Are you sure that's a rather unlikely example? With partial resists expected to average at 5%, I'd expect the deviation to rarely be as high as that WWS parse shows. If you assume the average 5% loss is something like 15% chance for 25% resist and 2.5% chance for 50% resist (and rest 0% resist) you get ~1.7% deviation on the % of damage lost to partial resists (and average damage lost 5%, obviously). 1.7% partial resist is 3.3% away from the average which is almost 2X1.7%. That has quite low chance of actually happening (although not nearly extreme enough to call it impossible). Remember I took assumptions of how partial resists derive over the different amounts which is just a rough guestimation but you won't get very different results using different (but realistic) resist breakdowns as long as you keep the average damage lost to partial resists at 5%.

So while that example shows how luck can mess up your WWS "experiements" or "tests", the specific example of partial resists doesn't normally cause as much deviation as seen in this WWS. Although it is probably the 2nd largest luck factor that affects your DPS after crit.

Well, this is why i'am talking about the partials resists being incorrectly logged to show the real DPS loss in a raid environnement.
Partials resists, in the way they are currently logged and shown on WWS, don't represent the real DPS loss you got.
I will post a complete topic about this matter very soon, so stay tuned (i just have to translate it in english as it's in french on my hard drive for the time being).

Ok, so... I may have made a rather huge mistake. As it turns out, I've had the wrong spell coefficient for Arcane Missiles for quite some time now... needless to say this changes a lot. I'll follow up on this later when I have more conclusive data, but right now deep arcane specs are looking VERY good...

Just to clarify, you guys are using an offtank of some kind with a [Nightfall]?? I've seen the various post asking if it's still viable, this is the first I've seen from a top end guild actually using one. I went to look at your parse for the buffs /debuffs gained, but the parse has been deleted.

Yes Cryic nightfall is commonplace for brutallus. Not much a prot warrior can do when hes not actually tanking on brutallus. It doesnt work on any fight except brutallus.

This is one of the most interesting things I've read in days. Is your oversight currently commonly held among the mage community, or is it simply a mistake in your spreadsheet or on magegraf?

Get ready to break out those Lightning Capacitors

Ok, everyone else is too worried about getting banned - but April 1? Somebody had to say it.

I joined a guild working in BT and did not have the hit to do competitive DPS as deep fire. As a late commer to the guild I knew I'd be low on the list for the upgrades I'd need to raid competitively as deep fire. While my old guild had been collapsing, I'd been running ZA and had collected all of the spell haste gear out of the instance except for the weapon off the last boss. I started raiding with an AM haste build. All the theorycrafting I'd heard about and read said that I should not have been able to do well with the spec, but it worked well for me with the gear I had.

My raid group was SP, ES, Moonking, Mage, Mage. Recently I got 4p T6 but then I switched to deep fire. Currently I'm playing with a Hasted Scorch build. I spoke to some of our best theorycrafters and was told that the way I was thinking about haste was wrong, the math I was using.

I was taking the 1% haste = 1% dps literally. So I built around the following math. Damage(45% empowered arcane missiles)+Damage =x Then I took X(Haste%)=y Then I took x+y=z This number was what I used to build my theorycrafting around.

It will be intersting to hear what basic formula is wrong in the current models.

I can't tell if this is a trolling attempt, a 1st april's fool, or just a very sad attempt at bad TC.

No, you will not bring TLC back from the dead. Neither MSD. They got nerfed to the ground to a point where they are borderline unusable. And please, don't try and make timbal work. Maybe ashtongue could give you something worth trying out due to lwoered GCD, but thats about it as far as 'broken' items go. Likewise, scorch spam will never work because the talents don't support the spell. AM will never work for the exact same reasons -- the underlying formula used to calculate its damage is far too bad to make it compare 'fairly' with any other build. And I'm not even talking about DPM, just DPS.

In any case, if you were serious and are topping meters with AM spam or scorch spam, I feel extremely sad for your raiders. I don't think I can put it in much politer terms. In both cases you're taking a severe DPS loss by using those as primary dps spells. And it should consequently put you in a bad position on DMs. If that isn't enough to get you off the top on DMs, then it is pretty much indicative of another problem.

EDIT: just to be clear. ashtongue is the best aoe trinket. but for main dps single target use its not good.

