Interesting to say the least.

Honestly, it makes me sad that they let obvious bugs like this persist so long. It is such a tease. I wish they would clarify their intentions for things like this more often.

We all know this is going to be fixed before it goes live and then we'll get to take our proper place below every other dps class again :P

I wish we could find out if these changes to AM (and therefore its amazing synergy with proc: on hit/cast trinkets) is intended and welcomed by Blizzard, or something unforeseen that will be changed back very soon :S

On mmo-champion.com I found the following interesting info:

Increased the duration of the Mystical Skyfire Diamond's cast speed buff to 10 seconds.

So in theory you could fire 4 arcane missiles :P (5 seconds becomes 2.5 seconds --> 10/2.5 = 4)

I did an off the cuff MSD uptime calculation, assuming no static haste or other haste procs (which would increase uptme):

let X be the ratio of MSD uptime to total time
assume each cast of arcane missiles has 6 chances to proc MSD at 5% proc rate on each
assume the MSD buff lasts 10 seconds

X = 1 - 0.95^(10s*((6/2.5s)*X + (6/5s)*(1-X)))

that equation looked annoying to solve, so I graphed it, and got the solution of X = 0.63 or 63% uptime

Couple of questions:

1) Will haste gear increase the proc rate of a MSD/Ashtongue combo?
2) Does anyone have some data on a full haste gear set up with a MSD/Ashtongue/TLC combo with AM spam?

I figured they would let the whole AM not consuming focus thing slide when it was a 4 second buff. Now it's a 10 second buff and there is almost zero chance of this going live. If it does go live, it's being hot fixed. I am sure they'll just change it so channeled spells can consume focus like every other spell can.

I'm regularly pushing over 1600 dps self buffed on ptr right now. I'm not entirely sure that's sustainable on live even with JoW and a shadow priest/shaman. But even if it's not, who cares? Dump your 2k dps and wand. By the time you have enough mana to start AMing again, other people will just be starting to catch up.

It's absolutely a 50% scaling, not haste rating. If MSD gave haste rating, classes below level 70 that procced the gem would have spells hasted by even more than 50%. That makes it multiplicative with the final spell haste value from haste rating.

Here is the problem I see. IF it manages to go live and not get hotfixed within a week it seems a more extreme version of the current AB focused Arcane spec. Using a period of higher then normal dps followed by lower then normal hoping the balance in the end will be above those who just stick with normal for an extended time.

I raid with an AB focused Arcane spec now, I like the spec and would like AM to become a main nuke... but this AM focused dps with MSD/Ashtongue/Passive Haste doesn't seem to be sustainable long enough to be worth the extreme mana dumping it takes, especially considering every time you add more crit/haste to your gear you increase ashtongue and msd uptime increasing mana use even more. It may even be to the point where it would be better to tank your crit rating and attempt to stack damage even more (although this seems rather hard as already damage is the better to stack once you have a decent crit, not a lot of options I see that allow for trading 5% crit for a ton of extra damage).

As it is the current AB focused Arcane spec relies heavily on making use of extra mana provided by things like the basically necessary SP. Now start chaining 2 second AM volleys at almost 800 mana and your having to rely on Wisdom being judged in addition to your SP and chaining mana pots. And then what happens when things go wrong and your SP or your Pally dies.

Not to say this isn't an interesting topic but untill the math is done showing how many steps must be taken to actually make this sustainable in a way that can consistantly keep up or beat 4 piece t6 fire specs or we start seeing a lot of 2-3 min. fights I dont think AM is gonna be a viable main nuke yet.

Well it really depends on the DPM of this "AM-spam". Since we've concluded that it burns mana rediculously fast (a la AB spam) - the only thing to do is to increase the DPM of the spam as much as possible.
So basically, getting rid of all the passive spell haste (increases DPS but decreases DPM) - and replace it with regular +crit+spelldamage gear.

Like mentioned earlier in this thread, AM with JoW and TLC can sustain almost the same DPM as fireball spamming. If that is the case, and its possible for us to burn nearly all our mana in one go - then as Frostie says "burn all your mana at the start and then start wanding" (or as some have pointed out, just spam arcane missiles 3 for JoW and TLC procs which might actually give you mana back)

If the DPM truly is that atrocious you could even just not wear the ashtongue trinket at all (though this would reduce a lot of the "synergy", and thus the ability for AM to become a mana dump as such), or you could as Manly pointed out earlier, run a rotation such as AB AMx2 which would reduce the DPS, but is worth it in terms of the amount of DPM you get in return.

