Maligne, what spec are you running with where you are fireballing but don't have improved fireball, and no clearcasts? *boggle*
Anywho, I find that DPS in phase1 of the prince does matter. If you take a long time to get him to Phase 2, you increase the odds that you'll get a bad infernal fal pattern and have to move the entire raid multiple times. The fight is easier the faster he goes down basically, and in light of that, I always have to use Invis at some point during phase 1 in order to not move above the tank on aggro. I activate Combustion once 5 scorches are up, and then it's ready to use again when my shaman pops Bloodlust at the 25% mark.
Certainly, you want to kill him as fast as possible... Mages shouldn't be wanding, of course. That said, without a Shadow Priest a Mage can easily go OOM if the overall raid DPS isn't very high by using all-out Fireball spam from the get-go. It's better to make sure you have the mana to kill him in Phase 3 than make Phase 1 go a bit quicker. The potential risk in Phase 3 is a lot higher, given that Infernals come twice as fast as the other phases.
My suggestion was mostly oriented around adapting to the mana consumption issues. Of course, push it as soon as you think you can push it without going OOM.
Longer fights as Fire do take a bit of finangling to make sure you have mana at the right time. Sadly, a lot of longer fights focus on "bad things" that happen towards the end--not to mention Molten Fury putting our DPS weight a bit heavier in the <20% region. This means a bit of conservation early in the fight is often an OK methodology until you have a feel for how soon you can start dumping Fireballs.
You can do a fire/arcane spec that is built around scorch spam, that may have slightly more overall dps for something like Mag, but I don't really know if that is worth it. It would certainly be less useful for getting the channelers down fast which is really the most important DPS part of the fight anyway.
As far as getting channelers down asap a 33/28 ish build can perform really well using AB. However, it's not going to provide chart topping dps over a full fight due to mana issues.
I see... then are there other specs that serve as good raiding options for solid dps, maybe less short term but more sustainable long term, I could investigate?
I would suggest 33/28/0 (with 3/3 arcane med, 4/5 arcane mind, 3/3 MoE) as a fire-based spec that has more flexibility than deep fire without sacrificing too much dps. It provides a stronger scorch than 10/48/3 so scorch-spam in mana-starved situations is more viable. Obviously 15% passive regen and 12% more int means more mana to work with (Arcane Med/Mind outweigh the 6% mana-cost reduction on fire spells you get with 10/48/3). One big drawback is that your mages would lose the 3% hit from Elemental Precision and they are already somewhat lacking in that department.
I'm not a huge fan of arcane blast rotation specs (at least without 2 pc t5) but in a theorycraft-world they allow a lot of control over your mana consumption. I haven't raided with frost since 2.0 so I can't comment on 40/0/21 or deep frost sustainability. Frost proponents say they are efficient, at least relative to deep fire.
If you want both high sustained dps and optional mana efficiency, 43/18/0 is the way to go. And if you have the tier 5 bonus this actually theorycraft's as the highest dps build overall. 33/28 is imo a pvp-oriented build, not really suited for raiding (though it's not terrible).
I was thinking about ways to increase my longevity in boss fights without chugging mana potions constantly (mostly I'm a cheapass and I still run out of mana sometimes anyway).
I think this build would be amazing with the Lightning Capacitor and Shiffar's Nexus-Horn trinkets.
Essentially, you would spam scorch until a clearcast then cast Arcane Missiles. I would think the longevity of this build would be great and the discharge from LC and the increase damage from the SNH would both proc a LOT with the increase in critical rate from Clearcasting resulting in (usually) 3 crits off Arcane Missiles.
I don't have either trinkets, but I may test it out tomorrow anyway and if I like it, I'll chain run Arcatraz until I get the SNH and hope for some luck with Illhoof.
Pros:
Very, very good mana efficiency.
Making full use of trinkets
10% innate +hit for Arcane Missiles (though scorch would suffer)
Cons:
Slightly lower dps (that might or might not be made up with proper trinkets).
