A Quick Look at Mage Spell Coefficients in Mists of Pandaria

The following numbers are guaranteed to change as beta progresses, but it’s useful to know them while testing and theorycrafting. Knowing mechanics and the numbers that feed into them can help us spot potential problems during beta; for example, in the Cataclysm beta, napkin-math theorycrafting quickly revealed that Frostfire Bolt was powerful enough to bump Frostbolt from the Frost PvE rotation. This was bad for the playstyle, and Blizzard soon made changes to both Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze to correct the problem.

Most of these numbers were extracted from the spell database using SimulationCraft. Waterbolt was calculated using damage and spell power differences.

Single-Target Spells

This includes spells like Living Bomb that are used in single-target rotation, even though they have an AOE component. Pyroblast’s coefficient includes its DOT, and Living Bomb includes the explosion damage it deals to the primary target. Combustion includes only its instant damage. Ice Lance's Fingers of Frost value includes both the 200% bonus for hitting a frozen target and the 25% bonus specific to Fingers of Frost; it should always have these bonuses active when used in rotation. It is also listed with just the frozen target bonus, for those PvPers who are curious.

This does not tell the whole story, however. Normalizing the coefficients for cast time tells us a great deal more about the relative scaling power of the spells.

A few observations:

• Frost Bomb has the highest coefficient of the three bombs, but remember also that the others scale with haste, gaining extra ticks. Frost Bomb also scales with haste, but only in terms of being able to cast it more often (which, conversely, you can't do with the others).
• Arcane’s spells have great coefficients when they have charges stacked, but keeping them stacked is expensive. A four-stack Arcane Blast is going to cost about 8% of your total mana after regeneration while casting is taken into account.
• Ice Lance cast with Fingers of Frost is clearly meant to be a significant factor for Frost, scaling nearly as well as a three-charge Arcane Blast.
• Pyroblast is a brute.

Area Effect Spells

Flamestrike includes its DOT damage. The Cone of Cold glyph triples the spell’s damage.

And once again, normalizing for cast time:

Observations:

• Glyphed Cone of Cold has the scaling power of a primary nuke; it will hit very hard. The spell has traditionally not been used for its damage, but if burst AOE is important, perhaps that will be reconsidered.
• Frozen Orb already has a forum reputation of being a weak hitter, but the frequency of its attacks means those hits add up; outside of the bomb spells and glyphed CoC, it’s the most effective AOE GCD we have (well, Frost has), especially considering how its 35% chance to proc Fingers of Frost interacts with glyphed Ice Lance.
• Blizzard, Arcane Explosion, and Flamestrike, our three traditional AOE spells, are the low-end fillers, but they do shine, even relative to Living Bomb and Nether Vortex, given a large number of targets. And of course Blizzard and Arcane Explosion have utility elements to them.

Discuss, comment and speculate!