A funny coincident, 0.031s is exactly the same lowest result I get when spamming a key, so I can no claim to be "as fast as Manly!"
When you make your macro, do you have any wait time between "button down" and "button up"? And also, have you gotten repeat options to work, specifically the toggle option? I can't seem to get that working. It could be interesting to see how many casts, if any, would be lost with a repeated key press at the exact time with the new system.
Due to the stopcasting workaround on the PTR, I'm having a lot of fun playing around with binding a nuke to the mousewheel and scrolling it rather than button mashing. I can't really notice the difference from the cast bars, but I bet if I were to use a program to monitor the ability to chain-cast it would be an improvement. The tough part now is breaking the button-mashing habit.
Well, wow reacts on 'button up' events and not button downs. If I were to really really min-max things I would try G15 macros with only button-up then pause. The reason I don't is because you're pretty much flagging yourself as an obvious g15 (ab)user.
With this said, here's what it look like in the G15 app:
4 (button down)
4 (button up)
wait 0.025s
I've been using macros following that format for months (years?). I've never tripped over the blizzard security thing (damn the name escapes me) or had a ban or something.
I wonder how you had problems with repeat options. When you right-click on the G15 keys on the application so you can write/edit the macro, theres a repeat option in the right-click menu. You can select repeat or toggle.
<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
Well, I've copied my Mage over 3 times to the PTR Test servers.
I spec the first copy 10/48/3, the second copy 3/0/58, and my last copy 40/0/21
I've noticed that 10/48/3 is definitely providing the most of the damage increase, followed by deep frost, then Arcane/Frost. However, In the deep fire spec I'm losing Ice Block which in these late BT/Hyjal fights is so clutch (Archimonde, Supremus, Azgalor, Etc.)
At what cost am i giving up too much to keep ice block? I mean as a personal preference I think living takes precedence in certain fights like Archimonde. But In a fight like RoS is surviving more important than burning the boss down? Suggestions.
There are also 2 additional advantages of Frost when doing trash:
The main nuke (Frostbolt) stacks the debuff, so you get at least some benefit from it while you get practically none from improved Scorch as it's not worth to Scorch up an enemy that's dying in 15 seconds anyway.
Ignite plain sucks on trash compared to 200% crits, when you have some critluck on a trash mob, you may lose a lot of damage due to the way ignite works currently when another spell crits while ignite is on the mob. For example a 15 second fight with 100% crits and 1000 DPS noncrit main nukes for both specs:
The logic used in both of these arguments is quite poor. You are assuming that involving scorch in your trash rotation as a firemage is inferior to not using it, and thus that the optimum fire strategy on trash is inferior to frost; essentially only because WC and FrostB are a package deal. Both of these assertions are made without providing proof to your audience (and I would suspect that you came to this conclusion without even providing proof to yourself, that is, you are going on a hunch.*) You are also providing a wildly unrealistic (for many reasons) example comparing the way the two trees handle critical strikes to support spec'ing frost. Yes, there are ways to construct things so that frost is better, but this involves achieving things that are no where near to attainable in game. There is a method in economics for quantifying the output of a complex function (that is, something that has so many variables and often confounding factors that are impossible to accurately model) by assuming the worst set of conditions for the argument you are trying to support. If the worst case for your side of the argument yields better results than the best case for your opponent, it can be reasonably argued that your case is 'better'. You do pretty much the opposite here. You are assuming the best case for frost and pretty much the worst case (again, for many reasons) for fire and asserting that concluding that frost must be better is reasonable. It is not.
* Post Script: MY hunch is that the best strategy for a firemage to approach trash is scorch till five debuffs are up, then spam fireball until you estimate that you are about to cast a fireball that will not land before the mob dies, at which time you scorch, then fireblast, then acquire a new target. I haven't seen/done a proof for this, but I would be surprised if deep fire mages can do better than this. Obviously, I think this strategy is better than pretty much anything a frost mage can do.
Frost's advantage on trash comes from:
*WC stacking from your main nuke.
*Frost being relatively less reliant on WC than fire is on Imp Scorch (and on trash your relative 5 stack uptime for both is lower).
*Fully frontloaded crit damage.
*Dead time between pulls allowing the WE cooldown to tick, as WE is worth more dmg than combustion.
*Greater survivability w Barrier + Block.
*Ability to reduce all spell pushback to zero by shifting to 2 pc T4 for pushback intensive pulls (scorch always has 30% chance).
Fire's advantages on trash come from:
*No partial resists on sub-lvl 73 trash.
*Scorch might be cast earlier than frostbolt due to it's lower damage and the backloaded nature of ignite.
