Eternal Flame, Vengeance & Mastery

In the course of reading several posts on this forum, I've found assertions that Vengeance and Mastery have some effect upon Eternal Flame, but the alleged "connection" is unclear. The remarks are made without any attribution to any source for the information.

Frankly, I've never found any connection mentioned between either Eternal Flame and Vengeance or Eternal Flame and Mastery in any documentation about the game, including Wowpedia, Wowhead, and such sources as the Spellbook with which my paladin is equipped.

Please tell me of the exact location of any factual information about the link between Eternal Flame and Vengeance, if there is one, and of any factual information about the link between Eternal Flame and Mastery, if there is one. (Yes, I know how to use Google's search engine, and it cannot find anything to which it has no access.)

--- Adeya

From the tooltip for Eternal Flame: "Consumes up to 3 Holy Power to place a protective Holy flame on a friendly target, which heals them for 5240 to 5837 (+ 49% of Spell power)"

From the tooltip for Guarded By the Light: "Your spell power is now equal to 50% of your attack power, and you no longer benefit from other sources of spell power."

From the tooltip for Vengence: "Each time you take damage, you gain 1.5% of the unmitigated damage taken as attack power for 20 sec."

You gain attack power from vengeance which is converted to spell power via Guarded by the Light, which in turn impacts Eternal Flame.


From Mastery, Divine Bulwark: "adds 8% to your Bastion of Glory"

From Bastion of Glory: "Increases the strength of your Word of Glory when used to heal yourself by 10%"

As Eternal Flame replaces Word of Glory, the increase to Word of Glory is also an increase to Eternal Flame.

Thank you for your throrough reply. Some answers lead to more questions, of course, but I won't flame you if you ignore them. ;-)

Koatanga wrote:From the tooltip for Eternal Flame: "Consumes up to 3 Holy Power to place a protective Holy flame on a friendly target, which heals them for 5240 to 5837 (+ 49% of Spell power)"

Neither the tooltip for Eternal Flame on the action bar nor the tooltip for EF in the spellbook says anything about "+49% of Spell power". It does say "... which heals them for 16,895 to 17,494 and an additional 2,659 every 2.31 sec for 30.07 sec." I've long been aware that those numbers change without knowing what changes them. The description on Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=114163) does say "... which heals them for 5240 to 5837 (+ 49% of Spell power) and an additional 711 (+ 8.19% of Spell power) every 3 sec for 30 sec." Granted, I know that Spell Power is a stat on the paladin paper doll, and that is all I know.

From the tooltip for Guarded By the Light: "Your spell power is now equal to 50% of your attack power, and you no longer benefit from other sources of spell power."

From the tooltip for Vengence: "Each time you take damage, you gain 1.5% of the unmitigated damage taken as attack power for 20 sec."

You gain attack power from vengeance which is converted to spell power via Guarded by the Light, which in turn impacts Eternal Flame.

I've probably read the entries for Guarded by the Light and Vengeance a dozen times without making the connection to Eternal Flame, because of the way EF is described in the game UI tooltips, and I wasn't thinking of them while reading the description on Wowhead. So this chain of arithmetic endures for 20 seconds "each time you take damage". Does "damage" include damage from spells, or is it only physical damage? ....

Hmmm... I suppose that I should look for a GbtL and/or Vengeance icon on the "buff bar" to see when this event occurs. There are so many buffs and debuffs appearing and disappearing and changing positions that one wonders what use anyone could make of them as they are presented.

Although I've read the Attack Power stat for ages I don't know exactly what role it plays in combat -- I don't know whether I need to know. It is a stat on some gear .... at least in the original WoW.

From Mastery, Divine Bulwark: "adds 8% to your Bastion of Glory"

The title is "Mastery: Divine Bulwark" and other than the word "mastery" in the title there is no mention of any explicit connection between how much Mastery the paladin has and any benefits of the passive spell "Divine Bulwark", which appear to be constant. Then again, I can't say that I've ever recorded the numbers and checked subsequently to see whether they change when Mastery changes.

The 8% value is given by Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=76671). Currently the spellbook entry for my paladin says "... adds 20% to your Bastion of Glory, ...". Heh. 20% of what? Not the amount of coins in his backpack, I'll wager. :-) Maybe each stack bonus is 10.2% instead of 10% since .2% is 20% of 10%. There are other possibilities and that doesn't seem likely to be the one.

