DPS/DPM values change a lot with how you are geared and what raid buffs you have available. I used to downrank to AM8 quite a bit, but I don't find it necessary anymore. Without any external mana regen or debuffs I get the following (no T5 bonus, Lightning Capacitor, Relentless):
You have a nice arrangement of dps and dpm combinations. It's hard to tell which combination to use in a particular case. I'm usually just changing number of AB in rotation lately. However in Karazhan where it was often that there was no shadow priest available I was employing downranking more. I still use lower dps cycles even with all mana regen options from shadow priests and JoW on aoe fights. For Hydross for example I'm using AE on adds and AB+AM on boss. Usual fight ends up with 60% AE, 27% AM and 13% AB damage.
I'm no expert on wowwebstats but I assume the low dps time means longer times not doing dps 1000-1100 so to a certain degree dps from wowwebstats can be flawed if your dps remain high by not doing anything, and is generally less favorable for fire where a fireball dot might keep your "dps time" going when you are not actually dpsing. I'm think arcane is a fairly good viable spec, quite a few fights are short and those that are not you can use a less dpm intense rotation and simply do less then you would have with fire.
However again
1. I have never seen any math or wowwebstats(I think) that suggests an arcane mage can beat fire without 2 piece t5
2. That arcane is less dpm with any repsectable dps rotation or arcane does more damage over the course of a long fight
I look at it this way well geared arcane mage could do around 1200-1400dps on a short fight and 1000-1100 on a longer fight. A well gear fire mage is around 1100-1200dps on any fight. I
But I have seen enough that convinces me
1. For fights around (3-4mins) Arcane can do around 100-200dps more then fire possibly 300+ over with some raid support(innevates).
2. Arcane will do less damage then a fire mage over a longer fight by around 100-200dps
This is all fairly in line with theorycrafting considering the 3abamsc rotation and then ab spam at the end. I just don't agree with all the talk about going with arcane without the 2-set bonus or that arcane has the same or better dpm as fire.
This is all fairly in line with theorycrafting considering the 3abamsc rotation and then ab spam at the end. I just don't agree with all the talk about going with arcane without the 2-set bonus or that arcane has the same or better dpm as fire.
Whilst I agree with your post, I would think the reason Arcane specs with 2pc T5 pop up a lot is due to Al'ar. Depending on how your guild tackles content, you would think you would be close to having the bonus when attempting Al'ar. Seeing as its fire immune, having a spec that performs relatively close DPS wise that doesn't require you to respec each week is desirable.
"Being a leader is not a position of power. It is a position of service." ~ Barestomper
I'm no expert on wowwebstats but I assume the low dps time means longer times not doing dps 1000-1100 so to a certain degree dps from wowwebstats can be flawed if your dps remain high by not doing anything, and is generally less favorable for fire where a fireball dot might keep your "dps time" going when you are not actually dpsing. I'm think arcane is a fairly good viable spec, quite a few fights are short and those that are not you can use a less dpm intense rotation and simply do less then you would have with fire.
However again
1. I have never seen any math or wowwebstats(I think) that suggests an arcane mage can beat fire without 2 piece t5
2. That arcane is less dpm with any repsectable dps rotation or arcane does more damage over the course of a long fight
I look at it this way well geared arcane mage could do around 1200-1400dps on a short fight and 1000-1100 on a longer fight. A well gear fire mage is around 1100-1200dps on any fight. I
But I have seen enough that convinces me
1. For fights around (3-4mins) Arcane can do around 100-200dps more then fire possibly 300+ over with some raid support(innevates).
2. Arcane will do less damage then a fire mage over a longer fight by around 100-200dps
This is all fairly in line with theorycrafting considering the 3abamsc rotation and then ab spam at the end. I just don't agree with all the talk about going with arcane without the 2-set bonus or that arcane has the same or better dpm as fire.
