Nah those numebrs are quite overstated. I know, I have levelled all of those a number of times.

Using malganis price-gouging prices, buying 100% everything form the auction house and not including any profit-recoup from de'ing/reselling grinding mats, heres what grinding the professions will costs:

tailoring: 1200g for 0-375 (hint: you only need 365 for [Pattern: Sunfire Robe], so you could save a lot of gold there)
leatherworking: 600-800g for 0-350 (all that is needed for drums)
enchanting: 1500-1700g for 0-360 (for ring enchants)
jewelcrafting: 1200-1500g for 0-365 (hint: you only need 365 for [Design: Pendant of Sunfire])

Also, the [Design: Loop of Forged Power]/[Pattern: Sunfire Handwraps] is BOE.

I'm Tailoring and Enchanting now. I think it's silly to drop enchanting. Should I

a) Drop Tailoring, get JC for gems, and finally get LW?
b) Keep Tailoring for robe?

I'm wondering if at this point they're going to make enchanted rings pick up Requires Enchanting tags once enchanted. Clearly they were trying to discourage profession min/maxing in the latest PTR patch, but even though I know it would require some new code on their part to "change" an item based only on professions, it seems like leaving Enchanting out of the picture is kind of a glaring hole.

That being said, it's somewhat premature to make predictions on the "best" profession setups when we're still missing most of the loot from a full third of the Sunwell bosses (2/6). I'm not wild about leveling JC or having to re-level Enchanting in WLK if I did drop it for JC now, so I'm not going to resign myself to it until I'm 100% sure we know everything that's coming off of M'uru/Kil'Jaeden.

That would be tremendously retarded on Blizzard's part because it would mean you would permanently lose use of those rings unless you took Enchanting again. And if one of the items in question is a rare boss drop, good luck convincing people to give it to you again.

If anything that's an argument towards not forcing profession locks. The only place where it makes sense is Engineering.

Further thought: every profession should have something to offer to all classes in some way so as to compel players to follow a profession, not "pick professions X and Y based on your class". If Blacksmithing had some completely insane BoP caster sword, would you pick it up?

They would either let you strip the enchant or simply require enchanting for the enchant itself, similar to how the Spellstrike set bonus works.

I would like to see this change made to put all professions on the same level.

The set bonus requires a specific level of Tailoring, not just having Tailoring. Those are two different things.

That having been said, it would probably require a significant enough recoding of how item enchants work as to not make the time and effort ratio worth it. As it stands, enchanting a ring already binds it to you - granted, not a very good argument since the most coveted rings are BoP anyway, likely done to prevent twinking - but also when some superior craftable comes along like Loop so that you can't get away with getting someone else to enchant it for you so you don't have to level the profession.

Right. If they can code a set bonus to work only with a specific level of tailoring, why would they be unable to code an enchant to only function at a specific level of enchanting? I am sure it could be done if Blizzard wanted it to, and without a significant amount of new coding.

I don't think it's an overly big deal. Unless the level of balance is incredibly fine, there're always going to be some professions that stand out over others, but that gap has narrowed significantly. LW is obviously the best choice simply based on overall DPS gain, but enchanting, tailoring, and jewel crafting are all fairly close together in terms of what you gain. All things being roughly equal, just pick whichever professions you enjoy the most. At this point we're already entering the realm where your second profession will make as little as a 5 DPS difference. At this point it almost becomes insignificant which you choose considering proper cooldown management accounts for significantly more than that.

Arcane mages and professions

I gathered mats ready to powerlvl JC, tailoring and end up at alchemy for the arcane trinket:p With the last change it just got a lot more complicated.. I am LW + enchanting now and was planning on dropping enchanting for either tailoring or alchemy.

[Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone] looks great, on average you will get +960 mana per pot, thats 2880 extra mana in a 5 minute fight (3 pots max). In comparison you will get about 15-20 k mana from your SP.

Considering that the base value of SAS is 7 spell dmg weaker than icon/card (Calculating 70 spelldmg on those to simplify), the added damage would be about 5400.

