On the other hand, since our best base cycle may be "ArcBarrage - Frostbolt", you may have Icy Veins, and you'll want to stack it with AP, and if possible trinkets.

You can actually setup these 5:20-6:00 fights with 2:00 trinket/potions, 2:30 AP and 3:00 IV as well:
0:00 Stack 2m + 2:30m + 3m
2:30 Stack 2m + 2:30m
5:00 Stack 2m + 2:30m + 3m
I was afraid that the -30sec cooldown was worthless, but it works out well in this scenario at least.


Also, regarding haste, an ABar-Frostbolt cycle has 4.0s cast time base.

Wrath of Air Totem is 10%, Ret Aura is 3%, Netherwind Presence is 6%. That's 20.1% haste, bringing 4.0s to 3.33s.
If you get another 11% from gear/buffs/elsewhere, you're already at the 3.0s cycle cap.

Any kind of haste buff (Imp. Moonkin Aura, Heroism, Icy Veins) will bring you below the cycle cap.

A cycle with Fireball/Frostfire Bolt will give you more leeway for haste procs, it has 4.5s base cast time.
With the above 3 static buffs, you're at 3.75s cast time. You need another 25% to get to the cap.


I'm thinking about some 51+/0/X spec that uses FrB rotations normally, and FFB when above the ABar-FrB haste cap.
I'm well aware that the DPS is terrible and FFB may only barely be a better filler than FrB.
If you spend a lot under haste buffs or have high base haste, it might be better to try stitching a 51/10/10 spec together to buff FFB (Ignite with Spell Power and Ice Shards) at the expense of FrB.

And there we thought Arcane Theorycraft in BC was complicated ...


Edit:
It's fine, when you get 1200 back from JoW then spamming AM is a mana gain already ...

A lot of the WOTLK changes seem to be towards "breaking" a cast rotation monotony and make players react dynamically to procs and cooldowns.

(Prot) Warriors can proc refreshes on their Shield Slam cooldowns, along with the loss of guaranteed Shield Blocks making Revenge less regular. There's also Sudden Death and Bloodsurge for out-of-rotation Executes and Slams.

Without going into too much detail, this goes on for most other classes.

When I look at a Mage, and specifically the new Arcane changes, two things stand out in this regard:
1. Winter's Grasp - you have to break your rotation and react with a Shatter combo
2. Missile Barrage - you have to break your rotation and react with an AM cast

Jarlyn, do you feel that these 2 points are not enough to significantly change the pace at which a Mage plays his DPS?

I like the general concept of Arcane Blast because the idea of tailoring your cast rotation and mana consumption to end at 0 mana the same time the boss reaches 0 HP is really quite exciting from the outside looking in. If anything, Fire needs a "rotation breaking" effect, since WG and Missile Barrage are quite deep into their respective trees.

This is a direct quote from what i just posted on the Mage forum on the WoW site.

Any thoughts, input and telling me if i'm wrong or right (lol) would be greatly appreciated.

Also, thanks rowryn for the insight into JoW. that's incredible

For Winter's Grasp, is adding in an Ice Lance every few Frostbolts substantially game-changing? It's dynamic in the sense that you don't do it at set intervals (ie. Scorch), but I don't see that as revolutionizing in terms of changing how a mage raids.

Arcane has always had a ton of possibility to be most "interesting" spec to play, but to this point they've never gotten it right. Looking at the whole of BC raiding here, Arcane Missiles has never for a single second been viable DPS purely on it's own merits. It worked in 2.2 through a combination of moderately overpowered mechanics that worked together to make a sub-par spell viable. And Arcane Blast has generally only been viable DPS when used in conjunction with 2pc T5 - it never really worked on it's own (ignoring unusual situations where you got chain innervates and whatnot). Both spells have more or less required external help to "work."

To this point in the beta, Fire and Frost (at least, before their revisions) feel very conventional to me, just teaching an old dog a couple new tricks. Arcane is by far the most exploratory of the three trees, and that's fantastic - if they pull it off. All the possible complexity and variety of Arcane is moot if it's not good DPS, and based on what we're seeing here, Blizzard is going to have a hell of time balancing it. As Roywyn mentioned a couple posts ago, the TC here is extremely complicated, but with the lack of an Empowered talent and a substantial percentage-based damage increase (Fire Power), there's a lot of ground to be made up.

I'm going to stop posting here until we see the Fire and Frost changes though, I don't want to have an argument about this when we know there's a lot more changes on the horizon.

