I posted this on the WoW-US Mage forums but I think it is worth reposting it here since it does add to the current topic of discussion.

WoW Forums -> Theorycraft-o-Matic



I'm not sure how Arcane Missiles would fare against Fireballs were all the Pre-mades gear to have been enchanted and properly gemmed for Tier 6 as well as if all the normal buffs and debuffs were in place. However even from that very small sampling it does look like Arcane Missiles, with the MSD in place, may finally be showing some signs of life.

Lhivera's Script hasn't been updated to show the effects of MSD on AM spam. Hopefully. this will soon be corrected.

I have a possible dilemma here. I got my second piece of T5 tonight (and of course I had pretty much done the "I give up I'm going fire" 2 hours before the raid and respecced 10/48/3). Anyway, I do NOT have TLC, and I only just found out that the 49/12 style build I had been using previously was structured around a TLC's proc, with the AM on clearcasts, and just using AM in the downtime between AB cycles. I had followed the philosophy and design of that build not realizing it was SO heavily expectant of a TLC (and now I feel like an idiot), and was wondering if frost would be viable for a secondary tree. The 40/0/21 idea intrigues me, and I'm thinking if I dropped AM and Scorch from my rotations completely and replaced them with Frostbolts, I may be more efficient considering my lacking TLC.

In short; is 40/0/21 the way to go if you're lacking one or more of the necessary items (TLC, 2pc T5) to make deep arcane with fire worth using?

(Sorry, I know I posted something similar on the previous page, but it never got answered, and I have a more concrete idea of my needs at this point)

I don't know, where your impression comes from, that Arcane(/Fire) would need a TLC to bei viable. In a normal cycle (3AB, AM, scorch), the effect of a TLC is overrated and thus you would be just fine using the Icon or whatever trinket you come by with +dmg.

I wanted to try Arcane/Frost for Al'ar, but you just can't build a cycle with frost spells to fit into the 8 seconds of the AB debuff (2 FB is not enough and 3, or AM,FB is too much).
If you just want to spam Frostbolts anyway, you wuold be better of with deep frost.

There might be better optiions but of course you can always replace scorch by icelance for Al'ar....

Edit :
True enough Maledict, I overlooked the mana tick issue.
I deny what I posted and declare the opposite

You don't want to replace scorch with ice lance on al'Ar. If you od that, you won't get the full tick of mana regeneration you normally get after casting arcane missiles, which will severely eat into your mana reserves on a fight which generally pushes your mana anyway.

I find it best to just wait a second and then start my arcane blasts again in phase 1 of Al'Ar, to preserve mana for phase 2. In phase 2, it's just arcane blast spam mostly.

The thing that made me start realizing how much damage I'm losing without TLC was looking at Vontre's spreadsheet. It seems that AM is far less valuable for straight damage then other spells, and without the boost Clearcast-->AM-->TLC proc, it seems I'm falling behind where I could be doing better damage going another route. Like I said, there is a 40/0/21 mage in my guild that is able to give me competition on damage, and my gear -should- be better suited for arcane than his, I'd think. I'll see how much the meter order changes after tonight's raid, first time for me using my new 2pc bonus.

The TLC is generally providing up to 10% of my damage on trash, and around 7% on bosses. So you can say it's 1.5-2x better than the T6 4piece bonus for AM spam.

That's not entirely true considering TLC doesn't scale with +damage and the T6 4piece does.

But it scales better with crit and haste

I don't know why topics have to suddenly switch to AM-spam when TLC comes up.
Yes TLC is awesome for AM spam, but thats not where the damage of an Arcane Mage comes from anyway, so whats the point?

This may or may not change, when the patch arrives, but its not the case right now, if you ask me.

The greatest benefit from TLC is for AE work and I think that goes without saying. It is still a quite superior trinket for 'normal' rotations (although I personally spend very little time in my AB3/AM/Scorch) and a very superior trinket under bloodlust.

I don't have one as it happens but I'm still finding 50/11 to be my preferred raiding build for the moment. That's in early Hyjal right now so take that as you will. I imagine I'll transition back to fire as we progress in BT however and I start to shed my T5. I prefer the arcane playstyle in many ways but the range issue and wasted +hit on too many items begins to wear on me even now.

I sorely wish I could do this, but Illidan throws a wrench into it because of the stupid phase 2 on fire elementals.

Sometimes I think Blizzard takes perverse pleasure in forcing Mages to change spec(or do horrible damage) due to immune mobs in every second raid instance.

I have a question regarding Arcane Blast burn-downs.

For folks doing a ABx3-AM-whatever rotation, there reaches a point at which you know you can finish off the fight doing pure AB spam.

Can you guys list some fights and give me some example AB-spam times?

