Could you explain this a bit more, please?

Basically, you use the first two charges as you usually do and by this time your stack should be reasonably high (6-8). You then can make both a Fire Blast and Fireball guaranteed to crit by hitting the mob with Fire Blast while the Fireball is in flight. (So, cast Fireball and then Fire Blast immediately after.)

The folks that run the numbers have shown repeatedly that with top-knotch gear (4pT6) AM spam spec and fireball spam spec will be equivalent in 2.3

Running 4 mages frees up 5 debuff slots for an extra SP and gets you an extra COA/COD. Seriously tho -- fire mages also need an SP in long fights since they run OOM in 4.5-5 min chain potting, gems, evocation -- and you do NOT want your fire mages OOM during the last 20% of the fight. Arcane mages just have more options to mana dump for burst dps.

And if you can get your pallies doing JoW that should fix most of the mana issues for your hunters.

I apologize in advance if this was posted somewhere in the thread before, but I've looked for a fair while now and can't seem to find any conclusive evidence on it yet.

For a raiding 10/0/51 Frost Mage in T4-level gear (dawning on T5-level gear soon enough), why is spell damage reported to be more valuable point for point than spell crit? The primary issue I'm concerned with is what to gem gear with once you're already at the hit cap, +9 spell damage or +5 spell damage, +4 spell crit.

The short answer is that damage adds more damage to both your non-crits AND your crits while crit rating just shifts a portion of your damage from non-crit to crit.

The longer answer is that the value of spell damage and spell crit are related in that the more damage you have, the more valuable crit becomes and the more crit you have the more valuable damage becomes. Once you get enough damage AND a low enough crit, the fraction of a percent increase coming from crit rating is a larger than the increase straight damage provides.

For example, say your fireball does 10k damage on average at a 0% crit rate. Adding 22 crit rating (or 1% crit) will boost your average damage by 10000*.01 = 1000 damage compared to adding 22 damage. This is a very extreme example in that it has a massive amount of +damage and an impossibly low crit rating. There generally isn't enough +damage available without int or +crit pushing up your crit percentage.

The only build in the game that can normally run into this situation is AM spam builds with an AToI and a Lightning Cap and that's largely because AM's fairly low +damage scaling and the fact that crit drives the trinkets. It's also possible for crit rating to be more valuable for a 33/28/0 build with 1500 +damage (can happen with raid buffs) and an abnormally low amount of +crit (~20% fire crit IIRC). Otherwise, +damage is always more valuable than +crit, usually by a significant amount.

The 9 damage gems will be better for you, check with a script or spreadsheet to find out exactly how much better.

I am baffled by our Mage's DPS...so is he.

Here's our Mage:
The World of Warcraft Armory
1020 Fire spell, 26.38% crit, 160 hit rating, 10/48/3 build.
Here's his WWS for our last Gruul attempt:
Skydriver - WWS
Average Fireball 2329, max crit 3916, 26% effective crit on Fireball.

Looking at other Mages, it became apparent that they are putting out significantly more DPS than him in worse gear. I know he's a decent player.
Here's our example:
The World of Warcraft Armory
825 Fire spell, 27% crit, 103 hit rating, 10/48/3 build.
Here's her WWS:
Feloree - WWS
Average Fireball 2617, max crit for 6019, 38% effective crit.

Obviously, we're loosing a lot somewhere either in raid buffs/pots/flasks or some debuff on Gruul.
Our Mage, Skydriver has been keeping the Scorch debuff up, and his spell usage is nearly exactly that of Feloree.

What baffles me is the extra 14% crit she has and that her Fireballs seem to do 200% critical damage and still do Ignite damage on top of that. Where's that coming from? I looked through the raid and through the debuffs on Gruuls and I don't see anything.

Our Mage uses Quartz and /stopcasting macros. That would explain overall DPS, but not the difference in damage between Fireballs. Our Mage has almost 100 more Fire spell than the other, yet her Fireball hits for like 300-400 more.

We raid buff the usual stuff, and I know he flasks and uses oils and food buffs. Is there something we're missing? How does she gain 14% crit? I checked their spell usage too, and they use Combustion about the same...

We have similar problems with our Warlocks. They put out about 600 DPS, but in the gear they're in, it should be like 800 DPS. We're tanking Gruul up to 18-20 Grows, so it's our DPS that needs to step it up.

The other mage is in pvp gear in the armory. I can tell by his/her lesser spell blasting procs that he replaces at least the helm if not more for raiding. He is probably close to the other mage in his raid gear.

Skydriver's average fireball is lower due to dying less than half way through the fight. He was not able to take advantage of molten fury which gives 20% extra damage under 20%. He also casted scorch way too much. He should only be doing it enough to keep the debuff up.

That would make sense. Even if she drops a few pieces for better raiding gear, and her spell damage and spell hit are about the same as Sky's, and that the higher damage is from Molten Fury.

...where in the world does she gain 14% crit from?

It's probably extremely likely that the other mage logged out their PvP gear, seeing they're tailoring and not wearing any spellfire. Yeah, thats probably it for sure, Feloree gets the Nexus horn buff 4 times in that report, and certainly isn't wearing it on the armory. Different weapons, gear and trinkets could easily make up that difference in average fireball damage.

