quasexort

How do you know this? Do you play on Anathema? Have you spoken to Anathema players? If so how many?

So, you think only like 15-20 players are unhappy with the population? I’m pretty sure you can log on Anathema and message random people and ask them if they think the staff should try to do something to help the population and I’m sure a majority would say yes. You could even ask them how they would feel if they merged the servers and see what they say.

Spell pen isn’t needed since none of the bosses have more than 75 shadow resists. You don’t need to compute DPS when trying to equate crit to SP. It’s just unnecessary extra work. The equation I gave gives the same result that you have but I never even cared about the cast speed of shadowbolt to derive it. There’s no optimization point at 10-11% hit either. Hit is pretty much always going to be better than crit for personal dps.

Ok let’s say one mage has 8/8 T2 and another mage doesn’t. Over 60 seconds the mage without 8/8 T2 will cast 20 fireballs. The mage with 8/8 T2 will cast 21 fireballs since with 8/8 T2 your cast speed is effectively 0.9*3 + 0.1*1.5 = 2.85, and 60/2.85 = 21. So, let’s say the mage without 8/8 T2 has 25% chance to crit and the 8/8 T2 mage has 20% chance to crit. Then on average the mage without 8/8 T2 will crit 5 times on those 20 casts and the 8/8 T2 mage will crit 4.2 times on those 21 casts. So the mage with 8/8 T2 gets an extra cast that has an 80% chance of not criting, even if the extra cast does crit they still match the mage without 8/8 T2. I don’t see how giving up 5% crit to use 8/8 T2 would make the ignite uptime better.

You will always get partial resists on bosses because they are level 63 and they get level based resistance which I think is somewhere between 5-10 per level, so 15-30 resistance that you cannot penetrate which will cause the partial resists. I'm sure someone could verify this by wearing as much spell pen as they can get and seeing that the frequency of partial resists remains the same. There's also a macro that shows how much resist as mob has. So, ignoring spell pen T2.5 shoudlers/boots give 1% hit and 58 sp, rank 10 shoulders/boots give 1% crit 53 sp and 1% hit, so you’re trading 5 sp for 1% crit if you use T2.5 shoulders/boots over rank 10 shoulders/boots. For the 14SP = 1% crit I’ll post about that later the math is pretty involved when trying to approximate how much SP is equivalent to 1% crit. You must consider the fact that a crit will potentially keep a 5 stack ignite rolling and guarantee another ignite tick.

AQ40 bosses only have like 75 fire resists so you don’t need spell pen. Since you don’t need spell pen I’d use rank 10 shoudlers/boots combo. Also, I don’t agree with your stat priority would rather have crit than hit. 14 sp = 1% crit how did you come up with this? I don’t agree with the T2 argument. T2 might be easy to get because no one wants full T2 but you lose a lot of crit/sp. Crit is so nice for fire mages it keeps the ignite rolling wearing full T2 you lose like 5% crit so on top of losing the 82 damage per fireball. Also, it’s easy to gear even if you don’t have BIS gear. Bloodvine is amazing and you can get that with just gold, rockfury takes like 1-2 weeks to farm, T2.5 is easier to get than T2 becasue it always drops and it's only good for warlocks/mages/rogues/warriors. and you really want to get mana igniting or cthun belt heading into naxx. There’s like no good belts in naxx, T3 belt sucks. Budget setup for someone who can’t get all the godly items: T2.5 helm AQ20 neck T2.5 shoudlers Cloak of consumption Bloodvine chest Rockfury bracers T2 gloves Mana igniting cord (AB rep belt if you can’t get this) Bloodvine pants Bloodvine boots AQ40 trashring / Ebonroc ring / Ring of spellpower (which ever you can get since they are all kind of rare) AQ20 ring MQG ZHC / 2% crit trinket Mageblade (drops all the time on Anathema) AV offhand This set of items is relatively easy to get and is very solid and you can pretty much upgrade whatever you want instead of forcing yourself into itemizing to wear full T2. Assuming you get AQ40 trash ring you get 493 SP, 7% hit, 10% crit (8% without trinket)

One other thing to note is Frostbolt is binary so it never gets partial resisted whereas I believe warth and starfire can be partial resisted. Also Arcane Power / PoM are really amazing for boss fights especially if you use MQG at the same time as AP. For BWL/MC mage also have really great AOE and in BWL they have 3/5 of the schools of mage that the dragonoids can be vulnerable to and druid has 2/5. For AQ and Naxx mage just becomes so much better when they spec fire since ignite is so damage efficient and scales so well. Papablaze is probably the only high end raider I know that was moonkin and raided with Coalition. http://realmplayers.com/CharacterViewer.aspx?realm=Ana&player=Papablaze

Just use this X = spell power equal to 1% crit SP = your spellpower crit = your crit chance coeff = spell power coefficient of the spell you are using baseDmg = base damage of the spell you are using X = [(1 + crit + 0.01)/(1 + crit) * (SP*coeff + baseDmg) – baseDmg]/coeff - SP This is only for personal dps and does not include added raid damage from applying the improved shadowbolt debuff. For raid damage crit becomes more valuable than this.

My advice is if you are unhappy with the server then just quit for a bit. In ~8 months I’m sure the servers will be merged so just come back in 8 months. It’ll be like when nost got shut down and we all had to leave our characters during the ~9 months between the shut down and Elysiums relaunch. From the looks of it the staff has no plan for the near future. The only real thing that can save Anathema is getting more players. Only way you can really do that is merging Elysium with Anathema which they don’t want to do, even though I don’t see that as a bad option.

