(I'm neither a mage nor have played one for more than a few seconds).
As I´m currently trying to figure out which classes/specs/changes are best to sustain close to 2k DPS in the 6 min Brutallus fight I´m seeking a little advice from the longer mage theory crafters.
For as far as I came up with numbers, a default 2/48/11 build can hardly sustain ~200 seconds of continuous nuking without a spriest.
What ever thread I look in, it say Fire is better DPS than Frost - but I can hardly find any posts about mana efficiency/sustainability over time.
Considering various scenarios:
10/48/3 - Thats a rough 10% more mana efficiency for loosing 2xIcy Veins
10/x/4x - Doing the same with frost
0/18/43 - With a rough 40% crit rate this build would provide more mana saving than clearcasting - while having all good frost talents.
I think we´ll probably end up doing it with 10/48 and a spriest still, at least that´s my feeling atm.
For as far as I came up with numbers, a default 2/48/11 build can hardly sustain ~200 seconds of continuous nuking without a spriest.
This isn't even remotely true now, much less in 2.4 when Mage Armor is going to become a lot more effective via spirit buffs.
Edit: to clarify. If your mages don't have a shadow priest, then yes, they'll probably have to chain pot/gem to make it through Brutallus, but even with 2/48/11 builds 200 seconds to OOM is just incorrect - they should be fine for six minutes. Clearcasting extends the timeline to an extent, but if you're looking at Sunwell, you've likely cleared T6, so ask your mages, can they make it through fights like Bloodboil (~5min), Council (~8min), and Illidan (~12min) without mana issues?
If you do give your mages a shadow priest, then they should be 2/48/11 (or arcane/frost or whatever else they choose) and if they're having mana issues, something is wrong. Most of our fights in T6 content now are 3min or less, and I routinely go through all those fights using double destro pot + flame cap, with no Evo. Swapping for gems and mana pots, I'll last six minutes with ease, probably popping flame caps on the last timer to help burn him down under 20%.
Interesting, highly. Guess I´ll have to let them run Dr. Boom for a couple of times.
That would shift shadow priests to healers/warlocks and/or giving mages the shamans.
What spell cycle are you running Jarlyn with your current gear/specc?
All our mages are fire, so everyone scorches 2 times to stack the debuff off the start. Then whoever applied the initial debuff keeps it up - beyond that, it's pure Fireball spam.
Theres absolutely no problem with 2/48/11 without a shadow priest on brutallus (I know i've done it), however, be mindful that a resto shaman would greatly ease the mana requirement in such a case and perhaps allow use of destro pot/flame cap.
However, as you gain more sunwell gear, it will* become a problem, because of all the spell haste. But using a moderate 11% haste on ptr I did not run into any issues.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
However, as you gain more sunwell gear, it will* become a problem, because of all the spell haste. But using a moderate 11% haste on ptr I did not run into any issues.
If all classes scale the same as mages are going to, then how is it going to be a problem? Right now a ~6 min Brutlallus is going to feel hard, but once a raid is clearing Sunwell, we'll probably see a 5 min or sub 5 min Brutallus, which counteracts the mana problems of haste.
But that is another problem, with all the haste we'll be gaining, whether we want to gain it or not, we may be forced in a position to not equip the haste as it will cause a hitch in our rotations. I'm not sure on this yet, but it does seem that it will happen.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
(I'm neither a mage nor have played one for more than a few seconds).
As I´m currently trying to figure out which classes/specs/changes are best to sustain close to 2k DPS in the 6 min Brutallus fight I´m seeking a little advice from the longer mage theory crafters.
For as far as I came up with numbers, a default 2/48/11 build can hardly sustain ~200 seconds of continuous nuking without a spriest.
What ever thread I look in, it say Fire is better DPS than Frost - but I can hardly find any posts about mana efficiency/sustainability over time.
