I accounted for the true value of drums in my last post (Deducting the loss from gcd + the occasional range issue).

Drums are equivalent to a personal buff of 280 spell dmg for 30 sec, every 2 mins (Which is a +4% total dmg increase to one person during an entire fight). In comparison Icy Veins will “only” give you a 2,8% dmg increase.

I have to admit though, I'm the only LW caster in the guild and I assume ppl wont shout "halleluja" after I post this in guild forum unfortunately...

The main reason sadly is that 95% of raiders are too self centered and rarely think of the "good of the raid" if it can negatively impact their individual meter result in any way. Human nature...

I can promise you this; If this drum would increase a players personal haste rating by 400 for 30 sec (Instead of group), every single DPS`er and his granma would spec LW instantly. Just imagine. 400 spell haste rating is too good to ignore (+4% added personal dmg including the gdc loss)). But 4% dmg divided over 5 ppl is not as good?

Same goes for the neck. If the neck would give you personally +10% crit then EVERY single caster dps would use it (All the time!). Its just that good! But is it really less imba because those 10% are spread over 5 ppl?

In my old guild, I remember I had to threaten our locks indirectly if one of them didn't spec malediction + shadow embrace. They really resented the idea and no one wanted to volunteer. It all ended with me having to bribe the chosen person with weekly flask tokens=o And at the time “malediction” would be equivalent to a +27% individual dmg boost...

Same goes for improved amp magic (Magic Attunement). You alone can increase ALL healing done on MT by 4%+ (Which is as valuable as +10% added to your own dmg), yet less than 2% of mages have any points in this (Even though you will hardly miss those two points - 12/46/3).

Even today, Im seriously considering going for 2 points in "magic attunement" for Sunwell even though it would gimp my personal dps by as much as 5%. +4% extra healing on MT is more important than me meterwhoring.

You will do your guild a great favor by getting these buffs. Any GM/guild with a brain bigger than a peanut will see that and appreciate you for doing it. Who knows, you may even get prio for raids...

+240 healing without talent, so +50% adds another 120. 120 healing is not even close to +10% heals. Worth it? dunno, but its value is much lower than you claim.

True, I saw it myself and corrected/edited the values a few minutes after I posted.

Anyone knows what happened to Lhivera's script? Doesnt seem to work for me.
Man Out of Time - obstinately living the future that was

Your link is to the old results output, not to the proper name of the base URL.

She apparently moved servers. The old link that will forward properly is Theorycraft-o-Matic . The new link that it leads to is Man Out of Time - Theorycraft-o-Matic

I can't say which is meant to be the permanent link as I haven't seen a post from the designer at this time.

The thing is with bumping +heal (as it is with healers only socketing +heal gems) there is no real use for it except for healing meters.
More RaidDPS means shorter fight times, because there is no real damage limit, only the boss hitpoints. But there is a heal limit, if the healed target is full then every single bit of +heal is overheal. Imho the only purpose of healing is to keep the target(s) alive... if the target(s) live(s) the heal is good, if not it issn't.

So when is more +heal good? Its good for heals that heal only a small amount like hots or groupheals... there more +heal can result in a CoH priest only needing 4 instead of 5 heals to get the group full (but that needs large amounts of +heal :p).
For a maintank scenario (and you wrote "healing done on MT by 4%" ) where lots of big heals hit the maintank in a short time +heal issn't really worth it. The only difference will be healingmeters, it won't have any influence in whether the tank survives or not.

If your guild was learning hard hitting bosses like azgalor, archimonde, mother sharaz and Illidan, I would say the +4% extra healing on MT was very important with todays setup (12/46/03 is so easy to set up without hardly losing anything). Even on your weekly clear a single wipe due to lack of healing on MT could be avoided with impr. amp.

However, the main issue is that a great majority of ppl (Mages included) don't acknowledge the Amp Magic buff and therefore ignore it fully. They haven't cared to do the math on it and therefore are insecure of when to use it (And unaware of its effect). Thats the main issue. Therefore a large majority of guilds miss out on +10-12% extra healing on MT in the learning curve of these bosses.

As long as you understand how powerful Amp magic is (Even in its un-talented form) and use it in any learning curve at least, then thats the most important thing.

Now with the new talents (Icy Veins) it will be very difficult to get magic attunement (Without gimping yourself too much) so the situation has changed.

