I can only really add anecdotal evidence at this point. As 10/48/3 I spank my deep arcane damage (no TLC though and I'd be happy to make a rant thread about how over 20 Illhoof kills have never yielded one for me). It's not a massive swing but on most fights I give up around 5-7% damage for the pleasure of far less threat and far higher potion consumption. I'm still using full arcane for the hell of it lately though because it makes trash ezmode and saves me a bit on repair bills.

I do think the ideal cycle for a mage is this in TBC though:
Deep Frost for levelling/heroics
Deep Fire for Gruul/Mags/SSC up to Vashj
Deep Arcane for Al'ar/Vashj and maybe Kael
Mixed Arc/Fire for early BT/CoT with K/V on semi-farm
Deep Fire again for late BT

Hmm, I will have to disagree with you northerner.

I like to believe that fire spec has the upper hand in most of SSC. A lot of it comes down to the strats your guild uses, but for the most part I expect better results from fire. Particularly on vashj. Karathress should be won hands down by arcane spec though.

For TK, well, I think the advantage should be al'ar and astromancer for arcane, void-reaver and kael'thas for fire. Numbers should be mostly similar though, except for astromancer/al'ar because of the inherent superiority of arcane spec aoe dps (and because al'ar vs fire is a stupid thing to compare).

Most of hyjal is arguably better suited for arcane mages, due to (mostly) short fights. Although I could expect similar results from both specs if you average it out on all 5 bosses, with a slight advantage for arcane. If you also count the trash in, arcane spec will destroy meters.

For BT: I think overall fire spec works very well there, but a few bosses stand out against it:

-Supremus (2nd boss). native 38% partial resist rate on fire spells. COE helps a ton, but expect 20% partials with COE up.

-Shahraz (3rd last boss). Expect piss-poor dps regardless of spec. However, I would not be surprised that 10/48/3 gets 20-25% less damage than arcane due to fight mechanics.

-Illidari Council (2nd last boss). You can get better dps as fire spec than arcane depending on a lot of factors. Basically, if you can nuke the paladin, fire should beat arcane. If you can't, due to positioning and the 'required' job of counterspelling the healer when BOP is up, this might not be possible. With the positioning that we use, I am not able to safely nuke the paladin, so in that particular case I would fare better as arcane spec.

-Illidan (last boss). The hard part of the fight is killing fire immune elementals in phase 2. Need I say fire is unworkable ?

How do you play an arcane spec on al'ar? Your AB/missile/scorch rotation means you can't use scorch but you also have no time to cast anything else... Arcane/frost is still screwed because if you could do 7.5s worth of casting in the 8s window I'd be a happy mage - in reality latency doesn't allow even with near-perfect /stopcasting useage. I hadn't done complete math for frostbolt yet but shouldn't it be better than AM spamming and/or rotating AB without taking advantage of the 1.5s cast with 2.5s mana cost?

How about AB*X AM+Icelance?

Less than ideal, but better than nothing?

For Al'ar I've just insert an extra AB at the start of my rotation, then don't do anything for a bit after your AM to get an extra tick at full regen to make up for the larger use AB in your rotation.

I use ABx3/AM and then use the remaining time, making sure to still get the cheap 1.5s AB after AM, to slowly adjust positioning so that I don't lose any dps time in the rotation from Al'ars transitions (except 4->1, but that can't be helped). I tried mixing in ice lance, but I decided the benefits from a little extra mana regen and positioning would be better (we're new to killing him and it's still a very long fight for us). For phase 2, things are mobile enough that having that extra time can still be used in the same way, although I often screw up my cycle in phase 2.

I do AB(3), AM, wand most often for Al'ar. Depending on friskiness I may just skip the wand shot (it's annoying anyhow) and do AB(3), AM, pause and hit the AB cycle perfectly. It's not ideal but it still beats what I'd do as frost.

Thanks for the BT information by the way Manly, although I can't say it makes me happy. Immunities and extreme fire resistance is frankly bullshit in my opinion.

Well, keep in mind that it makes fire seem worse than it is, but I found it funny you said fire for the endgame, whereas depending on your definition of 'endgame' it clearly wouldn't be the case. If you meant BT+, then yeah I think overall fire is a strong build. But if you speak Illidan, then no.

On Shahraz you will have poor dps regardless of spec. The fight is like a big FU casters written all over. You would have better results, but, oddly, while your personal dps from a fire spec will be pretty bad, the scorch debuff will help considerably your warlock dps (which will be 'forced' to use fire spells'). With this in mind, even though your personal dps would suck, the 'utility' of scorch debuff would probably outweight your personal dps loss. I will not contest that, for this fight, 33/28 > 40/18/3 > 48/13/0 > 10/48/3 > frost.

