Scorchio is the best addon I have found for tracking the debuff. All of our mages use it and it tracks pretty well between all of them. Not sure if everyone needs to use it for it to work though. I believe Manly has also posted that he uses it as well.

Well, I use scorchio, but it is easy to notice that it doesn't always pick up other mages scorches. For the most part it does a decent job.

Will be interesting to see if the change to the combat log in 2.4 will produce a message for a scorch debuff when the target has a full stack.

I would say that from all that was stated Manly has the clearest view of the situation on specs. Arcane indeed is misrepresented in TC most of the time. I usually stay in the back and watch people fight over what is best, but when I see statements such as 'you should dump your arcane mages because it says in mage thread that arcane sucks' in cross-class threads I feel like I have to say something.

I've been Arcane since day one, I've raided with it in MC in Naxx and now in BT. You could say I'm crazy but I like creating great results with unorthodox setups. In all these years I've been pursuing Arcane TC and I am quite confident in saying that I have a very good understanding about it. I'll be the last to say that Arcane is better than Fire, but I know that it deserves more than kicking somone out of raid for using it.

I know how it is with WWS parses. There are those that will say you are not proving anything unless you have something to show. And there are those that will say it only shows that your guild sucks if you're doing good with nonoptimal spec. So here's some WWs parses and take them for what they are.

Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
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Again, I'm not telling anyone that Arcane is the best spec, neither am I claiming that I have done anything that can't be done with Fire or Frost spec. All I want to achieve is to get some more tolerance from people and better understanding regarding specs. It's perfectly reasonable for someone that just got 2t5 to try Arcane if the guild supports it. If anything there should be more TC available for them to better understand what it takes to make full use out of Arcane.

That said, I have high hopes for Vontre's simulation tool. Most of the TC I've done is on Arcane only and I don't have any means to do proper comparisons with other specs. I really hope this tool will evolve into a common platform for spec comparison. Ideally it would support user input for spell selection and cooldown timing in a form of scripts that have the spell information and character stats available to make the decisions. If you provide something like this so that mage community can submit their algorithms we could build a nice library of casting style algorithms and one could choose and see how each performs on different sets of gear.

Be aware Kavan that the arcane specs on Vontres webtool do not use AB rotations. Well, its either AM spam, or its frostbolt spam, or its 3x AB/3x frostbolt. As you can see the webtool includes destro lock comparison -- well the reason is that the tool is somewhat an experimental testbed so far, and to be honest the interest in truly simulating proper play for an arcane spec is somewhat complex to code. For now, it is not what you're looking for. But for the other specs it should give a close enough estimate.

EDIT: I welcome your disclosure of information if I can call it this way. Too often people would just use one parse to 'prove a point'. I enjoy far more seeing a more clearer picture of a number of fights. I could post my parses but I know ultimately that the gear difference is too steep to come across to any possible comparison. Although the rage numbers are nice

its pretty impressive, what numbers one can get at execute range.
Unfortunately our officers don't understand how much mages gain by popping BL at around 20-30% so they waste it usually half a minute into the fight.

* Blink mana cost reduced roughly 40%
* Improved Blink now increases the distance you Blink by 15/30%, and you have a 15/30% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Fireball, Frostbolt, or Arcane Blast spell by 50% after you Blink. (Might just do one of these effects…)
* Prismatic Cloak now reduces damage taken by 3/6%, up from 2/4%
* Mana Cost of Slow reduced roughly 40%
* Arcane Fortitude now increases your armor by an amount equal to 100% of your Intellect, up from 50%.
* Mana Shield now scales with spell damage. (Max rank with full S3/best gear will absorb around 1Kish, added damage absorb doesn't cost/consume mana to the shield, it will always cost what the tooltip says)
* Improved Fire Ward is now Molten Shield
* New Talent: Molten Shield – Reduces all damage taken by 2/4% while using Molten Armor, and causes your Fire Ward to have a 25/50% chance to reflect Fire spells while active.
* Frost Warding: Chance to reflect Frost spells while Frost ward is active by 25/50%, up from 10/20%.
* Icy Veins no longer increases the chance your chilling effects Freeze the target, but now reduces pushback by 100% for 20 sec.
* Icy Veins spell haste bonus no longer stacks with Bloodlust.
* Ice Flows now gives you a 15/30% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any Frost spell.

Sounds like fun ;-)

The IV/Heroism nerf would hurt cooldown stacking damage a little, and the rest has little to do with PvE, other than some pushback protection for frost.

