Over the next week I'll try and get a WWS for every fight in BT from Naj'entus to Essence of Souls and Rage Winterchill to Archimonde. Our mages have found 40/18/3 (3x AB, 2x FB) to be strictly superior to it's fire counterpart. We almost always have a Shadow Priest (only don't have one on Teron Gorefiend, Naj'entus, and Gurtogg Bloodboil) and up until this week we have never had a Shaman.
In regards to movement and interruption, the only fight that I'd say I have a problem dpsing on is Archimonde due to constant movement and 30 yard range. However at the same time it is an excellent arcane fight since there is a lot of regen time when you are feared or air bursted, so when you do get to DPS you can blow your whole mana bar quickly.
I already did the math, 3Xab-2Xfireball is better than fireball spam with 10/48/3. However 33/28 is superior to 40/18/3 unless you spam a 3-debuff AB A LOT (meaning NOT using the rotation and just spamming AB). AB spamming drains mana so much faster than anything else that the fights where you can do that are probably pretty rare, so I'd stick with 33/28 as the 3XAB-2Xfireball would be your main rotation which is the best with 33/28, and it's still doing more DPS with almost as much DPM if you do 2XAB-2Xfireball or fireball spam compared to 10/48/3 - however if you use that more than you use 3XAB-2Xfireball might as well spec 10/48/3 for the range and slightly higher efficiency.
In our guild we have an arcane mage pwning the 10/48/3 mages when it comes to DPS, this is my first WWS log of the fight.. next to that, he doesn't even use arcane blast or the tier5 setbonus:
- this boss silences the entire raid about every 25 seconds or so
- and casts alot of rain of fires that needs to be dodged
But as you can see, with his Tier5 - Tier6 gear he outDPSes the fire mages just with arcane missiles spam, on top of that he also has a rather bad connection and a bit more lag then other mages.
Even though the report doesn't show it for some reason, this was a kill.
It was a close one though as Argalor decided to DooM our 2 offtanks near the end of the fight.
The story on that last web stats post is all in the gear. The nearest firemage on that pars had an 11% miss rate on fireball vs. the less than 1% miss rate on the arcane mage. If Igeya had as high a hit rate on fireball that Maxyz has on arcane missles Igeya would be looking at another 20k Dmg out which would top Maxyz by around 4.5k
Granted with talents it's not as hard to hit cap arcane school but with end game gear it would be hard not to hit cap fire or frost even if you ignored it and itemized ideally across the other stats.
The story on that last web stats post is all in the gear. The nearest firemage on that pars had an 11% miss rate on fireball vs. the less than 1% miss rate on the arcane mage. If Igeya had as high a hit rate on fireball that Maxyz has on arcane missles Igeya would be looking at another 20k Dmg out which would top Maxyz by around 4.5k
Yes, but isn't one of the strengths of arcane that you'll never need to spend as much as stats on hitrating as other specs? If Igeya would have had higher hitrating .. 11 * 14 more .. he would have to sacrifice alot of other stats, like spelldamage and critrating.
Yes, but isn't one of the strengths of arcane that you'll never need to spend as much as stats on hitrating as other specs? If Igeya would have had higher hitrating .. 11 * 14 more .. he would have to sacrifice alot of other stats, like spelldamage and critrating.
Yes and no. With end game gear you really can't get rid of that much +hit in trade for other stats. If hit capping at your current gear level is hard then yes, it's a major plus, but it will not always be so because hit capping with BT/Hyjal loot is more or less a given even if you place no value on hit because it's on almost everything.
I've tested a deep arcane spec myself and have concluded that until one has the 2set bonus from Tier 5 arcane spec does not deal near the sustained damage that fire spec does.
For all mages considering trying this, I highly advise waiting until you have the 2set bonus from tier 5. Until then, fire is the best overall raid damage spec out there.
I switched to arcane before I've gotten the 2pc T5 bonus and I have to say, it's not that much of a difference from when I was fire. I'm putting out close to the same numbers as I was spec'd 10/48/3 but I find raiding a lot more enjoyable when I can do more with my spell rotations then just chain fireballs.
