Yeonora

Well today on Prince Malchezaar my dps really sucked because I had to watch the infernals and tell everyone where to move, and we had to move a lot, plus I was already quite tired, so I got my spell cycles right only maybe half of the fight. That's a serious downside to arc/fire or arc/frost with AB-cycles. That fight I would have been considerably better with 10/48/3 and just fireballspam and the occasional scorch thrown in :-/

 

Tempestra

I hope you're talking from experience and not from a certain mage spreadsheet. If the former, please do elaborate. If the latter, just... nevermind.

My money is on the latter.

Edit: From my experience, deep fire and 33/28 fireball spam are incredibly powerful, and mind mastery AB-rotation builds can only hope to match them on fights that are excessively short (which I haven't seen) or excessively long (which again, I haven't seen), assuming the mage is geared out in gear that is worthy of raiding. Then again, we're only partway through SSC so maybe someone's figured something out that I haven't. Or maybe we're talking about Al'ar which is a horse of a different color... or something...

 

Copernicus

Pretty much my feelings. If I could maintain an Arcane Blast cycle, it's more fun and close enough to be an ok spec. But as fights become more and more about movement, range, and knowledge of what's going on, the added effort of maintaining Arcane Blast cycle makes deep fire the superior spec.

 

Stein

Well...I've owned every 10/48/3 mage i've grouped with so far, but i fear that i just haven't grouped with any top notch fire mages. I've done decidedly less dps with a 33/28 Fireball build. I haven't spec'd 10/48/3 yet since i haven't seen the need. I like the far lower TPS in favor of the theoretically/marginally higher DPS.

do you have any experience(s) to add? Is there some known flaw to the spreadsheet other than it being pure theory?

And, i'd definitely aggree with this:

however, i don't see how there could be any debate about AB cycles being superior once we get the 2 item tier 5 bonus.

 

◊ tenshi

This plus the range limitation of Arcane I think are the gotchas of deep arcane spec for raiding that theorycraft spreadsheets cannot account for properly. 6-11 yard range difference adds up in movement based fights, not to mention odd limited ranged splash damage avoidance.

Having said that, am I the only masochist who likes deep arcane just because of the added degree of difficulty?

edit: Urgh, I should remember not to post on public fora when I'm sleep deprived.

Sic transit gloria azerothi

 

Tempestra

If a mage can stand within 30 yards of a mob, not move so he can maintain proper cycles, and know how long the fight was going to last so he can dump all his mana at the end... then Arcane can come close to deep fire on short and very long fights. Too many "ifs" for me.

There are a lot of "spread out so you don't get killed" fights after Karazhan.

Edit: And yes, I will try arcane if I break spellfire in 2.1 and buy two pieces of T5 gear. It's something different, which is always nice, even though it's not very effective now. And I'm not looking forward to having the reach of a shadowpriest.

 

Yeonora

Hehe, got me there
I *was* getting bored by my mage, only spamming 1 or maybe 2 spells without any further thoughts.
But you guys are also forgetting the upsides of an arcane spec. You mentioned the inferior range and the need to be able to maintain cycles, but on the plus side we have:

- lower threat, which is not to be underestimated and often translates directly to more damage done, even on fights like gruul when you can save the trouble of using invisibility as an aggro dump

- versatility (no need to respec for Hydross or Al'ar), less boring

- more possibilities to up your dps and dpm through reacting right, e.g. timing procs/trinkets with ap/pom, using arcane potency on clearcasts to your advantage etc.

- absolutely superior dps on trash packs (which helps, as you can spend more time on bosses instead)


On a side note: Anybody got suggestions for data collection on bosses (see my last but one post)?

 

Stein

No worse than shadow priests and all mele. If you have to stand past 41 yards, can only hunters come to the raid? ;-)

As long as you aren't moving for more than 8 seconds, no worries. I'd also argue that breaking off mid spell to move/CS/spellsteal/etc is more disruptive to 3 sec cast spells than 2.5-1.5 sec cast spells.

Arcane is also superior when switching targets as you carry your arcane stack with you (as opposed to your scorch stack).

It's part of being a skilled arcane mage (a good arcane mage won't save it all for crazy spam at the end anyway).

I'll cede that fire takes less focus (leaving more attention for stuff like watching for interupts) and it has better range; but i'll maintain that arcane's better for multimob encounters and a viable end game spec (which is where all this started, right?)

edit: and better TPS!
edit2: and more flexible. arcane immune/resistent? 40/18/3 mage only drops off a little going pure fire
edit3: and more fun! haha...also better for pvp imo.