Lately I've managed to avoid hard OOM on long fights too, this is due to:
1) when I do flask, I use a flask of mighty resto (24mp5)
2) Insightfull eartstorm diamond (about 22Mp5 with ABAMSC rotation)
3) Judgement of wisdom is always applied on our bossfights (an insane 130mp5 with AMAMSC)
4) there's always a shadow priest in the mage group on our raids
even without the spriest buff added this is 175 mp5 or 2106 mana/ minute, which means that even on long bossfights I do not run OOM unless there is heavy AOE involved. This also means that I can even afford to AM spam, which means the JoW and earthstorm diamond become even more effective and this also scales up my lightning capacitator.
In practice, on any bossfight where only single point DPS is involved, I can outnuke fire mages easily because of all the mana measures we have taken as a guild to maximise our DPS output.
In my opinion, even without 2 pieces of tier5 arcane is a very viable build, you just have to know how to gear yourself properly for it and what setups work best in raids.
I haven't been on it myself so can anyone fill me in with what the deal is? I hear clearcasting got changed to proc on hits and not on casts. That would be the same difference as procs that are being triggered on hit ("Gives a chance when your harmful spells land") vs. on cast ("x% chance on successful spellcast")
I guess it's still being consumed on cast, not on hit, though.
If it really procs on hits, that would mean you would have a 50% chance to trigger it with an AM volley as opposed to 10% now, which would be really overpowered, if it's still not consumed until the next AM cast. If it would be consumed on hit (as in, a single AM tick), you would have a 5 times higher proc rate but but 5 times lower proc "yield". However I don't think they would make it consumed on a single tick, then they would have to change the whole way the mana cost is paid for AM, since you pay the mana up front, so a consumed clearcast on a tick wouldn't give you any mana efficiency benefit which is the whole point of clearcasting. All other spells would be unaffected by this change, though.
I'm confused. Buff? Nerf? Or only a bug after all?
It's not the AM that requires 2/5 T5 to be viable, and it's not the mana cost of AM either. It's the fact AM is not cutting it in DPS, heck even fireball filler arcane specs that do more dps than full aracne don't cut it in fireball dps, but with 2/5 T5 the AB damage actually makes up for the damage you lose by not being 10/48/3 when casting fireballs (or for the damage you lose by using arcane missiles which is a weaker spell by definition).
Also I did some rough estimations for value of mana for AB spammers with 40/18/3 spec with my guild spamming AB 25% of the time and doing a rotation for the rest of the time (3XAB-2Xfireball), I get that 1 mp5 is equivalent to 0.9 spell damage due to the extra AB spam time you get (as well as 1 spi = 0.4 dmg and 1 int = 0.14 dmg from mana, 0.25 dmg from talent and 0.23 dmg from crit for .62 dmg per int). This is by no means accurate but a good estimation to give you an idea for flask choices at the very least. 25 mp5 isn't even close to 70 spell damage.
It's not the AM that requires 2/5 T5 to be viable, and it's not the mana cost of AM either. It's the fact AM is not cutting it in DPS, heck even fireball filler arcane specs that do more dps than full aracne don't cut it in fireball dps, but with 2/5 T5 the AB damage actually makes up for the damage you lose by not being 10/48/3 when casting fireballs (or for the damage you lose by using arcane missiles which is a weaker spell by definition).
Sorry but that is very much not true.
I can only confirm that on our last Illidan kill we had 2 full arcane specced mages topping the meters and all they did was spamming AM. I don't really understand where people get the idea from that AM isn't suitable as a main nuke spell... I mean, what is wrong with 1100+ dmg AM ticks (after CoS etc. and other raidbuffs (not consumables) are applied) ? That's allready a solid 1100 DPS. Now add to that crits and your average DPS will never drop below 1300.
Now take into account certain other stats like:
- spellhaste rating (probably purely designed for arcane mages.. don't see how it's useful for any other class or talent build)
- "on crit: effect" - procs.
The AM spamming mage that topped the meters with the highest margin was a mage that has about enough hasterating for 4,5~ second arcane missiles and on top of that the Capacitator .. which causes about 10% of his DPS. (Well he also got Guldan's skull now so I he can pew pew pink missiles even faster).
