Copernicus

Assuming a deep-fire build and both Arcane Explosion and Flamestrike are at the cap, how much crit rating do I need to make Flamestrike better DPS than Arcane Explosion?

 

Kavan

I know Arcane is currently not en vogue but I've decided to report on my findings regarding the incoming 2.4 changes for anyone that's still Arcane for whatever reason. The findings are based on 4T5+ gear level.

So far AP was restricted to AB spam only with IV used on AB cycle. Change to global cooldown changes this and opens more options for stacking cooldowns. Basically it comes down to using all cooldowns on AB spam, the only difference is about which cooldowns to stack. At 0 haste level it's benefitial to stack both IV and AP on heroism at the same time. At 80+ haste rating the benefits of stacking AP and IV during heroism are countered by GCD clipping at which point only AP should be used during heroism. Outside heroism stacking AP and IV is always benefitial.

Overall damage increase compared to 2.3.2 is in the 1.5-2% range. Haste obviously gained in value but it is only as good as crit. Spell damage and Intellect are still the best stats for deep arcane IV build.

 

Etherealz

Assume 1400 spell damage and AOE capped.
77 dps flamestrike dot per target
10 targets (capped)
Let C be untalented Crit%asdecimal
Let H be haste%asdecimal
Assume 3/3 Imp flamestrike with deep fire build
Flamestrike cap = 7830
Arcane explosion cap = 6730

Solve for 2.4 -
Flamestrike Dps + Flamestrike dot dps = Arcane explosion dps

(7830)*(1 + 1.1*(C+0.24))/(3/(1 + Min(H, 2)) + 770 = 6730*(1 + 0.5*C)/(1.5/(1 + Min(H, 0.5))

With less than 50% overall haste this can be simplified to

7830*(1 + 1.1*(C+0.24))/(3/(1+H)) + 770 = 6730*(1 + 0.5*C)/(1.5/(1+H))
7830*(1 + 1.1*(C+0.24)) + 2310/(1+H) = 13460*(1 + 0.5*C)

I think it can be seen here that before 50% haste all aditional haste is more beneficial to AE given that the flamestrike dot is not changed. So I am going to solve for 0% haste.

10821.12 + 8613C = 13460 + 6730c
c = 1.40

Over 100% crit is needed - therefore flamestrike as of 2.4 will never be more DPS than arcane explosion when less than 50% haste is active - regardless of spec.

For pure curiosity let's assume you would stack all haste cooldowns - with a haste set equipped.

Haste from gear (the works) + ashtoungue trinket + activated skull = 699
Bloodlust and Icy veins added in (unfortunately now I need to solve H the way I implemented my equation)

(1+ 0.4435)*1.3*1.2 -1 = H = 1.25186

Solve for original equation
-0.47 = c

Obviously then with all that haste up there is no crit % making flamestrike worse dps.

The crossover point then would be easier to determine via a constant crit% with haste as the variable
Let's assume 25% base crit
Since I've already determined haste must be > 50% the equation can now be written

(7830)*(1 + 1.1*(0.49))/(3/(1+H)) + 770 = 6730*(1 + 0.125)
H = 0.69

Realistically lust wouldn't be popped so -
(1+gearhaste)*1.2 -1 = H = 0.69
gearhaste = 0.408 which is not possible without a skull of gul'dan.

I conclude - you need bloodlust and icy veins popped before flamestrike becomes better dps than AE in 2.4 as deep fire on a realistic scenerio. Spreading out your cooldowns so as not to exceed 50% haste ultimately would provide better dps via AE however.

 

galzohar

If those damage caps are correct (and are pre-crit) than on a capped scenario arcane explosion is also much more mana efficient with 30% crit, even counting the fact AE would only have 21% crit, and master of elements and +15% talent for flamestrike. Nothing I wouldn't expect with the 3s cast spell having not much more of a cap than the instant ;p

I'm not sure about flamestrike and AE coefficients though to check for non-capped situations though.

 

xiaoxin21

Has anyone measured the travel speed of ice lance? With the change in gcd I would think there might be a chance for a dbl icelance shatter with heroism and icy veins? Not too sure if they calculate the bonus damage after the icelance left your hand or when it hits.