Considering various scenarios:
10/48/3 - Thats a rough 10% more mana efficiency for loosing 2xIcy Veins
10/x/4x - Doing the same with frost
0/18/43 - With a rough 40% crit rate this build would provide more mana saving than clearcasting - while having all good frost talents.
I think we´ll probably end up doing it with 10/48 and a spriest still, at least that´s my feeling atm.
I'm most worried about manage to keep high dps without flamecap/destuction pots.
I'm not much of a TC'er but I guess that the "extended" 20% phase might help some.
I'm most worried about manage to keep high dps without flamecap/destuction pots.
I'm not much of a TC'er but I guess that the "extended" 20% phase might help some.
It depends if the dps lost by not using all those DPS consumeables is worth the dps increase of bringing another DPSer in teh place of the shadow priest. Assuming you have enough ways to avoid not running completely dry without slowing down for anything other than evocation of course.
And then if you actually reach a conclusion that it's more worthwhile to run without a shadowpriest (and with a "real" dpser in his place) you have to re-consider arcane VS fire, as currently all arcane numbers assume shadow priest for both specs, which helps arcane more than it helps fire. If the shadow priest DPS increase to the fire mages is bigger than the DPS lost by having a shadow priest over a "real" dpser, though, you can safely assume you will always have a shadow priest in an optimally-tuned raid (though obviously adjust if you happen to not have one).
(I'm neither a mage nor have played one for more than a few seconds).
As I´m currently trying to figure out which classes/specs/changes are best to sustain close to 2k DPS in the 6 min Brutallus fight I´m seeking a little advice from the longer mage theory crafters.
For as far as I came up with numbers, a default 2/48/11 build can hardly sustain ~200 seconds of continuous nuking without a spriest.
What ever thread I look in, it say Fire is better DPS than Frost - but I can hardly find any posts about mana efficiency/sustainability over time.
Considering various scenarios:
10/48/3 - Thats a rough 10% more mana efficiency for loosing 2xIcy Veins
10/x/4x - Doing the same with frost 0/18/43 - With a rough 40% crit rate this build would provide more mana saving than clearcasting - while having all good frost talents.
I think we´ll probably end up doing it with 10/48 and a spriest still, at least that´s my feeling atm.
Anyone with a good insight on this?
Plugging my current T6 gear (9% haste) + ele shaman with a 2/48/11 build into a Rawr for a 6 minute fight, I get the following:
2021 DPS with 50 mp5 "SP" (=mana spring from elemental shaman).
That's with mage armour, uses Evo, 3 pots+gems, and has 26 seconds AFK wand time.
For some odd reason, I still have 40 seconds Flame Cap time.
2110 DPS with mage armour, Evo, 2 pots, 3 gems, 1 Destruction Potion stacked with MF/BL/IV/CB/FC/SoG'd.
The is still 40 seconds of Flame Caps, odd bug.
2227 DPS with a 350 mp5 shadowpriest, using molten armour, 1 mana pot and the rest on DPS cooldowns.
A 10/48/3 build would yield the following:
2087 DPS with 50 mp5 and molten armour, 2084 DPS with mage armour.
With molten armour, it uses 3 pots, 3 gems and 0.91 Evocation. I.e. it needs nearly the full mana of evocation.
Playing with the numbers, it would run OOM at 6:11 minutes.
With mage armour, it uses 2.83 pots and 3 gems, skipping Evocation no to lose time.
2180 DPS with molten, 2130 DPS with mage armour with a 350 mp5 shadowpriest added.
A 10/0/51 frost build with clearcasting would yield 1929 DPS with molten, 0.77 Evo, 3 pots, 3 gems, 50 mp5.
Adding an 350 mp5 SP increases DPS to 1983 DPS.
(Changed fire necklace and Sunfire enchant too, for completeness.)
A 40/0/21 Arc/frost build with T5 hat/shoulders clocks in at 1980 DPS without and 2164 DPS with an SP.
It always uses all mana options and mage armour. (Changed weapon enchant to +40 damage, flask to supreme power.)
Add around +15 DPS since dual elixirs beat flasking.
