Not really, I have used Vontre's spreadsheet and the difference between fire and frost isn't that big and is generally in the range of 60-100 DPS. You seem to be under the misconception that fire completely blows deep frost out the water which is simply not the case nor has it ever been. I didn't say I outdamage them, sometimes I do but it depends on the fight largely, but I am very consistant when playing so overall I get very high on the damage meters.

This is our VR kill last night, the mage Klippa is deep fire and I am my usual spec, its not an ideal fight due to the randomness of the orbs but even so it should pan out as roughly equal overall. He was determinied to try and beat me on this fight so I know for a fact he wasn't slacking, his gear is on the same level as mine, slightly worse rings but he has 4 set T5 whereas I don't, so I guess that means he is a bad mage? Well you tell me, I personally think he is a good mage and I didn't see him put a foot wrong at all last night.

Wow Web Stats

I used that fight because its the only one where we single target DPS'd where we had the same amount of experience, it was his first night with our guild in TK and we were attuning him and a few others to Hyjal/BT he has enough experience on VR to be as good at the fight as myself.

Depending on the fight I can get up to 1100 DPS from single target damage even on our last rage I got just under 900 DPS with 18% miss rate due to the high frost resistance.

If you were to judge frost due to this small difference you would wonder why any mage would ever spec fire when you can compare it to the even bigger difference that arcane gets DPS wise. Atleast with frost you get survivability and utility whereas fire gets nothing over arcane.

When I do outdamage them its generally on AoE fights as I have specced the 3 points in Arcane Impact where deep fire doesn't have the freedom to do this and majority of all AoE is from Arcane Explosion due to threat mechanics mainly.

I have been seeing stuff like this a lot lately. I thought it was well established that Fire Blast should be left out of your main spell rotation? It's very expensive, and gets little benefit from your +damage gear since it's an instant cast. If you're repositioning, fine, throw in an Fire Blast. But all-out Fireball spam is going to be better DPS and DPM.

100 DPS is a huge, huge difference. It's 10% of a mages output at the tier 5 level on average. If every player took a 100 DPS drop because of their spec over my raid force, we'd go from killing every strider on Vashj on time to falling behind after the second. It's 1500 DPS easily spread across the raid force.

Even 60 DPs is an insane difference that would immediately have me respeccing. And frosts optimium DPs is much harder to get that fires, because the water elemental is unreliable on certain fights. 60 DPS is almost 1000 DPS spread across my raid force, which again is the difference between the kill and the wipe on fights like Vashj, Leotheras etc.

Why exactly do we still have mages speccing deep fire then?

Edit: OK thats probably one of the worst argumenst ever :P What I am trying to get at though is that it isn't always pure DPS that wins the day out. I also don't take the theorycrafting as the gospel truth and TBH I wish I hadn't brought it up because to be quite frank I have found such massive holes in it that I only tend to use it as a guide on what to try.

I prefer to try things out in practice, I have played deep fire and I have played full arcane and I have some of the best gear available for me to play arcane. I just don't see much of what everyone else sees in these specs my damage output barely moves and all I ever seem to get out of respeccing is less survivability which invariably leads to me dying more often.

I dont know, but when I aoe I usually do flamestrike -> DB > BW and then spam AE, draws aggro like hell but then you can usually nova and mobs die shortly after. Seems to work fine and outdamages frost aoe by far, and I usually live through morogrim/solarian just fine.

I've done TK/Hyjal as frost and you can do ok damage, but if your pet dies you're hosed. You might also want to tell Klippa that t5 is a horrible set for fire mages

I was arcane for a while and when i went back to fire it took me over a month to move back in fully. At first i wasn't using flamecaps & destruction pots every CD, wasn't riding my shaman to save bloodlust for 20%, wasn't riding my locks to keep COE up, wasn't keeping scorch up 100%, ...

People that hop specs for a day or even a few weeks aren't giving the spec a fair shot imo.

No, what he means is survivability is important and can also make the difference between a wipe and a kill. This is a big reason why a lot of mages spec ice for Archimonde.

I think Frenzi, that the reason the -only- reason you out dpsed Klippa on THAT WWS was pretty obvious ON the WWS.

1) Klippa only had a 28% crit rate you had a 38% crit rate. I don't know what was up if you had a boomkin and ele shaman or what, but your gear supports a 25% crit rate so that was pretty lucky. Klippa has a 31% crit static on his gear not even mentioning Combustion, looked like he got pretty fucked on this fight. Especially considering you geat a measly 100% from crits and he gets 125%. BIG difference there bro (argue raid buffed and potions all you want but technically he should be getting the exact same things so either you're getting super lucky or he's getting super fucked)

2) Klippa got hit by FOUR, count them FOUR arcane orbs. So obviously he did not play nearly as well as you did, getting hit by ONE, count it ONE arcane orb. There's the damage difference right there! Again he could have made the meager damage difference that was prevalent here.