However, we should wait and see how the sunwell boss mechanics are before we can say for certain if +4% healing on MT will be worth more than the added dmg. Who knows, there may be a new patchwerk on steroids where keeping MT up will be almost impossible;p

Unfortunately, even if a boss like this was to be introduced I doubt many mages would use amp magic for other reasons (Very often, either the mage is unaware or the MT/GM is incompetent and will freak out if he sees the buff, which is the case in some guilds...)


Blizz knows very well that the mage community ignore amp and would rather happily trade it for any other buff. Probably the main reason why they haven't looked at it and they are most likely not going to. It would be interesting though if they did, and f example to made it stackable (To increase the value of our group buffs). But I guess that would make it too imba.

Regarding the jewelcrafting necklaces, they don't require any profession skill to equip or use. Anybody can make these in bulk provided they know someone with the design. There are two reasons why almost nobody does.

-the item is obscure and very slightly inconvenient. Not too many people know about this or Eye of the Night, or how they work. Inconvenient in that you have to bring them out in batches of five, one to each party member, or else hope that wipes are few and far between enough to get around the 1h cooldown. Bringing a 10-charge necklace for every member in your party for a night of attempts would be expensive if you compare it to individual buffs and pretty reasonable if you consider its cost split between the five of you. Either way its enough to make people balk at the idea of adding it to their consumable shopping list.

-When its your necklace or your turn to pop the necklace, everyone gets buffed besides you. Or, rather, you get the buff, but are stuck with a blue necklace with poor itemization, and unless got spell hit from your other neck you might need to swap other gear around to get nearer to the cap. You start to resent and hate the necklace, since when you use it you slip further down the meters.

Considering how far people will go in terms of cost and inconvenience to maximize their own damage, you have to figure its selfishness and ignorance that's really responsible for their obscurity.

Edit: you have to keep the necklace on if you want anybody to keep the buff.

Wait... so the 2% crit buff stays up on the other people if you take the neck off? Soo.... you can swap healers into the group to pop the buff and then just take the neck off and go back to their normal group?

No, the buff does not remain if you unequip the neck.

I can confirm this, just tried yesterday before disenchanting it, if you have access to KT/T6 necklaces, the chain is now utter crap.

The thing to confirm now is whether the buff will be dispelled on all your party members or only yourself, as I read thottbot on this item, one comment read that only your buff will be gone and not your party buff. Overall this neck is not sub par at all. +29 damage and +10%crit(2% per person) makes it the best neck available for caster groups.

Only if every caster benefits from the 2% crit. Imagine a classical SP-shaman-mage(3) group. If the shaman is resto spec (most likely the case), he will not care much about the 2% crit, probably not at all. The SP will benefit very little from it, so that's leaving the 3 mages. The fact is that 2% crit isn't worth 2% dps, it's much less, especially with good gear. If you take all this into account, is the dps and stamina loss worth it ? I really don't think so.

I'll second that. The necks are rather sub-par; Given a group is only 4 other people, out of which at least one doesn't gain anything more than a totaly negligible benefit then the effect seems to drop off. This is particularly true given the (nowadays) astronomical crit rates mages are enjoying; I seem to recall a gleeful realisation at BWL-60 level that I could respec 28-23-0 and have the monumental crit of 33%, while nowadays raiding at 40% is the norm.

Adding 2% will be a boost, however small, but will it be significant enough to convince people to remove their lovely epics in lieu of an abysmal JC consumable? It's almost like asking people to farm Firebloom and LBS for Brilliant Mage Oil instead of the more conventional +42dmg variety. Doable at the expense of effort, but arguably next-to-irrelevant in the scheme of things.

Ok I'm not sure if I interpret things correctly here. Let say your shadow priest wear the necklace, activates it, then equips his normal necklace. Does that removes the 2% crit buff only to himself and not the 4 other members of the party? If that is the case we got a winner.

The buff disappears from all party members if you unequip the neck.

This whole Drums of Battle discussion got me interested in group swapping and drums, and so I did a couple tests with a hunter in my guild that's a LW this afternoon and made a couple discoveries.

1) You do not lose drums buff if you swap people in and out of groups for thebu ff. This is the same way group swaps for lust works.

2) Drums appear to be bugged (hopefully not intentional) that if you're a melee/ranged (hunter) class, you only give melee/ranged haste to other melee classes. In my tests, the hunter that I was grouped in a raid with was not able to give me drums buff under any circumstances. Got a warrior in the group, and he was getting them with the hunter just like he should, even while I was in the group, not receiving the buff.

Tried this test with Drums of War as well as Drums of Battle. No luck either way.

*edit* Maybe this is just a hunter thing, a rogue on the bug test seemed to think so.

