Well, I am not delusional. I am fully aware that redoing my performance will not be an easy task. Although I did get ignites falling off, but regardless, high dps is certainly reproducible, but it really requires precision. On the other hand, trinketed COD is mindless, and will give 'garanteed' results. For mages, its a bit a crapshoot, in the sense that one fight I might push 1950-2200 dps non-coe (and maybe even less, if sufficiently unlucky). I think on average you will still prefer or should be doing COD over COE in the case of 1 mage. I mean, I cannot garantee to match the COD dps. I can get close, but I can't know for sure. I think the best compromise would be to COD, then switch to COE for the 'last' COD. For instance, on a ~3min fight, 2 COD + COE would be best, your fire mage can take advantage of execute-ish COE, and the warlock would have had to COA anyway if he knows COD will not have the time to tick, and COA is only good if you get those last ticks in (and debatably, not worth casting for destro locks).

So yeah, this is what I would recommend. If you have 1 fire / frost mage, COD while you know its gonna tick for sure, then switch to COE. For 2 mages, I think nobody can realistically debate that COE > COD.

And although I do agree with the general stigma that mages dont have any raid synergies, and don't really top meters (that is - we would be better be replaced by destro locks), keep in mind that since the venue of icy veins this puts mages on equal footing as destro locks, as long as they don't have COD and we get COE. Our strenght is that we have cooldowns whereas they don't. This is where our focus, as a player, should be put, on our distinctive advantages. I gueninely believe icy veins allows mages to scale better than locks (or rather, very slightly above), because it allows us to stack a considerate amount of cooldowns. However, as I admitted, it does assume a very very precise control of your play, something that is not easy to accomplish.

My request for a new mod (the bar) would greatly help to that end. I started working on an article about how to play your cooldowns properly, and there is a lot more than meets the eye.

So yeah, I fully agree with you that warlocks are still more desirable, but I think this is why we, as mages, should strive and play better than we ever did to repell the idea that mages are bad dps, which sadly seems like a recurring theme.

I tend to disagree with this, perhaps my guilds warlocks aren't up to snuff, however I regularly out dps them, in fact on tuesday in BT we switched groups with our locks just to see how they did with the elemental shaman. That night without my elemental shammy (so i had to change some gear around to reach the hit cap, losing some dmg/crit/haste) I still beat the warlocks in dmg on najentus, and was pulling ahead of them on gorefiend when I was smashed by a construct that someone had failed to kill.

Basically a well-geared/played mage can easily put out 2200+dps with CoE, and can push it up over 2400+, which is around the highest I have seen locks using CoD doing. Yesterday on rage our top3 DPS were all mages, me with 2300+ second mage right around 2100, third one sitting around 2050, sure we could use some raid synergy, but our DPS is no laughing matter these days, heroism +IV+skull+dmg trinket +molten fury range = ludicrous DPS.

Then you have our utility, polymorph makes trash easier, and when you think about it 75% of any raid instance you are doing is trash, maybe it sucks that our utility isn't useful on bosses but we do save alot of time and are very useful for trash. As long as our dps is on a similar level as warlocks there will always be a spot for 2-3 good mages in a raid.

Actually, with mage dps at its current level, and the failure of scaling that is Curse of Doom, i'm pretty sure that CoE is now more beneficial than CoD with even one mage.

Assuming CoD does 13.2k (which is average), and you doing 2.3k dps, elements being 10% more dps (230 dps), over 1 minute you will do 13800 extra damage thanks to CoE. Add a little bit more slightly for imp SB and trinkets, and subtracting heavily for being a 1.5 second cast when he could have been doing shadowbolts, and i must say that at our current level of dps Elements is better for the raid than Doom even with 1 mage.

Then again manly, what class doesn't change drastically depending on their luck on any given fight?

I agree completely all though the randomness of it is the problem, for those fights where you are doing the 2300 dps it is worth it, however when you get unlucky and only do 2k, it isn't worth it. Really you would need your dps increase from CoE to be large enough to out weigh the randomness of your dps, since CoD will be doing 230 dps pretty much guaranteed.

