Comments on: Flamestrike spam

By: gnomeaggedon

gnomeaggedon — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:59:48 +0000

@pockie: I have been hesitant before, but it seems like it would work, and I notice that the Theory Craft-o-Matic shows 1xFS+Bliz comes out slightly ahead… so maybe there is something to the 2xFS.
But of course I didn’t take Specs into account & those Blizzard crits are nice to see.
And as for the targeting… I was pretty happy the other night when I started to judge where the tank would pull to. He was consistent. I noticed my fellow mage was dropping his FS where the tank “was”, not where I expected him to return to… Nice to be psychic.

@Arioch: Corehounds swallow us whole… but will spit us straight back out (one end or the other) due to indigestion.
I can’t see my talents right now… but I would be surprised if I picked up FS talents.. unless I needed to fill a gap.
Ghostcrawler says class changes on hold… so maybe we get to play with this error for a while as “working as intended”

By: Arioch

Arioch — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:17:22 +0000

Pfft. Gnomes are hardly more than a mouthful to begin with. I bet a core hound could snap you up in one bite. =)

I’m a Blizzard-spammer myself, what with being 57/3/11.

Is your flamestrike damage being boosted by talents that some of us may not have? It’s been a long time since I was fire.

One can only wonder how long the stacking of rank 8 and 9 will be viable… something tells me that is not “working as intended.”

By: pockie

pockie — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:35:44 +0000

Hmm. I actually wondered about this, but from playing my gut feeling was that Blizzard spam actually wins out.

Of course, this depends a bit on your spec. My mage is specced the usual 0/53/18 frostfire, so my Blizzard hits a bit harder than a 18/53/0 arcane-fire mage. But that’s not the major point.

Two main factors swing me towards Blizzard:

1) Blizzard ticks can crit, flamestrike ticks don’t. Given that my Blizzard crits for 1.5k, this is not insignificant. I’m running easily with 35% crit chance with molten armor, and my gear isn’t even that good. If the difference is only 11%, the crit rate could easily swing this to favour pure Blizzard spam.

2) Blizzard’s targeting reticule is HUGE compared to flamestrike. I can’t even hit all the mobs in a H VH pack with flamestrike, unless there’s a really awesome tank who can clump them up really tightly.