Where are you "AP+Trinket 14xAB PoM+Pyro" ??

AP+AB spam is as central to the arcane build as you get imo. If you have the mana to spam AB at any point in the fight, it should be spammed within an AP**. I do it from my first gem+pot to get me to my evocation faster...then use it every time the CD is up.

(** because of the fact that AP adds 30% of the BASE AB cost, not the ramped up cost.)

You keep saying Relentless Earthstone Diamond.... agility + melee crit.
Im just curious if you mean the Insightful. Or perhaps you had another completely different one in mind?

Benji, it really sounds like you're trying and have a sincere desire to do well as an arcane mage. I suggest you go back to the start of this thread, and read the whole thing. Then spend some serious time with a spreadsheet.

Just as an example, if you were to look at a spreadsheet like Vontre's you would see that your recommendation of drinking a mighty resto flask over a supreme power is truely insane. Take a 10 minute fight for instance, extremely lengthy right, seems great for some of that fancy mp5 stuff.

Doing this would lose you 20,000 damage over that 10 minute fight on a ABx2 Scorchx4 rotation.

Really I want to believe that you're trying to do arcane a good service with your post, but please, for the love of all that is good, inform yourself.


Edit: And to your question on the Relentless Earthstorm Diamond, it's 3% on ANY type of crit.

Ok, this thread is about how to play arcane spec. If you don't understand basic principles of how to mana DPM and DPS then this is not the place for this. No matter what the fight is, your goal is always to end with 0 mana at the end, but this also indicates that your current mana should be mostly matching the boss hp%. The only exceptions to that rules is things like procs or opportunities to boost DPS in a way that is not detrimental to your DPM. This means, if youre fire spec, and thus have 20% more damage on execute range, you want to make sure you have all the mana necessary to optimize your DPS at 20%, since that DPS boost does not affects negatively your DPM. Likewise, since you want to put focus on having mana available when you can push extra dps, that means you should be going all out when bloodlust/AP are active, and blowing cooldowns during that time.

And I don't know how someone can realistically claim that its a good idea to get as many mana regen from consumables as possible. That kind of statement has clearly never ran through some basic basic WWS parses. No matter how many flask of mighty restauration you take, or spirit gear you wear, or hell, mp5 gear (haven't seen much in tbc), the net effect from all of that will be very very very below the mana gains you will get from your shadow priest. I would say, at best, 10% of the mana your shadow priest will give you (mana pots not counted for obvious reasons). What you want to do is to stack damage as much as possible so that you can maximize upon the mana given by your shadow priest. Its the same thing as using cooldowns such as icon of the silver crescent during bloodlust; they both 'multiply' together, whereas adding more mana consumables just being additive to each other.

And theres a good reason you want to spam AB during AP.

I'm a 40/18/3 specced, my main rotation is 3*AB/2*FiBa. I rank down to 2*AB/2*FiBa is mana is a issue, and use mana dumps if I have mana to spare.
There are a few things I'd disagree with:


- Mana dumping at the start.

Yes, if you use evocation early, you may be able to use it twice, but not always.
The problem is - if you use it early and it gets interrupted, you may have gained 1 tick of mana and that has to last for the rest of the fight.
There are a lot of abilities that either interrupt you/knock you back, or force you to move immediately, interrupting your evocation.
I'd rather play it safe, but maybe I'm just overcatious there.
Also, for 10k mana, you need to have ~575 spirit buffed with evocation weapons, careful with your numbers there.

Also, be careful not to waste AP+AB-burn by running into the threat ceiling and having to stop DPS and use invisibility. The burst threat potential is beyond silly, make sure your tanks have a threat lead.


- Mana consumables over DPS consumables

1 point of spell damage adds 0.5-0.6 DPS for most sustainable rotations in T4/5 level raid gear.
1 point of extra mana will become 2.5-7 points of extra damage, depending on your mana consumption. If you use straight AB burn phases, it's around 2.5, if you use 2*AB/X cycles, it's around 5, and if you run 1*AB/Scorch mana conservation cycles, it's around 7 extra damage per point of mana.
Assuming you have a shadow priest and use 3*AB/X cycles and some burn cycles, 4 damage per mana is pretty generous.
1 mp5 then comes to 0.2 m/sec or 0.8 DPS, being about as good as 1.3-1.5 spell damage.

