WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes
Haven't checked it in-game, but it's in the notes.

Kavan, thanks a lot for Rawr.Mage. It's just plain awesome.
I'm toying with a 40/0/21 spec, and with the known gear so far, haste has some very erratic behaviour between 350 and 390 haste.
In particular, AToI goes from horrible (8th best trinket) with [The Sun King's Talisman] to twice-as-good-as-Gul'dan with [Design: Pendant of Sunfire].

(In reality, it will always be bad since the proc is delayed and does not affect the first cast after it procs.)

Removing AToI and swapping haste gems, there is a jump point in DPS between 442 and 444 haste. From 2507 to 2577 DPS.
The cycles change from AB/FrB4 to AB/FrB5 at that point.

I'll toy with haste later to find out more about its value.

Mitigation isn't a game mechanic per se, it's just used as a term meaning 'to make milder', hence absorption is a form of damage mitigation. I don't recall suggesting that absorption is the same as resistance.

Have a look at Wow Web Stats you can see there clearly that Qumulox is in beserker stance for the first Tidal Burst as he gets 9350 damage. Click some pages further and Qumulox has changed stance and gets 7650 damage from the next burst. Also, look at the damage received by the Shamans. Three of them consistantly receive 7650 damage from all tidal bursts. If you check their talent specs in armory you will see that those shamans each have 3/3 elemental warding which gives 10% damage reduction to frost attacks.

Again, apologies to the rest for wandering off-topic, but I didn't like to be accused of being incorrect by someone who didn't even bother to check his assertions.

To start , I ask for your indulgence as this is my first post to EJ and if I am posting in an impropper thread please move it to a more appropriate one.
As my guild progresses into SSC (4 bosses down with Leo and Vash to go) several questions have arizen on ways to improve our performance. I am deep Arcane/ice 40/0/21 (Slow/Icy Veins).

Our current challenge seems to be the High King style fight of Fathom Lord. This is where I believe spell mechanics might help and Elitist Jerks may have answers where other sites seem to fail. On the attempts we succeeded, I had been constantly spamming slow on the SHammy Dranai toon. His fire totems came slower (being laid down) , and he himself went down faster noticebly.

I have been trying to convince our guild that an additional mage specced to "Slow" could be spamming the fem healer/aoe'r as well and thus improve our downing of the adds and focussing on Fathom. I was told that it wasnt necessary as "curse of tongues" was being applied to her and that the two would not stack "probably".

Can anyone verifiy this? I find no relevant threads when doing searches for "Slow" and neither spell description states that it would "NOT" stack, other than that any single enemy can only have one slow spell applied, thus I am very curious, as the enemy heals definately lenghten the fight and decrease our chances of success.

For the record, this is a "help me" kind of question, usually best asked in this thread: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-mage_help_me_please/

As for the question itself, i don't know if they stack, but your guild members are right when they say it is not necessary.
You only need enough slowing to make sure your interrupts land. CoT (and an interrupter rogue with mind numbing poison) do the job quite nicely. Slowmage will have to waste 1/10th of his casting time reapplying slows, which will lower his dps by 10%, and on top of that will also screw his AB rotations. Not to mention an arcane mage using mana on non-damage spells is an arcane mage that's gimping himself.

Imo, have your mages burn down adds, and let people more suited to debuffing do their own roles

Regarding the AToI:

Despite the fact that this trinket does not give the 1st spell after proc the Haste Benefit.....this trinket now takes my Fireballs down to 2.5 second casting time in my Haste Gear. This means that I effectively get 2 Full Casts hasted @ 2.5 seconds despite not getting the initial benefit.

All the theorycrafting I've seen has been very 'anti AToI' in that it puts this trinket below just about every other end-game trinket. At what point does this trinket from a theorycrafting standpoint begin to shine (is there a specific haste level, damage level, crit level, etc)? If we are stacking haste gear come 2.4 and are able to manipulate our crit % with Combustion in the <20% health range in order to cause 'chain procs' of the AToI does it begin to look better than its current state?

