This point is irrelevant. You can already do this no matter what spec you are. Pending its a t6 tank.

That is an excellent point, especially on the shorter boss fights. Also a 50/0/11 build will be nice for clearing trash in Hyjal as Arcane is back on top of AOE clearing again. Also a guild clearing Hyjal trash should have mages with 2T5 set bonuses.

I hope the numbers work out for Arcane having value as I think it would be a nice potential spec to add to the pile. It has serious drawbacks in mana consumption, range and pushback. But it would be nice to see it adjusted so that for fights of N length Arcane was better than Fire where fights of >N Fire won out. It would avoid the 2.2 event where all mages went AM spam as it was superior in too many ways to Fire at that point. It seems like Blizzard is trying to make the various major trees for mages closer together as far as dps potential.

Why so?

Because everyone has been wiping on kael so long whilst having everything else on farm you should have tons of t5 pieces by then :P

But on a more serious note about arcane (even though i feel it really isn't going to happen) - why is everyone trying to fit AM into the rotation?
You only need 2 spell cycles - and two specs - either 40/21 or 40/0/21 (i have no idea which is higher DPS, you guys work it out)
First cycle is obv ABx(infinity)
edit: just realised how confusing this might be. I meant frostbolt, not fireball. But similarly, you can do 3x AB 2x Fireball 1x scorch rotation
From there surely with a bit of haste you can do 3x AB 3xFB rotations or similar (with 0 lag you already got 0.5 sec leeway, and remember with the new(old) changes to the way casts works its feasibly you can stick 3 FB's in)
I can't see why anyone would want to touch AM anymore, both bad DPS AND bad DPM.

Optimally, fight only lasts 2-3 minuts and you can go AB spam whole thing, but the real question is -

Is it possible in a 5 minute fight to AB spam 2 minutes, Rotation 2 minutes (gain mana back with some insane MP5) and then AB spam again after (probably in conjunction with some pot cooldowns or something).

Also, don't forget serpent coil braid might gain a lot of value here.

I see talk of ABx3/FrBx3 rotations as the one being investigated currently. If you spec to disinclude AM talents, what is your plan for bloodlust/heroism? Wearing the amount of passive haste that the new gear allows for in addition to the BL wouldn't be clipping a frostbolt?

One assumes bloodlust would be smoked with as much AB as possible. It only makes sense to stack the best DPS with the best DPS enhancer.

If you look at stat equivalences I posted before you'll see that haste doesn't scale well with arcane exactly because of all clipping issues, also having more haste just means you'll have to lower AB spam uptime. For arcane specs I'd probably avoid any more than about 60 haste rating, or basically avoid it all unless it's on a obviously superior item.

I understand most of this community has Illidan on farm. But at least for where I am at progression wise, the 2.4 tailoring gear definitely fits the description of superior item. I suppose most of my questions and concerns will be addressed if I sit back and wait for the TC to be completed, however, so I suppose I will do just that.

I just realized what this means for Innervate. At those stats one would have 3335 mp5 spi regen. If you AB spam all the way to OOM and then get Innervate you can get a chunk of mana back while continuing AB spam.

Even being oom with an arcane spec looking at the heavy spirit you'll have, "wanding" would regen your mana really fast if you really want to wand and forget the mage armor, but you'll be casting the rotations that do inferior dps than AB spam but do regen mana, not to mention CC on AM while the boss has JoW up.

You can also assume windows of high dps doing AB spam, like if you're going oom in 2min of AB spam do 1:30 min AB spam, 25-30 sec of rotations and do another 1min of AB spam, depending on the fight length, it's all about mana management and how you want, when you want or when you can put the high dps AB spam offers at the price of the high mana consumption.

Don't you think wasting innervate on a mage to validate AB spam more is a little bit much? :P

You say "wasting" but (1) tree druids don't need it, and neither do ferals and (2) priests who to my understanding were the principle recipients of Innervate Love will need it a lot less because under raid conditions they will go up by anything from 50 to 200mp5 from the change themselves. Given we're looking at a 15k+ mana gain from 1 innervate and this spec is specifically designed to be able to convert every single bit of excess mana into 2k+DPS we're valid recipients I should think.

