Ended up getting grouped with a warlock and a elemental shaman and a resto shaman (on the PTR) so I put on molten armor and double elixired and ate bask meat and went to town on Dr. Boom with them.

Got up to over 1700dps on one of the kills. Arcane definitely didn't look too shabby there with all those buffs being involved. Definitely needed Molten armor though, lost a lot of dps putting on Mage with all of the damage being thrown around.

I don't think Arcane will beat Deep Fire after the patch but I think it will end up being competitive enough where the slight dps lost from staying with AM spam will be made back by having CoS all the time (maledicted too if your raid is lucky enough to have someone specced that way) vs sometimes getting CoE and sometimes not.

Arcane also will be amazing on mana if Ret pallys will start appearing on raids and we start seeing 80-90% JoW uptimes (not a clue if they were buffed enough for that to be in the cards yet or not).

Evocation ticks faster with haste and focus is working with it in ptr. You don't lose eny mana/ticks and tooltip has channel time like 9.64 sec if you have some haste. You can see amount of mana gained per tick in combat log too.

So, does the mana gain per tick from Evo generate threat?

As BrTarolg pointed out, this is blatantly false. Haste works by percentages; as such, the net benefits are exactly the same whether the spell is 10s cast time or 3 seconds. You can easily view this if you compare pyroblast to 2x fireball, you end up with exactly the same cast time (ignoring lag).

You've got the wrong haste formula. 100% haste means your spells will cast in half the time. Here's an example of the formula at work:

fireball cast time
(10% passive haste)
3 / (1 + 0.10) = 3 / 1.1 = 2.73s

Edit: never mind.

I believe it always has. Not sure exact amt but I've noticed mobs and bosses turn their heads when I evo during a transition (stopped doing that a while ago)

Unless I'm mistaken, mana regen procs 0.4 threat per mana gained. Irrespective if this is a manapot, an evo, or even drinking. We once had a hunter OOC and drink during a hydros transition and the tic of +mana from the water was enough to pull him at exactly the right moment when he switched phases.

Currently Evo mana gain is spirit regen and does not generate threat. You can see this by having by body pulling a mob, having a warrior hit it once and then using Evocation... the mob will not leave the warrior for the duration of the Evocation. The only threat generated as far as I can tell is the aggro generated from buffing (since Evo is a buff).

However, almost every mana regen mechanic in the game that generates a combat log message generates threat. I'm pretty sure mana gains generate 0.5 threat per point of mana gained spread evenly over mobs which have you on their threat list.

Most of my math was done for fire, CSD is only ~2.15% DPS increase... however as some are realizing, the mechanics are a little strange like they once were for the RED.

I am sorry if I seem little behind, but what does the "RED" stand for, can't really find anything on it. So am a bit confused when so many use it as some sort of reference.
Ty in advance.

RED is [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond]
MSD is [Mystical Skyfire Diamond]

Thank you very much.

By the way - I saw some people saying you should switch weapons AFTER you start evocate, and not before.. is there a reason for this?

I'm slightly confused at how the new evocate works - when you switch int weapons, does it just give a flat out increase in your max mana pool without raising your mana, and when you lose your int do you lose any mana or do you keep the mana but with the reduced max mana pool?

Presumably it's an issue of speed and simplicity. If you're in-combat, swapping weapons will put you on Global Cooldown. As such, you can't swap weapons and then Evocate all in one go, e.g. in a single macro. But Evocation doesn't cause a cooldown, so you can Evocate and then swap weapons w/o any interruption.

Weapon swap in combat causes a GCD, so you can't cast right after it.
The best way really is just using a macro. I made mine recently and have no idea how I managed two years without one.

Right-click to Evo, Left-click to switch back to my usual weapons.
Actually, when Evocation ends, I cast my next spell and the do the left-click to swap weapons so that I don't lose a GCD.

Bill Gates once said : "Never be unkind to nerds; one day you'll end up working for one."

I like the fact the person you called a geek handed you your ass, with a smile on his face. He also answered your question with an excellent summary of frost vs fire vs arcane pro's cons.

Just a little aside there, apologies.

I may be mistaken but it seem obvious that a viable AM spec after 2.3 will be based on damage,haste.

Someone have the time to calculate how much +damage +haste you can stack including the new 2.3 gear and see if it can be good enough to compete?

Sorry if it has been done and i mist it, can you point me the post?

I think it should be fairly obvious that AM spam as the strategy that we know it as now will be dead once 2.3 goes live (assuming the MSD cooldown makes it to live). While you might think that you could mimic the effects of 2.2 MSD by stacking spell haste gear (especially with all of the natural spell haste that comes on most of the ZA caster gear) this is likely not to produce the results that make 2.2 AM spam what it is now.

This is because (from 5 second napkin math, MSD by itself gives something like 187 effective haste rating.* Just from a metagem slot. The opportunity cost of equipping an equivalent amount of ZA gear is spell hit, spell crit, and +dmg. Break your boots and your neck in 2.2, and that might approximate what this opportunity cost looks like.



* This math is based off of the focus proc giving 50% spell haste, at the rate of 15.7 spell haste rating per 1% spell haste, which is conservative. If focus yields 100% spell haste, the argument against 2.3 AM spam is even stronger. Sorry, I don't really know exactly how haste works

I'm not trying to emulate exactly the boost MSD give but if the channeling of AM is reduce to let say 4 sec whit passive haste will it not be viable and more constant then a proc?

Following the formula given above is correct(5 / (1 + 0.10)), it should look like

200haste / 15.7 = 12.73
5 / 1.127 = 4.44s

250haste/15.7 = 15.92
5 / 1.159 = 4.31s

300haste/15.7 = 19.1
5 / 1.191 = 4.19s

Assuming this is the good formula would 300 haste point be available? I think a constant 4.19 AM channeling time should be someting interesting

*Sigh* Ok, currently on live I use a passive 329 haste (counting ashtongue) to get competitive AM spam DPS. If you prefer, roughly a permanent 21% haste. The reason I stack this much is to increase the rate at which I get MSD procs. If increasing haste has relatively no impact on MSD procs (due to cooldown) then really there isn't much point.

AM as a spell sucks really hard. What makes it good is the combined effect of MSD, ashtongue and TLC. You could say in other words that what is good about AM spam is (MSD, ashtongue and TLC) and not AM, I believe that would be closer to the truth.

And I'm sorry to say but I have had a few fights with barely any focus procs, and the DPS really sucked. It will not compete. Even if you stack a passive 30% haste. You lose too much +dmg and +crit to get all that haste (because every ZA drop is less DPS than the BT counterparts). Losing the 4pc t6 bonus is not really an option.

I'm sad to hear that :/.

Thanks for the testing Manly.

So AM spam will suck with the 45 second cooldown on MSD. How long could the cooldown be and still keep AM spam competitive with Fireball in 2.3?

Would it work with a 20 second cooldown? 10 seconds?

Napkin math seems to say it couldn't be any higher then 10 seconds but my napkin math normally leaves a lot to be desired in the accuracy department.