If anyone out there is interested in crunching the numbers, I'd greatly appreciate your input. I'm using Irontygress's Mage Calculator to run the numbers for my current gear.
Keep in mind though, Shiffar's has a hidden cooldown period, as do the other "on crit" trinkets. It won't proc every time you crit, or even on 20% of crits. It has a 20% chance to proc on a crit that happens at least 45 seconds from the time of the most recent proc. And with a 15 second proc uptime, you'd get at best a cycle of 15 up - 30 down - 15 up - 30 down.
Just a note I wanted to make on that before you go to respec and expect the trinket to work differently than it really does.
To quote a comment on WoWhead that sums it up nicely:
Originally Posted by thantik
Theoretically, if you could get this thing to proc, EVERY TIME perfectly on its 45 sec internal cooldown with it lasting 15 seconds - it would be equal to adding approx 80+dmg. However getting it to proc is the tricky part on a 20% proc (on crit).
If you conservatively estimate approx 90 seconds, (say you were unlucky and didn't get a crit until the very end of where statistics say you would be guaranteed one), its still = to approx 40+dmg. So based on your luck this thing is netting you anywhere between 40+dmg and 80+dmg over the course of a sustained fight.
Estimations given on an approx 30% crit rate - either way, if you do the math with a 15 sec duration and a 45 sec internal cooldown, this trinket is miles ahead of others. (For comparison most 2 min/90 sec CD trinks giving you 150+ dmg for 15 seconds come out to roughly 31.25+dmg sustained.)
If you want both high sustained dps and optional mana efficiency, 43/18/0 is the way to go. And if you have the tier 5 bonus this actually theorycraft's as the highest dps build overall. 33/28 is imo a pvp-oriented build, not really suited for raiding (though it's not terrible).
Two quick things:
1.) I am just curious how many people actually pvp with a 33/28 or 34/27 build anymore. I tried it, and was absolutely miserable. My own personal experiences were that 10/48/3 is preferrable, and I am now to the point that immediately after our last raid on Thursday night, I respec frost until Sunday and pvp with that. I just started doing arenas with a few people (we suck- half of my teams have never pvped), and frost surely seems the way to go for pvp, at least for me.
2.) Respecced last night to 34/27 (I usually raid with 10/48/3) and toyed around with arcane blast spam. I was actually running the WoW web stats combat log parser last night for the first time, and the results were shocking.
Arcane blast accounted for over half my damage throughout the course of the night, and I led the raid in damage (for eveything) by 4%. Additionally, I led the damage done on each boss with the exception of the maiden, in which I died at 20% because I was not cleansed.
I was simply astonished by the sheer numbers arcane blast put up. I was also trying out a number of different things for mana efficiency in longer fights- scorching until clearcast and then using AM, as well as going invis at 25%, then popping AP/POM/Pyro and starting my AB spam rotation on bosses to try to make up for the finishing dps loss due to not having molten fury talented anymore.
At any rate, I was pretty astonished at how sick the numbers are from AB spam, but at the same time I need to do a few more runs and then compare those logs to some stuff from 10/48/3. I am concerned that numbers might be inflated by the obscene burst on trash, but when it comes to when it matters, boss fights, I might not be putting out the same damage. At the same time, though, my sustainability was through the roof- if I went OOM, it was a conscious choice, as I chose to start my AB spam near the end of the fight and maintained it until the finish.
I respecced to a 41/20/0 out of boredom with 10/48/3 and I've found it to be fantastic for my play style (41 in arcane since I kind of suck at kiting and Slow is great for it). I've gone over Vontre's spreadsheet with the spec many times and I've been quite satisfied with the damage output compared to other specs. My gear is not all that hot (rather sub-par, really) but with pure Arcane Blast spam (and stopcasting macro) I run around 1500 DPS... for a little over a minute. Scorch spam is not bad at 990 DPS and can last a little over 5 minutes.