The big problem I see is that this is for 0 haste which seems to be a rather uninteresting case with all haste buffs out there (Can't see an ABarr mage not speccing Netherwind Presence). Any haste at all will lower the gcd from ABarr which make a Missile Barrage AM finish before the ABarr cd is up (even worse if Missile Barrage is affected by haste). Stacking haste might even lower frostbolts cast time below 1.5 seconds.

Winter's Grasp reads as follows...

"Gives your Frost damage spells a 5% chance to apply the Winter's Grasp effect, which increases the chance all attacks will hit the target by 2% and the target is considered Frozen for 5 sec."

i dont get how ice lance matters when spam frostbolt would be more damage conductive and even ice lance spam would only proc the debuff 10% more...

Winter's grasp hasnt really caught my eye as anything particularly special... not to mention i'm hard pressed to believe this will actually effect raid bosses, further proving (to me anyway) that frost is the major pvp spec and that's about it.

that is however, my opinion.

Right, i'm not the greatest at TC, just some basics from what i could toss together. I really just hoped to inspire people with more skill to help out and then work together as a community to figure this out. Give me a few, i'll try and add in AP, PoM, IV, NWP and Bloodlust...

this could take a while...


EDIT -- question. from what i'm reading it seems as though the MB proc is pretty much set in stone as far as it's casting time and pulse rate (1 pulse/.3 sec)... any idea if that would be reduced by haste? or if it's going to be 1.5 seconds no matter what.

I'm putting my money on the second option because of how it's written, but i'm unsure...

Now I feel like a jerk. D:

Well, didn't Lhivera have an idea about using Incanter's Absorption to take advantage of AoE damage by shielding to get the spell damage increases? Mana Shield is a lot more costly than Power Word: Shield, but when that shield goes down after an AoE while you still have Weakened Soul, keeping Mana Shield up seems like an idea. 2 talent points for the Imp Mana Shield might make the difference between Mana Shield not being worth it for Incanter's Absorption and being a decent use of talent points.

Edit:

To the WG doubter, WoW Forums -> Winters Grasp and ImageShack - Hosting :: sgrasponboomjx1.jpg.

right. i mentioned just below there all those things in my post :P

and while the fellow above you did post that WG was working, it's not going to be up all the time unless there are like 3 mages in the raid who are all deep enough into the frost tree to grab that talent... i.e. i dont feel it's worth it either... people can get 2% hit elsewhere, it really shouldn't be that difficult.

I like most of the changes of the Arcane tree, but anyone else is feeling like we simply have to spend too many points on it? For a 51-XX-XX spec at least. And there is no clear difference between PvP and PvE ones, so you have to drop key talents, resulting in the loss of either survivabilty, controlled crit (CC+potency), mana efficiency, haste and so on, not to mention Incanter's Absorption, which requires an enormous sacrifice, despite it's a key talent of PvE and PvP.
This is even emplified by the fact that this tree (unlike frost of fire) is crippled without 20 points spent on the other two.
Could be fixed by fusing talents and/or making 2/3 pointers out of 5-pointers.

I have seen it proc on Dr. Boom - not enough to convince me that it works on raid bosses. And the 2% isn't why it seems overpowered in mage stacking raids. It is shatter and the freeze effect. Each mage adding 5-10% more damage to all mages pr extra mage in the raid - that is a nerf waiting to happen.

this is the spec i've come up with, basing it solely around PvE

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

there's obviously a clear difference between the PvE and the PvP talents. Incanter's Absorption (to me) is very much a PvP talent, unless it work with PW:S and you have a lot of bosses throwing magic damage at you all the time... Prismatic Cloak is a PvP talent. Imp CS is a PvP talent. Imp AM really isnt necessary for either spec it seems, you shouldnt be spamming AM...

By the way i only put 1 point in each of the +3yd range talents so that i could have a static 33yd range work instead of having to go 30 yds because i couldnt do a proper rotation with arcane moves at 36 yds and frost only being at 30, and vice versa.

those range talents were the only thing i crippled. the deeper frost talents should be evened out by the great deep arcane talents. (minus the crit from WC/empFB)

so you're saying that when the target is "considered frozen", shatter applies? as well as the ice lance 3x damage? i was merely thinking of it as +hit mechanic, that didnt even cross my mind lol.

THAT may prove useful. giving mages an extra 50% crit every so often. that's a whole different ball game.