Anyone who pays attention to Vontre's sig box should already know that he has the unmost distain for AM both as a spell and as a strategy. So just in case anyone missed the joke, this seems most definitely to be an April Fools prank. As you are well aware, there is a segment of the mage community that has developed an irrational fondness for AB and/or AM. It's just not nice to play with these peoples' feelings like that. You, sir, should be ashamed.

As I was driving home, I was thinking of this. I think I got suckered in big time.

Well played sir

Well played, Vontre. Almost had me on that one.

Now a question about Timbals- a mage in my guild is adamant about getting a Timbals because he thinks it is an overpowered Arcane/AM spec trinket, as he believes it procs off of AM ticks. To my best understanding, AM does not count as a channeled spell, but as a series of individual casts, thus allowing proc based buffs to... well, proc on each hit... subsequently not allowing timbals to proc.

So, since I have DE'd any hope of seeing a Timbals (nor would I take it over my Shadowpriest), is there any proof that AM does in fact proc Timbals? (keep in mind that I am disregarding the fact that AM is a terrible spell post TLC/MSD nerf).

While it's true individual AM bolts have been capable of proccing things like MSD / TLC in the past, Timbals isn't based simply on spell hits but rather dot ticks. AM does not apply an actual dot to your target, so I don't think Timbals will work.

[e]Also a hidden cooldown of 10-15 seconds has already been confirmed, so it doesn't really matter anyway.

[Timbal's Focusing Crystal] does not work with AM.

Tried 2 minutes of rank 1 AM, and then max rank AM until OOM, no procs.
No, I didn't log or have a recount screenie or whatever.


Tested it a bit as fire spec, did ~0.7% of my damage on Dr. Boom.
Then tried it in BT and got 3 procs in a minute fight. I think it tries to tell me something.

That's what I thought. Thanks for testing it, Roywyn. Time to go slap a mage upside his pointy head.

Does this look about right for brutalus? slightly modified of what jula posted earlier

Only destro and flame cap would be time restricted, the others could safely be pushed back quite a bit.

I can confirm that if you combustion straightly after scorch combustion stacks to two and uses a crit charge if the scorch is a crit.

So the verdict would be...

Scorch5 (or how ever many, based on the number of mages)
Fireball
Wait for impact, possibly pop drums?
Combustion/IV/etc
Fireball


blahblahblah

That seems to be the only way I can see to avoid all the bugging, however having the first fireball crit isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you're being threat capped. The point of combustion would be to increase your crit chance, so it's not all bad I suppose.

Crit is never bad, but it is sometimes not any good either. This is becuase if you're threat capped you have to assume your next spell crits even if you only have 1% crit so you have to give the tank enough threat for a single crit to not pull aggro, so critting will never get you killed. On the other hand, if you're threat capped critting will mean you just skip the next spell (as you can't cast another without risking it critting and pulling aggro) so critting didn't help either.

Bottom line is having more or less crit isn't going to ever reduce your DPS due to threat, but in certain situations it might not help either. Practical conclusions from that is that popping combustion (as well as other cooldowns) would be more useful when you're not threat capped, which might happen in that very fight if not using cooldowns is actually low enough DPS to never pull aggro so the tank gets a lead before you catch up with cooldowns (while the other way around wouldn't work because he can't "catch up" on threat once you're dead).

All in all pretty obvious but just wanted to point out the common misconception people have caliming crit reduces their DPS due to threat.

It seems to me if you get to the point where you are threat capped such that you have to stop casting for fear of critting, then crit actually is hurting you. You could have selected a different piece of gear that had more damage or haste instead of wasting item budget on a stat that is actively stopping you from chain-casting. I'm sure you could do up a couple graphs to prove it, but there is no way the DPS loss of one less crit during an encounter is greater than the loss from having to stop casting for 10 seconds due to threat.

This is all pretty unlikely in a raid situation, though. If your tank is awake at the keyboard, there is almost never a time you are threat capped between Salvation and Invisibility.

Does [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] proc off of the flamestrike dot? I feel silly but I guess I've never noticed if flamestrike applies a debuff or if it's like consecrate, and mobs can move out of it. If its on the ground, does that mean mobs could have multiple flamestrikes ticking on them?

I know its a moot point from a DPS perspective, especially with 2.4 arcane explosion, but it certainly would be mana efficient...