Guardian I usually go for (major) mage blood.
Battle it varies, but usually firepower.

I'm tending to flask more as I find the new mats pretty easy to obtain. Yes I do have mana problems w/o a shadow priest.

Speak of which, does any deep fire mage (10/48/3 type) found a setup that works well for them when you find yourself not in a shadow priest group? I would be interested in your gear setup.
My OOM time spreadsheeted, in boss gear, is around 4:20. In an actual raid setting where I have to scoot and shoot it is a bit longer but I'm worried about it.

If I'm stuck without a Shadow Priest on an extremely long fight, I tend to move to Scorch+Fireball on Clearcast until the fight is far enough along that I feel I can go to full burn and sustain for the remainder of the fight.

Another possible option on fights longer than 9-10 minutes is to go max burn right away--Scorch to 5, trinket, Combustion+Fireball+Fireblast rotations and burn down into Evocation range as quickly as possible with the hope of getting two Evocations over the duration of the fight.

I find the latter to be a bit unreliable sometimes, though...although it's probably a solid option on something like Magtheridon where you could go full burn on the Channelers, Evocate, and probably get another Evocation in around Phase 3. On something like Nightbane--which is a semi-long fight, but not terribly stressful--I tend to just go with the Scorch/Clearcast method, and use Fireball burst on the Skeletons in the flight phase and full burn once I feel I can make it to the end of the fight.

Random question, but I didn't want to start a new thread with this simple question. I've taken a 3 month or so hiatus from WoW and getting a little itch to play again casually. With all the new changes, is frost spec still the way to go for leveling, and are there an specific talents to avoid while leveling? I'm not familiar with the Mage talent line anymore.

Edit: Nevermind. I saw some advice somewhere in this thread about 60-70 leveling and will apply that to 1-60.

Alright, now here's a toughie. Hi, I'm a warlock, and I want to learn how to play a mage. Normally, I'm a destro lock, so stylistically it's similar, but there's far more to a class than possessing nukes, of course.

I am trying to learn some solid mage specs/spell rotations to help the mages in my guild go from 620 dps on, say, Mag, to higher. Speaking of which... let's say you've got mages in roughly Karazhan/Gruul/PvP/non-tailor-required craftables. What kind of numbers, if they're specced well, playing well, good rotations, chaining pots, etc should we be seeing in fights like Magtheridon? Am I being too hard on them trying to ask them to work towards at least 750 dps on Mag? Any idea what could be wrong?

Either way, I'm currently trying to figure out how to optimize 10/48/3. What kind of basic spell rotations should I start investigating first? (I'm actually going to borrow and play a mage for a while, lol, if that's what it takes). Anything I should look for? I know at least getting spirit weapons for Evocate, but... what delicate things does only playing a mage for a while teach you about the class? Any other solid specs I can investigate? I'm working with Vontre's spreadsheet, so any clue of what stat balances I should be looking for?

Basic info is all I need to get started, and any and all help is appreciated. Thanks!

A bit more specific on the gear would help. Something like damage / hit / crit for your sample mage. Are you providing shadow priests? boomkins? elemental shaman? CoE? All these things along with specs can VASTLY change the amount of dps done.

For 10/48/3 scorch a 5 stack up and then fireball as much as possible till you need to refresh the imp scorch... then fireball.... etc...

Well I would say the most important is learning how to use a stopcasting macro. Unless you have extremely good latency ( <50ms) it will be a huge boost to your dps. I'm sure there are plenty of posts about stopcasting in this thread but basically you want it to look like this:

/stopcasting
/cast Fireball (rank whatever)

and do that for scorch too. Then you can either use a mod like Quartz to have a castbar that has estimates latency to tell you where to stop, or just judge it by yourself. I just do the latter method with a fairly long cast bar and it seems to work fine for me.

Not bad for moderately geared Kz mages.
Very Very Very low. That should be your first priority... Getting them more +hit gear.
Also pretty low but this should be a secondary concern to the hit gear. Make sure they are using Molten armor as well. Is this before talents? If so then It's actually not really low.

