It could scale better though, as it sounds like a % of total mana. That is, it will scale better if you are picking items that are dmg/crit/hit weighted without much spirit. Or, for arcane mages, stacking a bunch of int becomes an even better secondary stat. More mana for evoc, use it earlier, end fight with a straight AB spam.

Meh, too early to tell at all. The damage tax removal is great alone.

My sentiments exactly . This change would be a big nerf to the amount of mana my Evocation currently returns.

A bit of parses from today, gear like in armory atm, NO stopcasting at all. Molten armor used. Oil and food used, flask or adept/draenic wisdom pots used)

Rage Winterchill-> http://wowwebstats.com/ziof3g336qvlu?s=2850-3054
(4 d&d + icebolt and one d&d that forced me to stand at 35y and wank for its duration...)


Supremus - > http://wowwebstats.com/ziof3g336qvlu?s=6300-6687
(Used 2 destruction pots, had to reposition 4 times on tank & spank due to flames lockign on me)

Teron Gorefield -> http://wowwebstats.com/ziof3g336qvlu?s=12384-12655
( No totem of Wrath till about 70%, mistimed Ap+destro pot, NO shadow priest in grp,used evocation and got a innervate , JOW was up 75% of the time and i STILL decided to use Molten Armor which turned out to be a good call. 2% miss is i guess bad luck... and single shadow priest in raid got the second Shadow of Death and was NOT rezed so lack of Misery for most of the fight.)


Like Manly wrote, mana consumtion estimates where much much lower than expected, if i changed destro pots for mana pots on teron i would have managed (without evocation) no problem without shadow priest providing JoW uptime is decent.

The question i want to ask is stopcasting AM's really profitable in terms of dps? I didnt use that and the dps was well...very good

I've been under the impression that stopcasting benefits shorter spells the most whereas longer spells aren't hit as hard by latency (200 ms latency per 1.5s cast versus 200 ms latency per 5 second cast).

For AM spam I use: /cast [nochanneling:Arcane Missiles] Arcane Missiles

and /stopcasting for arcane blasts

I went ahead and ran a simulation on my project (not nearly ready for public release) and pulled some quick numbers to demonstrate the effect of the 2.3 changes. I also went ahead and removed casting latency, which may or may not be the result of Blizzard's implementation of the stopcasting fix. Mana wasn't considered here at all, just dps. Basically for the fire/frost builds I'm using Skull of Gul'dan and Icon, arcane is using Lightning Capacitor and Ashtongue. Endgame approximation stats, unbuffed 1200 spell damage and 330 crit rating, hit capped, 4 pieces of T6. MSD assumed for all. Flame cap is assumed for fire. For arcane spec I swapped 64 hit rating for more spell damage. Everything here is considered except for Molten Fury and a shaman. Comparison for 5 min of combat looked like this:

Fire: 1661.8406813201
Frost: 1650.3016389009
Arcane Missiles: 1662.2948586472

I'm still deciding how the effect of Molten Fury should be modeled, a straight 4% increase to damage seems problematic as it's unlikely most will get 20% of their time on target during execute range. By the same token I didn't account for malediction on curse of shadows, which is likely.

What this isn't counting is spell pushback, target switching, or range. Fire wins on range obviously, but fire also loses a lot of steam from pushback (even after talents) and target switching if those things come into play.

So considering those factors and the general outlay of damage, it looks like fire and arcane will be too closely matched to tell which would win out. Generally arcane will win where a lot of adds or pushback occurs, fire will win for constant dps against a single target for a long duration. Kinda like it was before the MSD buff pushed arcane missiles up to absurdity.

Frost just loses at everything though, except survivability.

Pretty sure that's taken into account.

So eloquently put.

vontre, how does scaling look after that, assuming they are equal at 1200?

although I guess we should also account for how arcane gets better as raid dps gets better (with ab at least).

First night playing around with AM spec and I'm impressed. We are just breaking into Hyjal/BT though and I've taken no loot for ages really. Still, sitting in 4-piece T5 and with no TLC I still put out a good bit more dps than I did in a rotation and more than I did fire specced in the past. We didn't get much done though, played with buggy al'ar for a bit and then just ran off to pop rage/aneth and both are pretty new fights for us still. When I can stand and spam though it's an easy 12-1300 dps and at oddly low mana drain even without constant JoW support. On Aneth I actually dumped my full second mana bar on AB spam.

It'll be interesting to test the changes that come from here but AM + MSD even without basics like a TLC is still working well for me at the moment.

Slow night for us today, so I really didn't get much testing in. We did get Teron in though and I wanted to toss this out there

Aldric - WWS

to show how well you can actually do with pretty much minimal support. Very low JoW uptime, no heroism, no shadow priest and it still performed fantastically. I did have mage armor up to make up for the lack of a shadow priest though.

This is our parse from BT lastnight (Just starting to learn BT so not a lot of T6+ Loot and a sloppy supremus)
Wow Web Stats

I Had around 1360 Arc dam for most of the raid, spamming AM With MSD. No Exalted trinket, no TLC.

It feels about 150-200 DPS Better than the week previous with the usual AB*3, AM, Scorch rotation, or maybe i just sucked at rotations due to latency.

Anyway, it works ok for me so far with "BT Entry level" equip.

A few Questions.

1. Is AM spam going to work without TLC? Since I have killed Illhoof over 9000 times and still don't have one.

2. Can this AM spam be maintained with virtually near zero JoW uptime? -- (But 100% Shadow Priest uptime)

3. Molten or Mage Armor?

4. Passive Haste stacked in all slots (Shoulder/Bracer -- Ring -- Illidan Staff) + 4 piece T6 for max effect?


Thank you for your time.

