TBC Mage Theorycrafting - Page 85

chase · 04/10/07, 6:22 PM

Originally Posted by Gleep9

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?

Yes you are way off.

Spell Power/Ignite Fire build
Base fire crit is 150% or 50% over a normal hit.
Spell power:50% of 50% is 25%
So our base crit on fireball is 175% (upfront)
Ignite is 40% of the 175% or 70% (ignite)

Spell power is a modifier to the crit modifier.
100% normal damage
150% crit damage
Crit modifier for fire is 50%

So total increase is 175%(upfront)+70%(ignite)=245%

Tempestra · 04/10/07, 6:23 PM

Originally Posted by Gleep9

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?

Yes, you're way way off.

It's 50% *of crit bonus* from spellpower, just like ice shards is 100% *of crit bonus* taking frost from 150% -> 200% (50% bonus -> 100%)

For Arc/Fire 2/2 Spellpower 5/5 Ignite

You get 50% crit bonus base.
Spellpower adds 50% of crit bonus. 50% of 50% is +25%
So you're at +75% crit bonus.
Ignite burns for 40% of your total crit damage, so 175% + 175*.4% = 245%

In your example:
Fireball would hit for 1000, crit for 1750 (500 from base crit, 250 from spell power)

40% of 1750 is 700 (ignite). Therefore your total damage would be 1750 + 700, or 2450.

2450 is 245% of 1000.

This is pretty ele-mage-entary. =)

Edit: Darn, beaten to the punch. =)

Jayde · 04/10/07, 7:11 PM

Originally Posted by Vontre

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.

I have had this debate with our guild Hunters, and for long fights I really can't see much argument over giving Hunters a Shadow Priest rather than Fire Mages. On a fight where JoW is not practical you are looking at sustainability of around or less than 4 minutes max for a Fire mage, even with pots. For longer fights like Gruul this is simply not an option IMO.

A Fire mage would have to scale his DPS back significantly to sustain for, say, 6-7 minutes. My feeling from looking at the numbers would be that a Fire mage gains a lot more DPS from a Shadow Priest over a 6-7 minute fight than a Hunter would. Hunters have the better option of Fel Mana, which Mages don't really have as a viable option, and it seems to me that the drop-off is a lot less steep.

Of course, it depends heavily on the gear of the people involved in terms of what DPS figures to consider, however when you have Mages with 1200-1300 buffed spelldamage, and around 30% crit, I think the loss in heavily scaling back mana usage is significantly larger than the eventual 200 DPS dropoff for Hunters over a 6+ minute fight.

I have not had time to run the exact numbers as to how much a fully potted Fire mage actually loses by having to scale down mana usage to fit in that time period, though.

Vontre · 04/10/07, 7:18 PM

This does beg the question though, if the fire mage requires the shadow priest to work then is that a significant enough drawback to justify the higher potential dps compared to other specs? If the hunters with the shadow priest each do +200 dps because of the mana, but the fire mages with a shadow priest only do 100 more dps than they would be doing as frost -without- a shadow priest, is deep fire still the "best" spec for the raid?

It's an interesting question because I had never even considered putting a hunter in a shadow-priest group.

alienangel · 04/10/07, 7:27 PM

Jayde, if you could quantify the DPS for mages going from Fire + ShadowPriest to either Fire without shadow priest or Non-fire without shadow priest it would be helpful, since you're commenting on how steep a drop-off you think the two classes face.

Your 200 dps drop for hunters seems reasonable for MM hunters (slight underestimate maybe, but spam of ludicrously expensive fel mana potions can make up for it), but it's an underestimate for BM hunters, since once the pet dies for lack of healing, the pet alone would likely be 200 dps, the 3% damage buff to the whole group (and hence the shadow priest's mana generation) would vanish, and the hunter would lose all the buffs he gets from the pet being alive.

