I completely disagree with this - somehow warlocks are balanced with 200% instantaneous crits along with a 20% bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt, this gives them 240% crits on subsequent crits, and no one is complaining that Warlocks do overpowered burst damage in pvp.
I would argue that the reason ignite is 210% helps to make Fire Mage crit benefit somewhat more comparable to Warlocks, if you just removed it and made it 200% straight up, that would simply be worse in every way, which makes no sense.
It seems to me that you could re-implement Ignite as an instantaneous seperate-damage proc and it would not be especially unbalanced. It isn't like Fire Mages are tearing up the pvp statistics in the first place, this change would make their burst damage a little scarier, but so what? Frost would still have more reliable and better burst in terms of Shatter Combo anyway.
Well, technically you could argue up to a point that if ISB was already up that it remained 200% crit multiplier all along. I don't think we can draw any direct parallels comparing classes. I think that, arcane/fire aside, PVP would be fine would the ignite damage not be delayed but integral part of the damage. With this said, I do agree that arcane/fire has some burst potential that would be indeed quite absurd.
However, you could also make combustion turn the 'old ignite' into a direct damage component, which would make arcane/fire unaffected. In other words, without combustion you get the old style ignite, with combustion all your crits will do the damage directly.
As for other real 'solutions' to fix this issue, I am totally unsure. Moving down to one tick would not remove the bug (just make it harder to reproduce, but give twice the efficiency).
---- EDIT: yeah well the combustion idea is nice, but it also means you could do rolling ignites by not speccing in combustion. Maybe do it for 1/5+ emp. fireball?
Well, technically you could argue up to a point that if ISB was already up that it remained 200% crit multiplier all along. I don't think we can draw any direct parallels comparing classes. I think that, arcane/fire aside, PVP would be fine would the ignite damage not be delayed but integral part of the damage. With this said, I do agree that arcane/fire has some burst potential that would be indeed quite absurd.
However, you could also make combustion turn the 'old ignite' into a direct damage component, which would make arcane/fire unaffected. In other words, without combustion you get the old style ignite, with combustion all your crits will do the damage directly.
As for other real 'solutions' to fix this issue, I am totally unsure. Moving down to one tick would not remove the bug (just make it harder to reproduce, but give twice the efficiency).
---- EDIT: yeah well the combustion idea is nice, but it also means you could do rolling ignites by not speccing in combustion. Maybe do it for 1/5+ emp. fireball?
How about making Ignite 175%(+spell power becomes 200, vs 225% for frost) and then making Empowered Fireball add 7% per rank for a final 210% crit multiplier if you go fully into Fire.
That solves the problem, gives deep fire a boost in pvp for burst damage, and leaves arcane/fire about the same - it gains a very small amount of burst(200% crits from 175%), but loses the ignite dot damage completely. Given that it currently is not the dominant pvp spec, that seems reasonable, and deep fire could absolutely use the increased burst damage since it lacks AP and PoM Pyro, and Combustion is terrible in pvp.
The nicest thing about this solution is it's all accomplished with existing code, no new code would need to be written to just alter our crit modifier with two separate talents, and the entire mess that Ignite is goes away.
I would in fact, go so far as to argue that it might be fair to drop Ignite down to 3 talent points this way, freeing up 2 points for utility/pvp talents in normal pve builds, which would be handy.
Last edited by Sancus : 05/07/08 at 9:55 PM.
<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl
The only reason you saw it tick off the second ignite tick vs the first one was because the fireball on the first ignite didn't crit. Ignite ticks in 2s intervals after it's been applied, so if I would have waited for the second ignite dot PURPOSELY to try and get rolling ignite effect, I would have completely missed 1 fireball's worth of damage. In order to get it to go only off the second ignite, you'd have to be at 2.09s fireball+2s to get it on the second rather than the first, which is a significant dps loss as well as pointless.
I'm not saying don't cast while "waiting" for the second ignite. I'm saying cast two fireballs during the time ignite is up, having the second one crit with the second ignite tick to gain a rolling ignite. The 2.09s fireball rolling ignites work because 2.09s + time between casting and scoring a crit is roughly equal to the time it takes for the ignite to register as a debuff and do its first tick. I'm just suggesting instead of aiming for that ignite, aim for the second ignite tick.
