Rouncer

How does the changes to the MSD affect fire builds?

The changes to the MSD are only really a significant buff in regards to AM. For Fire spec raid spam it has exactly the same effect after the patch as it does currently. Wasted if it occurs on the Fireball before a Scorch (since with /stopcasting you just wasted the proc) and a really nice dps boost if it occurs anywhere else in the cycle.

Sure will be nice not to be forced to use the proc instantly or lose it, especially if movement is involved in the encounter but I don't know how that would qualify as an insane buff for fire builds.

 

Mystz0r

Wasn't the MSD proc changed in such a way, that it could proc of every single missile after 2.2, as opposed to now where it only procs on the AM spell as a cast? (meaning, that the chance you get a focus proc on an AM cast is higher in 2.2?). Not sure about this, though I think I read someone who'd come to that conclusion on the test servers.

 

◊ Vontre

That is correct, multiple people have confirmed this on PTR. There was no significant buff included regarding fire or ice mages, except that the buff takes a little more time to expire so you can run around if you need to.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Magusrex

I need some advice. My guild has Lurker & VR on farm. We just started working on Hydross.
Until very recently I was full frost. I recently switched to 10/48/3. I have a set of Frozen Shadoweave and Spellfire. I was recently informed we are soon to start on A'lar. Other than the raiding I do, I do not have much time to farm instances for gear or badges, or arenas. I am a father and do not play until after my daughter is in bed for the evening. So limit possible gear advice around that. I am working on getting the darkmoon crusade trinkett. If you look at my gear I could be wearing different things. I wear Scryers Bloodgem and the Lightning Capacitor on bosses. I have both necklaces from Kara, belt of divine inspiration, and T4 gloves at my disposal as well as what I wear. I am willing to change any of my gems or enchants. Sunfire enchant goes on weapon tomorrow. I will always have s shadow priest(we have many) and a Paladin(wife is a Paladin who raids with me) judging wisdom. Now my questions.

Can Arcane spec(48/13) work for me without 2 piece T5 and my Spellifre set if I redo my gems to compensate for lack of stats?

If yes, what should I do with my gems and what should my boss spell rotation be?

If our guild is at this level of progression will fail miserably on A'lar( can we do this?) anyway and should I just wait for 2 piece T5?

I know I am asking for much effort. I can't really get Vontre's sheet to work for me( maybe my excel is too old) I am currently working on reading this entire thread. I am hoping someone very proficient in Arcane could help out. Thank you in advance from a busy father who wants to do the best he can for his fellow raiders with his limited resources.

 

◊ Vontre

Arcane is fine, spam arcane missiles and dump your remaining mana into blast spam at the end of the fight. Yes I'm serious. Don't bother with Darkmoon, just get an Icon of the Silver Crescent with heroic badges. Redo all your gems for spell damage, get a helm with a meta socket and put in Mystical Skyfire Diamond.

There, the short version. =p

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Northerner

Don't forget, although it is perhaps not optimal in many situations, getting a pyroblast in 3 seconds as a 50/11 mage is sometimes fun too. It's actually almost certainly mathematically inferior to AM under Focus all the time but hey, it amuses and is great dpm =)

EDIT: I am indeed playing with the idea of an arcane AM-based spec in 2.2.x as well. Gear like a shadow priest (which I somewhat do already) and it might even work pretty decently. Time will tell but it is certainly worth experimentation.

 

Shawn

If you mean putting red damage-gems everywhere I beg to differ. I don't think that's the way to go in endgame. You don't want a critrate below 25% - 30% with trinkets like [The Lightning Capacitor] and [Ashtongue Talisman of Insight]. Thus I'm trying to balance orange and purple gems as much as possible. Having in mind that most socket bonuses are ~5 spelldamage you won't lose a lot of spelldamage while keeping a decent amount of spellcrit. If I got that right the double-dipping of Arcane Potency for Arcane Missiles will be removed as well so it's even more important.

 

Andersnordic

Only channeled spells will consume the 10 sec buff. Doesn't that mean that you can nuke with 3-4 fireballs for 10 secs, while the old MSD it only affected one spell and didn't give you the 10 sec buff?



Shawn,

You shouldn't focus on any other stats than spell dmg as we know the ratio at end lvl is aprox 1 spell = 1,8 crit rating.

And I would never ever stack crit rating around TLC when your main nuke as an arcane mage is AB (70%+ of your spells should be AB on an average fight). TLC is in my eyes HIGHLY overrated and most calculations made are created around the illusion that you stick to your 2(3) AB, AM, Scorch, which you never ever do-.-

In an average fight you will spam that AB keeping AMs to a minimum, which will severely diminish the effectiveness of your TLC.

