Faxmonkey

Doesn't really tell you which one is better to use when you're out of mana though. You'd need to know what your average damage is with your regular cast rotation.

 

Kavan

True, I don't have the exact setup anymore, but it was in the following ballpark:

AB+AM: 1006 dps, 5.8 mps

EDIT: Actually I take that statement back. It seems I had some AM3 parameters wrong in the first test. It should be:

Wand: 169 dps, -123.3 mps
AM3: 576 dps, -61.8 mps
AB+AM: 1006 dps, 5.8 mps

And AM3 comes ahead of Wand. With no JoW however Wand is on top, characteristics change to:

Wand: 169 dps, -98.6 mps
AM3: 576 dps, -17.6 mps
AB+AM: 1006 dps, 30 mps

It's possible I have some errors still so I'd appreciate if someone has an alternative source of numbers I could cross-check with.

 

averly

AM3 vs Wanding

Yes I had been confused by the earlier post as well. When I did a (rudimentary) analysis of an AM (rank 3) x1 ABx1 rotation vs wanding I got the following:

AM10x1 ABx1: dps 970.3 dpm 7.09 mps 73.6 mana cost: 1026
AM3x1 ABx1: dps 512.9 dpm 9.72 mps -2.1 mana cost: 458.9
wanding: dps 112.3 dpm n/a mps -64.8


Wand then AM10x1 ABx1 Cycle:

time wanding for 1 AM10x1 ABx1 rotation = 1026/64.8 = 15.83 sec
damage wanding = 15.83 * 112.3 = 1778 damage
damage AM10x1 ABx1 = 7277 damage

TOTAL cycle damage = 9055 damage

(time cycle = 15.83 sec wanding + 7.5s casting = 23.33 sec

AM3x1 ABx1 Cycle

TOTAL cycle damage = 23.33 sec * 620.6 = 14643 damage
TOTAL cycle mana regen = 23.33 * -2.1 = 48.93 extra mana regained

This assumed LC, mage armor, and JOW up 100% while in low mana state, spirit weapon + wand. It did not take account of doing AM10 when clearcasting proc'd or any raid buff beyond JOW (e.g. VT, totems, misery, COS etc).

So it seems clear to me that given my gear, it is preferable to switch to my spirit weapons and cast AM3x1 ABx1 with AM10 on clearcast as long as I can eek out the mana to do so from JOW.

If JOW is up only 50% of the time, the mps for the AM3x1 ABx1 cycle jumps to 12.7mps meaning that I would run out of mana and be stuck with wanding.


Edited to adjust for downranking penalty. Thanks Kavan for catching that. Regardless, the conclusions are the same (as I see Kavan got in his redone calculations as well). If you can get JOW up reliably in a mana starved situation, downranking to AM3x1 ABx1 cycle with AM10 on clearcasts and LC is superior.

If we do the analysis with no LC:

AM10x1 ABx1 dps 810.2 dpm 5.92
AM3x1 ABx1 dps 468.4 dpm 7.65

TOTAL damage wanding + AM10x1 ABx1 cycle: 6076+1778 = 7854 damage

TOTAL damage AM3x1 ABx1 cycle: 23.3*468.4 = 10913 damage

So even without the LC, AM3x1 ABx1 cycle is superior provided reliable JOW.

 

◊ manly

No I have 8.01% base + ruby cape on boss gear. What you saw was my abomination you can loosely refer as my 'pvp' gear, which really is just an horrid mish-mash of gear not made for pvp in the first place.

Regardless, I keep switching specs back and forth, and while I do agree with you that the talent points are fully wasted - the alternatives are non-dpsing talents. In my opinion non-dpsing talents are a matter of personal preference. You take them if you like them, but in the end the dps will be the same. I chose 5pt arcane focus as a temporary choice.

I think you're missing the whole point. I did not recommend to retrofit the build. I said, if you have 9% hit from gear and raid with an elemental shaman, then you might as well pick that build. What you're saying is that if you don't have an elemental shaman the build is hard to make work. Well, guess what ? We both agree on the same thing.