*Less push backs from the interrupts/aoes we see on many trash mobs using standard gear.
*Greater spell diversity allows for pumping damage in at the last second through scorch/fireblast.
*Greater damage potential while moving, due to a superior fireblast.
*Imp scorch up sooner than WC, based on an educated guess that more mages will be fire than frost in 2.3.
It doesn't seem possible to decide which does more damage overall on trash. Knowing which trash mobs you will be facing makes all the difference in the world. I would hardly call the chart posted above unproductive, as it shows a situation in which the ignite mechanic results in a substantial loss in damage.
In a theory of multi spell function allowing some use (though not as effective) of arcane blast and missles and taking raid mana longevity into consideration with the mana efficiency of frost I came up with a weird little build I can't decide how I feel about.
The reason is the meditation talent adds 30% of your spirit in combat situations, the uniteruptable AM allows for its use in pushback situations (unsure if that is even useful) and clearcasting for mana efficiency.
This has everything but the aoe related talents, shatter, and cooldown talent Iceflows. Its a totally raid centric build stacking dps related talents as much as possible and not so much focus on trash related talents.
Opinions? (take it easy on me, it was a whimsical talent build that struck me as I was looking at the new meditation talent change)
Depending on mana efficiency you could replace mana pots with destruction pots as a possible 2 minute cooldown burner and you still have survival talents.
Expected Value = Probability of an event occurring weighted by the Value of the associated event
EV(Situation in chart) = ('Gains' associated with spec'ing frost instead of fire) times (Zero, which is essentially the probability of this event, or even one remotely close to it, happening.)
In this sense, I disagree. That chart was completely unproductive because the initial conditions needed for it to be true are out of the realm of possibility.
Sackobones:
I would be surprised if one could show that casting a pushback-immune AM is superior DPS to a pushback-vulnerable Frostbolt, but I'm not saying that it is unprovable. If you believe that AM is better than FrB in this regard, the 5 points in the tree might be worth it. If it is proved that it is not however, AM likely will never be cast, and thus the points are wasted. If you dont AM, the value of having arcane meditation goes down, as frost is already generally not mana intenstive. That being said, given you don't care so much about trash as much as you do boss encounters, there are not many valuable alternatives to how to spend these iffy talent points. There is only one talent that you chose NOT to invest in that could be argued to have an impact on how much you contribute to killing a raid boss: magic attunement. No other talents are relevant in this regard.* So to make a long story short, if all you care about is how well you DPS a boss, how you chose to spend your talents points could very well be wrong, but it wouldn't matter in the context of boss-killing, because you have 61 point available, and only 42 or so of them are relevent.
* Maybe if you spend your arcane points in a way for you to pick up PoM, but clearly the gains from this DPS wise are negligible.
I find it amusing that nobody took the time to note that fire would clearly have finished with scorch/fireblast due to travel time. This itself would have closed the gap. Then again your fireballs/scorch/fireblast would have the +20% execute bonus.
<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
There are also 2 additional advantages of Frost when doing trash:[list][*]The main nuke (Frostbolt) stacks the debuff, so you get at least some benefit from it while you get practically none from improved Scorch as it's not worth to Scorch up an enemy that's dying in 15 seconds anyway.
Hmm I didn't see it mentioned, but anyone think using 2 piece T4 would be viable for the heavy push back fights like najentus and p2 RoS etc? I know this would break the 4 piece t6 for those that have it but for those of us that are still mid BT progression, I think 2 piece t4 to break 4 piece t5 would be a decent option for pushback fights especially for frost specs.
This is what I do while frost specced (still working on Archi), and it might even be worth it over T6 on an extremely pushback-aggravated fight ala Vaelstrasz, though nothing else like that comes to mind.
Keyne, I in no way am sure that without Empowered arcane missles that it would out dps frost with push back. But if you go in enough to get to Arcane med you have 2 choices for points.
The idea comes in for AE, AB, and mana regen to dip into arcane. Since AE is the most effective aoe having the threat reduction and crit bonus to go with it. the 5/5 arcane missles may have a use somewhere or you can squeeze it in a talent to the left .
There is a loose point in the build that can finish off one talent or dip into starting any other talent in the frost tree.
Keyne, I in no way am sure that without Empowered arcane missles that it would out dps frost with push back. But if you go in enough to get to Arcane med you have 2 choices for points.
The idea comes in for AE, AB, and mana regen to dip into arcane. Since AE is the most effective aoe having the threat reduction and crit bonus to go with it. the 5/5 arcane missles may have a use somewhere or you can squeeze it in a talent to the left .
