With a lot of mages going the 40 / 0 / 21 build for raiding, I did some calculations for a niche of mages. This niche of mages has spellfire tailored set and is inclined to using fire instead of frost for high raid dps. A fire mage has a lot of crit 30+%, decent hit rating, and a good amount of spell damage to back up his necessity for massive damage.

For a 25 / 36 / 0 raid build I have figured 900+ dps with the help of Vontre's Mage DPS Spreadsheet, and with a build of 40 / 21 / 0 I have calculated with the same spreadsheet 1000+ dps. Both builds were done including blessing of wisdom, molten armor ( added dps over mage armor ), vampric touch, wrath of air totem, spellfire set bonus, a lag of 0.35s, and no arcane power. Arcane power for the 40 / 21 / 0 build raised dps by about 10% over the 1000+ dps benchmark.

Also, the cookie cutter 10 / 48 / 3 build comes close to competing with the 40 /21 / 0 build, by just coming in under 1000 dps.

In comparison with the benchmark of Vontre's spreadsheet with a 40 / 0 / 21 build, I have calculated a 40 / 21 / 0 build will out dps a 40 / 0 / 21 build by about 50+ dps. I know 50 dps does not seem like a lot, but thats 50 damage per second, with an average fight on the spreadsheet lasting 6 minutes. That extra 50 dps equates to about 18000 extra damage over the course of the fight.

Any thoughts from the veterans of fire?

What gear did you base your DPS-values on? When talking about Raid-DPS, you should also consider a mage with decent raid gear, witch would be at about 900-1000+fire-/frostdamage, 100 hit rating and 250 crit rating (even more with tailored gear).
Its been stated several times in the "Mage theorycrafting"-thread, that under this circumstances a deep fire build (e.g. 10/48/3) has the highest single target damage potential. Even with the recent buff to frost (+5%damage), I don't see it close to fire, witch it also shouldn't be due to it's high mana efficiency and defensive aspects (ice block, ice barrier).

Sorting out what you said:

40/21/0 is coming out at just over 1000dps
10/48/3 is just under 1000dps
40/0/21 is around 950dps
25/36/0 is around 900dps

And you are looking for thoughts regarding whether switching to a 40/0/21 is a reasonable alternative for raiding?

With those assumptions, my thoughts.

1) What do the other gear slots look like. What's the base +dmg and +hit to go with an assumed 30% crit and is that 30% crit fire cirt (after talents) if so- what is base crit from gear.

2) What fights are you doing/other interests do you have? A "perfect conditions" span of 100dps is just small enough, imo, that each option is viable as long as it fulfills the mage's general requirements. In other words- if you're PvPing regularly, taking a dps hit on raids may be a trade you're willing to make. What is the value of the dps loss in raids worth to you in terms of your toolbox. Do you die a lot where iceblock is a greater DPS boost due to living through something than a higher base dps build? Also- not everyone plays every spec as well as another spec. Forgetful people lose dps with heavy arcane because they don't ahve AP up every cooldown, etc.

For me, I went with 10/48/3 and don't see much of a reason to change it with 2.1. It's a functional build that I'm comfortable with and I only pvp 10 games a week on a trash 5v5 team with no pretensions (called: At least we get points.). I like my cooldown toolbox although I miss iceblock =(

If a 21+frost build ever came out as a base dps increase over fire- I'd go back, but until then I'll stay fire because it suits my playstyle =)

Next patch the frost talent Artic Winds will change to have an additional +5% frost damage with 5 points in it. I think this makes full frost with atleast 10 arcane for concentration also a interresting option for raids.
Although i recognize that full frost is not the best and highest dps build. It still shines on many aspects such as: All round playstyle, it is still very good in both pve and pvp/arena, +10% crit on all frostspells with winters chill in raids, so if you have a couple of other 40/0/21 frost mages they will love you. The water element saved me many times in both pve and pvp, instant summon and a nova for the moments where you need it the most. And if you use your water element every time its cooldown is gone it also adds a nice % of your total damage. And ofcause icebarrier for when you cant be healed and dont have the time to bandage.

A build im planning on taking (even if the DR on all frostbite/petnova/frostnova goes on): http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0VZZVVGcofxRiqt
But i might switch one point from concentration back into improved CoC.

