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Q u o t e:


Oh I dunno, something about having to carry around a set of resist gear for each school of magic ontop of another set of armor-oriented gear for physical damage(which off of the top of my head is 7 different sets of armor, probably not even physically possible to contain in all five bags, and assuming you don't play a class which requires a specialty bag), then having to spot your enemy on a battleground, decide which school of magic he'll be using(three types for mages, two types for warlocks), and then requiring the outfitter addon to switch your entire set into that resist type, all before you enter combat, and dealing with whatever HP/mana disadvantages that may leave you at, since extra HP/mana does not get added instantly when you upgrade with gear sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Arena doesn't even enter into it since you can't change gear.

As far as the overall point of the thread, I don't have the knowledge on spellcasting outside of a lock's perspective to base any real opinion off of. But the resist gear thing is a dumb point.

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Oh. Why are people talking about resist gear to begin with? It was not my point and is certainly not relevant to this thread in any way. Neither was complaining about armor mitigating physical dps, either, because this change *would not significantly affect caster dps.* It would just give all casters 5 less points of needless bloat in their trees, and allow some casters to pick up more utility or damage through that talent cost reduction.

TBQH I'm almost sold on the idea.

It's a cute 'point of difference' that spell crits are less than melee crits (it's hard to hit someone perfectly in the nuts with a giant fireball after all). Since the first thing most talent trees do is immediately close the gap with a fixer talent that lets spells deal double damage on crit, it doesn't seem particularly useful though.

As against that... Fire Mages would probably have to lose ignite all together, and that is one of the coolest, funnest talents in the entire game (at least for PvE boss fights, seeing how high you can get the ignite does a lot to dispel the boredom).

At the end of the day, the gains are pretty minimal (5 extra talent points) and it's really just an arguement about talent bloat in your direct dps trees.

first?

Woot! my first first! BRB guys, i'm gonna go get a cake and celebrate.

Add 250 magic resist for every school to our pvp gear and I am game.

If you want double crits, then you have to get mitigated by armor just like melee is. There are no double standards.

Is it just me or does WoW have a fairly bad 'spell system' all round, regarding resists and resistances?

I mean melee gets:

Dodge
Parry
Block
Armor
Armor Penetration
Expertise
Weaponskill
Glancing Blow
Crushing Blow

not to mention interesting math with dual wielding missrates and offhand damage.

Spells get:

Partial resist
Full resist (doubles as a miss)
Immune

You can't even dodge or block this stuff. It's reliable, but very very dull at the end of the day.

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Q u o t e:
Add 250 magic resist for every school to our pvp gear and I am game.

If you want double crits, then you have to get mitigated by armor just like melee is. There are no double standards.

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Do you read? We have double crits, because we specced for them. All of us. And our DPS is balanced, right now, with yours being mitigated and mine not being mitigated. The only double standard is you don't spend 5 talent points to get double crits, and we do.

@GC - Ty for the response! Yes, they make great talents, but if melee critted at 150% baseline, the talents in each tree to bring that up to 200% would make great talents, too.

I think that a lot of the scaling issues Arcane saw in BC and before Barrage was given an 85% coefficient in beta have to do with Spell Power only bringing crits up to 175%. And it can't be higher, because it's very easy for a mage to take both Spell Power and Ignite or Ice Shards, for huge fire or frost crits, which ends up making off-tree spells scale better than same-tree spells.

And of course, Demo and Affliction locks have to make very difficult choices and lose talents we'd love to have in our main trees, (or utility talents low in affliction/demo) in order to pick up ruin, even now that ruin's in tier-3.

Ruin being in tier-3, and destruction spells making up such a huge percentage of any warlock's damage creates a further impasse in terms of putting more crit damage in demo or affliction, because we'd just pick up both.

If you did remove the talents, in almost every case, you wouldn't even need to replace them at all, and the trees would still make sense. Elemental would maybe need some juggling, because until 75 and Lava Blast, it's tough to get down to tier-4 and tier-5 without taking EF without "wasting" 1-2 points in a sub-optimal PVE talent build.

Destro would be really easy - just put Devastation back where it was, and make a new 21-pointer.

