Realistically maintaining a rotation of
3AB ABarr 2AB AM 2AB ABarr
is 98.4% reliable (99% if AM can proc itself) while being very close to simply being 2AB and the punishment for hitting that 1.6% window is just having to start over.

Calculations made not accounting for a proc on the final AB since you would be in the next spells cast time, e.g. there are 9 spells planned between missile casts and 1-(.6^8)=.984.

Bear in mind that while Arcane doesn't get the passive school multiplier for Flame Orb, it does get a substantial increase on the spell form Mana Adept, while the Fire and Frost masteries do not affect the spell. At level 84, in quest gear picked up mostly in Deepholme, I have enough Mastery Rating to get a 22% increase to Flame Orb from Mana Adept at max mana. Granted that your average multiplier will be significantly lower than maximum, but the maximum is also going to increase substantially from what I currently have.

When you add in the fact that Arcane has a couple talents that will benefit the Orb's damage (Improved Mana Gem and Focus Magic), it seems likely that Arcane's Flame Orb will be reasonably competitive with Frost's Frostfire Orb.

To be fair, even if Flame Orb didn't get the bonuses from Mana Adept, I would surmise that its rather absurdly high coefficient, coupled with its equally high DPM and DPCT would alone make it worth the global to cast, even as Arcane

That being said, I believe what Pasture was getting at was not necessarily the raw damage of the spell, but how the spell's secondary effects synergize with the Frost and Fire specs.

In Fire, Flame Orb not only has the explosion (i.e. another AoE option) but has the ability to proc a myriad of effects which will boost the Fire spec's output (e.g. Impact, Ignite, and through extension Pyromaniac etc).

In Frost, the added chill effect means that for the time that Frostfire orb is active, your % chance to proc important effects (e.g. brain freeze, FoF) will skyrocket, which in turn lead to a massive boost in the specs output.

In Arcane, no such synergy exists.

So while the base spell's damage may be similar across the specs, the thing which does undeniably make the spell mark-ably better for fire and frost, is that its secondary effects will boost the core mechanics for Fire and Frost, while not doing so for Arcane. Which makes any assertion that, overall (as in, in a holistic sense), Arcane's flame orb will be as competitive as Fire or Frost's, somewhat disingenuous.


In short, casting Flame Orb as Fire or Frost will "do more damage and make other cool stuff happen which makes you stronger" whereas casting Flame Orb as arcane is just "more damage", which is also rather boring.

Does Flame Orb proc Arcane Concentration? I would assume so since it procs things like Brain Freeze and FoF for Frost, but I might be mistaken. If it does indeed proc Arc. Conc., then it would also be providing a chance to change to a slightly less mana-friendly rotation given that you'll be critting (Potency) and saving mana (possibly even gaining mana, if you grab Master of Elements) more often, theoretically. Then again, you would only be doing so over an ~15 second window, and "Arcane's" proc (besides AM) is eaten by any spell rather than a small subset...

Maybe it would be smarter to cast Flame Orb right before going into an AB-spam-(AM maybe?) cycle, which comes before Evocation? The Orb would help sustain the spam cycle (however minutely) by providing extra chances for a Concentration proc.

On another note, while Arcane doesn't have a ranged AOE rotation, it does have a huge repertoire of instant-cast AOEs until it gets into melee range to jump around like a lunatic (I mean, who doesn't do this when spamming AE?). You can do the following on the run in: POM-Flamestrike, Flame Orb (technically not an AOE, but still worth the GCD), Curtain of Frost (though one of the people in the beta might want to correct me on this, depending on whether its damage is only inflicted once and whether it only affects units that enter it after being cast), an ABar (if you're not there yet), followed by AE-spam.

Also, Arcane's out-of-school AOEs, while not as synergistic, will likely be doing as much damage as they would for the other specs thanks to Mana Adept. If it's not safe to jump around like a lunatic in cleave range, you can just rotate between Flamestrike and Blizzard or whatever happens to be the best DPCT rotation, and you'll still do comparable damage to at least the Frost Mage who's probably just spamming Blizzard (and not even gaining any benefit aside from +% Frost damage anymore since Frostbite is gone).

Flame Orb actually does not proc...well...pretty much anything from Frost and Fire talents. No Ignite, no Fingers of Frost, etc. I believe the idea is that it's almost like a minion -- its attacks are its spells, not yours, so just like a Mirror Image's casts, it doesn't really do much for you except deal damage. So no, there really isn't any extra synergy for Fire and Frost. (This raises the question of why Mana Adept affects it, though.)

There's the Kaboom, which Fire will spec for, and theoretically Arcane and Frost could also spec for, but won't.
There's Focus Magic and Improved Mana Gem in Arcane, which affect it. Arcane Power does not.
As far as I've found, there is nothing in the Frost tree that affects it except for the FFO talent itself besides Piercing Ice, which everyone can take.

Am I mistaken here or would you not rather cast ABarr if AM procced and ABarr is not on cool down, as you would then have the opportunity to clear your AB Buff with AM inbetween ABarr Cooldowns to conserve mana?

I'm clearly in the minority here, but I'll give it one more try. I don't understand why some insist on there having to be some miraculous mana management spell. As long as you have rotations with a spread of dps and mps characteristics you can achieve the required results. And you don't need them to be 100% reliable either as some seem to insist. We haven't had a need for such for some time now, most rotations we're using currently rely on procs in one way or another and there's nothing wrong with that.

