Is the water elemental pet merged for your full frost mage that is pulling up WC? Most do not do this by default.

Enough with the anecdotal "We have this one Mage who's specced 20/20/21 and he is our #1 DPS" garbage. It's not helpful.

Hasn't it been shown that putting 2 points into Incinerate is at most a .2% dps increase? There are other talents that are not a buff to dps overall, but for certain encounters that are more viable.

Personally next patch with going 0/50/11, going to put points into Impact just to help out with Hyjal trash. It seems a far better utility, for certain PvE situations and a decent PvP helping. Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft It seems a bit for self sustained for AoE situations, and a nice little helping of "wtf he reflected that" on the side in pvp.

As far as people coming here posting shit about mages respecing and getting #1 dps, not useful as you forget at lower gear levels a 10/48/3 build is not the best, there are superior builds for a lower geared mage(karazhan and lower) that will produce a higher dps outcome.

Incinerate is clearly one of the weaker talents for sustained DPS, but for trash clearing it's very useful. It's just that the idea behind the build is just to stack all the stupid 1% DPS talents and it is the highest single-target DPS build. At this point, I'd reccomend 13/45/3 for the standard raiding mage, with 2 in Magic Attunement and 1 in Arcane Impact.


And looking at your build, I'm reminded again about how much I hate the first tier of talents for the support tree. Improved Frost Ward vs spell you'll never cast!

I've actually raided as 13/45/3 with 3 points in Arcane Impact before LC was nerfed, and the dps gain on it was huge, more than you'd think. But as for now, it's not worth it going more than 10 points in arcane for anything really. Sure getting Magic Attunement is nice, the reality is, at most you only cast Amp Magic on 3 targets at a time, and if you're going to use Dampen Magic for an encounter, having Magic Attunement makes it not worth it with such a big hit on the heals you receive.

And yea, the filler talents suck, but with what you just said about Improved Frost Ward, and it being a Tier 1 talent, why is Improved Fire Ward a tier 4 talent? Never occurred to me till now that Improved Fire Ward is the single most useless talent a mage has, even more useless than Wand Spec.

One thing that is concerning to me about the theorycrafting that is going on right now is that it's not really showing any form of realistic scenario regarding the (current) set of encounters I'm against.

Basically, we're just starting HS/BT and there is just so much AOE as part of the encounter mechanics (Kael weapons, Hyal trash, not seen any internals of BT yet) that focussing on single target DPS seems, well, pretty outdated.

Has anybody been looking at modelling the various scenarios we find in game to use a comparative source, rather than a single target.

While we can probably agree that the IV-Deep fire variant specs are likely to be best single target, I'm more likely to believe that something with deeper arcane is likely to do more in a DPS fight overall. (Say 40/0/21)

While not directly "theory", I'd like to hear from some of the more progressed mages about a couple of things regarding encounters;

1. Do you have roles for your mages ? (deep frost for WC, arcane/frost for AOE, IV/Fire for single target)
- this would have the advantage of building a "set" of mages that have synergy between each other

2. Our guild has felt that destroying AOE packs is of value, is there a diminishing return in worrying about that and just making sure that we do "enough" damage using a 10/48/3 spec is sufficient.

Finally; has anybody thought about building simulations with 5 rounds of 5 AOE targets + 1x single target to compare the various specs.

A possibility is 2/45/14 or something close to that; deep fire talents for single target DPS with a tricked out blizzard for heavily snaring mobs in AE. I used this on Hyjal this week and was really happy with it, we run with a fair number of warlocks and snaring mobs while they used SoC made it easier than I remember it being otherwise. Should note that frostbite is something tanks / melee need to be aware of as it can lead to aggro-on-reachable-target versus highest-threat, could possible drop this for something else too though.

But the loss of your own personal dps was very substantial using such a build, while with a deep fire build with Flamestrike spam, and the 3 points into Impact like the build I linked a few posts ago will lead to a higher personal dps run, and if multiple people are speced the same, will lead to a far more controlled fight with the same high personal dps.

Even if you have other mages seeding buffs to offspecs, from a pure dps standpoint, a deep Fire mage will out damage an Arcane/Fire mage getting seeded the Imp Scorch debuff. The only time seeding a debuff is worth it is when a deep Frost mage seeds WC to an Arcane/Frost mage, and even then, with proper rotations and gear, a deep Fire mage will beat him on damage with sustaining Imp Scorch himself.