As a side note to inferior dps cycles on arcane, Kavan pointed out something I hadn't thought of before: AB*3/AM/Sc suffers from the fact that while the 1st AB does get the haste but not the cost, server latency often means the next cast starts casting at default 2.5 cast and not 1st debuff cast. This nullifies what we thought was the whole point of 3AB/other cycles. Instead, when not ABing, rotate (AM/AB)*3/Sc. The succession of AM/AB causes a lot of OO5SR regen and the Sc every 3 cycles ensures it drops off.

Arcane is looking to be particularly complex and exciting to model and simulate; it's not at all clear how mana-management, cooldown-management, item value and rotation should be optimized, unlike, frost or fire.

As for the gentlemen inquiring about Ele. Pre.: It is particularly difficult to establish this. Back when it was discovered some lovely chap copied a 65 mage and made a 500+ parsing to prove it at Dr. Boom. It's barely the 2nd day of 2.4 and I'm sure all the theorycrafters on PTR with a working copy of a mage are busy doing other immensely more interesting things and are probably not too keen to go hunting for lvl 73 mobs to shoot a few hundred frosbolts at to establish a bug or not.

Be patient, I assure you I want to know as much as anyone else. The knowledge will arise with time as long-standing frostmages notice missrate change on PTR Bosses.

It's the same when asking for a bloodlust given there are only 3 players in your group that will benefit from it over a melee group composed of rogues, warrior, feral druid... If you have 1 feral dps and 1 tank druid and given the fights in MH/BT are short this matter is not as trivial.

And as Pintofbrew said "It only makes sense to stack the best DPS with the best DPS enhancer", here the best dps enhancer for arcane being mana and innervate being usable for only 1 player, so it's not the case like stacking 2 SP in the arcane mage group just for the sake of mana and his dps.

Bloodlust is slightly unique in that for Direct Damage casters, it'll affect 100% of their output. Ele Sham, Mages, D-locks all gain a clean 30% from Bloodlust. Melee, while they scale well with haste, do not gain 100% from it. Rather, they gain only a30%*X where X is the % of their total damage which comes from white attacks. Unless my understanding of melee is faulty, this is never over 60%, so even under ideal circumstances a bloodlust can not be more than 18% benefit to a melee. This is saying nothing of massive fire-spec CD stacking.

Many of you see innervating a mage as heressy, but I maintain: you're looking at 2.4 from a 2.3 perspective. Firstly, Innerv will be less needed because the healing classes all will gain from small to signifficant amounts in mp5 from the change to start with. Secondly, unlike fire/frost "if you have mana you do dps, the end" where mana is an "if-gate", for arcane mana is turning into a way to maximize AB/AM ratio which in turn maximizes DPS.

Kavan already demonstrated that stacking Int is superior in these cases to stacking spell power, showing that in this case smaller spells in much higher abundance are superior to less-apparent bigger spells. I'm sure he could make an extra 80-90 spell damage re-gemming, but dumping 70 int would make the arcane-spec not work due to bad AB/AM ratio.

I must try this out on PTR before I do anything rash. The thought of re-gemming and re-enchanting all my gear for int just to see if this works scares me. (The cost above all else - I am poor) Arcane spec is shaping out to be such a different spec from frost or fire than it requires a totally different mindset and different gear setup to play well. Gearing for int ... who would have thought we would come to this day. lol

Honestly theres not much to say at this point. Whichever spec is best suited at sunwell bosses will be the favored spec, and that is going to be it. Looking at it so far it seem fire is the winner for brutallicus, unless you enjoy 6min AB spam.

Hey, here's a question. With new t6 pieces, it's now possible to have 4-piece bonuses from 2 different tier sets. I'm curious if it's actually worth it to keep 4/5 t5 and 4/8 t6. Any thoughts? It could ppobably (I'm pretty sure, definately) be a very stupid idea since 70 spell damage on crits is stupid compared to some of the new gear.

I'm just curious is all, don't kill me ;-;

I wouldn't really see keeping 4pc T5 being incredibly useful, as you'll be sacrificing a lot of better gear with those two slots. However, 2pc T5 and a hybrid spec of 40/18/3 may be worthwhile, as so far on my guild's 25-man attempts it seems there are an awful lot of threat sensitive fights.

Edit: Fixed some typos.

There we go! That was exactly my thought when I only saw the gear tradable on vendors.

