My mage is specced Fire. Yet, on some fights, such as classic BWL Nefarian, my mage, Snowtroll, is misclassified as Frost:
The miscategorization occurs in spite of my mage having cast Blast Wave (not possible for Frost spec), and, in spite of having been categorized as Fire spec on several other fights in the same encounter.
I have a similar problem even in AQ40 on some Bosses. I therefore dont get the Ignite Damage addet to my overall DPS. I dont have the standard deep fire talent build, instead I got Arkane Power and POM but I have still 5 points in “Ignite”.
Here is an example: https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/A8KxzDrY1Mk9j3Gc#fight=27
In this fight are two mages (Luke, Strobobobo) classified as Frost, but both are POM-Pyro specced and dont get the Ignite addet to the overall damage.
Here the talent tree for POM-Pyro: https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/mage/2300250310231531-5052000122-003
I can’t really handle every possible weird build you come up with here. Mages in the mage discord and in the WCL discord agreed that Master of Elements would be good for Fire detection, and so that’s the main thing I key off of.
@Kihra
I agree that Warcraft Logs cannot guarantee 100% accuracy when trying to identify specs - as specs aren’t known during combat, Warcraft Logs needs to somehow determine specs from events.
The trouble with using Master of Elements as the primary indicator of spec - Fire versus Frost - is that Master of Elements only procs if a critical strike occurs.
My mage is well-geared - but without World Buffs - I have only 13% critical strike chance for frost spells.
Numerous encounters are fairly short - and let’s say, for BWL, that I’m forced to cast frostbolt - due to boss immunity to fire.
Looking at our BWL logs, this means that I can only cast, say 18 frostbolts, for short encounters.
The math here is:
(0.87**18)*100 = 8%
Which is to say, using MoE to gauge whether or not a mage is fire-spec can be off by 8% in cases where a fire spec mage has lost world buffs but is specced into MoE in a short encounter where frost spells are cast.
Moreover, as a previous poster pointed out, some fire-spec mages will not take MoE - opting for POM-Pyro. The MoE approach to mage spec identification will miss all such mages - probably the POM-Pyro spec is somewhat popular for mages wishing to spec fire for PvP but don’t want to spend gold to respec for PvE.
Bottom line - focusing on MoE events - which depend on critical strikes - will miscategorize roughly 8% of mages in short encounters where world buffs are lost and the mage doesn’t apply wizard oil; also, POM-Pyro spec mages will be miscategorized regardless of crits.
Such mages won’t be in competition for top parses (in most cases) - so perhaps this is acceptable.
On the other hand, mage spec detection can be dramatically and easily improved:
Spec determination for a single boss fight that is ranked has to be deterministic, i.e., it cannot depend on surrounding context, because that context could be present or absent, etc. If an uploader uploads only that single fight vs uploading the entire raid, the decision-making process for what spec to choose needs to be consistent.
In other words, using the entire raid only really works if I didn’t rank individual bosses. It would have been my preference to do things this way (i.e., only rank a complete raid), but people just approach Classic so differently than Retail, i.e., some people view the entire raid as the metric to compete on, while others still want to compete traditionally on bosses. That’s led to the worst of both worlds where I grafted on complete raids while still trying to support bosses. If I had it to do over again, I would have just ranked raids like Mythic+ dungeons in retail and not even had individual boss ranks.
As to the second point, I’ll discuss using Pyroblast and Blastwave with mages in the discords and see what the consensus is.
Thanks Kihra.
For what it’s worth - I think you made the right call to implement the individual boss rank feature even though it makes it more difficult to identify specs; boss rankings seem very popular.
Have there been any updates on this? Having just a single indicator that’s not even guaranteed to proc with a pure fire spec seems quite limited. It makes very little sense to categorize someone with 100% fire spell casts as frost, only in very narrow cases can it be the case that a frost mage has to use only those (chrom, sapph). There has to be several ways to determine this, not just one random proc.
Even having Master of Elements, I’ve also been affected by this, mistakenly being classified as a frost mage on Viscidus because I use a quick frost wand and there’s very little room for a crit with 2-5 spell casts during the only shatter phase in a 1-phase kill.
Wouldn’t including an improved scorch talent (i.e. applying the Fire Vulnerability debuff) as an indicator be a good idea as well? Of course it’ll usually be one person per boss, but there’s plenty of adds (skeram illusions, sartura guards, fankriss spawns, visc globs, twin emps bugs, cthun tentacles), so there’ll be plently of opportunity to be the one starting the vulnerability.
It technically is quite early in the tree and some hybrid “elementalist” specs can have it too, but they aren’t really frost if scorch is used so it shouldn’t matter much which category they fall in as they are neither.