I read a lot of people comparing Arcane/Arcane, Arcane/Fire and Arcane/Frost. I know the supporting arguments for each tree as a 'filler between AB' tree, but i've yet to find any solid maths that shows numbers for each.

these are the builds i'm comparing:

arcane/arcane:
World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

This has the advantage of a lot of 'floating' points you can dump anywhere. its uses only arcane spells but with all those 'spare' points you can beef up some basic frost or fire to play with other rotations. For mages about to start T5 content, this build will save you a lot of money on respecs between a'lar/water dude (I honestly forgot his name O_O)

Arcane/Fire:
World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

This build reaquirs 3 'filler' points in total. 1 in fire and 2 in arcane. they're early-tier floating points. What I dislike about this is the 'drop off' of usefulness for the hit stat. After arcane is at the hit cap you're now only using +hit for half of your spells. I put MoE in over imp. scorch because most raiding mages will have another mage in the raid keeping imp. scorch up.

edit:

Arcane/Frost:
World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

This build has 2 floating fillers in early arcane too. The reason I don't take the extra 2 points in arcane focus is because you're gearing to hit the hit cap with frost anyway. Those 2 points in magic abs. can go anywhere, really. This same rule can be applied to a greater extent for arcane/fire.

Now, on all these builds there is a 'regenerative rotation' that is used to build up mana untill arcane blast spam can be done. Fire will give the best DPS DURING the regenerative stage, but will take longest to regenerate and misses 1 extra cooldown for the AB phase. My Curiosity lies in the comparison of Arcane's regenerative phase versus frost. Frost has a higher natural DPM and the lowest MPS cost but arcane has a distinct advantage of leaving the FSR for long periods on CC procs. I'm not sure if the difference from 60% regen to 100% on the occasional tick is enough to justify 800mana per AM, and even if it is would that make up for the lower overall DPS?

Other way around...with EP you need 164 hit for fire spells. EP appears to be bugged for FROST spells, adding an additional 3%, which means for frost spells you might need significantly less, on the order of mid 130's.

It does, but EP is 6% for frost due to a bug, and 3% for fire. Seems to be like you're better of with +hit until you reach the cap instead. Note, the help me-thread might be more suitable for questions like this.

Dwelling further on the coice of supporting tree I've thought that perhaps its best to theorycraft on your in-raid MP5 from all sources and choose a spec that gets you closest to 100% mana after 3 minutes. That way you're ready for your AB spam just as the cooldowns free up.

From this perspective you would have lower geared mages starting out with arcane/frost and as their gear improved to support it they would eventually move to arcane/fire.

Working with this idea, i'll look at MPS consumption on rotations and calculate some 'benchmark' values for each spec in order to facilitate an ideal 3 minute rotation.

But that'll have to wait untill tonight. Must be off, toodles.

Stewe, your sentences are long convoluted and confusing. You start saying you want to ask something but don't in fact ask anything. Elemental Precision does not add 36 hit rating, it adds 3%. You need 10% from gear for frost and 13% from gear for fire. Answers to what you seem to be wondering but don't word correctly can be found in http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-mage_help_me_please/ and http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18441-m...tional_thread/ .

The reason I insist on Ele Pre adding 3% and not 36Hrate is that it will add 3% irrespective of what level you are and hence how much hit rating 1% represents at that level.

Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not seeing arcane frost putting out higher numbers than deep fire when you set the stats to what you would have should you have all the known sunwell gear. These stats are calculated by adding the new gear to the spreadsheet.

The best i could come up was 2450 for arcane/frost with having on 2t5, 4t6.

The best I could get for fire is 2661. I see some of the logic has changed since these numbers are different than they were a few days ago.

2/48/11

1st Post on E&J!


After running MT and Heroic MT a few times on the PTR last night, I noticed that my Fireballs were traveling (what appeared to be) alot faster than they do on the Live Realm. Has anyone else noticed a difference in the speed / travel time of your Fireballs and Frostbolts?

I'm not sure how to go about even testing this, but having raided on my Mage for over 2 years, I am accustomed to a certain amount of 'travel time' between myself and my target. It 'feels' like that travel time has been diminished.

Would this be a 'quick fix' to the <2 second Fireball Ignite stacking?


As a side note and totally off topic: E&J has been a valuable resource for myself and my guild mates for a long time. I appreciate all the info that Vontre, Pointofbrew, and Manly have taken the time to dig up and discuss openly on these forums. Here's a big THANKS to all you guys.