Am I just really missing something here and way off base?
I'm not saying don't cast while "waiting" for the second ignite. I'm saying cast two fireballs during the time ignite is up, having the second one crit with the second ignite tick to gain a rolling ignite. The 2.09s fireball rolling ignites work because 2.09s + time between casting and scoring a crit is roughly equal to the time it takes for the ignite to register as a debuff and do its first tick. I'm just suggesting instead of aiming for that ignite, aim for the second ignite tick.
Am I just really missing something here and way off base?
If i understand correctly, 2.09 sec casting speed fireball triggers rolling ignite on consecutive crits. If we are aiming for 2nd ignite tick, we may want to reduce the casttime of fireball further, so that 1st fireball hits at, say, 2.045 second mark, and second hits at 4.09 second mark. If first doesn't crit, and second does, we get a roll on 2nd ignite tick.
Wonder if doing it this way would constitute a dps improvement. We get less chances to lose an ignite stack, but also less chances to actually roll ignite (requires crit-miss-crit sequence, which is less likely to appear than just crit-crit). Also we get to stack even more haste in situation where +damage is more effective stat for basic gearing.
Wonder if there is a window of haste that allows ignites to roll on both fireballs.
Also wonder how latency factores in all that precise cast-speed fine-tuning.
New Mages: There is a whole thread which explains how rolling ignite works, please don't derail with "I've read all the threads, but how does it work?". Amusingly, the thread has the words "ROLLING IGNITE" in the title. if you can't even manage to find that in the haze of threads, for your viewing pleasure: [Mage] Rolling Ignites: are they back? . Maxi, you're planning on delaying a 3sec cast to cast as a 4.09, with the intention of getting a free 50% of the crit's 40% added to your ignite. If they both crit. In exchange for delaying your normal spam 35%. Well the statistics don't look particularly promissing to be honest. You'd quite possibly make more dps spamming Fball without speccing ignite at all than sitting around for 1.04sec every fireball.
Ignite Frontloading: Gentlemen, we are arguing what is a moot point. Rounced, you're stuck in 2004 going omg-pom-pyro-lol. That spec died a timely death, first with trinks not stacking, then stamina increase, then resilience, and then resilience-DOT fire double-dipping. Your crit will get it's size reduced from resilience and hence do a smaller Ignite, which in turn is a DOT and will then get it's size reduced from resilience. Ignite has had it's anus reamed by PvP since Arena became serious with a Black&Decker. Not to mention, it's been a long, long time since mages have been core damage dealers in PvP. You are probably aware that life-pools have more than doubled yet manapools have barely increased by 25%. Last I checked Damage was the secondary (though useful and bursty, in frost's case) function of mages. Even if you were planning to focus on damage dealing it's extremely unlikely any spec could manage to do it better than frost can. -25% crit from Res is hard to counter with talents worth +16%crit (highest crit scenario, as 33/28/0) compared to 5% from emp FrBolt, an eventual 10% from Winter's and 50% from shatter.
Neither does front-loading ignites mean anything at all. You can achieve, as others stated, much bigger crits with arcane/frost and arguably much more useful too via nova-silence-(AP-Fbolt-POM-Fbolt)-Fireblast-Coldsnap-Nova-Icelance, even gaining the chance of critting the blast via a frosbite. PoM-LoL is only useful in world-pvp videos where some skilled mage picks on a useless gnome mage (Why is it always the gnomes?) who then hurls a monstrous pyro into his ice-block and watches as all his CDs tick away versus an immune foe who then eats his face off.
However, the peculiarities of PvP are neither privy nor relevant to this thread. Fact remains Ignite is broken and problematic:
1) Mob death costs us much in terms of actual output. "if it'd live'd I'd have done more" doesn't cut it.
2) It can clearly miss-function, costing DPS with ignite over-writing
3) It can again miss-function adding DPS via rolling, requiring us to jump through hoops to perform stupid parlor tricks like getting "exactly" an amount of haste, which plus or minus 10 points will cause a steep damage drop.
4) Fball travels as fast as a dead mule, crits, applies ignite, boss phase-changes and gets a warm 1250 tick in his face. Dead mage, or stop casting 8.5sec before change? Lame.