 

◊ tenshi

I'm not trying to denigrate deep arcane spec as non-viable, which would be a bit self defeating since I've been playing deep arcane spec in TBC. However, I don't think one should cavalierly dismiss the Arcane range limitation by comparing it to classes with different damage mechanics.

Movement based encounters give an edge to DoT based damage classes over a stand and nuke class.

Given the difference in 11 yards for primary nuke, if one is having to run around in and out of range quite a bit, the lost time while running to get within range will affect the performance of a deep arcane build.

As you and other have pointed out, deep arcane has it's own set of advantages, and unless one is min/maxing only, remains a viable raid spec, just like Frost. It's just not the optimal autopilot raid spec.

I guess this is nitpicking and also I have a vague recollection that these issues have been covered before in various manners within the previous 94 pages, but.... this is a 95 page thread and some retracing is inevitable.

I could have just linked this instead: http://elitistjerks.com/showpost.php...postcount=2002

Sic transit gloria azerothi

 

Jayde

Arcane is a nice spec--I was Arcane for quite a long time. However, the range and timing limitations are quite poor on certain fights. Gruul, for instance, always sees a marked decrease in our Arcane Mages' DPS, simply due to the fact that they often end up OOR after shatters, in addition to losing their AB stack. A poorly timed reverberation can also destroy an AB stack, which causes issues.

I don't think it's a make or break in the end, but Fire is most certainly a lot stronger in many situations. When you start chaining back-to-back 5-6k fireballs, you start to see why Fire is so strong with good gear. Being able to do around or over 8k from a single 3s cast nuke is impressive, to say the least.

Either way, I have to agree after comparing both builds: 11 yards is a long way to run sometimes.

 

Evilinside

hi,

I am a relatively new Reader in this forum and did not read all posts before, so hopefully the question isn´t too dumb:

My Mage got rounded stats from ~900 +spelldmg and ~34 % spellcrit selfbuffed and i got 10/48/3 talents. I got almost all gems +crit Dawnstones.

And now my question is:

How should I rate these both stats? Should I focus more on spelldmg/spellcrit or both for max Raiddamage?


Sorry for the bad german english.

greetz Evilinside

 

Anduryondon

just download vontres spreadsheet, fill your stats in and then use the item comparation to see what fits better for you

 

Amarek

Evil you can check out this thread in a german forum:

http://forum3.ingame.de/wow/showthre...hreadid=132835

It's an easy way to calculate the effectiveness of each stat (hit, crit, spelldmg) for yourself.

 

◊ Vontre

He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named?

My spreadsheet has always supported deep fire as being strong overall, slightly stronger than arcane cycling. Arcane cycling, by the way, does not involve mana dumping at the end of the fight (unless it's Huhuran-style), it's about finding an optimal cycle for the encounter duration which, after a bit of experience, is not too difficult to play by ear. If your movement phase is less than 8 seconds, that's actually a boon to arcane as the arcane blast portion of the cycle is what brings the best damage.

My only real qualm about deep fire is the utter reliance on a shadow priest mana battery. This is not for everyone. In my personal experience, a deep fire mage in my recently-left guild wasn't able to outdamage my deep ice spec on Gruul despite having the advantage of a full suit of spellfire and spellstrike tailoring gear (whereas I have no tailor gear at all) and more consumables. Your personal experiences may vary greatly.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Tempestra

We've already covered what I think about the claims that fire mages are only effective with a shadowpriest around 10 pages back, so there's no reason turn back the clock.

Switch to mage armor. Use pots. No problem.

The part I will add, thought, is why would you ever do more than 3 ABs in a rotation? For example, if you somehow correctly predict that a fight will last 5 minutes, and that the ideal cycle is ABx5, the 2 ABs you cast when you have a 3stack would work just as well as part of a mana dump at the end. Why would you risk running OOM early by spreading out your mana dump, if say, the fight actually lasted 7 minutes (because all the casters were <30 yrds and were killed by an AE, or something, hehe)?

It's certainly better to end the fight with mana than to end dry with lots of time to go, where you're essentially sitting there, useless, during a crucial burndown. If you miscalculate how long the fight will take, you're hosed. If I were cycling, it'd be straight up ABxY, where Y is 3 or less, plus my rotation, and then attempt to dump all my mana at the end. Shrug. Again, none of this will occur until 2-pieces of T5, which makes AB viable given the large drawbacks of tyrannosaur-arm-range and focus lost elsewhere, imo.