Thanks in advance for your theorycrafting help!

Kavan, I see Blizzard has decided to change the Alchemist Stone from 54 hit to 63 damage. Looks like it will be a serous trinket from Deep Arcane now. MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies

Until the Alchemist's Stone amplifies damage from Destruction Potions it will remain behind the Blessings card.

Seriously? 63 static damage and 40% bonus from mana pots and health pots as opposed to a potential 80 non static? If you're rolling a particularly mana intensive arcane spec/rotation this would be excellent. Also excellent for arcane blast spamming in heroics . Personally there are one or two fights where they take away my shadow priest and the extra mana would be extremely helpful.

I use Destruction Potions, so yes. 63 static damage is far inferior to what is basically 80 static damage. Saying Blessings is "potentially 80" is silly when it's so ridiculously easy to keep the buff up. Scorch even stacks it twice per hit, and situations where Scorch might drop (Pretty much just Illidan, perhaps Archimonde if you're extremely unlucky) are also situations where you would need to restack the card.

I'm pretty sure he was saying for Arcane specs and rotations, the new Alchemist's Stone would be a contender as it would allow them to more easily maintain higher proportions of AB spam while also contributing bonus damage.

Given a rather generous 45% crit and assuming enough haste that it affects 2 fireballs:
Uptime = 1 - (1-(0.45*0.5))^2 (it's not up if neither of the casts 2.5s and 5s ago procced it) = 40%. 40%*145 haste = 58 haste. Not worth it.
Also, mind you that it won't work until you get one normal and one hasted fireball into the proc.

Rawr Beta 12 posted!

DOWNLOAD: https://www.codeplex.com/Release/Pro...eleaseId=11411

Beta 12:
* Rawr now includes models for Moonkins, Mages, and Warlocks!
* Many more stats are tracked about items, for use in new and upcoming models.
* Fixed a bug in the options for Cat, so that it updates the label for the value of expose weakness.
* Icons now pull from the more reliable wowarmory.com instead of the old flakey armory.worldofwarcraft.com.
* You can now safely run multiple copies of Rawr at the same time by duplicating Rawr's folder. Each running copy of Rawr must be in its own folder, with its own cache xml files.
* Fixed some bugs that would cause Rawr to crash.
* The Splash screen has finally been redone! It now has a background image, and an icon for each model that is loaded, along with the version #s of each model, Rawr's UI, and Base.
* Tooltips on the calculations should really last a long time now, for everyone, I hope.
* The ItemCache should save faster, load faster, and take up alot less space, per item.
* There's a menu item now, to reload the character data from the Armory for the current character.
* The Projectile and Projectile Bag slots will now be hidden if they don't apply to the current model.
* Improved how Rawr handles requests for data from the Armory.
* When unable to access the Armory will now handle it much more gracefully. If you see blank icons, anywhere, that's probably the case.
* There's now an options dialog. More will come in there, but for now, there's customizable proxy settings. If you were previously unable to use Rawr due to being behind a proxy that was different from your IE settings, or required different authentication, give this a try.

Thanks for this report. I'm looking now at what happens and the AToI effect you see is transition from AB/FrB3 to AB/FrB4. One issue in play here is the way I have defined this cycle. At this haste levels you have AB at 1.2 sec level and FrB at around 2 sec. This means you have a gray area where you're trading 0.8 sec pause or adding another FrB which would cause you to drop debuff before you start AB. Since the time lost in dropping AB debuff is also 0.8 sec it might be worth considering a cycle where you fill FrB until the debuff is off. Or maybe even using a Scorch as a filler. If anyone has any ideas for some cycles at these haste levels let me know.

