Fireball spam is about 100 DPS more than scorch spam.

Our debuff list is...

1. Curse of Elements
2. Curse of Recklessness
3. Curse of Shadows (only if 3 or more warlocks)
4. Sunder Armor
5. Faerie Fire
6. Demoralizing Shout
7. Thunderclap
8. Judgement of Wisdom
9. Fire Vulnerability
10. Gift of Arthas

Those are the only ones we actually care about. We don't really reserve slots for random DoTs.


BTW, the real solution to warlcoks complaining about Fireball knocking off their DoTs is to bring more fire mages and less warlocks. :P

For all the people saying that Rupture does over 100 dps....

How?

As far as I'm aware the current 5 point Rupture rank 6 does 800 + 0.24*AP dmg over 16 seconds.

It ticks every 2 seconds. 8 ticks.

Thus with 1600 AP for example it would do 800 + 0.24*1600 = 1184 dmg over 16 seconds.
Or 148 per tick. Which is 74 dps.

With Improved Rupture it would do 158 per tick which is 79dps.

My Shadow Word: Pain does 135 dps not counting Imp. Shadowbolt.
Warlock dots aren't too far behind.

How exactly is Rupture worth it?

I get the impression that Rogues are looking at the amount their Rupture's tick for and assuming that shows its DPS. Which it doesn't.

I specced 2/3 imp blizzard back in the day to help with Nef phase 1. I finally respecced out of that about a month ago. I have experienced no other raid encounter where it's helpful to that degree (i.e. worth the points).

Serrated Blades boosts your rupture damage by 30%.

(800 + .24*1800)*1.3/16 = 100.1

Now remember that a rogue with Improved Rupture is probably 21/0/30 Deadliness/Hemo specced, and may well have >2k attack power.

A properly constructed ignite stack takes a little bit of time and a fair amount of co-ordination and awareness. Ideally you start combustion (three mages or so preferably) and build until you are at Combustion level 3 to 6 (without using more than one charge ideally) by just scorching or fireballing if you are concerned with wasting charges. Of course you must be sure to apply the debuff and more importantly it also preps each mage to have at least a 50-80% crit rate for the real stack build, which must be built before the imp scorch stack lapses (~25 seconds after you start). Then you let that mini-stack fall off and build the stack you want to roll from trinketted fireballs or even pyros if you have weird specced people. To do so reliably with only fireballs I think you'd want four fire mages but that's just what I've seen, not based on any math at all in this case. Sometimes people slack after all. As soon as it hits five, you fireblast and scorch-spam to roll it as long as you can. With only three mages you will want pretty high crit rates to keep it up for any length of time but such is life.

I sometimes wonder if it is really worth building 'perfect' stacks for a lot of fights though to be honest, as often the owning mage will need to call for a lapse anyhow once aggro builds too insanely. Just rolling away on more random stacks is often enough of a dps perk without the real danger of constantly rolling a really big stack although of course it is a fraction of the damage potential of riding that one big wave. As well, setting up the monster is of course costing you a small amount of damage during the lapse phase as some mages may well be sitting idle 10 or more seconds while prepping. Hopefully not but it can happen. Play around with it if you have some fire mages though and see if you like the results in terms of raid dps.

EDIT: On the fire versus frost front, a lot of the problem is that frost really just looks better on trash and fights that involve periodic spawns. It isn't exactly really doing a ton more damage (there is a lot of wasted damage when a 2.8k frostbolt gets a killing blow) but it sure looks nice when your crits are factored immediately and you always personally get credit for the damage produced. Ignite stacks are garbage on trash as it simply doesn't live long enough. They are also pretty useless on fights where you need to leave and return from the main target a lot, and although WC suffers the same fate as imp scorch unless it's refreshed occasionally frost doesn't have the ignite loss issues. Still, fire should on paper and from my own raid parses simply dominate frost in AQ/Naxx. If your mages hate the playstyle though then there is no point in pushing it at all really and frost is far from gimped entirely. I do still debate the overall usefulness of fire's increased damage versus frost's increased control anyhow... but my heart is in the damage.

