See I'm not a fan of that kind of logic because it's assuming a half cast fireball is less damage than 6% more dmg on crits. It looks like they're actually a lot closer than that, except CSD would not benefit evocate. I'd rather min/max endgame gear though as much as possible.

Actually you're right based on the rough calculations I did the CSD is only adding 36-48% via those 6-8 Fireball crits over the course of the minute, vs. the MSD's 50%. So on the lower end the CSD is losing hardcore, but I'd emphasize the 6-8 Figure is somewhat conservative.

But the more haste gear you have the better the CSD becomes, since MSD is unable to reduce the GCD and you're able to get off more Fireballs during the MSD's cooldown. Not to mention the CSD is giving 0.6% crit.

If you can reliably pull off the Focused Evocation then that would be a big advantage for MSD. Four more seconds of DPS would pretty much tip the scales in MSD's favor.

Regardless, for a lot of people geared like myself right now the decision will be made based on the fact that we still need a few Veiled Noble Topaz to get to the hit cap as 10/48/3.

I wrote a DPS simulator a while back. This isn't a simple calculation like you would get from a spreadsheet. It's more like a clone of the WoW game mechanics as best I know them. One of the features of this simulator allows me to accurately model proc effects so you can properly compare them to static effects. The following MSD vs CSD simulation is a good example of this feature.

I will make a more detailed post about the simulator once I hit the 10 post minimum so it can have its own thread.

Anyway I ran this simulation for a post on the WoW boards a couple days ago, comparing MSD and CSD for a 10/48/3 fire spec spamming Fireball.


Fireball spam w/2.3 MSD, 10% proc rate, 45s cooldown
Spell Damage: 1000
Crit Rate: 35%
Hit Rate: 16%

=========================================

Damage: 50001924 Time: 37284s
Ideal DPS: 1341.11
Fireball - 12680 casts

-----------------------------------------
Hits: 8170 64.4% Max: 3292
Crits: 4392 34.6% Max: 6914
Resists: 118 0.9%

Fireball spam w/CSD
Spell Damage: 1000
Crit Rate: 35.5%
Hit Rate: 16%

=========================================

Damage: 50002729 Time: 37200s
Ideal DPS: 1344.16
Fireball - 12400 casts

-----------------------------------------
Hits: 7872 63.5% Max: 3292
Crits: 4403 35.5% Max: 7124
Resists: 125 1.0%


This shows that a 35% crit rate the CSD is looking a little better than the MSD for Fireball spam.

Looks like Fire just got an indirect buff.

"Reverse cooldowns are correctly refreshed when a buff is reapplied by another player."

Which should mean that it really won't be that hard to know when to refresh Scorch even if a different player started the initial debuff.

@zurmagus:
Even though these numbers show that the 2 meta's are almost on par, I still like to know
the difference to taking pure spelldam, that is the spirit-shard meta or simply taking
(on T5 lvl of gear, the 1000 spelldam you took for the calculation seems to be consistent with that)
Cowl of the Grand Engineer instead of T5 head and socket 3 spelldam gems...

Casting Frost Nova on aoe packs before a Cone of Cold is standard practise for a Deep Frost Mage. Shatter and the increased damage from Cone of Cold can cause some jaw dropping aoe damage

MSD isn't really a 50% dps increase when it procs using a 8:1 rotation, can't ignore the 1/9 chance that scorch gets wasted

Just a little aside, if you happen to see a Prism of Inner Calm drop, don't pass on it if you have the opportunity to pick it up. Most people don't know that it was buffed a while ago to drop 1000 threat on spell crits.

It's not exactly a boss fight trinket and while it may be a decent threat reduction percentage on single target fights, it really shines in aoe situations. An arcane explosion crit actually reduces your threat on the target rather than raising it. Hyjal, anyone?

The only reason I feel this is worth mentioning is that I believe this is one of the best utility trinkets around and will easily serve it's purpose in level 80 raid content as well. Potentially even better than now depending on new spells/talents/gear. And it seems that many people are unaware of this.

For me the fact that MSD loses it's benefit with increased haste, combined with the interesting side-effect the new meta has with molten-fury combustion double-dipping and the fact that MSD doesn't improve DPM is the kincher tbh. If a 37000sec simulation comes out with a 3dps difference then there really seem to be no reasons to prefer MSD. Not to mention you're free to have as many damn yellow gems as you please with MSD req out of mind.

Frostie: Good lord, what a whopper of utility that trink is!