Getting +30 DPS (For an arcane mage) upgrade from chest/gloves equates to about 10800 dmg during a 5 min fight. For fire spec it would be about +18000 dmg.

JC items (Neck/gems) would add about 7200, slightly better than the alch trinket.

An approach can be to take tailoring, but drop it once you get the arcane items (Spi - chest/gloves). And then pick up JC. But considering these are much better items for locks/SP`s (Fire mages) it would be counterproductive to take the patterns before these classes... So atm. Im really uncertain what to do:/

Its pretty obvious that Blizz is trying to make this as hard as possible for us-.-

PS. For fire mages, its a no-brainer ofc;p

First of all, thanks for an excellent job ont Rawr.mage (and thanks to Astrylian for Rawr itself). I have a couple of suggestions that I've thought of while playing around with the program, but as I'm not sure where the limit goes between Rawr and Rawr.mage I don't know which part of the program my suggestions apply to.

Comparison to a previous gearset
Often when trying out different gearsets it is not only a case of just changing one piece of gear, but rather I may have to change several pieces. I would then like to have a "locked" profile on one side of the screen which would be my starting point and I could see how my changes affect the overall stats after doing them all. One cool way of doing that could be to be able to tell the program to store the current stats, and then as you start doing changes it would show the difference to the stored set. For example, the basic stats frame could look like this:
Throw in some neat colors as well (green for going up, red for going down?) and it would make it really easy to monitor the total change since your last "store" or "lock".

Profile name in window title
Most programs have the name of the document you are currently working on in the window title. Not having that makes it hard to remember which profile you are working on now, and thereby you don't know where your work will end up when you hit "save".

More tooltips
Large parts of Rawr.mage already has a lot of excellent tooltips explaining the meaning of different values, especially in the stats tab. However, the buffs and options tabs could use some tooltips as well to save time or explain things to noobs like myself. Having a tooltip as you hover over the different set bonuses is an example where I wouldn't have to go browse some websites in case I can't remember exactly what the values of the Spellstrike set bonus is for example. On the options tab I have no idea what values I can put in the "interrupt frequency" field and what effect they will have. Just a couple of examples but you get the idea.

Filtering by profession
Sure if you really want to go all the way you may train one profession, make some BoP stuff, switch to another profession and get the tasty bits of that one etc. Not in my case though, I'm pretty happy with being a tailor & enchanter. For that reason those BoP jewelcrafting gems are not useable to me, and I would like to be able to tell Rawr to not show those items that require me to be a jewelcrafter. Same with the engineering helmet. For a generic solution I think you could have a listing of professions in the options tab with a checkbox next to them where you tick the box to show the items that require you to have that profession in order to get or use the item. Default it to have all boxes ticked and it would work as today.

Filtering by class
I've seen this mentioned elsewhere so it's not my idea, but I'm including it here since I agree with it. Basically just make Rawr.mage hide all the items that require you to be a warlock or priest or something else to use them. This along with the profession thing above would help remove some of the "noice" from the gear listings.

Switch between "current" and "upcoming"
I'm not quite sure if Rawr.mage has implemented the 2.4 changes already, but I think it would be useful to have both the current live patch and the future PTR patch available to choose among. In the case of 2.4 for example we have for some time known of a lot of the changes to the mage mechanisms (haste rating etc.), but the 2.4 patch has also been in testing for quite a while so before it goes live I would prefer to be able to model my current gear while at the same time test out stuff for 2.4 so I know if I need to change my gear when that goes live. So, a setting in the options tab to switch between PTR mode and live mode perhaps?

TPS
You mention threat constraint yourself, and that sounds interesting. A start would be to just show the TPS of your current setup just as you show the DPS, this would give an idea of how one build compares to another in terms of overall TPS.

Last I checked, potions have a two minute cooldown, not 1 minute :o

Using rawr with an arcance spec, +40 mp5 from the trinket on potion spam is +18-22 DPS, which equals +20-24 spell damage.
That makes the trinket a +83-87 damage trinket at most, not much better than other trinkets.

Mind you that clicky trinkets tend to have more value if you can pair AP/IV/Heroism with them.