Elemental shaman will help with their horrible hit ratings at least. As far as amount of difference that would be for the spreadsheet wizards to exactly quantify. However, think of it like a melee group without windfury and battleshout. The difference is fairly large.

At the beginning all of them should get the stack up to 5 asap. As to how you maintain it I don't think it really matters other than it stays up. Keep in mind the mages even with full consumables can't keep fireballing for very long without a shadowpriest.

Something to remember is that it may be extremely hard (if not impossible) for a moderately-geared Fire Mage to maintain 750 DPS over an entire Mag kill if they do not have a Shadow Priest. (And especially if they are on clicking duty.)

Long fights like that will pretty much destroy the overall DPS of a Fire Mage without some form of serious mana recovery. If you're doing, say, a 12 minute Mag fight, the Fire Mage will probably be OOM within the first 6-7 minutes depending on what happens during the fight. This will have a significant impact as to what resonable DPS levels they are able to maintain.

If you're trying to get a feel for if they are maintaining high levels of DPS, it's probably best to either give them a Shadow Priest or keep an eye on them during fights where they are not going to be having mana issues (Maulgar, Kara bosses, etc.)

You are also right in regard to Quartz/macros. They are very much worth it. I'm sure they would notice a non-trival DPS increase from using something like that.

On any fight that lasts longer than 5 mins a 10/48/3 chaining fireballs will run literally oom without a shadowpriest (even using Mage Armor and gems/pots as early as possible to start the cooldowns). Without a shadowpriest, the only way a fire mage can self-sustain for longer (5-6+ mins) fights is scorch spam on a Wisdom-judged mob with Mage Armor up. Needless to say, that's at a massive dps cost - at least 250, potentially 400 dps or so.

It's hard to overemphasize the difference a shadowpriest makes for the 10/48/3 spec. I would estimate an spriest is worth anywhere from 100 dps (on a short fight) to 500 (on an AoE intensive fight) for a 10/48/3.

To put it bluntly, a group with an spriest and an elemental shaman is the difference between your fire mages performing like rockstars and them performing like mana-starved pre-2.1 hunters (i.e, unless they are especially good they will look pretty pathetic on the meters).

I am just about to get my Spellstrike pants and have a hard time making up my mind about what gems to use: 3x dmg or 3x hit/dmg which basically comes down to 12 dmg vs. 1% hit ...

Character is 10/48/3 spec and has +840 fire dmg, 85 hit rating and 26.94% crit chance (unbuffed), no really great gear (T4 gloves and some heroic rewards and crafted epics) and will hopefully soon pick up raiding again (dead Prince in Kara is the "highest" kill so far).

As long as you're not hit capped against bossmobs, +hit will beat every other stat when it comes to doing damage (against +3 mobs), so, yes, go for the +hit/+damage gems.

Pardon the question if it already was asked, but i'm wondering which trinket choice is optimal for a arcane mage using t5 bonus and 3xab+am+scorch rotations?

Currently i am using the SSC mage trinket and Nexus Horn but i wonder if thats the optimal setup?

Those probably are good general choices for an Arcane build. Of course, you always have the option of going with the Icon of the Silver Crescent instead, but I guess that depends on how much you value the Nexus-Horn at the moment.

I would be curious, however, as to how the new Darkmoon Card: Wrath would work with AM? Could be quite interesting.

I see... then are there other specs that serve as good raiding options for solid dps, maybe less short term but more sustainable long term, I could investigate?


Also, wouldn't cube duty on a Mag fight actually help dps (just hurts overall damage)? Considering when you're on a cube you aren't using mana, particularly on the southern one? Though I suppose Ignite may distort WWS-indicated dps a bit, but overall, it still shouldn't damage WWS dps overly, should it?

Hey all. I have recently respecced from heavy arcane to heavy fire. I went with a 10/48/3 build, and I'm curious how you all feel that compares to a 40/21 build. I made the change to have more sustainability for longer fights (prince, gruul, etc), but I'd like to keep my dps up as much as possible. Thanks in advance for the input

Most of this thread is about how 10/48/3 is the best possible spec for boss fights. It will not only give you more sustainability, but you'll do more damage as well. Download Vontre's spreadsheet, plug in your gear, and do some comparisons. You can also fiddle around with cycles as well, but fireball xX / scorch x1 will probably be your best bet.