Manly, your idea for the addon seems good.

I could honestly see an addon like that working.

You would just have the slight problem of all the calculations that go into the addon, such as the number of members alive, and some serious syncing of dmg done.

I would expect all the members to have this addon, and then perhaps it would be possible.


Try checking up with the Author of 'Recount' since that seems to be the best 'ingame' addon for dmg done.

SWstats is great for WoWweb stats, but Recount seems to deal with ingame analysis better than Swstats.

Minor point, but unless I am highly mistaken (and I might be), you have to have CoD tick while ISB is up. The time you cast it is irrelevant as you have no idea whether ISB will be up 1 minute later.

Well, not all fights are tank and spank. I would have a hard time to imagine much above 2.3k dps on gurtogg given the necessity to do a full invis, and the fact that you probably need to use 1x gem and/or 1x mana potion. I think 2.1k (with coe) would be much closer to the expected average of high-end mage dps on gurtogg. Then again, this is fairly a tank and spank, but fights like archimonde (ignoring here decursing duties), you're pretty much garanteed that COD will be better than COE for 1 mage.

I think it all comes down to common sense. You know whether or not you can push 2+k dps consistently on a given fight, if you can, I think COE will 'equal' COD as far as the 1-mage-context goes.

Also Akuman, you should try timetodie. It simply checks the time taken for the boss hp to change. The algorithm is the simpliest thing ever. Yet, I think for all intent and purpose it is good enough, and definately does not require any much more advanced settings. All you need to do is slightly adjust the execute range. If we wanted to get something more accurate, then we would take into consideration the number of bloodlust activated. Not much more than that should be needed.

EDIT: ah I stand corrected then. I thought COD damage was calculated on cast (as far as debuffs go). question: do you activate the trinkets on cast or when it lands to get the extra bonus on COD ?

Good addon, especially now that our guild has seen the value of heroism at 20% for fire mages our 3 get it at ~25-30% (depending on when the mod says to) and go at it.

You do have a point too manly, Doom is of course better on a fight where you move. But with blink for doomfire and air burst, i find that i get a lot more dps time than other classes. That said, warlocks just have to be in range to cast doom once, but the converse is true, if they're out of range they can't cast doom and lose said time and raid dps by not having a curse up.

Also fights like Gurtogg Serpent-Coil the roughly on par dps trinket works wonders, both in the extra mana and the fact that it stacks like a double trinket.

Curse of Doom is considered a DoT effect, and gets its spellpower bonus on cast. Effects like Curse of Shadows and ISB affect individual ticks while they are up, but trinketing at this point has no benefit.

For example, if my corruption does 300 damage a tick normally, it will go 300-300-300-300 etc.

Say trinketing increases that to 400 a tick, or 400-400-400-400 etc.

If ISB is up for ticks 2 and 3, that changes to 300-360-360-300 etc, or if you trinket, 400-480-480-400 etc. The latter sequence will retain its 400 'base' damage even if the trinket expires right after the cast.

But given the minute timer for CoD to tick, its a coin toss as to whether ISB is up at that time.

This sort of gets into randomness of fight lengths, but in say a 7:45 fight, we have that 45 seconds off 'leeway' time between CoDs. On a 7:45 second Archimonde, there would have to be a lot of bad luck for me to get less than 7 curses off. So in that sense, I'd have 100% CoD 'uptime'. On an 8:00 fight, I probably don't cast that last CoD as its not a sure thing to tick.

I guess the theorycraft of this is rather hard to model; you'd probably have to estimate how much dps uptime the mage has to pick the better option. That said, on any given 10 minute fight, a lock will probably have 9 CoDs go off, and certainly no less than 8.

The bigger issue is threat. Our nukes get the same 10% threat reduction as yours, but damage from CoD does not get it. I'm not as geared as you guys, so its not an issue for me at the moment (the highest DPS I have done is 2108 on Kaz'rogal), but it can be with 4 pc t6.

