzard, it won’t even be a cool purple like warlocks get if they do get around to updating the set colors.
The bone boots and mouth on the hat are making me boggle as well. Someone at Blizzard needs to just be taken out back and shot. Half of what’s wrong with this set is the hat design. The one saving feature of this tier are that the set bonuses are decent.
In other PTR notes, some updates for fire talents were included but seemingly are for PVP-oriented abilities:
- Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.
- Dragon’s Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
- Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.
- Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
Finally, I really want a flying pony. Ghostcrawler promised me one.
Mage Tier 10
In a rather surprising move, Blizzard devs posted the Tier 10 set bonuses in a thread and asked for people to give feedback based on their class and spec. For mages, this meant that our set bonuses could be evaluated for fire, frostfire, arcane and frost, presumably so we wouldn’t end up with a four piece set bonus that was useless for half of the specs. To further my shock, Blizzard promptly (and, in my opinion, adequately) addressed the concerns listed by mages in the thread.
The original set bonuses were:
2 pc – Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 15% additional damage for 10 sec.
4 pc – Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 3 sec when the effect of the talent is consumed.
While I liked where the devs were going with these changes, the math just didn’t support it. Giving mirror images a trinket-like status seemed like a good idea to me — it’s already used as a threat dump, so it makes sense to line it up with other cooldowns. Making the four piece set bonus grant haste instead of spell damage (or, god help me, crit) seemed to be in line with my projections for Icecrown Citadel: we’ll finally hit the magic spot where gemming for haste will provide more of a DPS benefit than gemming for spell power. (Given full BiS T9/TotGC gear, we’re not quite there, but it’s close.) So, good ideas in theory, but there was one glaring problem: Blizzard forgot about the GCD. Mirror images and Hot Streak both trigger the GCD, which means the actual benefit of the bonuses is drastically reduced. Then you take into consideration Mirror Image’s long cooldown, which means that you get 15% additional damage for effectively 9 seconds every three minutes. You don’t have to crunch the numbers to realize that’s not a very big boost to your DPS.
But all is not lost, mages! Blizzard has updated the set bonuses. Observe:
2 pc – Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 5 seconds when the effect of the talent is consumed.
4 pc - Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 18% additional damage for 30 seconds.
Hot. Damn. The change to the Mirror Image bonus is significant: it provides a considerable cooldown to use on fights where burst is necessary — something TtW fire mages have lacked. My crappy napkin math shows it to be about a 3% DPS increase on a six minute fight, which isn’t too shabby. Giving the 2pc bonus a few extra seconds means we can likely squeeze in two casts with the haste bonus. I don’t have the mathematical talents necessary to model the effects of that, but intuitively I think switching the bonuses around was correct. I’m looking forward to someone really crunching the numbers to break down the benefits further.
Frost mages are still screwed by the Hot Streak/Missile Barrage/Brain Freeze bonus, though. Of course, if you’re raiding T10 content as a frost mage, you are probably quite used to being screwed over.
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