The 2nd mage had quite an assortiment of "on crit: effect"-proc gear .. like 4x Tier5 or Karathress trinket etc. and he also managed to maintain a solid near 1400 DPS with just spamming AM.
Now the other side to the story, I was the 3rd full arcane specced mage, but i didn't nearly do as much DPS as they did ... I believe that this was mostly due to me not having the right gear for a full arcane build, because well on the meters you could clearly see that while spamming AM.. that my DPS was about 250 lower then theirs. (In 10/48/3 however my DPS is "extremely competitive" (to express it with humble words) ... even when they also spec this same build.)
The only thing I can conclude from these personal observations is that you need a totally different approach to gearing yourself for arcane DPS. You can't just respec to full arcane and go "test it" to see if it's any good.. you need totally different gear if you want to top DPS with arcane than if you'd want to top DPS with the cookie cutter 10/48/3 build.
And as a side-note .. Arcane Blast is really too much of a hassle in alot of fights to keep those rotations up, it's more preferable to just spam AM, which shouldn't give you any less DPS then AB rotations.
1100 AM? My non-crit fireballs are nearly 3000 average on a fully debuffed mob (before execute range, after that it becomes 3600) and it crits for 210% instead of 175%, so I really don't see how after upgrading a shitload of gear my fireballs wouldn't do noticeably more damage than arcane missiles... I mean only item I have from SSC/TK is T5 shoulders so far, so I bet their fireballs can hit much higher in their gear which makes it even more clear that AM spamming is not an effective way to dps... Let me know if I'm missing something but can 1100 per hit for AM with lower crit chance and crit for less match with a fireball that hits for over 3000 (probably quite a bit over 3000 due to SSC/TK/BT gear) and crit more often and for 210% damage? I just don't see it unless you're also spamming AB with 2/5 T5 bonus for a non-neglicible portion of the fight.
TLC makes AM spam godly, on 5 hits I crit on average 1.65 times, which means 0.55 * TLC proc, which adds roughly 475 damage per AM volley or a full 92 damage per missle/ per second.
I don't think AM spam is viable unless you've got this trinket. TLC + JoW = near infinite mana and extremely high DPS. I do agree that mathmatically the base value of AM is fairly shit, but there's so many synergy benefits to abuse with AM spam that it can be good, providing you know what you're doing.
I mean, what is wrong with 1100+ dmg AM ticks (after CoS etc. and other raidbuffs (not consumables) are applied) ? That's allready a solid 1100 DPS. Now add to that crits and your average DPS will never drop below 1300.
And as a side-note .. Arcane Blast is really too much of a hassle in alot of fights to keep those rotations up, it's more preferable to just spam AM, which shouldn't give you any less DPS then AB rotations.
Quick number check.
1100 AM means ~1700 arcane spell damage after buffs/talents (assuming 13% CoS + Misery). With those numbers, your AB hits for about 2800 damage, and doing 3*AB with a long first cast (2.5s on first cast since you can't cycle properly with AM) nets you 1500 DPS, compared to 1300 with AM (including crits and such).
With AB spam when you need to burn things down quickly, you can peak beyond 2k DPS (without AP) for a short period of time.
Edit: Arcane Missilies hit for 264 + 0.3757*arc_dmg per tick (if empowered), multiplied by 1.03 (Arcane Instability), 1.13 (Curse of Shadow), 1.05 (Misery). Takes ~1700 damage to break 1100 ticks, unless they changed the mechancs, or am I doing something wrong? Maybe FI from a hunter, trinkets, procs, something?
Even if I forgot something there, casting 3*AB after every second AM should be a DPS increase and mana cost decrease.
Quick number check.
1100 AM means ~1700 arcane spell damage after buffs/talents (assuming 13% CoS + Misery). With those numbers, your AB hits for about 2800 damage, and doing 3*AB with a long first cast (2.5s on first cast since you can't cycle properly with AM) nets you 1500 DPS, compared to 1300 with AM (including crits and such).
