Elemental Damage on Weapons

[Zarathustra]

Messing around with my hunter a while back, I stumbled across a Hurricane in Un'Goro while questing. Usually I don't have that kind of luck, since I've got a lot of alts. I always find something that can be used by ANOTHER character. So I was pretty pumped to actually get an upgrade piece of gear while questing WITH that character.

The cool part of the weapon, putting it in the family of those such as Thunderfury, the Iceblade Hacker, etc., is that it has elemental damage added.

"Awesome," I thought, "can't be mitigated."

But checking through the combat log showed no frost damage that I could see.

Looks like I'm not the only one: LINKY

Edit/Addition: This means my ideas of a Paladin capitalizing on the supposed holy damage of Ashbringer won't work. Bah.

[MongoJerry]

That's really interesting, Zarathustra. Thanks!

This brings up another question for those who have killed Viscidus. There seems to be some disagreement about what causes him to freeze up. My guildmates are convinced that the only thing that counts are spells and abilities that cause a slowing debuff. So, frost bolt, frost shock, and frost oil work but frost wands and hunter ice arrows do not. On the other hand, other people are convinced that any attack that causes frost damage causes him to freeze. Does anyone have any conclusive information on this? Please, I want something more than "I heard somewhere that..." on this. If you have a link to someone who thoroughly tested this, I would appreciate it.

This is important, because if a debuff is required, Frost Shock makes the Viscidus encounter even more unbalanced in favor of the Horde than the poison cleansing totem that people always talk about. (Yes, my guild has killed him). Previously, I thought to make up for the lack of Frost Shock, Alliance guilds could try to stack casters with frost wands and hunters with icey arrows along with a few melee people with fast weapons with icy enchants. The melee idea would still work, but not being able to use frost wands or ice arrows would really hurt, if the debuff idea is true.

[Skandranon]

That's really interesting, Zarathustra. Thanks!

This brings up another question for those who have killed Viscidus.  There seems to be some disagreement about what causes him to freeze up.  My guildmates are convinced that the only thing that counts are spells and abilities that cause a slowing debuff.  So, frost bolt, frost shock, and frost oil work but frost wands and hunter ice arrows do not.  On the other hand, other people are convinced that any attack that causes frost damage causes him to freeze.  Does anyone have any conclusive information on this?  Please, I want something more than "I heard somewhere that..." on this.  If you have a link to someone who thoroughly tested this, I would appreciate it.
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Frost wands work. Hell, each tick of Blizzard works, it's just hard as hell to aim and not worth the mana. Ice arrows do not work. Icy enchants do not work. Only actual hits for frost damage count: frost oils count because they inflict a little bit of frost damage when they go off, but Icy enchants just slow.

All tested, third kill of Viscidus was just last Monday.

[Concillian]

That is interesting, since I used to use an "Iceblade Hacker"

If a pally used the blessing of Protection, which mitigates physical damage, but not spells and elemental damage, I would see an "Immune" to my swing, then a very small amount of damage given (I think Iceblade Hacker is 1-4 damage)

Also on the Dark Shades in Scholo (the Occultists that turn physical immune) it would show a tiny amount of damage each swing with the "Immune" message

This was, however, several patches ago, like probably 1.7 ± 0.1

[MongoJerry]

That is interesting, since I used to use an "Iceblade Hacker"

If a pally used the blessing of Protection, which mitigates physical damage, but not spells and elemental damage, I would see an "Immune" to my swing, then a very small amount of damage given (I think Iceblade Hacker is 1-4 damage)
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Maybe the problem is only with ranged attacks? So, perhaps Hurricane and ice arrows don't work but melee weapons do?

[Concillian]

Maybe the problem is only with ranged attacks?  So, perhaps Hurricane and ice arrows don't work but melee weapons do?
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Apparently this is exactly the case. Hortus added this to the initial thread a few minutes before I posted:

I was just told that the damage limitation only applies to ranged weapons, so melee weapons should be applying the elemental damage. If you find otherwise please let me know.

As for other ranged weapons, they'll all get individually changed from +elemental damage to elemental procs. The exact damage amounts and proc rates will be determined by our developers, but will average to the same amount of bonus damage.

[...etc...]

these changes should be retroactive, so current weapons in your possession will gain the effect, you won't need to get new ones.

[MongoJerry]

Frost wands work.  Hell, each tick of Blizzard works, it's just hard as hell to aim and not worth the mana.  Ice arrows do not work.  Icy enchants do not work.  Only actual hits for frost damage count: frost oils count because they inflict a little bit of frost damage when they go off, but Icy enchants just slow.

All tested, third kill of Viscidus was just last Monday.
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OK, Skandranon, a couple of mages in my guild don't want to believe it. Personally, I think they like the idea of a fight where they are absolutely essential and like having the raid stacked with eight mages. So, I need some ammunition here. What exactly did your guild do to test whether frost wands work?

[Quark]

Haha ... oh this is hilarious. There's a fight going on in the Rogue forums about the value of Thunderfury for Rogues, with the base argument from the original poster focusing on the Nature damage added.

Whelp, there goes that.

[castille]

Haha ... oh this is hilarious.  There's a fight going on in the Rogue forums about the value of Thunderfury for Rogues, with the base argument from the original poster focusing on the Nature damage added.

Whelp, there goes that.
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I still want it :P

[Quark]

Haha ... oh this is hilarious.  There's a fight going on in the Rogue forums about the value of Thunderfury for Rogues, with the base argument from the original poster focusing on the Nature damage added.