Not to mention the other WWS that were in that report that you neglected to link
Which are showing ME, that Klippa can beat you it's not like zomg can't beat frenzi he's frost and stuff.

*shrug*


Fire out DPSes frost man, when played by an equally skilled player with equal gear. Survivability is your main argument here, and that's prevalent only with ice block. Certain talents throw in a chance to miss hits and a like 3% damage reduction from certain things, but mostly iceblock is what you're talking about

Thats 24 seconds of silenced=0 dps? (6 seconds silence each if I remember correct). Thats almost 10% of the entire fight doing 0 dps (going by our guild kills, which are a bit under 6 minutes each)

You mention his gear lvl, and 4 piece tier 5 - all of that is useless and irrelevant - when hes doing 0 dps because hes getting hit by arcane orbs and silences for ~10% of the fight. I wouldnt say someone getting hit by 4 orbs is 'a bad mage' but if they want to do very competitive dps, where you cant afford to get silenced - they certainly wouldnt be doing very good.

ReignConfused, the big crit difference would be Winter's Chill, extra 10% crit for frost spells.

It's not a good idea to try and compare dps of a Deep fire build and other mage builds using WWS parses. WWS tracks dps for any damage done + 5 seconds until the dps "time" stops.
The fireball dot severely screws up the WWS dps for any fight that involves down time due to aggro wipes, stuns, whatever.

You will routinely see fire mages have more damage, yet lower dps then others in a boss fight.

So if your looking at a deep fire mage who is doing 920 dps, and your frost and doing 880 dps, it looks like your only 40 dps behind according, but the difference is almost always more.

A good example is the Gruul fight. Between the slam and the silence, your fireball dot will continue to tick, lowering your dps, yet upping your total damage done and dps time. Check out this parse to see the example:
WWS Gruul Parse
You run in, and everybody starts nuking after the tank and offtank get a bit of aggro. The fight last 5 minutes, my dps as deep fire is listed as 1,016. Sephtin, a skilled frost mage, is listed as 915 dps. So you think that our dps is only 100 dps apart, or roughly 10%. Yet take a look at the damage done. 313k vs 229k. Almost 30% more.

Edit: Added: Just to clarify a bit: Digging a bit deeper you see that my DPS time is 100%. The entire fight some kinda of damage was being done with 5 seconds of my last damage. Sephtin had a DPS time of 82%.

I casted 58 Fireballs (3.2 secs with lag), 22 scorches (1.7 with lag), and 4 fireblast (1.7 seconds with lag) for a total cast time of 229 seconds.
Frost mage casted 73 frostbolts (2.7 secs), 11 icelances (1.7 secs) for a total cast time of 215.8 seconds.

The difference in dps time should be around 10%. Yet it's 18% because of the fireball / ignites ticking.

I think a large part is because frost "shows" extremely well when looking at DPS numbers when compared to fire because of nature of the fireball dot. See above.

I agree 100% with your points about the benefits of deep frost. I perfer to raid with Deep frost, but switched back to Deep Fire when working on Vashj and Kael. The extra dps can easily be the tipping point in getting the striders down and having 2 up and a wipe.

I would add Leo to your list of fights where fire is inherently worse. A bad ignite tick when he is changing forms can lead to a wipe. Plenty of ways to stop that from happening, yet it still does.

Plugged it into Vontre's sheet - deep fire spec (with Incinerate), T5 level gear, raid buffed, no shadow priest. Comparing Fireball vs. 2 Fireball + 1 Fire Blast cycles.

Mage Armour
Fiba - 1382 DPS, OOM after 6:00
2Fiba/FiBl - 1420 DPS, OOM after 4:31

Molten Armour
Fiba - 1421 DPS, OOM after 4:56
2Fiba/FiBl - 1458 DPS, OOM after 3:53

Looks decent enough to me, like a "second Molten Armour" that you can use to burn more mana, a bit less efficient though.

Well lets see,

Al'ar, no contest
VR I won
Solarian he beat me fair and square but its an AoE fight where he gets the better tools for AoE burst
Kael he wins because he wasn't assigned to do anything other than DPS
Rage I win with 18% miss due to high frost resistance
Anetheron he wins because I was assigned to infernals losing my WC all the time

That is why I linked the VR, If you really want to look at the others look at the overall damage for the evening where I came 2nd by a good margin.

BTW 38% crit is average for me I have 15% extra crit besides what is on my gear from Emp Frostbolt and WC, he was also in the same group :P

I never said that firemage don't outdamage frost btw, I said that the difference isn't as big as everyone makes out.

Hey mages,

Could anyone explain to me why a 10/48/3 mage with 26% crit and 8% hit would prefer to stack crit over hit? I thought hit was pretty much the best stat to stack untill you hit 16%, but when talking to a guildie today he said he didn't want hit and needed more crit. And no, he doesn't have the Eye of Magtheridon.
He didn't seem to be in the mood to explain it so I thought I'd ask here.

Becuase he doesn't understand the best way to increase his DPS against raid bosses, or if he does, is not interested in doing so.