// Supreme Power ~= 60 DPS, Pure Death ~= 30 DPS, Blinding Light ~= 40 DPS, Adept's/Draenic ~= 75 DPS
0/18/43 - With a rough 40% crit rate this build would provide more mana saving than clearcasting - while having all good frost talents.
Frost is a heavy tree, 43 skips a lot of talents.
Yes, at high crit rates, MoE returns a bit more mana than CC, about 2% or so? CC works on AE/Blizzard though, and if you trade 18 fire for 18 arcane, you get CC and Meditation (30% regen while casting) and Improved Amplify/Dampen. Fire only gets you MoE, and frost doesn't seem needed in Sunwell from what I saw.
Hope that gives you some figures.
Frost isn't "much more efficient" as everyone tries to preach it. It uses less MPS, but the DPM is about the same.
No idea how correct WE is modeled. It lists 3 summons, but I have no clue what's calculated.
You'll very likely want/need a Blood Pact + Shadow Embrace warlock on Brutallus (from what I heard tanks say in their thread).
A shadow priest increases all magic damage by 5% and shadow damage by 10%, and increases the DPS of grouped mages by ~120. Grouped warlocks receive a benefit in a comparable ballpark I think.
If you don't bring an SP, all other warlocks need to be fire and you need a fire mage. Not sure how the SB/Inci numbers turned out now.
But I think at least one SP is a significant benefit unless you stack hard against casters (reducing the value of 5% magic damage and 10% shadow damage).
Edit:
For arcane/frost specs, Adept's/Draenic Elixir beat a Flask of Supreme Power by ~15 DPS. Added note.
The 40 second flame cap increments is more a design issue than a bug. It results from trying to combine 2 min gem cooldown with 3 min flame cap cooldown into a linear constraint. Basically I have to allow either flame cap or mana gem to be in partial increments. By default I decided to make gem integral, but I'll see how it plays out if for non-arcane specs I specify constraint in terms of integral flame cap.
For WE it uses totems, debuffs, heroism, but does not try to stack it against trinkets.
EDIT: I've tried playing with the flame cap constraint a bit more, but I can't find anything that would really behave in a better way. The problem only shows up when it's finding intermediate states when it uses a bit of gems and a bit of flame caps. The main issue is that 1 mana gem is equivalent to 40 seconds of flame cap in terms of cooldowns. So when you have maximum 2 flame caps for example, then next step is transition to 1 mana gem and 80 seconds of flame cap. It could stop at 2/3 mana gem and 60 seconds flame cap, but it'll choose whichever option gets the most total damage. Short of changing it to a discreet problem I don't see how to solve this better, and computational requirements of doing that are a bit too high I'm afraid.
EDIT2: Oh I see what you mean, it used 3 gems and flame cap when gems would use all the time available. 360 seconds was an edge case I wasn't handling in the best way, I put a fix for it in.
EDIT2: Oh I see what you mean, it used 3 gems and flame cap when gems would use all the time available. 360 seconds was an edge case I wasn't handling in the best way, I put a fix for it in.
Speedy feedback! Non-integer gems/caps are fine (I prefer that for stat values actually), was just confused about 3 gem *plus* a cap at 360s fight.
( I *can* actually use 2 caps + 1 gem in a 3 minute fight by opimising cooldowns. )
A 40/0/21 Arc/frost build with T5 hat/shoulders clocks in at 1980 DPS without and 2164 DPS with an SP.
It always uses all mana options and mage armour. (Changed weapon enchant to +40 damage, flask to supreme power.)
I havent done any numbercrunching on this yet, its just a weird spec idea right now, but I figure I'll throw it out here and see if anybody thinks it is in any way viable.
I've heard some mages say that after 2.4 we will be able to spec arcane/frost, go heavy AB spam and then frostbolt and with a shadow priest actually GAIN mana while frostbolting so you can frostbolt enough to get up to full or however high you want and then arcane blast again. Sounds great to me, but I dont wanna be a cookie cutter spec and after that hits the ground if it is successful it will be cookie cutter.
