+10% scorch buff and the mirror image glyph

#0 - March 13, 2009, 9:54 p.m.
Blizzard Post
So blizzard is obviously trying to allow arcane spec mages to provide the +10% crit to raid buff, but i do not agree with how they have decided to do it.

Q u o t e:

*NEW* Glyph of Mirror Image - Your Mirror Images gain the Winter's Chill talent, granting their Frostbolt spell a 100% chance to apply the Winter's Chill effect, which increases the chance spells will critically hit the target by 2% (up from 1%) for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.


With raid damage being a Constant reality in Ulduar, do they really believe giving such an important buff to my easily killed mirror images is the right way to correct the problem of +10% crit being too much of a "unique snowflake". I feel this change will make many mages dump frost-fire because they can excuse not picking up imp scorch. They can simply tell the raid, "My mirror images provide this now". But the truth is the massively useful +10% crit buff to raid just isn't reliable when provided by such gimpy/uncontrollable mirror images.

Lets look at sarth+3 encounter as an example to how this new glpyh could play out if it was introduced now. Popping your mirror images in this situation is a roll of the dice, you can't control what targets your images hit, so even if they miraculously avoided void zones and lava walls, +2% crit on a 5 random whelps is completely useless when you really need +10% crit on tenebron and shadron. Further more, many guilds have all arcane mages and one "scorch b____" at the moment. When that lone FFB mage jumps to arcane, all the mages in a raid will have to coordinate their highly random and impossible to control images in order to potentially maximize their raid DPS. The problem with this is that the whole process is so ridiculously random that even if we do chain the mirror images together to maximize the +raid crit uptime, the process is so vulnerable to RNG that its almost laughable to have a coordinated system to attempt to control what the outcome will be.

Not to mention, do you really want this to take up a major glpyh spot? Glyph of arcane blast and Glyph of missile barrage are already mandatory. If you add mirror image glyph, for many of us, it will kind of annoying that a *mandatory* glyph will so rarely be used effectively.

Raid leader says : "Why was DPS so slow that attempt"
Frustrated mage says: "Sorry, my mirror images were attacking lava blazes instead of the drakes before they died 10 seconds later to a void zone, maybe next time we will get lucky"
Raid leader says: " One of you needs to spec fire or frost"
Frustrated mage says: " Raiding frost is laughable"
Raid leader says: " One of you needs to spec fire"
frusterated mage says: " 3.1 really changed a lot.... /sigh, back to frost-fire bolt"

IMO imp scorch should be nerfed to +5% and should also be given to warlocks.
#15 - March 14, 2009, 12:09 a.m.
Blizzard Post
We did change the Scorch etc. buff to 5%.

The Winter's Chill effect being applied to Mirror Image is supposed to be just a little extra bonus. I wouldn't at all depend on it to keep that crit bonus up. I don't know how you could.
#27 - March 14, 2009, 12:20 a.m.
Blizzard Post
The Mirror Image glyph is currently at 1% with a max stack of 5 per target but you get 3 mages and they spam a lot of Frostbolts, so probably you will get a 5% buff on top of the 5% you may already have as as mage.

But with Mirror Image's cooldown, you're probably not going to have this buff up very often unless you really stack mages.

It's not intended to be a new unique raid buff, just a little bonus to casting Mirror Image.