I used a mix of gear and ranges. My gear comes out over 1000 dps for all the builds except 40 / 0 / 21 because I have spellfire and spellstrike sets with the set bonuses. My hp suffers a lot, but thats pretty much the life of my mage since TBC.

On my personal gear I have +880 fire spell dmg, +833 arcane spell dmg, and +633 frost spell dmg and my crit is at 36% on fire spells, and 27% on all other spells when I am raid buffed. Those figures do not include any buffs from foods or potions. With potions and foods, I am over 1k fire dmg, right under 1k for arcane spell dmg, and frost is still kinda bad for me.

I was really wondering if going with a 40 / 21 / 0 build would be raid viable. I am more inclined to fire and arcane over arcane in frost since my frost spell dmg suffers a lot from spellfire tailoring.

Arcane power being 10% damage? I mean, I'm a mage with arcane power (33/28) and I guarantee you it's not 10% of my damage. (even sneaking in a pom-pyro at the end, 30% more damage for 8.25% (15 seconds / 3 minutes) of the time does not equal 10%).

40/21/0 beating 33/28 and 10/48/3????

Rire wasn't changed in this patch and 40/21/0 most *definitely* does not outperform 33/28/0 and 10/48/3, especially being over 1k buffed fire dmg and over 35% crit. I'm not going to bash the spreadsheet because Vontre's given us quite a nice tool for certain situations, but on my pen-and-paper back of the envelope figures, there's no way 40/21/0 is sniffing those other builds (outside of AB spam which isn't viable enough to enter the discussion on any serious boss fight), so please check again.

Edit:

Ok, to seriously answer your question, there are two major things about this patch that changed for mages.
(1) Deep frost got a ~5% dps buff from arctic wind change.
(2) Fireball spam got a slight nerf from the spellhaste changes (if you had quag's + wizardry, it's probably ~1% dps loss to shift to something like mindblade + nel's tear - at the benefit of lower mana expenditure).

That's about it. They fixed arcane missiles *but it's still a terrible raid spell*.

10/48/3 and 33/28/0 were the "go-to" raid specs for spellfire mages who wanted to do a ton of damage in raids. Nothing's changed except for the fact that were I to spec frost (for Al'ar or something), I'd consider deep frost a lot more now than deep arcane/frost.

I dont have anything to increase my spell haste rating. Wish I did sometimes though.

Amaren:

Response to 40/21/0.

What happens going from 40/21/0 to 33/28/0?

You lose 1% effective crit in arcane potency and 25% of your int as spell damage.
You gain 4% crit (assuming 21 fire before gave up blastwave for 1/3 critical mass)
You gain 6% fire damage
Assuming the net gain of 3% crit means your dps increases by ~4% (3 * 1.45), you gain ~10% DPS at the cost of a flat amount of +dmg, typically around 110 (440 int raid buff is typical).
110 +dmg would have added ~35 dps with no latency. Seeing as how you'd be doing upwards of 900 DPS, the 10% gain from switching to 33/28/0 would give you at least 90 DPS, resulting in a net gain of ~65 DPS.

So if you're 40/21/0, you'd do more damage switching to 33/28/0 assuming 10% DPS is worth more than 110 +dmg (for any decent mage, it is).

******

Case 2, 25/36/0 (what kind of build is this???).

Assuming 25/36/0 = http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=ow0VfoczLZxgM0fcc0eR as that's the best DPS build I could come up with.

What happens going from 25/36/0 to a 10/48/3 build?

You lose 8% int, PoM, Mana regen, 9% crit on AB and 15% mana regen while casting.

You gain 3% damage (playing with fire) and +15% of your +dmg on your fireball, as well as 3% hit for elemental spells and -3% mana cost (elemental precision).

8% int is ~40 int, which is 0.5% crit, or around 0.5% DPS lost
9% crit on AB is huge if you're using AB cycles, but since you're trying to maximize DPS, you're not using AB cycles. Thus, 0.0% DPS
15% mana regen is longevity, and I won't deny that it would be nice to have, but does not affect DPS and is offset by precision's -3% mana cost.

6% dps gained, minus 0.5% dps lost = net gain of 5.5% dps
15% of spell damage for fireball gained, or ~150 +dmg.