If JoW is available most of the time the situation isn't that bad mana-wise, since I think it benefits hunters more than mages - but our raids at least don't see it up very often - and that still wouldn't address the pets dying from lack of heals.

edit: and your durations for sustained DPS with pots without shadowpriests sounds about the same for hunters and fire mages - except hunters have the option of burning fel mana potions, and mages have the option of speccing something more mana efficient

Jayde · 04/10/07, 8:09 PM

Originally Posted by Vontre

This does beg the question though, if the fire mage requires the shadow priest to work then is that a significant enough drawback to justify the higher potential dps compared to other specs? If the hunters with the shadow priest each do +200 dps because of the mana, but the fire mages with a shadow priest only do 100 more dps than they would be doing as frost -without- a shadow priest, is deep fire still the "best" spec for the raid?

It's an interesting question because I had never even considered putting a hunter in a shadow-priest group.

Well, the question is more about optimizing with what you have available. If you wanted to maximize DPS, you would bring all Warlocks and Shadow Priests and say to hell with it--but that isn't viable for any kind of realistic scenario anyhow.

Also, I'd say that JoW is uber for both classes but in my experience simply is not very viable on a good number of fights. We do not have a ton of Paladins, and they are some of our primary healers. They often can't be screwing around trying to keep up judgements, especially with the mass of cleaves, melee unfriendliness, and general issues with range thereof.

Without JoW, can even a Frost Mage sustain 6 minutes without scaling back?

I downloaded your spreadsheet at home, and plugged in some ballpark numbers (I have far more realistic numbers at work, but left the spreadsheet there!) and even with mana pots and consumables, I can't see see Frost getting to 6 minutes full-stop either. So, I dunno.

Although, perhaps this warrents a "feature request", but as uber as your spreadsheet is...I would love to see more "damage pool" type figures. Seeing both total pool until OOM and pool clipped to encounter time would be a great savings to my calculator fingers in times like these!

chase · 04/10/07, 8:15 PM

Originally Posted by alienangel

Jayde, if you could quantify the DPS for mages going from Fire + ShadowPriest to either Fire without shadow priest or Non-fire without shadow priest it would be helpful, since you're commenting on how steep a drop-off you think the two classes face.

Your 200 dps drop for hunters seems reasonable for MM hunters (slight underestimate maybe, but spam of ludicrously expensive fel mana potions can make up for it), but it's an underestimate for BM hunters, since once the pet dies for lack of healing, the pet alone would likely be 200 dps, the 3% damage buff to the whole group (and hence the shadow priest's mana generation) would vanish, and the hunter would lose all the buffs he gets from the pet being alive.

If JoW is available most of the time the situation isn't that bad mana-wise, since I think it benefits hunters more than mages - but our raids at least don't see it up very often - and that still wouldn't address the pets dying from lack of heals.

edit: and your durations for sustained DPS with pots without shadowpriests sounds about the same for hunters and fire mages - except hunters have the option of burning fel mana potions, and mages have the option of speccing something more mana efficient

Why don't you just try it out. Than report what you see. You obviously don't want advice, you just want to justify getting a spot. So give it whirl, maybe you will be suprised, maybe we will be suprised and all raiding mages will spec frost.

Tempestra · 04/10/07, 8:21 PM

Originally Posted by chase

Why don't you just try it out. Than report what you see. You obviously don't want advice, you just want to justify getting a spot. So give it whirl, maybe you will be suprised, maybe we will be suprised and all raiding mages will spec frost.

That'll be the day - bringing us back to MC/BWL 28 arcane-23 frost goodness!!! By all means though, if someone discovers the holy grail of mage raid specs, please let us know =)

Our hunters do quite a respectable job without a shadowpriest (chain-chugging pots + very sporadically getting JoW), and honestly, the answer to this problem is *MORE* shadowpriests. We have two about to ding 70 and that should clear up any VT-envy remaining among the locks/mages/hunters who don't get into stacked caster group.

alienangel · 04/10/07, 8:22 PM

Originally Posted by chase

Why don't you just try it out. Than report what you see. You obviously don't want advice, you just want to justify getting a spot. So give it whirl, maybe you will be suprised, maybe we will be suprised and all raiding mages will spec frost.