I'll be the first to admit i'm not as high on the meters anymore for some fights, but it's not a reduction across the board. I'm still coming in at the top and I'm still dealing with getting used to my rotations and remembering to actually use the cooldowns I have now. For the min/max crowd I still consider fire as the top DPS at the moment, but I think arcane has a lot more potential then some would think. For the record, I use an ABx3,AM rotation with either a scorch thrown in at the end or sometimes just wait 1 second and recast AB as the debuff wears. I'm torn between what feels like "wasted" casts on scorch since I only have enough hit to cap arcane now and not fire, and squeezing in every bit of dps I can.
I had to spend a lot of time re-gearing myself for arcane friendly stats as opposed to fire, and I think its a very important point to remember if you are considering changing specs. As fire I focused heavily on hit, crit and damage, and largely ignored stats. My hp was dangerously low for some fights, my mana pool was small, but I cranked out large numbers. I work with a huge mana pool as arcane, with amazing passive regen and betters stats although lower crit/dmg by a bit. I decided to switch before T5 because I wanted to get used to playing the spec before I got the bonus and tried it out expecting huge numbers while not knowing how to use an arcane build. I may yet go back to my fire build until I get T5 now, since I have a bit more experience using it and can effectively make use of the 2pc when I get it and see the difference.
I would also like to get people's opinion on the effectiveness of an arcane build improving more as your raid overall improves as opposed to fire. Theoretically the better your raid dps is overall, the shorter the fights will be and the more an arcane mage's DPS spamming AB would rise, as opposed to a fire mage only being able to cast fireballs so fast.
I seriously disagree with 10/48/3 being the "best" DPS talentbuild in the game though, it mostly depends on people's gear and playstyle. I can show you about a dozen more WWS parses of either frost mages or arcane mages hugely outDPSing the so-called "ultimate" 10/48/3 build. Even if these 10/48/3 mages are allready pushing out insane DPS, some good frost or arcane mages can output even higher DPS. And you could throw the argument that these frost or arcane mages would be doing even more DPS in a 10/48/3 build.. but from what I've seen, they don't at all.. appearantly their playstyle allows em to do more DPS with frost or arcane, then with fire. Just like appearantly a huge majority of the mages doesn't seem to be able to output more damage with arcane or frost, then with fire.
I'm 10/48/3 myself though, but that's more as a preference of playstyle, i even used to be fire in back in the old MC and BWL days
Consider the WWS parse posted above. Some quick calculations tells me that the Arcane mage expended over twice the mana of the fire mage (32k versus 14k), and yet managed to only "barely" scrape out ahead of the fire mage. Does that make Arcane "better"? It does, in the ultimate meters-fashion, but that is just an instant meter caught in time. What about the next raid, where he has no shadowpriest, and so forth. Will he be able to keep up?
Arcane has always had the lure of the "mana dump". Team a fire mage with a shadowpriest, stick JoW on the boss, and there's just no way that fire mage will go OOM. Being able to reach a DPS which is perhaps only 10% higher, for say a doubled mana consumption rate is obviously a deal you want to make in this SP/JoW situation. But I'm more curious about the DPS of Arcane when it is NOT faced with these optimal conditions. How much will it suffer? Will it suffer at all?
Fire is high DPS, I don't think anyone will dispute this. Question is, if the higher DPS+lower DPM of Arcane is worth it. That's a choice up to the individual mage, which must be made ontop of his knowledge of his specific situation. Fire is largely independent of such choices, which makes it a very friendly build. Arcane is also a very "complex" build, AB debuff trickery (which is so much harder on movement fights), FSR ticks, "filler" casts, and so on. And to a certain extent, Arcane also require different gear choices then mages have traditionally made. Any idiot can spam Fireball, and just hoard hit/crit/dmg.
10/48/3 is a highly rated build for many reasons besides it's high DPS. To be honest, is there any other build that exists that isn't either a good deal more involved and/or situational and/or dependent on external factors to really excel? I don't think Arcane will ever outperform Fire by any order of magnitude. It will perform within degrees, which makes the choice less clear as well.