The travel time shouldn't make a difference to the frequency at which the fireballs land and thus the duration of time between ignite procs. If they ARE travelling faster it makes them a bit harder to intercept in PvP (Not that many people are quick enough to react to a ball once its already in the air, but meh).

since EU transfer is still a bit screwy, I can't go test this.

I must have misread the new 'rolling ignites' concept then. I was under the impression that you had to be a certain distance from the mob to allow for a certain amount of travel time between casts but before ignite ticks. If that travel time is diminished, wouldn't that mean the fireball would reach the mob faster on the 2nd cast and thus negate the stacking of ignites? Or would the oppositte happen and make it easier / more likely that the ignites will stack because you can get more Fireballs at said mob in a faster period of time (because of increased travel speed on the Bolts).

While browsing the WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes , I think I found a new note.

* Arcane Explosion: The damage cap for area of effect damage on this spell has been increased by approximately 50%.

Mages are now officially DPS KINGS. At last.

So this would imply that "IF" the Fireball travel speed has been increased, then we may actually be 'more likely' to see the Fireball 'mid-air' while the ignite application time is being calculated. Interesting. I'll do some more testing with my Haste gear on with <2 Second Fireballs on the PTR and post results later.


The AE Change would mean that instead of our AE damage being hard capped at 6,000 (for example) it would now be capped at 9,000? This is a pretty substantial increase in Damage if this is the case! Woo hoo!

AOE DPS KINGS.

It does seem that blizzard is trying to push mages towards arcane again with the GCD change, spirit changes, still lots of spirit on the mage gear, and now this. Arcane should not need the 2-piece T5 bonus to be viable though, they need to just buff the spell with it and then change the 2-piece T5 to something that benefits all specs.

Think these are good ideas Vontre? Plan to include them in your super cool simulator?

Would the [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] have any possible use for an arcane mage in 2.4? I believe it has a 2% chance to proc from each target (with no internal cooldown to boot). Doubt it would be worth if it you were just AB spam + FB regen period. It could be though, I haven't done any math on it at all regarding that. But would this be effective for an encounter with AoE presence? Fights like Gluth, Nightbane, Hyjal Trash, Suppression room mechanics etc - could theoretically let you spam AE while remaining in 100% regen time the entire time (And let you put on Molten Armor over Mage Armor as well).

Especially now with the AE damage cap change, it gives Arcane mages more viability overall perhaps. AoE has been a present concept throughout the various tiers, and we can only expect it to appear in Sunwell as well (if it hasn't already )

Pudgeball, it would seem at first glance that the card is beneficial overall. However, those situations you mentioned: "Gluth, Nightbane, Hyjal Trash, Suppression room mechanics etc" aren't exactly gamebreaking. Gluth is irrelevant for intents and purposes, Nightbane is archaic at the top-end, and trash waves in Hyjal give more than adequate time to regenerate enough mana. In-combat mana regeneration is a different concept, but does it warrant a discussion in regards to AOE? I'm not so sure.

Places with "Suppression room" mechanics like ROS trash are extremely easy for most BT guilds, and the only time I know of when mana is an issue is if someone lags behind and drags an Angered Essence mob down the ramp. It is an interesting concept though especially if the new Arcane Explosion buff remains through the 2.4 PTR unchanged.

Aye understood. Would be curious to see the single target math on it for AB spam. Regarding the AoE portion of it, I guess we'll need to see the rest of Sunwell first before we know if there's anymore serious AoE. I also forgot Solarian and Morogrim, which probably for him, it could be really neat.

Is the Arcane Explosion change really going to make that big a difference? As a normal deep fire mage, even with the best gear possible (pre sunwell), I would have to hit 9-10 mobs to cap my Arcane Explosion (6700 damage cap I believe). That doesn't happen very often to me in our raids. I haven't checked, but I'm guessing the average Hyjal wave has about 13-14 mobs total. That includes "hard-to-aoe-mobs" such as Gargoyles, Frost Wyrms, Infernals, Necromancers (usually sheeped I think?) and Banshees (sometimes immune to magic).

It does make it much easier to utilize Arcane Power and Power Infusion while AoEing though. Another arcane buff I suppose, at least more so than fire/frost.

A buff is a buff however, and maybe it comes to its own in sunwell instead.

Edit: It does make it a fair bit better with molten fury. Forgot about that. Hopefully, the gcd change and this will bring it close to SoC.

I just did a round of aoe tests on PTR. The new cap for AE seems to be 10180 non-crit damage (up from previous ~6730, so 51% increase)

I agree that the debuff is never applied in time on the client. Try casting the spell .2 sec earlier than quartz says you should....during ramp up, it will still work.

I think the debuff is being applied server side, and the cast completes as fast as you'd expect it to in a perfect world.