So, unless my numbers are totally off, you vastly overvalue mana. You're far better off by limiting your mana burn phases and increase damage stats, than mindlessly burning mana and stacking mana stats.
Flask of Supreme Power (or maybe the new Arcane damage flask, if you use only 1 scorch per cycle), Brilliant/Superior Wizard Oil and +23 spell damage food are still the way to go for standard occasions. Greater Adept's elixir + Elixir of Draenic Wisdom (24 dmg, 24 scrit, 30 int, 30 spi) might be better than a flask if you need to pot to the max, but that's about it.

Also, I think the dreamless sleep potions are worse than mana potions. They restore 1200 mana more, but damage loss of doing nothing for 12 second is more than than what you gain from 1200 mana more if you adapt your cycles.


I know that my spec is not a full arcane spec, but I think those point apply to every arcane focused spec.

For those of you concerned about my mana conservation and what not, it really is a non-issue.
And as such, I can choose to spam and dump AB in great quantities when necessary, and still have plenty of options available to me with my mana pool. Scorches are unecessary.
Just arcane missiles, and AB.

Heres a post taken from elsewhere:

Just a quick post, very quick to demonstrate why no on should worry about a properly geared, properly fed and greased up, oiled up and spec'd Arcane mages mana during boss fights.

Ill use me as an example and a 10 minute boss fight as an example.

My base mana: aprox 12,200
Spell damage: aprox 1,000
Spell miss rate: aprox 1.5%

My boss fight MP5 while casting raid buffed (no bow): 167

Blessing of Wisdom mp5: 41

Blackend Sporefish mp5: 8

Superior Mana Oil mp5: 14

Vampiric Touch effective MP5: 133

Mana Gem Recovery: approx. 3200

Evocation x2: approx. 22,000 - 26,000

Dreamless Sleep x2: 6200 mana (+2 casting mp5 tick and 2 non-casting mp5 tick)

Super Mana Pot x3: 6600 mana (avg 2200)


My total MP5 casting: 230

My total Effective MP5: 363

My total mana gain from MP5 / effective MP5 over 10 minutes:

600 / 5 * 230 (and 363)

27,600 (43,560)

My total mana gained through pots: 12.800

My total effective mana pool: base mana + mp5 + pots + evocation + touch.

83,560

Without touch

67,600

(i realize vamp touch isnt up 100% of the fight, if it were, my effective MP5 would be basically infinite)

K, 5 minute fight... cut everything in half.

God made examples, so we could reference other things against them.
Thank you god... capital G

I still don't see any WWS parse.

Not a problem. Ill get it to you on our next boss fight. Sound good?

I recommend you put on your fire resist gear before you post your WWS parse. Not because of me, but because, to be quite honest, I don't think anything good will come out of this. I do expect to have a good page full of replies about how good/bad that parse is.

I tried showing you that using spell damage consumables 'multiplies' the effect you get out of your mana (ie: increases DPS and DPM), whereas the approach of putting your eggs in mana regen will only add additively to your dps.

All of this could be boiled down to common knowledge: maximize DPS and DPM, but you seem to have chosen neither, and instead go for maximizing dps time. We'll see how that goes.

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned so far, is using a destruction potion during arcane power/bloodlust/arcane blast spam. My guess would be (haven't done any math yet) that the damage boost you gain during this small window would outweigh whatever damage you get from the extra mana from a SMP cooldown. It might also be worth looking at for arcane power burns without bloodlust, I'm not so sure on that though.