Kavan:

Already mentioned, but a cast sequence / timeline of abilities would be ideal, ala magegraf.

Not as big deal now as it was when raiding SSC, but a % of time spent on boss level vs non boss level mobs would be nice. When figuring out gear for fights like Hydros or FLK knowing I was only going to spend 40% of my time on the actual boss, then trying to figure out what the ideal gear trade off between hit and crit was important.

I assume this would not be possible, but the ability to easily save the current gear + talents within an HTML link would be ideal. Probably to much information to try and store in the string, but maybe somebody knows a hack. This would allow people to easily compare their build + gear to others.

One other suggestion would be a % time for JoW uptime. My guild actually raids with a ret paladin, but when switching targets and other factors, JoW is usually only up for around 60% of the time.

Kavan + Rawr is already doing this. SCB with an Arcane build is already in the top 3 trinkets, depending upon gear level. Rawr also computes the stacking ability of SCB + haste abilities when you mouse over the Spell Cycles you'll something like this:

Heroism+IV + AP + Hex + SCB + AB: 15 seconds
IV + AP + Hex + SCB AB: 15 secs

Hey Domner, thanks for the awesome feedback. Some of what you suggest is Rawr.Mage specific, so I'll leave that to Kavan, but to touch on a few things... 'Comparison to a previous gearset' is planned, but not started yet. 'Profile name in window title' is a good point, I'll get that added. 'More tooltips' are planned for the Buffs tab, but Kavan'll have to handle tooltips on the Options tab. 'Filtering by profession' isn't on my todo list at this point, but I'll add it, though not a high priority. 'Filtering by class' and 'Switch between "current" and "upcoming"' are both already done and working in our current development build.

Ok, so the Skull of Gul'dan does not stack with the Icon or the HSH on the test realms at this time, correct?

Has this change been docuented?

I have been stockpiling dkp, waiting for a skull to drop. If this change goes live, I may no longer hold out on the trinket, and finish off my T6 first.

Yes, this change has been documented in the patch notes under item changes and in these forums. Despite the nerfs to the skull, it is still the best trinket in the game if you can utilize the +hit. Given its drop rate, it is probably still worth saving for.

That can only be due to mage armor giving you a lot more mana that you can spend on doing damage.

480s is 8 minutes, pretty long. Did you assign a shadow priest? If so, with how much mp5? And are you fire or arcane or some mixed spec?

If you have a long fight, you will need mana. Using mana pots prevents you from using destruction pots. Mana gems prevent you from using flame caps. Evocation causes 10 seconds downtime. If you run OOM with all mana options used, your DPS takes a sharp dive.


For arcane specs, Mage Armour is almost always better than molten.
For fire specs, molten is better until you reach the point of bad mana starvation.
It all depends on the fight and the cooldown timers you can use.


In the tab that shows your DPS, mouseover the * below, labeled Spell Cycle.
It lists the cooldowns you use, and whether you have idle time. Check for the difference between molten and mage armour there.

I hope that clears it up, can't tell you more with the sparse info you gave.

I didn't see an option to add a shadow priest, so unless it's there by default I don't think I included it. I'm 2/48/11 and with mana gems and mana pots (sacrificing flame caps and destro pots) I haven't gone oom to the point of having to wand in a long time, and I normally use molten armor.

Edit: Just checked it at home and a shadow priest at 175 mp5 is included by default. Shows me 1562.98 dps with molten armor and 1604.32 dps with mage armor. Seems odd that about 82.2 mp5 while casting would be worth more dps than 66.3 crit rating :-\ It's also worth noting that if I scale the fight time back down to 300 seconds, molten armor pulls back ahead by about 40 dps.

480 seconds of pure chain casting is an extremely long time, it's likely that you are running out of mana with only a 175mp5 shadow priest. Note that I'm fairly sure no encounter in the game includes this much time of chaincasting Fireball at all, except maybe an incredibly incompetent Illidari Council kill.

That's true. I tend to forget TC is based on stand and shoot nonstop.

Try lowering dps time option if you want to simulate fights where you get rest time.