 

◊ Vontre

Well I suppose you could die before you get to burn your mana. I've never used more than ABx3 for a boss encounter anyway, though. It's the distinction between 1x/2x/3x that's mainly important. It would really depend on how comfortable you were with the mana situation whether you would ramp higher than that or not.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Stein

When I have the mana (via shadow priest, judgement of wisdom, w/e) to go deeper than 3xAB, i always save those AB spams for......AP time!! The mana increase isn't additive (but the haste/+30% IS), so using AB spam during AP is actually kind of mana efficient.

The fact that AP isn't modeled yet is selling arcane short, i think. It may well be that Arcane Damage > Fire with effective use of AP+AB+proc+trinket+....

 

Northerner

It still is very fight-dependent however and that's why I shy away from trying to model AP and for that matter MF/Combustion with clicky trinkets. They are all great tools if you use them intelligently but their effect on different fights is extremely varied.

Much like I don't care too much about my trash dps, I also don't care as much about my damage during non-critical phases of a target. This comes with the obvious caveat that the raid needs to be sustaining enough damage to cover enrage timers. Ideally though, I want my build to be able to do a few specifics things:

- Optimal to near optimal dps on +3 targets over a sustained period of time
- Optimal to near optimal dps on fresh targets such as spawned adds
- Minimal reliance on repositioning for delivering prompt damage to spawns is a portion of this
- Optimal burst damage on command for burn phases and late boss phases
- Decent to better AE damage for appropriate boss phases
- Sufficient mana efficiency that a shadow priest in-group can sustain me indefinitely if I chug pots, use gems and evocate intelligently

Then of course I want my spec to do this all for my specific gearset or with an obtainable gearset.

This makes for an interesting decision matrix and for me the 10/48/3 pure or offspec works best so far. I've tried before to wedge in an AB/Scorch/blast rotation for better results and simply haven't found it to be viable for me yet, although I will revisit it now that picking up two pieces of T5 is actually quite palatable. Primarily though I find that the interactions of AB and Scorch with haste are problematic and their use with /stopcasting is painful at best. With a simple fireball spam or 7:1 rotation I can generally shave some latency off with reliability and also have spare attention for counterspelling and watching raid conditions. With more convoluted rotations though I just spend a little too much time focused on my casting bars and not enough on the raid as a whole.

I am concerned that the arc/fire specs will be transitional for SSC at best anyhow. Spellhaste seems to be the next big thing for BT loot and it translates poorly into damage for the commonly cycled spells.

 

Stein

Northerner...i was surprised when i got down to 10/48/3 working best for you.

I think arcane supports your desires better than fire. Your arcane stack moves to new target, scorch doesn't. You lose a lot less dps restacking AB (1 sec of AB cast time) than you do making a new scorch stack (1.5 + .2 lag * 5 scorchs => 8.5 sec of scorching).

I think all of us have been fireball spammers at some point; have the arcane blast haters done much serious cycling though?

I think a lot of fire mages are equating the AB stack falling off to the scorch stack falling off. Losing your AB stack really isn't NEARLY as detrimental.

 

Northerner

Right, but I'm in a raid setting with other fire mages so restacking scorch (or situationally not stacking it at all) is a really minor concern. Now, as an officer I could probably influence changes in specs but I really simply just don't see it as a good move for the raid.

Take a fairly simple example like Lurker's adds. The 41 yard range in substantially preferable and while taking your arcane stack with you is quite nice, being tied to a predetermined spell rotation is pretty rough. Your dps will see a fair amount of variation during that cycle I guess is what I am hunting around and if you ignore the rotation your dpm is going to take a big hit. Now, fire has substantial variation given the nature of crits but it washes out reasonably well across three mages.

I'm certainly not writing off Arcane summarily and I really have tried to get it to work for me quite recently. I think I'll wait for the 2-piece bonus though before taking another swing at that though and I'm fairly positive that I'll summarily dump it again once I am in a position to collect spell haste gear.

 

Tempestra

I've done plenty of AB cycling, because I was hoping the spell would turn our class into something more poetic than learn how to calculate optimal gear, make sure scorch doesn't fall off and don't die. Sadly, after running numbers and running 25-man bosses using AB-cycles, it just doesn't work from a DPS standpoint and a "oh god I'm trying to pay attention to not dying, moving at the right time, counterspelling, and giving orders..." standpoint

However, regarding Northerner's needs for a spec:

- Optimal to near optimal dps on +3 targets over a sustained period of time
** 10/48/3 is the clear-cut single-target +3 winner. Even Vontre, arguably the most vocal AB mage of them all, states that deep fire is better DPS.