From Bastion of Glory: "Increases the strength of your Word of Glory when used to heal yourself by 10%"

As Eternal Flame replaces Word of Glory, the increase to Word of Glory is also an increase to Eternal Flame.

Thanks again.

Adeya wrote:Thank you for your throrough reply. Some answers lead to more questions, of course, but I won't flame you if you ignore them. ;-)

Koatanga wrote:From the tooltip for Eternal Flame: "Consumes up to 3 Holy Power to place a protective Holy flame on a friendly target, which heals them for 5240 to 5837 (+ 49% of Spell power)"

Neither the tooltip for Eternal Flame on the action bar nor the tooltip for EF in the spellbook says anything about "+49% of Spell power". It does say "... which heals them for 16,895 to 17,494 and an additional 2,659 every 2.31 sec for 30.07 sec." I've long been aware that those numbers change without knowing what changes them. The description on Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=114163) does say "... which heals them for 5240 to 5837 (+ 49% of Spell power) and an additional 711 (+ 8.19% of Spell power) every 3 sec for 30 sec." Granted, I know that Spell Power is a stat on the paladin paper doll, and that is all I know.

Pretty much every spell in WoW works this way. It does some base damage plus some extra damage based on your spell power and/or attack power. For Eternal Flame, this is

total_damage = rand(5240,5837)+0.49*spell_power

where I'm using rand(x,y) to indicate a random number between x and y. The value 0.49 is Eternal Flame's spell power coefficient. Wowhead doesn't know your spell power, obviously, so it reports the base damage and the spell power coefficient.

Adeya wrote:

From the tooltip for Guarded By the Light: "Your spell power is now equal to 50% of your attack power, and you no longer benefit from other sources of spell power."

From the tooltip for Vengence: "Each time you take damage, you gain 1.5% of the unmitigated damage taken as attack power for 20 sec."

You gain attack power from vengeance which is converted to spell power via Guarded by the Light, which in turn impacts Eternal Flame.

I've probably read the entries for Guarded by the Light and Vengeance a dozen times without making the connection to Eternal Flame, because of the way EF is described in the game UI tooltips, and I wasn't thinking of them while reading the description on Wowhead. So this chain of arithmetic endures for 20 seconds "each time you take damage". Does "damage" include damage from spells, or is it only physical damage? ....

Vengeance is based on the raw damage the boss deals before any mitigation effects for various reasons, but mostly so that it doesn't penalize you for increasing your survivability. So you get vengeance every time you take direct damage from an auto-attack or spell, AND every time you avoid a melee attack. When you avoid, it uses the boss's raw damage it would have done had the attack not been avoided. Spell damage also grants 2.5x as much vengeance as melee damage (to make up for the fact that you have much less mitigation for spells thanks to armor).

The one caveat is that they can "turn off" vengeance from any given spell, so most persistent area-of-effect damage sources that you're not supposed to stand in do not grant vengeance (to avoid the incentive to stand in that damage source to game the system).

As a player, though, you don't really need to worry about how the calculation works. You just need to know that you'll get more attack power (and thanks to Guarded by the Light, spell power) from harder-hitting bosses, which makes your Eternal Flames (and most everything else) stronger.

Adeya wrote:Hmmm... I suppose that I should look for a GbtL and/or Vengeance icon on the "buff bar" to see when this event occurs. There are so many buffs and debuffs appearing and disappearing and changing positions that one wonders what use anyone could make of them as they are presented.

The default UI is not all that great for this sort of communication. There are a variety of AddOns that give you a better display of such things. I have a set of WeakAuras that gives text displays for Vengeance, amongst other things.

Adeya wrote:Although I've read the Attack Power stat for ages I don't know exactly what role it plays in combat -- I don't know whether I need to know. It is a stat on some gear .... at least in the original WoW.

Again, it's just like spell power. Most spells do (base_damage + AP_coefficient*attack_power + SP_coefficient*spell_power), where at least one of (SP_coefficient, AP_coefficient) is nonzero. There are a few spells where both is nonzero (Judgment, for example, scales with both).