Maybe took a BG queue.

The mana you gain from the bonus int is probably equal to the mana you regen from that small amount of spirit humans get. I only got like ~230 spirit in my PVE gear with buffs so that's like +11 spirit, I got like 400 int with buffs so it's like 20 int? 11 spirit > 20 int? I mean if you want to go human I don't think anyone is going to give you a hard time about it the difference isn't much but I would rather have 20 int than 11 spirit. Also that Arcanite Dragonling cost like 300g in mats to craft, I doubt warlocks are going to craft it for the mages.

How does it cost at least 6s? ignite only lasts 4 seconds. You just scorch wait 1 second and fireball.

If you got 5 or more mages you can just have each mage scorch once then fireball.

Are you sure it isn't level based resists that are causing the partial resists? In AQ20 the bosses have more resistance according to the API call and it's definitely noticeable to me. In AQ40 I haven't noticed that many partial resists. http://vanillagaming.org/forum/index.php?topic=15951.0 Not sure how accurate this is but according to the information here 140 resists would mean ~85% of your casts would be partial resisted in someway. I'm also not sure what the level based resist is, perhaps somewhere between 18 and 30 (6-10 per level). From the link 18 would mean ~16% of your casts get partial resisted in someway which is around what I have noticed.

Why?

Don't think so.

Timeline is outdated. The from the announcement section shows 1.10 coming out in 8 days.

This timeline makes more sense than the old timeline. World first Rag happened April 25th 2005, BWL was released July 12th 2005. That’s less than 3 months of the best guilds killing rag before BWL came out. Patch 1.5 (AV patch) came out June 7th 2005, so it was within ~1 month of BWL back then as well. I guess back in 2005 blizzard messed up by releasing BWL during July too.

Might be a bad idea but they could do something like what Path of Exile does with their leagues. Basically Anathema = Standard league, Fresh realms = New leagues that PoE introduces periodically. So, with Elysium and other upcoming fresh servers they could have a timeline something like this: June – Release AV July – Release BWL September – Release ZG/Nightmare Dragons November – War effort -> Release AQ20 / AQ40 (this time don’t make the war effort last longer than a couple weeks) January – Merge with Anathema After merging Elysium, they could create a new fresh realm ~2-3 month later and follow a similar timeline wherein ~10 months that realm would reach Naxx and merge with Anathema. They could keep doing this continuously so that there’s almost always a fresh realm for players who might have missed their chance at experiencing it but since these fresh realms eventually feed into the final realm the final realm doesn’t really die off. If you make it to Naxx you aren’t going to reroll fresh, the fresh realms basically attract new players who likely wouldn’t be able to help a Naxx level guild anyway. The nice thing about this is it lines up with how it was in retail vanilla. For instance, there was 2 months in-between world first Cthun and Naxx opening. On Anathema, it’s going to be way longer than that which kind of diminishes the vanilla feel. I remember back in retail vanilla there were only a handful of guilds on my server that could kill C’thun by the time Naxx was released, maybe with this timeline it would be like that on Elysium too. A timeline like this would make vanilla raiding feel more vanilla like. We shouldn’t be farming content for 6+ months before we get to the next tier, that didn’t happen in retail vanilla. It shouldn’t happen here even more so because the average guild on these servers are way better than the guilds from retail vanilla and delaying content just means they will be over geared for the new content. The only reason it was like this on Nost / Anathema was because the content wasn’t ready, but that excuse doesn’t really hold for the newer servers. I honestly wouldn’t mind rerolling on a fresh server if I knew it would reach Naxx within ~10 months because raiding when content is fresh and you aren’t over gearing everything is more fun and vanilla like IMO. This would also add to the longevity of the project as a whole. I feel like by the time Elysium reaches Naxx those who missed out wouldn't be able to truly experience vanilla and that seems to be the whole point of this project, to let people relive vanilla as it was (with some minor twinks, 1.12.1 talents etc).

True, if they do update T1 then it wouldn't make sense to not buff T2 to it's final state. Regardless though you raid BWL for the offset pieces more so than for T2.

Did they say they were updating t2 upon release? It wasn't updated on Anathema until the war effort. Unless they've announced something I feel like it's safer to assume they won't update it until the war effort since that's what they did in the past and that's what's blizzlike and there's really no reason to update it.

Caster t2 is going to be updated with BWL release?

+1 I understood why it took so long to release content on Nost/Anathema since they had to finish scripting it but on Elysium it doesn't make much sense to delay content. Maybe it was by design to deter players from choosing Elysium over Anathema? Clearly didn't work out that way. I guess to add to this http://www.retributionguild.net/ was a guild on my server and you can see that the war effort started ~4 months after their first nef kill. They got world first Ouro and within 3 months have a naxx progression post. For the health of the entire project they should accelerate the Elysium timeline and merge the two servers when their timelines match. Announcing something like this would help Anathema since new players would have an incentive to roll on Anathema to progress faster than they would on Elysium since the two realms would eventually be merged together.

It’s sad that no matter what the staff does there will always be backlash that they must deal with. They can’t win no matter what they do because people love to complain about everything.

T2 for casters is pretty bad during the BWL patch, doesn't get updated until AQ patch. Mage chest for example gave like 30 fire damage or something. I thought I remembered them saying that they would update the pvp gear 2 weeks after AQ on ALL servers. AQ seems like a good time to update it since that's when T2 gets updated with it's final stats. Also didn't nost update the PVP gear during the ZG patch and NOT the BWL patch?