Kavan

Nothing relating to mechanics of either gem changes, CSD should still be ahead.

 

Beska

What are the numbers of the arcane/frost spec that's looking to be top dog in 2.4? I've never specced into anything similar and I don't know where to start with it.

 

Pintofbrew

There is no chance in hell Insightful will ever compete with anything, let alone CSD. Insightful is barely better than Swift Starfire Diamond. The jury is still out on whether CSD is better than the new "14crit rate 2%int" meta but it's extremely unlikely CSD is dethroned as the DPS choice.

 

lunaire

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator


Question:
If you have another deep frost mage in the raid who is putting on Winter's Chill. Would it be a better and by better I mean a higher dps choice to go the arcane frost spec at a +spelldmg of 1250 (raid buff) and buffed int of 700 (with this spec)?
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator


What I've thought so far:
First things first: Ignore Winter's Chill effect because another mage is going to be putting that up for me. It seems that This spec scales better with intellect and full raid buffs give a great benefit mainly because of MOTW and BOK which both increase int. However you lose out in the DPS scaling for spell damage because now we don't have Empowered Frostbolt. The arcane side of the tree with Arcane Instability and Arcane Potency give (average) a 6% crit increase which can off-set the 5% crit you get from Empowered Frostbolt (leaving +1%crit to this spec is comparison). The only problem I can't seem to calculate with my stupid brain is with the above +dmg and int, does the gain from Spell Power, PoM, Mind Mastery, Arcane Power exceed the gain from Empowered Frostbolt, Arctic Winds and the Water Elemental? You probably don't have to worry about Ice Floes + Cold Snap = Shorter Icy Veins CD because, even without the talent, it is enough to do one extra Icy Veins per boss fight.


Reason for talents spent that might need explanation:
The reason for only 2 points in Elemental Precision is because I hear that you get an extra +1%spell hit per point spent in that talent for Frostbolts. And the only 2/3 Frost Channeling is going to be balanced with a subtlety enchant on my cloak. Cold Snap is to use Icy Veins more frequently.


Please no replies to this questions with silly answers like "pft arcane frost is sub-par fullstop blabla". Please give a calculated mathematical answer.. I would really appreciate it.... as this has been on my DPS hungry mind for a long time.

Oh and mind mastery would go along well with the new 2.4 Metagem which is about to come out.

 

Sinborn

I would have to say that Arcane Power (or Spell Power) is the tree-defining ability in arcane. Perhaps placing Arcane Meditation in the 2nd tier, trading spots with Magic Absorbtion. That way fire has to give up a bit to get 8 points in arcane for it.

The reason mages want 1 set of gear that does it all is because we only get ONE set. This isn't vanilla wow anymore. We can have 2 sets of gear. Hell give affliction locks a 2nd set even. They get one for arena right?

 

Gand

As I am currently switching back and forth between 2/48/11 and 40/21 these days, I find this very true. What I would love to see is buff food for casters equivalent to melee's [Spicy Hot Talbuk] to help avoid the constant regemming when trying out new specs.

 

Mithr

Hi all,

I follow this thread since a long time but this is my first question. I'm Mithr, a french mage currently working on Kael Thas. Here is my profile : The World of Warcraft Armory

I often use the Lhivera's theorycraft tool in order to chose my gear and to improve my dps, but one thing surprises me.
Among all the dps cycles used by this tool, i don't see any cycle based on (fireball*2+fireblast) with refresh scorch when needed.
In my mind, the (fireball*2+fireblast) cycle does a little more dps (but is much less mana efficient) than the (fireball*8+scorch)and i try to use it whenever i can (with shadow priest + shaman in my party).

As i don't see this cycle in the Lhivera's calculator i asked myself if it is really the best cycle for dps? (cause of lag after casting a fireblast?due to the gcd you can't start casting sooner as i used to do thanks to quartz).

Please could you brief me about the difference between this 2 cycles and why (fireball*2+fireblast) is not in the Lhivera's calculator? (perhaps he forgot it but it is very unprobable).

Thanks for your answers, and excuse me if i did some mistake, i'm not yet fluent in english so don't hesitate to correct me^^

 

Ginkgo

This is due to an ignite bug where if you crit with Fire Blast after a crit Fireball in your Fireballx2 Fire Blastx1 rotation, there's a chance one of the ignites won't register, which hurts considerably.. At least that's my reasoning.

For the re-gemming, please see my post on the previous page why there is no need to re-gem to hit.

 

Mithr

Very fast answer

i ever heard about this ignite bug, but i thought it was very rare and i didn't look after this problem. How often this bug take effect? I'll try to go to Dr Boom this evening but if anybody ever know it would be nice

 

Ginkgo

Please report your test!

I'm interested since I'm thinking after the 2.4 haste changes, it might be feasible again, even though at a 35% crit rate and 1.545 pre-ignite modifier, that's approx .35*.35*.4*1.545 = 7.5% loss, so even if the bug occurs at a 10% rate, that's still a .75% dps loss which is hard to overcome.

 

Setia

Also, at full T6 level of gear, full Fireball spam becomes straight-out better DPS than using Fire Blast.

 

• RoboStac

As far as I'm aware, the ignite bug happens if you cast a fireblast and it crits while the fireball is in mid-air. See the rolling ignites thread for more information.