1. i cant really answer as i dont have it either , best leave that to someone else.

2. I know im only just starting in BT, but we had almost 0 JoW uptime and mana was never near an issue with shadowpriest in group.

3. I use mage armor atm, but i can see being able to swap over to molten armor once our spriest's gear improves a bit as we progress in BT and Hyjal.

4. I think this was answered earlier in, i think the conclusion was it depends on the item, some are great such as the staff from illidan, others not so great like the crafted shoulders.

Does frost calculation include Water Elemental damage? Lower damage of frostbolt has been reality for quite a while but added WE damage it should be pretty close fire and arcane damage. If it includes WE damage then frost DPS has fallen maybe too far.

This looks interesting indeed. Would you guys even say it might be worth going Arcane without 2x t5 even, just complete make-over of current gear ?

The Armory

Bank Belt of Blasting for Spellfire-bonus, re-gem all with dmg-gems, break spellstrike with MSD in t4 helm, switch out some items to land at hit-cap and do AB, 2x AM ? Switch offhand(one from Mag, [Karaborian Talisman]), use TLC+Crusade neck/ring-combo with [Lola's Eve]/[Charlotte's Ivy] and re-enchant weap.

I'm nowhere near being on the verge of getting loot since I'm ~1month in this guild and usually just get the crumbs that are brushed of the table, but would be nice to be able to try Arcane instead of fire if it's possible without lowering dmg-output. Working on Kael atm so no BT/Hyjal yet.

Still feel abit unsure about re-doing all gear towards Arcane, dump several 100g and discover I should've stayed with fire until better gear :S Any quick tip would be most appreciated.

edit* I've still to see any JoW up from palas, might be able to get one to do it, have shadpriest in group all raids

[Mage] How Can Arcane Damage Work?

Page 63 , there ya go mate.

So Passive haste pieces just aren't that good when compared with Crit/dmg?

IE. Mantle of Tirsifal 2x12dmg > Mantle of Nimble?

Hm, you got some strange numbers here. I actually did some own calculations, using your sheet two days ago (w/out 2.3 changes, and w/out the haste changes in 2.2 too i think), and posted the results in our guild forum:

"i toyed a bit around with vontres new dps-sheet, that (suposedly) fixed WE calculations. tried the 3 standards builds and got the following results (under raid conditions considering buffs/mana regen etc, and with my personal gear):

NOTE: all calcs are with mage armor unless otherwise stated!

full fire (10/47/3) with 4*T6:

- 5*fball, 1*scorch cycle (for keeping up imp scorch): 1699 dps, 25:17 minutes max
- molten armor: 5+1 cycle: 1741 dps, 11:56 min
- fireball spam: 1758 dps, 20:31 min


full frost (4/0/57) with 4*T6:

- fbolt with WE(avg): 1679 dps, 20:21 min
- molten armor: 1712 dps, 10:17 min

* -> just ~ 1.5% less dps than with a firebuild!*


40/0/21 arc/frost with 4*T5 (with gay blue gems):

- 1*AB, 2*FB cycle: 1357 dps, infinite min
- 3*AB, 2*FB cycle: 1534 dps, 8:28 min
- 10*AB, AM on clearcast cycle: 1736 dps, 2:05 min
- AB spam: 1977 dps, 1:14 min
- AM spam: 1247 dps, 6:50 min


43+ arc build with 3 emp AM with 4*T6:

- AM spam: 1693 dps, 4:40 min"

The setting on the main sheet were: 300mp5 from VT (our spriest is a machine ) 13% CoE and CoS, Wrath of Air Totem, no Totem of Wrath, 10% bloodlust uptime, 400 sec fight and 0% pushbacks.

So maybe you disregarded the WE dmg, or you were using a different frostbuild, but the difference in our two calculations are a bit too huge to be reduced to some different parameters we used, like gear or settings.

I'm gonna modify your latest sheet to add the 2.3 changes and do some new calculations, let's see if i just overlooked something important

Moreover, it's clearly NOT a bug. The first generation patch notes were more clear about what specfiicaly was being changed with arcane missiles than the final patch notes. It specifically said that effects that could not be procced from individual missiles previously now would be able to. Treating each seperate missile as a cast is obviously intended as that's what the patch originally stated was changed.

Now you may consider this "ill-planned" or "in retrospect, overpowered" -- but it was nevertheless intended and not a bug.

The real distinction between "on spell hit" and on "spell cast" with offensive spells is with AoE Effects. For instance, one arcane explosion can be a dozen or more spell "hits" for the purposes of proccing. Ashtongue Talisman of Insight is on spell "hit" and I proc it pretty much 100% of the time when I start Spamming AE on hyjal trash packs. Every cast procs it.

Each missile is treated as a cast just as the patch notes said it should be. If you want to argue its nerf-worthy or abusive, that's a separate issue.

From speaking to a GM last night, it is reportedly a bug. Each missle isn't meant to be treated like a cast.

A long long time ago:

To GM: Hey im stuck in the wall inside sunken temple
GM: Im sorry, i cannot give hints as to the location of ingame items, good luck!


Ill take what GM's say with a pinch of salt untill i read otherwise i think.


And ontop of that i dont see whats so overpowered with it, because mages are actually keeping up with the other classes on DPS Now? What ive noticed in my guild especially are some dieheard fire mages complaining about how overpowered it is , i expect because they fear for having to spec arcane which they dont like.

But anyway, bug or not, ill enjoy it for as long as its here, its great to feel like a DPS class again .