I do have to pass a comment about using mystical skyfire diamond with an AM build and you pretending in your same post that you spend most of your time AB spamming. I don't understand the logic behind it, but hey, everyone is open to their own opinion.

What I was trying to explain really was that the whole point of that build is that you don't stack hit ratings on your gear because the crit ratings you stack for your arcane spells will give a really good result on your fire spells as well because you get 245% crit damage on your fire spells. So instead of stacking extraneous hit ratings only for your fire spells, instead you stack crit ratings which give a better DPS return than hit ratings anyway for your fire spells. Without delving into specifics, 1% hit is roughly 1% more damage, whereas 1% more crit is 1.45% more fire damage. So no, you don't stack hit ratings for such a build exactly as I said in my original post.
Yes, fireballs dont work on phase 2 illidan. Nothing new here. No build is perfect. AM dps and dpm is horrid under almost every scenario possible. It also sort-of forces you to wear TLC, which isn't really all that awesome. But regardless, if you do illidan the way you are describing it, then the gains you get from 3pt into emp. AM is the only difference between the alternative builds and the one I proposed.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Kavan

Averly, I'm a bit surprised why your AM3 dps is so hi. What +dmg factor are you using? From my testing I found it to be around 0.915 (including emp. AM).

 

Dustwhisper

The more and more I read about arcane the less enticing i find it except of course not having to respec for certain bosses >_<

 

kadgar

As I'd mentioned 1 or 2 pages earlier in this thread AM1 should be much more efficient.
It's less mana/bolt, more focus procs (4/3sec instead 5/6sec) wich compensates the little bit more lag (more casts) and it's especially a LOT more CC procs.

 

Finkum

I imagine the use of AM3 is assumed because of the increasingly steep spell coefficient penalty applied to all spells learned prior to level 20 (which includes ranks 1 and 2 of AM), on top of the fact that ranks 1 and 2, being 3 and 4s casts respectively, get a lesser benefit from +damage anyway.

If wowwiki's explanation is correct then rank 2 AM has a further 15% and rank 1 a further 45% coefficient penalty.

I'm not sure off the top of my head exactly how the penalties interact but it is entirely possible you will get _better_ dps wanding than with rank 1 or 2 AM - some back of the envelope calculations with 1200 +damage/25% crit suggest roughly 200 dps for AM2 (barely more than wanding, and less if you take imp. wands, however unlikely that may be :P) and 50 for AM1 (significantly less than wanding). Note no TLC was assumed here, which would boost the dps by a non-trivial amount.

 

BrTarolg

I think it's about fishing for clearcast/focus procs and proccing the TLC a lot, not about the damage of the spell

 

Kavan

In light of RED possibly no longer working on spells once 2.2 goes live I've decided to evaluate my meta of choice before RED. IED gains the same benefit as MSD from change to AM. For a typical AB rotation IED is equivalent to 12 int and about 23 mp5.

I was a bit surprised at the results. The tests this time were done ignoring meta requirements of MSD. All is including 2/5 T5, capacitor, shadow priest, full arcane spec.

10 min fight, 80% dps time, no JoW:

no meta: 557738 damage
RED: 565531 damage (1.40% increase)
MSD: 565537 damage (1.40% increase)
IED: 567032 damage (1.67% increase)

10 min fight, 80% dps time, with JoW:

no meta: 592103 damage
RED: 600506 damage (1.42% increase)
MSD: 609684 damage (2.97% increase, here AM spam/AB spam on AP becomes optimal)
IED: 599360 damage (1.23% increase)

3 min fight, no JoW (here majority comes from AB spam):

no meta: 221241 damage
RED: 224427 damage (1.44% increase)
MSD: 223344 damage (0.95% increase)
IED: 224067 damage (1.28% increase)

 

Finkum

Using AM1 or 2 will not give you significantly more focus procs over AM3 (1.33 chances per second vs. 1.2, discounting latency), although yes it will give you additional clearcast procs (and thus slightly more TLC procs, assuming Arcane Potency). However I doubt (in an entirely hand-wavy, calculation-free fashion) that the dps gain from the additional clearcasts/TLC procs offsets the dps loss from downranking AM past rank 3.