With AB spam when you need to burn things down quickly, you can peak beyond 2k DPS (without AP) for a short period of time.
Ehm .. not sure how you get to the number of that 1700 spelldamage .. but i think I had around 1400 spelldamage (not sure if the +110 spelldamage elem. shaman gives also is included in that), when I did those 1100 AM ticks.
187.9 coefficient with emp. AM
1400 base AM damage
1400 +dmg
Damage bonus: CoS (With malediction: 13%, Misery 5%, Arcane instability: 3%, so 21%
Total volley damage: (1400 + (1400 * 1,879))*1.21 = 4887,026
4887,026 / 5 = 975,4052
So not quite. If my math is right you'd indeed need 1674 +dmg to reach normal 1100 hits. Unless you were talking about average ticks including crits, not straight hits.
187.9 coefficient with emp. AM
1400 base AM damage
1400 +dmg
Damage bonus: CoS (With malediction: 13%, Misery 5%, Arcane instability: 3%, so 21%
Total volley damage: (1400 + (1400 * 1,879))*1.21 = 4887,026
4887,026 / 5 = 975,4052
So not quite. If my math is right you'd indeed need 1674 +dmg to reach normal 1100 hits. Unless you were talking about average ticks including crits, not straight hits.
Sorry, but this calculation can't be correct .. my AM ticks never did less then 1000 damage .. they nicely stayed around the 1100..
Might it be that the coefficient you use isn't 187,9 but higher instead?
IIRC the base spelldamage modifier on a 5 seconds cast spell is 5/3,5 = 1,43
Now on top of that you also have the 1,45 spelldamage modifier from emp. arcane missiles.
Now the thing what I don't understand is why people assume that the spellmodifiers should be add up instead of multiplied. Has this been tested out enough before? Because to me it seems like it hasn't. Multiplied it would change the coefficient into 2.07 ...
207.1 coefficient with emp. AM
1400 base AM damage
1400 +dmg
Damage bonus: CoS (With malediction: 13%, Misery 5%, Arcane instability: 3%, so 21%
Total volley damage: (1400 + (1400 * 2,071))*1.21 = 5202,274
4887,026 / 5 = 1040,45
That seems to match reality alot more .. now add to that the +110 totem and voila .. the 1100 arcane missiles ticks.
Why are people assuming that emp. AM only gets a 187,9% coefficient though? This doesn't seem right at all to me.
And if it was additive .. wouldn't that be totally weird for a talent like emp. frostbolt for example? Would the +10% spelldamage it gets also totally ignore the 3 second base casttime of frostbolt? And as such making it an extremely powerful talent for DPS in the frost tree ? Perhaps even more powerful then what the emp. fireball talent is for the fire tree?
His character sheet shows 1139 spell damage. Assuming +42 for weapon oil, +23 for food, +80 for flask, and then adding the +110 for wrath of air totem, thats ~1400 spell damage after Totems, not before. (interesting side-note: he is significantly over the hit cap)
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I'd hate to see this thread thrown off by fuzzy math and unrealistic approximations.
It really seems like there are 2 types of arcane builds being discussed. The first is the Arcane blast rotations with AM as supplements. The second is an AM spam build based around haste. Clearly, Maxyz has a lot of haste rating.
So how much haste and spell damage is needed to push AM spamming into the realm of a plausible dps? Becuase it seems as though the math wont support it at the entry raiding level (tier4 for example).
I am pretty sure coefficient talents stack additively. The wording says that the talents gets an additional chunk of your spell damage added to the existing bonus, not a seperate bonus multiplied on top.
His character sheet shows 1139 spell damage. Assuming +42 for weapon oil, +23 for food, +80 for flask, and then adding the +110 for wrath of air totem, thats ~1400 spell damage after Totems, not before. (interesting side-note: he is significantly over the hit cap)
I was referring to myself with the 1100 AM ticks ... Armory
but I'd hate to see this thread thrown off by fuzzy math and unrealistic approximations.