5) It's another debuff slot. No comment on Fball DoT.
However: Ignite is an interesting mechanic in that it's unique and jovial, makes "sense" with fire setting as it were, fire to the target and can possibly herald new mechanics for us in the future.
What I foresee, is a mage-version of Conflagrate which will chew up all remaining ignites and DoTs and frontolad them plus some. This will also sort-out our phase-change-agro issue. Frontolading it is not creative enough and makes it too samey.
Is the 2.09 rate a function of some weird Blizzard mechanic, or is it somehow affected by latency? That .09 number is awfully close to the effective latency many mages are able to achieve even with aggressive "pre-casting". Wondering if that is a coincidence, or whether the specific haste rating you need would vary depending on your effective latency.
If i understand correctly, 2.09 sec casting speed fireball triggers rolling ignite on consecutive crits. If we are aiming for 2nd ignite tick, we may want to reduce the casttime of fireball further, so that 1st fireball hits at, say, 2.045 second mark, and second hits at 4.09 second mark. If first doesn't crit, and second does, we get a roll on 2nd ignite tick.
If you really want to get rolling ignites with relatively low haste, you might be able to pull off an alternating Fireball-Scorch sequence. It should only need about 160 haste.
Wonder if doing it this way would constitute a dps improvement. We get less chances to lose an ignite stack, but also less chances to actually roll ignite (requires crit-miss-crit sequence, which is less likely to appear than just crit-crit). Also we get to stack even more haste in situation where +damage is more effective stat for basic gearing.
The Fireball-Scorch variation is unlikely to help much. 50% of casts are scorch which is probably costing a little over 10% of your dps compared to a more typical 8 Fireball/1 Scorch mix (with a very small improvement in dpm, but nothing to write home about). Then, as you point out, the crit-miss-crit sequence is much less likely that crit-crit:
The size of the rolls will keep improving with higher crit either way so the optimum for the crit-miss-crit case is probably about 70%.
The only case in which I can imagine this helping is with an unrealistic combination of low spell damage (no more than 500-ish so scorch dps is close to fireball dps), high crit (50% or more), and moderate haste (10%). There may be a more realistic range where the dps loss is small and there is a dpm improvement, but I doubt it will be applicable to many (if any) mages.
EDIT:
Thinking about Fireball-Scorch alternation, I was missing the obvious. If you can run with 132 haste, and alternate Fireball and Scorch, and with travel times of 0.7 sec (fireball) and 0.0 sec (scorch) then spells will *land* consistently 2.09 apart. This is much more favorable than the idea I orginally posted. You still have to overcome the dsp loss from using scorch half the time, but you get to take advantage of every consecutive crit-crit. With a sufficient crit level - probably starting in the mid 40s or low 50s - the rolling ignites could cause this could beat fireball spam even with high spell damage. I'll do some testing, though I don't have the gear for a really high crit rate.
It is not clear from you post, but travel time does not impact rolling ignites as long as you do chain casting, assuming both you and your target doesnt move. Its a variable that is effectively constant in this context. However, you do raise a point if your goal is to intermix scorch/fireballs rolling ignite rotations.
It is not clear from you post, but travel time does not impact rolling ignites as long as you do chain casting, assuming both you and your target doesnt move. Its a variable that is effectively constant in this context. However, you do raise a point if your goal is to intermix scorch/fireballs rolling ignite rotations.
If I understand correctly, travel time is irrelevant assuming that it is constant between consecutive casts. Movement breaks that assumption, as you point out, but so does spell alternation.
Well, movement under normal cases hardly affects the results. There is an elasticity allowed in your cast time in order to get a rolling ignites. It doesn't have to be precisely 2.09s. And travel time, from my experience, is quite fast, enough that you would need a lot of movement in order to get that 2.09s to go above or below 2.11/2.07, probably more than the time it would take for your to cast a new fireball.
It does apply for alternating spells though.
The problem is more complex than that in practice because depending on when you don't crit during an alternating rotation you mess up the rolling ignite and just get a stacking ignite. Simple example:
scorch crit (1.1s)
fireball no crit (2.09s)
scorch crit (1.1s) // no rolling ignite here
Well, movement under normal cases hardly affects the results. There is an elasticity allowed in your cast time in order to get a rolling ignites. It doesn't have to be precisely 2.09s. And travel time, from my experience, is quite fast, enough that you would need a lot of movement in order to get that 2.09s to go above or below 2.11/2.07, probably more than the time it would take for your to cast a new fireball.