I know that a 10/48/3 fireball spec can sustain higher DPS for longer and all, but for short fights and instancing I really think a 40ish/20ish/0 spec is great. You don't have to have good +hit gear for AB if you spec with Arcane Focus, and the -40% to threat from Arcane Subtley means if you're in an instance without a pally you can still spam AB like crazy. So I strongly recommend a heavy arcane, Arcane Blast-based spec for 5-mans, heroics, and folks gearing up. Oh, I suppose I also recommend it for folks who want to pwn damage meters since you can just go crazy on trash (until your raid leader gets sick of you drinking from 1% mana to full after every trash pull).
1.) I am just curious how many people actually pvp with a 33/28 or 34/27 build anymore. I tried it, and was absolutely miserable. My own personal experiences were that 10/48/3 is preferrable, and I am now to the point that immediately after our last raid on Thursday night, I respec frost until Sunday and pvp with that. I just started doing arenas with a few people (we suck- half of my teams have never pvped), and frost surely seems the way to go for pvp, at least for me.
2.) Respecced last night to 34/27 (I usually raid with 10/48/3) and toyed around with arcane blast spam. I was actually running the WoW web stats combat log parser last night for the first time, and the results were shocking.
Arcane blast accounted for over half my damage throughout the course of the night, and I led the raid in damage (for eveything) by 4%. Additionally, I led the damage done on each boss with the exception of the maiden, in which I died at 20% because I was not cleansed.
I was simply astonished by the sheer numbers arcane blast put up. I was also trying out a number of different things for mana efficiency in longer fights- scorching until clearcast and then using AM, as well as going invis at 25%, then popping AP/POM/Pyro and starting my AB spam rotation on bosses to try to make up for the finishing dps loss due to not having molten fury talented anymore.
At any rate, I was pretty astonished at how sick the numbers are from AB spam, but at the same time I need to do a few more runs and then compare those logs to some stuff from 10/48/3. I am concerned that numbers might be inflated by the obscene burst on trash, but when it comes to when it matters, boss fights, I might not be putting out the same damage. At the same time, though, my sustainability was through the roof- if I went OOM, it was a conscious choice, as I chose to start my AB spam near the end of the fight and maintained it until the finish.
Any thoughts?
I know this thread is long and hard to navigate, but there's been over 5 pages of discussion on this. Blast is an incredible spell, and offers a lot of flexibility. On trash there is no spell or ability that will even come close to a blast spamming mage but like you said, boss fights are what matter, and fire is still king there.
Inform your dealers and whores of my credit, and pour me a goddamned drink!
1.) I am just curious how many people actually pvp with a 33/28 or 34/27 build anymore. I tried it, and was absolutely miserable. My own personal experiences were that 10/48/3 is preferrable, and I am now to the point that immediately after our last raid on Thursday night, I respec frost until Sunday and pvp with that. I just started doing arenas with a few people (we suck- half of my teams have never pvped), and frost surely seems the way to go for pvp, at least for me.
2.) Respecced last night to 34/27 (I usually raid with 10/48/3) and toyed around with arcane blast spam. I was actually running the WoW web stats combat log parser last night for the first time, and the results were shocking.
Arcane blast accounted for over half my damage throughout the course of the night, and I led the raid in damage (for eveything) by 4%. Additionally, I led the damage done on each boss with the exception of the maiden, in which I died at 20% because I was not cleansed.
I was simply astonished by the sheer numbers arcane blast put up. I was also trying out a number of different things for mana efficiency in longer fights- scorching until clearcast and then using AM, as well as going invis at 25%, then popping AP/POM/Pyro and starting my AB spam rotation on bosses to try to make up for the finishing dps loss due to not having molten fury talented anymore.
At any rate, I was pretty astonished at how sick the numbers are from AB spam, but at the same time I need to do a few more runs and then compare those logs to some stuff from 10/48/3. I am concerned that numbers might be inflated by the obscene burst on trash, but when it comes to when it matters, boss fights, I might not be putting out the same damage. At the same time, though, my sustainability was through the roof- if I went OOM, it was a conscious choice, as I chose to start my AB spam near the end of the fight and maintained it until the finish.
