Molten Armor Bonus Now Varies With Spirit
March 20, 2009 by Angelo Fernandez
Filed under Mage
Just the other day, Ghostcrawler hinted at giving mages some more use for all that spirit that was quite plentiful in a lot of mage gear out there, even the ones coming in Ulduar. Warlocks get a bonus from spirit for their life tap and fel armor abilities but Ghostcrawler wanted mages to get a non-damage modifying bonus. Well according to MMO Champion, the new PTR build 9704 actually changes the spell Molten Armor to do just that. the crit bonus of both Molten Armor and the Glyph of Molten Armor now gives the crit bonus based on spirit, instead of a fixed number. Below are the details:
Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
Glyph of Molten Armor — Your Molten Armor grants an additional 15% of your spirit as critical strike rating. (Old – Your Molten Armor spell grants an additional 2% critical strike chance.)
mage casts molten armor
So while mages finally have use for some of that spirit that comes with their gear, it’s probably not the kind of change they wanted. The most obviously affected are those people who don’t really stack spirit since their crit chance will go down when using Molten Armor compared to what it currently is in live. This includes those people who do a lot of PvP since PvP gear doesn’t have a lot of spirirt and crit is pretty important in PvP. In PvE, it seems like this is also a problem since mages will be forced to stack a lot of spirit just to match the crit they currently have.
I think this would have been a nice idea if spirit just added to the existing 3% crit chance molten armor gives, not replace it. After all the idea was just supposed to give a bonus for having the spirit and not to force mages to stack it.
You said: “After all the idea was just supposed to give a bonus for having the spirit and not to force mages to stack it.”
I’m pretty sure this is not true. Ghostcrawler said more than once that they were not going to give mages free DPS as a result of considering spirit.
I read your blog a lot, nice job!
Well by bonus I meant exactly that, something extra and not necessarily a damage bonus. This new model for molten armor can be seen as a nerf for people who don’t use spirit. It shouldn’t be that way. If I have the spirit then cool but if I don’t stack it, it shouldn’t penalize anything that has to do with my dps like crit rating. That’s why I said it should be a bonus over and above the 3% (5% if glyphed) it used to give.