It does apply for alternating spells though.
The problem is more complex than that in practice because depending on when you don't crit during an alternating rotation you mess up the rolling ignite and just get a stacking ignite. Simple example:
scorch crit (1.1s)
fireball no crit (2.09s)
scorch crit (1.1s) // no rolling ignite here
You are right. I thought I had found a way to get around this using the travel time discrepancy, but I plugged it in backwards. If the faster cast had the longer travel time, it would have worked. Looks like the crit-miss-crit pattern is the best you can do low haste + spell alternation.
What I foresee, is a mage-version of Conflagrate which will chew up all remaining ignites and DoTs and frontolad them plus some. This will also sort-out our phase-change-agro issue. Frontolading it is not creative enough and makes it too samey.
Personally I liked Lhivera's idea the best for that, which was to give Firemages an instant cast spell that would only work on a target with an ignite stack, that would eat the remaining ignite damage and then reapply it as a 12 second DoT to the target (with the DoT being affected again by the mages +damage) and at the same time refreshing the Scorch debuff.
As for me being offbase about the PoM Pyro thing, Frostbolt with spell power and shards does 225% crits and has a much lower base damage range then Fireball or Pyroblast as well as a much lower spell damage coefficient and if the ignite was frontloaded when combined with spellpower it would give 235% crits. For a mage with 1400 spell damage that means an APed pyroblast would crit for 7871.5 and could be followed by a 4119.7 Fireblast or 11991.2 damage in 1.5 seconds. Since Pyro has a travel time the spells could be started at range with the target eating both before they even knew they were being attacked and without even having a chance to Ice Block before being destroyed. At least with the shatter combos you get a little bit of warning that they are coming (being rooted by a nova kinda says TRINKET or ICE BLOCK NOW very loudly). Sure resilence would affect the numbers and the rate at which it would occur but doesn't that seem like just a tad bit more damage then Blizzard really intends any class to be able to do, for all intensive purposes, instantly.
Take [Quagmirran's Eye]
Arcane Blast through most of the proc, at the last second cast Arcane Missles. Now you have hasted yourself for 9 seconds of casting. at 320 haste, AM starts to become competitive. Now if you do the same with [Blade of Wizardry] [Mystical Skyfire Diamond]
You can keep up a spell hasting effect of 300 for about 25 seconds given you are Arcane Blasting at proc time and then AM just before it falls off, also given that all 3 proc at different intervals (doable via weapon swapping). For weapon swapping I would put Spellsurge on Blade Wizardry and you are basically going for a double proc on one weapon.
Added [Ashtongue Talisman of Insight]
You can also do the same thing, keep the buff up an extra 4-5 seconds by AMing just as it drops.
In addition there is the clearcast factor, which is basicly a Crit proc.
There are ways to go with this. If just two hasting effects proc together, 600 hasted AM can out preform AB. You have a good chance of procing hasting when you need to evocate, you can get 2 AMs casted before your AB buff falls. Even just at 320 haste doing what I said above, all you do is after AM, switch to AB/Frostbolt as normal. Other possibilities include nocking yourself out of 5 second rule via AM (4.5 second AM + 2.5 second Frostbolt).
Best case scenarios?
1000+ hasted AM while clearcasting during IV/Arcane Power. Much like a slot machine, some times you roll cherries and some times you hit the jackpot. BY THE WAY, you thing IV/AP is bull in Hyjal? You haven't seen a 1000+hasted mage spamming down-ranked AE and still blowing the crap out of SOD.
If the idea takes interest I'd like to divulge further.
--EDIT--
Course now I gotta go re-farm my Eye of Quag and buy a new Blade of Wizardry.