If you would of read some of the last few pages of this thread, you would see that an AoE has a max damage that can occur, without outside interference, so no matter what spec you are now, on AoE packs each mage within reason should have nearly the same damage done, which leads to a use of AoE spell rotation in the end on deciding which is the most damaging output per spec of mage.

At a tier 5 point in gear AoE damage caps become reachable without popping trinkets and such, so at no point pre-Morogrim shall you be worried about not enough damage per AoE cast, just the amount of AoE classes and whether they spam their spells or casually cast them.

I checked some of our random WWS parses of damage dealt during Hyjal trash and found I did a very slightly larger amount of damage with blizzard than arcane explosion spam, there are so many other variables that this comparison is probably worthless but I really didn't feel gimped on damage (AE capping out and all anyway). Just for context - we run with +/- one mage or lock 2 mages and 4 warlocks, using imp blizz lets us start using blizzard very early on a pull very shortly followed by Seed of Corruption. It's very clear when a mob is moving towards a warlock; this isn't a problem as we still have frost novas, dragon's breath, soul shatter to use until the mob gets a tank's attention.

Impact as a method of keeping mobs off cloth very early in an AE pack seems less reliable to me but I'd imagine it would scale better with more mages, where as blizzard is something only one mage really needs to be doing to snare all mobs in the blizzard footprint more or less instantly. It's only useful on trash really but since we're all going to be putting 11 points into frost soon I thought I'd try spending some points on something I thought might be worthwhile in the frost tree and was pretty pleased with the utility of it on AE trash in KZ, ZA, Hyjal, and BT, it felt more elegant than straight AE spam, and I think it made the trash easier (not that it's hard to begin with). YMMV (?).

Personally I'm planning on rolling with a 0/47/14 build and using a flamestrike -> Blizzard -> flamestrike rotation.

Figure using the initial Flamestrike to proc the Ashtongue and then popping IV + Blizzard. The flamestrikes keep the haste up and the blizzard uses the haste as well as rooting and snaring and generally keeping them together for the next flamestrike. Should also help to maximize warlock dps with seeds and with the snare allow them to start seeding earlier since their personal risk will be lower. Also should be nice for tanks since any mob heading for the outside of the AE zone will be moving so slowly they won't have to move far to taunt/smack them to regain aggro.

Still debating my last 4 points in the Fire tree though, currently leaning towards 2 in Impact and 2 in Blazing Speed and not putting any points into incinerate and going without pyroblast or blastwave. Although that leaning does seem to change on a somewhat regular basis.

There is no doubt that Imp Blizzard+Frostbite is huge control boosting, but when it comes down to it, Blizzard ticks every second for 360ish damage in my gear, for a comparison, 980 damage every 3 seconds, and AE is 700ish damage per hit, 1400 damage every 3 seconds, per target it hits till capped. And since Blizzard can't crit, it is completely worthless when the number of mobs dwindle, where as AE is still viable.

The amount of personal damage you lose from using Blizzard over Flamestrike, AE, Blastwave, DB is to much to let it slid. And since the trash at the Horde camp usually becomes spread out very easy, Blizzard becomes more useless.

to spider, I am in favor of the validity of that spec, but does your control take into account having a protection paladin? I've never been to hyjal but I do have a prot pally myself, and it would seem that consecration alone should allow you to do as much personal dps as you want without worrying about aggroing large groups.

We never used to do Hyjal with a Protpally up until a month ago. The difference, for an aoe-happy mage, is night and day. Just let him round the mobs up, then AOE your heart out immediately.

The idea that blizzard lets you 'aoe earlier' and associated benefits might have some merit for Warrior/Druid tanks in Hyjal, however - but is thrown out the window when you have a prot pally at your disposal.

Not sure. However he is the only mage in the raid with a WE. Currently right now we have 3 mages who usually raid. One is currently fire, one is deep frost, one is arcane frost. Before 2.3 all 3 were deep arcane/fire. I'm just looking at the relative ratings of the 3 mages in comparison to eachother, before all 3 were usually equal, now the arcane/frost guy has pulled in front of nearly all the casters.

Edit: I know anecdotal evidence isn't that great, but it was just something I've observed within our guild. And no this isn't a 20/20/21 build. This is a pretty normal 40/0/21 build which from what I've seen in Lhivera's TC does pretty well if someone else is providing the WC debuff.