On illidari council, it depends a lot on your strategy. If you have 'some other caster than you' deal with the counterspells, and that you can nuke the paladin full time, fire will clearly beat anything else. However, since you will probably have the task to counterspell the priest, then you will be forced to stay nearby the priest, which means you get to deal with constant BOP / BOSW (bop for spells), which will constantly stop you from dpsing, as well as clear your scorch debuffs. You probably wont be in totem range if you go nuke the paladin, so you probably can forget that too. In short, arcane wins if you're on counterspell duty only because you dont have to deal with reapplying scorch constantly.

Having tried Illidan quite a few times now I can say I totally hate constantly dealing with the 30 yards range. Spreading out is required, and 30 yards doesn't allows me to dps much. I think I'll be going frost, because range would really help a ton, and the damage reduction is definately not to be ignored. Arcane frost is a strong contender because burst damage happens to be quite handy for a number of places in the fight. But you get screwed by range. Pick your poison I suppose. One has poorer dps, but safe, the other one is risky but provides burst dps.

Just keep in mind that there are 9 bosses in BT I think the only one where fire spec hits a brickwall is Illidan.

I look at these in somewhat order of creditability.

1. Theorycraft from multiple sources that seems to verify what I see in game or stats/meters from people whose posts some of which include there math appear acuurate.(I'd say Lhivera, Irongytress, and Vontre are in this catogery)
2. WowWebstats/Damage Meters/SWStats great tools but can be misleading at times.
3. Post from people I'm fairly sure are being accurate
4.Theorycraft from I source i suspect is unreliable
5. Posts from those I don't know
6. Posts from those I don't know and I'm fairly sure are wrong(My am hit's for 1100)

Claims I feel are the worst. For example what's does "beat badly" mean 10%, 20%? Who is this fire mage? What situation is he in to you?(Cos/coe, latency, shaman/bm hunter) What sitution is the fight short/long, mana burn/mana unlimited? I think arcane is a great spec for short fights(which quite a few bt/hy are) or those where mana isn't an issue and is amazing if you can get support for it say an early innevate from a feral druid, jotw, ect. I think it also works well for fights on farm or that you're familiar with since these are quicker then first kills and you have a better idea of how to manage your mana. I wouldn't suggest arcane learning vashj or kael, but I would for say a 3-4min bt/hy fight WITH the t5 2 piece or for fairly short fights on farm.

No actually its much simplier than that. To re-iterate myself, you cannot use 'someone else in your raid' as a point of reference to compare specs. The reasoning is simply that results will vary from guild to guild.

Did this mage already go arcane? Dug through the armory and couldn't find a fusion mage with 1500 fire damage and capped hit. I wanted to see the setup he was running for ideas.

Is Khazim the fire mage you were speaking of?

I'm still a tad puzzled about AM rank 10 vs AM rank 8.
Would the rank 8 be used in normal rotations (eg. ABx3 AM Scorch) with AM10 on CC?

AM10: 1300dmg 740 mana
AM8: 1150dmg 655 mana (using base thottbot values, NO emp AM)

Is the tradeoff of 150 dmg for 85 mana a significant dps loss?

Main benefit comes from +damage as both ranks get full effect from it, base damage difference is quite insignificant compared to final wave damage and difference in mana cost.

AM 11? I only have AM 10 and it tooltips as 264-265 a missile. Am I missing something?

Also In honesty, I'm not sure if other Arcane mages can back this up but, I rarely if every AM on clearcasts deliberately, I simply continue my rotation like normal. Pretty sure you lose more DPS than you gain by missing your cheap/fast AB.

Nevermind, I meant AM 10. Thottbot has AM 11 as highest rank and I'm at work so didn't have a computer to check that. I naturally assumed AM 11 was the standard lv70 AM, but it turns out it doesn't even exist. There's also rank 14 Frostbolts, etc.

Good game Thottbot. I edited my post to reflect this misinformation.

wowhead has the same stuff, but no knoledge of anywhere they might exist in game. someone also linked to a "spell" that teaches the rank of fireball on the wowhead database, but again no other data.

Isn't AM9 learned at lvl63, meaning AM8 counts as lvl62, meaning you lose some of your spell damage bonus as well?