What Im thinking of, if I spec even heavier arcane and then throw whatever talents are remaining into frost up until icy veins (or farther if I really have a lot of room just for more cooldowns or whatever). Instead of frostbolting, I can start wanding (with wand spec). Obviously this will see greatly reduced numbers in DPS while wanding but on the plus side you will gain a lot more mp/s if wanding instead of casting (this is especially true if you have molten armor up instead of mage armor) and then with faster regen rates you get back into your arcane blast rotation faster and THAT is where the majority of your damage comes from.
So...thats pretty much my idea, any input?
"Time is like a monkey, you think its there and then its gone eating a banana."
Has anyone done any number crunching on [Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone] vs [Item not found!]?
I don't have access to Illidan or Malacrass trinks yet, so I've been using the Icon and DC:C trinks.
Curious if the permanent +63 dmg on the Sorcerer stone outweighs the +80 from the card, assuming there's a good chance that it'll drop at least a few times on most encounters.
My guild is 3/4 TK and 3/6 SSC right now, and in most of those fights, there are several periods where I can see the the card buff dropping and having to charge back up over time (which it does -- I just don't religiously keep track of how often). I don't think exalted w/ Sunwell for the recipe will be too difficult or take too long.
I'd say stick with the sorcerer's for pretty much every fight unless both A) you dont run oom period, meaning you can afford to forget to mana gem and still not run oom B) you dont take any damage whatsoever, if its a fight like malacrass where there is heavy AoE against everybody in the raid, in a situation like that you're going to want the extra healing just because its that much easier to stay alive and that much easier on healers (this applies especially if you have low HP)
"Time is like a monkey, you think its there and then its gone eating a banana."
I was completely ignoring the +40% from pots since it's generally not a concern. I typically have a shadow priest and/or shaman with me, and with mana gems and their touch/totems, I'm typically OK with mana.
From the damage aspect alone, would the constant +63 outweigh the +80 that has multiple chances to drop throughout certain fights? I don't know about the T6 bosses, but in fights like Hydross during transitions, Lurker during dives, and Solarian when she ports away, there are tons of opportunities for that +80 to drop and have to charge back up.
Well without doing any serious number crunching here, you're gonna wanna do about 20 spellcasts to get equal benefit from the +damage over the 20 casts instead of a stable +63. That said, if for example you are the only mage and thus scorch 5 times at the start of the rotation, you can do higher DPS with less spellcasts because your fireballs gain more damage per +spell damage than scorches do (and of course do more DPS), so having low +damage on the scorches isnt a real issue. So uh...rough estimate, if you can get 15 fireballs before the buff resets, its an increase in damage, if you kinda cant get that many fireballs in on it, dont go for it. If you are looking at lurker though, you can avoid this by hitting mobs when they spawn as he ducks underwater and refresh your buff, even if you keep all the mobs sheeped if you really wanted you could hit it with an arcane blast and sheep right after before they do anything to refresh your buff.
*edit, response to dollar*
Originally Posted by Dollar
You can just resheep the mob.
Thats exactly what I said at the bottom of my post? Sorry if I was unclear in what I wrote
Last edited by Soraxis : 03/17/08 at 3:39 AM.
"Time is like a monkey, you think its there and then its gone eating a banana."
Well without doing any serious number crunching here, you're gonna wanna do about 20 spellcasts to get equal benefit from the +damage over the 20 casts instead of a stable +63. That said, if for example you are the only mage and thus scorch 5 times at the start of the rotation, you can do higher DPS with less spellcasts because your fireballs gain more damage per +spell damage than scorches do (and of course do more DPS), so having low +damage on the scorches isnt a real issue. So uh...rough estimate, if you can get 15 fireballs before the buff resets, its an increase in damage, if you kinda cant get that many fireballs in on it, dont go for it. If you are looking at lurker though, you can avoid this by hitting mobs when they spawn as he ducks underwater and refresh your buff, even if you keep all the mobs sheeped if you really wanted you could hit it with an arcane blast and sheep right after before they do anything to refresh your buff.
