The largest argument is simply that most trash mobs don't live long enough for it to matter. The difference between CoE and CoA is irrelevant when the mob barely lives long enough for me to get a full stack of scorches on it, much less cycle through my cooldowns. I could spec 20/20/21 and it'd look like passable dps on trash (exaggerating, but not a lot).

I don't understand the obsession with clearing T6 content super-fast though. I'm all for an efficient raid that moves quickly through things with minimal deaths/wiping, don't get me wrong, but for my guild and I imagine most other Illidan farming guilds, it will take us 2 days to clear our content. We clear BT in one night, we clear Hyjal on the next night, and it's not realistic to speed either up to the point that they could be done in one day. I'm perfectly content to have a relaxed raid where people can enjoy themselves without being stressed about moving as quickly as possible. If I feel like we're slacking or underperforming, then yeah, I'll get on people about it and move us back on track, but I just don't see need to be hyper-concerned about clearing in record times when there's absolutely zero pressure to do so.

I'm going to try to break down the details on this, I've failed at math on these forums before . . .

Spell Power is 1/4 more damage on an AE crit compared to untalented. Talents will increase crit%, which is notable - Arcane Instability 3%, Arcane Impact 6%, Arcane Mind 2-3%, Clearcasting is 3%. I think with this crit it's reasonable to say crit chance with AE could be around 33%, so 1/3rd will do 1/4th more damage, so the sum of the additional +crit (14-15%) and better crit modifier (spamming AE, ~8%) is something like 23% more damage accounting from pure AE spam.

Relative to deep fire, Playing with Fire is 3% crit that an arcane spec wouldn't have, also Molten Fury will let one hit the AE cap but not exceed it (source: WoW forums) which I'd be hard pressed to quantify, but certainly not worth more than a percent or two.

I was surprised at how this adds up, I would've expected it to be a lesser advantage. Of course a WWS would be better than laying the numbers out as the collective significance of other factors in a Hyjal trash clear dwarf the relative merits of AE spam w/ differing mage specs.

I admire your stamina if you can focus 100% of the time for 4 hours. I know I can't.

When you really think about it, reading these forums in order to clear BT/hyjal faster once they're on farm is probably more of a waste of time than just not reading the forums and doing the runs slower.

Not that I'm saying these forums are useless, since I bet many guilds would take a LOT more time to down new bosses without these forums and many would not be as useful on bosses (see: new bosses). It's definitely a waste of time, though, to discuss what's the best way of farming, as discussing+farming fast is generally a longer time than just farming slow. Also you will never reach an agreement to the fastest way of clearing trash because you're not even close to agreeing on what actually matters on the trash and makes it faster. You can't maximize speed at doing something when you can't even decide on all the factors that affect that thing you're trying to do fast.

I believe you've missed the entire point of the class mechanic forums. It is not how to clear bt faster, but how to play your class to the best it can be played and out perform other equally geared people of the same class. The challenege is not to shave 30 seconds off Teron...but to maximize the amount of dps you do. Now if you do not care about competing against other people, don't read the forums.

Well to get this a bit back on topic towards boss dps , I had a pretty solid raid last night.

Started out with all stars aligning on Rage (had coe) not gonna post the number as it was pretty much a one time thing but uh yea it was amazing (it's in the wws)

Then did 2166dps (no coe) on kaz this one shocked me as i wear SR cape, Mage Armor no destro pots.

Then for Teron 2267dps (no coe) which was my personal goal to beat manlys 2189 no coe, soooo manly go do more dps so i have something to strive for.

wws here WWS Loading...

Group was kinda same as last time, Ele Shammy, Moonkin, SP, 2 mages.

Well my gear is still not 100% optimum either I need Anetheron's Noose, small difference but still an upgrade. Then I still need to try the haste route, need a Zhardoom none have dropped and first 1 is accounted for possibly first 2 before i even get to dabble with it.

And yea RNG in this case basically made the moonkin no difference, u had 45% crit on yours to 47% crit on mine.
But I did have the better partial resist rate, but again RNG at it's finest.

And my dps is no place near capped at the current point in time IMO wether it's 20-30dps increases or more but i can still fine tune, I capped out pre 2.3 i couldn't do any more, but now dps will only improve and the biggest dps increase to come is when our RDPS gets up more and more, we shoulda had our first sub 3min kill but someone failed and we had some constructs in raid and 3 people got atropgy.
If we some how manage to get in the 2:30 range for RDPS everyones dps should go up just from the greater time under trinkets/hero.

What you need to change is mostly get a ring of ancient knowledge over captured storms. Swapping blasting to anetheron's noose will not really change things much, all you gain realistically is more stats (and some crit from the int, but again, very minor). I know your gear isn't optimal either, but I am under the impression mine was less optimum. In any case, all I need now is mana attuned band, should the RNG gods decide to be merciful.

And also I disagree with being damage capped. Maybe from a gear perspective, but from a play perspective I believe there always is something to improve upon. I know I've never had a single fight that I was unable to remember anything I did wrong. There's always something suboptimal, which you learn over time to best manage.

I have a mana attuned band and will prolly snag a ring of ancient knowledge, not a huge fan of haste so passed on the first bunch of them.

As for second paragraph not sure if your agreeing with me which i think you are or misread what i wrote cause of my 2.3 comment.

I concur my dps currenlty is not capped and room for improvement either in gear/or play style

pre2.3 Is when i felt i was capped, maybe it was gear, or just how gimped mages were lol.