If its possible to force AM to an "acceptable" DPM amount, through some methods, or if at any point AM + either wanding or AM3 spam becomes better DPM than fireball, then it truly is a case of ignoring the fact its not sustainable, because all youve done is convert your whole mana bar directly into damage you would have done with a regular spec, but in a fraction of the time, which allows you to take advantage of the "free time" that youve gained to either wand or AM3 spam.

alright, I'll use that.

ashtongue haste = 0.0924

H = Static Haste ( 0.01 for 1% haste)
C = Crit Chance (0.01 for 1% crit)
M = Mystical Skyfire uptime ratio
A = Ashtongue uptime ratio
Q = Mystical Skyfire chances to proc in 10 second window
P = Ashtongue chances to proc in 5 second window

Q = 10[ (1-A)[M(6/2.5)(1/(1+H)) + (1-M)(6/5)(1/(1+H))] + A[M(6/2.5)(1/(1.0924+H)) + (1-M)(6/5)(1/(1.0924+H))] ]

P = 5[ (1-M)[A/(1.0924+H) + (1-A)/(1+H)] + 2M[A/(1.0924+H) + (1-A)/(1+H)] ]

M = 1 - 0.95^Q
A = 1 - (1 - C/2)^P

well, there's your model. as for solutions to it, I'm tired and I'm going to bed, so that will have to wait, unless somebody else does it for me while I'm sleeping.

the ashtongue trinket has no effect on DPM. it increases MPS but does nothing to DPM. the only way replacing the ashtongue trinket could help your DPM is if you replaced it with some kind of mana regen trinket.

Sigh, I'm not sure why we need to keep pointing this out, haste gear does NOT effect DPM.

DPM - Damage per Mana

Haste effects spell cast time. Nowhere in the calculation for DPM is time a factor at all. Haste therefor only effects DPS, which is time dependent.

The only way that you could say that adding haste gear effects DPM is that adding the haste gear relatively removes the possibility of adding damage enhancing gear which would increase both dps and dpm.

as I understand it JoW has a 50% chance to restore 74 mana when you hit the mob. that means on average each cast of arcane missiles will refund 185 mana. it's nice, but it doesn't even come close to solving the mana dumping issues of spamming max rank AM at half cast time.

rank 11 AM is 832 mana with talents. cuting 185 "effective cost" off that is not even close to enough to make it sustainable.

I believe he means that haste reduces DPM in that it costs item points. Item points that could be going to stats that increase your DPM.

On live, with a shadow priest, elemental shaman (normal caster group setup) spirit, BoW and JoW, max rank AM is more or less self sustaining. Obviously it would need help in terms of pots, mana gems and evocation with the changes. But I wouldn't put it in the same league as AB spamming. Not at all. I'd consider it 'possible' to run out of mana. Which, currently on live, it is not.

The argument is that faster casting means you have less time for mana regeneration while the spell is casting. When modeling the effective cost of the spell (like irontygress does in his mage calculator), the lower amount of regen nets a higher effective spell cost yielding a negative dpm on haste rating and all other haste effects.

Which of course is inaccurate. Because the faster you cast, the less regen time you may have but the more regen time you could potentially have outside of the FSR effectively increasing your mana regen for a similar effect.

The idea has some merit but shouldn't be taken as law.

Yes, but over time that argument falls apart. The idea of faster conversion is that you can decrease the amount of poor regeneration (inside FSR) and increase the amount of valuable regeneration (outside FSR) without hurting true DPM.

Lets take this to an extreme and say that you have a base regen of 300 mp5, and due to BoW something like 55% of that is regen inside the FSR. Now assume that a fight will last for 6 minutes (360 seconds). Now say that you have a build like AM spam where DPM does not vary. Without the haste you spend 100% of the time inside your FSR

No Haste:
360 * .55 * 300 / 5 = 11880 mana returned

With enough haste to be casting AM at 3.75s (25%, this is certainly possible with the MSD at 10s and not consuming) you would spend very roughly 25% of the time ouside of the FSR and 75% inside

360 * .75 * .55 * 300 / 5 + 360 * .25 * 300 / 5 = 14310

This means you would gain 2430 mana over the fight by increasing your regen. Normally, it would be awful to adopt this strategy. But at a fixed DPM it's not a bad thing at all. Give your AM spam a conservative DPM of 8 and haste means that you did 19440 more damage over the fight.

