I'm assuming that deep fire will still outdps an AB rotation?

Once you start getting gear in BT/Hyjal, it looks like it. I was wondering more if the nerfed MSD is still comparable to fire.

Well, I still got relatively decent unbuffed DPS on AM spam on Dr. Boom, but I havn't done any testing with 33 28 or 10 48 3 yet since I'm in the middle of no PTR raiding, I will do that later, have to keep in mind that my fire gear is pretty lackluster as Ive geared for Arcane the last 4 months

Not if they add a bunch of fire-immune or extreme aggro-sensitive encounters @ sunwell. Otherwise, yes.

As I said many times, back when I was fire spec I never had aggro issues. Sure you do begin dps earlier with AM spec, but aggro was definately never an issue. Unless you get 50-60% crit rate, which happen from time to time. In any case, I rarely ever had to use invisibility.

Aggro sensitive fights won't make fire non-viable. Unless maybe you don't use misdirection on aggro dumps or don't have a properly played tank.

The only way I can see aggro being a serious problem is on fights where aggro is randomly dropped and the tank would also become incapacitated. Ignites usually tick for more then any other dot so you go splat if another tank can not get to the boss in time. Thankfully blizzard does not seem to keen on doing those type of encounters. The closest thing I've seen is on Leo when the alert bars are way off and the ignites ticks when he starts a whirlwind. But usually you know it's coming and can switch to AB spam for a few seconds.

Exactly, and if that kind of aggro is a problem, then dot classes will have FAR MORE of a problem dealing damage than mages will. I think blizzard avoids those encounters for that reason, much in the same veins that they avoid shadow immune bosses because shadow priests wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Honestly, unless every tree does nearly the same dps (which they can't, with frost's survivability), there will never be 3 viable trees in the way you mean it - currently there are 3 viable trees, but there is one that is better than the rest if you're min/maxxing for raids - in 2.1 it was fire, in 2.2 it was arcane, and in 2.3 it'll be fire again (barring T5 2pc discussions).

No. Arcane was viable in 2.2 because of MSD, Fire was going to be just as good/equal in terms of dps once the coefficient nerf was undone, but with the MSD nerf it makes arcane useless and fire the only viable dps spec.

Take a look at this new gem for fire though. I think you'll find it better suited for that.

Exactly.

The only other option is to use the 3AB AM Scorch rotation with 2T5 and have a timer keep track of the MSD's cooldown and then switch to AM spam when it is up and then back to rotation when it is back on cooldown, but even then you are shafted into using 2T5 indefinitely and honestly what would be the point since Fire spec will do the same (more) dps without half as much effort or potential for screwing up the rotation and wasting dps.

Still waiting on someone to stick the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

Vhad showed some really nice AM spam dps on Dr Boom on the PTR and I'm waiting to see what Deep Fire will do in the same/similar gear.

I would love to test it myself but since character copies are full atm and leveling and gearing up another toon on the PTR might take a bit too long, I'm stuck here waiting to see what other people who are already on the PTR can see by doing the direct comparison.


Stated simply - Please will an Arcane mage, who has the MSD and is in T6 level gear, go and spam 3 mana bars of AM at Dr Boom in a Deep Arcane spac and then respec to 10/48/3 and spam another 3 mana bars and tell us what the dps averaged out to for each spec.

Things to watch out for,

Dr Boom can't be below 20% health when spamming Fire spells or it will skew the results, alternatively just don't place the 2 talent points in Molten Fury to avoid the issue altogether.

Make sure that CoS/CoE/Misery are not present on Dr Boom when doing the spam.

Looks like wowhead already has the new datamined info for MSD. Spell Focus Trigger - Spells - World of Warcraft Looks like the proc rate was changed to 15% and based on posted results I would assume AM still has 6 proc chances. This would be 62.3% chance to proc on AM cast.

Edit: I've just noticed wowhead has Focus buff changed to 6 sec. Can anyone on PTR confirm/deny this?

Quick playing around with Lhivera's script shows 2t5 roughly even with deep fire at ~1150 damage and falling behind from there. This doesn't account for tricks you can pull off on both sides, so it looks like arc nuking is pretty much shot.

THEORYCRAFT RESULTS WHOA

Hey, the sky isn't falling. I went ahead and assumed a 10% proc rate for our new MSD friend, and 0 ms casting latency thanks to blizzard's fix. Ok the scaling might help that out a lot. Anyway, I went ahead and did some comparisons using my new module. I'll be releasing a spreadsheet update too, but the spreadsheet is still limited to the "Patchwerk scenario", for the most part. Programatic approach tells the whole story. I'll have these calculations visible before too long.

Ok, how did I build this? Basically I included everything, shaman totems, bloodlust, etc. I did NOT include malediction. I DID include Molten Fury, and furthermor assumed that Bloodlust is popped during Molten Fury. I also assumed bloodlust would stack against arcane power and water elemental. Realistic, I think. For arcane damage, I added 72 spell damage, to represent the amount of spell damage you might gain for dropping hit gear. This number was derived by theoretically dropping 8 hit gems (64 hit rating) and replacing them with 8 spell damage gems (at 9 damage each). Guess this would be even better in BT gear? Hmm.

Anyway, I finally got around to making a complete calculation, which means everything included. Not just the extra buffs Bloodlust and Molten Fury, but also options for interruption, pushback, and target switching.

So the theorycraft simulations are not just stand still and spam fireball for 6 minutes, they account for scorching, buff ramping, timer effects, etc. I assumed there was a second fire mage to help with scorching, fairly common. This doesn't mean "scorch bitch" (a concept which is inherently retarded), this means help, as in the debuff goes up twice as fast. Awesome. No such luck for our poor frost simulation, though. He has to stack Winter's Chill on his own.