The problem with any type of frost build that relies on frostbolt spam is pushback. If you had in pushback in any sort of fight frost comes way behind and there are currently too many encounters giving this a nail. RoS stage 3 (or in the old days Vaelastrasz) is a perfect example of why there is a problem with using frost while raiding, even in a 40/0/21 build (although you can spam AM in a situation like that it's a dps and dpm drop by 20% at least on both parts).
I doubt frost actually can be viable unless they give it some sort of pushback protection, just a small amount of damage delays frostbolts by .6-1 second which is a huge dps dip if it only happens on every 3rd frostbolt even.

You are forced to do x/46/10 (4point spare) if you want to be optimal for 95% of the current boss fights. Frost is currently only good for one thing and thats for learning encounters but thats mainly due to Ice Block which is trainable from 2.3.2 and as such there is no reason at all after that. Ice barrier (30sec cd); you might as well use mana shield while learning encounters if you really need something like this.

Either way I think it's valiant to try to find something else then a cookie cutter build but albeit it seems like a lost cause.

ps. Since your fire-mage is trailing behind the two frost mages then I dare to say its how that fire-mage plays and his/her stats/gear setup vs trash and bosses. Not cause the other builds are better, because 40/0/21 will be in the same neighbor hood as 10/48/3 right now if you play both correctly, even theory crafting and simulations show this.

edit: just recalled that while you are in ssc/tk and you still have 2x T4 as your best equipment in some slots, frost is actually very viable due to the set bonus "Pushback Resistance". Not sure where the balance is when 10/48/3 or x/46/10 will be better. I am sure someone can do the math on it though.

I've been swapping back and forth between Arc/Frost (40/0/21) and Deep Fire (10/48/3 - Imp Flamestrike, no Incinerate) to see what it's like.

I find that on a lot of encounters the damage "bursts" from AP+Trinket in frost, and the current +3% frost hit is making Frost come out ahead for me.

The main thing that's making frost working well right now is the phantom hit. (I'm in T4/T5 gear) Maybe when I get more T6 gear that's less of a problem, but TCing out the gear I wear with frost and being hit capped, and the gear with fire I get about a 1-2% increase when Arcane/Frost. _If_ the phantom hit went away, I'd be forced to swap more gear around and would be getting about a 1-2% in favour of fire.

While I agree that pushback is quite a minor issue, shielding one's self can only go so far: Given a shield costs you 1.5sec in terms of dps, it needs to "last" 1.5sec worth of interrupts. Each time you get pushback, it can be from 0.6 to 1.0 depending, so unless you get pushed back twice on one spell or once on two spells you're not really gaining in terms of pushback resistance. This is particularly true given the damn thing only soaks up ~1300 damage and as such isn't really much of a consolation against interrupt resist.

Somehow I'm still reluctant to believe 40.0.21 is competitive in real terms with full frost. I'll be even more so in 2.3.1 when frost will have the benefit of potentially two Cold Snaps per boss. Even if 40.0.21 has coldsnap too, it's only one more IV, whereas for frost it'll be one more elemental on top, and another IV++Elemental when the second cold snap goes through.

Edit: My ignorance of the encounter betrays my uninformed state. He is of course not refering to Ice Barrier.

I think he was talking about stealing the rune shield since it is in reference to RoS phase 2.

Don't dorget that you can always switch your gear to 2p T4 for heavy interrupt fights.
Switching from T6 gloves and shoulders to T4 changes your stats:
-13 sta
-5 int
-7 spi
-32 spell dmg
-3 hit rating
-6 crit rating
-1 blue -1 yellow +1red socket
-18 spell penetration

Additinally you loose the T6 bonus and the effect of epic gems not taken into account.

Together you loose about 50 spell dmg, 6crit rating and 5% frostbolt dmg.
Not soo bad for 100% pushback prevention, where fire has only 70% (with T6).

To provide better numbers, the average T6 geared mage has 1200 spell damage, to all that is easily. Dropping T6 4piece is a 60 damage drop, then another 60ish from the gear swap, you're down 120 damage, a substantial hit when dropping down to use 2 piece t4. Not to mention that if you need to avoid pushback to gain damage, Fire is already twice as good as frost for that reason only.

