Tizzlewump

I swept it under the rug as part of my many conservative pro-wand assumptions. When I stack the deck in favor of wanding and it still loses I still get a valid conclusion.

By not including the extra mana regen during wanding I made an anti-wand assumption that breaks with the spirit of the analysis (moreover it's probably the worst mistake I could have made). Thankfully Wizeowel logged in his pve gear/spec so I get a nice estimate of 495-292 = 195 mp5 gained in solid post-Illidan gear. Using wand_mps = -39, the tradeoff coefficient in my conservative estimate improves to 2.97, which is still insufficient to beat frostbolt spam's 1.97.

Even the ~10% improved wand dps from the holy [Wand of Cleansing Light] (thank you again for your counterintuitive upgrade lists, Rawr) is not going to tip the scales.

Mage PvE stuff I'm supposed to remember.
People who fight fair suck at pvp.

 

Kavan

Can you explain what you mean by this?

 

Alvira

Mana that you have in an entire fight is essentially finite. Based on constant 60% regen, evoc, pots, gems, etc. If you have 20k mana in a 4 min fight, that is it.

DPM stays constant when you add haste rating. But DPM goes up when you add +int, +dmg, and even +crit. So yes, you will run out faster on a stat by stat comparision basis. In a situation where mana is finite for a fight, haste makes you reach that point where you "lapse" into your high DPM, lower DPS rotations. In contrast, +dmg, +int, +crit does not make you reach that stage sooner. They add more damage without the cost of having to use more mana. And to an arcane mage, mana = damage.

Taking this to an extreme, if you add enough haste, then you won't be regenning mana even during your AB rotations because you cast them so fast they use up more mana than you regen.

On throwing AB rotations off. It depends on the rotations. But various rotations are already set based on the inherent cast times of the spells such that they take advantage of the third debuff on AB. All the 3xAB rotation variations are meant to sqeeze in DPS and then start the cycle again with an AB just before the debuff runs out. Add haste in any increasing amount and you will soon find that you have to change the rotations because you are casting spells so fast you start the AB too early, yet you can't quite squeeze in another spell, etc.

In the end, it boils down to mana and sustainability. If you can stack more haste and still sustain your 100% AB spam, by all means. But if you can't stack on more haste without running into serious mana problems, then stack +dmg, int and crit which doesn't cause such problems. It is raid comp dependent. Not every arcane mage has such luxuries of super heavy mana support. As long as you are having to resort to rotations in a raid boss fight, then there is much more leeway to add +int, +dmg, and +crit because if you are in a situation to get more mana, you can easily transform all that into more ABs to use it up and obtain higher DPS anyway.

Its only when you are already at 100% AB spam, with mana to spare. Then you want to add on haste because you have excess mana that you can't use. If the goal of every aspiring arcane mage is to reach 100% AB spam in a raid fight. Then +int really helps, +dmg and +crit is just more damage but doesn't help, and +haste actually puts you further away from this goal.

 

Spuddelkopf

Imagine the following situation:
You do a fight in which you are able to spam 100% AB and your mana reaches zero exactly when the fight is over. Now add haste to your gear which, for the same fightlength, allows the additional use of one frostbolt and substract an equal amount of crit.
I'm quite sure that in this case the damage won by the frostbolt is bigger than the damage lost by the missing crit rating. That's also what Rawr says, if I understand correctly.

 

Wizeowel

No, the goal is to maximise damage, just like any other dps caster class. If that means popping your Hero+IV+Skull with Frostbolt instead of AB, then so be it.

The best advice about haste is to work it out for yourself, depending on your gear and the fight you are doing. Instead you seem to want to come up with some generalised theory based on assumptions which don't stand up to deeper scrutiny. You can't say "haste is bad if X" because X is actually a combination of 50 other variables. For instance you said, "if you add enough haste, then you won't be regenning mana even during your AB rotations because you cast them so fast they use up more mana than you regen" - show me the gear where this is true. Even with full Sunwell gear, over 400 haste I'm seeing the opportunity to cast 2900-3000dps frostbolts which still return 64-75 mp5.

 

Roywyn

The bolded part is actually wrong when you look at it from an overall perspective.

Your DPM for the overall fight actually increases with haste.
You're right that haste doesn't increase the DPM of AB spam, nor the DPM of FB (or whatever youre filler is) spam.
Haste however does make you reduce your AB spam time and increase your FB spam time, which is an overall DPM increase because FB is better DPM.

But I'm not going to beat the dead horse. Every stat has their benefits, stick your gear/setup in rawr to find out what's best for you.