I myself am starting to get rather annoyed by all these mathematics and assumed 'correct theories' that don't match reality or personal experience.
I just tested the coefficient on my arcane mage, here are the results that I got:
Test 1: 1176 arcane damage - AM ticks for ~732.5 x 5 - 3663 total damage
Test 2: 1229 arcane damage - AM ticks for 753 x 5 - 3765 total damage
Net difference - +53 spell damage = +102 damage on arcane missiles
Doing the math, the spell coefficient works out to about 192% (including modification from arcane instability). The numbers aren't exact due to crits being thrown in there, and I wasn't paying attention to my health bar and got ganked by another mob and killed while testing. In any case they are good enough.
This leads me to believe that 187.9% coefficient is probably correct.
This is not to say that I think that arcane missiles is useless, I think it is probably one of the most underestimated spells in the game.
Well, math says that 1100 AM hits (excluding crits) are not going to happen with less than 1650ish spelldamage. The only explanation would be BM hunter group procs, special vulnerabilities or 4 piece T6 set bonus.
Axira, i checked the armory for you. You are currently specc'd fire. Since you mentioned you felt your fire spec gear was suboptimal for the arcane build, I sought out the mages you said were outperforming you with deep arcane builds.
You can make an argument against the "mathematics" and assumed theories all you want, but in the thread about +spell hit being overrated, you've already shown to go against the majority of the people on these boards when it comes to math and probablity. You've also provided 0 hard evidence of reality to allow others to try and explain. A WWS parse of a fight where an arcane mage is shooting out AM for the DPS numbers you throw out would be incredibly helpful. Vague recollections and approximate numbers thrown out, especially when they dont match up to what people can see on the armory, is not going to be enough to counter peoples math (assuming it is wrong, which is a big assumption).
Haste as it relates to AM and Arcane DPS is a huge topic, that hasn't been discussed much in this thread. Your posts are bringing it to the forefront, although I'd love to see some of the math junkies like galz shed some light on how much you want/need to make huge dps gains.
But right now you aren't doing a good job of explaining why your personal experience doesnt match up to the math, nor are you doing a good job of verifying that personal expereince with hard evidence. It really comes off as a "Onyxia deep breathes more since the last patch" argument.
Axira, i checked the armory for you. You are currently specc'd fire. Since you mentioned you felt your fire spec gear was suboptimal for the arcane build, I sought out the mages you said were outperforming you with deep arcane builds.
You can make an argument against the "mathematics" and assumed theories all you want, but in the thread about +spell hit being overrated, you've already shown to go against the majority of the people on these boards when it comes to math and probablity. You've also provided 0 hard evidence of reality to allow others to try and explain. A WWS parse of a fight where an arcane mage is shooting out AM for the DPS numbers you throw out would be incredibly helpful. Vague recollections and approximate numbers thrown out, especially when they dont match up to what people can see on the armory, is not going to be enough to counter peoples math (assuming it is wrong, which is a big assumption).
Haste as it relates to AM and Arcane DPS is a huge topic, that hasn't been discussed much in this thread. Your posts are bringing it to the forefront, although I'd love to see some of the math junkies like galz shed some light on how much you want/need to make huge dps gains.
But right now you aren't doing a good job of explaining why your personal experience doesnt match up to the math, nor are you doing a good job of verifying that personal expereince with hard evidence. It really comes off as a "Onyxia deep breathes more since the last patch" argument.
Well I wanted to link back to that old WWS i posted here earlier, in which i could also show you that his AM's ticked for around 1050 even with his 1150ish base spelldamage. I could post alot more of these if I logged all the fights we weekly do and show you stuff like .. mages with extremely low hitrating and high critrating outDPSing the theorycrafting hitcapped mages (like myself) by alot and certain arcane mages just outDPSing, sometimes better geared, 10/48/3 mages also by alot.
