Not debating the scaling. Frostbolt does scale better than AM. I went back and rechecked after our last discussion and it turns out that the big determining factor is not +hit, as I'd thought, but rather the extra 172 damage on AM from Spellfire. Frostbolt scaling does overcome this in the t6 range, but for most situations while wearing spellfire, AM is equal or better in terms of DPS and the dpm varies by JoW or no JoW, as mentioned. This is significant because spellfire is best in slot in terms of dps until well into t6, particularly if you're stacking int.

Basically, Spellfire==investigate 50/0/11 in your raid environment. No Spellfire == 40/0/21 always.

You just pointed out one of the ways to plan your DPM ahead of time. There are many possible strategies, this is just one of them.

You can have a conservative playstyle (ie: try to keep mana for the end in case the fight extends). Try means obviously that you err more towards the side of high DPM at the start. See, this is the problem with all simulators. They do their job fine but they do assume a static fight duration. I am not saying this is incorrect on their par, but in practice we do not know ahead of time the true fight duration. We may have a rough idea, but its never precisely that. With this said, it also means that if you follow to the letter any simulator given rotations to the letter, you're likely to end up, in practice, with a sub-optimal result, simply because the fight duration probably won't match. They'll give you a 'close enough' result. I think ultimately, and this is not something TC-based but more something I would do instinctively, I would rather, as a player, opt for an overall strategy that takes variable-kill-time into account, rather than come up shorthanded with no real answer to it. My strategy will never be optimal, but it will be far more flexible. I am not pretending one approach is better than the other, but personally I far prefer my way of doing things (obviously).

You can also take the reverse strategy, which is more focused around high burst at the start, and err more towards medium-high DPM towards the end, allowing a 'cleaner' kill with near-zero mana. This 'strategy' is closer to what you want from a pure 'max dps' perspective, but it is also the least flexible. It will better react to a faster-kill-than-planned (good), but will fail a lot harder if the reverse happens.

There is also the other other strategy which I used to use. Problem is, this is more or less easy to do, particularly since they added icy veins. If your current_mana (out of the total_mana_available_over_entire_fight) matches roughly the boss HP, you will never theorycally run out of mana and finish the fight at 0 mana. It means that if you have 40k mana available over a 10 min fight, it means at 5 min mark you should have used 20k mana. It also means you use 40k mana at 10 min. Of course, this strategy ignores totally DPM. Maybe it is more of a 'guideline' that ignores DPM spikes.

Of course, you can also do a bit of both, but those are just the major guidelines.

If anything, you can always plan some parts of a fight ahead of time. What you want is roughly 2 things:

1- have guidelines to know ahead of time mana incomes (something that can easily be calculated mentally)
2- have guidelines about the mana used on every cycle

If you prefer, the first first thing I would check on my outline is:
1- how much mana total do I regen on average every 20, 30, 40 and 60 seconds. (this is important to easily compute cycles)
2- how much mana do I consume during a AB-spam AP/lust, during AB-spam IV, frostbolt spam. Please note that personally when doing this, the goal is to make live decisions on the spot during a boss encounter, so you want to keep things simple. It also means that I would avoid taking into account the mana regen during the cycle -- only take into account how much mana I consume.

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I requested that the number of points brought up in the OP are too many. I know I already said it in my earlier post, but I think this sums it best:

In any case, having a thread with no real focus is like a conversation with no topic.

Very interesting idea. But just my 2 cents on this. An arcane mage with two piece T5 can also use moten armour, drums, destrution pots if its really that short a fight. And the arcane mage has the option to have some filler spell sequenecs to conserve mana.

So, while there is some increased mana cost that comes with the T5 bonus, the arcane style of play accomodates this for the most part. I mean, even with the increased cost, we can spam AB most of the fights in MH and BT. The increased mana cost of AB is something that I suspect most arcane mages have come to live with and accept along with the necessity of two piece T5.

I will update the opening post in thread as it progresses. Have put in headers bolded and underlined. About answers to many of the points I raised. The thing is I have seen them raised here and there all over the place. But have we really come a any difinitive answer on all of the points?

For example, is weaving in frostbolts and not letting the AB debuff fall off the definitive best way to play it as arcane frost? If it was, there wouldn't be so much interest in which filler spell sequences to use.

What you want is a mix of AB spam and FrB. To force Rawr to give you such a solution (meaning that it is theoretically worse than what it would otherwise give you), just disable the AB cycles option. This way the solution will be some AB spam and FrB. It won't tell you directly what ratio is optimal, but from the time spent on each you should be able to compute the optimum ratio yourself.

