Yes i was hugging the balcony.... funny "mechanic"

JoW is a massive buff to AM spam indeed, provided you have a retri pala or a "normal" pala that can keep it up.

Not strickly true. It also helps with empowered AM. The empowered AM is vs base cost as is the AP 30% extra cost.

I didn't transfer over a pre-made, I transferred over my real character. I have ~1150 all schools with LC equipped. I bummed a MSD from a pre-made and swapped out some gems to meet the requirement. 600 DPS with rank 3 AM involved the following:

MSD/Lightning Capacitor/Full Rank AM on Clearcasts

I wasn't able to sustain this indefinately on Dr Boom, but I went for about 5 minutes or so. With JoW up my mana would have been increasing not decreasing.

Unlike the pre-made character you might have transferred in, my gear is actually enchanted -- so your mileage may vary.

Your math is bad here. You took 2100 and divided it by 120. That's 17.5MP1, to get mp5 you should multiply by 5.

87.5 MP5 (and 40 intellect too on the same trinket) is hardly "lackluster", in fact, it's damned amazing and would be well worth giving up a trinket slot since it's going to take quite a bit of mana to be able to sustain AM spam.

As for the Darkmoon card, again as I said it depends on whether or not it has an internal cooldown. A similar trinket I know does, but Darkmoon card is old school and I dont' recall any items at level 60 having an internal hidden cooldown so it may or may not.

Assuming, however, it does not.

The buff is up for 15 seconds at a time. It has, within those 15 seconds of AM spam assuming *No* Meta gem procs, 18 chances to proc (3 initial casts, 15 waves).

At a 2% proc rate, it has a 98% chance to not proc on each of those 18. The odds of it not proccing within a 15 second window are .98^18 or 69%. That means there's a 31% chance, during any given 15 second window, of it proccing *AT LEAST* once. So the minimum average uptime for the trinket should be at least 31%. So we have a trinket that takes you from 45% mana regen to 100% mana regen and is active about 1/3 of the time with AM spam assuming no internal cooldown.

Having 55% extra regen 1/3 of the time should be functionally the same as having 18% extra regen all the time.

By my math, 18% of a mage with 300 spirits mana regen is going to be somewhere around 33.75MP5. Not off-the-wall incredible but not bad either. Of course if you were donig say, the first 2 bosses on hyjal, you could double that or if you had full T6 you would likely have closer to 450 spirit after BoK/DS/Food buff so you would also get more out of it in that scenario.

At any rate, definitely not "lackluster" imo.

Ok, I clearly am wrong there.

Another trinket that might be interesting in this context is Mark of Defiance - it has a best case 50ish mp/5, and this 'best case' should be much easier to achieve than the best case on Pendant of the Violet Eye (which would need a lot of AM fueled by MSD for its best case?).

Mark of Defiance would be amazing but it does have some sort of hidden cooldown. How long, I have no idea. If it's not that long, it might not be so bad.

It's tested and confirmed to stack on each missile. The game isn't making a distinction between on spell cast and on spell hit for arcane missiles (normally the only distinction would be with AoE abilities anyways). Each missile counts as a cast and according to some, the initial cast also counts as a cast meaning 6 "casts" per 5 seconds.

Pretty sure the prohibition is on mana-free abilities like changing paladin Auras or casting Find Minerals. Shamans using Totem of the Maelstrom cast (talented) Healing Wave r1 for free (no mana expenditure) and it procs the Pendant.

I stand corrected then. Gotta get me a Violet Eye, clearly...

How is the Blade of Wizardry functioning on the PTR with AM spam? Is it on spell hit, if so, is it worth using again?

I'm not sure if the proc is on-hit, but even if it is, the Blade of Wizardry has a hidden internal cooldown and thus won't synergise particularly well with AM spam (unlike TLC/Ashtongue etc).

If the cooldown is 30 seconds (as listed on wowhead) and it procced the second the internal cooldown expired it would be equivalent to a flat (280 * 6 / 30) = 56 haste rating or 3.6% haste using the new conversion ratio.

My gut feeling is that this wouldn't be worth the +dmg/stats loss from either the Merciless Gladiator or raiding one-handers, but YMMV.

I got the same question for the [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond], would be quite nice to have a ~10% chance of getting 300 mana back every Arcane Missile spell. Just interested

You can model this as -150 mana for each Arcane Missiles cast. While nice for longevity, I'm suspicious the extra mana would result in a net DPS increase versus using Mystical Skyfire Diamond.