Just an observation here. As your raid DPS increases and the length of the encounter goes down, the value of arcane is going to increase. Looking at some of these parses, many of these kills are done extremely fast - at least in comparison to my guild. Guilds new to SSC are killing Karathress in 9 minutes where your guild is killing him in 5 minutes. An arcane mage in mostly T4 in a 9 minute fight is going to perform dramatically different than a mage in mostly T5 in a 5 minute fight - even though the encounter is the same. On the other hand, a fire mage is going to perform relatively well in the T4/9m fight and only have a minor dps improvement in a T5/5m fight (his total damage done will likely fall significantly).

I'd say that the best possible spec for heroics is deep arcane, nothing beats DPS zerg bosses like spamming 1.5 second arcane blasts with arcane power, not to mention that the -40% aggro comes in extremely handy when you don't necessarily have a paladin in your group.

Looking over several of you wws posts I have trouble finding coe in the debuff list I can find several that have cos and coa. Also oddly enough several fights have 0 debuffs. I'm no expert in wws and how exactly they work but this leads me to think you may not have enough people submitting logs for adequate coverage(this could present a problem for someone who dps 41 yards from the boss). I also don't entirely know how the dps calculation works or how the fireball dot affects it as manly mentioned earlier. I was however able to find several debuffs on most of the wws manly and aldric posted.

I never said you specifically got an innervate, I mentioned it working well for arcane.

WWS is great with buffs/gains/debuffs BUT like almost any dm/stat meter it's far from perfect or 100% accurate.

I can see you beat your fire mage based on your wowwebstats post, I can also look wws and find guilds that had other fire mages who had higher dps for the same fight.(On the other hand I'd be hard pressed to find an arcane mage who beat you by a the same margin)

It's really hard to compare different players it introduces way too many variables(ISP/Computer/Skill). I enjoyed the wws aldric and manly posted when they tried or are trying the spec.

He's at 1163 fire damage self buffed 34.34crit non hit capped are you talking raid buffed? What happened to the fire mage with 1500 spell damage?


I don't disagree that with 2 piece bonus it's a better spec for several fights I've seen wws and theorycraft that backs that up. I don't think it blows fire out of the water, but does win by >10% for most or large number of fights. I do not agree with statements about it being better dpm or better dps without t5 2 piece(in most cases).

I think by far the best thing you can do is try things out for yourself, and do your own research into theory craft, wws, and what works within your current guild configuration. As long as math is accurate it's correct and you can find errors in math. Stat's or at least those currently in wow have shortcomings things don't get tracked, get missed, don't reset, or can be off do to any number of things several of which are not as easy to find.

This thread really seems ripe for lockage.


Frost is superior on trash imo, and that's where the difficulty of heroics lies.
a) Frost is arguably the highest sustained dps spec on freezable mobs due to shatter.
b) Permafrost gives you great control, which means getting agro doesn't kill anyone. In fact it can help reduce the burden on healers.

As far as bosses go, don't underestimate 1.5 minutes of water elemental on every boss either.

There's just a lot to say for frost in 5 mans. I can't count how many times a WE + Ranged nova has saved a healer. The big bonus in my eyes is that frost requires no complicated rotations, so you can spend 100% of your time marking targets, monitoring the group's agro, explaining fights, etc.

Really sound's like you've never played arcane in heroics and just claim frost to be superior because of that. There's hardly any trash where you can't nova your self and being able to slow something in a pinch I've found to be much better then putting out a pet.

Shatter is only good if you are soloing mobs from pulls really as someone else will be hitting it if you go with the more traditional approach of having more then 1 player on each focused mob.

Great control and getting aggro doesn't go well together in my book, with arcane you are not going to get aggro to begin with.

Rotations are only difficult while learning, they become routine and you don't think about them alot after you've taken the time to get used to it.

The true strength of frost in heroics is having shatter and iceblock, and again as in half this threads discussion it's about personal preference.

I talked with him and hes at 1383dmg 37.98% crit full raid buffed... So I overestimated his dmg and underestimated his crit. Still very Respectable stats.

As to the rest of your post, I fully agree. Arcane is good in alot of fights, and fire is very viable as well, the myth that we're trying to dispel in all of this is that 90% of the raiding populace believes deep fire to be the end all spec.

As far as the people saying Arcane is similar DPM they are absolutely off their rocker. If my shadow priest dies or discons midfight I am boned. End of Story. Luckily this happens maybe 1 / 30 fights.

Also as far as 1100AM's that is by no means average but ENTIRELY Attainable with trinket on use. Ive hit 1120 AM's on RoS Phase 1 and hes not taking extra dmg in that phase.