Any thoughts?
Just one really, since so much of your damage comes from AB you'd be better to have mind mastery =).
I am concerned that numbers might be inflated by the obscene burst on trash, but when it comes to when it matters, boss fights, I might not be putting out the same damage. At the same time, though, my sustainability was through the roof- if I went OOM, it was a conscious choice, as I chose to start my AB spam near the end of the fight and maintained it until the finish.
You answered your own question. If you're lumping trash DPS in with boss DPS, you can just stop there and not worry about analyzing anything.
Got my T5 shoulders last week and when I manage to pick up another piece I'll give AB a shot. I'm interested to see if 20% more damage can push it to the forefront of viability.
Awesome thread, even though I don't comment as much as I should, I love getting input on how to play my mage better on raids - thanks to everyone for that .
The reason I'm posting now, is to seek advice. My guild has now progressed to Al'ar, who we're gonna be working on tonight. Now, I've allways been 10/48/3, and it's the spec I like the most without a doubt. Since we're now on Al'ar however, I'm gonna have to respec, and thus i seek advice! I only have 1 tier5 (other than I have different pieces of gear, which puts me to about 1050 spell dam with spellfire). I was thinking of something like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Rf0VZZVAMcofxRiqt - what do you guys think? Im really only interested in raid dps, everything else is second hand. How about a deep arcane spec? As far as I've read, the sustained dps (with snap and WE) of deep frost, should only be slight ly inferior to full fire anyway, so how much less dps will I do? =)
In particular, I'd love to see some of those arcane mages putting up good numbers. I've been 10/48/3 for quite some time now and it is a great raid spec, but god is it boring.
In particular, I'd love to see some of those arcane mages putting up good numbers. I've been 10/48/3 for quite some time now and it is a great raid spec, but god is it boring.
The thing is that mages did better after they changed from arcane spells to frostbolt spam with their ~45/0/rest frost builds.
I ran with deep frost to provide Winters Chill, but was dissapointed by the damage it offers. On the other hand, I provided arcane frosts with 10% crit increase, which is a considerable increase of DPS for the build.
my guild is doing hydross and we are talking about AOE-ing the adds, ofc that means even bigger mana problems.
I was wondering did anyone theocraft the use of manaregen flask /oils after patch 2.1. my rough calculation makes +dam stuff 15-25% better but im not that good in modelling all the talents etc
So question is manaregen stuff worth it on long fights vs damage flask/oil
my guild is doing hydross and we are talking about AOE-ing the adds, ofc that means even bigger mana problems.
I was wondering did anyone theocraft the use of manaregen flask /oils after patch 2.1. my rough calculation makes +dam stuff 15-25% better but im not that good in modelling all the talents etc
So question is manaregen stuff worth it on long fights vs damage flask/oil
That completely depends on whether you're running out of mana or not.
Depending on how much control you have on Hydross I don't think AoEing has to be that demanding mana wise. We've yet to kill him (29% best) but on our best transitions I'm using very little mana (~1/10 mana pool), on our worst transitions I'm using a lot (~2/3 mana pool). If all our transitions are good then damage buffs are best, if all our transitions are bad then mana regen buffs are best. In practice it'll be a balance you'll have to find yourself I think.
Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.
I've been raiding as full arcane for some time now, I generally beat or stay on par with all the other mages/casters (they are 10 48 3). I don't have any WWS though as we slack on that department atm.
I rarely ever use AB though, since the chance on procs from my gear works very well with AM, combined with how clearcast works with AM I don't think I'll ever really use AB, maybe when I get my 2nd piece of t5, but then it would still only be for the last 20% or so.
my guild is doing hydross and we are talking about AOE-ing the adds, ofc that means even bigger mana problems.