 

alvinrod

Unless things have changed recently, I believe that the damage and whether the spell crits or not is calculated at the time of spell cast instead of impact.

 

spiderella

I think the question is whether you can lower the GCD to a point where you can launch a second lance before the first one hits (or crits). I don't know if it's possible to have reactions quick enough to both:

- Not automatically cast a second lance (and incur GCD)
- Cast a second lance after noting that the first one hasn't broken the freeze on the current target *without* losing a few split seconds react to the first one hitting.

If a hasted GCD guarantees a target is still frozen as the second lance is cast, this could actually be a pretty trick-y buff against anything that can be frozen.

 

Vhad

I doubt it'd be possible for several reasons. Frostbolts traveltime was just around 1 second unless I'm mistaken, and we all know you can icelance hit before frostbolt hits this means you'd have to get the GCD to be less than 1 second which is impossible.

What!?

 

Alvira

Just the haste change of allowing it to go as low as 1 second could be a big boost for arcane relative to other specs. Right now, arcane gains the least from haste because arcane blast spam is already at 1.5 seconds. While other specs like fire or frost all gain from haste. So, bloodlust, battle drums and haste gear has a large impact on the DPS of the other specs.

Come next patch, Arcane will now at least scale as well in the haste department compared to other specs. So, while the full chagnes aren't out yet, at least in this area, it seems like a bigger (and much needed) buff to arcane.

 

Jarlyn

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but assuming some passive haste, with any combination of Skull, Icy Veins, Bloodlust, and Drums active, you're still going to run right back into the GCD with AB spam (or instants, or any other 1.5s cast). The lowered GCD will give Arcane some leeway with haste, of course, but only marginally so, since Arcane had no room to expand to begin with. It will still fall way short of haste scaling in regards to Fire and Frost, though, and if anything the lowered GCD should only further exacerbate one of the primary issues with Arcane, mana consumption. 1.0s AB spam would completely obliterate your mana pool.

To my mind, speaking in terms of boss DPS, the GCD haste seems most likely to affect Frost, since fully hasted frostbolts were the most prone to dipping under the GCD. A lowered GCD should bring the "burst" capabilities of Frost more in line with Fire, since Frost should no longer be subject to clipped bolts.

 

Alvira

1.5 seconds to 1 second is a lot of leeway. You need a fair amount of haste rating to bring it down by 0.5 seconds. In any case, at least it allows for some amount of haste rating scaling for arcane. Previously, any amount of haste rating or increase was essentially wasted during AB spam. Now, you can stack some without that worry.

 

Dryssa

I'm curious about how the new spell haste mechanic will affect the possibility of a Scorch build, especially one using the Ashtongue trinket. How would its potential DPS compare to that of the current Fireball w/ Icy Veins build? And how much would haste be valued?

 

Ztorm

Even with the haste buff, scorch will lag far behind deep fire builds because fireballs just scale much better than scorch.

 

Jarlyn

I was able to get up to Dr. Boom to do some testing on 1.5s spells assuming the 2.4 1.0s GCD.

Using only Ring of Ancient Knowledge + Bracers of Nimble Thought for passive haste, I was able to get my scorches (being identical in cast time to ramped up AB) to around 1.07s using only Skull + Icy Veins. I don't have a Zhar'doom, but throwing on miscellaneous haste pieces I had (Supremus belt, Zul'Jin neck) I was able to get down to 1.03-1.04s on my spells. Even with that gear, I was still using less haste than what I would consider an "ideal" haste setup (Zhar'doom + Mana Attuned Band), so ultimately, reaching the GCD using only Skull + IV is quite possible.

Which means that Arcane (and scorch) is going to afford you very little room to work with in terms of haste, less even than Frost currently has, before you hit the GCD. Using drums or adding in Bloodlust would knock you well under 1.0s.

As far Scorch spam being viable, its coefficient simply isn't large enough to compete against Fireball. My WWS logs now indicate that it takes more than 3 Scorches to equal a single fireball, so even assuming 100% uptime on AToI, three 1.0s Scorches is still less than damage than one Fireball. And then there's the problems I just mentioned with cooldown stacking running into the GCD, which is where Fireball really shines right now.