In my opinion, you can't really do this. It depends on your mana, what mana recovery mechanisms you typically have available at 'the right time' and the DPS of the rest of your raid.

You really need to find this out for yourself. Don't be afraid to go out of mana too early when you're learning. At the very least, you'll be contributing a fair amount of DPS for that period of time. At which point you can wand/gem/pot/Evoc and try to dump again.

This is just part of the learning curve associated with the spec. But, maybe someone else has better insight.

Well, thats very simple. Download vontre's spreadsheet. Enter the stats you want to use as an example. Then specify the fight duration matching the boss you want to get a general idea about 1.5s AB spam time. Lets say you put 240s for an example. Thread spreadsheet will automatically calculate the best AB rotation. Typically you will get something along the lines of '5x AB, AM, scorch', which means your 1.5s AB spam time is, well, as you can guess, 3 second per rotation. This is essentially the same as saying 'your DPM rotation is 3x AB, AM, scorch, your DPS rotation is 1.5s AB spam (2x 1.5s AB per DPM rotation).'

I think it's important to realize that that's all you're going to get from a spreadsheet, even one as nice as Vontre's. The most important factor to the answer of this question, in my opinion, is the raid DPS. In general, the higher your raid DPS, the more AB-spam-based DPS you can do. Movement/activity, five-second rules, DPS time also factor into this question.

You're never going to get something that says: 'For Gruul, given your gear, raid makeup, raid buffs, raid debuffs, given these mana recovery abilities spam AB at these times'.

That is something you'll just need to figure out.

I re-specc alot and do lots of testing on Dr. Boom and I can't help but have a little voice in the back of my head screaming at me that fire spells have a high resist rate when used with an arcane spec/rotation.

I get 10% less resists from arcane talents on arcane spells
6% therefore comes from gear (Less if I have class/racial abilities to aid me in raids)
Whenever I use a fire spell its facing at least a 7% resist rate if I go xx/xx/3 and 10% or more resist rate if I go xx/xx/0)

I say at least, because if I'm arcane and I know i have racial/class abilities helping my hit rating I'll down my hit gear to maximise my damage amount/crit rating.

So - Can a few people just dismiss / validate this little voice by evaluating the dps / mana wastage by using scorch in a rotation vs doing nothing for that time...

Obviously the fact that fire/frost spells have a higher resist rate, AM spam (If you have the int / mana regen to back it up) and/or MSD become winners on this issue.

Help!

Edited to remove a 40 word sentence and assuming your lungs aren't that big.

Edit #2 :
Possible points I've thought of include :
a ) Give myself circa 10% hit from gear to improve the hit rating on fire, or try and find "THE" best hit rating vs Dmg/crit ratio in order to keep arcane spells kicking, but also have fire spells not sapping my dps but receiving resists
b ) Go full arcane rotation, AM spam with/without MSD ; Use mana oils, mp5 food and other such aids to assist until I receive gear with so much Int AM spam becomes viable for me
c ) Stay fire

I would love to be able to experiment in a raid environment on an encounter involving a boss, and truly give some weight to these thoughts - but Dr. Boom is my only reference point as I'm not prepared to lose dps and risk wipes in a raid environment while my guild progresses in SSC (which is where we are at the moment). I did try Arcane spec on morogrim and have tried it in Kara, but I hope you guys can save me the trouble of experimenting wit gear to counter this problem without me risking the lives of my guildies
Also I don't want to reduce my dps in such a way that people think that I suck. :p

Since most of my damage nowadays comes from Arcane Blast, and I've since gone from using Improved Scorch x 4 to Fireball x 2 to Scorch x 1 as fillers. Each time reducing my # of non-Arcane casts such that now I couldn't care less about my hit rate with Fire spells.

It's been reiterated a bunch of times over the past few pages, but your DPS in a Deep Arcane build comes from AB spam. No matter what you cast for your 'normal' rotation, you're trying to get at the very, very least 75% of your damage to come from your Arcane spells. And ideally, you want most of that percentage to be from Arcane Blast (depending on the encounter, exceptions are probably Solarian, Morogrim other AoE-heavy bosses).

So, again in my opinion, max out Arcane to hit, then stack damage, crit and haste in that order.

I have a question that is semi-related but may be in another topic that i am hoping someone can point me to. I want to know as an Arcane mage how should I gem my socketed items should I be pushing more crit, more damage, more intellect, more mp5? I thought there was a topic about this on here but I can't find the thing so maybe someone can either a) point me to the post so I can read it or b) give me a slight overview on some of the better gem options.

Just to throw my questions back into the thread they belong in.