The only way of doing real theorycrafting around TLC is analyzing WWS files, not basing the analysis of theoretical rotations which seems to be the case very often.

This is a common misconception regarding TLC.

 

Aastarius

I think rather it means channelled spells will also consume the debuff where currently this is not the case.

 

Rouncer

Depends on whether you are talking about the 12 damage red gems or the 9 damage ones.

 

Aldric

As of the 2.2.2 PTR the double dipping is working exactly as it used to. Doing rank 3 AM for about 1500 missiles I got a crit rate of 34%, 6% over my character sheet. So I would say that double dipping still works.

 

Rouncer

nope...what the guy above said, one proc=one spell cast whether it's channeled or cast. The buff to the gem is that Arcane Missiles gives 6 chances to proc it every 5 seconds and that if you get a proc on the initial start of an Arcane Missile channel you can allow it to complete now and still utilize the proc as opposed to being forced to interrupt your current channel to make use of it.

For Deep Fire the MSD is worth about 40dps. For Arcane Missile Spam it's looking to be worth about 150dps. That's why I'm looking at a 1AB 2AM rotation for a low mana consumption rotation and straight AB spam for the high consumption cycle.



I don't think that is going to be correct next patch. With or without 2T5, if you are using a MSD and a deep Arcane Spec, AM will be your primary nuke and AB will serve as either a mana burn or a mana conservation spell. I blew up Dr Boom a lot while the PTR was up and my dps from a 3AB AM Scorch was a lot lower then what I was seeing with a 1AB 2AM rotation and my DpM was a lot higher with the 1AB 2AM cycle as well.

Straight AB spam was still significantly higher dps then either rotation and even then straight AM spam but that really isn't sustainable over a normal fight. So it will end up being 1AB 2AM with AB spam when the mana is available to sustain it until the completion of the fight.

That presupposes 2T5, without 2T5 or with 4T6 you will be better of using straight AM spam if JoW is present and only using the 1AB 2AM rotation if JoW is not present. With JoW present straight AM spam is equal to the DpM seen with Fireball rotations (using mage armor on the arcane mage and molten on the fire mage) so it should be completely sustainable. With 2T5 you still use the 1AB 2AM rotation, even if JoW is present, so you have more mana available for AB spam as you get closer to the end of the fight since 2T5 gives unstacked AB the same dps as the Arcane Missiles.

Just to clarify the 1AB 2AM rotation is based on using AM for all procs/clearcasting and the AB is there just for it's DpM. So if you get a clearcast or a focus proc on the second AM you use a 3rd AM and then cast the AB after.

 

Andersnordic

Sounds like an interesting theory. Have you tested it out on any specific bosses? "Boom" is the reason why so many analyzes are flawed, as no bosses in game work like that. However, it will be very interesting to find out if this may be the way to go (Will get a chance to test tomorrow

 

Kavan

I'm not sure if this is a result of gear specifics or if you were just lucky with procs, but I'm not getting the same results. For me ABx3+AM+Sc is about the same dps as straight AM spam. Mixing in AB just decreases dps, while dpm is not improved enough to counter with extra AB spam. Are you assuming spell haste gear in addition to 2/5 T5?

 

Rouncer

Only haste gear I have is one of the rings from BT. I was wearing my capacitor as well but those are the results I was getting. Well guess we shall all see what happens once people are able to try out all the rotations tonight under real raiding conditions.

 

• Astrylian

In case anyone was curious, I just tested [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] on 2.2 live. It procs ONLY off of the beginning of AM, not on each missile. Emptied 2 full mana bars at Dr. Boom. It proc'd 3 times total, all 3 times at the beginning of the cast.

 

Zure

I've been meaning to play around with this, though slightly modified. AB gives you a period of mana regen when cast after any full length AM. So theoretically, assuming no MSD it would be more efficient to AB-->AM-->AB-->AM instead of spamming AM and then shifting to spamming AB.

Of course procs complicate this. On the one hand, mixing in your ABs gives you an extra chance to proc CC + MSD on the subsequent AM. But it also creates the possibility of consuming an MSD proc from late missiles. And of course if you religiously alternated AB/AM you would inefficiently consume CC/MSD procs with ABs.

So the real issue is this: can you, without squandering an excessive number of MSD procs, select when to AB given that not all of the missiles from AM have hit your target by the time you decide to hit your /stopcasting /cast AB macro?

 

• Astrylian

AB-AM will keep stacking the AB debuff, making it inefficient.

In AB-AM-AM, if you get a focus proc from a missile hitting after you start casting the (full cast time) AB, I imagine that letting it cast would eat the focus proc without actually getting its benefit, though I haven't tested it yet. If a late missile procs focus, I'd say stop the AB and start another AM. A little bit of time wasted there, but at least you got a mana regen tick out of it.