Ok so I was mistaken a little bit, it would require more haste to aim for the second ignite tick and the crit-noncrit-crit sequence. However from the mention of the scorch-fireball sequence I think I might have come up with an idea to get rolling ignites with low haste. Maybe not that reliably, but I would think it would work. I also went back in this thread and found the combat log for the rolling ignite off the second tick, it was from a post by wadi on page 13, but here it is again:
05:08'54.869 Arcanis's Fireball crits Dr. Boom for 4855 Fire damage
05:08'54.869 Arcanis's Fireball crits Dr. Boom for 4855 Fire damage
05:08'56.838 Arcanis's Fireball dots Dr. Boom for 27 Fire damage
05:08'56.916 Arcanis's Fireball hits Dr. Boom for 3002 Fire damage
05:08'57.041 Arcanis's Ignite dots Dr. Boom for 971 Fire damage
05:08'58.916 Arcanis's Fireball dots Dr. Boom for 24 Fire damage
05:08'58.994 Arcanis's Fireball crits Dr. Boom for 5073 Fire damage
05:08'59.025 Arcanis's Ignite dots Dr. Boom for 971 Fire damage
05:09'00.994 Arcanis's Fireball dots Dr. Boom for 24 Fire damage
05:09'01.088 Arcanis's Ignite dots Dr. Boom for 1501 Fire damage
05:09'03.056 Arcanis's Fireball dots Dr. Boom for 24 Fire damage
05:09'03.088 Arcanis's Ignite dots Dr. Boom for 1500 Fire damage
Now lets look at the time between the original crit and the second crit that caused the rolling ignite.
58.994-54.869 = 4.125s
If we have 143 haste rating, this should bring our fireball cast speed to 2.75s and scorch to 1.375s roughly. So one fireball and one scorch will take 2.75s+1.375s=4.125s. Now as far as casting sequence, you would just fireball spam until you see a crit. When you see the crit you will be in the middle of another fireball cast, when that one releases, cast a scorch instead of another fireball. That will cause the scorch to land at the time needed for a rolling ignite off the second tick.
The good:
-you don't do a strict fireball-scorch-fireball-scorch rotation, you only have to do the scorch when you see a fireball crit
The bad:
-if the fireball before the scorch crits, no rolling ignite
-I don't think you could get enough rolling ignites to offset the dps loss from not spamming fireball
Alternate idea:
Perhaps instead of doing on every fireball crit, look for a crit-crit to roll the ignite on. If my head is still clear at this hour, you should get a higher "extra" tick from rolling that ignite than from a single ignite. Of course that still relies on a crit-crit-noncrit(fireball)-crit (scorch) sequence, and i have no idea of calculating those probabilities.
First of all, you have to drop coldsnap to do the empowered arcane missiles build. Second thing is the GCD capping at 1s, which is approached relatively quickly with arcane blast (especially inside cooldowns). Also, keep in mind that the extra haste on the AM extending the proc is only for the portion of it that would not otherwise be overlapped by frostbolt doing the same thing at a better DPM.
There are some other things like blade of wizardry being VERY suboptimal compared to an end game weapon as well as quags (assuming your alternatives are ZA trink / blessing / skull). The crit aspect of clearcasting is also non-viable as you would have to stop an AB to cast the AM and that's highly un-optimized.
+Damage procs apply to spellhit, not spellcast like haste so those are out of the picture.
Take [Quagmirran's Eye] BY THE WAY, you thing IV/AP is bull in Hyjal? You haven't seen a 1000+hasted mage spamming down-ranked AE and still blowing the crap out of SOD.
You are of course referring to SoC as there is no SoD, and even without a bajillion haste you can "blow the crap" out of it, however, I remain sceptical at "why the hell bother".
Firstly, you are again at the AoE cap. 1k haste is 63% haste, and you can not go below 1sec on an instant. I understand AToI on aoe, as it's perma-up but Quag's? So you get one proc over the whole aoe phase and cast 0.7AE more than you would've otherwise? Even if it procs you only gain 60% of an AE per 6sec of Quag's activation and that's not even discounting the 1.5sec you'll lose because it'll proc and then your GCD will be clocking.
I'd much rather have an SCB equipped in case some bozo AoEer decides he'll agro everything outside the Consecration and leaves me extra work to do; the mana difference is appreciated much: it's an extra AE.