One thing to consider about effects like AToI is that the way I'm modeling them now it's only really accurate on single spell chains. At the moment I estimate average haste gained on single spells and then use that as a fixed haste increase on them for composite cycles. Obviously this is not accurate, but it's a good first approximation. If used with AB cycles it essentially turns it into a dynamic cycle which are hard to model. Since the effect is generally weak I'm not planning to add more accurate models of it on AB cycles unless some TC shows that it would be worth considering it.

Sorry to bring this back up, but its of interest to me as a mage who used slow on the healer while our guild was learning this fight;

Could you not equally argue that the rogue is losing damage not using a damaging poison/totem buff or that the warlock is losing damage when using CoT over CoA? Out of personal interest, with the changes to the cost of slow next patch which class sacrifices the least by being on 'slow the casting' duty for this boss?

And for the record, slow, mind-numbing poison and curse of tongues do not stack.

Maybe, but Curse of Tongues lasts for 30 seconds instead of 15, and has essentially no mana cost, compared to Slow at half the duration and about 8 times the mana cost.

The Mage is definitely the one losing more.

Ah, that clears up quite a few things, thanks!


- AToI is averaged, that's explains a lot.
Just curious, do you model the bugged version (the first cast after a proc does *not* get the haste bonus) or the version how it should work (but does not work)?
It doesn't matter much since AToI is pretty bad for anything but AE spam unless it gets fixed.


- FrB3
Is that cycle what it states? You 1 AB + 3 FrB, to get one 2.13s AB (pre-haste) at base mana cost?
My gut feeling from previous calculations with Vontre's is that is lower DPS and only very slightly better mana efficiency than pure FrB spam - in a setting with CoE and WC.

The ideal thing to use is AB3/FrB3, but the AB debuff delay bug kills it.

AB/FrB/AB/FrB/AB/FrB3 is a suggestion of mine. Separate the ABs with FrBs to make sure you get the cast speed debuff, and end with FrB3 to have the debuff stack run out during the following AB.
It's just a suggestion - put it into a sim/sheet and see how it works.

From what I remember, AB/FrB rotations only a tiny bit better than FrB spam and AB spam mixed.
Seeing that you will still run into the same issue of having a 0.8s cast gap for the AB debuff, it's probably not worth it.

What I'd strongly recommend is having a "FrB spam and AB spam only" pattern to fall back to if you run into debuff timing issues.
It avoids timing headache, and is very potent with CoE+WC+4T6, on par with rotations.



I did some testing yesterday with the old Rawr with arcane and haste.

Setup:
50ms latency, 360s fight, 350mp5 SP (a bit high, but 360s fight is long too);
No DSpirit, Imp. MotW, BoK, BoW, AI, IP+ToW+WoA Totem;
+70 dmg flask, +23 dmg food, dmg/crit oil, +40 dmg weapon enchant;
Imp. Scorch, WC, 13% CoS, 10% CoE, Misery;

T6 hat, Amice of the Convoker, Council cloak, Sunfire Robes, T6 bracers, Tyri's Gloves, T6 belt, Leggings of Calamity, T6 boots, Forged Power/Eternal Sage, Hex/Skull, Sunflare, Heart of the Pit, Wand of the Demonsoul.

The Sun King's Talisman, +12 dmg (red), +6 dmg/+5 haste (yellow) as +damage setup.
Loop of Cursed Bones, +6 dmg/+5 haste (red), +10 haste (yellow) as +damage setup.
(Amulet of Unfettered Magics wasn't published then).

I only later realised that this setup lacks 2T5. Doh. Will redo that with Rawr 12 and the new neck.


The base +damage setup had +356 haste. Stat values for gems were:
+12 dmg - 2674, +10 crit - 2032, +10 int - 1756, +10 haste - 1656

Changing Sun King's to Sunfire Pendant (=> +386 haste), values changed to:
+12 dmg - 2708, +10 crit - 2059, +10 int - 1786, +10 haste - 3459

With the damage setup, I had 2193 DPS with +356. Changing gems to more haste one by one, it went down slowly to 2148 DPS at +442 haste, and jumped up again to 2174 at +447 haste with 1 more gem.