I've been specced 61 points into Arcane for a while now, using an ABx3, AM, twiddle thumbs + repeat rotation and have been thinking of speccing a bit differently and to add scorch to my rotation since I certainly feel I can afford to lose the regen and squeeze out more damage. Dropping 7 talent points in arcane wasn't hard, but I actually have to struggle with the idea of dropping Magic Absorption a bit and am surprised that you find it so useless. There a quite a number of fights with random aoe damage that can easily turn into an extra 500 mana with that talent. Perhaps I'm overestimating it, but it doesn't feel like complete garbage to me.

/Edit: Well serves me right for not actually looking at the numbers before posting. I blame the lack of sleep. Looks like the actual full resists I get are few and far between, making the benefit of Magic Absorption much less than it "felt" (yes, yes, I'm repenting). For a spec with all points in the Arcane tree its certainly still worth getting (duh), but I guess I can more easily ditch the talent for some talents in fire now.

The lowest conversion is 1 extra mana => 2.2 extra damage with AB spam (over 3*AB/X rotation), so a super mana potion means at least 2400*2.2 = 5280 extra mana.
A destruction potion (2% spell crit, 120 damage) lasts for 15 seconds.
To beat an SMP, it has to do at least 5280 damage in 15 seconds, i.e. increase your DPS by 352 (=5280/15).

With current T5 level gear, a destruction potion increases AB spam DPS by ~94 (73 from 120 damage, 21 from 2% crit), make it 100 DPS for simplicity. AP adds 30%, Bloodlust adds 30%, and trinket synergies add maybe another 5% (it's probably just 1-2%).
So, with all those things together, it's a 180 DPS increase at most, being very generous with numbers there.

Super mana potions sadly are still twice as good, destruction potions are simply to weak to use unless you cannot dump your mana in time, or need to maximise DPS in a limited time frame. Not to mention that they're far more expensive.

Over their 2 minute timer, SMP are 100 mp5 and DP are 6 spell crit + 15 spell damage. It takes a lot of conditions to make DP better than SMP.

With stacking up mana returning buffs you are never going to be on top, ever. And if the spec can't offer you the place on top, why bother with it?

Well, it HAS its uses. Problem is, its god damn rare. It was the craziest talent on firemaw, essentially giving you something equivalent to like 200-300 (+ ?) mp5 (and yes, this is a number pulled out of nowhere with no mathematical backing, just what I remember from when I was doing it). I recall being able to essentially stay in LOS of firemaw the entire fight, only popping ice barrier / fire ward and ice block if I ever had too many stacks. My mana almost never went below 20% after the full fight. But again, I had my full flarecore set, with all the best enchants available, and 280-300 fr for as far as I can remember.

However, therein lies the problem. It only procs on misses and not on partial resists. This means, if the spell the boss casts is non-binary (think: any damage effect), then no matter how much resistance you have, it won't have any impact since your base miss chance will remain the same (1% I believe ? or maybe 4%, not sure). However, if the spell casted by the boss is binary, that means both the partial resist and the miss chance are rolled together. This will result in resistance gear increasing up tour chance to get a spell missed from that 1% (non binary spells) up to 75% (binary spells with 365 resist).

Having done every encounter in TBC, I have no memories of anything worth noting where the talent comes particularly handy. The sole exception is illhoof, if you use the mage tank strategy. But that talent becomes 'key' for that illhoof strat just because you're soo mana starved that anything giving you mana is good. You will still have to deal with 1% chance to get a magic absorption proc per firebolts (non-binary), so the mana returns will be somewhat very poor. The only saving grace is that you can get like 10+ firebolts per second to make up for it.

The day theres a fight where you need to wear max resist, and that the boss casts a debuff of sorts on you that can be resisted, thats where its going to come in handy. But again, to make it worthwhile, the boss also needs to cast debuffs on you often so that the talent becomes good at all. I think that everything accounted for, its hard to say that this is not a very very narrow talent that might possibly have a use for some odd boss mechanic.

I believe the reason it seems more handy than it probably is to me is because of Azgalor, where resisting the mana drain quite frequently and gaining mana to boot from it has been life saving.