Adeya wrote:

From Mastery, Divine Bulwark: "adds 8% to your Bastion of Glory"

The title is "Mastery: Divine Bulwark" and other than the word "mastery" in the title there is no mention of any explicit connection between how much Mastery the paladin has and any benefits of the passive spell "Divine Bulwark", which appear to be constant. Then again, I can't say that I've ever recorded the numbers and checked subsequently to see whether they change when Mastery changes.

The 8% value is given by Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=76671). Currently the spellbook entry for my paladin says "... adds 20% to your Bastion of Glory, ...". Heh. 20% of what? Not the amount of coins in his backpack, I'll wager. :-) Maybe each stack bonus is 10.2% instead of 10% since .2% is 20% of 10%. There are other possibilities and that doesn't seem likely to be the one.

Every class's mastery has a name, ours is "Divine Bulwark." All classes start with a base amount of mastery, which is usually 8% (there are exceptions, but this is not a detail you need to worry about for now). As you stack mastery rating, you'll see your character sheet mastery percent increase, and the tooltip will say "X rating gives Y%;" it's easy to verify that 8%+Y% is the total displayed on your character sheet, which is also what shows up in the Divine Bulwark tooltip.

Bastion of Glory's mastery bonus is additive. So if you have 20% mastery, Bastion of Glory will increase the strength of Word of Glory (and Eternal Flame) by 30%. Again, this is easy to verify by reading the tooltip in-game.

Adeya wrote:From Bastion of Glory: "Increases the strength of your Word of Glory when used to heal yourself by 10%"

Last caveat: Tooltips can lie! Word of Glory's tooltip was wrong for the first half of MoP, in fact. But there are people out there who verify such things every expansion, so at least as of right now these tooltips are accurate.

Adeya wrote:Thank you for your throrough reply. Some answers lead to more questions, of course, but I won't flame you if you ignore them. ;-)

Theckhd beat me to it and is a far more reliable and thorough source of information than I am, so there's nothing more for me to add.

Answers are always going to lead to questions, which is what theorycraft, and science in general, is really about. The most powerful words in all of science are "hrm, that's interesting".

For whatever it might be worth to you, I logged-in to this forum and spent quite a bit of time and effort composing a reply to Theck's response. Apparently, at some point the forum software dropped my log-in without, of course, any warning or notification whatsoever. So, when I attempted to submit my remarks, the forum software notified me that I must be logged-in to quote other posts in mine. Of course, it was already too late to save a copy of the work to an external file from which I could retrieve it. Succinctly, after I used the proffered dialog to log-in again, the forum editor presented a quote of Theck's entire post, without anything at all that I had already written in response.

I simply do not have either the energy or the time to repeat the effort. It could be an interesting conversation, but this forum software is either user-hostile or incorrectly configured, if not both. The jackass jerk who designed it is either incompentent or a sadist who cannot resist his/her urges to play stupid "gotcha" games and inflict punishment upon the hapless victim of their work. I have no idea as to why anyone would choose to use such a product and, most likely, pay good money for it to boot.

Thanks anyway.

Or you could take the simple precaution of copying a long post before hitting "submit" so that in case of any failure of any kind you could simply paste it into a new reply.

Is that not standard practice for any long post you make on any board anywhere?

Koatanga wrote:Or you could take the simple precaution of copying a long post before hitting "submit" so that in case of any failure of any kind you could simply paste it into a new reply.

Is that not standard practice for any long post you make on any board anywhere?

The case in question is not a "failure of any kind" it is the consequence of incompetent, user-hostile design carried forward from the days when we used terminals with landlines to mainframe computers. It's like having medieval oxcart wheels on your car instead of steel-belted radial tires.

It is not "standard practice" for any long post that I make on *every* board "anywhere" to make a backup copy. The majority of the forums that I use, such as Elitist Jerks, have abandoned the legacy forum software for a package that is much more user-friendly. Malfunctions are uncommon in those forums, excepting Blizzard's Community Forums collection which I very rarely use. You never know what will happen when you press a key while you are visiting that one.

Sometimes I make a backup copy, but only when I know that the forum software is a user-hostile and/or an unreliable antique. On the face of it, this forum software should be better, and I'm rather disappointed that it is not.

Putting aside my wonderment that you're a regular on Elitist Jerks but until now did not realise there was a relationship between vengeance and Eternal Flame, I don't find it excessively difficult or oppressive to hit control-A, control-C right before I hit submit if I have created an exceptionally long or involved post.

I guess I'm just used to it from many years of posting.