Ultimately my boggle boils down to why are you bothering swapping gear around and weapon-swapping and designing optimal gear and... For trash. I understand swapping off some hit for more crit, or a few gimmick trinks or something, but so much work on something which is only fundamentally critical in MH and even then a very risky business when there's Abominations in the pack seems quite futile. You even said yourself you're down-ranking. If you're gearing everything to make your AE huge why are you doing the one thing that makes it smaller? And don't say "agro" because if you have an agro problem you either have a Protadin problem or, as I suspect, you're going overboard on the AOE DPS for e-peen reasons (because it clearly isn't critical to the raid, unless you have too few AoEers). Or both.
Edit to add to Etherialz: While AM-arcane has it's time and place and is in fact not as sub-optimal as many think compared to 40-0-21, E is correct in that irrespective of spec/gear there is no concievable scenario where AB can outperform FrBolt. The reason AM-arcane works has nothing at all to do with AM being anything better than shit, because it isn't. And Clearcasting AM is only possible in an AB/AM two-spell-rotation or (AB-AM)*3/Sc rotation, which in the later case is great but in the former is quite bad because though you get a CC'd AM (lovely) you then have to spend either 9.5sec AB-ramping or 20+sec AB-AM ramping AB up, again another DPS loss which was not made up with the CC'd AM. Ultimately, I've found if CC procs? Just let it hit whatever you'd do otherwise. The only spec that was worth cancelling a cast to use a CC was 33/28/0 and even then only to go Trink-flamecap-destropot-AP-PoM-Pyro on the CC.
While AM-arcane has it's time and place and is in fact not as sub-optimal as many think compared to 40-0-21, E is correct in that irrespective of spec/gear there is no concievable scenario where AB can outperform FrBolt.
I don't disagree with the overall analysis, but no conceivable is a stretch too far. My normal raiding situation is CoS but no CoE with JoW on the target due to a comp of one mage, bunch of locks, and pally tank or ret pally in raid. As a result, I'm 50/0/11 and my AM outperforms my FrB in terms of dps by a significant margin (1152 vs 822) while remaining fairly close in terms of dpm (33.5 vs 32.2). Before you complain that my FrB isn't properly talented, I ran through rawr and for my gear level (spellfire/ZA) and expected fight durations, 50/0/11 consistently outperforms 40/0/21 when I sub in available gear for both, so I talent my FrB for convenience while grinding since I never toss a FrB in raids. Shifting the talents around to boosting FrB only nets another 100 dps or so for FrB. I'll be switching over to 40/0/21 in the t6 range due to the unavoidable excess +hit on the gear pulling up FrB's performance.
Last edited by grayrest : 05/09/08 at 2:18 PM.
Reason: additional details on 50/0/11 vs 40/0/21
I don't disagree with the overall analysis, but no conceivable is a stretch too far. My normal raiding situation is CoS but no CoE with JoW on the target due to a comp of one mage, bunch of locks, and pally tank or ret pally in raid. As a result, I'm 50/0/11 and my AM outperforms my FrB in terms of dps by a significant margin (1152 vs 822) while remaining fairly close in terms of dpm (33.5 vs 32.2). Before you complain that my FrB isn't properly talented, I ran through rawr and for my gear level (spellfire/ZA) and expected fight durations, 50/0/11 consistently outperforms 40/0/21 when I sub in available gear for both, so I talent my FrB for convenience while grinding since I never toss a FrB in raids. Shifting the talents around to boosting FrB only nets another 100 dps or so for FrB. I'll be switching over to 40/0/21 in the t6 range due to the unavoidable excess +hit on the gear pulling up FrB's performance.
I know this is the first time I've chimed into the mage thread so I'll probably be looked on as an outsider, but I've done some quick napkin math on this and I can't see how it works. According to my quick and dirty calculations, with a 30% crit rate and assuming hit-capped, a properly talented (for 21 points in the tree, anyway) Frostbolt will still outscale fully talented Arcane Missiles based on spell damage. Even assuming that wasn't true, Arcane Missiles is still a more expensive cast on a mana-per-second basis than Frostbolt, so from a regen perspective, it would be cheaper to throw the Frostbolts as it would get you back to spamming Arcane Blast sooner.
[edit] I also checked and the scaling problem is even worse with crit. Am I missing something?
Last edited by thedopefishlives : 05/09/08 at 3:41 PM.
Reason: Updated information
[edit] I also checked and the scaling problem is even worse with crit. Am I missing something?
