Alvira

In all honesty, if you are so well supported mana wise you can spam AB for most of the fights resulting in it being more than 70% of your damage. Then I think relentless earthstorm meta gem is still better than mystical for such a situation.

Because mystical skyfire does absolutely nothing for AB spam. The changes probably doesn't help the high end well geared arcane mage like you who are alraedy spamming AB most of the time. It only helps the less geared, less lucky mages who have no SP or shammy support in their group because their AM spam might be close to competitive to fireball spam and possibly sustainable even without SP support. ^_^

AM spam's DPM doesn't need to be as good as fireball spam. It doesn't even need to be fantastic. It just needs to be able to last the entire boss fight, and if the DPS is comparable, then that's pretty good already. Cos it then adds an additional option to arcane mages in terms of what they can choose to do in a fight.

 

◊ manly

They are both somewhat equivalent, but there are many downsides to MSD on AB rotations. The first one being that it can completely mess up your rotation, which is a very big issue. The second one being that, as you noted, it has no impact on sub-GCD times, which happens to be any levels of AB.

Plus, for any arcane spec casting fireballs in their rotations, +3% of 245% is very attractive. Not that you will cast that much fire spells over the crappier +3% of 175% for your arcane spells, but it's not like there are any real alternative metagems really.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Dustwhisper

I'm still a bit on the edge on wether to attempt arcane-spec or not, meaning I'm considering picking up an additional T5 piece from kara/leo when the opportunity presents itself.

What's making me a bit doubtful is seeing that for example Stion is keeping up/out-dpsing manly with considerably better DPM as deep fire has over AB-arcane mage.

On an additional note though I'm wondering how you are even hitting 1500 DPS as a firemage. I just checked our recent lurker kill for example where I was top but with my gear (Think I'm sitting at around 1250-1300+ firedmg, 15.5% hit and 30% firecrit fully raidbuffed) I'm only hitting 959 DPS

Wow Web Stats

I'm wondering if my DPS-loss might be just because I scorch to much. Only thing I can see increasing my DPS upto 1100+ substantiably is a large increase in crit.

 

Athemeus

There are a few things that come to my mind to improve your DPS:
- Stopcast, if you already do, stopcast tighter
- Fireblast after every second Fireball if you have mana to spare
- Try to achieve a higher DPS-time by e.g. staying in the water for the whole fight or avoiding knockbacks

You also shouldn`t expect to hit those DPS without bloodlust/heroism and other support (such as an other mage scorching for you).

 

Dustwhisper

Used to use it but for most of the time it was rather neglible for me since I often raid with ~100ms which made gaining anything from it rather small compared to the loss of missing one.

Yes some more fireblasts could do but I normally don't have mana for that. I don't know if it's cause we generally don't kill bosses fast enough or something else but when I do a chaincast 8xfireball - 1xscorch rotation on a boss I run OOM even when chaincasting gems, super mana potions and evocating and when i have a shadowpriest sometimes I can add fireblasts (like in the lurker kill)

Yea I could increase my DPS time this way, I might actually try it but still because of how i do the water transition (I run into water on the lag-zone on quartz and do a backjump up in the same fashion) I lose very little on going in/out of water.

Yea that is true to some extent since I'm lucky if I even see a SP in my group >_<

Just find it appalling how many tricks and corners I have to take and cut. I can now barely win some fights and there are a couple rogues and a lock or two that are really hard to beat and I have to use every trick in the book for that compared to what they have to do.

 

Athemeus

I was somehow asuming that every mage is grouped with a shadow priest nowadays, my bad.

 

Alvira

Well, from the fight stats I saw. He didn't even scroch once, just fireballed all the way with fireblast thrown in. Another fire mage did the scorching. Furthermore, I believe he had COE up. Might not always be so lucky to have COE up all the time.

His average fireball was close to 3k dmg and his crit rate was close to 50%. I don't know what kind of raid buffs, food, flask, or whether it just his gear etc he is optimising. But even raid buffed, being able to get 3k average fireballs and crit 50% of the time is NOT the norm and achievable by possibly only very few fire mages.

 

Dustwhisper

Before I managed to convince or themselves managed to convince them to go over to arcane-spec our SP if we only have one in raid was given to a healer-group but now that we have arcane-mages SP mainly goes to mages and a lock or two.

 

Jeru

..Which is exactly the reason blizzard put the 10% +dmg tax on imp fireball/frostbolt.

 

Dustwhisper

I think you give blizzard to much credit tbh.... What is the off-chance that blizzard did that having in mind that someone in the future might reach 1300+ spelldmg hitcapped with 40% crit and using that exact spec ?