Now lets take that trading item value argument. With our rough numbers you would need to make up 20k damage to not use haste items. If you were chain casting AM in our no haste case that would be 72 total AM volleys, or 278 damage per volley, at a 1.875 coefficient for AM thats 148 +dmg (this would be driven lower by raid debuffs). Seems like haste is pretty good to me.

To my knowledge, rank 11 isn't actually available anywhere. Rank 10 is 785 mana. Clear casting (long term) takes it down to 711. If you model JoW as 185 mana, that's down to 526 mana or 210 mana per second at 2.5s.

By comparison a quick check on 10/48/3 fireball in ironty's calculator using no spirit (quick and dirty ftw) shows ~318 mana for every 3 second cast at a 30% crit rate. That's 106 mana per second. An AB spam session is 614 mana every 1.5 seconds (409 mps).

I don't have the time to do real calculations on sustainability but a back of the envelope calculations mean it's not too far outside the realm of possibility. JoW makes a huge difference.

Fair enough. The question was why people think haste is negative dpm and that argument is the most common I've heard for it being that way. It didn't sound quite right to me, but I hadn't thought about it deeply. Static haste rating items aren't exactly common.

Possible? With pretty consistant ashtongue uptime and no passive spell haste your getting chain 2.25 second AMs, with 2-3 passive items its 2.1 second. Even without ashtongue or passive haste you can fit 4 of those in each focus proc. 4 casts x 5 missiles = 20 5% MSD proc rate means you frequently get chain procs, when your getting 16 casts in 40 seconds x 785 mana = 12560 mana in 40 seconds. Now even if you take off the 10% clearcasting and 185 IF you can manage full JoW uptime which honestly not all guilds even consistantly bother putting it up even on fights that it isn't extremely difficult to keep up your still at ~8.4k mana in 40 seconds or 210 MPS. Add in if your getting chain procs with any passive haste or ashtongue and its even more MPS. Considering this is including JoW I can't really quite see anything else (SP/Shammy/Etc) that could come close to providing you 900-1000 mp/5 to make this sustainable.

Now SP would help a little, but they need time to do damage to return mana, in 40 seconds they aren't going to make a huge dent in that 8.4k mana, same thing with mana spring which will give you a paltry 240 mana over that time.

You can't just do the calculations with JoW/Clearcasting/Etc for AM, you have to do the same for Fireball if making the comparison.

Fireball with the same conditions, subtracting for clearcasting and JoW up on the boss = 323 a cast, now factor in 35% crit rate and your looking at 289 average cost or 96.3 MPS, less then half the MPS

Although as said DPM needs to be looked at even more then MPS. If you can burn through your full mana bar in 1 min and then evocate + pot + mana gem, do it again in 1 min how long would it take to recover a full mana bar to do it again. Popping in some numbers for 4 piece t6 with fire spec and some various BT/hyjal gear into the mage dps spreadsheet I'm seeing close to 1600 dps, which while maybe not that high in practice could still easily be 14-1500 dps. How high would the dps/dpm have to be to compete with 1400 dps for 6 mins instead of Burn Wand Burn.

With 11k mana if you can get 500 mp/5 out of the 5 second rule with Spirit/JoW Wanding/SP/Etc thats basically 2 mins of downtime to regen. Thats 2 mins of 175 dps. The ideal fight (longer then 1-2 mins of course) would then have to be around 5 mins if you figure 1 min burn, evocate/pot/gem, 1 min burn, 2 min regen, 1 min burn. 3 burn cycles with only one down cycle, anything longer then that your burn-downtime ratio gets worse, in a 7 min fight you burn evocate burn wait burn wait... and dont have time to get another burn in. So in that ideal 5 min fight a fire spec doing 1400 dps would put out 420,000 damage. For those 3 1 min burn cycles to compete you would need over 2200 DPS.

Now I like theorycraft but I'm not a huge math genius or anything so my napkin math may be a little off but it looks to me like AM would have to be putting out a lot bigger numbers then 17-1800 dps to survive a Burn/Wait/Burn approach to competing with sustained fire dps.