Back on topic - Wanding.
Using Leulier's sheet with 3 warlocks (2 destro, 1 aff, sunwell gear) and 2 shadow priests, we get ~65% ISB uptime and 10.025 shadow DPS total.

If we now add a shadow wand with 1.5s shoot time, our ISB uptime drops to 51%.
That's a 14% uptime loss, causing up to lose ~280 DPS.

Sunwell wands have 198 DPS.
Wand spec +25%, Misery +5%, MCoE +13%, crits +15%, shadow priest shadow vulnerability +10%, misses -4%, partial resists -6%. ISB uptime adds another +10% on average.
Spell haste doesn't affect wand. Normal haste might affect it, but stats are not before the WotLK pre-patch.

So, that's a total of 369 DPS. Our wanding still increases net damage, but 3/4 of its damage are eaten up by the ISB.
It's even more if you add the lost VE/VT mana.


So, don't use your shadow wands then. What else can we do?
Fire wands - all arena wands are fire, 198 DPS, 1.9s shoot time.
[Sporeling's Firestick] - 97 DPS, 1.3s cast time.
Holy wands - [Wand of Cleansing Light] - 198 DPS, 1.5s shoot time.
I didn't remember that this one was not shadow! You'll have to see a lot of those drop to get one though.
[Consecrated Wand] should be mentioned for its 1.2s speed, but it's nature damage eating stormstrike charges, it's an alliance quest reward and the damage is really bad.


So, what are our options for wands then, assuming JoW is up?

Shadow wands deals little to negative damage due to ISB.
Arena wands are 1.9s, 351 DPS, 19.5 m/s from JoW.
The sporeling wand is 1.3s, 172 DPS, 28.5 m/s from JoW.
The sunwell wand is 1.5s, 270 DPS, 24.5 m/s from JoW.

Wands gain another 39 m/s from 40% spirit regen outside 5SR.


That gives us a tradeoff for 2.0 for frostbolt, 2.9 for the arena wand, 3.1 for the holy wand and 3.3 for the sporeling wand with JoW.

So, frostbolt as filler is still 50% better than wanding, and fast wands for better JoW are not worth the damage loss from lower DPS.
Also, Tizzlewump's DPS values are really low, missing debuffs and probably some more. So, frostbolt will pull ahead quite a bit more there.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

Rate-my-WotLK-spec! If it's not listed here, it's probably not worth it: http://elitistjerks.com/846078-post4020.html

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.

 

Wizeowel

I guessed he meant to thank you for showing us that items like [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] can be best in slot for arcane mages despite them being 'healing' items.

 

tommynt

3700 Frostbolts?

Well that let me rethink my spec, I m currently 40/21, using scorch as filter spell as (criticize me for that) as I dont really care for IV at all (cd stacking in start of fight might even get me close to agro so I rather just do a plain AB spam and do my ap Pyro when agro is save and I got a clearcast).

My gear lvl is 4T5, havent had much luck with T6 drops (like anatherion s belt)

So the question for me isnt if I should spec 21 points in Frost instead of Fire to have IV instead of Pyro, but if Frostbolting has higher dps or better dpm as scorch.
I m currently even thinking about respecing the fire tree to use Fireballs instead scorch.

Can someone help me in theoriecraft which of scorch, Frostbolt or Fireball got best dps/dpm - assuming sunfire enchant and scorch spec without "the mana return when crit" talent and Fireball spec with it.

Sry for my bad english, I m no native speaker.

 

Wizeowel

Yes sorry 3700 dps was blatantly exaggerating. Had that value in my head somehow. Still, it was around 3k dps with 75 mp5 when stacking hero+IV+sliver.

You are also quite welcome to download Rawr - Release: Rawr b14.1 and find the answer for yourself, based on your own gear and tailored to your situation. There is also a thread called [Mage] Help me please? so that you know for the next time.

 

tommynt

Well, I have done that and my conclusion is that highest filter spell dps is with Fireball while all 3 mentioned options got nearly same mps - and thats the reason why I wonder why so many prefer this Icy veins build when the Fire tree got a Pyro and a Blastwave to offer.

 

Zinaida

While fireball is (very) slightly higher dps than frostbolt, it uses a lot more mana. IV and cold snap are also a lot more powerful than pyroblast.

Back on the subject of haste - 100% AB spam is not sustainable in a fight such as Brutallus, without extraordinary support such as multiple shadowpriests or multiple innervates. Aiming for 100% AB time is not always the right approach. In the case of haste vs crit, haste will cause your AB spam to run you oom faster causing you to switch to filler earlier. This is not a dps loss as the AB spam time lost due to haste is still being used for dps via filler, as well as regenning mana.

