Having assembled gear of around 1050 fire spelldamage, without mind mastery, I have got 5200 hp unbuffed. Here comes the question, is it worth gimping hp (and possibly crit) into gaining even more spelldamage? Of course for fights like gruul or aran I got few pieces with huge stamina, but my regular gear is more focused on damage, as I assume I am not tank, and my job is dps. Problem is that our tanks are either slacking or that amount of damage is too big, because I can easily match tank's aggro only with scorch spam, then I invis at around 20k aggro, burn my combustion and trinket, and with 7fb 1scorch cycle I get full tanks aggro pretty fast and have to use obsolete arcane blasts or arcane missiles just not to aggro. Of course I got that crappy burning soul talent too.
Anybody faced same aggro problems? I see only one possible way out, a paladin with salvation, but those are often not available, especially in heroics.
p.s. Where to find link on that spreadsheet in excel file?

You say "gimping hp to gain even more spelldamage" like your health isn't already gimped. It is. If you're doing heroics like you mentioned you may want to get more - around 7k unbuffed is a good starting point.

I went from Arcane to elementalistlol last weekend for battlegrounds. It's downright silly how much threat fire generates. Maybe I just got spolied with Arcane, but as fire I just sit at the top of KTM while doing no where near as much damage.

7k health on heroics for mage? Are you joking me? Tell me any encounter in heroic instance where hp is somewhat necessity. The only thing that comes up to mind is ogre boss in SH, but you should pop limited invul pot there either way, and 5k or 8k hp kinda makes no difference for me, but 700spd or 1100 difference does, because topping dps is somewhat I prioritize. Anyway if mob is on me, tank is doing something wrong, and nobody cancelled dragon breath ^.^

Errm.. how about that last boss of slave pens with the massive aoe damage?

On non-25 man stuff I can pull agro with arcane blast cycles if I really push the envelop. I wouldn't want to be fire specced for a heroic instance.

outrange it ...

I thought the range was 40 yards?

Fireball has a 41 yard range. Last boss of pens is extremely easy when he can't hit you... Just another reason to be fire. I do fine in heroics and am approaching 100 badges now. If people need to spec "for heroics" they have problems (maybe with the exception of shattered halls for double block, handy vs. the ogre).

Yeah, just don't have the tank face him away from the group and healers and fire mages (and some hunters) will take no damage against Quagmirran or Rokmar for that matter. Same range on the AoE water bolt.

And you can outrange him as arc/fire as well.

Apologies for asking for a summary of something you've likely discussed a lot, but skimming through the more recent of 84 pages here, I'm not seeing it (feel free to point me to a page range to read): could you tell me about mage mana consumption please?

How often are raiding mages finding themselves capped solely by mana issues, when not grouped with a shadow priest? How much mana do fire mages use per second, and how much do they regen per second? How does this compare to frost mages?

The reason I ask is that some of our mages recently switched from frost to fire, and since this is apparently much much more mana intensive, they took the shadow priest that the hunters had been getting previously. While they're certainly doing more DPS as fire (although not dramatically better), the hunters are doing dramatically worse DPS. And while one of the fire mages seems to do great DPS even without a shadow priest, the other does not. I was surprised to learn that our top DPS warlock never uses mana consumables at all (she was actually surprised to learn how much the hunters are potting), so I'm wondering how mages fare when using all the mana regen available to them, without severely gimping their DPS.

For comparison, here's the sort of info I was looking for: as an MM hunter, I burn mana at 100-115 mana/s (depending on whether I'm keeping Scorpid Sting (-5% chance to hit) up all the time or not, and regen 2.8 mana/s, for a net mana expenditure of around 98-113 mana/s. I have around 6k mana self-buffed (7.2 ish raid buffed IIRC) so am completely OOM in about a minute in DPS mode, or 2 minutes if I'm being conservative. If I did the hunter equivalent of mages trading stamina for spell power, I'd be in leather with much better DPS but less mana/regen. This basically means I'll mana pot even on 5 man bosses, and during raids am popping mana potions on cooldown whether I have a shadow priest or not - the difference is that without a shadow priest I'll still go OOM early using super mana pots, but with a shadow priest I'll be fine with combat mana pots as long as I have a mageblood/mana oil running.

Doing that puts me at 750-800 DPS, more or less competitive with our other DPS classes. In conservation mode that I go into without a shadow priest, I'll be around 550 DPS, and my pet will die to incidental damage without the VE healing, dropping that value further - afaik the healing component of a shadow priest's regen is wasted on mages?.

I am never capped by threat, and am generally only capped by Mana, FPS, latency and the GCD, in that order.

Are you using aspect of the viper? I assume yes, my hunter friends have told me it's incredible for mana and easily outweighs hawk.

Ok, let me look at my spreadsheet a sec. Looks like fireball mana expenditure clocks in at around 98 mp/s with a typical build. That's per second, not per tick. That's after all regen and such.

Frost specs look be about 85 mp/s.

Fire build is doing about 50 more dps than the frost.

Comparison was made with 812 spell damage to all schools, 158 crit, 77 hit, 157 spirit, 400 intellect, 0 mp/5

Seemingly the shadow priest is even more beneficial to the frost mage because it feeds the water elemental much-needed mana. A fire mage can maintain dps for about 4.5 minutes maximum without a shadow priest, assuming judgement of wisdom and potion spam. Drop about 45 seconds from that number if JoW is not maintained.