There is a loose point in the build that can finish off one talent or dip into starting any other talent in the frost tree.
If AM doesnt out dps frostbolt, I dont see how it is castable given the spec philosophy you are imposing on yourself. If AM isnt castable, its not worth the tier 1 talents. This is especially true as it appears that you are putting more points into tier 1 than the 5 that you need to get to tier 2.
If I were forcing myself to go deep frost, splashing 18 points in the arcane tree to get arcane meditation, I would probably elect to get something like:
-5 Imp. AM (never gonna cast it anyways)
+2 Magic Atunement (Amp/Damp is likely an underutilized skill, and as such is more valuable than usual because most mages probably won't pick it up)
+2 Arcane Focus ( because of elemental precision, you will need 13% hit from gear to be hit capped. Once you are capped, each marginal point of hit rating is worthless. Therefore you need at least 2 points in Arcane Focus. Doesn't really matter if your 5th tier 1 point is in 3/3 AF or 1/5 Imp. AM, as they are both completely worthless.)
-2 Permafrost (bosses are immune to chills, unless I am mistaken, and you said you dont care about anything besides bosses)
+3 Imp CoC (I haven't done/seen any numbers crunched on this one, but I have a suspicion that, in some meaningful way, a fully talented CoC is 'better' than an AE in situations where you would need an AoE spell.
As I tried to say before, it is not so important how if you invest in some of these talents, as they are of secondary importance if your two goals are: be deep frost and get arcane meditation.
Had been reading over the thread and saw many people mention optimum gear setups and such. I played every spec (regemming is indeed a pain) and we have everything on farm. However, I was curious what exactly the optimum gear setup would be for both a Deep Frost and Deep Fire build?
I've, albeit not much, toyed around with WoWEquip some to see certain gear setups. I'm most certain come 2.3 I'm diving back into the old 10/48/3 spec with the MSD nerf and removal on coefficient. However, I had originaly set up my ideal gear as an arcane spec, and thus, it's now dated with me switching to fire.
I find it amusing that nobody took the time to note that fire would clearly have finished with scorch/fireblast due to travel time. This itself would have closed the gap. Then again your fireballs/scorch/fireblast would have the +20% execute bonus.
I did! ;-).
I think it's about time someone mentioned that timeless advice: spec for max damage on bosses, not trash.
I took this quote from the other mage thread. If these results hold close to true, it looks like each spec will have its boss encouter where it will outshire the other 2 specs. Sorry for the cross post. But this information is too good to just leave it get buried over in the other thread.
Hey, the sky isn't falling. I went ahead and assumed a 10% proc rate for our new MSD friend, and 0 ms casting latency thanks to blizzard's fix. Ok the scaling might help that out a lot. Anyway, I went ahead and did some comparisons using my new module. I'll be releasing a spreadsheet update too, but the spreadsheet is still limited to the "Patchwerk scenario", for the most part. Programatic approach tells the whole story. I'll have these calculations visible before too long.
Ok, how did I build this? Basically I included everything, shaman totems, bloodlust, etc. I did NOT include malediction. I DID include Molten Fury, and furthermor assumed that Bloodlust is popped during Molten Fury. I also assumed bloodlust would stack against arcane power and water elemental. Realistic, I think. For arcane damage, I added 72 spell damage, to represent the amount of spell damage you might gain for dropping hit gear. This number was derived by theoretically dropping 8 hit gems (64 hit rating) and replacing them with 8 spell damage gems (at 9 damage each). Guess this would be even better in BT gear? Hmm.
Anyway, I finally got around to making a complete calculation, which means everything included. Not just the extra buffs Bloodlust and Molten Fury, but also options for interruption, pushback, and target switching.
So the theorycraft simulations are not just stand still and spam fireball for 6 minutes, they account for scorching, buff ramping, timer effects, etc. I assumed there was a second fire mage to help with scorching, fairly common. This doesn't mean "scorch bitch" (a concept which is inherently retarded), this means help, as in the debuff goes up twice as fast. Awesome. No such luck for our poor frost simulation, though. He has to stack Winter's Chill on his own.
So how does our "Patchwerk scenario" look? Meaning standing still and doing your spells and scorches for 5 minutes. Pretty much like this:
Yeah, that's a big WTF. Apparently if the water elemental actually stays alive, and you never have to move or deal with pushback, frost fucking owns. Actually isn't a huge shock, considering how often the water elemental actually stays alive... so let's assume he dies about half the time, for starters. But we want to make this look even more realistic. So let's add some more encounter effects.