We are trying it out, thanks. The problem is that the 25 man fights we're doing these days (Gruul, Mag, Hydross) aren't exactly great for comparing DPS on - and our raid leaders aren't going to constantly tweak groups so we can experiment to our heart's content. So I thought asking in a Mage Theorycraft thread might be a good place to see what the current theorycraft has to say about what we would see in ideal situations. Sorry for the intrusion.

As for reporting what I see, sometimes our Fire mages have done great damage, sometimes our arcane/frost mage has done great damage.

Jayde · 04/10/07, 8:26 PM

Originally Posted by Tempestra

That'll be the day - harkon back to MC/BWL 28 arcane-23 frost goodness!!! By all means though, if someone discovers the holy grail of mage raid specs, please let us know =)

Our hunters do quite a respectable job without a shadowpriest (chain-chugging pots + very sporadically getting JoW), and honestly, the answer to this problem is *MORE* shadowpriests. We have two about to ding 70 and that should clear up any VT-envy remaining among the locks/mages/hunters who don't get into stacked caster group.

My opinion at this point is that Shadow Priests are far too good for their raid spot, if you consider they could potentially be adding 200-300 DPS to all other 4 members in their group in addition to their own rather high DPS when geared correctly. (Not to mention the one-time bonus of Misery and Shadow Weaving.) But yes, more is probably better.

If you have enough to cover your mana-heavy healers and your Mages/Hunters, all the better for everyone.

My experience, personally though... is that as a Fire Mage on Gruul, being with a Shadow Priest made an absolutely massive difference, and I was basically able to spam Fireballs non-stop the entire fight. Given that I easily am over 1000 DPS when spamming, this is certainly a non-trivial improvement when compared to Scorching or Scorch delay/Fireball clearcasting approaches.

Vontre · 04/10/07, 8:30 PM

Does someone have some numbers handy for the water elemental's mana pool? I would like to be able to modify his damage output based on mana available.

Vontre · 04/10/07, 8:31 PM

Originally Posted by alienangel

Sorry for the intrusion.

Don't apologize, you brought forth an interesting and not often considered angle.

Antiphonal · 04/10/07, 8:37 PM

Hi, Alienangel!

Disclaimer - I'm Deep Frost (10/0/51)

My guild is not as advanced as many others represented here - we're about 1/3-1/2 of the way through Karazhan. The problem with answering your question is that there are so many variables involved. In the very few straight stand and cast fights, the Shadow Priest starts to make a very big difference past the 5 minute mark. Before then, using gems, evocation with spirit weapons, and Greater Dreamless Sleep pots (my personal fave) will cover the mana issues just fine. Part of the advantage for me is that my dps cooldowns (trinkets and the Water Elemental) actually improve my mana efficiency, so I can just use them whenever they are up and not worry about it.

I've noticed that several of the fights include forced cool-off periods (Maiden for example, Moroes to a lesser extent) and even outside the SPriest group I have had quite a bit of mana to spare at the end of the fight (and I am on kiting duty for the first few minutes of Moroes, so that is a mana hog right there).

If you are dealing with Arc/Frost mages, though, this becomes very different. They can control the rate and efficiency of mana -> damage, so if they are fed by a SPriest, they can use more aggressive cycles. A double-SPriest group could allow a nearly full-time AB spam - which would outdamage everything else at significantly lower threat. Putting Arc/x mages in a SPriest group is almost always a great idea. Deep Frost like me - only if the fight is really LONG and no JoW or Tide.

I'll let the fire guys speak more about their longevity.

Jayde · 04/10/07, 8:42 PM

Well, you are very right that it is highly situational. On many Kara fights, the advantages of a Shadow Priest for a Mage or Hunter both are rather slim. I go full burn on many fights and rarely have any mana issues. I can barely make it through Attumen, full Moroes, full Maiden, full BBW, slightly reserved on R&J, pretty much full out on Curator (natural breaks really... Scorchx2 on flares, full Fireball during Evocs), full Aran, etc...