 

Jeru

Why wouldn't they have it in mind? They designed the talent trees and the itemization. They made spellpower stack. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that the dps potential of arcane/fire fireballs surpasses the deep fire ones at a certain point in itemization.

 

Athemeus

Somehow I refuse to believe, that they would intentionally nerf both the main damage trees' nukes and thus screw mages' scaling because of a talent far up in the support tree, instead of altering the talent itself (e.g. illumination).

 

koetjeka

This is actually a very good argument against using MSD in AB rotations. As the Two-Cycle Theorem learned us already, you should only use 2 cycles and MSD can really mess this up!

 

Axira

In all honesty you shouldn't expect to hit 1500 DPS in Tier4/Tier5 gear.
I sometimes hit 1600 on Gorefiend yes, but notice the 4T6 setbonus.
(And our mages are _always_ grouped with an elemental shaman and shadowpriest on raids)

1100 DPS in Tier4/Tier5 gear .. doable.. but hard.

 

Athemeus

This reminded me of a graph, I saw here a few months ago: http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/4...lepointlr0.jpg

It basicly says, that you would need a ridiculous amount of critrating for an arcane/fire build to surpass a deep fire build at "normal" amounts of spelldamage in terms of DPS.
Unless something has changed, I don't see that less valid today, since you won't get more than 450 critrating at best.

 

Axira

Like this ?

 

Athemeus

He certainly has very nice gear, and I didn't assume somebody would be crazy enough to socket that kind of gear with critrating, but the question remains, if he wouldn't be better of socketing spelldamage and stick to deep fire.

According to the graph, he would need around 1000 critrating to begin to compete...

 

Axira

Well it's not my armory there.
And ... I can't really comment on his behalf, but I'm sure he'd say you'd have to go play a shadowpriest instead if you wanted to stack spelldamage, like he often does to me.

And also, that graph isn't correct I think .. I know for sure that he can compete with nearly everyone on the damagemeters atm. So badly lately that he seems to complain that he's threatcapped...

I assume that that graph doesn't take into account being raidbuffed etc.

 

Dustwhisper

Relying on crits will threat-cap you harder because of the higher amount of spikes you'll have, the same amount of dmg just harder to threat-walk.

 

BrTarolg

Yaarrgh...

The two cycle spell theorem assumes that a lot of things stay static (such as the mana cost of the spell, the damage, its casting speed etc.)
It doesnt take into account things such as arcane power, trinket usage, MSD procs, because these are random variables it cant handle

So it doesn't "break" the cycle theorem, it just means that the theorem is simply wrong and doesn't apply to these cases. The times the theorem applies is when all this stuff is static.

Otherwise, what would be the point of the 15 second "AP AB spam with PoM Pyro at the end"? Clearly this is beneficial, yet it doesn't conform to the theorem, which would state this is unoptimal. It is in fact optimal, its just that the theorem doesn't apply to these cases because the cost of your spells has changed (AB has just become much more mana efficient)

Also, nobody is really sure about why the tax was implemented (jaw dropping damage ofc!) or why mage talents were nerfed. I agree with the person above who says it isn't blizzard looking into the future seeing this particular build suddenly becoming stronger (and for what its worth, its still quite short of certain other classes)

 

Ellenia

I just hopped on the ptr to test out AM + MSD and I'm not seeing the chains of quick casts as you guys are. Is it supposed to still be the case that AM isn't consuming the MSD proc or are the large chains of quick missiles solely due to the fact that it can proc off each wave? If it's the former, I think they may have removed that particular feature in the latest ptr push. I hope I'm just doing something incorrectly.

 

Logun

AM is still consuming the buff. I tested it this morning. You can get back to back procs. I got 3. But it is unlikely to do so.

 

Roywyn

Ashtongue Talisman of Insight on the PTR:
Some level 10 on the EU PTR forums wrote (today or yesterday, can't find the post anymore) that it wouldn't proc from Arcane Missiles. I don't have the trinket yet, so can anyone confirm/deny that?

 

Frostie

I can confirm that it does proc from AM. Unless that was changed in some random patch this morning.

 

BrTarolg

A question with the ABx3 fireball x2

Do you use 40/18/3 for that?
Do you try and hitcap both arcane and fire?
Since fireball x2 is 6 seconds, then do you just "wait" for 0.5 seconds before casting the first AB in the rotation again? (otherwise you cast it before the debuff runs out) - or will lag always take you over 0.5 s?