So how does our "Patchwerk scenario" look? Meaning standing still and doing your spells and scorches for 5 minutes. Pretty much like this:

Fire | fire1: 1821.98
Frost | frost1: 1837.29
Arcane | arcane1: 1651.97

Yeah, that's a big WTF. Apparently if the water elemental actually stays alive, and you never have to move or deal with pushback, frost fucking owns. Actually isn't a huge shock, considering how often the water elemental actually stays alive... so let's assume he dies about half the time, for starters. But we want to make this look even more realistic. So let's add some more encounter effects.

The first is simple enough: interruption. Not like a counterspell, but something that forces you to cancel a cast and move. Al'ar makes a flame patch and you need to go right fucking now. Sucks that you had 2 seconds on that frostbolt, wasted time there. Or in the case of AM, wasted mana, since you fire bolts at every second. Ok, cool, let's say there's an interruption every... 45 seconds. So to account for interrupt I added 3 seconds of downtime for moving, and half of the spell's casting time to represent the average lost casting time. This hurts fireball the most, because it has the most potential to lose casting time.

Fire | fire1: 1664.28
Frost | frost1: 1612.92
Arcane | arcane1: 1527.78

Ok, so it's counting the 3 seconds downtime as dps time, so we're looking at a reduction around the board. Fire gets hit the most, arcane gets hit the least.

Now let's throw in pushback. Say you get hit maybe 5 times for the ecounter... or once every 60 seconds. Pushback reduces your channel bar by 1 second, so it has a slightly lesser effect on fast spells like scorch. Frost has no pushback resistance at all, and arcane is flat out unaffected. This is the result:

Fire | fire1: 1652.48
Frost | frost1: 1598.76
Arcane | arcane1: 1527.78

Ok, last thing is target switching. Say it's add time, you have to kill adds. Great. Fire needs to ramp scorch, frost needs to ramp WC, arcane can just nuke away at full potential. So let's say you switch targets 6 times during the fight. This is how it looks:

Fire | fire1: 1631.65
Frost | frost1: 1589.72
Arcane | arcane1: 1527.78

Ok, so fire is basically still dominating these numbers. If you count malediction for arcane spec, the nice 2.7% damage increase brings it up to 1568. Still less than frost.

So I was wrong, the sky has, in fact, fallen.

This was taken for around 1200 spell damage, if you drop down to about 1000 it's a little more even and you can justify arcane spec for encounters with a lot of interruption, switching, or pushback. Overall though fire just scales too well. The only thing I haven't considered is mixing in blast spamming, which could be considerably better with zero latency. I doubt a mana dump will make up for it, but you never know. Time to start buying Flamecaps.

Lhivera's last posted change was on September 19th.

There's an option for no damage tax and no accomodation for MSD. What exactly would be missing? It's not the most precise model, but it's good enough to show that arcane without 2t5 is at deep frost levels while burning through mana at its normal rate and with 2t5 it's roughly even with fire at best on a stand and burn. Your conclusion seems rather similar. Not a really convincing reason to regear/respec/regem for arcane at the 2t5 level.

Well there is and there isn't truth to that notion. If you clip the end of a missile volley you lose more then just mana, you also lose dps along with it.

Lets say you start the next channel at 4.75seconds, that means that your next missile won't fire till 5.75 seconds and the last one fired at 4 so instead of 1 missile every second you just added in an xtra 1.75 seconds of dead space which really is a pretty significant loss of overall dps.

If you can still restart channels I'll be macroing AM (if it is still even viable) with

/cast [nomodifier:shift; nochanneling] Arcane Missiles
/cast [modifier:shift] Arcane Missiles

That way I can still interrupt my current volley to take advantage of things like the, soon to be rare, focus proc but otherwise I can't interrupt my volley by spamming the key. With the new functionality I should be able to spam away and the moment that 5th missile is gone (according to the server) it will start the next volley and there will be no chance for lost dps.

Arcane Missiles should actually get just as much of a boost as any other spell, excepting the fact that it is a longer channeled spell so wasn't as badly hurt by latency as other spells in the first place.

So far Vontre, your results are showing fire/frost to out dps arcane pretty much all the time?

I have been looking to play around with frost raiding again at some point but waiting for the coefficient unnerf to play a week or so frost.

Vontre, could you look at 40/0/21 Arcane/frost dps? My own numbers point to it outdpsing any other spec on a single target (as long as there's a full frost in the raid to provide WC), but as your own spreadsheet has seen a lot more peer-review than my own little private one, I'd like you to evaluate it.

Hmm, I did 3 sessions of 33/28 and 10 48 3 now on Dr. Boom. The only one that worked with parsing and didn't mess up is this one:

Vhadnow - WWS

it's worth keeping in mind that the fireball dot makes dps lower and I didn't have any addons to check dps while casting.

Also, my fire gear is not very good, think I had something like 36% crit 77 hit rating and 1200 fire dmg for that.

Well the 77 hit rating shouldn't matter at all actually since Dr. Boom is level 67 so you are way over the cap.

What's strange is that you are showing 1700 dps with AM spam and only 1502dps with Deep Fire (should actually be the other way around). Do you remember if there were any debuffs on Dr. Boom when you tested arcane?

Also you should be able to remove the effects from the DoT lowering the dps on the Fire run by just trimming your log so that it stops after the last Fireball/Ignite tick occurs.

Edited to add - looking at those numbers I think that parse is from a 33/28 run and not a 10/48/3 run.