I was wondering did anyone theocraft the use of manaregen flask /oils after patch 2.1. my rough calculation makes +dam stuff 15-25% better but im not that good in modelling all the talents etc
So question is manaregen stuff worth it on long fights vs damage flask/oil
If you have a shadow priest, then its really not that big of an issue. Without them, it will be a lot harder on your mana and the regen might be necessary. I only have one hydross kill under my belt and we lost our shadow priest very early on so I was out of mana for the last transition phase. I was also wearing molten armor though so I think simply switching armor would have allowed me to last the entire fight even without a shadow priest. We did have a somewhat stacked raid though with 4 mages and 3 warlocks so the aoe requirements were pretty spread out. If you really need the effeciency, sticking with flame strikes for the aoe and scorches for single target should allow you to go quite a while. There are a few seconds in between phases that should give you some regen ticks so its not constant aoe.
my guild is doing hydross and we are talking about AOE-ing the adds, ofc that means even bigger mana problems.
I was wondering did anyone theocraft the use of manaregen flask /oils after patch 2.1. my rough calculation makes +dam stuff 15-25% better but im not that good in modelling all the talents etc
So question is manaregen stuff worth it on long fights vs damage flask/oil
The solution to this on Hydross is fairly straightforward:
1) If you have a shadowpriest in the raid, put him/her with all of your mages. Done and done, go nuts.
1b) If you do not have a shadowpriest in the raid, kick your officers and go recruit one.
2) Otherwise, use flamestrike on the frost adds (with MoE it's actually a pretty efficient) and try to lean on the warlocks' SoC for nature, but throw in dragon's breath and some IAE, as well as keep them rooted with nova. Do *not* waste mana single-targetting Hydross if that means you'll be mana-starved for the next round.
And yes, if you have no shadowpriest, you might as well roll with mana oils and food, as +dmg doesn't translate very well to better AE damage.
I d/c ed once through the fight and ended up taking a big shatter because of that. I had to use dreamless because i had run out of mana pots. Buffs were : BEM flask, + dmg food and wizard oil. I used a rotation of 3AB/AM and burned up AP at the beginning so i would have the cd up for later.
I know this is not cutting edge content but i am putting off my respec to fire and gather a few more parses and see. It would be great if other arcane mages can post their parses too.Any advice/comments regarding rotations are welcome.
For a while now I have noticed the very rare occurrence of my Fireballs doing, well, nothing. I cast the spell, see it go off and travel towards my target and then nothing happens. No resist message, no damage caused to the target. If it was an initial cast, the mob will come running for me, so at least the mob has noticed that something was flying past his head.
A couple of days ago another mage in my guild asked if someone else has noticed Fireballs sometimes doing nothing and I confirmed his observations. At least I know I am not alone with this phenomenon.
At one such occasion I seem to remember to have seen a "missed" next to one of my Fireballs in the scrolling combat log, but in the heat of the battle I forgot to take a screenshot and didn't have logging turned on. I will pay more attention next time this happens.
Anyway, that got me wondering: if I am not imagining things and you can actually have hit/miss/resist/crit results, how/where does +hit rating come into play? Would it be used first to determine a real miss of the spell and then again for a resist?
Or could it be just a very rare hiccup and potential missed packet or something like that? I recall another threat about someone saying his healing spells sometimes seem to have no effect at all and just "vanish" even though the animation went through and by all accounts it should have done something.
[10:05:49] <Nat> how do u know if a unicorn is a virgin?
For a while now I have noticed the very rare occurrence of my Fireballs doing, well, nothing. I cast the spell, see it go off and travel towards my target and then nothing happens. No resist message, no damage caused to the target. If it was an initial cast, the mob will come running for me, so at least the mob has noticed that something was flying past his head.
I've seen that although not sure I've seen it on an initial cast. I often assumed I'd inadvertantly cancelled and was just hallucinating when I saw the fireball shoot off. It's not a common occurrence but when it does happen it confuses me a lot. I imagine somehow it's got cancelled on the server but the client hasn't been notified and so you see it fire off. I think it usually happens when I move while the casting bar is still up but in the red latency bit (I use Quartz for casting bars) which should be fine.