I think overall our classes' dps is comparable, but warlocks come with the advantages of Soulstones, higher stamina, healthstones, and the lack of cooldown management simply makes us easier to play.

beta4Life: You might be viewing the "lifetap effect". While warlocks will undoubtably dance over the possibility of 3% extra hit and crit the 25mp5 difference between elemental and resto shamans, as well as the hugely potent mana tide mean that they might be better off having the resto. Every single lifetap is 3/5 of a shadowbolt they didn't cast and ele shamans start to become better than resto shamans only when they don't incur more lifetap's worth of DPS loss than their ToW provides.

Well...you can't really compare a resto vs an elemental shaman in terms of just what dps gain is given to the warlock/mage. You need to consider the damage done BY the elemental shaman as well. The damage done by a single persion really doesn't matter that much if it is a raid dps loss.

So lets go with the warlock + elemental sham + resto shaman. The highest dps I've seen bye an Elemental shaman is around 1750 on Teron. So lets assume around 2100 for a destro lock. Together, this team of 3 will do 3850.

Now for the mage + warlock + resto sham. With both the mage & warlock around 2100...you're losing 350 dps by bringing an elemental sham. A +39 dps increase on the mage OR warlock isn't going to make up for this. Even if you have 4 destro locks & an elemental shaman, it's still going to be a raid dps loss.

This is why you don't see that many elemental shaman in BT.

Elemental shamans don't have pushback protection (in a PVE context). So yeah their teron dps will be low (just like some other mage spec...)

Maybe folks have mathed it out and the result is the same, where an elemental is less total raid dps, but shouldn't that comparison be made assuming the whole group is gearing appropriately for that extra 3% +hit? Surely 3% hit is worth more than 7 dps of item budget.

I didn't include the hit because I was showing it's close, and assumed the benefit of increased spell damage by dropping 3% hit on your gear would yield again similar dps for the mage and warlock.

This wasn't about wether to bring the elemental shaman or not, but for who to put with the elemental and who to put with the resto. Granted if your elemental shaman is doing 200-300 dps under your mages/warlocks/hunters he probably isn't worth bringing, assuming your raid composition can actually replace a non-shaman healer with a resto shaman and the elemental shaman with a mage/lock/hunter. In my guild the elemental shaman is just an amazing player and gets very high dps consistently, so he doesn't meet the threshhold of elemental shaman not being worth bringing. For us it's more about who to put with him over who.

That said, I'd love to see numbers though of elemental shaman dps at similar gear levels and wether his dps increase to his group via totem of wrath is worth the loss of personal dps + mana returns. Then again does anyone really raid with 4 shamans in a raid with 3-4 of them being resto? Since shamans are big dps buffs regardless of spec, if you're min maxing why would you not bring 4 shamans of whatever spec? In that case (where you agree max dps requires a shaman in every group except tank group) the spec choices for the shamans isn't only about maximizing dps, it's also about how many healers you actually want in the raid and of what classes.

For example, while a resto shaman + another dps - holy priest for example may be more dps than elemental shaman + holy priest, the healing in your raid may (or may not...) become suboptimal as a result.

As a mage in top gear...you're going to have to really try to get to where you can use 3% more hit. Sure it's possible, but I'm at 170 hit and the only item I have on specifically for the hit is the Belt of Blasting. I would only gain 5 damage from wearing the noose. The only real way is to use Zhar'doom.

As for a lock, it is easier I'll give you that...but I question the logic of doing this. What happens if that ele sham can't raid a night...or quits wow. Sure a mage can throw on a few pieces to get to 164 easily...but a lock would have to re-gem himself or do much lower dmg.

Manly:

I forgot about the pushback protection of an ele sham...but I'm not seeing anything better on Rage.

If someone has a valid parse of an ele shaman doing 1800+ dmg, i'd love to see it.