Now the only thing they have left to do is revamp Molten armor or something to be like fel armor, like 100-150 spelldmg so we can compete with warlocks and it's all gravey! Oh and increase icy veins to either 50% speed or 30 seconds :P It's all good in the hood ! =)

Intro: My guild is working on SSC. We have three mages who for a long time used arcane/fire hybrid builds and are now wondering whether to switch to deep fire. After reading the information in this forum, I had been encouraging them to do so. However, after conducting some tests using Vontre's spreadsheet, I'm no longer so sure. Below are the results of some calcuations I conducted regarding the relative DPS of arcane fire versus deep fire.

Procedure: Using the base stats of one of our mages (wishingstars) as a starting point, I altered her spec and gemming numerous times and plugged the results into Vontre's spreadsheet.

I used three different gemming configurations:

High Crit
Spell Damage: 695 base (+221 fire, +172 arcane)
Crit Rating: 361
Hit Rating: 164

High Damage
Spell Damage: 794 base (+221 fire, +172 arcane)
Crit Rating: 273
Hit Rating: 164

Extra Hit
Spell Damage: 754 base (+221 fire, +172 arcane)
Crit Rating: 273
Hit Rating: 200 (with her gear, no gemming configuration could produce exactly 202)

*Edit*: Note that 794 base damage + 221 fire damage = 1015 total +dam when casting fire spells. Granted this is not terribly high, but it seems quite normal for most mages entering SSC. The analysis in this post is aimed at mid-level raiding mages, not those in BT gear.

I used four different specs:

33/28/0

40/21/0

40/18/3

10/48/3

I assumed that another mage would be applying Imp. Scorch, but that no curses or other debuffs would be on the target.

*Edit*: In all these builds, fireball is assumed to be the typical nuke. However, in examining the results on Vontre's spreadsheet, I noticed a very large difference among the specs in the damage that can be obtained from an AB spam. Clearly, an AB spam is not viable for any significant length of time. However, it could be used towards the end of a fight or during AP to add additional DPS at the cost of mana. That is the reason for including the AB spam numbers below. I apologize for not explaining that in the initial post.


Results:

33/28/0_____Fireball Spam_____Arcane Blast Spam
High Crit__________1029__________1173
High Damage_____1050__________1205
Extra Hit__________1057__________1181

40/21/0_____Fireball Spam_____Arcane Blast Spam
High Crit__________1010__________1250
High Damage_____1025__________1281
Extra Hit__________1033__________1257

40/18/3_____Fireball Spam_____Arcane Blast Spam
High Crit__________1021__________1250
High Damage_____1036__________1281
Extra Hit__________N/A__________N/A

10/48/3_____Fireball Spam_____Arcane Blast Spam
High Crit__________1102__________1023
High Damage_____1135__________1058
Extra Hit__________N/A__________N/A


Conclusions:

1. As expected, 10/48/3, hit-capped, with +dam gemming produced the highest DPS for a fireball spam. However, it also produced the lowest AB spam DPS compared to the other specs. The high +dam variant of 33/28 is 85 DPS lower than 10/48/3 for a fireball spam, but 147 higher for an AB spam. Meanwhile, the +dam variant of 40/18/3 is 99 DPS lower than 10/48/3 for a fireball spam, but 223 DPS higher for AB spam.

2. 40/18/3 performed better than 40/21/0. 40/18/3 with +dam maxed out beats all three gemming variants of the 40/21/0 build. Thus, 40/21/0 is not recommended.

3. 33/28 seems to perform better at 164 +hit and +dam maxed out then at 200 +hit. Adding the extra +hit increases fireball DPS by only 7, but reduces AB spam DPS by 24. Also, compared to 40/18/3, the 33/28 spec gives a better fireball (1050 versus 1036) but a worse AB (1205 versus 1281).

4. Gemming for crit rating over +dam decreases DPS in every case no matter what spec.

In sum, the arcane/fire builds seem to me slightly more competitive than others have claimed, but still lacking in DPS. 40/18/3 is 8.7% less DPS than 10/48/3, whereas 33/28 is 7.5% less. A well-timed AP/Pyro/AB Spam could make up for some of this difference. Also, the arcane tree provides extra total mana and mana regen, thus enabling greater use of destruction potions. Any leftover mana can be converted to DPS at the end of the fight using an AB spam, whereas such an option is not available to deep fire mages. Still, ~8% is a lot to make up, and deep fire will likely come out ahead even given these factors.

One wrench in this analysis is Icy Veins. If the new 2/47/11 specs prove to be even higher DPS than 10/48/3, then arcane fire builds may be even less viable than my calculations suggest.