Celtic Heroes

Fire or ice.... a real mage chooses their path and MAKES it work!

Tru

Sorry Armo but Im gonna half to agree with Fury, he just seems to have a more cool approach (get it, Fury,cool, Ice mage. You could do the same thing with Armo, heated/fiery, fire mage anyway thats how I see ur approach) When just comparing raw dmg fire wins but the more variables you add the closer ice gets and can even pass fire. But, no matter, as both are so close the dps difference if negligible and not many people just try for strait dps anyway. Also, this is all theory the real comparison is in practice and since rogues always get the kills we'll never know. (Not really but you get my point) so as I said before the difference in dps is negligible so you should really just play the one that suits you the most. End of discussion!

Just popping by the forum and saw this fire vs ice debate.

These recast times are definitely reasonable, I remember testing them a while ago.
Now Armo actually switched the damage for ice blast and ice shards. Blast does more damage.
When you correct that, and then add fire/ice attunes, here is what you get at 2000 focus and 3000 fire/ice magic:
The reason why the results are still similar to Armo's is due to the timing of the spells. Sure, Ice Attune is almost exactly 50% stronger than Fire Attune, but in a 2 minute rotation you can pull off about double the fire hits (15+7 = 22) than you can with ice (6+5 = 11).

With equal focus/ability, let's say fire attune gives +1000 damage and ice blast gives +1500 damage. In a 2 minute span that fire attune gets applied about 22 times, effectively dealing 22x1000 = +22,000 damage. In that same 2 minute span, ice attune gets applied about 11 times, dealing only 11x1500 = +16500 damage. Hence Fire Attune is more effective DPS wise.

Furyion also points out that outside of attune, these calculations don't account for raw damage boosts on gear. Yes, ice gear offers a larger boost, but because of cast times, they are similar to fire DPS wise. Now since I don't have time to search through all of the new gear, I looked up Godly Silverweb Rings, which were highly sought after around the time I left.

Godly Fire Bolt Ring: +450 FB damage, +10 FB skill level
Godly Ice Shards Ring: +900 IS damage, +10 IS skill level

On the surface it seems that the ice shards ring is twice as powerful, but remember that the cast time of shards is about 15 seconds, whereas fire bolt is about 7 seconds. Therefore DPS remains roughly equal between the rings.

So in conclusion, Armo is definitely right that a fire mage beats an equally powered ice mage in all cases except for the ~20 second time frame.

However, there are probably still benefits to opting for Ice Mage at end game. If things haven't changed, on average there are more fire mages than ice mages. So that means ice mages tend to enjoy better gear, whereas fire mage equips are more thinly spread out.

Apologies if this is redundant, I only had time to read a few select posts, not all 11 pages. See you all next year maybe.

Swan!

Long time no see Swan !
Lately for us our active mages are ice, but fire on equal gear usually wins (not taking resists on different bosses into account), but generally seems like otm gave low elemental resist to most bosses.

I'm not tryina sound mean but I see a few things in this that tilts the results to fire.

One big thing I noticed is cast times are ignored(seeable by less ice shards then firestorms)

There is 1 less ice shard then firestorm at the end, when ice shard has same cool and 1 sec faster cast. Ice also has less time for interruption. So ice shards should be equal to or greater then firestorm.

There is 3 ice blasts at the 50 second mark, but 5 at the 120 mark. This doesn't make any sense to me.

It is impossible to cast 2 firebolt and a firestorm in 10 seconds due to cast time

I also find it a little odd that the 120 second results are substantially bigger for fire as supposed to ice compared to the 60 second mark. As for any math formula like this there's a ratio, and for this the longer it goes on the more accurate it should get. However it is a plateauing formula and should get slower ratio gains overtime, but the ratio jumps up 0.2(about the same amount as 2x 60 second, which should not happen). To me at least, this seems a little off.

One big thing I noticed is cast times are ignored(seeable by less ice shards then firestorms)

There is 1 less ice shard then firestorm at the end, when ice shard has same cool and 1 sec faster cast. Ice also has less time for interruption. So ice shards should be equal to or greater then firestorm.

There is 3 ice blasts at the 50 second mark, but 5 at the 120 mark. This doesn't make any sense to me.

7, 15, 20 seconds are just rough approximations. What really counts is the 1-2 spell rotation. 1 = bolt or shards, 2 = storm or blast.

If my memory is correct, ice blast has a pretty slow cast time (2+ seconds or something like that?). Fire bolt, firestorm, and ice shards are all relatively fast cast times (maybe around 1 second, with storm being longer).

Fire mages go through their rotation faster than an ice mage does, not only because of faster cool downs, but also because of faster cast times. That's why you have 7 storms in 120 seconds, but only 6 shards in the same time frame. Having a slow cast time (ice blast) in your rotation also impedes your other spells, because you cannot fire off two spells concurrently.

Assume for the sake of argument that blast takes exactly 2 sec to cast, and shards needs exactly 1 second. If your blast is ready, but shards has 0.5 sec left on the clock, tapping on blast means that shards will be open for 1.5 seconds. Or, if you wait the 0.5 seconds and hit shards first, then blast will be open for 1.5 seconds. Either way, that's 1.5 seconds of wasted time.

In the ideal scenario, you would have no wasted time, which tends to happen in short time frames. That means whenever you're casting a spell, your other spell is still cooling down. But as you go for longer term fights, wasted time becomes a bigger problem (esp. for ice mages), possibly explaining why the fire/ice DPS gap widens from 60 to 120 seconds.

Fire also suffers from this problem, but because fire storm casts faster (I think?), wasted time is much less of a problem for fire mages.

It is impossible to cast 2 firebolt and a firestorm in 10 seconds due to cast time

I do believe it is very possible to do this, as Armo pointed out a fire bolt cools down in about 7 seconds. Does that include the cast time? I'm not sure. Let's assume it doesn't:
Fire bolt cast time 1 second, fire bolt cool down 7 seconds
Fire storm cast time 1.5 seconds?, cool down irrelevant

Cast fire bolt. T = 1 second. Cast fire storm. T = 2.5 second. At T = 8 seconds, bolt is ready for casting. By T = 9 seconds, bolt should be released. Two bolts, one storm accomplished within 10 seconds.

Even if fire storm took 3 seconds to cast, it wouldn't matter because there's no wasted time, i.e. storm is casting while bolt is cooling down.

Hope this all makes sense. Also I haven't played CH in nearly a year so some stuff I said could be inaccurate.

Cast/cool times(I used a stopwatch. To avoid human error I only accepted a number as true if I got it 3 times in a row)

Fb cast 1.2, cool 6
Fs cast 2.2, cool 15
Is cast 1.2, cool 15
Ib cast 3.3, cool 20

Here is the results I got timing cast and cooldown.

Let's say someone casts 2 firebolts and a firestorm(starting uncooled), that would be 4.6 seconds of cast time with firebolt needing 12 seconds of cool and firestorm requiring 15. If someone casted an ice shard and an ice blast(uncooled) it would be a combined 4.5 seconds with ice shard requiring 15 cool and ice blast requiring 20. Ice has to deal with less interuptions because it has less total cast time if your spamming it as opposed to fire. And ices burst damage allows time loss to be less important.

But about the firebolt, I messed that up kinda sorry. I mixed it up a little thinking storm wasn't ready for some reason. Happens to us all after all, we are human

Feel free to test out how many of each spell you can cast within 2 minutes. Then criticize my findings.

Feel free to test out how many of each spell you can cast within 2 minutes. Then criticize my findings.

I'll have results tomarrow. Don't feel like doing anymore math today.