- Optimal to near optimal dps on fresh targets such as spawned adds
** I need to cast all of 1 or 2 scorches for a full stack. Just like AB falling off is not that big of a deal for an AB-mage, scorch stacks falling off isn't a big deal either. In a 10-man Kara run, again, scorch falling off is a bigger deal. However we bring at least 2, if not 3 or 4 mages on our 25-man runs, so that's anywhere between 1-3 scorches needed instead of 5.

- Minimal reliance on repositioning for delivering prompt damage to spawns is a portion of this
** Hello 41-yard range. Sure, in early Karazhan fights it's all about standing still and nuking, but when you're looking for adds on lurker, trying to fireball an add while standing next to your cube in magtheridon, or doing full dps while standing in a safe spot on Gruul... range is great.

- Optimal burst damage on command for burn phases and late boss phases
** Burn phases = combustion. Late boss phases = mage execute.

- Decent to better AE damage for appropriate boss phases
** Dragon's breath makes it a wash vs. better IAE.

- Sufficient mana efficiency that a shadow priest in-group can sustain me indefinitely if I chug pots, use gems and evocate intelligently
** If you have a shadow priest and aren't retarded (ie, wait til you're OOM to use your first gem or pot, or pop evoc right before you know you're going to get hit or have to move), you won't run out of mana.

I'm honestly not surprised 10/48/3 fills those desires. I've been the offspec 33/28 for awhile but I'll probably switch back eventually. Shrug.

 

◊ Vontre

Now to be fair you have to give the nod to arcane power on these 2 points. AP is a mind-blowing ability and it really washes away combustion for both aoe and burn phases. Especially stacked AP->Arcane Blast spam, plus a PoM pyro for good measure. Better IAE + Arcane Power will drop an aoe pack faster than shattering flamestrike and cone of cold simultaneously.

Edit: That being said I'm aware 10/48/3 is a great spec, but there are some distinct advantages both builds have which shouldn't be ignored.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Northerner

I would indeed agree that AP is more flexible and superior for pre-20% burn phases (of which there are few but some). For a sub-20% burn though, MF + Combustion + trinket + bloodlust + 'zerking is really pretty perfect and still doesn't burn mana nearly as fast as AB spam. Keep in mind, these burn periods are still in the 45 second+ range, not 20. It's still not a landslide for either spec of course and that's why I say they are very fight-dependent.

For AE work however I will give the nod to arcane specs. While flamestrike/DB/BW/AE is not bad with a fire spec, pure AExplosion is obviously preferable for a number of reasons. It does have issues but hey, Mage AE has issues as a whole.

 

Tempestra

AP+IAE isn't practical (as bosses with AE phases requires a mage to last through multiple AE phases, and AP+IAE = no mana), but I agree, spell power + IAE spam is great. Sadly I wish mages actually had a better AE spell, as nothing even SNIFFS seed of corruption (but that's another story altogether).

My point wasn't to hand each aspect to 10/48/3, but merely state that it is competitive (AP > Combustion for situational burndown, sure, but nothing beats molten fury aka "mage execute" for the last 20%), or it is hands down better (single target DPS).

I agree, AP is extremely powerful. Heck, I guess you could tab me as an "arcane" mage as I have 33 points in arcane, even though I use AB only in certain threat-sensitive situations (1-2 on Mag's first channeler, or 1-2 right after a Hydross transition).

And yes, I also agree that the AB cycle has its advantages, but the point most fire mages make is that those advantages only really shine in Karazhan... Most of the fights where we say "range is great" or "it's nice to molten fury for that last push" are the 25-man fights where bosses have millions of HP and tons of random AE effects that doesn't let a mage focus on maintaining optimal cycles. Because I spec to bring down those 25-man baddies, I choose low-maintenance fireball spam...

 

◊ Vontre

Fair enough =).

Is what you're describing comparable to, say, Shade of Aran? I haven't been past Gruul yet, mostly as a matter of choice (I fucking hate consumable farming).

It's also true that these builds probably fluctuate based on progression level. I find it kind of disconcerting that the tier 5 bonus is SO amazing for arcane blast, but then tier 4 and tier 6 have nothing for it, and the tier 6 bonus include arcane missiles instead, doesn't it? I still haven't figured out what a solidly good use for this spell is, by the way. Arcane Missiles? Anyone?

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009