Assuming 1000 spell damage, you gain 5.5% DPS and 150 +dmg on your fireball. Again assuming 900 base DPS, 5.5% DPS added to 150 +dmg on your fireball is ~ 50 DPS + ~40 DPS, or approximately 90 DPS gained from straight fireball spam (note, this is actually higher because I'm not including modifiers on the +dmg, but let's be conservative anyways).


*****
Moral of the story??
If you are interested in single target raid dps and have the aforementioned gear (1000 fire dmg, >30% crit, etc.) there is no reason to be 40/21/0 -- switch to 33/28/0. There is also no reason to be 25/36/0, as 10/48/3 crushes that build.

The sweet spot for Arcane is around 33, assuming you're repping arc/fire. It nets you AP, 2/2 spellpower, 3/3 instability, and 2/3 potency, along with arcane's bag of tricks. Any higher gives you far less return on your talent points (mind mastery is basically a *static* bonus, it doesn't really scale). If you decide not to go up to 33 arcane, you might as well drop down to 10, as there isn't anything really of value, dps-wise, between 10 and 25. Again, that assumes you aren't using AB cycles, because AB cycles are great for efficiency but can't touch fireball spam's DPS, and DPS is the point of the exercise, yes?.

I would definately disagree that Arcane Mind is a *static bonus*. There is nothing static about this talent. If your intellect increases so does your plus spell dmg. What is static about that?

25 / 36 / 0 gives me 15% mana regen while casting, 15% more intellect, +10 to all resists, and the utility of arcane. AB cycles are used in this build, are very efficient and AB cycles if done correctly exceed fireball dps spam. Arcane Potency is not useless, but not something I would consider taking since you only get an effective chance at increase in dps. The increase in dps from this chance would basically be 10% * 30% = 3% at most increase in dps in a perfect world of crits and clearcasts. At best, you could get one clearcast every 10 spells on average. Then you increase your chance to crit by 30% on those clearcasts. So you basically have a 3% chance to increase your chance to crit for one spell.

If you have the spellfire bonus you get 7% spell dmg increase from intellect which arcane mind scales, and I do not have the need to wear mage armor all the time since I have 15% mana regen while casting from Arcane Meditation. Without the mage armor, I can wear molten armor giving me an effective increase in dps since I am increasing my crit chance by 3%. With the spellfire bonus and the Mind Mastery bonus, your plus spell dmg scales by 32%.

15% mana regen using arcane meditation does offset 3% reduction in cost of fireball. In one 5 second period you can only cast 1.2 fireballs. It would take 6 5 second periods in order to cast two fireballs in one 5 second cycle, and that is assuming no client side to server side lag between chain casting.

If the improved fireball nerf would not be in effect, I wouldn't even consider taking up 40/21/0 because of the empowered fireball talent. Just seems with the nerf even with that empowered fireball, the two builds would be extremely close. Maybe, 40/21/0 and 10/48/3 could come out to almost the same dps. I am not denying that, but I still believe 40/21/0 would come out on top slightly.

I believe 6% effective dps from your calculations on crit, is a good trade off for 20% more dps overall. Each build is slightly different, but AB rotations are not hard to work out.

[url]http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=kf0E00f0xZxgM0fcc0gRo[\url]

25/36/0 Build

The spell damage changes from typical intellect fluctuations are small. Generally speaking, when you upgrade gear, the large changes are in +damage and spell hit/crit, not intellect. The difference between good gear and great gear might be 50 int (as a freshly plucked number). That difference would result in an additional +12 damage, which is fairly negligible in this context.

I'm not sure that statement is clear. The net effect of Arcane Potency is to increase your crit rate by ~3% on all spells capable of triggering clearcasting (which to my knowledge is all damage spells of any school).


All these numbers assume molten armor. As was pointed out above, Arcane Meditation is helpful, but contributes to OOM time, not dps.

Amaren, I'm guessing the closeness you're showing is due to your particular gear choices... you could easily switch in different trinkets and gems and get much more dmg and do more dps with a 10/48/3 build than you're doing with a 40/21 by a substantial margin.

With my gear, the difference is about 90 dps for a 5 min fight.