442-445 is the step where FB drops under 1.95s (+50ms delay) and we switch to AB/FrB4 cycles.


Mage/Molten Armour and Haste

DPS numbers with the setup above look like this:
2205 (haste, mage) > 2202 (damage, molten) > 2176 (damage, mage) > 2173* (haste, molten)
* - runs OOM

If I reduce the fight length, the highest damage comes from the haste/molten setup.

Correct me if im wrong but AToI does affect 2 fireball casts even with 0 spellhaste with a delayed buff or not. You have to take missile travel time into account, assuming a 1 second travel for fireball, by the time your fireball crits and you get the haste buff you are 1sec+latency into a new fireball cast. Ofcourse that cant get the haste buff since the cast started before the crit occured, but 5 sec is more than enough to get the buff effect on 2 fireball cast starts. Just need it to be up at the start of a spell to lower its cast time.

The trinket still sucks tho :P just didn't understand all this talk about AToI and it affecting only one fireball cast.

I would like to know this as well. Although I expect it's one of those funky abilities that procs when the spell leaves your hands. I remember seeing SCTD pop up frostbite the second that a frostbolt leaves your hand, only to see the spell land and proc frostbite 1 second latter. Maybe this is the case?

Speaking of AToI, it would appear to be better at AB/AM rotations than any other non-AoE scenario. Proccing off a AM pulse means that even with a significant delay (eg 0.2sec) it'll still gain good value as ambient haste gain affects your current channelling of AM, I seem to recall. Correct me if I'm wrong though. I was a pauper back in 2.2 and didn't have one to AM my way to dps heaven.

Im pretty sure it works like the lightning capacitor which shoots the bolt after projectile crit not when it leaves your hands. Ofcourse i could just test it at Dr.Boom with fireball and quartz showing current cast time, too bad im specd frost for the week and to be honest not that really interested in AToI.

Improved Amplify/Dampen Magic in Sunwell - Yay/Nay?

Think that talent is worth it in Sunwell Plateau? Seems not to me, with so much magic damage flying around.
Would love some feedback/Opinions of others though who were on the PTR more often.



Edit:
I know what Amplify/Dampen does, thank you very much. I could probably tell you which 2.3.3 bosses to use it on when asleep.
I don't want to know about Azgalor or Malacrass or about what people think it might feel like.
I would however love some feedback/thoughts from people who were on the PTR and did more than an hour and a half fighting Kalegcos and Latency.

Unless the tank is tanking an elemental, you pretty much always want amp magic on the tank, and nothing in sunwell changes that. It's not worth dropping Icy Veins to get it, but if you're getting clearcasting anyway, the extra 2 points are always well spent.

To decide if someone should have amp magic, you need to look at the number of times they take magic damage, not the quantities of damage dealt. For example, consider a tank on Azgalor standing in rain of fire-- this is pretty much the worst case for magic damage on a tank in today's raiding. The base ticks are what, 1625? Amp magic increases that by 120 damage, and that damage is reduced by 16% because of improved defensive stance, so that's 50 extra damage every seconds. Meanwhile, amp gives +240 healing per heal. So if just 3 healers are on the tank, the tank gets a minimum bonus 240 * 3 healing every 3.5 seconds, or +200 per second. (Actually it's even better than that, because of talents that reduce cast time and because of HoTs.) The benefits of amp magic far outweigh the costs.

Also, it's a myth that you shouldn't amp magic the tank if there's a danger of death from a large spike of magic damage. Suppose there's a fight where the tank can take a shadow bolt which averages 10k. With amp magic, the average goes up to 10.12k, which doesn't substantially affect survivability. But getting +240 on each heal to top him off after the bolt definitely helps, since healing that much damage will require three big heals, so he'll get a bonus 720 from them.