Not actually a member of Refusion on Burning Blade.
Arcane mage info: I saw this thread on the mage official wow forums and consider it so informative/valuable I wanted to post it here for others to read. The original poster did a exceptional job of summarising the benefits of Arcane mages. Please have a read and post your thoughts/comments - id love to hear what other people think about this:
Deep arcane maximises the damage output of Arcane Blast as well as arcane missiles, Arcane Blast has far higher DPS than fireball, arcane missiles has slightly lower dps than fireball, spamming arcane blast for extended periods of time (over 1:30) is not practical as it will quickly exhaust your mana pool, so using a rotation that attempts to end any given encounter with zero mana using AB and AM as appropriate taking into account the environmental variables for any given encounter will result in a higher damage output than a 10/48/3 build.
Deep arcane gives you the ability to *pick* your +30% crit buff to a spell that procs at a 10% rate, and on the chance you pick each one and hit it with AM, the potency buff stacks to all five waves, if you proc potency on an AM cast, the potency buff applies to the 5 waves of that cast as well as the next five waves that consume the potency buff, if you blow arcane power on a clearcast with arcane missiles, you get the +30% damage buff and ignore the +30% mana cost buff for almost half the effective duration of that arcane power, thus pushing your actual dps sky high as well as increasing the efficiency of your DPS rotations, your threat ceiling is far higher than a deep fire build due to the -40% innate threat reduction, and your +hit innate bonus is 7% higher than the 3% available to 10/48/3, this is a big deal on 73 boss mobs as you can stack damage, crit and int, and largely ignore hit.
Deep arcane gearing maximises the mana returns of evocation as you won't be ignoring spirit, giving you a larger pool to work with, deep arcane has a higher mana regeneration rate than deep fire due to arc meditation stacking with mage armor and once again, the spirit thing. Deep arcane allows you to boost your mana pool, spell crit, and damage with a single stat.
AM gets 188% bonus from spell damage vs fireballs oft maligned recently nerfed coefficient, meaning any +dmg investment to a deep arcane build has a rather large lead over it's fire based counterpart.
Deep arcane crits come quicker due to faster spells and hits, AM impacts are one second spacing and AB impacts are 2.5-1.5 second impacts, making it a proc happy spec for trinkets such as the lightning capacitor.
Tier 5 mage armor has spirit, it also increases your (massive) AB damage by 20% whilst simultaneously increasing your (initially tiny, relevant to marathon DPS tests) AB cost by 20%, this results in an increase in burst DPS, but a far more massive relative increase in long term dps.
Deep arcane requires more timing due to the debuff effect of arcane blast to manage your rotation correctly, requires you to predict fairly accurately when the battle will end in order for you to dump all your mana in the optimal way for that space of time, requires you to be more aware of encounter specific info as you will be 11 yards closer to the action than a 10/48/3 fire mage, with these drawbacks in mind, it makes absolutely no sense to imagine sitting in the back ranks pressing fireball is going to allow you to outdamage a well played deep arcane mage, accept or ignore this as you please, but keep in mind the argument that deep fire typically uses against deep frost when questions of the damage potential of frost focused builds come up, if you could do this just as well, why would we even be an option?
I write this post because I'm simply sick of people referring to deep arcane as the spec to go for when you're just getting your feet and do not yet have the gear to invest in a 10/48/3 build, 10/48/3 is actually an inferior spec compared to deep arcane, for all of the above reasons, and I wil never bother to discuss the issue again, aside from to reference this post.
1) Arcane missiles procs Judgment of Wisdom 5x more often than other spells from a single cast.
2) If you start a cast of Arcane Blast before the "stack" of debuffs wears off, you'll get the speed bonus -- but you only get the extra casting cost if the stack is still there when you FINISH. So starting casts with 1 second left before the stack expires gives you all the benefit and none of the downside.
3) Arcane Missiles can "double dip" into Mystical Skyfire Diamond procs so long as the second cast is started before the first one ends (the buff only disappears when your cast finishes, so you can just start a new arcane missile cast after 4 out of 5 missiles have fired and get 9 missiles over 4.5 seconds).