The fireball crit damage isn't that far off for Feloree either, 2600avg for the fight, average crit would be 3900. Use of combustion and a flamecap in the last 20% could easily move that average crit to 4400. Especially with that massive 6k crit, probably a lucky overlap under 20% with both trinkets active.

Please use http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16781-mage_help_me_please/ for mage help requests instead of cluttering this theorycrafting thread. This megathread is already big enough as it is.

I'm not sure where you got that about blizzard fixing the need for a stopspell casting macro because... they pretty much cant unless they allow for queuing up spells...

Or allow spells to be spammed to the server, rather than block it on the client side.

If you could spam the server every 10 ms /cast scorch, and the server decides when to begin to cast scorch, then you effectively removed the need for stopcasting as far as pve dps is concerned. It doesn't eliminate lag, but sure as hell makes it more manageable. It does, however, make the g15 a true dpser tool.

or any macro program that can send a key imput every 10ms...

Im not sure I'd prefer the standard thing for a dps caster to be to have a macro software enabled and to activate it once the pull happen(and then pretty much just watch the game happen) over everyone using Quartz...

feloree also has a shaman in her group, for another 101 spell dmg, which is probably anotehr large portion of that +fireball dmg.

The crit is random, sometimes you will crit 40% of the time even though u have 30% crit, others u will crit 20%.

This mage needs to get his spell rotations down better. Assuming he is doing the only scorching in the raid, he should have 5 initially, then 1 more every 6-7 fireballs (8 is the max you can get in, but once you factor in the movement required for that fight, and lag, the number will drop some, call it 6 fireballs per scorch) he should have only scorched 9 times, yet he scorched 15, 6 more scorchs = 3 potential fireballs and since his fireballs (on average) are 119% the dps of scorch (actually a little higher because of the lag time between the 2 scorches) he is losing out on ~1200 dmg over those 9 seconds. Assuming my math isn't horribly wrong, it is late, so there is a good chance it is.

Basically, this guy needs to get quartz, get accustomed to it, and watch his scorch timer. I would guess he would see and increase in dps over the entirety of the fight of 100+. Give him a shaman and you will see it go up quite abit more, that 101 spell dmg is huge, then you also get to give him a well timed heroism (20% for huge molten fury dps) and you will see some big numbers out of him. I always topped dps on gruul back in the day (mage craftables are hax) .

Learning class specific techniques and information will get you a lot further than quartz. Stopcasting is imo the most overrated crap ever though it's quite nice.

shaving ,2 seconds off a cast due to lag is the difference between wearing 210 haste rating and nothing when spamming AB I wouldn't say that's overrated - granted 200 ms lag.

While I'm not a fan of stopcasting, I dont think the poster above you is not referring to using Quartz in connection with a stopcasting macro. Instead he's pointing out that the person being talked about simply Scorched too many times, compared to how many was needed (presumably to keep Imp Scorch up). Quartz has a built in debuff monitor, which presumably shows how long the current debuff has to go before it expires (assuming you were the first to throw it up).

Personally, I couldn't stand stopcasting. I feel it's a horrible fix, that really ruins my enjoyment of the game so I never used it myself. The gains becomes lesser as you will mess up casts now and then, and the attention you must sacrifice on the castbar itself, detracted in a big way from my enjoyment of being a mage. I'm looking forward to 2.3 (and I'm also curious as to what the vague comments Slouken made regarding stopcasting will amount to).

I dont really agree that it mess up casts. The thing that many Mages using /stopcasting do wrong is that they try and get their spells of as early as possible wich will result in alot of interrupted spells. What you need to do is play it a little bit more safe and you will notice that you can cut 0.1-0.2 seconds from every cast and still get no interrupts.

Is it official and decided that blizzard really found a solution that they will implement to 2.3 patch?

This is an absurd comment. While it certainly is important to know everything about the class you play and play as well as possible in all aspects, that doesn't negate the fact that /stopcasting macros are incredibly beneficial.

As pointed out previously, it's like giving yourself Haste gear, and it takes no effort whatsoever. It just requires a slight adjustment in play away from the keyboard mashing that many Mages develop as a bad habit.

If you have 200ms ping and play it safe and only cut off 150ms off your cast time that's still reducing your cast time from 3.2 sec to 3.05sec, or 4.7% haste. For free. There is absolutely NO reason NOT to do this except for stubbornly sticking to old, bad habits.

I normally use the scorch x 5, fire blast, fireball x 2, fire blast ... refresh scorch rotation. On trash mobs that die quickly (SSC trash as reference), is it best to get a full scorch debuff (i.e. 5x) on them?

I usually cast scorch x 2 on these, then continue with the regular rotation. Is this better or should I really try to get 5x scorch applied?

I wouldn't bother putting a full scorch stack on trash at all, or keeping it up once it drops. At most I'd scorch 2-3 times before commencing with the fireballs, just to give the tanks a brief period to build up aggro. It's only trash, and they should die fast enough with the entire raid focused on them. There's no point trying to eke out 6% more fire damage over the course of the mob's one minute lifespan.