Can any arcane mage with high progression comment on the value of the lower threat generation? Does it enably you to nuke harder and sooner or is it a non-factor when it's all said and done? So far I only notice it as an advantage on trash, on most bosses the tank threat generation is so fast that I can't really exploit my extra buffer and classes with lower threat reduction aren't really limited. Are there a lot of very threat sensitive fights with lots of threat resets on the horizon? (I only just killed gruul)
Many boss fights involve non-AoE'ed adds. Arcane will be able to start sooner and harder in these fights. Other further fights have aggro resets and/or reductions (ones I've tried is Hydross, Void Reaver, Lurker, and I know there's more of the same bag later in SSC).
Consider the WWS parse posted above. Some quick calculations tells me that the Arcane mage expended over twice the mana of the fire mage (32k versus 14k), and yet managed to only "barely" scrape out ahead of the fire mage. Does that make Arcane "better"? It does, in the ultimate meters-fashion, but that is just an instant meter caught in time. What about the next raid, where he has no shadowpriest, and so forth. Will he be able to keep up?
Arcane has always had the lure of the "mana dump". Team a fire mage with a shadowpriest, stick JoW on the boss, and there's just no way that fire mage will go OOM. Being able to reach a DPS which is perhaps only 10% higher, for say a doubled mana consumption rate is obviously a deal you want to make in this SP/JoW situation. But I'm more curious about the DPS of Arcane when it is NOT faced with these optimal conditions. How much will it suffer? Will it suffer at all?
The fact is that in most decent raidguilds afaik, your mages will always be in a group with a shadowpriest, since you'll always have 2 or 3 in the raid, at least that's how I know it is in my own and a handful of other BT raidguilds.
Next to that, this is only one WWS yes, but I can, and I will, show you more WWS of other fights where he'll also top the meters, sometimes by alot.
And about AB-rotations, I've seen plenty of WWS logs of arcane mages now that just use Arcane Missiles 100% of the fight and still manage to get higher DPS with it then the 10/48/3 mages using their fireball or fireball/fire blast rotations. My guess is that when a mage's gear starts to become of the "Tier 5 or higher" level that full arcane actually takes over the role of best DPS spec. Trying to proove this with theorycraft however doesn't seem to work decently, it's only out of experience and things that I've witnessed that I have this opinion.
Reminds me how a group of chemical scientists with their theories about how to make the perfect pie badly lose the pie baking competition to some farmer grandmothers every year at a local tradefare.
My numbers say 33/28 is ~9% more DPS than 10/48/3, while 10/48/3 is 25% more mana efficient, if you have 2/5 T5 and compare 3XAB-2Xfireball type rotation to fireball spamming. If you want more mana efficiency with 33/28 you can fireball spam or 2XAB-2Xfireball and get very very similar DPS to 10/48/3 (within the 1% difference) but your range will suffer, and your efficiency will be slightly lower (although probably close enough for arcane meditation to even things out). All in all if you're regularly using a rotation that doesn't outDPS 10/48/3, I don't see a point giving up the range, blastwave and dragon's breath for doing the same damage, not to mention it takes more effort ;p
If you don't have 2/5 T5 not only your 3XAB-2Xfireball rotation will do about equal DPS to 10/48/3 fireball spam while costing a lot more mana, you also still lose the range, BW and DB. No point doing that whatsoever. More effort, less tools, same dps - why do this to yourself?
Arcane missiles is just terrible, with every talent in the game its DPS is too low, and everyone should know by now that reactive use of clearcasts will kill your DPS even more simply due to the time wasted not casting anything between each spell or time spent on the spell you just canceled.
As for the utility, while arcane has the burst of AP and the little extra threat reduction (30% more but only on ~1/2 the damage), fire also has the burst of combustion which before you add in the pom pyro I estimate to be pretty close to the AP bonus, and you have blastwave and dragon's breath as extremely mana efficient high burst damage AOE spells (which 33/28 cannot get without gimping DPS!), and on top of that you have 36/41 yards range instead of 30. You may have to be in 36 yards to scorch but if it's a movement fight and you end up 41 yards you can fireball a bit until the next time you have to move if scorch isn't just running out. Arcane has to be in the 30y range becuase it's reliant on AB. Although I do agree there is little point casting AB in the firstplace if you don't have 2/5 T5 ;p
So all in all you need 2/5 T5 for 33/28 to outDPS 10/48/3 and then still need a lot of mana. Is it worth the loss of mana? In my experience I finish most fights up to 10 minutes with plenty of mana left, so having an ability to burn it faster producing more DPS is welcome. However I don't think I would have enough to AB spam to the point where it actually matters, although it is something to consider, but really without 2/5 T5 even AB spam DPS isn't that high.