When do you use combustions? I usually can easily fit two, as long as I'm very careful with agro in the first phase.

I try to use one early so that I can fit two in...a lot of that depends on how fast your DPS is, though. Prince has ~1.1m HP, meaning that phase 1 is 440k, phase 2 is 330k, and phase 3 is 330k. I'd say that as Fire, you probably want to have Combusion (as well as Trinket) ready for when he hits 20% for Molten Fury goodness. So, realistically speaking, you should be able to fit 2 in that span provided your raid DPS isn't super-high--and, well, if it is it probably doesn't much matter anyway.

If you're in a low DPS group where most people are in the 600-700 DPS range, in a typical 3 healer group, and with your backup tank (probably a Druid or hybrid Warrior) DPSing you would have 5 @ ~650 DPS + ~500 DPS = 3750-4k raid DPS. (Note: this is a very low ballpark for average or lower-end Kara groups though. YMMV.) That means you're looking at 4.8 minutes for a kill. You would be hitting 20% at around the 4 minute mark (3m55s) so you could use Combustion as late as ~45 seconds into the fight and still have it up for later.

You can easily get 3 uses of a 2 minute CD trinket in, though. Which can be handy.

Best way to handle it is probably just burn it as soon as you feel aggro is secure, stack up with a couple Scorches then Fireball until it's gone, use your mana gem, then go back to Scorch/Clearcast Fireballs.

If you're in a high DPS group, I'd just save it until phase 3, since you want to minimize the time you spend in the fast Infernal spawning phase...and don't want to risk it being on CD too much. However, if your healers/tank are having problems with the phase 2 DPS, you could always use it then instead. As my guild has gotten pretty geared up now and we run with pretty high DPS groups, I don't usually bother trying to get two Combusions in. We usually have something like 5k-5.5k+ raid DPS on a fight like Prince, so he's going down in ~3-3.5 minutes anyway. You'd have to to use it right at the start and might only barely squeeze one in at the end trying to double up with that high DPS. (Doable, but you have to have a tank that's good at threat gen for that.)

We're just starting to farm him, so as a whole our DPS is kind of low. The other thing that makes it interesting for me is I'm 0/38/23, so no clearcasts. What I have been doing is just scorching to keep the debuff up, and fireballing the whole time. I go through 3 gems, 2 pots, and an evocate and since I don't have improved fireball I think I can sustain a bit longer at the cost of some DPS.

I can easily fit 2 combustions in, but I really need to work on saving one for sub 20%. I'd like to use 1 at phase 2, and 1 at 20%, but I don't think that would be possible with the timing. I also need to work on not letting scorch drop off, but I'm the guy with the big icon over my head that moves when infernals spawn so it's kind of tough paying attention to everything.

Maligne, what spec are you running with where you are fireballing but don't have improved fireball, and no clearcasts? *boggle*

Anywho, I find that DPS in phase1 of the prince does matter. If you take a long time to get him to Phase 2, you increase the odds that you'll get a bad infernal fal pattern and have to move the entire raid multiple times. The fight is easier the faster he goes down basically, and in light of that, I always have to use Invis at some point during phase 1 in order to not move above the tank on aggro. I activate Combustion once 5 scorches are up, and then it's ready to use again when my shaman pops Bloodlust at the 25% mark.

Armory linked on my name as well.

You can do a fire/arcane spec that is built around scorch spam, that may have slightly more overall dps for something like Mag, but I don't really know if that is worth it. It would certainly be less useful for getting the channelers down fast which is really the most important DPS part of the fight anyway. If your mages are going full burn through phase 1 and have some juice left for phase 3, then you can kind of allow them to ride it out during phase 2 if you cannot give them a good support group. Blow everything on the channelrs, Evocate right after the channelers are dead and scorch through phase 2, evocate again for phase 3 and go full burn again. Better a dead Mag than a wipe with a mage at the top of the meters.

A mage (or any mana dps class) without a shadow priest should definitely be on cube duty though.