Lot more than 60, if you count the 120 it took to get the prior 3 ranks (assuming it was maxed headed into TBM). But yes, it is used, and it is awesome.
I'm still not a fan of the damage being spread out to everyone in the raid instead of being attributed to the caster, but we couldn't really figure out a better way to do it that wasn't massively OP in the group game.
Used, and often. It's worth the mana. Although I'm not a fan of Wizards working as ADPS. All that 19 mil damage should be MINE! Hail, Wither! Hail, Decay!
If only it could be all used by the people with decent crit rates and nuke sizes worth a damn? Is there no way to add a restriction of some sort? For example, "Limit: Minimum Mana Cost (2000)" would eliminate most of the fluff not worthy of the awesomeness of this ability.
The nuke sizes dont mean anything. You get the same gain whether its a big nuke or a teeny tiny one. The crit rate I could see being an issue. Do other classes not get 100% crit rate during raid burns? If too many of the 500 procs are not critting that would be a waste.
Well, maybe not 2000, but the idea is to cut the non-caster nukes and especially procs. Right now it doesn't have any min mana limit, i.e. every crappy proc eats a charge. Casters have good 100% crit setups. I'm not so sure about Rangers and Beastlords. Melee classes don't have anything going on for their dd procs. Limiting it to non-procs would be a good 1st step.
This ability also works on melee weapon procs but only seems to activate on critical procs. You get a lot more benefit from this ability on cast spells vs. procs.
Does it? If it's coded that way then it's perfect and don't need to be changed. But I don't see anything in the spell data that would limit it to crits.
I tested it with a melee person on a test dummy. We did a baseline and looked for typical max (non-crit hits) and typical max crit hits. Then we tested it with the mana burn debuff on the mob. The typical non-crit max hit did not increase, but the max crit did increase by a lot. For this particular person's weapons they normally had a max crit proc of about 36k damage, but with the mana burn debuff they were critting for a max of 95k. The person also said that they had never seen a crit proc as high as 95k before on those particular weapons. I also tested with a necro and the mana burn debuff did not seem to enhance any part of their DoT spells (neither the initial hit nor the ticks) regardless of it being a normal hit or crit. For my guild on a raid the debuff seems enhance damage about 20-40 seconds or so on a burn before it runs out of charges. If it is a balanced melee/range fight then it was closer to the 20 second range, but for a ranged fight we were seeing more in the 40-45 second range.
Very interesting! Thanks for testing that. Lifetaps and some 'Resource Taps' (SPA 457) are excluded. Perhaps that one means dots. But if it works only on crits, that would have to be specially coded.
As of this last patch, you don't have to worry about wizards being OP anymore because it did in fact get nerfed. Why did they bother to reintroduce it at all if they were just going to make it useless again? Using MB on a raid mob does maybe 1 or 2% damage and nothing noticeable to the supposed "added damage for others". Now they have made it useless in groups, since nobody in their right mind would waste half their mana on a mob they can burn down in 3 regular nukes anyway. Instead of worrying about nerfing wizards, they should fix the AETL that has been broken since the start of the expansion. That now gives us 2 AAs that have tons of levels that have been rendered nearly useless. Manaburn and Hole in Space.