If you accept that the best strategy for maximizing damage output is to 1) Not run out of mana and 2) cast as many fully stacked ABs as possible, it's a reasonable approach. The basic idea behind the "as many fully stacked ABs as possible" is that you lose 2 seconds of AB casting time every time you have to restack the debuff when compared to casting 3 ABs fully debuffed**. What the rotations do is put off the decision on whether to AB spam or not as long as possible.

If you permanently had 3 stacks of the debuff up, there'd be no difference between the damage output or mana consumption in casting 20 FrB->10 AB, 10 AB->20 FrB, and 10 AB->2xFrB rotations. Even with the debuff falling off, the 10 AB->20 FrB and 10 AB->2xFrB options remain the same. The only difference is that the AB debuff is maintained all the way through on the rotation option. Since the debuff is maintained, doing 10 AB->20 rotations, and 20 rotations->10 AB is exactly the same, but the last is the better choice because it puts off the decision to fully blow out your mana as late as possible, which minimizes the risk that you'll run out of mana completely if the fight doesn't go as expected and allows you to spend mana when you have more information about how the fight is going.

The weaving strategy will fail in two scenarios:

1) You don't have the regen to sustain AB->2xFrB and would have to revert to pure FrB spam to not go OOM. This can occur in either an excessively long fight or one where you've underestimated the fight length. I solve this by having enough regen. AB->2xFrB is ~900 mp5, subtract spriest, gems, pots and you get ~470 mp5, I'm at 400 now, shooting for 450 before I start stacking +dam. This gimps top end damage in optimal scenarios on shorter fights but limits the worst case scenarios and allows me to push harder towards optimum without the risk of going oom. Is this the best option for pure dps? Not really, but I favor consistency over absolute top end.

2) You overestimate the time remaining in the fight and start your AB spam too late, finishing with more than 0 mana. This can be solved by initiating the final AB spam sequence a bit earlier than necessary and doing a few rotations to finish out.

Now, this does mean that AB->FrB is neither highest dps nor is it best for buying time, but there's no real harm in weaving in 1 FrB if it helps you time the fight as long as weaving only one doesn't force you to FrB spam.

** Of course the mana cost drops which changes dpm and complicates analysis and the behavior of 2t5 further complicates things, I'm not pretending that this is conclusive proof. If the 'remain fully debuffed' advice is incorrect, then we're back to doing 2.1 rotations interspersed with extended AB spam, as suggested by Rawr.

Hi, just new to the theorycrafting scene and what not, I was curious, from what I have seen, many recommend that you have 2piece T5, for obvious reasons of course, to spec into arcane. I'm simply here to ask, is raiding arcane without 2p T5 a viable raiding build, or should I stick to fire until I get it?

Secondly, For an AB spam playstyle in raids, I assume it is realistically impossible to do full AB spam when you have average raid support (no innervates, 1 SP, 1 sham), without popping pots, am I correct?

And lastly, when you spoke of having 400mp5, I'm quite confused as to how you achieved this, because I'm 50/11 atm, and I managed to only have 200? (In response to post prior to mine).

/bow out of theorycrafters' way.

It's not optimal, but it's doable. The 2t5 bonus is worth ~200 dps when you get it, so if you're comfortable with the heavy consumable use for inferior dps, then your dps won't be embarassing but won't be superb either.

All discussions here are assuming you're potting on every cooldown--that you start the fight spamming AB and pot as soon as you're down 3000 mana and again on every cooldown.

You stack int and wear gear with spirit on it. If you regemmed all your gear with +int gems and used adepts+draenic, you'd have 321 mp5 I5SR when fully raid buffed.

When I was raiding as Arc/Frost I got them all the time from our Druid tank. I would whisper him for one and if it was available and no healer had died he would hit me with it. Only encounter I could count on getting it though was for Brutallus.

I would never ask for one for one of our resto druids but in fights with transitions where our feral can pop out and innervate and where healers won't need it, it seems like a great thing to do to avoid it just being wasted and not used.

Re: Innervates.

If they're not going to be used otherwise, then sure get your druid friends to innervate you. As an arcane mage you not only benefit hugely from it (400% of my spirit regen as I stand in Shattrath after raid [buffed] 2468 per 5) but also you can turn the mana into damage ; and effectively "dump" the mana onto boss in the form of damage.

If raid mana is high, and an innervate is going to waste - then you wouldn't really be doing your job if you didn't have a druid on /r for quick innervate requests.

Times change ; I personally would never have imagined a day when mages were awarded innervates ; but when you remove prejudice and think about how many times an innervate isn't used... its almost a positive thing that now it can be used in a productive way.