I wouldn't be impressed by a blatantly incompetent player either. The fact of the matter, however, is that having all your mages spec fire significantly increases the dps of the raid in basically every case, hence why people do it.

There is quite a big difference between one fire mage who doesn't even know what to spec, and 7 using coordinated Combustions, however.

Also, Fireball doesn't knock stuff off, Scorch does. Fireball is one dot every 3 seconds. Restacking Fire Vulnerability(or shadow weaving, or any stacking debuff) wipes a debuff slot completely, every 1.5 seconds. No, I don't know why a stacked debuff in one slot wipes another slot and puts nothing in it, but it does.

Anyone including trash on their damage meters really shouldn't be using that as a measure of comparative dps ever. The simple fact is that trash dps doesn't matter in the slightest, since trash is trivial. You optimize for the fights where dps is required to kill the mob.

Well, apart from the occasional ignite train. (We had a mage pull aggro with what was in total a 15k Ignite over 5 ticks on Anub's adds, fueling FTW.), Fire is way more damage. We've essentially got a core of 6, 2 of which were always Fire, 3 of which respecced in the last 1.5 month and 1 is atm Elemental. The respeccers went for the 1x/3x/3 build and it was an insane DPS increase. Yes, even if you are alliance with BoS and two TF tanks, I'd still spec Burning Soul. I've personally got 17/31/3 with Imp Scorch in the mix, it helps the damage a lot. Debuffs can be tedious at times, but then again, Hunters in my guild are at times fond of Serpent Sting...

We usually just bring a lot of mages and if it's a fight that we really want the optimal class spread on we will drop warlocks and bring in another class if they will be better DPS. Like you said, there really isn't much of a reason to bring more than two warlocks on most every fight unless you need them to fill the raid. Patchwerk is more about keeping tanks alive than DPS, it can be done with extra healers or sub-optimal DPS but for fights like Thaddius/Loatheb are much more of a DPS test and both fights where fire mages will excel. I've also been looking for an excuse to post this ignite picture I took during a Thaddius attempt a while back and I think this is a good illustration of the power of ignite in certain situations.

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2121/ignitexu4.gif

And yeah that damage meter is correct.

Ha! I can't really say that the raw damage shocks me but the fact that you managed to live through rolling that monster that long does indeed. As a caveat, I do concede that rolling ignites on vulnerable mobs is a bugged mechanic though and will likely get fixed eventually. C'est la guerre.

So in this current list of Debuff slots, I have yet to see a mention of Hunter's Mark. My guild has 4 hunters per raid, sometimes 5 and you are gauranteed that Hunter's Mark will be taking up one of these Debuff slots. So where do you list/prioritise Hunter's Mark in the list of debuffs??

It's also difficult to account for proc debuffs such as Improved Shadow Bolt which is going to proc a few times at least during a boss fight.

Regarding Fire vs Frost, when Naxx came out all our mages initially specced fire to play with the changes and also see how their dps was. When we killed Patchwerk I believe we were back to two Frost and the rest were Fire. At this point the fire mages all spec around each other, and the frost mages do the same amongst themselves (we both have 1 point in imp blizz, 1 of us has 3/5 winter's chill, etc). While switching the last two mages to Fire might increase raid dps some, it doesn't make it particularly ideal for us. Using frost mages on Gluth frees the hunters to tranq and trivializes the kiting for us (ymmv obviously) and thus far the Frost specced mages have passed the more crit heavy pieces to the fire mages while we've received more of the hit/damage upgrades. It's a good balance and since our DPS on Patchwerk, Thaddius and Loatheb hasn't been slacking we really don't see any reason to push the issue.

ps: I love being Frost on Loatheb. Ice Barrier and Ice Block are very nice skills to have for the encounter.