I'm not sure how coherent that explanation was, so to clarify i'll give a simplified example.
With 0 haste you cast 100 AB's in 150 seconds.
With 10% cast time reduction you cast those same 100 AB's in 135 seconds.
The remaining 15 seconds are used for 6.6 frostbolts, during which you regen mana to be used on more AB later.

As you can see, 10% cast time reduction is not a 10% damage increase due to mana concerns, but the damage increase is still significant. The reason why crit is not strictly better despite not affecting mana usage is the same as for any other spec. It simply doesnt give enough of a damage increase for the item budget it uses, and AB's small 175% crits only amplify this issue.

 

Elysianfield

Until recently (actually until i sat down and spent a few hours reading over this thread) I was also under the impression that haste was BAD for an arcane mage but I think I finally understand why haste is actually a decent stat to acquire.

First off, to get rid of the obvious, dps = damage/time. The goal is to find out what does the most amount of damage over a fixed amount of time.

Let's assume that someway, somehow, you managed to get a passive 20% haste on your gear, and that we're looking at a 5 minute fight. If you were to use the exact same cast sequence in your 20% haste gear as you did in your non haste gear, you'd go oom in about 3 minutes, 50 seconds (trying to account for the mana lost from regen and spriest); you'd have delivered roughly the same amount of damage but in a little less than four minutes instead of five.

That extra minute you just acquired is not dead time because you can still cast your filler spell and have a net gain in mana.

Ex) assuming that you cast AB 90% of the time, that translates (before haste gear) into roughly 180 ABs and 12 FrBs.
If you add in that extra haste gear, you'd get something like
First four minutes: 175ABs and 12 FrBs
Last minute: 6 ABs and 20FrBs.
TOTAL: 181 ABs and 32 FrBs.

180ABs and 12 FrBs < 181 Abs and 32 FrBS
Being able to cast more spells in the same interval of time is a dps increase even if the ratio of Arcane Blast to Frostbolts decreases.

This has interesting implications that I, for one at least, had not realized. The Arcane spec is more complicated than assuming that higher AB:FrB ratio means higher dps, you really do have to take the whole picture into account. Yes, in the short term, your run OOM faster BUT it also allows you to squeeze in additional filler FrBs; essentially, though it may be counterintuitive, haste is actually increasing your mana pool.

The question then becomes, what is better? That massive passive haste in the example above came at the expense of something, would more dmg be better? more crit? int and spirit?

Rawr will help give you an idea of what to expect, but there really isn't an answer that can be posted here that will serve everyone well for every encounter.

 

bolinho

But if you dont have the haste you would get more spell dmg,int,crit.Since you are exchanging this stats for haste.
Then you need see what would be your damage in 5 minutes than change some stats to haste and see in how much time you can do the same damage. And this will be more than 4 minutes

 

Laif@garona

At first, I belong to the school of thought similar to Zinaida and Elysianfield:

With haste you go OOM sooner, buying you time to go into mana regen phase i.e. FrB, thus gaining you more mana for more AB spam, which threfore results in a total dps increase.

Then Alvira struck me with this:

"Mana that you have in an entire fight is essentially finite. Based on constant 60% regen, evoc, pots, gems, etc. If you have 20k mana in a 4 min fight, that is it."

Which I thought was a powerful argument. Casting FrB may seem like it's giving you a +ve mana return, but whether you cast AB or FrB, your 60% mana regen remains constant. So you don't really get 'extra' mana from FrB regen by going OOM earlier, more like you are proportionating more mana into FrB than AB.

Then again, haste is not necessary a bad stat. As just a few posts earlier there were discussion on why not wand instead of FrB? Perhaps stacking haste then go into wanding instead of FrB'ing is an idea?

However the point where the balance is tipped is really, haste is often stacked at the expense of spell damage, crit and int. So for shorter fights, I believe haste might just increase dps, but for longer fights spell damage, crit and int may be the way to go. In other words, I believe haste means different thing to mages in T5, T6 and Sunwell content.

 

Wizeowel

Mana throughput isn't "finite" though. I think a better word in this case is "limited". Anyway, although it would seem that mana throughput is fixed by the fight length, there are some other factors like JoW and clearcasting which depend on the number of spells you cast. Furthermore, since evocation is usually a big timeout during any fight, you also have to consider how much extra casting time you get from a hasted evocation. Note that Alvira mentioned having "20k mana", actually your mana throughput is much higher on a six-minute fight. If you have a 14k pool and evocate 12k of it back, 25k from VT, 8k from JoW, 8k from pots, 9k from gems, plus another 8k from totems. That's 84k mana already without considering your 60% regen, so in reality you are approaching a mana throughput of 150k. Not to mention clearcasting. In this sense, the mana spent on frostbolts is really very trivial, maybe 10k-15k. So claiming that extra mana spent frostbolting is cutting into your AB is factually true but kind of misleading since it's not a 1-to-1 relationship. AB costs much more per cast and per second than frostbolt.