Just to follow up with Destruction Potion math:

First, my assumption is that AB has a 2.5/3.5 (0.714) spell damage coefficient, meaning arcane blast gains a base of 85 damage from the destruction potion.

Modifiers:
Arcane Instability: 1.03
2 piece T5: 1.2
Arcane Power: 1.3
Curse of Shadows (malediction): 1.13
Misery: 1.05

Total damage added per arcane blast: ~163

With bloodlust Arcane blast casting speed is 1.15 seconds, for 13 casts (best case), or 12 casts (with latency). With 12 casts it runs out to 1956 extra damage (base).

Now for the harder part, to model the crits I'll assume 4k base damage with all of these buffs - the highest crit I've seen in a normal boss WWS is 7500, or about 4300 base damage. I don't think this is a unreasonable assumption, but I could be way off base, seeing as my alt arcane mage definitely does not have tier 5 gear. I'll also assume a 44% crit rate with the destruction potion - 30% base, 3% molten, 3% arcane instability, 6% from arcane impact, 2% from the destruction potion.

So on average, 42% of the 1956 damage will crit for 0.75 extra damage, or 616 additional damage.

In addition, 2% of the 48000 damage from the arcane blast spam will crit as a result of the +crit on the destruction potion, for an additional 720 damage.

Total: 1956 + 616 + 720 = 3292 damage.

Unfortunately there was some rounding and guesstimation thrown in, so this isn't entirely accurate. Its probably as close as you are going to get to real values though. Unfortunately, it does look as if the super mana potion will still grant more damage over the long run if you have time to dump your mana bar. In burn fights, or fights where damage is timing sensitive, it may be worth while to use the destruction potion.

What is shocking though, is the amount of damage potential you have in this 15 second window. I calculate an average of ~63000 damage in those 15 seconds with this setup, or 4200(!) DPS. Could this be what was meant by that infamous blue post when he said mage damage was "ZOMG" during testing?

With T5 or even weaker Gear (Haven't kill Leo oder vashj yet, but I do have 2er T5 Bonus) i can confirm that it is quite possible to have 3k+ DPS for 20, it costs it huge amount of mana but if you know when you are able to get it back you can utilise it in sweet ways on many encounters...

I still do not have the 2pc T5 bonus yet. How does WWS handle the fireball dot because I've noticed that I have higher DPS than when I was deep fire, but far less actual damage done.

Does it strike anyone as humorous that the OP is back to being Deep Fire? ^^

I saw that the other day, didn't think to mention it.
I lmao'd.

Well, to get those numbers (4k Arcane Blast hits), you need over 1950 spell damage including MM. That probably needs top end gear, gemmed/enchanted purely for +damage, all buffs that exist and a trinket proc.

A bloodlusted destrolock with power infusion and that gear spamming shadow bolts at a target with shadow vulnerability hits around 3k DPS, so the 4.2k AB spam doesn't seem overly high. It's kind of balanced by the fact that you spend 8.8k mana in those 15 seconds or pure burn

And you shall be answered. The way WWS calculates the dps and dps time % of every player is very simple:

If you deal any damage, your dps time is increased by 5 seconds (like a stack if you wish). So if you have a fireball dot, it will 'water down' your DPS and increase your DPS time%.

In other words, if you do a fight where all you do is land fireballs every 12 seconds (8s fireball dot + 5s extra time since last damage deal), then your dps time% will be 100% and your DPS will be total shit because of that fireball dot.

EDIT:
<begin rant>
I believe that the generic formula used by lossendil to calculate DPS time makes no sense, as far as non-dotting casters go.

If I cast a fireblast, and it crits, it shouldn't count that as 9s of DPS time. That will make my 3k fireblast crit (3k w/ ignite counted) count as 333 dps (3000/9s), rather than the 'expected' 600 dps (3000/5s).

I believe that the proper fix would be to have a list of dots that shouldn't count towards one DPS time. Thinking quickly about it: ignite, fireball dot, pyroblast dot, flamestrike dot (not sure about that one), (blizzard ?).
<end rant>