And yeah I know that I've a hard time trying to explain or probably even trying to understand atm why these things I see don't match others or even my own math.. even when using Vontre's DPS-sheat my DPS should be alot higher with an arcane spec then the other mage you just linked the armory profile from .. but it isn't .. and it's not because i'm like sleeping 4 seconds everytime after I'm done with casting my previous AM before starting the next one, with damagemeter addons you can easily compare how much difference in DPS there is between certain people on a specific cast.
And yeah I know I'm going "against" what the majority of people seem to believe about mage-theorycraft lately, but this is once again, merely due to personal experience ... If I actually did see the theorycraft matching the WWS and damagemeters .. I wouldn't be doubting the currently "correct theories" .. but well they don't.
But don't worry, I'll try to get more WWS made to show you all these things, like mentioned before I wanted to refer to the one i posted earlier .. but the site only hosts WWS for 15 days it seems =(
Axira, does that mage with the 1100 AM ticks have 4/6 T6? Was it with a zone buff? (I believe you get the zangarmarsh one in serpentshrine)? Was there a BM hunter in the party?
If not, you're basically saying spell coefficient bonuses stack multiplicatively which just isnt true.
Axira, does that mage with the 1100 AM ticks have 4/6 T6? Was it with a zone buff? (I believe you get the zangarmarsh one in serpentshrine)? Was there a BM hunter in the party?
No, It was me that had 1100 AM ticks on Illidan ... no 4/6 Tier6 no zone buff etc.. just full consumables, CoS, elemental shaman etc.
If not, you're basically saying spell coefficient bonuses stack multiplicatively which just isnt true.
Maybe not multiplicatively but not additive either as far as I can see .. from the few tests I did a moment ago .. unequipping my Magtheridon's Eye (54 spelldamage) .. my (emp.) AM's tick for about 22 less... that ain't the 2,07 coefficient i talked about earlier, but it ain't the 1,87 coefficient other people were referring to either.
Can you make screenshots? I'm not saying you're lying but I have a really hard time believing that you can do 1100 ticks (or 1088) with no trinkets, AP, mob vulnerabilites or zone buffs on a raid debuffed target. The math just doesn't add up. Again, you are talking about straight ticks from your combat log, not averaged hits including crits from damagemeters, right? I also read that illidan takes additional damage while being trapped by maiev, maybe that's the explanation?
Well, math says that 1100 AM hits (excluding crits) are not going to happen with less than 1650ish spelldamage. The only explanation would be BM hunter group procs, special vulnerabilities or 4 piece T6 set bonus.
I'm looking at a spreadsheet saying you'd need around 1900 spell damage to acquire 1100 damage each missile (Lhivera's Theorycraft Script)
When it comes to haste, it's not that hard. If you haste AM by 10% it'll do 10% more damage, and so will fireballs... The only thing that can't get hasted is scorch which is already a really small part of your DPS. AM and fireball need to be very very close in DPS for the fact scorch doesn't get hasted to turn the tides. In reality you can just say it doesn't matter if you have haste or not when debating fireballs VS AM.
Also remember that unless one spell scales noticeably faster than the other (remember while AM gets a bigger coefficient it's not all that big. That 45% extra spell damage is spread over 5 seconds while fireballs 3.5% extra spell damage is spread over 3s, so basically AM gets 27%. But fire also has quite bigger damage multipliers if you're specced into fire, and higher starting damage. you're right AM has an advantage on mobs where you can't keep imp scorch up but let's get realistic - those mobs are the exception and not the rule - and even on those it's still not enough for AM to catch up in DPM, and besides the numbers I ran for it were assuming the fire is equipped for +hit, if you're gearing for fighting these adds you'll have more +damage (which is what the AM numbers are using), not to mention your DPS will go higher than my numbers for the plain fact I'm not using a crit-capped build. At the end you'll have to run the numbers accurately (I'm not going to go any deeper than this because non-boss mobs are the exception and not the rule) but if you look at boss DPS AM will do lower dps and DPM (at least without TLC and JoW with 100% uptime).
07/19/07, 7:28 AM
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