Well im not sure if group 5's really the group that's pushing dps.

That said i've never had a problem to this day with anyone not getting it, but im never grouped with hunters

This one's for you JasonX!

And I'm probebly going to get another Infraction for "Going against the Flow" like my previous infraction. This Reply is about how for Frost mages, + Crit rating is better then + Spell Damage.

Ok, to prove my point, I started number crunching.

I am unable to post a Graph on here, but if you visualize, As time goes on +spell Damage is > + crit Rating, but for quick potent Damage + Crit Rating is > + spell Damage.

This is a small example of Crit Rating Versus +spell Damage Rating Rating in A 1 to 1 Ratio as far as which is better


Frost bolt is a 2.5 Sec cast which falls under + damage penalty using (casttime/3.5)x which equals 81.43% of your + damage gear affects Frostbolt and Improved Frostbolt the same. (Patch 2.2)
-------------------------------------------
For the following Examples we will use the following
(Please note, Crit Damage is +100% bonus from traits)
(Please note, I was very nice to the + Spell Damage, we all know its "Up to # of Damage", not exact like Crit)


24 Crit Rating = 2% crit
24 Spell DMG = 19.44 (20 rounded up just to make you guys happy)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At a base rate of 900 damage and 12% crit, Frostbolt is casted 100 times
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

+ Crit rating total over 100 casts = 102600

86 normal @ 900 = 77400
14 crit @ 1800 = 25200


+ Spell damage Total over 100 casts = 103040

88 Normal @ 920 = 80960
12 Crit @ 1840 = 22080

440 Damage diffrence Over time for the entire instance (+ spell Damage wins)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At a base rate of 900 damage and 12% crit Frostbolt is casted 25 times
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

+ Spell damage Total over 25 casts =25760
3 crits 920 Average damage

3 Crit @ 1840 =5520
22 Nor@ 920 =20240



+ Crit rating total over 25 casts = 26100
4 crits 900 Average damage

4 Crit @ 1800 = 7200
21 Nor@ 900 = 18900


340 Damage Diffrence for the boss ( crit wins)


So by these examples we see that as time continues, + spell damage can be more effective for total Raid
damage, however for the quick Burn of a Boss, + crit rating is better.

I would also like to state that +spell damage usually comes as an "Up to # of spell damage" and not an exact
+ Spell damage, Although I just gave a pure + spell damage in this example,

So, as you can see, if you want to be Potent, + Crit Rating is better, honestly, how many times have you
casted 100 Frostbolts at a Boss.

And with this, I would like to State that since Fireball is 100% + spell Damage while Frostbolt is only 81.43% Along with the + Crit Damage Frost gives unlike Fire: Fire Mages should go + spell Damage over + Crit rating, while Frost Mages should go + Crit Rating over + Spell Damage if you have the choice to choose one over.

But in no way Do I mean Use A + 12 Crit Rating Gear over A + 60 Spell Damage gear. That would just be dumb.

I tried to make it as neat as possible with as little time that I'm willing to spend on here, since, all the replies I got before where just lame responses like the qouted one above.

As of Patch 2.3 Empowered Frostbolt and Fireball both increase coefficients in 2.3, pre 2.3 Improved Fireball and Frostbolt reduced coefficients, this no longer occurs.

Unfortunately, this statement is far from being true. You need 22.1 crit rating to get 1% crit at lvl 70. Your entire math falls hard if you adjust it with the proper value.

Athenalyn, the "up to" expression that Blizzard uses for +spell damage is only to reinforce that +spell damage is subject to varying coefficients. It does not mean that, on top of the coefficient, you may receive less benefit.

Furthermore...

4/25 = .16 = 16% crit rate, not 12% base or 14% that you even assumed. That's the problem here: you did not compute the average.

I see what you were trying to get at--that short-run variation can make crit better. But there's a reason it's variation: the average, the expected value, is still the same, regardless of how many casts you're looking at.

Manly's reminder only reinforces the established convention that crit is an inferior dps stat.

Do you mean that a person with +1000 spell dmg will have his fireball range from 700 to 1700 (not accounting for talents).

That's not how it happens :P

Although...that would be funny


The range of the dmg you get from 1 spell is pretty much the base range (ex: 700 to 900 or whatever it is for fireball, without accouting for talents and debuffs).


Oh and spell hit is still the most valuable stat till you reach the hit cap rating, so veiled noble topaz would be the way to go, and then go for +9spell dmg once you hit the cap.

Check this page out, it'll answer most your questions.
Sweet Informational Thread for Mages