Arcane missiles is just terrible, with every talent in the game its DPS is too low, and everyone should know by now that reactive use of clearcasts will kill your DPS even more simply due to the time wasted not casting anything between each spell or time spent on the spell you just canceled.
How do you conclude this? When I didn't have 2 set tier5 I was stacking +dmg and using the capacitor and AM hit for over 1k every second with ~28% expected crit pr wave +clearcast it did pretty good dps. I've had AM hit up to 1700 with AP and double trinkets active.
Repeatedly stating that other builds can outdps fire but offering little explanation as to how or why, then coupling it with an analogy saying how supposed "experts" are wrong helps no one.
It is explainable, but there are important factors that we don't have yet. Gear selection is huge. It's obviously apparant in the case of the linked WWS when one mage is clearly laking +spell hit on his gear. It's also hugely apparant when one mage has 8% of his damage coming from the lightning capacitator.
I agree with you, that real world results are more important then the theorycraft. It is hugely important, however, to make it clear we are not looking at a select few exceptions however. Seeing the armories/gear used for a fight is a huge first step. Seeing similar results spread over different boss encounters is another. Important info regarding Mage A uses a /stopcasting macro and Mage B doesn't, opr something similar, could also skew results.
But just posting a counterexample, or saying its not becuase you've seen different results is both frustrating and unhelpfull. Anyone who's smart enough to read all that's been written about the different spec's knows that they arent that far apart in terms of DPS output. Please don't dilute the discussion by making mountains out of things that might be explained when all the factors can be looked at.
i've been a long time reader and follower of these forums. last week on our void reaver kill I happened to get my t5 shoulders which gave me my 2 piece and with us about to try a'lar for the first time i went 43/0/18 to see how deep arcane would go.
How do you use the Mystical Skyfire Diamond procc as an arcane mage? Heard a lot of things about getting 2xams with half casttime on one procc. But therefore, dont you need (same as clearcast procs) to stopcast your current spell to cast am?
AM is listed as 260 damage/sec. I can't log in right now to see what damage it has at 70 so let's guess it's ~270. Coefficient is 5/3.5+0.45 fully talented, divided over 5 ticks, so 1300 spell damage with 500 int will be giving 533 more dps, for a total of 803 dps. With 99% hit, multiplied by 1.055 from arcane isntability and arcane power (30% X 15 / 180 = 2.5% for AP), you get 837 DPS. With a (generous) crit chance of 32% (counting each point in "10% crit on clearcast" as 1% crit on average since as already said specifically casting AM on clearcasts will kill your DPS), with 1.75X damage per crit, you get 837X(1+.32X.75)=1040 DPS. Note I'm not counting warlock curses as they affect all specs rather equally, so you will see more in game. Tell me if any of these numbers are wrong, 1002 average theoretical DPS when AB/fireball or just fireball (with either spec) can do over 1200, AM damage is just too low.
Even if my calculations are wrong, and you are getting 1000 damage per non-crit AM without warlock curse, with 32% crit, you're still around the DPS of a fireballer with either spec that also doesn't have CoS. And besides 32% crit on arcane missiles is pretty damn high, if the fireballer I calculated has 30% crit your equivalent arcane mage would have 24% crit unless you can swap every single hit rating item to crit rating and even then 7% hit is 88 rating which if turned into crit rating is 3.9%. You could turn it into spell damage too but I won't go there. AM is just too weak and on top is less mana efficient.
All in all every build can DPS every other build given a better player ;p topping the damagemeters as a 61 frost or 61 arcane mage only means your group was subpar or the boss was fire+shadow immune and melee unfriendly ;p
I might post my spreadsheet but it's really not designed to be understandable by the general public, I only made it to do my own comparisons.