This is still talking around the issue a bit as I think we have two competing goals here and I'm not sure which Kadgar was trying to preference - 1) to do max damage while consuming mana at a rate roughly equal to the rate at which it is received from spirit regen, JoW, the resident shadow priest etc. or 2) to do max damage while consuming significantly less mana than is received from the aforementioned sources, in order to regain mana for another "burn phase".

To best satisfy 1) AM3 seems to be sustainable (disclaimer: based on what Kavan et al have been saying, not personal experience). For 2), wanding is probably desirable unless the gains from O5SR spirit regen are minimal compared to those received by faster JoW procs.

 

Sancus

Is AM's "burn" dps even good enough anymore with the nerfed/fixed MSD to make it worthwhile to HAVE a purely mana-regen cast cycle in the first place?

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Finkum

Yes a pure regen phase is probably not worthwhile with the fixed mechanic. But then, I doubt that doing a full AM burn phase followed by sustained AM3 is going to result in high overall dps either (substantiated again by my irrefutable proof by hand-waving). As Manly mentioned, the best use for an AM burn is probably at that point in the fight where you would otherwise start AB spam (appropriately offset by the cycle's superior DPM).

Still, discussing these cycles, optimal or no, is (for me, anyway) interesting and engaging

 

kadgar

The little more focus procs just compensate the additional lag you have because casting more casts.
It increases the CCs a lot (more than 50%), so 15% more TLC procs.
It clearly wins the mana competition.

About the downranking, is the < lvl20 penalty additional to the general downranking penalty?
If so than AM1 dps is really bad, if not the extra coefficient from empowered AM should compensate a big part of the dps gap to AM3.

 

Finkum

Although I haven't tested it in-game it is my understanding (backed up by wowwiki) that the downranking and sub-20 penalties are cumulative (as wowwiki says this is also implied by the post Drysc made when they implemented the downranking penalty). I'll do a quick test tonight to be sure.

A 50% improved CC proc rate sounds impressive in the abstract but isn't so wonderful when considered in context. As an example, let's say you cast AM non-stop for 10 minutes. This is 200 AM1s or 120 AM3s in a latency-free, prefect-reaction time environment (no haste effects). This gives you only (20 - 12) = 8 additional CCs by choosing AM1.

It is as you say a negligible mana cost but if your aim is to regain mana then (in general) wanding will be superior, but if your aim is to maintain the best dps you can using just the mana coming in from JoW, shadow priests, I5SR regen etc then AM3 should do the trick.

 

◊ manly

No, AM is total shit. Hogwash. It was usable in 2.1 under very extreme scenarios because AM didn't consume it, so if you could keep a rolling 4s focus proc (particularly under bloodlust), it could be done. AM spam was higher DPS than AB spam due to that mechanic, but now that its gone, its lower DPS than AB spam, by a far margin.

Yes, focus might last 10seconds now, but the fact that AM consumes focus proc is a net nerf over what we had pre 2.2.

With this said, since its a bad DPM rotation and bad DPS rotation for the most part, I don't really see any incentive to it. One of the 'advantages' of such rotation is that you can make use of spell haste over crit and use procs, but unfortunately every spell haste drops has better crit pieces with sockets. So going that road is pretty darn hard to justify. You would have the advantage of an uninterruptible nuke, which is certainly nice when tanking mobs (ie: illidari council / krosh).

But then the problem is, if you go a build that's made for AM spam, that means youre 43+ arcane, which means you already have every talent making AB your best main-nuke. Sure, you can do AM spam, but the build can also do ABs just as efficiently, so you might as well discard the idea of AM spam and go for AB anyway, since its almost better in every scenario. And in the few cases where you DO need an uninterruptible nuke, then your 43+ build can do AM spam just as well in any case.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Logun

I would hardly say AM spam is worthless. MSD getting 6 proc chances is still a significant upgrade to AM spam. Come 2.2 it will be taking the place of my ABx3 AM Scorch rotations. I will of course be spamming AB as much as I can. In the tests I've done, the MSD is just an annoyance 1 out of every 20 ABs when I spam it. MSD gives zero gain to AB spam but it doesn't really hurt its DPS either.