Prince and Nightbane are longer fights where I find I need to pace myself though. I suppose Maulgar would be also, if I was DPSing instead of "tanking" (best job ever, btw!) and Gruul certainly is.

So, really, we are only talking about a handful of fights where this is even a serious issue for anyone. But, indicentally, these are also the fights were small DPS tweaks can make the difference between a kill and a wipe.

alienangel · 04/11/07, 2:37 AM

Well unless you kill Attumen in 70 seconds I can absolutely go OOM during even that fight :P Fortunately the fight is still short enough to get away with just using a mana pot or two, and it's hardly DPS sensitive enough to forbid some slacking. I'd agree it's not really a serious issue for contention on many fights, but most of what I'm hearing about fights in SSC seem to be that they're fairly long ones (albiet pet friendly so the shadow healing may no longer be an issue).

As for testing it, at least one of our fire mages went with a totem of wrath shaman for tonight's [very messy] Gruul - she was apparently oom by the end of the fight, but still seemed pretty happy with damage.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm surprised the mana angle is apparently a new one for consideration though, since your spreadsheets seem to cover both DPS and mana consumption for different specs. Good luck figuring it out.

Antiphonal: I'm in the opposite boat, since several of my cooldowns and procs actually reduce my mana efficiency, since they increase my attack speed, allowing more steady shots to fire :S

Vontre · 04/11/07, 2:41 AM

Yeah the spreadsheet pretty much confirms that mages can't maintain good dps for more than 4-5 minutes without going oom unless they have some outside help, or are arcane spec *cough*

alienangel · 04/11/07, 2:52 AM

Based on Antiphonal's point that a mage with dual shadow priests could do pure AB spam and outdamage everything else, the hunter-esque response would be to demand two shadow priests every fight, to do just that :P Has no one actually tried this out yet?

Kalman · 04/11/07, 2:55 AM

Originally Posted by Antiphonal

A double-SPriest group could allow a nearly full-time AB spam

Somebody track down Navaash's hypothetical maxed-int blast spam post and figure out how long two spriests could keep it going.

Vontre · 04/11/07, 3:08 AM

Nothing can sustain full AB spam. Nothing. I tried putting 4 shadow priests in my spreadsheet numbers and almost got up to 2 minutes.

It just burns mana faster than it can be regened, there's no stopping it. The only thing that has a significant impact on arcane blast spam is (gasp) intellect. How appropriate.

alienangel · 04/11/07, 3:12 AM

+ Chain innervates and a mana tide shaman rotation (gets even better at higher int values!) and Drums of Restoration rotation?

Now I want to see this in action more than ever.

• Hamlet · 04/11/07, 4:16 AM

Originally Posted by Arawethion

Originally Posted by malthrin

Originally Posted by Arawethion

[Bangle of Endless Blessings] dropped from the last boss of Botanica today. It increases effective mana pool size by 2080 from the Evocation effect alone.

Picked up this trinket last night and I've noticed some very interesting things about it. While the proc rate is low (~5% range), I've had it proc off of things such as:
1) Switching auras
2) Spiritual Attunement converting a VE heal into mana

Needless to say, it's a little stronger than it should be in certain circumstances.

My favorite: It procs off of the invisible, nameless, "you can see the dead" buff that you get flying into Terrokar.

Ok, new favorite.

It procs off of the "birds" animation from Atiesh:
http://www.thottbot.com/s31796

Tempestra · 04/11/07, 4:58 AM

Originally Posted by Vontre

Yeah the spreadsheet pretty much confirms that mages can't maintain good dps for more than 4-5 minutes without going oom unless they have some outside help, or are arcane spec *cough*

Good thing we don't raid in a vacuum where we can't get any help then, right? heh

I dunno, if I need to cast longer, I don't need to respec arcane. I'll throw in more scorches than fireballs, I'll use more consumables, or I'll figure something else out. Arcane blast is a nice toy, and I use it sometimes (starting off boss fights so I'm not twiddling my thumbs or to drain excess mana at the end of a boss fight, for example), but my own spreadsheet tells me the DPS just isn't there unless the mana cost becomes insane with chain-AB.