It all depends on your assumptions. If you assume FrB is hit capped and the two spells have a "fair" set of debuffs (both CoE and CoS) there is no way FrB is behind AM. FrB scales faster than AM with both +dam (due to the high base damage of AM) and crit (due to ice shards) and equally with haste. I base my theorycrafting on my own situation, which is CoS and JoW on target and no CoE at the arcane hit cap. I can gear for additional +hit, but that comes at expense of stats that benefit my AB, so it doesn't boost overall dps. I did check.
The JoW reduces the cost of AM an average of 2.5*74=185 mana and you get a tick of OOC regen if you're not chaining them, which I don't. I'm 600/405 for regen when raid buffed, so that's another 78 mana. This pulls the cost down to 521 mana for the AM compared to the (345*.82-(74*.5))*2= 492 mana for 2 fully talented frostbolts. Toss in a 4% miss for Frostbolt (I'm assuming phantom hit for the FrB) and the 10% extra damage on AM and you get the unexpected result. Higher gear levels bring enough extra stats (notably +hit) to overcome the difference, and gemming for +dam instead of gemming for int/spi will move the transition point lower.
As for getting back to casting AB sooner, t5 fights are short/interrupt prone enough that I spend most of my time casting AB regardless. I normally split damage 85% AB/15% AM.
Last edited by grayrest : 05/09/08 at 4:34 PM.
Reason: comment on re-gearing for hit
Yeah, I dropped the hit rate for Frostbolt down to where it would be if you had 3/3 Elemental Precision and hit-capped for Arcane spells, and I see a _very slight_ downward trend with increasing spell damage. I suppose situationally, then, it's feasible for AM to be higher dps at points than Frostbolt, unless I'm missing something yet again. Also, I didn't take into account buffs, which would presumably be enough to tip the balance in AM's favor situationally.
I have recently grabbed my first piece of t5, and realize that arcane is the way to go at 2 picece t5.
However, as I am fire right now 2/48/11, and with the boost to the cap on AE, is the end-all word on AoE damge to use AE, instead of FS spam if I am a fire build? If so, does Flamestrike not deal enough damage or is threat a problem with being able to hold the dps?
Also, is it not worth it to then have 2 points in Arcane Subtlety if you are spamming Flamestrike?
Also, is it not worth it to then have 2 points in Arcane Subtlety if you are spamming Flamestrike?
No matter what spec you are AE is much better for pure AOE damage then Flamestrike. If you're spamming Flamestrike you're wasting the ticks from the flamestrike itself as well as sometimes ignite tick. If you're going to use Flamestrike at all use it first then go in and AE spam. But IMO flamestrike is not a viable source of AOE damage.
Flamestrike is half-decent when you use it with Combustion and IV, immediately followed by Blastwave.
You get a mad amount of crits and 2 mana refunds from elements.
Other than that, best sustainable AoE for fire is AE spam with BW/DB in between. Which sucks tbh.
thdopefishlives: You will notice I too am a 50.0.11 variant, I did not say AM is not a useful spell or a bad one. It is however, sub-par and the suggestion in the post I was responding to was somehow to use it as a main damage source. This is impossible. Clearly I'd have to be brain-damaged to suggest anyone FrBolt while having a 50 arcane setup and neither did I ever advise such, however by no stretch is AM superior to the whole point of Arcane, which is AB.
Whether you'll make more mana with AM over FrB due to JoW despite efficiency trade-off is a question only Rawr can answer, because weaving AM is a lot coarser than weaving FrB and also changes the dynamic substantially.
regarding AOE: Flamestrike+BW with Combustion, then moving on to AE is considered the wizest choice in aoe terms. Spamming Fstrike is not particularly good and now that AE's cap has increased it can't compete at all, specced or not.
From the quick math I did, I can definitely agree that you would have to be brain-dead to use Frostbolt in a 50/0/11 build. I was simply trying to theorycraft out the question of 50/0/11 versus 40/0/21, which I understand now is dependent on the presence of CoE and the hit rating of the mage in question - the closer you are to being hit-capped in Frost, the better a 40/0/21 build will scale versus the 50/0/11 Arcane Missiles build.
05/07/08, 7:43 PM
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