I'm still not convinced that spell haste rating isn't a viable stat for an arcane mage, I know for a fact that when beserking is up I am able to throw in an untalented fireball in place of scorch. So I figure with ~20% haste rating passive I could throw a talented fireball in instead of scorch. Sure this requires sacrificing hit/crit/dmg for a significant amount of haste rating but your post originally stated that the entire point of an arcane build is to get to arcane blast, the spell you talented everything around. I don't entirely agree with this, A lot of the arcane talents improve all spell schools, mind mastery doesn't just increase my AB damage. I realize this sounds asanine, and that yes the real core point is to get to AB, and much like you I'm showing ~70% of my damage from AB and about 20% from AM. and only about 10% from scorch/pyro/ignite.

This still doesn't explain at all, why haste rating isn't a viable stat for an arcane mage. With 20% haste rating, although I don't gain it on the first cast I do gain it on the second and third stacking of AB, time saved DPS increased, not to mention when the debuff falls off entirely. While you mentioned that human reaction time limits how you can react to procs, if clearcasting procs while I'm AMing a target in my ABx3 AM scorch rotation, I'm gunna cast AM again. Haste rating is huge here! it improves both my AM's and ALL THREE of my ABs. And fireball instead of scorch no matter how you work it is going to improve my dps.




So my AB stacking time is shorter, my AB debuff waiting time hasn't changed at all, I've loaded more DPS into my waiting time.... I've allowed for more versatility and adaptation to different procs and encounters.... I'm not seeing where haste isn't an insanely good stat for any arcane mage. The only ... THE ONLY talent build I couldn't see haste rating being the single best stat after hit rating, to go for is 33/28 scorch spam. Or if I'm gearing to do a lot of AoE dmg, IE morogrim.


It occurs to me that you also mentioned that the real limiting factor for any mana based user with haste rating is that all it really does is empty your mana pool faster. And you're entirely right... and really, if I wanted to increase my DPS and empty my mana pool I suppose I always could AB spam. I'm an idiot :-/ *shrug* was fun to talk about tho

Its a combination of things. First, to restate what I said before, 43+ arcane means all your points are basically built to max your AB damage (and 2pc t5 gearing that goes with it). You can check the DPS/DPM values and compare it to your other spells -- you will see they don't really fare as good for that spec. Sure, your haste *can* be used, but that doesn't mean, in any way, that doing so is optimal. In practice, I lose more dps with my partial spell haste gear than I gain from it, because of '1.48s stopcastings'. You might think that 'oh hey look, I can throw up a fireball in there with +20% haste with procs rather than a scorch!', but all it does is eating on your AB casting time. Sure, if you cast AB you won't get mileage from your haste, but your fireball with that spec will be mostly uninteresting. If you spec arcane, you pretty much always go for mage armor. The only case you go for molten armor is when you use fireballs in your rotations (or really short fights). Plus, TLC is really garbage on fireballs. Basically, the build isn't really designed to throw out fireballs, despise the fact they do excellent damage *when they crit*. If your fireballs are 15% less efficient DPS wise than your AB, but you have 20% haste, you're not really winning a whole bunch. You're just adding extraneous overhead to your playstyle without gaining much dps out of it.

But the core of my argument is that on almost any fight I do spend at least 30%+ of my DPS time casting 1.5s AB. Also, as you saw, haste only depletes your mana faster, but arcane spec is already able to do so without it. You will get a better DPM out of your spell hasted rotations rather than using a non-spellhaste rotation + 1.5s AB spam, but the difference will be very very minor if you average things out. In other words, spell haste will only serve you for some of your non-1.5s AB spam (and won't do anything on the first AB of every of your DPM rotations). Lets say that the first AB of every 3x AB, AM, scorch is taking up (1.7 / 13.1) = 13% (note: counting a flat 200ms lag) of your DPS time. Taking my previous example, that means spell haste is only usable during (70% * (100% - 13%)) = 61% of your DPS time. Additionally, for every extraneous spellhaste you stack you deviate away from AB spamming since you try and fill the interlude with 'sub-optimal spells', which will further 'tank' your dps. Its not that you won't get any benefit out of spell haste, its just that its going to be quite underwhelming compared to every other piece of gear you can get, since every single spell haste drops have no crit, no hit and no socket, which makes them extremely uninteresting. Maybe zhar'doom is fine, I haven't ran the numbers, but the other ones are quite clearly simply worse than their socketed counterparts. Just to make my point, here's the full list of every spell haste item available and the gear slot they are competing with.

[Bracers of Nimble Thought] - [Cuffs of Devastation]
[Mantle of Nimble Thought] - [Mantle of the Tempest] or [Hatefury Mantle]
[Ring of Ancient Knowledge] - [Ring of Captured Storms]
[Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer] - [Tempest of Chaos] + [Chronicle of Dark Secrets]
[Waistwrap of Infinity] - [Anetheron's Noose]