downranking + empowered XXX = ?
 

Do the empowered XXX talents that add a percent of your spelldamage apply before or after the downranking penalty?

What exactly is the downranking penalty for damage spells? I've heard two things:

A. scaled by (level at which spell is trainable + 6)/(player level) or 1.0, whichever is smaller

B. scaled by (level at which next highest rank is trainable + 5)/(player level) or 1.0, whichever is smaller

Perhaps B. only applies to healing spells whose amount healed increases with level.

Why would anyone but a healer want to downrank?

The same reason a healer would want to downrank - better efficiency (DPM/HPM) for better sustainability, at the cost of pure throughput (DPS/HPS).

It's not an issue that comes up often, but there are cases where it's viable to downrank and let the DPM gains outweigh the DPS losses (a warlock doing Patchwerk back when Life Tap gained nothing from +spell damage, for example).

Isn't that what mana pots are for?

j/k, I just had never heard any mana using DPS class talk about downranking to save mana....our hunters for instance generally carry super mana pots and usually only need 1 on a long fight. Our locks never run OOM and our Mages with evo + mana pots never rum OOM either.....but, we haven't gone beyond gruul so that could change.

Empowered Healing adds to the coefficient after the downranking penalty so it's a constant +Heal over all ranks (Holy Priest 2pc T5 discussion).

It should be easy enough to test for the offensive talents if they function the same way.

There really isn't any reason for any DPS to downgrade. If you're worried about mana efficiency as a DPS class, then you need to GTFO and reroll. On most fights, i'll end with about half my full mana(as a mage), and that is without having a shadow priest or shaman.

Serious question (and possibly the inverse of the original question) -- I looked at your (Donzig's) spec and you are classic 10/48/3 like all of our guild's high-DPS mages right now -- but if you are ending a boss fight at half-mana, are there other options that have worse DPM but higher DPS than your current cycle (Arcane Blast is the only one I can think of offhand).

I have a mage alt who I am just learning to play now at level 70, and have been wondering about these situations. It seems like a mage's job is to burn his entire mana pool on a fight (ideally the killing blow is the one that makes you go OOM after evocation/pots/gems if you are truly going all out). However, I can imagine being threat-capped or otherwise limited in what you can do.

Incorrect. Data from that thread showed fairly clearly that the Empowered Healing coefficient is applied before the downranking penalty. The testing methodology was to calculate the effective coefficient being applied to GHeal 1 with 5/5 Empowered Healing, which was shown to be in the range 76.55% - 77.03%.

Predicted coefficient if EH applied after downranking:
(3/3.5 * 51/70) + 0.2 = 82.4%

EH applied before downranking:
(3/3.5 + 0.2) * 51/70 = 77.02%

In other words, if EH applied after the downranking penalty, then some of the heals people reported in that thread would be inexplicably too small.

I remember downranking to rank 4 Frostbolt during BWL on longer fights like Ebonroc, which I could cast forever. But that's back when mages using mana potions was unheard of, and before Vampiric Touch.

I think the cases where it'd be advantageous would be slim none, especially in the TBC world of constant looming enrage timers. Perhaps if your guild has no shadow priests.

I'm confused. Is this not the same thing?

Arcane Mages quite regularly downrank Arcane Missiles.

It can proc Clearcast which gives you a free spell plus higher crit chance.

Can proc trinkets/items like TLC or Spellstrike.

Gives mana back from JoW while still giving chance to proc the above.

Typo; sorry. The formulas were correct, however.

Correct, I use rank8 quite regularly on very long fights or when missing a spriest, with jow on a mob popping rank5 arcane missles means that I can do constant DPS even when oom, since all the jow procs + normal regen compensate the mana cost and giving me a chance to proc TLC/ insightful earthstorm diamond. Downranking to rank5 is obviously only in very extreme cases.

Here is what I remember as testing of Rank 1 Shadow Bolt with Shadow and Flame.

First, Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) is 1.7 sec cast spell giving it a coefficient of 1.7/3.5 = 0.4857...

Then, it is learned at level 1 (19 before 20) receiving a multiplicative modifier of (1-0.0375*(20-level)) which is 0.2875

This brings coefficient to 0.13964...

Then we add Shadow and Flame which is additive 0.2 resulting in 0.3396...

Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) base damage points increase up to level 6, making it count as level 6 for this purpose and the buffer (just as Blizzard stated) is extra 5 levels, this produces last multiplicative modifier of 11/70

This ends in coefficient of 0.05337... which quite well matches experimental results.

So as a conclusion
1. Base spell coefficient
2. Penalty for spells learned before level 20
3. Empowered talents
4. Downranking penalty.

Don't forget that downranking penalty usually starts 11+ levels after spell was learned (11 for most or even all spells that received ranks every 6 levels pre-tbc and some spells that received ranks every 8 levels pre-tbc). In most cases lower ranks have higher mana efficiency as long as they are learned after level 16-20 or so, however compared to pre-2.0 we are talking about small mana efficiency improvement for a huge effect loss, instead of a huge mana efficiency improvement for a small effect loss.

I remember I ran a spreadsheet for the hell of it for priest heals seeing a very neglicible difference in efficiency when downrakning with +heal at the 1500-2000 ranges. The only efficiency you get in this case is less overhealing, not more raw HP/mana.