Whelp, there goes that.
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Or you can ignore me, because I hadn't gotten to page 2 yet ...

[Skandranon]

OK, Skandranon, a couple of mages in my guild don't want to believe it.  Personally, I think they like the idea of a fight where they are absolutely essential and like having the raid stacked with eight mages.  So, I need some ammunition here.  What exactly did your guild do to test whether frost wands work?
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Beat him with five mages and five warlocks (wanding) doing the freezing, as Alliance. If frost wands don't work, warlocks should have no way to contribute to the freezing. If warlocks couldn't contribute to the freezing, we could not possibly have killed him since we don't have warriors, hunters, or rogues helping freeze, nor do we have shaman. The proof's in the pudding.

Furthermore, on our numerous wipes before we got him down, we tried it with warlocks and without and got a noticeably faster freeze time.

Finally, we all know that Viscidus has a precise hit counter for when he shifts states; it's something like 150 to slow, 100 to freeze up, 100 to freeze solid. A mod was written counting the number of frost hits on Viscidus, including wands, and every time, he shifted states at the exact number of hits he was supposed to. If wands really weren't contributing, the mod would have recorded a number of hits greater than that required to make him shift states. If you have a modmaker in The Core, I'd suggest you do this - build a mod that counts the number of incidences of "hits Viscidus for x Frost damage" and then do the test once with just frostbolts and once with frostbolts and wands. You'll find that they all count as Frost hits.

[MongoJerry]

Awesome, Skandranon. Thanks so much!

Any chance that we could get a copy of that mod? I don't think we have an expert mod maker. The best home made mods I've seen were just a few timing mods.

[Kevin]

Awesome, Skandranon.  Thanks so much!

Any chance that we could get a copy of that mod?  I don't think we have an expert mod maker.  The best home made mods I've seen were just a few timing mods.
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If you can't get the mod from Skan, then ProcWatch might do what you like. Can be tuned to just look for events in the combat log.

[MongoJerry]

Skandranon, while we're on the subject of Viscidus, could you describe how your guild dealt with cleansing the poison dot? As we all know, Horde has it easy here in their ability to drop totems once every eight seconds to instantly cleanse the dot off an entire party. Did you do it by stacking druids? What did you do?

[Skandranon]

Awesome, Skandranon.  Thanks so much!

Any chance that we could get a copy of that mod?  I don't think we have an expert mod maker.  The best home made mods I've seen were just a few timing mods.
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Unfortunately, it's integrated into the guild's custom AQ40 mod, not the kind of thing that we go around passing out, and I'm not good enough of a modder to pick out the Viscidus hit count part.

[Skandranon]

Skandranon, while we're on the subject of Viscidus, could you describe how your guild dealt with cleansing the poison dot?  As we all know, Horde has it easy here in their ability to drop totems once every eight seconds to instantly cleanse the dot off an entire party.  Did you do it by stacking druids?  What did you do?
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We didn't stack the raid: we've not had more than five druids on a Visc kill, ever, and no more than around four paladins with them. What we did:

http://www.thottbot.com/?i=13343

All the learning runs combined consumed several hundred of these, each. We're refining our kills so that we need to drink fewer and fewer of these each time; most of us are down to single digits now.

[Heliotal]

Messing around with my hunter a while back, I stumbled across a Hurricane in Un'Goro while questing.  Usually I don't have that kind of luck, since I've got a lot of alts.  I always find something that can be used by ANOTHER character.  So I was pretty pumped to actually get an upgrade piece of gear while questing WITH that character.

The cool part of the weapon, putting it in the family of those such as Thunderfury, the Iceblade Hacker, etc., is that it has elemental damage added.

"Awesome," I thought, "can't be mitigated."

But checking through the combat log showed no frost damage that I could see.

Looks like I'm not the only one:  LINKY

Edit/Addition:  This means my ideas of a Paladin capitalizing on the supposed holy damage of Ashbringer won't work.  Bah.
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If you look through the full posting you linked (I'm guessing it's been updated since you read it) the issue with elemental damages is only applying to ranged weapons. Melee weapons with additional elemental damage (IE Black Malice, Night Reaver, Thunderfury) are functioning normally. Also, it was added that they will be replacing the straight +elemental damage effects from the ranged weapons with procs that should average out to similar damage. Hope this helps and I hope I haven't repeated anything.

[MongoJerry]

If you look through the full posting you linked (I'm guessing it's been updated since you read it) the issue with elemental damages is only applying to ranged weapons.  Melee weapons with additional elemental damage (IE Black Malice, Night Reaver, Thunderfury) are functioning normally.   Also, it was added that they will be replacing the straight +elemental damage effects from the ranged weapons with procs that should average out to similar damage.  Hope this helps and I hope I haven't repeated anything.
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Hortus added that note after Zarathustra's original post. Concillian already pointed out the update on melee weapons earlier in this thread, and it's also noted on the Lurker Lounge front page. :D

[Zarathustra]

The change is live on the 1.11 PTR. One thing that's odd is that a Hurricane has an "On Use" "chance" to deal frost damage on a hit.

Faulty wording, or a funky workaround to make a proc work on a ranged weapon? Not sure. It could be that the game doesn't consider ranged weapons to function the same way for auto-attacks as melee, and the actual skill Shoot Bow merely "uses" the ranged item.