 

◊ manly

What makes scorch suck so much is not related with its cast time, its all about the lack of talents that boost it further. Empowered fireball power cannot be denied, particularly as your gear gets better. This alone is too much to be made up for.

If you can't find a way to make scorch gain 10% more dps from somewhere that isn't available for other spells/specs, then I'm afraid there is no possible way to ever make this works. As it is, scorch has a worse DPS and DPM than fireball on every competitive mage spec that I know of.

What caps [Ashtongue Talisman of Insight] is mostly cast-time, not crit rate. I know that is what you said, but I just wanted to re-iterate. 33/28/0 can easily get 50% scorch crit rates, which would indeed make the ashtongue trinket solid in such a build. Problem is, skipping icy veins is too much to be outdone.

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Alvira

So, just spread out your cooldowns. Its still a much bigger buff to arcane than to fire and frost which is receiving the full benefit of haste scaling at this point while arcane isn't.

Imagine, for an arcane heavy, and geared mage, who can spam AB say 70% of the fight. Say 50% of those are at 1.5 seconds. Now reduce that to 1 second. His DPS during those 50% just sent up by one third. If he has the mana for it, he will be doing one third more damage during that time. That's a lot. Key issue would more of whether there is the mana avialable to sustain that kind of arcane blast spam.

 

Pintofbrew

Alvira, you make false assumptions. You simply can not "say 70% AB" and then "say 50% of those are 1.0sec". How do you get from 1.5 to 1.0? If you're using cooldowns, said cooldowns will not total 35% of the fight. Even so, a poster above proved you would not be talking of simpy Skull/IV, but plenty of passive haste. If you are talking passive haste, then the 1.5 isn't viable.

You're used to looking at arcane with 0 haste and now somehow think that some haste -not- being useless means it's fantastic. It isn't. "his dps sent up by one third". Big deal, any other spec with that much haste would partake of exactly the same buff, only if it was Fire it would have Combustion and Flame Cap as well as Molten Fury in the mix, where as arcane can only show AP to stack with this mythically huge haste.

This all is before one looks at the grossely inadequate DPM of arcane; Mana management has always been the number-one bane of the spec and it has just gained the potential to get much much worse; can you even begin to immagine 70% AB time with haste? Mage armor, spirit spec, r-shaman, SP, chain-pott, chain-gem/serpentcoil-braid will not even sustain that madness without evocation. The "Mage cooldown management" thread is there to prove that for mages, the devil's in the details. The more potential we waste on these minor swaps the more the dps benefit from the superior spell dwindles. What can stand up to a quartet of 10k fireballs at the end of the fight?

 

Alvira

Err, I am not as good a maths person as the others, so I will leave the math to them. But to me, its a bigger buff to arcane than to fire or frost (which already benefit from haste). So, it brings arcane dps up relative to fire and frost. Would it make arcane better? equal? still worse? I don't know. But it certainly buffs arcane DPS. Saying it doesn't is similar to saying that haste does nothing to frost or fire DPS, when it clearly does help.

 

Pintofbrew

What was keeping arcane from not sucking was not it's irrelevance towards haste, it was and still is terrible scaling, small crits, horrific mana efficiency and problematic reliance on range/pushback/rotations/mana sources. These do not change and neither does the fact that haste (to an extent) is not irrelevant any more make arcane competitive enough to come realistically close to either of the two current specs.

Yes arcane is buffed, (well, technically "un-nerfed" if you will) but by making a shit spec into a terrible spec nothing has changed.

As was mentioned before, the most signifficant impact the haste/GCD change will have will be to AE DPS as IV-AE will potentially become quite devastating, possibly surpassing the locks SoC.

I see plenty of scope for 13/0/48 spec to gain a better foothold in the raiding scheme of things.

 

Etherealz

The buff to arcane is notable compared to frost or fire given that you had to gimp some of your gear choices before the change because haste just wasn't that good for the AB rotation. However just like every other spec you are forgoing other stats to gain said haste - so the buff is not just "my cast is x% faster" sort of buff, but being able to use some of the better items more effectively IS a buff to arcane.