I believe that icy veins has really made a huge difference. I think the net effect of icy veins is that it makes proper cooldown stacking particularly apparent. Before 2.3.2 (or before icy veins if you prefer), proper cooldown timing had a much more minor impact on your dps. As such, the variance in top mage parses was mostly meaningless (ie: 2000-2050 dps, and once upon a time 2100-ish). Nowadays I think mages started picking up on the concept of proper cooldown stacking, which I kinda started in a way in quite a few of my posts. Now mages have noticed that hey I'm getting a huge dps boost form icy veins, and the only plausible explanation seems to be proper cooldown stacking -- or proper play if you prefer.

There is lots of room for min/maxing. And pre 2.3.2 those min/maxing were mostly not apparent (in WWS) because there wasnt a key spell that would greatly affects the numbers as much as we have now. Thus, it gave the 'false' impression we were damage capped.

EDIT: I know this is somewhat late, but keep in mind the RNG has a much bigger impact on DPS. Notably, the timing of crits (during cooldowns) will have a huge impact on numbers. This is not something that is easily seen in WWS. Also, you can get lucky in the fireball damage range, which also is not easy to see. Looking through the resists, partial resists, and crit rate will give a good idea, but it also only shows some of it. Unfortunately I don't think it can be settled out in any meaningful way. I think what matters is honing personal play.

Just on a side note, since your fights go so short your dps variance would be huge from crits alone! 30% crit would cause [(1-crit)*crit/N]^0.5 deviation in your crit chance, and similar deviation in your dps. 5 minutes of non-stop fireballing with 45% crit will have almost 5% deviation in crit chance, so having your average 2000 dps go 1900 1 fight and 2100 the other is very very likely, and if your fights are shorter it only gets bigger. Add in other random factors and you only increase the deviation/variance (not by much though).

Haste bracers >> Cuffs aswell right?Playing your CD's properly makes HUGE diference , this week i was on 2K dps but i played my IV just 20secs too late , also bloodlust was bad(hardly got any <20%) and SP got ghosts(no flamecap/destro pot) so it really wasn't best conditions.It's kind of hard to time your cd's with tanks aggro/mana/RDPS

Well you won't have PI specced priest lol

Yeah, i wish some of our priests would spec PI!

It's just not sensible for holy priests to go deep enough into Discipline to pick up PI. It's certainly not "something we all need to aim for" (especially given that in a substantial percentage of raids, the number of fire mages will be greater than the number of holy/disc priests). It's about as reasonable as asking a second lock to forgo destruction and go deep aff. so you can have maledicted CoE.

To bad you're not a troll, could of had a 30% berserking and hit 1.2s fireballs, switch to 2.6s Pyroblasts and crit for 13k. It's fun when that all lines up and Fireballing is a dps loss.

Do you really think Blizzard will tune Sunwell such that you won't be able to pass whatever arbitrary enrage timers are there without PIs consistently handed out to mages? If they do, wouldn't it be just as effective to replace all your mages with warlocks, hunters or rogues (especially as there will no doubt be the token boss with immunity to mage school x in there somewhere)?

Consider also, depending on how healer-light you typically run, that requiring one or more of your holy priests to pick up PI may mean that you need to slot an extra healer to pick up the slack (especially if there's lots of the sort of splash damage that CoH is excellent at mopping up, and doubly so if you aren't lucky enough to run with 2 - 3 resto shaman).

I'm all for min-maxing, but there are limits!

I'm curious, given 2 destros and 1 affli, three mages all fire, would it not be superior RDPS for one of the destros to go affli for Mal-COE if the mages were all in the 2k DPS region? I mean the 2.7% difference is bound to be rather gloriously huge with all this cooldown stacking going on...

Or at the very least, for all the poor gentlemen on non-CoE raids, would it be so much to ask to get a CoE at >20% instead of the damned CoD/CoA? Clearly to make overall 2100 DPS, when in non-molten fury range a mage makes signifficantly less can only mean a 30-50sec CoE at the start of MF range (when we burn CDs) would blow heads off.

Well, about Discipline Priest and PI: You should always have one in raid, not so much for PI, but rather for (Improved) Spirit for all your raid and Pain Suppression. The latter especially is very useful to deal with predictable burst damage when learning an encounter. Just think of Fel Rage, Enrage at RoS, Dark Barrage, Enrage on Illidan and so on - and even on Mages/Warlocks when we are doing AoE. Of course, I am assuming you usually have more than one holy priest in your raids. Full Holy with CoH + T6 gear is probably the most potent healer at the moment.

In our raid we usually give PI to the best shadow priest, not because he does most damage (he still does very good damage still) but because it will yield higher mana and health returns from VT/VE for himself and his group.

I agree with all you said. If theres one healing priest in the raid, I would want them to be COH - its just such an invaluable spell. If theres 2, then DS/PI is fine for the other.

I've got one quick question about item stat depreciation, specifically haste. I was wondering how valuable my Skull of Gul'dan will be in the next expansion - namely how much blizzard will depreciate the value of haste rating to achieve +1% haste at lvl 80. If I recall, 1% from lvl 60->70 was:

8 hit -> 13 hit
14 crit -> 22 crit

What pattern are we likely to see when we get to level 80 with hit/crit - Is it likely to follow the same % devaluation? If 1% is 16 haste now at 70, would it be reasonably accurate to assume ~27 haste for 1% at level 80?

(My numbers might be a little off, but I hope the point is clear - Ill leave the serious maths for others ;P )

In the grand scheme of things it won't matter. You put the best items you have in every slot. The skull might be your best one one given time, or become outclassed. There is no way to know how well itemised the trinkets in the next dungeons will be.

No it wouldn't, as affliction dps is downright miserable. You're looking at a 600-800 dps loss for that Maledicted CoE.


What I could fathom, though, is 2 locks 'switching' the maledicted CoS to a maledicted CoE at the 20% mark. You lose 2 globals and 2.7% of your shadow DPS (4 users) and gain 2.7% of fire dps.