I am trying to figure out what is best for me to do when patch 2.3 hits. Currently I really like how arcane works, but after 2.3 it doesn't seem to be the best option anymore. However at my current point of progression I need to factor in the effect of the spellstrike bonus as well, but I am not sure I have that figured out correct.

The spellstrike set bonus has as 5% chance to proc on spell hit, so that would mean a 25% chance to proc on the cast of an AM cast. Since the proc lasts 10 seconds would it be correct to assume that the buff will have an uptime of 50% on unhasted AM spam and thus representing a flat out buff of 46 dmg on average?

Honestly, using 3 seconds to crit a spell that has it's highest rank at level 65 isn't really worth it. CoC isn't all that great for pure DPS nowadays. Even with Imp. CoC, the base damage of both Dragon's Breath and Blast Wave is considerably higher. Presuming a 13.57% coefficient, I believe you'd need pretty unreachable amounts of +dmg to make CoC hit as hard as Blast Wave/Dragon's Breath currently.

Also, realistically, it's kinda a waste of a GCD to cast a Frost Nova just to get a 50% crit increase on one nuke before the Nova breaks from all the other AoE damage being put out by the raid. One is probably just as well off using two AoEs in that case, and avoiding all the nasty side-effects of Frost Nova aggro mechanics.

Sounds interesting. Hope to see that simulator soon

I'll definitely get it posted it later today because I'm trying to see if anyone is interested in helping me develop it further.

I'm not really an experienced programmer, but I'm wanting to help (things like testing and such

Sounds good. I will post both the source code and executable so everyone can give it a shot.

Has anyone been able to confirm that's really what the patch note means? I've never heard the term "reverse cooldowns". If it's true, that's right up there with Ritual of Refreshment as an incredible reduction in the Mage Headache Factor.

The problem with the scorch-stack is that only the person who owns the stack gets the timing information on live.
The change could mean different things:
1) I can now see the cooldown even if I don't own the stack
2) the remaining time on my own stack was sometimes not correct when refreshed by a different player
3) the maximum time was not set to the correct time when refreshed by a different player (this was a bug with bear mangle for example some time ago: you refresh the debuff, the remaining time is reset but the maximum time doubles)

1) is very unlikey if you read the description again. I haven't seen the bug in 3) with scorch. So 2) sounds plausible to me. So it's not a "fire buff" in this sense.

It's a long time ago since i was fire but I have written a small addon that displays a timerbar that is refreshed whenever a player in the raid hits (edit: with scorch of course) a mob with the same name I am currently targeting. It was still a bit buggy, target switching is a mess and an "ignore player" option (someone who did not spec improved scorch) is missing. It's not perfect and using an addon that broadcasts timing information would be much better but that requires cooperation
Anyway, as soon as I'm back to fire (read: when 2.3 hits and the arcane nerf goes public) I will look at it again, if anyone is interested...

What I am seeing from Vontre's numbers earlier in the posts is that the DPS specs at 1200 spell damage will rank.

Generally

Fire
Frost
Arcane

But looking at the DPS numbers we are seeing a 10-50 dps swing pretty often with the biggest drop from fire to frost being about 100 dps on water elemental unfriendly fights?

It looks like Arcane loses a lot this patch to even keep it in the interestingly differen't but capable level with these Coefficient removals.

Is it going to be a huge drop off from frie to frost at any point in teir 5-6 content or will it stay somewhat competative?

I see a lot of suppositions that the numbers show are not as relavent with the dps possibilities so close to each other. Is a Frost user going to be a serious underperformer like it has been in raids of the past? Is the only real raid spec to stay dps competative going to be fire?

MSD nerfs or no, is Frost a viable end game spec in competative DPS? I have yet to set foot in hyjal or BT and they are coming quickly so with 2.3 on the horizon am I going to be less effective taking a frost build over a fire is my basic question.

Seems like things are evening out a lot depending on frost elemental dps surviveability.

I've already started collecting the mats to make frozen shadow-weave.

Of course we won't "really" know until we start seeing some WWS reports, but TC says that if you can keep your WE baby alive and waterbolting, you are ~par with DeepFire. I don't believe this is what Blizzard has envisioned, but /shrug.

don't mods like Xperl already do that?

Well if all mages use Scorchio, then that addon shows nicely the scorch debuffs and when to refresh it. We use it and that has improved the amount of fireballs casts, since we dont need to guess when scorch is having to be refreshed. But ofc if they fix it so you dont need that in 2.3 that justs makes it easier.

Finally hit 10 posts and made the thread about my DPS simulator if anyone is intrested:

[Mage] DPS Simulator