Aiming for not swapping people on farm content is cool, as all that really matters is how fast it's cleared and adding dps doesn't help if it costs wasting time getting people swapped. But when progressing I bet you'd take the best available. Not to mention even in the "average" raid, it's still not clear-cut wether you should have the mages with an elemental+sp and warlocks with resto+sp or the other way around. Even with a given raid group maximizing dps by party setup is not simple since things are so close. Add pushback elements to a fight and it's even more complicated if you try give dps casters conc auras.

Warlocks receive larger amounts of spell hit on their Tier 6 sets than mages do. Assuming T6 or equivalent in most slots you're not going to lose a substantial amount of DPS from having to wear, say Ring of Captured Storms in place of Ring of Ancient Knowledge, or as you mentioned, Belt of Blasting vs Anetheron's Noose. Using my own gear as an example, I could get up to 202 hit without dropping any appreciable amount of DPS, and that isn't factoring in that warlocks get +hit from a few pieces that mages generally don't (Nethervoid Cloak, Translucent Spellthread Necklace) or the inherent gap in +hit from mage vs. lock T6 (or that I don't have T6 chest because Illidan loves the Conqueror tokens in my guild). The bottom line is that as a general rule, I think it's difficult to not hit cap yourself in T6 gear, and as a result, Totem of Wrath becomes less and less valuable as you approach "perfect" gear.

This is sharp contrast to Enhancement shamans, who give fantastic group buffs at any level of gear, and make me wish Elemental shamans had some sort of scaling buff to match their Enhancement counterparts. That's entirely off-subject, though.

As a sidenote, however, I've had great success on RoS (and to a lesser extent, Gurtogg) with splitting up our usual caster group and creating two groups of caster/caster/paladin/priest/shaman, where the caster can be a mage or lock, the priest can be shadow or holy, and the shaman can be elemental or resto. It's a bit difficult to quantify via WWS because mage DPS (in my experience) tends to vary wildly per person and per week on RoS, mostly related to who mashes Spellsteal the fastest in p2 and who's a bit luckier with crits in p3, but the net result is that the majority of the time, there isn't an appreciable gap in DPS between the two groups, and both groups as a whole seem to perform favorably against not having the Concentration Aura.

Edit: grammars.

Well, you can't use akama or ros for any dps measurements. The results will vary far too widely.

I know, RoS is just the only example of a fight where Concentration Aura is going to always be useful, rather than situationally so.

I try to draw a line on logical approaches (What will actually benefit the raid as a whole, instead of minor details that would just "rearrange the dps" or give a minor boost. If the content was a lot harder I guess it would give us incentives to min/max a lot more. But unfortunately the content has a rather modest difficulty lvl.


Here is our situation atm (I think this is the situation in most BT/Hy guilds).

On trash, one lock always put up CoS. CoE is never up because the other two locks cant be arsed. I know this issue is widespread and Ive even heard it has caused some drama in a few guilds (Locks refusing to put up CoE on trash). Locks getting kicked for being slackers. But personally I haven't bothered making an issue out of it.

I'm curious about your view on this. I feel that asking locks to put CoE on trash is going too far.


As for curses in cases where only 1 fire mage; Ive discussed this with one of the locks. As far as I know "agony" will give him an average 8% boost (Compared to the 10% from CoE) so he ignores CoE automatically when only 1 fire mage.

If my estimate of 0-2% difference in DPS is correct I don't feel like making an issue out of it. It would basically be irrelevant whether the lock did his own dmg curses or put up CoE.

The only annoying thing about this issue. Locks can smell if a mage has respecced from 5 miles away;p As soon as one mage want to experiment with arcane (We only take 2 mages to raid) it is basically screwing the fire mage out of CoE.

If he can spare a global cooldown for agony, he can spare a global cooldown for CoE. The only reason to not CoE on trash is if the total damage done by mages to that mob until it dies is lower than 3/5 of the average shadowbolt damage. Since full duration CoA isn't better than CoE with the raid setup you're probably running with, if it's worth it to cast CoA it's definitely worth it to cast CoE isntead.