On serious attempts I chain chug super mana potions. ~100 mp5 + gems + evo is enough to keep me going.

Something to keep in mind that a lot of fights you can use two evocates if you blow it early.

This is of course assuming I don't have a shadow priest. If I do, then I switch to Molten Armor and gems + evo is more than enough.

I use Viper when I don't have a shadow priest. Using it means invalidating 5 talent points that do nothing when Hawk isn't up, and also loses ~3 tiers worth of gear in terms of AP. Fully raid buffed (AI + kings + MotW), Viper provides 13.5 mana/s, so no, it's generally not worth using over hawk unless you're really screwed on mana (pots on cooldown, no shadowpriest, going to go oom even just using steady shot - basically at this point you've given up being anywhere near acceptable DPS).

Fire is only 50 dps more than frost :S? That number should rise significantly with higher spellpower right?

I hadn't thought of the shadow priest feeding a water elemental mana, thanks, although our frost mages never clamoured for a shadow priest anyway. The corrolary would be keeping a hunter pet alive the whole fight.

Mention was made of getting to use Molten Armour only when with a shadow priest - how much of a DPS buff is that?

edit: How does being grouped with a Wrath of Air shaman compare to being with a shadow priest for a mage?

Molten armor is 3% crit. You can safely assume that it correlates to a 3% damage increase (for mages that use elemental spells), but that's being conservative for fire mages, arc/frost, or arc/fire mages (who get 210%, 225% and 245% damage on crits, respectively).

I found myself beating the pants off of our frost mage (enough to cause him to switch to fire), so the 50 dps gap does seem a tad low - said mage who switched to fire vaulted up the meters once he switched, so skill and gear weren't the issue, spec was. However, I can see frost's elemental->snap->elemental giving it enough burst damage to stay closer with fire in a 3-4 minute window than on fights where I pay attention to damage (6+ minutes on Gruul or longer on Magtheridon). If that was Vontre's window, then I'd believe it for that situation.

Wrath of Air adds ~100 spell damage. I assume the mage would also be getting at least mana spring totem, which is 30mp5. The answer to that vs. Shadow priest (allowing a switch to molten armor) is that it depends. Personally I'd rather have the shaman, and if he/she is elemental, it's a no-brainer - shaman all the way.

The way our guild enhances DPS is that we have a "caster group of death" consisting of mage-mage-elementalshm-shadowpriest+1. The last one typically is either another elemental shaman (double wrath totem/heroism + tranquil air oh so sweet) or a lock/mage. The shadowpriest feeds the elemental shaman enough mana so that they also are extremely competitive DPS-wise.

Wrath of Air is strictly better assuming mana can be maintained. I am -reasonably- confident that a wrath of air frost mage will do better dps than a non-wrath of air fire mage. Once again due to double benefit from the water elemental, the group aura is much better for frost mages (generally true for any group aura).

What's really scary is seeing a water elemental pumped up on VT mana, wrath of air, and bloodlust. Would you like a 400 dps pet? Yeah.

Frost gets like 10-15% of its total dps from the damn pet. On fights where he can't be used it is pretty suck.

Thanks for the replies. Final question would be, how much pain is a fire mage or a frost mage in without a shadow priest or a mana tide shaman? Assuming he chain pots is he still very low on mana while doing a good DPS cycle?

Our BM hunter already pretty much has one without all those buffs :P Hence we like the shadow priest keeping it alive.

Depending on the specific point allocation the critical damage percentage would vary. With my 33arc/29fire spec I get 280%, 200% from Spell Power 5/5 and 80% from Ignite 5/5 (since Ignite is 40% additional damage of the critical damage which is 200% in this case). Also an arc/frost spec with spell Power 2/2 and Ice Shards 5/5 would crit for 300% of base damage.

You're misreading spellpower. It's a 50% boost, not a 100% boost.

Arc/fire is 245%, arc/frost is 225%.

This is absolutely not true. The critical strike coeffecients are 2.45x for spell power/ignite, and 2.25x for spell power/ice shards.

At 1k+ spell damage the difference becomes about 70-80. It's not a scaling issue, just there is more dps to had so more difference for the same percentage of difference.

At any rate, it is conceivable that your frost mages simply don't work it as hard, because if they were ultimately concerned about pumping out raid dps they would make the switch to fire or arcane. There's really no arguing which is better, after all, it's just a question of "how can I maximize dps while keeping this bitchin' pvp spec", or, "how much do I lose?"

Spell Power is an increase of 50% to critical damage, since the base critical spell damage is 150% Spell Power would increase this to 200% of base spell damage.

If a Fireball hits for 1000, that spell would crit for 1500 without Spell Power and 2000 with Spell Power. Adding Ignite would give 600 additional damage without Spell Power (40% of the critical damage, 60% of the base spell damage) and 800 additional damage with Spell Power (40% of the critical damage, 80% of base spell damage). Thus with Spell Power and Ignite a Fireball would crit for (base damage)*2.8. Am I way off on this? If so how is 245% for arc/fire arrived at?

+50% "bonus" to crits.
If you have spell hit for 1000 and crit for 1500, spell power will increase bonus damage by 50% thus making it 1750. You can see it in the frost talent, which increases the crit bonus by 100%, and with it frostbolt hit 1000, crit 2000.