/shrug =)

Vontre · 04/11/07, 5:09 PM

Originally Posted by Tempestra

Good thing we don't raid in a vacuum where we can't get any help then, right? heh

I dunno, if I need to cast longer, I don't need to respec arcane. I'll throw in more scorches than fireballs, I'll use more consumables, or I'll figure something else out. Arcane blast is a nice toy, and I use it sometimes (starting off boss fights so I'm not twiddling my thumbs or to drain excess mana at the end of a boss fight, for example), but my own spreadsheet tells me the DPS just isn't there unless the mana cost becomes insane with chain-AB.

/shrug =)

Right. Well my point was that the mana efficiency on some cycles beats out scorch and the dps of arcane cycling tops scorch as well. I have on occassion been stuck in the group without a shadow priest and it does suck. The issue here deep fire is so focused on fireball, the less fireballs you can use the more and more your dps will hurt. In fact for scorch spam, deep arcane is straight up better than deep fire. So there is a certain threshold of mana efficiency where deep fire is going to fall behind very quickly if mana is a major issue.

The consensus here seems to be that most raid boss encounters of the 25-man variety are short enough, if just barely, to maintain fireball dps if you have a shadow priest. When I say "what if you don't", I'm not talking to you in particular, but the hypothetically person who might not. Assume for a moment that there isn't a shadow priest for every group, shadow priest mana is a limited commodity that can only be given to certain people in the raid. If your mages have the option of vastly increasing dpm, would it be overall better for R-DPS to give the shadow priest to someone else? It's an interesting question and one I'm not really prepared to answer.

We have already established that given optimal conditions, deep fire will win the dps war. So for any real exploration of theorycraft to continue we need to start looking at the non-optimal.

Vontre · 04/11/07, 7:58 PM

I put up a new feature in my spreadsheet, total damage for encounter. This accounts for going oom and has some new calculations for post-oom time such as casting dps based on the mana regained, wand dps, and jow return. This gives a pretty clear picture of how much total damage is dealt by the casting method even if you go oom a bit early (or a lot early).

I got to toy around with this for a little while and found out some interesting things. I set the fight for 6 minutes. At that length fireball specs would trounce everything, but only if VT was up - they didn't do so well without it. Amazingly, when removing every single buff/mana helper I could the winner there was not the arcane spec but the water elemental spec - I guess I hadn't considered how mana efficient it is to summon him, stacked on top of the already efficient ice dps. Arcane ended up more middle of the road in most cases, and usually beat out the ice spec.

Jayde · 04/12/07, 9:23 AM

Great! Really look forward to playing around with it.

I put a Hunter in with the Shadow Priest instead of me for one of the Gruul attempts last night, and I found the interesting thing was that he still stated he had to chain pot to keep up his rotation. I don't really understand this, but could it simply be that the "optimal" Hunter rotation could simply be as optimal as Arcane Blast is for Mages. Great DPS, but ultimately unsustainable regardless of the situation. (We even had JoW up last night, which actually made my mana situation not too bad even without a Shadow Priest that attempt.) But, I will leave that to the Hunters to discuss somewhere else I guess!

Anyhow, will be interested to see some damage pool numbers. I'm quite interested to explore the relative pros/cons of Arcane and Frost specs as well.

The other question, however, is that all things being equal...does Arcane still win unless you go Arc/Fire and use Spellfire? After all, Arcane will be quite weak compared to Tailored pure deep fire/deep frost without doing this. I was Arcane/Frost for a long time, but when I ran up against the gear brick-wall, it seemed to me that Arc/Frost became the most unworkable spec due to the configuration of Tailored gear.