The closeness he's getting is from the mana regeneration. Vontre's spreadsheet is weighted towards maximizing Arcane Blast damage based on ending at zero mana. Which is fine in a spreadsheet but difficult to move to real conditions. I'm sure that he's using a cycle along the lines of Arcane Blast * 4 or 5 with 2 Fireball (assuming someone else is providing Improved Scorch). The main difficulty with that is it requires knowing the end conditions of the fight (how much mana regen from Shadow Priests and the length) at the begining.

---

As far as 41/20 or 40/21 vs 10/48/3...

40/21 Advantages
-Less gear dependent, because of Mind Mastery
-Less threat because so much damage comes from Arcane
-Improved burst from Arcane Blast spam
-Mana effeciency
-Slow is useful in Heroic for a 41/20 variation
-Maximizes crit rating for DPS

40/21 Disadvantages
-Requires lack of interruption or movement to maximize cycles
-Scales worse than a 10/48/3 build. The line starts at 700-800 damage
-Lacks effeciency in long-range fights where 30+ yards is useful
-Reliance on two curses for maximizing damage (could be an advantage if the Warlock uses Curse of Shadows only)

--

10/48/3 Advantages
-Best DPS build
-Best build where range is a factor

10/48/3 Disadvantages
-Poor mana effeciency
-Very little utility
-Threat issues

Hmm, while of course Fire is more threat than arcane, I wouldn't necessarily say it's an issue that would affect your decision on spec choice. Are you referring to 5 mans mostly or raiding?

Starting off with a few scorches and dropping an invis if you're worried should be plenty to make sure you're way behind the tank. The only times I have aggro problems is when I'm being reckless which would be the case for any spec (especially Arcane Power :P)

You all are forgetting that a good arcane build will get over half, usually more, of its damage from arcane blast. Dropping mind mastery points for critical mass does not get you 6% crit, it gets you 6% crit to fire spells.

Testing I've done has indicated pretty clearly that hybridized builds are not useful for raiding dps, 41/20 and 10/48/3 are the clear winners for raw damage, deep ice has its place as well in some odd situations. And this was calculated after patch 2.1 changes, so no, arctic winds is not going to make ice the new bees knees or what have you.

Are you talking about hybridized builds that use arcane cycles or elemental spam? 33/28 isn't a cycle-based build..

If you're talking arcane cycles for 33/28, yeah I'll agree. However, on Gruul and Mag, my DPS went up when I switched from 10/48/3 to 33/28 fireball spam... are we're testing different fights?

On Gruul I have found I do much better with full frost than fire. Being able to iceblock to remove the movement speed debuff and get to a safe spot and continue frostbolting along with having an elemental being able to do dps while I still have to move is invaluable. Maybe it is just my playstyle, but I always seem to do much better with frost. Im just dreading hydross.

My own observations are pretty lame in that I keep track of my performance by % of raid damage instead of DPS. On the 2-3 weeks of Gruul where I was 11/47/3, I was at around 9-10% of raid dps on both attempts and kills. With 33/28/0, I've finished anywhere from 9% to 12.3% overall (the latter being a pretty big fluke, had 2 elemental shaman and a shadow priest, so double totems of wrath, wrath of air, tranquil air, and mana spring, along with double heroism... and only 1 cave-in on me -- pretty much the most fun I've had on a boss ever!). Typically the next highest is another mage who has similar gear and runs 10/48/3 at ~8-9% and an affliction lock who doesn't have a shadowpriest or elemental shaman at ~8-9% as well.

Just to clarify, we always bring 8 healers and we only have ~30 people in our guild, so % of raid damage isn't a bad tracker in that we have the same number of DPS and typically the same people. Empirical data is always shoddy but there you have it, that's my experience running a hybrid build with a fireball x 5-7 : 1 scorch rotation.

Raid buffed and potted/flasked I'm at around 1400+ fire damage (with wrath of air), 250 crit rating and 130 hit rating. Tailoring is a wonderful thing. I also have blade of wizardry and quag's eye, so I'm abusing the hell out of spell haste while I still can.