You can say that you can't generate optimum result if you don't know the fight duration. Another way to look at it is if you know what the optimum is under different durations you are better prepared to handle the reality. One thing one will notice is that optimum sequence does not change drastically when making small changes to fight duration. Most differences will occur as result of additional cooldowns becoming available.

I'll show an example analysis for my specific case using sequence reconstruction in Rawr. It is good to know at least an approximate fight duration. If you don't know whether it is going to be 3 minutes or 10 minutes then all bets are off. Let's say we're expecting a 5 minute fight. Then it is reasonable to be prepared for anything between 4-6 minutes. I'll show the sequence reconstructions as computed by Rawr and give an interpretation of them. In some cases you'll see some suboptimal suggestions which I'm still working on improving, but it's good enough to get a general sense.

Starting with 4 minutes the optimum sequence is:

So we start with Heroism burst at the start. One possible consideration when running this in real situation is threat which is not currently considered in the reconstruction. Goal here is to burn mana as fast as possible to get the pot/gem cooldowns going. Further AB burst until we have enough room for Evocation and a bit more to create a sizeable mana gap in anticipation of switch to dpm cycle which is mana negative. Main purpose of the switch to dpm cycle at this point is to prepare for the next AP+IV phase. After enough mana is recovered (or more importantly not burned with AB spam) it switches back to AB spam, and ends with AP+IV burst. You can see here a clear bug at the end as it runs out of mana during AP+IV, while it could move the final AB dpm cycle in front of it (this is a bug in the reconstruction, the cycle solution is guaranteed to have enough mana, it's just a matter of arranging the different cycles in temporal relationship).

Next if we look at 4:30 fight we get:

We have a similar structure. Starting with AP+IV burst, evocation, brief switches to AB dpm cycle to conserve mana and end with heroism burst. One thing that changed is the alignment of trinket. 4:30 allows for 3 uses of a 2 min trinket, so we see a change there. If we are planning for 5 minutes then in the 4:00 scenario we probably wouldn't realize in time that fight will be shorter than expected and we would use the trinket whenever it was ready. So that would be one source of suboptimal sequence as a result of unexpected change in fight duration. Other than that the structure is more or less the same. The AP+IV and Heroism bursts are switched, but that choice is more or less arbitrary.

Going on to 5 minute fight:

Again basically the same structure. For 5:30 we have:

First we notice the suboptimal placement of AB dpm cycle, more of it should be in front of Heroism. Another thing to notice is that this sequence is not really compatible with the plan we should use for 5 minute fight. The suggested order of major cooldowns is IV+Hex=>Heroism+AP+Hex=>IV+AP+Hex. We could rearrange the sequence into AP+IV+Hex=>IV+Hex=>Heroism+AP+Hex. That way we have a more similar structure, but we also see that longer fight duration allows a better variant of AP+IV desyncing and using both with the trinket. In 5 minute fight the IV is not ready yet when we have to use the trinket. Longer duration here allows us to wait with the trinket until IV is ready. Similar to the previous cases it is good to be aware of these nuances. As the fight goes on and we get better estimation of fight duration we can still change our plan. With this rearrangement the plans are more or less the same until the trinket is ready for the second time. At that point we have to make a decision on whether to delay with trinket to pair it with IV or just use it whenever it is ready. In my view it is better to play safe and assume shorter fight and use the trinket as soon as possible. We're balancing between cooldown stacking and the potential option that we won't even be able to use the cooldown if fight ends sooner than expected.

For end let's look at the 6 minute fight:

We see that this is more or less the same situation we had at 5:30 as no new cooldowns become available in this time frame.

Looking at all the examples we see that the big decisions concern cooldown stacking. Should I wait with the cooldown to stack it or use it now when it's ready. Other than this everything stays the same. Start with high mana burst to start the gem/pot cooldowns as soon as possible. After all mana cooldowns are going enter conservation mode anticipating the future bursts. This part is what requires the most experience to do right and has to be performed on the fly taking into consideration your actual external regeneration that is not under your control. In practice it's usually better to err on the side of conserving mana. As arcane it is very easy to burn mana. Even with the highest mana pools you can burn all your mana in about a minute. So until you're almost at the end just make sure that when mana pot/gem is coming ready you have enough room to use them as soon as they are available. After managing your mana becomes second nature then you can start worrying about the other decisions about how to stack cooldowns.

Overall I hope you got the impression that arcane is very flexible in terms of adjusting to uncertain fight duration. The plan remains more or less the same in all situations and as a result you can reestimate the remaining duration of the fight on the fly when you have a better estimate in hand. The key idea to take from this is to use AB spam on all cooldowns if appropriate and use your fillers for mana management in preparation of those bursts.