 

Sancus

Well, AM has 6 chances to proc it on the PTR still as far as I know, which I think is still a net buff over what we have pre-2.2, even with AM consuming the buff.

Still, who knows if that will remain.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Frostie

Bingo.

It's a net buff. A HUGE net buff.

How could anyone possibly consider it a nerf? It's an efficiency buff because you never have to cancel AM to 'catch' focus. It's also a dps buff because of the extra proc chances.

This is very very very good.

 

◊ manly

Ah yes, I forgot about that. I did mean to say that 6x MSD proc chance per AM cast + 4s AM-not-consuming-focus was a stellar concept compared to what seems to be the final 2.2 AM.

With this said, AM spam DPM is really bad without JOW. Nothing seems to be able to fix this major hole. And even under the best cases, you still have not very impressive DPS compared to what regular AB rotations can do. The results are slightly below for a much much worse DPM. I am not denying that there are upsides to it - most notably, not being as much affected by lag by virtue of having long cast spells. But thats about it. Sub-AB rotation DPS, as well as subpar DPM with no JOW.

Keep in mind, I did report that I did get the impression during my tests on the PTR that arcane potency was not double dipping on AM anymore. The net difference between what we have in 2.1 and 2.2 is 5% MSD procrate/AM to 26.50% MSD procrate/AM, ignoring arcane potency possible nerf. Counting a bit chain focus procs, and ignoring the theorical arcane potency, the net gain is in the order of 12-15% more AM DPS. Is this really what will make or break AM ?

I believe it makes the spell usable. I don't believe it makes the spell that much more attractive under most fights. I don't expect to gain any major DPS boost from it either, unless the spell haste 15.75 really helps boost that number. I just expect very similar DPS to AB spam with far far worse DPM.

EDIT: Although, on Vontre's credit, he did point out that AM is the only spell that has no ramp-up time. This is another highlight of the spell.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Kavan

The way I see it AM spam can work under the following conditions: you use MSD, you have very high JoW uptime, fight is long enough that just AB spam is not sustainable.

 

Frostx

So to drop 2 piece Tier 5 for 4 piece Tier 6 or not? Hmmmmm.

 

Northerner

I do find that under bloodlust AB is sketchy at best. I have a /stopcasted and non version but since I mysteriously get poor latency on my now-home realm, timing the lusted AB/AP spam is painful at best. I'm honestly getting far better dps (and far worse dpm) from AM spam under those conditions.

I've been arcane primarily for a month but I think I'll head back to fire for now. We are still just on Kael so I should focus on what's blocking us and honestly, although I'm grasping at #2 guild dps still, I'm getting tired. Shamefully I have never, ever seen a TLC drop either and that definitely colors my opinions. GG RNG and no one wanting to run kara anymore (myself included). In fact, we've never had a single TLC drop for a mage. Two warlocks and a shaman have em though (in their banks most likely). Our bad in splitting groups back when I suppose.

 

◊ manly

That's because bloodlust doesn't reduce the GCD....
And no, I'm not bullshitting you. After all these months of everyone clamoring it does, it turns out its BS info.

Personally I use 2x AB, 2x fireball, scorch rotation under bloodlust when using a 3x AB, 2x fireball build, otherwise I use 2x AB, AM, fireball under 43+ arcane builds / 3x AB, AM, scorch.


Working Theories of Theorycrafting as of 2.1

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

• Valoran

There's more to the story though. While heroism/bloodlust may not reduce the global cooldown, there is some evidence to suggest that instant casts may be more frequent than standard while under it's effects due to the way the game handles latency.

WoW Forums -> Haste, Heroism, the GCD, and you

Is my point of reference.

Edit: only benefit for a mage would be chaincasting instants however. Such as arcane explosion during heavy aoe situations. Doesn't really have any place in a discussion on arcane dps.