The first is simple enough: interruption. Not like a counterspell, but something that forces you to cancel a cast and move. Al'ar makes a flame patch and you need to go right fucking now. Sucks that you had 2 seconds on that frostbolt, wasted time there. Or in the case of AM, wasted mana, since you fire bolts at every second. Ok, cool, let's say there's an interruption every... 45 seconds. So to account for interrupt I added 3 seconds of downtime for moving, and half of the spell's casting time to represent the average lost casting time. This hurts fireball the most, because it has the most potential to lose casting time.
Ok, so it's counting the 3 seconds downtime as dps time, so we're looking at a reduction around the board. Fire gets hit the most, arcane gets hit the least.
Now let's throw in pushback. Say you get hit maybe 5 times for the ecounter... or once every 60 seconds. Pushback reduces your channel bar by 1 second, so it has a slightly lesser effect on fast spells like scorch. Frost has no pushback resistance at all, and arcane is flat out unaffected. This is the result:
Ok, last thing is target switching. Say it's add time, you have to kill adds. Great. Fire needs to ramp scorch, frost needs to ramp WC, arcane can just nuke away at full potential. So let's say you switch targets 6 times during the fight. This is how it looks:
Ok, so fire is basically still dominating these numbers. If you count malediction for arcane spec, the nice 2.7% damage increase brings it up to 1568. Still less than frost.
So I was wrong, the sky has, in fact, fallen.
This was taken for around 1200 spell damage, if you drop down to about 1000 it's a little more even and you can justify arcane spec for encounters with a lot of interruption, switching, or pushback. Overall though fire just scales too well. The only thing I haven't considered is mixing in blast spamming, which could be considerably better with zero latency. I doubt a mana dump will make up for it, but you never know. Time to start buying Flamecaps.
With all this taken into account. I am really not sure which I will go with. Fire is looking more promising, but I have a while before I get the gear to support it. With my spell damage hovering around 1100-1050 as a fire spec mage, I may be slightly better off with AM spam. But patch 2.3 is a ways out. I pray for the devs to un-do the MSD nerf.
I think it's about time someone mentioned that timeless advice: spec for max damage on bosses, not trash.
I think you might not be reading manly's post correctly. I could be wrong, but I believe he is talking in regards to the 15 second trash mob simulation. It is definitely true that the simulation doesn't take into account molten fury at the end of the mob's life and, if I'm interpretting Manly correctly, he is saying that he thinks it would be optimal to end with scorch/fireblast.
Start with scorch+fireblast. For a raid that brings say 3 mages (We actually tend to bring 3-4 because that's our most stable class of DPSrs; i know wtf:P), then you have 3-4 scorch up within 1.5 seconds and with some stupid amount of luck 3-4 fireblasts getting that 3-4 scorch stack then throw in a fireball or two and you already jumped way up. Scorch is the most forgotten magespell it seems, I've had numerous faceslaps with our mages for not using it, especially on bosses they tend to not give a f.
Any smart mage though knows that scorch+fireblast is usually easier to time at the end of a mobs life aswell due to no traveltime and shorter castingtime which is again an increase compared to those that attempt to squeeze of an additional fireball just to see the mob jump 5% to death.
Hasn't it been shown that fireblast provides only marginal gains with heavy risk (that is, fireblast is not worth casting as a part of a rotation)? I seem to remember reading something in the mage threads about it being bad because you can't stopcast the GCD, so you lose DPS time due to latency after 'blast. Does this change in 2.3? (I don't have a char in the PTR to test myself)
I have a simple question that I feel must be a common one, yet don't remember ever seeing it addressed.
Since casts get delayed when taking damage, how much time is the delay?
(I realize this is a bit of a topic detour, but believe it or not, this is the most relevant thread I found after searching key words "cast delay damage." Also, Manly's posts about tuning timed G15 macros made me feel confident people here must know the answer. Apologies if it turns out I overlooked a prominent FAQ somewhere.)
Edit: OK, I've since learned that the keyword I needed to search was pushback. But I haven't found a specific value for pushback duration.
Last edited by Stinkerbelle : 10/19/07 at 3:47 AM.
Some quick and dirty math on how Fire Blast affects Fireball spam.
Fire Blast - 725 base, 1.5/3.5 = 42.9% +damage, +4% crit
Fireball - 719 base, 115% +damage, +x% haste, +5% damage at 4/5 T6
All specs get +10% (FP), +3% (PWF), +4% (MF), +5% (Misery), +10% (CoE), +15% (Scorch) damage. Ignoring hit, it affect boths specs the same way.