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Q u o t e:
We don't think 200% spell crits need to be baseline for most classes. They make some really good talents and if we pulled those away, you might be left with less interesting talents to choose.

We do think it's a problem that some specs don't have access to those talents though.

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Because Arcane Barrage needs to be buffed, right?

Mage crits are all over the board - Frostfire is WAY above average

Um arcane crits are 150% baseline and 175% fully talented, which is just below par compared to most everything, even untalented. It makes Arcane Blast underperform, it makes AM suck even more and it also makes Abar crits weak. You may not like Abar because it's instant, but Abar wont matter much at Level 80 with 20k health pool avg.

Arcane: 175% crits talented
Frost: 200% crits talented
Fire: 210% crits(w/Ignite) + Hot Streak crits = ~240% crits
Frostfire: 280% crits talented(w/Ignite) + Hot Streat crits = ~350% crits

So yeah Arcane crits suck and Frostfire crits are ridiculous.

damn, 3 solid pages of obtuness and refusing to understand how melee, at baseline, get mitigated anywhere from 20% for the lightest cloth to easily 70% or more for bears and shields. white damage, yellow special attacks, ALL OF IT.

resistances by comparison may as well not even exist.

shut up and be grateful you even can spend 5 pts instead of staying with 150% damage.

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Q u o t e:
damn, 3 solid pages of obtuness and refusing to understand how melee, at baseline, get mitigated anywhere from 20% for the lightest cloth to easily 70% or more for bears and shields. white damage, yellow special attacks, ALL OF IT.

resistances by comparison may as well not even exist.

shut up and be grateful you even can spend 5 pts instead of staying with 150% damage.

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I understand that perfectly, it's just not relevant in any way, and I have no idea why you think it is. Please, everyone on either side of the "resistances are mitigation LOL" argument please get out of this thread. It has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Why do frost mages only spend 3 points for this (in a tier 2 talent, no less) whereas every other caster is stuck spending 5 points in at least tier 3-4? If you think that more specs should be able to pick it up, there should be at least some sort of compromise, where the talents are moved further up the tree and reduced in point cost. Putting ruin where molten core is would be a great start.

This is really a non-issue for the most part. No serious dps caster is hindered to the point to make a real different in this area (I should know =p). I believe the original design was that caster damage was more reliable, less spiky, whereas melee damage is more spikey. Melee has way more chances for failure on their abilities, a higher crit damage, etc to make up for it.

[e] oh and armor, that too, since spell resistance is very rare.

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Q u o t e:
damn, 3 solid pages of obtuness and refusing to understand how melee, at baseline, get mitigated anywhere from 20% for the lightest cloth to easily 70% or more for bears and shields. white damage, yellow special attacks, ALL OF IT.

resistances by comparison may as well not even exist.

shut up and be grateful you even can spend 5 pts instead of staying with 150% damage.

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20% in FULL PvP gear which doesn't seem to stop you from shredding mages and locks still. Hell I have 10k armor and I feel as if I'm wearing cloth against a rogue or warrior.

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Q u o t e:
We don't think 200% spell crits need to be baseline for most classes. They make some really good talents and if we pulled those away, you might be left with less interesting talents to choose.

We do think it's a problem that some specs don't have access to those talents though.

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Then why not fold the 200% crit talents into talents that are seeming "weak", point for point, and use increased crit damage as a "sweetener"?

I think talent bloat is really still an issue for some specs, and for those specs, this might be a good way to approach that issue that wouldn't much effect game balancing much.

Just a thought.

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Q u o t e:
We don't think 200% spell crits need to be baseline for most classes. They make some really good talents and if we pulled those away, you might be left with less interesting talents to choose.

We do think it's a problem that some specs don't have access to those talents though.

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I don't necessarily agree with this logic. I'd argue spell crit talents are rather boring, but necessary to keep the damage up. By NOT having to choose these, this lets blizzard implement 1 or 2 other same tier talents are ARE interesting. just my $.02

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Q u o t e:
We don't think 200% spell crits need to be baseline for most classes. They make some really good talents and if we pulled those away, you might be left with less interesting talents to choose.

We do think it's a problem that some specs don't have access to those talents though.

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What about healers? Why are we stuck at 150% crits? (At best; at worst, crit does nothing, as is the case with HoTs).