Infraction for solbergb: General Idiocy

• LodeRunner · 06/12/08, 9:18 PM

Post: [Mage] Help me please?
User: solbergb
Infraction: General Idiocy
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Your theorycrafting is dumb and so I must conclude you are as well. Now go stand in the corner and think about what you did.

Original Post:

I have a question regarding the 2 points in arcane subtlety that is assumed for all raiding builds.

The use appears to be low threat AOE spamming. When you run the numbers vs untalented, say, deep fire equivalent (dragon breath, blast wave, spam arcane explosion until cooldowns come up repeat....for frost spec with improved cone of cold...2xcone of cold with cold snap blah blah) you get something that looks like this

1. it takes 3 arcane explosions to match the damage of your two "talented" elemental AOEs
2. Threat after your two "elemental" AOE's is already 50% higher than for the arcane explosions
3. The mobs have taken ~2000 damage by this time and probably have not had time to react. They'll take another thousand or so before they can really gang up on the mage, assumign he just "tanks" it and he pulled aggro right away (as opposed to kiting).

When instancing in 5-mans, what I've noticed is the short range AOE spam is mostly done in these situations.

1. clearing off weak adds from the tank after you've helped him kill the main threat (be it boss+adds or elite+nonelite trash)

2. pulling adds off the healer if his healing aggro has yanked them off the tank (and you need a plan if they are tough on how you'll survive succeeding....generally kite them back to the tank and lock them down next to him)

3. clearing weak trash because it's faster and more mana efficient than killing things one at a time and you don't respect their counterattack.

An awful lot of the time the mobs just die before they can react to the mage even if he pulls aggro on the second or third boom, as they're softened up by other stuff going on before the mage moves in and goes nuts with AOE spam. (the first boom won't pull aggro...or at least with a fire mage they'll be disoriented so so what?)

With the exception of pulling off healer, these situations just make your overall raid DPS meter look better if you do them more efficiently (start earlier for less worry about threat, or use the big cooldown nukes because they'll be too dead to hit back). These situations are rarely dangerous to the mage if he's paying attention. For the healer situation, you don't WANT a low threat attack. You want a high threat one. The tactics you use to get the mobs back on the tank after you've pulled them off healer is the same as you use if you get overexuberant with AOE's and they all turn in your direction. Slow them down, move next to tank (and stop attacking). Ice block in worst case. Not great for your DPS, but so far it's been pretty rare untalented even when I go all out.

Does this dynamic change in raid groups or possibly in specific difficult battles in certain instances? I'd like to be able to spend my last two spec points on something that is useful either in solo PVE or in PVP than somehing that makes it slightly easier to do something that is already pretty easy untalented when raiding.

Level 68 fire mage who is actually going to have to make this decision pretty soon.