4) The 5 second rule plays with arcane missiles differently than other spells. Your 5 seconds starts when your cast takes mana. For most spells this at the end of the cast, for channeled spells it is at the start. If you alternate between a channeled cast and a non-channeled one, the the time you spend casting the non-channeled spell is 100% mana regen assuming the channeled spell was channeled for at least 5 seconds.
Arenas? you're better off with iceblock. However, for specs without iceblock deep arcane is probably at least as good as 33/28 arc-fire. Possibly better because you have more weapons at your disposal.
Battlegrounds?
Deep arcane builds can be quite good especially if you take some points in fire. For instance as a 46 / 15 arc-fire spec I have a large selection of effective nukes available to use in pvp. Much larger than a deep fire or 33/28 arc-fire mage. Also unlike a more conventional fire or arc-fire mage, if my fire tree gets counterspelled, as an arcane mage I can still output very high dps with arcane spells.
Scorch and fireball - With 15 points in fire I get flamethrowing, burning soul, and ignite. Damage with these nukes is about the same as a 33/28 arc-fire mage except that the effective crit rate is around 6% lower.
Pyroblast - this build can do the "3-minute mage" AP POM pyroblast and it hits as hard or harder than the same from a 33/28 mage. However, like scorch and fireball, the crit rate is significantly lower.
Arcane Blast - surprisingly effective in battlegrounds. It hits as hard as a frostbolt with the cast time of scorch when ramped up. It has a very high crit rate similar to that of a 33/28 mage's fire spells. Though its range is short, it has no travel time and leaves no flaming trail giving away your position. Particularly effective when followed by fireblast to finish off foes with less than 4k health left. With the extreme dps of Arcane Blast combined with Slow its often possible to sneak up and ambush opponents and win even in 1v2 encounters where other mage specs would have to rely on lucky crits.
Arcane Missiles - Not the best choice for your dps in pvp. This is not the spell you want to initially use to begin the battle because of its short range and vulnerability to counterspell or interrupts. It hits deceptively hard. Properly talented and equipped an arcane mage can output 900+ dps with arcane missiles even without arcane power up. This is a good choice to use to finish off an opponent or when your fire tree gets counterspelled.
Arcane missiles is also an effective choice against classes that rely on damage to interrupt casting such as hunters because of its 100% chance to resist interrupts from damage. This can be a fun spell when used with arcane power and on a clearcast. Opposing players are very surprised when they take 1700+ dps in damage from arcane missiles. Toss in the BG zerk buff as well for extreme damage (I've seen each wave in the cast critting for over 2200 with zerk, AP and trinket up).
Arcane Explosion - same uses as for any other type of mage. However, it has a very high crit rate and good crit damage. With AP up it can easily crit for over 1400 damage per cast.
Slow - excellent in pvp. Highly effective against warriors, shamans, other mages and warlocks. Its far easier to apply than rank 1 frostbolt as you don't have to stop moving or even face your target and if your opponent trinkets out of it you can instantly reapply it. Slowing spellcasting by 50% is also incredibly helpful against any caster class that lacks the ability to remove it. If you slow a warlock make sure to cast detect magic afterwards for the felhunter to eat.
Q:
So what would be your pve spell rotation in a deep arcane build?
Well, the answer is, it depends.
First of all, you have to lay out some general rules for your rotations, to maximise the potential of an arcane build (or any build really) you need a cast bar mod that shows your latency ghosted like quartz, so you can correctly time your spells, this is more critical with an arcane build because you want to time your rotation so as you pick up your arcane blast, you get the haste buff from the debuff, but drop the debuff before the cast completes to lose the stack to zero and get the mana cost to 195 and immediately pick it back up to one stack again.