Personally I enjoyed reading the warlock hammering, but since it could well be fake, there is no poing getting too excited.

Please, don't bring unconfirmed patch notes into this thread.

Even if the notes are 100% true, there's probably a more to them. To theorycraft or even predict with such an incomplete picture is an exercise in futility.

Was just reading the discussion about Flamestike and Arcane Explosion in 2.4. I was wondering if perhaps the best DPS could be obtained from a rotation of the two spells rather than just spamming Arcane Explosion. Has anyone done any calculations on a 1x Flamestrike, 2-3x Arcane Explosion rotation.

This would allow the Flamestrike DoT to fully tick off. The question is whether or not this is better DPS than spamming AE?

Time-To-Die on WoWAce. It's fairly accurate.

I've been thinking, been trying to see how such an addon would be possible, and for fights of Teron, and Azgalor, the mod would completely freak out. You could have your worst dps'rs get all the Shadows/Dooms and your kill time would be fast, or all your best dps'rs could get it, and you're kill will go slow. So can't use that kind of an addon that Time-To-Die does.

But if such a mod is to be made, one thing to try is to have all the fight durations in seconds stored, and at certain times, the bosses health recorded, and each week, the bar starts up, and each 5, 10, 20, 25% or w/e of the boss, it compares the time in to where you were the last week, or at certain times it compares the health of the boss. I think this would be the optimum way of having the mod work.

It would allow you to compare how your raids dps is compared to the week prior, and judge cooldowns easily. Without having to estimate a bar, and use some fancy approximating code.

I'm not entirely sure what you would use Total Time you were in combat for. However, time to execute range would be helpful. I mostly use Time-to-die to time my cool downs. I usually cut off a minute off the calculation it gives me as a rough estimate as to whether that trinket cool down will be up again for execute range or if I wait to pop it.

I'll contact the author for permission to edit his addon and I'll see what I can work up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, as I've just recently started to use the addon, but I've only noticed tracking target DPS as opposed to RDPS. On Illidan tonight it accurately tracked our split DPS on the Flames.

Well, what I mean is that Time-To-Die doesn't tell you how long to certain %'s of the mob, it will only show how long till the mob dies.

What the addon needs is that kind of availability to the user to be worth it, because unfortunate things can happen, and the RDPS will suffer, and the time-to-die will change based off that, and change your cooldown usage. Whereas with what I purposed is that since a guilds rdps doesn't vary by more than 2k per week, or shouldn't, it will give more acurate comparisons to where you stand, and when you can pop cooldowns reliably.

Surprised you TCers haven't gobbled up the confirmation earlier today about spell haste and spells, until the post we weren't clear if veins/bloodlust would affect it and not just spell haste gear (Or focus gem). They've clarified with this response:

Trying to think about the implications of this. At the very least this should allow 40/0/21 to become THE (at least burst) aoe spec, among other things like frostbolt double ice lance combos in arena.

I think we already established how double icelance is a near impossibility. Frostbolt's traveltime would have to be way above 1 second so would ice lance for it to even be slightly possible.

Edit: unless mistaken the sig is about the new team fortress?

So, just of a random rant heh. There is nothing more annoying then waiting 6 days to kill Teron again only to get ghosted right before 20% /sigh.

Sunwell needs to come out, I get way to depressed if Teron goes bad.

Though next week gonna finally give in and try using Bracers of Nimble Thought and Mana Attuned Band.

It doesn't beat clearing to teron with darkmoon faire buff, use blessed wizard oil, flask of pure death and get the first sacrifice.

Ouch, yea a few of us were gonna use DMFB, but our GM kinda frowned on it, more like a do it if you really want.

I might use it for Rage tonight just cause I was so angry bout Teron last night lol.

But definately glad I'm atleast not alone in my depression of bad Teron's.

I tested the double ice lance with frostbolt, and i give it a "good" chance of working. Combat logs don't usually record when the spell leaves the hand, which as we determined is when shatter is figured. That said anecdotally it looked like ice lance was almost up when the spells landed, subtract off that .5 seconds and i'd say there's a fair chance it works.

Edit: Sig is TF2, more of an inside joke.

My simulation tool is scripted pretty well for the rotation... it skips arcane blasts that fall under GCD and automatically selects the correct filler based on timing. I think it's missing some minor stuff like AB spam mana dumping.

User uploaded script is a fine idea, but I don't want to spend a billion years writing a parser for a full-featured scripting language. Anyone have a good idea of how they'd like to see the simulation scripting done?