Adeya wrote:For whatever it might be worth to you, I logged-in to this forum and spent quite a bit of time and effort composing a reply to Theck's response. Apparently, at some point the forum software dropped my log-in without, of course, any warning or notification whatsoever. So, when I attempted to submit my remarks, the forum software notified me that I must be logged-in to quote other posts in mine. Of course, it was already too late to save a copy of the work to an external file from which I could retrieve it. Succinctly, after I used the proffered dialog to log-in again, the forum editor presented a quote of Theck's entire post, without anything at all that I had already written in response.

I simply do not have either the energy or the time to repeat the effort. It could be an interesting conversation, but this forum software is either user-hostile or incorrectly configured, if not both. The jackass jerk who designed it is either incompentent or a sadist who cannot resist his/her urges to play stupid "gotcha" games and inflict punishment upon the hapless victim of their work. I have no idea as to why anyone would choose to use such a product and, most likely, pay good money for it to boot.

Thanks anyway.

This would only happen if you spend an insanely long time composing your post, grabbing a cup of coffee, logging in game to do Timeless Isle/LFR/<insert chore here>, and then coming back to finish your post. The forum software expires sessions for load reasons after a configurable time period; it's 3,600 seconds (1 hour) by default, but can be changed by the board administrator.

Full disclosure: I did a bit of hacking on phpBB in my late teenage years.

"This would only happen if you spend an insanely long time composing your post, ..."

I suppose more than an hour is "insanely long" if you don't stop to think about what Theck wrote in reply to my questions and remarks, and do some checking on Wowhead and/or the tooltips to which he referred, i.e., by accessing your character in the game. He did write a long reply to my questions and remarks so I had a lot to think about. I enjoyed reading it and thinking it over, as I have enjoyed many other of his Maintankadin essays in the past and his posts now on Sacred Duty.

As to doing any of the other things, it takes two minutes to heat a cup of water for a fresh teabag. But I didn't visit "Timeless Isle" with my PC or run a dungeon or tank a raid. Why would anyone do anything like that while composing a reply to Theck's response? Are you bored with your own writing, or what?

People have no ability to concentrate on any one thing any more, I guess. The "multitasking" generation that grew up with a mouse in one hand believes that anyone who doesn't live the way they do doesn't have a clue. Unfortunately, it is they and the people who reared and educated them who are clueless. That is not an opinion, it is a reality.

An hour seems long to me. I would not type something into Word or Excel for an hour without saving even though both of those programs are plenty stable on my system. It's just habit to save my work periodically, but that may be because I am old and developed habits because I have experience losing things to crashes in the past.

Certainly if I took an hour to assemble a post I would take the extra second (or less) to hit control+A and control+C to copy my post to the clipboard before hitting Submit.

I don't think a 1-hour session timeout is in any way draconian, barbaric, incompetent, or malicious. I think it's quite reasonable.

It's not really a problem specific to our boards. I've lost posts on forums all over the place due to session timeout. It's annoying, but ultimately something you have to put up with due to the prevalence of phpBB.

I've found that the Firefox addon TextArea Cache has saved me loads of time dealing with that particular issue - both here and on various other sites, including the Blizzard forums and even my own blog (Wordpress has logged me out mid-blogging session or mid-comment before).

theckhd wrote: ....

I've found that the Firefox addon TextArea Cache has saved me loads of time dealing with that particular issue - both here and on various other sites, including the Blizzard forums and even my own blog (Wordpress has logged me out mid-blogging session or mid-comment before).

For what it is worth: I have watched the Weak Auras UI video. It mystifies me. I guess it would be great for research, for examining the inter-relationships of spells and buffs, etc. Actually using it while tanking a raid would, I think, be a very steep learning curve for someone who comes to it cold, without having used it in its previous incarnations. It occupies so much of the screen that I wonder how you can be apprised of what is happening around you in the course of the fight. My eyesight isn't as sharp as it once was, so the tiny buttons could be a problem. And scrolling text on a chat frame tab? Who has time to read the static messages, let alone the moving ones?