Extra mana with an Arcane spec should be converted into extra damage ofcourse.
I won't be using [Mystical Skyfire Diamond] when I get my hands on 2 T5 and spec Arcane, in my opinion it only shines with massive procs and haste rating while spamming Arcane Missiles.
If [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] works the way it should, thus proccing off every missile, I will maybe try it out. There would be quite some chance it procs during a AB-AB-AM-Scorch rotation (9 on spellcast checks).

Ok before this turns into a mess, [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] is a terrible metagem for like pretty much every possible class.

2% chance per spell cast to restore 300 mana.

Assuming you can get 6 procs per AM (derived from PTR proc rates on MSD), that means a bit below 12% chance to proc 300 mana / AM. Let's be generous and assume 12% proc rate per AM. That means you get, on average 300 * 0.12 = 36 mana / AM.

Under the best case scenario, its not usable. Please let it die.

My bad; I thought the poster was quoting a 10% chance as 10% per missile, so 50% per cast. As it's just 2% per missile (10% per cast), then yes, it's downright horrible.

So the test servers just came back up with the patch to make MSD buffs last 10 seconds and I can confirm that the impossible has happened: You can chain 4-5 AM casts off a single MSD proc. It's fairly insane: *BUT* there's a possibillity of a hidden cooldown on the MSD now. I need to get a much larger sample size before I could say that with any certainy and my initial test may have just been unlucky (sample size was small enough that luck could have done it).

I'm going to downrank my AM to rank 3 so i can do a much larger sample size and see if I can confirm chain procs are still alive and kicking.

Edit: Tested and confirmed there is NO hidden cooldown. My intial test was just too small of a sample size. I was chain casting rank 3 AM at double speed for 30 seconds in a row. The DPS on rank 3 spam is up a significant bit becuase of this.

So, long post short, Everything we thought couldnt' happen has happened. MSD lasts 10 seconds and is not consumed by AM, 3-5 casts per MSD proc is possible which can indeed lead to semi-frequent chain proccing. Combined with a lightning capacitor, it is, in a word (or two), absolutely insane.

SHHHHHH ;-)

Is there any change to clearcasting working on the Test Realm?

With it working probaly (meaning that CC can proc from each missile) the synergy that are working in these build would be astonishing.

A 40% Chance to get a Clearcast from casting one AM, which will directly increase the Crit Chance by 30% of 40% or your spells (or even more with the current mechanic of doppeldipping). This equals a 12% crit increase or even more.

With these crit ratings and the extremly fast cast times of AM the Ashtongue Trinket will be up almost 100% of the time, which directly translate into even more hits over the same amount of time.

It is like a chain reaction that can't be stopped - with the MSD in its current state and an working CC this build will be come way to powerful in my opinon.

I dont have the gear (just downed Vashj for the 1. time earlier today)to test these things on the PTR but they sure as hell look amazing on my sheet of papers.

I will have to do some serious math and look how viable it becomes with clearcast and maybe even a mana trinket...

Last I checked on the PTR, clearcasting can still only proc at the beginning of AM channeling, meaning a flat 10% proc chance per AM. Individual missiles don't grant additional chances to proc clearcasting.

Is the Blessings Deck really that good for arcane mages? I just spent 500g on the 8 of Blessings (I've been looking for it for weeks) to complete the deck. I have lightning capacitor too. Is this deck really that good, or do you think it's replaceable by a trinket from SSC?

I'm currently 44/17/0 with 2 pieces of tier 5, fang of leviathan, etc. Inspired by Draxonias (sp.?), I've collected the entire deck. I'm just wondeirng if it's a better trinket than the other trinkets in SSC for mages.

In other news, we finally downed Vashj today.

Ok so I logged on the PTR to test this. That's without 4pc t6. Just TLC/ashtongue and ring as spell haste.

I won't say a thing but let people make their own opinion.


Wow Web Stats - 2 sessions - 1936 dps - lucky streak with very high crit rate (read: lots of clearcasts)
Wow Web Stats - 1 session - 1858 dps - lucky streak (log edited to only show when focus procced, which took 2 AM to get started)
Wow Web Stats - 1 session - 1607 dps - not a single clearcast procs
Wow Web Stats - 1 session - 1548 dps - nothing special, mixed luck (cos was up)
Wow Web Stats - 1 session - 1435 dps - moderate luck on clearcast/focus
manly - WWS - 1 session - 1684 dps - COS was up (bad luck streak, low dps)

edit - those numbers are using absolutely nothing else besides AI/mage armor. No pots, no food, no oil, no AP, no activated trinket, no cooldown.
edit - while testing I got the impression that clearcasting wasn't double dipping anymore. It seems to only give the +30% crit when you consume clearcast and not when the buff is up.