They put feral loot on vendors - since it is kind of off-spec and annoying if it drops for the tenth time and it's only useful for one person in your guild. So, an option to trade main-spec loot for off-spec loot and vice-versa ensure that offspecs can get their stuff without having the "10 RoS kills, 8 Moonkin Bracers" effects. Or Tome of the Lightbringer, our guild's favourite. I'm sure everyone has their item that always drops and no one wants.

Cloth damage gear with spirit and no +hit is pretty good for shadow priests and arcane mages. Hit from talents, regen from spirit, shadow priests often get innervates for maximum group benefit in endurance fights.
So, that's the off-spec gear, tradable from healing gear with spell haste. Which may be kind of off-spec too, our healers at least don't like haste too much, not over regen. But that's debatable, just a thought, not the base of an argument.

However, none of your warlocks or non-arcane mages want spirit.
So, since the leggings already appeared, I'm sure that there is more "main-spec" loot. Without spirit, and maybe with hit even.


T5 gear has no hit on 4 pieces, just damage and crit and stats. The set bonus averages at most ~40 damage for fire/frost specs, at the cost of 4 pieces of shit gear. Honestly, even if you can upgrade one of those T5 items for Sunwell gear, it's most likely worth breaking the set bonus.

That's not going helpful I think. Just look as a full (AM/AB)3/Sc cycle, and fix the ABs and its cast times.

Now, if you rearrange that on paper (*you cannot rearrange that while casting because the debuffs timer wouldn't work, but we can do it as a mind experiment if we make sure every AB has the correct mana/time cost from the above rotation), we would get:
(AB*3)/AM*3/Sc
AB*3 as medium to high DPS (at or near fire level), but AM and Sc way lower. My estimates from the last numbers in Vontre's would make that rotation too low DPS to be competitive.
Sure, it gives more O5SR ticks, but arcane already has 60% I5SR ticks, so going out of 5SR won't change it much.

Also, I don't get why people want to stick with AM as filler spell. It's shit damage and shit DPM.
Even without WC on the target, Frostbolt is 5-10% more DPS than AM, 15-20% with WC on.
And AM burns 40% more mana per second without Jow, 25% more with JoW. 2FB=1AM for whatever timing your rotation requires.

Even if frost drops below the hit cap, they'd break even, and AM still has the vastly higher mana cost.
I just can't see FB being a better filler than AM. 40/0/21 gets you all you need for AB spam/rotations, AM just has the bonus of no interrupts over FB.
And honestly, if interrupts are an issue, AB spam suffers enough to make fire surpass it.

Yes, the new regen formula is awsome for Innervate.
The sarcastic thing is, that it would be really awsome for the old Evocation too.
With the new formula, the old Evoc., 600 int and 350 spirit that would regen 10875 mana.
Anyone else want the old Evocation back?

Brilliant observation and I couldnt agree more.

I have run the math as well, with my current gear the arcane/frosbolt rotation totally owns ab/am rotation. I honestly dont understand why the 40/0/21 build isnt accepted more as a viable spec to fire. I believe we have two groups here. Some people when they hear the word arcane they say cant be done AM does horrible damage.

There is the other group like myself who believes that arcane blast spam filled in with frosbolts allows us to maximize dps because we can control our mana better. I mainly use ab/spam unless my mana gets low the I switch to a abx3/fbx3 rotation till a mana gem and pot is ready. Then I start all over again. At 50% of bosses health I evocate. As boss gets close to death, I look at current mana and when I can arcane blast spam him to his death, I do just that. Arcane blast spam has higher burst dps when wear 2pct5 then fireball does when boss is below 20% health.

That why I like arcane/frost Its has massive burst dps with arcane blast and wicked mana effeciency with frost bolt. My numbers in a raid are compareable with fire and depending on boss fight mechanics sometime fire is better and some times 40/0/21 is

The main thing about using AM instead of Fire or Frostbolt is that it gets you out of the 5 second rule for mana regain. By using the AM on clearcast followed by a firebolt you have 3 seconds full mana regain time. When you combine it with clearcast you get 8-9 seconds depending on how quick you are to switch to AM...

I haven't done the maths on it but I believe that you get more mana using that rotation and the clearcasted AM gives nice dps for 5 seconds without costing any mana.