Come to think of it, could you significantly increase the efficiency of AM spam by pausing half a sec after each full-length AM? What was the name of the addon that displayed regen ticks (I think there's RegenFu, but would rather use something that didn't require FuBar. Then again, I'm just guessing that it requires FuBar, maybe it doesn't)

 

Dothorio

Just a quick note, after a few (30ish) minutes of testing the Mystical Skyfire Diamond proc is now consumed by an Arcane Missile cast.

So no dice on casting four 2.5 second Missiles


edit: i just had a focus proc off of an instacast, and then cast two arcane missiles before the buff was consumed.

however, a focus proc off of an arcane missile would be consumed on the next spell cast. i think blizzard must have some issues with this proc and latentcy, because sometimes it wont consume after an instacast procs it.

J'adore quand un plan se déroule sans accroc

 

Zure

Manly did the tests reporting double dipping to no longer exist. I believe his work simply showed that back to back CCs wouldn't give +60% crit to the clear-casted AM that generated an additional CC.

So both of you could be right, in which case AM spam receives 5.7% crit from arcane potency (10% chance for 30% crit, plus 9% chance for an additional 30%).

Inefficient relative to AB-AM-AM for the entire fight, but more efficient than AM spam followed by AB spam. The goal of this would be to convert some of your AB spam time at the end of a fight into 1.5 second ABs in the middle of the fight, with each probabilistically giving some regen.

It adds up to a lot of time wasted though. We know this because we have already determined AM spam + prolonged wanding to be severely slacking in DPS. Intermittent pauses would seem to produce similar results, unless there is something I'm missing wrt how regen works.

 

Keyne

These fully debuffed AB's are no less efficient than the ones that are spammed at the end of encounters as the 'dps rotation'... Notice that AM, AB, AM, AB repeating is a mathematically transitive version of AM, AM, ..., AB, AB, ... (pure AM spam as dpm rotation, followed by pure AB spam as the dps rotation 'finisher'.) Which leads me to this question (which may or may not have an obvious answer, but I haven't slept in 36 hrs)...

I'm not entirely sure that the fully debuffed (read: slow) AB is specifically desireable as a spell in this rotation. It would seem that it is only really in the AB, AM, AM rotation to slow rate at which AMs devour your effective mana pool. Which dpm rotation is more mana friendly compared to the dps that it puts out? AB, AM, AM or AM, AB, AM, AB? Two points that I think might be relevent to this question:

AB, AM, AM rotation is essentially AB, AM, AB, AM with every other AB cut out. Therefore AB, AM, AM ought to have half as many FSR mana ticks as AB, AM, AB, AM. Notice that since AM, AB, AM, AB is a mathematically transitive form of AM spam, followed by AB spam (which I believe I recall Manly suggesting as a possible encounter strategy), that the version that alternates between the two should be superior, mana-wise, due to the fact that one has FSR ticks and the other doesn't.

The two-cycle theory of spellcasting seems to suggest that only one of pure AM spam or fully debuffed AB (followed, of course, by filler spells while waiting for the buff to fall off) can be the optimal one for the dpm rotation; not both. The the unbuffed AB is the more valuable for dpm than AM for our dpm rotation, then we should use AB, AM, AM repeating. If AM is the valuable part, then the only spells we should be casting during encounters seems to be AM and AB with 3 debuffs.

My gut tells me that the correct 2.2 rotation is AM, AB, AM, AB repeating until the point that you can AB spam to go OOM when the target dies. The only downside I can immediately see to this strategy is that it is optimized only with perfect stopcasting when focus or clearcasting proc (as AM will be be the best spell to cast under those two buffs). This is likely very difficult when these two procs happen on the last AM bolt (and likely the second-to-last as well). The problem is exacerbated as AM, AB, AM, AB has twice as many of these trouble spots as AB, AM, AM, as well as the fact that having an AB eat a focus while performing AB, AM, AM is a lot more palatable than while performing AM, AB, AM, AB (fully debuffed ABs).

Incorrect information is the worst thing in the world. So please correct me if I've said anything blatently wrong here...

 

• Astrylian

The thing that bothers me abot AB-AM is that whenever you get Focus or CC off an AM, and then cast another AM, you lose the AB debuff stack. I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, but it complicates things alot.

 

◊ Vontre

Considering this build is based around an average of 1/4 arcane missile casts proccing MSD, I don't think this kind of rotation will work out. It is a good thought though, if you don't have any haste going on. Clearcasting is further complication, however... clearcasted fireball? I could theorycraft it but I don't feel like it right now.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Unequaled

Any confirmation that the MSD proc'ing on each missle made it to the Live server? Or is it back to just spellcast for AM :-/

 

• Astrylian

Will tell you as soon as Kavan gets on and cuts me a MSD!