In 1.5s, we can cast 1 Fire Blast, or 0.5*(1+haste%) Fireballs (ignoring latency). The redulting DPS difference is that damage difference divided by 7.5 (you can cast Fire Blast every 7.5s).
So, Fire Blast vs. Fireball in 1.5s is as follows:
Blue gear, 900 damage, 20% crit
2197 vs. 1675, 70 DPS difference
Epic gear and raid buffs, 2% haste (from MSD), 1300 damage, 30% crit
2757 vs. 2350, 54 DPS difference
Top end gear, 7% haste, T6 bonus, 1500 damage, 35% crit
3059 vs. 2976, 11 DPS difference.
I reread this post today and something struck me as not quite right. Fireball has everything going for it when compared to fireblast: haste, more contribution from +dmg (weighted for cast times), set bonuses, etc. Yet somehow fireblast comes out ahead at all three levels of gear in this simulation. I have a sneaking suspicion that the problem is derived from the math associated with the statement: "The resulting DPS difference is that damage difference divided by 7.5" The wording makes it a little unclear. What are you dividing by 7.5 and why? I'm fairly sure that to compare the DPS's of the two spells, you just plug all of the stats that affect the single spell's damage, then divide by 1.5 in the case of fireblast, and the net cast time in the case of fireball (3.0 weighted by haste bonus). I don't see where 7.5 comes into this equation.
I was sorta hesitant to write out this post as Roywyn appears to me to be fairly smart, and Vontre seemed to read it and not take issue, so I'm kinda afraid that I'M the one thats lost here. I'd like to get it sorted out, however, for posterity.
Fireball has everything going for it when compared to fireblast: haste, more contribution from +dmg (weighted for cast times), set bonuses, etc. Yet somehow fireblast comes out ahead at all three levels of gear in this simulation
"The resulting DPS difference is that damage difference divided by 7.5" The wording makes it a little unclear. What are you dividing by 7.5 and why? I'm fairly sure that to compare the DPS's of the two spells, you just plug all of the stats that affect the single spell's damage, then divide by 1.5 in the case of fireblast, and the net cast time in the case of fireball (3.0 weighted by haste bonus). I don't see where 7.5 comes into this equation.
7.5s is the cooldown of Fire Blast.
Well, untalented, the cooldown is 8s, and you spec 0.5s off to do a 2*Fiba/1*FiBla rotation in 7.5 seconds. The alternative is spamming Fireball, which could be written as a 2*Fiba/0.5*Fiba rotation in 7.5 seconds.
So, the difference is that every 7.5s, you can either push your Fire Blast button, or your "one half Fireball" button. Actually, it would be a "1.5s shortened Fireball" button.
The resulting DPS then is the damage difference between the two buttons divided by 7.5s, as you can only push the button that often, every 7.5s.
Haste will cut that cycle to maybe 7.2s, but it won't make a huge diffence.
On why Fire Blast still comes out ahead there:
It's the inital damage. Fire Blast is an instant spell that does more damage than the 3 second cast time Fireball without gear. Fireball has far better scaling, but it only starts less than half as good. The gap closes rather slowly, and 4/5 T6 makes the biggest difference.
I didn't factor in latency/cast delays, which plays even further against Fire Blast. Poke Ventre's sheet for more data.
Hasn't it been shown that fireblast provides only marginal gains with heavy risk (that is, fireblast is not worth casting as a part of a rotation)? I seem to remember reading something in the mage threads about it being bad because you can't stopcast the GCD, so you lose DPS time due to latency after 'blast.
He was talking about trashmobs and how to "finish" them... if the mob is dead after fireblast who cares about GCD or rotation?
Originally Posted by Zerase
... However, I had originaly set up my ideal gear as an arcane spec, and thus, it's now dated with me switching to fire.
I planned my gear for arcane spec and fire spec and ended up gemming 12 spelldamage everywhere I could, only a blue (purple) one in my shoulders for MSD (needs more blue than yellow gems). With 2.3 I'm gonna get the new wand from heroic badges and put another blue (purple) one in there for CSD (exactly 2 blues).
Going for full spelldamage is best for arcane and for fire as well, it was even in 2.2 with coefficient nerf and will be even better in 2.3 without the nerf.
1. What about 33/28/0 or similar?
2. Int seems to be ignored in these discussions, what impact does a big int pool + a criting spec with MOE and Arcane Concentration have?
3. Can we have some discussion around run of the mill gear - I think it's fair to assume 5 tailored + some T4, but T5 and more is beyond many peoples progression... I think more mages will benefit from a wider analysis.
10/18/07, 10:39 AM
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