***
Edit: The two screenshots I could find were from last week's Mag/Gruul. I was 9.2% overall damage sustaining 875.3 DPS on Gruul (next highest was the 10/48/3 mage at 8.2%). On Mag, I did 11.5% sustaining 1024.9 DPS (next highest three non-clickers were at 9.5% 10/48/3 fire mage, 8.6% shadow priest and 8.3% fire mage - all in my group with an elemental shaman). Elemental shaman + shadow priest + full potting = pretty awesome.

Editx2: Again, this is all pretty meaningless, but the other mages were 10/48/3 with almost similar gear (maybe ~3% less spell hit and ~50 less spell damage) and in the same group as me. It doesn't mean 10/48/3 is worse, but it certainly means 33/28 is viable.

I do not want to derail the thread, although it's seems obvious that even though the frost tree got some love in 2.1, Fire is still the higher DPS tree. (and arc/fire if you're lacking the gear)

That being said, I too have been messing with a 33/28 build. From my understanding, this is a scorch crit build. The talent choices evolve around increasing your crit, specifically fire crit, although AB or AM can be used to add a little bit more efficiency/aggro control at the cost of DPS. The point I'm trying to make is that your gear choice will reflect on how effective this build will be for you. For example, if you go stack all +spell crit gear and try 33/28 you'll probably have better results than if you stack all +spell dmg gear. Of course there is a line of how much spell damage you'll sacrifice for crit, you still want tons of crit but not if you're going to be running around with 400 spell dmg.

The other point I wanted to talk about which is more theorycrafting and should perhaps be made in the other thread, is about spell haste with a scorch crit build. This comes in part from reading some of the Moonkin theorycrafting threads that have been popping around. Scorch like wrath are similar in that they both have 1.5s global cooldown. Scorch is also a 1.5s cast. Would this not mean that builds centered around scorch would not really gain much from +spell haste effects such as Quag trinket proc or shaman's bloodlust?

Thanks

PS I just noticed you said fireball spamming in 33/28. I have not tried Imp Fireball with the 33/28 but am curious now and that would then answer my spell haste question.

Yeah I only use scorch to build up the debuff and then maintain it every 20-25 seconds.

Scorch is pretty nice, especially with the capacitor, but it can't touch fireball (even with the imp fireball nerf).

I tend to shy away from scorch when I know haste effects are coming - such as having shaman in my group, or using wizardry/eye. I've gotten "this spell is not ready" sometimes, and sometimes not... too unreliable and when fireballs are going off at a <2 second clip (proc + heroism), the comparison is moot.

The only way I've changed my gear going from 10/48/3 to 33/28 is to make sure I have a healthy amount of spell hit. My two other 10/48/3 mages are running with ~60-70 hit rating, when I'm almost always over 120 to compensate for the lack of elemental precision. I still stack spell damage heavily and usually don't have my crit rating over 275.

Edit: As Copernicus said below, deep fire is pretty simple. I'm usually in charge of leading raids or at least doing a lot of the in-fight decision-making. The last thing that should be on my mind is where I am on an AB cycle =).

5-mans and Karazhan trash mostly.

When I was 40/21, I never cared about my aggro and could always cast almost instantly on the pull. With a 10/48/3 build, my eyes are glued to KTM.

---

The other large advantage I missed with an arcane build is maximizing DPS in a heavy-drinking enviroment... that is, trash and 5-mans. An Arcane specced mage can blow through their entire mana pool with AB spam, as long as they have 30-45 seconds to drink up for their next pull. And if they don't, they can drop down and use effecient AB/Scorch rotations to DPS while conserving mana.

And the big, gigantic, most important advantage I missed with a deep fire build is that it's really simple to use. It really depends on the fight and the amount of stuff that a player needs to be dealing with, but I've found for myself that Fireball spam frees me up for paying attention to positioning, the stuff going on in the raid, interrupts, etc.

While this may be a valid point, I would point out that with a Fireball build you can easily secure a "safe" rock postition and still be in range of Gruul if he is tanked in the center. This means you can DPS through the shatters and never move the entire time. I'd say that's a bit larger of a benifit on that particular fight than Ice Block.

Copernicus, I do agree with your notes about having to worry more about threat with a Fire build (clearly, a 40% reduction on Arcane comes in handy) but half of the reason is that I think I do substantially more damage now compared to an Arcane Build. I mean, it's hard to deny that when you get multiple 3.6-4.2k crits in a row in a 5-man, you will pull aggro.