Look at the itemisation please. Show us items which have haste but no spell damage, or haste but no int. In fact, it's hard to find any caster pieces with haste that are worse than an equivalent iLevel piece that doesn't have haste.

 

Laif@garona

I wouldn't take the 20k mana Alvira mentioned literally. I think in fact the 'finite' mana pool that he mentioned includes all other mana regen factors that you said (JoW, clearcast etc.). The point is, after you put in every possible positive mana regen factor, that mana pool is still 'finite'; i.e. there's no other way to increase this total pool of mana except lengthening the fight. Optimal dps output is when you use every drop of mana from this 'finite' mana pool for AB, then isn't it true that for every FrB that you cast you are moving away from optimal dps? (Because the mana used for FrB has to come from this 'finite' mana pool and no where else, it's a bit like the first law of thermodynamics - and not only that, it also eats into the time, because time is also finite - 1 AB is 1.5s whereas 1 FrB is 2.5s)

As for haste stacking at the expense of other stats, I was referring more to gemming. But it's certainly possible that one might stack haste at the expense of other stats, e.g. picking [Bracers of Nimble Thought] over [Cuffs of Devastation].

 

Gofa

Just curious, are there any WWS logs of an arcane mage pulling 2k+dps at Brutallus? Couldn't find any. In theory, they can, of course, but I would really like to see a log.

Yesterday I specced arcane (weird 47/0/14 spec) for ZA timerun because we had 1 shadowpriest and 1 warlock, so CoS was used most of the time, and I thougt I would perform better with arcane + cos than with fire and no coe. Besides that, I just wanted to play a litte bit around with it.

I was quite suprised how good it actually turned out to be (warlock used CoR on some bosses), considering I didn't had a shamy nor did I have 2 pally buffs or improved divine spirit. Since I'm fire specced normally, my gear is also far from perfect for arcane. It's gemmed for 2/48/11 and I don't even have SCB.

Here is the log: Wow Web Stats

Was arcane just so good for me because the fights in ZA are rather short compared to Sunwell bosses or could I sustain it for a fight like Brutallus and deal even more damage with all the missing buffs I would normally have? I know 1900 isn't really impressive for bosses, fire will do this with ease, but like I said, I was suprised.

So I would really appreciate a log of an arcane mage pulling 2k+ (preferable 2,2k-2,3k, so that's it's comparable to fire dps) dps on Brutallus to check his armory in order to find out, if I could give arcane a shot next week at Brutallus.

 

nathanbp

The thing that people talking about haste seem to not be considering is that frostbolt is better DPM than arcane blast. So take a fight where you cast 100 ABs (ignoring ramp time, 150 seconds) and go OOM exactly at the end. If you get 2.3%, you could give yourself 153.5 seconds of effective cast time during that fight, and cast 99 ABs and 2 Frostbolts. This uses the same amount of mana, but does more damage in the same time. Our goal is always to maximize dps, which does not have to be the same thing as maximizing AB percent (if it did, we'd spam AB until OOM and never cast frostbolt).

Edit (because I realized I had more to say): This doesn't mean that haste is good, but it should not be totally ignored given the choice. Rawr in the item budget category for me values 10 Int ~= 11.7 spell damage > 10 spell haste > 10 spell crit, so [Shadowcaster's Drape] ends up better than [Brute Cloak of the Ogre-Magi], for example. In terms of gemming, spell damage or int will almost certainly end up better than haste, but depending on what gear you have access to, the best piece for some slots may have haste on it.

 

Amrahil

Here is one from my guild, just over 2k DPS: Wow Web Stats

The arcane mage has 92% AB DPS time.

I am considering going arcane for the twins fight (reverse strategy), so I can do 30% more damage. Find myself at the threat ceiling far too much. But then this is while doing 1-1.1k DPS, so if I went arcane for twins I could go ahead & use a rotation with a lot of AB'ing and then 5FSR time when I hit the threat ceiling, I imagine. Would it be possible to have less than a ideal group for it, as you'll be having some time outside the 5FSR anyway to regen in? I really want our healers to be spoiled with as many regen options as possible, and thus take a spot in a less than ideal arcane mage group. This is an easy option as fire, but my DPS is really not good enough.

 

Elysianfield

The only WWS for an arcane mage on Brutullas that I've seen would be Fireangel with around 2400-2500 DPS. Unfortunately, the only reports I had links to have expired... but someone here probably has one, or knows of other arcane mages doing really well on Brut.