Beyond that, fireblast scales very badly compared to fireball (no scaling with haste, 0.42 damage coefficient compared to 1.15, no T6 bonus).

 

Ginkgo

With the haste changes assuming top gear, Fire Blast will be ~100 dps better than Fireball, and so the rotation will be ~25 more dps without the bug

 

Ztorm

I believe latency is the real killer for having fireblast in your normal rotation.

 

Ginkgo

Doesn't the new changes to client-server casting minimize that effect? Just spam that G15 macro

 

Pony

mithr je pense que la reponse que tu cherche c'est que le fireblast scale moins bien que la fireball avec le spellpower Lhivera ne l'a peu etre pas inclus pour cette raison et aussi pour le bug qui a ete mentionner juste avant. Sur une optique endgame le spam fireball est beaucoup plus rentable que fireballx2 fireblast voila.

( sorry for the french but i couldn't find the word to explain it clearly to him )

 

ogotaï

Hi,

I'm little bit lost with the haste. My talent are 2/48/11. For you which weapon is more "powerfull"

Fang of the Leviathan or Blade of Twisted Visions

If it's the Blade of Twisted Visions, it s going t keep is advantaage with the 2.4 patch?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Ogo

 

Vannik

The probability of a fireball crit to fireblast crit with a 33% crit rate is 1/9. And if it happens it's not guaranteed to disregard the crit. If your fireblast does noticeably more damage than your fireball, then I'd say to keep it in your rotation unless you're going to be moving. On the first add I would save fireblast so I could do damage while getting in range for the next fireball. The thing that I think would be worse on your DPS is if you move without being able to use fireblast. That's just wasted dps time.

I almost forgot: Latency shouldn't be too big of an issue with the spell casting system implemented. The big thing is to watch if you have any haste gear on so that you're not overlapping rotations.

 

Pintofbrew

Luniare all you've posted is well known and has been known since BC came out. The 40/0/21 spec is not a new invention. Information further about it can be found on http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18441-m...tional_thread/ . 2/3 Frost Channeling because of "cloak enchant" is not a valid excuse, though you may argue that if you cycle AB with Fbolt it is less needed. The same stands for 2/3 Ele Pre. There is only one excuse not to spec full Ele Pre and that's you're capped out with it on one less point. The point of speccing it isn't to reach 4% with only two points, it's to reach as much as possible without surpassing the cap.

 

sambjo

If you're doing blast/bolt rotations there's no reason to even want arctic reach over ele precision or frost channeling since blast is limited to 30 yards. And arcane blast or not, you want frost channeling maxed. The only floater points are ele precision depending on your hit.

40/0/21 vs 10/0/51:
Yes, 40/0/21 has higher frostbolt dps than 10/0/51 when you're leeching WC from another mage. However, depending on how water-ele-friendly an encounter is, 10/0/51 can be the better choice.

 

galzohar

Then again if the encounter isn't elemental friendly there shouldn't be a 10/0/51 mage to leech off of anyway, not to mention in practice there's no real reason to be 10/0/51 over 2/47/11+1, and therefore no real reason to be 40/0/21. And if you're optimizing your DPS based on some suboptimal choices of your raid members that's really something I wouldn't like to be a part of discussing

 

Alcyon

Twisted Visions is currently better (as haste is better than crit) but less "safe" as haste increases your mana usage and it has no stam. Next patch, however, Twisted Visions gains a bunch of stam and even more +dmg at the cost of a bit of haste so it becomes even better than it currently is.

 

Tifordin

I have a question with regards to Molten Fury -

In a typical 25-man raid against a boss with a large amount of HP (in excess of say, 4mil) what percentage of fight length is the boss likely to be under 20% hp for? Obviously if a single mage's DPS was negligible alongside the other DPS in the encounter, then the boss would be in execute range for roughly ~20% of the fight length. However if there are one or more fire mages (out of 8-10 DPS classes) then the time that the boss spends in execute range is going to drop below 20% of the total fight length. Is this drop going to be negligible (eg. drop to 18% time) or is it fairly significant? Would it make a bigger difference for a 10-man raid?

Trying to establish the best way of modelling time spent in Molten Fury execute range for a time-based fight :P

 

galzohar

Wether it being significant or not depends on warriors executing, fire mages and bloodlust usage. If all your blooslusts are being used <20%, fire mages or not the last 20% will last far less than 20% of the duration. With no bloodlusts and only 1 warrior and 2 fire mages in the raid, though, it'll be much closer to 20% of the time (but still under of course). Note that I'm not looking at people dying affecting this as you're just as likely to die yourself and gain nothing out of those last 20%, as you are likely to be alive with other people dead gaining more from that last 20%.

 

Celani

@Lunaire. Ignore the arctic reach. You need to be inside 30 yards for AB anyway, which is a key part or your rotation. The extra point in elemental precision is never wasted. That's 25.2 points of hit rating (2% hit for frostbolt) that can go into something else, like haste or damage, and 2% more efficiency on frostbolt. With 126 hit rating, you are capped for both arcane and frost this way. I'd also swap out of Magic Absorption and put those points into Magic Attunement, which will benefit the raid substantially on a number of fights.