two issues still: buff doesn't stack with itself, so if it procs back to back you lose a charge, and if you get a proc while casting starfire, that starfire will consume the buff. (I know the first one is not fixed, I'm not 100% on the last)

Handwraps of the vigilant are pretty superior to frozen glade, basically same stats but more 19 more crit, as well as 3 more int and 8 more spi.

Looks like point for point your lose the least with shoulders. Guess it still comes down to where you are with Hit though.

So, since GC seems willing to consider a change to the impMF talent and adding a little something to spirit I thought we should really take the time to consider what we need. I for one am not lacking spellpower by any means, but I would like to see some crit put back on the gear. So if blizzard wants to give us spirit instead of crit, then we should see iMF adjusted for crit, right?

So what is a reasonable amount of crit to see from spirit? Obviously 15% to crit % would be too much, and 15% to crit rating would be too little, so looking at a few pieces of gear it seems the transition from spirit to crit on respective pieces is pretty close to 1:1.

E.g.
Umbral Brute robes gains
58 Crit
7 Haste
8 Spell Power

t8.5 gains
60 Spi
277 Armor
1 Sockets

So, we gain a socket which you can argue would provide the 7haste/8sp, and we ignore the armor since it is not a DPS stat. This leaves us with 60 spirit vs. 58 crit.

The 58 crit from the cloth robes is ~1.26% to crit so giving spirit an extremely modest 1.5% to crit gets us about .9% crit from the t8.5 leather alternative. The 1.5% also works well for the iMF talent 3 ranks (0.5%, 1%, 1.5%). Is 1.5% too much, too little? This is of course operating under the assumption that we are stuck with spirit and the unfortunate truth that many of us will not even be able to roll or bid on the cloth alternatives. Would this new addition to iMF make you okay with leather finally? Is this too large of a change? Would like to hear some opinions.

P.S. this is all in addition to iMF, we would get 15% of spirit to spellpower and 1.5% to actual crit % chance.

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone has suggestions for spell rotation/gear choices during General Vezax to promote mana efficiency?

Last night I was below 35% mana before the first Surge on many of our attempts, and on the successful attempt I was OOM by the 1 min enrage timer whacking on Vezax praying for Clearcast. My damage overall was less than our MT.

I usually took 5 ticks of the saronite cloud when i could get to one and there weren't too many people in one already.

We were limiting the people who could stand in shadow crash to two to avoid the siphon becoming a real issue.

Some of my randowm thoughts:

MF vs IS. MF is 21% of base mana and IS is 8%. IS with the trinket has as much DoT as MF, but MF with the glyph can be extended by casting SF- so the MF DoT has the potential to last longer. But is it long enough to warrant double the mana cost?

SF with the 4 piece T8 can insta-cast which causes more mana expenditure- should I break that bonus?

If you only cast while in shadow crash, you'll do a lot more damage over the course of the fight. I also like to remove the insect swarm glyph and keep that up on the boss as much as I can, even if I'm not in a shadow crash. 3% avoidance is very useful in this fight.

Yeah this weekend was our first time poking at him, so the raid in general is still learning about the fight, placement and movement. We did tend to get really spread out, which made crash placements awkward. You are keeping up a full rotation? What do you do during the down time when you are not in a Crash?

Let's suppose the SF cast overwrite issue will get fixed soon as it's obviously not intended. I don't count the refresh issue as a bug as many buffs work that way. It might be a small loss but isn't going to have a major impact on the bonus's worth.
I've been playing around with Rawr 2.2.1 in order to find the best in slot gear depending on rotations and stuff. With hard mode gear included the 4T8 wasn't worth it, however when excluding the lvl239 gear the optimiser was already giving the old 4T8 bonus as more valuable than the offset pieces (the non-set piece used being wyrmhunter or umbral brute depending on lunar or solar rotation). With the buff to 15%, i'd imagine it's going to be something to count on, especially on fights with multiple dot targets.
I do think it's relevant to look at hard-mode gear separately since it's not going to be immediately available to all players (depending on guild level and stuff).

@poromu : your numbers seem strange since until you're GCD capped, SF cast time should be at 2xGCD cast time : the same haste applies equally to both durations. Latency will screw this up a bit but the time gained should be more significant than what you are saying.

I run around trying to get into a crash when there's not one currently down in a good location :P - don't worry about not dps'ing the whole time - it's definitely the way that fight is designed - melee does consistent damage the entire duration of the fight, and casters catch up in 20 second bursts when they get to stand in crashes.

Spreading out a lot is good in theory but if you're TOO spread out, the potential to get an unusable crash is much higher, and that is a pretty huge dps loss since half your dps is holding out until they can stand in one.

I do my whole rotation in the crashes, at least initially - if there's a bloodlust, though, the haste is just too brutal to do anything but basically starfire spam (I was actually clipping gcd on starfires, which was amusing, but the numbers you'll see at that point will make you very happy)

Since General is all about DPM rather than DPS, and because Shadow Crash gives so much haste, I've been spamming Starfire in crashes in our last 2 kills.

If there's no crash up (or its too crowded), get in melee and try to proc a clearcast (use this on Starfall if it's up) or bandage the nearest person (your healers should only heal themselves and the MT) or try to proc clearcasts with Nature's Grasp whenever its up.

As rumored, the spirit -> SP conversion has been doubled in the new PTR build.

On fights you have a crit buff on (loatheb etc) and your crit chance is well over 100% with a lunar proc, is it agreed upon going for a solar rotation?