Thanks for the link to Text Area Cache. Although I am using Firefox 28 at the moment, I probably won't be using Firefox much longer. The fools in charge really do think, I suppose, that putting the Tab Bar above the Navigation Toolbar and Bookmarks Toolbar makes using Firefox "more efficient" .... because they don't use it? For every mouse-click on those two toolbars, I make a dozen on the various tabs that are currently on the Tab Bar, when I'm not interacting with the content below the Tab Bar instead. So why must I repeatedly move the mouse cursor across these toolbars to access a Tab? Why should I have to move the mouse cursor across those toolbars from the Tab Bar to reach the content of the page?

Also, I can't relocate the Back/Forward button to the righthand side of the screen any more. The guy who wrote Mosaic put it in the upper lefthand corner, where it is located to this day for Internet Explorer and even for Google's Chrome (AFAIK), because that is where the MS-DOS command prompt was located. The Windows OS command prompt is still there, of course, because it is the most efficient location to begin entering text strings -- the display screen is analogous to a blank piece of paper.

But pages from the World Wide Web are seldom just pages of text now. We don't use the keyboard, we use the mouse (or our fingers!) to activate "buttons", mostly, located wherever. But we still need to navigate. The vast majority of people are right-handed. You could be amazed at how different it is to use a Back/Forward button that is on the right side of the screen instead of constantly moving the mouse cursor to the upper lefthand corner! These Mozilla guys who think they are so clever do not have a clue, and won't listen to anyone who does.

EDIT (re-written paragraph): With Firefox 28, at least, Tab Mix Plus relocates the Tab Bar to "below content" without obscuring the Status Bar, AKA the "Add-on Bar" (that renaming is another scar from the Chromefox coup-de-etat), or interfering with access to the hidden Windows Task Bar, which is shown when I move the mouse cursor to 3 rows of pixels at the bottom of the display screen. With Firefox 30, Tab Mix Plus relocates the Tab Bar to place it below the content (but cannot relocate it below the Navigation and Bookmark toolbars). In that position, it obscurred the "Add-on Bar" and intefered with access to the Windows Task Bar. Perhaps an upgrade to Tab Mix Plus would resolve those problems, but I doubt that it can be designed to place the Tab Bar beneath the two toolbars. The Chromefoxers would blacklist Tab Mix Plus if it could do that.

The only extension that I could find to restore the "classic" interface is at some Ukraine/Russian website. Let's just say that I've been there while running Firefox 28 in a Sandboxie sandbox, and advise "don't go there" without comparable security measures. Your browser might fetch some "potentially unwanted software" along with the bait. To make a long story short, I could not make the proffered add-on work after it was installed.

In conclusion, there are too many voluteer programmers who can expertly write unmaintainable code, but don't have a clue as to designing anything so fundamental, but subtle, as an efficient UI. Then there are the graphics wizards who create gorgeous "eye candy" UIs for software that is unreliable, lacking in useful features or essential configuration options, or even useless. .......

My apologies if reading this diatribe has been a waste of your time. Writing it has probably been a waste of mine, too.

--- Adeya

Adeya wrote:For what it is worth: I have watched the Weak Auras UI video. It mystifies me. I guess it would be great for research, for examining the inter-relationships of spells and buffs, etc. Actually using it while tanking a raid would, I think, be a very steep learning curve for someone who comes to it cold, without having used it in its previous incarnations. It occupies so much of the screen that I wonder how you can be apprised of what is happening around you in the course of the fight. My eyesight isn't as sharp as it once was, so the tiny buttons could be a problem. And scrolling text on a chat frame tab? Who has time to read the static messages, let alone the moving ones?

I'm not a fast person either, but having large buttons in the middle of my screen means that most information is available without big eye movements. After I installed Theck's UI, I took ten minutes to tweak it a bit (mostly remove information that wasn't useful for me). After that, it's only a matter of training: it took me about a week to develop reflexes related to the display, mostly:

- the five main icons governing your rotation
- the "Bastion of Glory stacks / Holy Power" couple of icons
- the percentage estimation of the next Eternal Flame

Once you train yourself to react to those buttons, the rest is the cherry on top of the cake, and you might as well turn your attention to other parts of the interface, like the raid frames (which you also should bring close to the center of the screen): a paladin tank has many tools to take care of the raid, healing others, redirecting damage, popping bubbles, making threat drop, and so on.

As for your Firefox rant, I won't reply any further since it's off-topic, but my experience is that I spent less than a minute getting used to the changes, noticed that my productivity was intact and went my merry way about more interesting things. YMMV.