Secondly, an effective arcane rotation maximises the use of clearcasting, you dynamically modify your rotation to take advantage of the arcane potency buff, use it with arcane missiles and you'll get a +30% crit buff to every wave in the spell, it can be hard to catch arc potency before your next spell goes off, and harder still the more you're stacking AB and the lower the cast time gets, but ideally unless you're doing full out AB spam, catching clearcasts with arcane missiles will drastically increase your damage and your effciency.
Lastly, for deep arcane you can use your arcane power to increase your efficiency / dpm as well as your DPS by blowing it on long fights multiple times when it's up and you have a clearcast, this results in almost half the effective duration being cost free whilst still maintaining the large damage buff.
Some standard rotations keeping all the above in mind;
AB x 2 Arc mIssiles / scorch
Higher dpm than 10/48/3 fireball spam with a scorch stack, lower DPS. (not counting effectively managed clearcasts and arcane power usage)
AB x 3 Arc missiles / scorch
Higher DPS than 10/48/3 fireball spam with a scorch stack, lower dpm. (not counting effectively managed clearcasts and arcane power usage)
AB spam
Highest DPS in the entire game period.
Math follows, this is for my current gear following the rotations listed above for deep arcane.
stats are 1048 arcane damage 22.94% base crit. (1048 fire dmg substituted in the fire tests)
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Additional Advantages:
* The limiting factor on arcane dps is mana, not +dam. Stacking a mage group with multiple shadow priests results in more group dps. Haven't theorycrafted it, but I'd suspect that 2 shadow priests and 3 arc mages is probably the highest dps you can get out of a caster group on a tank 'n spank.
* If all mages are arc, the CoE warlock can use CoA/CoD, boosting raid dps.
* You can nuke arcane and still have iceblock (you lose 1 Arc Potency, 1 Arc Mind, 1 MM in a 40/0/21 build)
Additional Disadvantages:
* The limiting factor on arcane dps is mana. Raid practices may have to change to support the arc mage. JoW must be on the target for any sort of reasonable arcane efficiency.
* Movement/Interruption fights punish AM harshly as interrupting AM mid cast causes DPM to tank. The workaround is to use your secondary school when you might have to move.
* No pushback protection on AB.
My mage has: +1160 arcane damage with 29.3% crit (for arcane spells) or +1114 arcane with 31.1% crit (with sextant of unstable currents) and im currently in a 49 arc / 12 fire build. All of my damage done is arcane (well maybe I fireblast a little sometimes too), usually in the form of a (AB + AB + AM -> Repeat) rotation, unless I wish to go harder dps (at the expense of mana) and im always doing very well on damage.
All the '10.48,3' pve fires mages who believe their build is best dps are getting a bit of a rude shock-awakening - the mage 2 piece tier 5 bonus with good arcane gearing and good control of your rotations = can easily dominate dps meters. Yes, it takes a little practise to perfect how to play an arcane mage, when your used to fire - but try it and you will never look back!
The hardest class for me to beat on dps is actually.... beastmaster hunters (in fights where they can use pets).
the mage 2 piece tier 5 bonus with good arcane gearing and good control of your rotations = can easily dominate dps meters.
Well that pretty much sums it up. Get 2 piece tier 5 then spec arcane.
I love how the post suggests 2 shadowpriests in one group. That may be able to boost your own dps higher. However, spreading out your shadowpriests would most likely net you a larger raid dps increase.
The post also provides no solid dps numbers. Just that you will dominate the meters! Sounds like an infomercial.
I was deep arcane for awhile (admittedly with the AM bug) and the mana usage just wasn't sustainable in longer fights without special raid catering. While I am all for exploring arcane specs. DPS numbers on varying fights would be needed to get me interested.
That thread on the official forums is one of the things that prompted me to come here and ask if anyone had any good parses for top tier arcane mages.
It looks great on paper, but you can't raid on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of many raid encounters reduce the effectiveness of arcane mages. I've looked at quite a few WWS parses and the only time I have really seen arcane mages are on obvious fights like hyrdoss and alar (and of course, they sucked pretty badly).
06/04/07, 1:42 PM
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