Yes, but isn't one of the strengths of arcane that you'll never need to spend as much as stats on hitrating as other specs? If Igeya would have had higher hitrating .. 11 * 14 more .. he would have to sacrifice alot of other stats, like spelldamage and critrating.
Honestly, no. Most of the gear I'm wearing now has hit rating on it, and I went ahead and changed over most of my gems to Veiled Noble Topaz (+4 hit rating/+5 spell damage). In most cases, the gems they were replacing were Potent Noble Topaz (+4 crit rating/+5 spell damage) or Glowing Nightseye (+5 spell damage +6 Stamina) so I lost virtually no spell damage with the change over, and my boss dps actually went up since you gain hit faster than crit. Now I can hit cap myself by just making 2 gear changes (offhand and ring) and if I have an elemental shaman in the group, I don't have to make any gear swaps at all. I think I traded out 11 gems total, so I lost 36 crit rating and about 20 stamina for 44 hit rating.... so I lost about 2% crit/200 hp for ~3.5% hit. Still a dps increase on a boss fight, though my trash dps took a hit (big deal).
I picked up my 2nd piece of T5 last week, so when I respec for al'ar this week, I'll try deep arcane again and use the 2 piece and see what it does for me. I had initially gone deep arcane for him so I could keep the use of my spellfire gear, but found the dps to be a good bit less than what I'm used to and the mana issues were horrible. I started going deep frost for him, and even with swapping out spellfire for greens ended up with better results. Will see if the 2 piece bonus makes a significant difference.
I think someone needs to mention that mystical skyfire diamond can screw you over if you don't watch.
AB
AB
AB
missile
scorch
(focus proc)
AB (bad* time to proc, causes you to keep 3 AB stacks)
etc.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
Heres a wws parse of me (full arcane mage) on our last void reaver kill.
Please note, im still a bit of noob with WWS (just started using it) so it didnt record all dps because my combatlog range is too small. (How do I change it please, someone?) But anyway its correct at least for my damage/dps/skill breakdown, which is what mages here would be interested in.
DPS worked out to ~900dps in a 8-9 minute fight using AB/AM only (and the occasional fireblast/pyro). Not my best performance, im sure theres better potential to reach (more fireblasts and perhaps a little more stacking of ab to (3) - hence why I read this forum for tips from others
Your parse only includes 2.7 million damage. Should be around 4.5 million. Not a factor for your own damage, but when comparing it to others in your raid it's not close to accurate.
Yeah, thats why I mentioned you should only use it as a reference for my damage (and compare that with other parses from other guilds of a similar fight length).
Ive been watching some of the Elitist Jerks mages WWS parses on lossendil.com lately - particulary Stion who seems to pull out some very nice numbers sometimes. Id really like to see fire mages like that (who know how to kick ass) respec arcane for a bit and see what sort of results they can deliver.
It gets a little tiresome reading endless theorycrafting imo! I see lots of theorycraft in various threads, but unfortunately - not *that* many wws parses that I can check out. Can you arcane spec guys out there please post more parses!
Yeah, thats why I mentioned you should only use it as a reference for my damage (and compare that with other parses from other guilds).
I still get some some combatlog range issues for WWS (which obviously are most noticeable in a massive room like Void Reavers)..., and reading these forums , the wws thread in particular , gives conflicting reports on what does/doesn't work when it comes to fixing it. Some people say modifying the wtf file has no effect , others say it does etc
My own experience with the combat range has been to use mods to extend it. I believe the last mod to load overwrites any previous mod's range change. So if you use AutoCL to set to max range (which turns out to only be 100, see below), then Deadly Boss Mods loads to set it to 150, then some other mod loads which has range extender, but it's set to "normal" it can set the final range to 60 yards or whatever. It's a pain in the ass to be sure.
Part of the pain is that mods will use different syntax to alter the max range. Here's the code from AutoCL which does it:
local RANGE_LOG= { {30, 50, 50, 50, 50, 60},{60, 80, 80, 80, 80, 60},{100,100,100,100,100,100}};
Then below it sets it for the various pet / party / mob etc.
There's also debate on whether 200 actually works vs 150.
07/02/07, 2:53 PM
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