With that said - arcane will benefit a lot more from bloodlust and icy veins now. Previously one would switch to AM spam or frostbolt spam during such haste effects - AM / frostbolt spam by it's nature is less dps than arcane blast - however it became slightly better obviously with the haste that AB spam saw no benefit from. The reduction of the global cooldown will change that rotation - however, and I haven't seen the new numbers modeled yet but, I don't believe it is enough to be competitive with fire on a consistant basis. (even without COE)

 

andastra

Here's the thing with arcane. If you can do, for example, AB spam 70% of the fight, that means you are having mana problems. Anything below 100% AB spam means you are having mana problems. Allowing lower than 1.5s casts and using it means that you will have to use your lower dps rotation for a larger % of the fight.

I don't think that the dps increase of AB spam versus AB+something else rotation outweighs the dpm loss. Unless you can do 100% AB spam and end the fight with lots of mana to spare currently, the change won't do a thing for you.

 

galzohar

Even without empowered fireballs fireball gets more dps per spell damage than scorch.
Let's clarify by looking at the coefficient per second (how much of your spell damage is applied every second, ignoring % modifiers as they apply to both spells equally):

Scorch: 1.5/3.5 coefficient, 1/3.5=~0.285 per second. Even if the extra 4% crit would be +4% DPS (in reality quite a bit less than that) you'd have 0.296 per second.
Untalented fireball: 3.5/3.5=1 coefficient, 1/3.5=~0.285 per second.
Improved fireball: Same coefficient, but 1/3-~0.333 per second.
Empowered fireball: 1.15 coefficient, 1.15/3=~0.383 per second.

As you can see scorch scales much slower than fireball. Not to mention they start out with fireball being higher DPS. So at any gear level if you have improved fireball it will outDPS scorch by a noticeable amount. Empowered fireballs just makes it even better. Haste not helping scroch makes fireball even better, but taking out that factor in 2.4 isn't going to save scorch, because as you can see, scroch sucks anyway.

 

Stein

A couple of points:

1) I think almost everything said by the premier posters in this thread implies full T6 gear level. That's not the case for a lot of people. in the 2/5 T5 to 3/5 T6 gear range, 40/0/21 has a home.

2) The arcane haste un-nerf is significant for people in that progression range. More ABs can fit within AP/trinket times. AB has always been about throttling mana consumption based on ever changing variables. We now have a sixth gear. That's not a bad thing.

 

Copernicus

Even in that gear and fight range, arcane just doesn't work as well as deep fire or deep frost.

Drawbacks of deep arcane-
* 30 yard range
* No pushback prevention
* Strict rotation that has to be kept. If it's broken, it's a large DPS loss.
* Heavy mana requirements forcing the mage into a shadow priest group and reliant on the shadow priest to be alive and DPSing 100% of the time.
* Worse scaling with crit rating, hit rating, and damage.

Advantages-
* Better AE
* Better burst damage if the mana pool can keep up and the mob isn't sub-20%.

---

Pre-2.2 I was deep arcane using an AB/AM/Scorch rotation. From what I remember back then, it was a barely viable spec due to the strange DPS requirements of fights that I was in (Kael Phase 2 AE spam and early MH/BT bosses featured some very short boss fights and heavy AE requirements). Deep fire was competitive with that spec, but a lot of it came down to fight length and the amount of mana the arcane mage could gain. I remember thinking that I needed a Shadow Priest AND a Resto Shaman/Ret Paladin to match or exceed the possible DPS of a deep fire build.

Then 2.2 came out and it was all Arcane Missiles spam.

Then 2.3 came out and AM was dead and Fireball/Frostbolt weren't getting a damage tax anymore. So Fire had a clear advantage over Arcane in most circumstances when it came to raw damage. In addition, it was just a more forgiving spec. Deep arcane, in some circumstances, might be the higher-DPS spec than deep fire. But in most cases, it isn't. In addition, it requires more support and more effort to fail to match the standard of deep fire. It's just a spec that requires a lot of effort to master for little to negative gain.

 

◊ manly

I'm sorry, but the tired old argument about arcane 'burst' dps is really really outdated. Yet, I see it every once in a while. Arcane power is +30% dmg for 15s every 3min, whereas WE is +35-40% dmg for 45s every 3min. Firespec has no real 'burst' per-se, but you can heavily stack on execute range and take advantage of molten fury.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.