You can just resheep the mob.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
Thats exactly what I said at the bottom of my post? Sorry if I was unclear in what I wrote
I think what he meant was that you don't even need to break the sheep (unless you are trying to keep Arcane Blast at 3 debuffs or something) as the Polymorph itself will refresh [Darkmoon Card: Crusade] anyway.
I havent done any numbercrunching on this yet, its just a weird spec idea right now, but I figure I'll throw it out here and see if anybody thinks it is in any way viable.
I've heard some mages say that after 2.4 we will be able to spec arcane/frost, go heavy AB spam and then frostbolt and with a shadow priest actually GAIN mana while frostbolting so you can frostbolt enough to get up to full or however high you want and then arcane blast again. Sounds great to me, but I dont wanna be a cookie cutter spec and after that hits the ground if it is successful it will be cookie cutter.
What Im thinking of, if I spec even heavier arcane and then throw whatever talents are remaining into frost up until icy veins (or farther if I really have a lot of room just for more cooldowns or whatever). Instead of frostbolting, I can start wanding (with wand spec). Obviously this will see greatly reduced numbers in DPS while wanding but on the plus side you will gain a lot more mp/s if wanding instead of casting (this is especially true if you have molten armor up instead of mage armor) and then with faster regen rates you get back into your arcane blast rotation faster and THAT is where the majority of your damage comes from.
So...thats pretty much my idea, any input?
I've been toying with 40/0/21 and while I am liking the playstyle, I don't personally think it will be a serious contender for progression dps. We shall see though and I'm looking at it much as I did the old 28/23 specs in the past. It's major perk for now is the 3% free hit and the fairly nice low-mana high-dps 'lust/trinket/IV frostbolt spam phase. As a spec it is still terribly luck-based though and hugely sensitive on crits during the burn phase.
Regardless of that, the issue with your suggestion is that wanding, even with the spec for it, is simply horrid dps. It isn't viable at all. When you are trying to stretch to 2k+ dps it would just seem to me that a period of 300dps would not be worthwhile at all even if you enjoyed ridiculous mana regeneration. Keep in mind that pure AB spam is not even that far ahead of 2/48/11 fireball spam and is certainly no where near enough to offset a period of such hideous damage output. Hell, even Evocation is questionable.
Considering I try to avoid using evocation like the plague, I can't fathom playing purposefully with the idea of actually intending to do wanding DPS.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
I havent done any numbercrunching on this yet, its just a weird spec idea right now, but I figure I'll throw it out here and see if anybody thinks it is in any way viable.
I've heard some mages say that after 2.4 we will be able to spec arcane/frost, go heavy AB spam and then frostbolt and with a shadow priest actually GAIN mana while frostbolting so you can frostbolt enough to get up to full or however high you want and then arcane blast again. Sounds great to me, but I dont wanna be a cookie cutter spec and after that hits the ground if it is successful it will be cookie cutter.
What Im thinking of, if I spec even heavier arcane and then throw whatever talents are remaining into frost up until icy veins (or farther if I really have a lot of room just for more cooldowns or whatever). Instead of frostbolting, I can start wanding (with wand spec). Obviously this will see greatly reduced numbers in DPS while wanding but on the plus side you will gain a lot more mp/s if wanding instead of casting (this is especially true if you have molten armor up instead of mage armor) and then with faster regen rates you get back into your arcane blast rotation faster and THAT is where the majority of your damage comes from.
So...thats pretty much my idea, any input?
A typical AB rotation has around 2.8-3.2 dpm tradeoff against AB spam. The best wand even with wand spec and JoW is only at around 4.6 dpm. Wand would have to be around 800-900 base dps to achieve that kind of dpm tradeoff and we're not gonna see that anytime soon.
03/15/08, 9:05 AM
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