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 April 24, 2010, 11:20:40 AM
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Exalted
Posts: 1767
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I dunno..."easier" implies that with a great amount of skill, a mage could surpass a hunter but I just don't see that. Granted, hunters have a lot of issues in arena and mages have great synergy with some other classes in the arena setting, but in the "open-field" situation in BG's, hunters are just insane.
I expect the class to get some major nerfs in Cataclysm if Rated BG's are going to be the new Pv P focus. Otherwise you're just going to see swarms of huntards. A comment I hear a lot at the start of a BG right now is, "We have more hunters, this should be easy." (Or the reverse, "Crap, they have more hunters.")
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Jaw dropping damage
Blue bar vanishes quickly
Get in your corner
- The Mage Haiku, by Bovinity -
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May 05, 2010, 02:31:15 AM
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Revered
Posts: 250
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We finally managed to kill the Lich King in 25 normal, and started doing the hardmodes (8/12 so far). Fire does fairly well, with the exception of the Dreamwalker fight, where it is significantly worse than Arcane. Ok, that was maybe an understatement, Fire was nothing more than atrocious there. Problem: stuff dies too fast, taking all the unexploded living bombs and the ignite bank into the grave. Add the mana-leeching elements of the fight (frostbolts and mana voids) and you likely end up OOM with evocation still on a >2min cooldown. Apart from this fight, fire is quite ok, and I even got myself the [Phylactery of the Nameless Lich], curious how much it boosts my fire spec.
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May 05, 2010, 06:59:50 PM
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Exalted
Posts: 1215
(A unicorn goes here)
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A mage in i2, Sanich (his Armoury) has swapped to Fire. He says it gives generally higher deeps on bosses, higher deeps on trash, you lose the arcane empowerment buff (which can be replaced by a Retadin, boo-fricken-hoo), and gain the 5% spell crit buff. So if your gear is good enough, and you're willing to swap out pieces (He apparently had to swap several for fire), it's apparently worth it. Take the armoury with a grain of salt though, he's back to arcane.
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The Ultimate Guide to socketing as a tank.The All-Seeing Eye on the Washington Monument: "The Eye's become a crucial part of Homeland Security. It costs a lot to maintain, but it sees all." - Onion News Network
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May 10, 2010, 04:36:04 AM
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Friendly
Posts: 41
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I'm still Arcane, even though I've been fire for ages. At least one of the "best-geared" mages on our realm that Tiga mentioned has an Arcane off-spec, so you really don't know which is used most of the time. And they might have been fire when Arcane was better as well. Personally, the differences I see in Rawr are rather small. In reality, fire suffers a bit more from the lack of spell queuing after instants. With arcane you have the problem with clipping AM ofc, but I'm using no-channeling macros for that, and for me it works better than manual timing. In fights where you need to switch targets, fire is at a disadvantage as well, and the longer casts with travel time and DoTs are lost damage.
From what I've seen in Rawr, you need quite high gear levels before fire actually does higher dps. And the main cause of it is lack of a good second 25 man heroic trinket for arcane, and lacking well itemized ilevel 277 pieces, in particular bracers and legs. And the high haste levels meaning that you can't stack all cooldowns during heroism/bloodlust probably hampers arcane a bit as well. But even then, the difference is less than 2.5% or about 400 dps (with 15% buff). The effects of the spell queuing issues after GCD's, possible ignite damage loss from doubt dipping etc can easily cause a bigger difference than that. And who knows, maybe Blizzard adds or changes trinkets/bracers/legs so that Arcane gains a bit (Ruby Sanctum trinket maybe).
For now, I'm sometimes using a modified version of the old frostfire spec with improved blizzard and permafrost for AoE fun (lootship) or when we need (AoE) slowing. It's less dps than a full fire spec, but the play style is the same, so it still gives me a good idea of the dps I could do with a full fire spec. And from that, I'm not so sure that it would actually result in better dps for me. So I'm not really planning on replacing a lot of gear to swtich back to fire.
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May 10, 2010, 09:57:01 AM
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Revered
Posts: 250
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Be careful with fire when your tank is geared worse than you. In our guild raids this is no problem, our main tank is an aggro beast, but some days ago I went into ICC10 with a PUG, and drew aggro on every single fight (druid tank, ilvl 255something).
Not only do you have only 10% threat reduction as fire (arcane: 40%), but the nature of rolling Ignite mechanics make aggro management very unpredictable. When you have enough haste or manage to keep the 2xT10 bonus up, your spells hit in <2sec intervals, delaying the first ignite tick for as long as you crit.
What happened to me was reaching >100% of the tank's aggro shortly after the start of the fight, then stopping to allow him to catch up. As my last spells were all crits, a huge Ignite avalanche startet rolling as soon as I stopped casting, with two ignite ticks for 47k, surpassing the tank in aggro and killing me before I realized what even happened.
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