Depends on the encounter and what he is tasked to do. Most boss fights that means getting to 16% to hit, then crit. But there are several boss fights where you are spent a considerable amount of time killing non level 73. In my experience (SSC / Eye), the ones that stand out are Fathom Lord, Hydross and Vashj.

Fathom Lord you spend most of your time killing the 4 adds, and most people agree once you get to the boss, it's all downhill. So when your dps matters the most (killing the shaman), stacking crit over hit will help. (The adds are all level 71).

Depending on how you kill hydross, you could spend 50%+ of your time killing adds. So again, all that +to hit is wasted for half your time. You just need to strike a balance.

Vashj is similiar to Fathom Lord, in the sense that the hardest phase of the fight is phase 2, when your killing adds. Probably striders. This is when your dps matters the most, and swapping in crit for hit will max your dps for the hardest part.

It's already been established (and Manly laid down the rules *repeatedly*) that comparing one WWS parse from a guild only tells us about the mages in that guild. Congratulations on being a better player than the fire mage in your guild.

The fact remains that mathematically you're looking at 100 DPS difference between an equally skilled frost mage and a fire mage, and that's hugely significant. You can't justify frost by comparing yourself to mediocre player s- if you geared and specced for fire, you would be doing significantly more damage than you are now.

This isn't up for debate - there's no magical frost DPS rotation that outdamages fire, there's no special tricks, all you do is frostbol and use your water elemental efficiently. And that cannot produce the same numbers as deep fire. Coming into a theorycraft thread where all the numebrs are available and saying "I can do decent damage as frost" is only saying two things to the world :

i) The other mages in your guild are bad
ii) You're willing to settle for less than the best performance for your guild.

If you're going to be claiming that frost is a worthwhile trade off from fire, you had best either have some secret we've missed pushing it's DPS higher, or be talking about a particular fight where survival > DPs.

Ah ok, I'd read here a while back in one of the threads here that it was better to drop hit with it, but I guess it's been disproved since then. Just thought I'd mention he didn't have it in case someone suggested that was his reason on that basis.

Thanks all who replied, we're not focusing on any add heavy fights at the moment so I'm not sure what he's planning. Oh well.

I agree only comparing one WWS parse isn't a realistic test of DPS even having multiple one only compares me to the people in my guild ultimately. You can see the DPS I have been outputting though and which someone has already said is more than respectable

I also know the numbers and have tried out numerous different specs over time which I have stated previously. Again I would like to state for the record I never said frost was better DPS than fire.

I also don't see how you can just presume every player in my guild is a bad player merely because I can compete on a equal level with them, I am not some exceptional player and I don't consider myself so much better at this game than they are that it should make a difference. I have also been commented on several times when we recruit someone new that they have never seen a frost mage manage to output as much damage and its like you say there isn't anything I can change as far as spell rotation, I have checked it out, to get better DPS I have to do 5xAB 3xFrostbolt which isn't sustainable.

So what exactly is it? you don't exactly leave me with many options a) I am an exceptional player b) My whole guild is just shit or c) I am doing something different that no other frostmage has tried?

As to my spec, I think it does have its benefits over fire that make it worthwhile losing some DPS and not speccing fire or arcane. A really good benefit is while you are progressing both ice block and ice barrier keep you up and you save mana from your healers, you can remove stuns and debuffs giving you more DPS time, you can use less stamina gear on fights where you take a beating because you can negate the damage. Just because an ability doesn't give you more damage on some spreadsheet doesn't mean it doesn't in the game.

I could've ice blocked through the orbs on VR to stop moving to give me more DPS time, I don't think I did but the option is there. On Naj'entis I IB before we pop the bubble and I don't need to bandage myself up. On Morogrim I IB out of the grave not only negating damage but getting back to the fight, same on hydross with the tombs. When we still did Magtheridon I IB through the 30% damage to increase my DPS time. Do you see where I am going with this?

How much DPS you do on paper is absolutely not the same as you do in practice and as I said I use the numbers as a guide not as an absolute. So in answer to your question I use the spec I like the most and that I feel works best for me, which in this case is frost. I can't defend my choice through numbers and I wasn't trying to, I was trying to show you frost being used effectively.

Thanks again for the additional assistance everyone, I'm really getting excited now! I will work on the gear mentioned already while I gather mats for the Spellfire set, I'd hate to switch and see dps drop.

This is an awesome thread, the discussions are excellent!

Seconding Stein on this. If you are changing trees, don't just change for a day and then declare your new spec worthless if it doesn't perform to the level theorycrafting says it can. Fire, arcane and frost all play very differently, and there's tricks to each spec that don't apply to the other trees. Smart use of the water elemental, managing your burn rate versus your current mana (plus any incoming cooldowns), and timing trinkets/consumables to wring out the most effect are all tricks of the trade you must learn.

I went from 10/48/3 to 46/15 full arcane after I acquired three pieces of T5 many weeks ago, and I still don't feel like I've delved all of arcane's potential.