Basically, FFB(Frostfire Bolt) has taken center stage and will probably remain there for the rest of the game. It benefits from all talents that affect frost or fire spells. It benefits from debuffs such as Improved Scorch and Winter’s Chill.
I approve of the teamplay mechanic of 2 mages supporting eachothers output through different debuffs, but would like to see more distinction than just one uses scorch and the other doesnt.
Why did Fire get a worse rotation? Losing Hot Streak, Pyroblast is no longer a consideration for fire. Why? FFB is on the same runeslot as Hot Streak and fire has the talent points to dip into Ice Shards at 50.
Frost. Inconsistent with reliance on Fingers of Frost. Its frustrating to go dry in any aspect of the game. You spec Shatter because there isnt that much damage in the tree on your way to Winters chill, so you might aswell take FoF over Burnout at that point.
FFB and Hot Streak should not be on the same slot. Hot Streak should also be adjusted to work with FFB.
Frost could use something like Frozen Orb/Freezing Winds. It does not have to be Frozen Orb or frequent as the supplementing talent, but something with a medium cooldown that is fire-and-forget to help get FoF procs for its duration.
There is quite a few considerations in things you dont wanna see one spec use because chances are is that means the other spec is doing the same thing.
Like Fire taking finger of frost, shatter + frozen orb or equivalent.
Or Frost speccing Pyroblast+Hot Streak.
The general goal of the feedback is to prevent these two from looking identical to eachother.
P.S. can Living Bomb detonations please not eat FoF procs? Nothing like wasting procs and not being able to double dip ffb+deep freeze on the last charge.
2 Likes
Missile Barrage and Hot Streak should be on Boots with Brain Freeze. This makes sense as these are the 3 specs’ big procs in WotLK. Belt should have FFB/SFB/BFB. You should only be able to run 1 dual-school nuke at a time.
Move Spellpower to Chest, this should be Arcane’s default/preferred Chest rune as it is a deep Arcane talent (2nd to last row) in WotLK that is unreachable for Fire and Frost. Giving Fire and Frost another crit multiplier when they already have Ignite and Ice Shards (and a 3rd multiplier for FFB) just makes Arcane way too weak in comparison. Fire will still want to take Burnout (more Hot Streak procs) and Frost will still want to take FoF.
Change FoF to its Cata form. 30% proc rate but only procs 1 charge at a time, stacking up to 2. No more munching FoF procs where the first Frostbolt/FFB that consumes 1 charge procs 2 new charges before we can spend the 2nd charge from the first set. FoF additionally buffs Ice Lance by 20%.
Ice Lance also goes to its Cata form. Higher base damage (around the same as Fire Blast) but only does 2x damage with FoF/against Frozen instead of 3x.
Frozen Orb was datamined so it will probably be a Rune or new spell (book drop from lvl 60 5mans like the Scarlet Monastery books?) in P4
4 Likes
Man, I was going to be like “I agree with this idea, but Spellpower should just die in a fire” but then you said to make it unobtainable by Fire and Frost and I was back on board.
Honestly though in that scenario I think FoF needs some benefit, even now it struggles to compete against Burnout for Frost. (Although that is largely due to Ignite + Spellpower)
Absolutely agree though, even if gear means specs still take spellpower over Burnout that does mean they still miss out on the additional 15% chance, both for Ignite and Hot Streak etc, whilst removing the synergy Spellpower and Burnout have in general.
…just continued onto your stuff about FoF even, I mean really just completely on my wavelength, you already have everything written down before I get to it 
How come they don’t have someone like you doing these changes instead of…whoever they currently have churning out these terrible designs.
1 Like
This is more or less the weakness of the rune system and being able to use abilities that were normally deep spec exclusive. It works in some cases, but in dps cases it seems to have had a net negative on playstyles.
I can’t take credit for it really, all this work was done 15 years ago during the development of Cata by members of the mage (especially Frost mage) community working closely with the devs. It’s very disappointing that the SoD devs chose not to take any of it and instead went for the WotLK version. I’ve been saying this stuff since P2 since it was very obvious what the end result would be of the choices they made.
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Spellpower is our answer to overload and all the other HUGE JUICE abilities other casters have gotten, no reason to take it away but I do think if they moved it to wrist and moved BFB to belt it would not upset balance.
PVP would have to choose between displacement or spell power
molten armor would be a dead rune on wrist except for arcane burst healing so maybe move it to headslot or honestly make it a book. (but maybe leave it as a meta choice for pvp)
If boot runes become the “proc runes” and belt runes becomes the “specialty spells” runes this would give a fighting chance to hot streak but if fire trounces frost again by a huge margin I would suggest instant pyro damage be nerfed by 33-50%(good for pvp also). In addition to that deep freeze damage has no effect on pvp and is such a goos scapegoat for blizzard to put their thumb on the scale and tune frost damage.
Maybe, but the biggest factor is the placement of the runes in SoD and that’s something you addressed perfectly where those being paid to do it have fallen short.
So you have to give yourself credit for that 
To be fair I think only Mage and Warlock really have those kinds of runes.
There is a big reason why Elemental, Balance, and Shadow are all F-tier dps right now and it isn’t because they received massive dps steroids.
Mage is the only one who really got insane synergy through their runes with things like Burnout + Spellpower + Ignite + FFB + Ice Shards.
30% spell haste is nice and a great steroid for Warlock but it just doesn’t have the same synergies.
DoT crit for Shadow just doesn’t play into any synergy with existing talents or runes and simply is a bit more damage.
Same with Overload for Shaman, it’s something Overload has always dealt with even through retail but it is deliberately designed to not trigger with anything (so it doesn’t proc itself) so it doesn’t have great synergies, and only really improves with spell haste (which is currently absent) increasing chances to proc.
spellpower is more or less a flat % boost to damage, overload is the exact same. You can argue that spellpower is overtuned but both roads lead to bigger numbers on your screen. The only dynamic they really have a meaningful impact on is PVP where they can have a profound change in the outcomes of a fight on a micro level, so decision making, meta-changing outcomes.
Overload is pretty much an exact copy
druids have their lunar dance stuff that buffs crit chance significantly, same thing but better window dressing
shadow priest got mind spike and crit dots, you could argue mind spike isnt the same but it isn’t important here
warlocks have haste and a bunch of weird boosts with pet sacs and a spell that takes the place of a steroid buff by critting for a billion instead.