And finally I'll say that if you think that Mana Adept means you should try to maintain your mana at some magical percentage that is not optimal. What you want is to gradually ramp up your mps so that by the time your evocation is ready you'll evocate to full. If we had a mana neutral rotation you'd use it at 100% mana, not somewhere in the middle.

And hopefully by the time I make another post I'll have some concrete numbers to show to those that proclaim all kinds of doom.

I believe it has to do with the idea that you still have a chance to proc AM in the next cycle, so using it in the current cycle doesn't cause you to 'waste' a proc. In this situation, it is ok to keep ABr off CD since if you don't cast it instead of AM in the current cycle and the first few casts of the next cycle don't proc AM, you can use ABr then. It also helps that AM is significantly higher DPM then ABr.

You are not in the minority. To perhaps add a little clarity (since I think you might be mixing up two separate issues).

The quandary isn't with having a mana management spell in the form of a spell or cycle that lets you reduce your mana expenditure. As you mentioned, that is already possible with the different DPM cycles.
The problem is with not having a spell/cycle that lets you increase your mana levels (essentially a spell or cycle which is not just mana neutral, but immensely mana positive in use), hence allowing us to increase our mana at an alarming rate, outside of cooldowns. This will allow for things such as, burning mana very fast with cycle X, but then regenning mana really fast with cycle Y (where cycle Y consists of the cycle or spell that regenerates mana really fast).

The reason I think many people are latching onto this idea (i.e. having something outside of cooldowns that lets us gain mana really fast), is that it will, somewhat, allow us to play with our mana in reaction to different fights in an interesting way, as well as giving us a very fine grained way to control if, when and how our mana levels go up and down.

After playing around in the PTR for a bit, I found that at really low haste %, it is somewhat possible to have an ABx1 cycle which allows for us to actually gain mana when used, however, to do this you have to be using Mage Armor constantly, and even then, the regeneration is rather slow. I think maybe it is an extension of this kind of idea that people were looking for when they say things like "the mana management tools are incomplete".

I think the disconnect is where some people define "mana management toolbox" as just a way to alter the DPM of your cycles to maybe a mana neutral point, whereas others define the toolbox as 'complete' when it goes over the entire spectrum, from immense mana negative cycles to immense mana positive ones. Yin and Yang if you will.

Hopefully that clears it up a bit?

just a quick edition edit:
Just wanted to add a few points.

One characteristic that I, personally, would think that this "regen" cycle would need to have, is that it would have to regen mana faster then if the mage was not casting at all. Which is why I suggested something that perhaps buffs the regen output of mage armor for a few seconds.

The other thing that I wanted to mention, is that you may be reading into the "doom gloom" aspects a bit to deep. I am certain that there is no one here who thinks that the Arcane spec will not be as performant as the other two in the end. I am pretty confident that the new restructuring of the trees and talents will allow Blizzard to ensure that all specs perform within similar bounds.
The issue is less about if the spec will perform well, but more to do with the playstyle of the spec. The idea of having a yin/yang spectrum of mana management, at least I think, for many people plays into this need to have the playstyle of Arcane evolve through the addition of new mechanics (Mana Adept) but also the addition of new tools to interface with these mechanics.

If the damage of AB spam divided by the damage of the standard rotation (call it x) is at least as high as the damage of the standard rotation at 100% mana divided by the damage of the standard rotation at 0% mana, (call it y) you have to end the fight at 0% mana with AB spam. If x is not higher than y, you will still have to spam AB, but a bit later so that at the end of the fight you should have 10%, 20%, 30%... etc. mana left depending on how much x is lower than y, or maybe you´ll have to use a third rotation, a rotation with better dps and lower dpm than the standard rotation, but worse dps and better dpm than AB spam, while still trying to get to 0% mana. But I am not sure about that third rotation.

For sure arcane seems to be much more interesting than a few days ago.

Edit: Maybe you do max dps through a mana safing rotation, then changing to that third rotation and than changing to AB spam at the right moments. Could that be possible?

I really don't think we need mana positive cycles. If we had some spell that let us gain mana at alarming rate then by the very design of mana adept we would use it on cooldown. Any cycle that is mana positive without cooldowns is redundant as you'd want to use it at 100% mana and all you need for there is a mana neutral one. If you also had a mana positive one you'd always choose the mana neutral instead because of higher dps.

Close, but no cigar.

So let me set up a simple scenario that will show how a mana positive cycle is in fact, not only very useful, but how it also leads to a much more engaging playstyle for Arcane, which has been the goal of many mages this entire time.

Let us assume, for a minute, that ABspam+ is the highest DPS rotation between 100%-60% of mana, given Mana Adept. I don' think this is an unreasonable assumption to make, given this post by Blizzard.

Now, given this ABspam+ rotation, it then becomes the job of the arcane mage to maximize the uptime of this rotation, i.e. maximize the amount of time, during any given fight, that he spends in the 100%-60% mana range, spamming AB. This becomes the 'goal' of the Arcanist.

Now, the mage knows that starting from 100% mana, he can spam ABspam+ rotation for approximately 20 seconds (just an example) before he reaches the magical '60%' mark. The question then becomes, what must he do to get his mana back to 100%, so as to continue this "high burn but exemplary DPS" rotation.

He could use a CD, but he wants to save this CD since he knows that the boss is going to be vulnerable to spell damage in the next 40 seconds, and wants to preserve his CDs for that phase.

This is where the mana positive rotation comes in.

A mana neutral rotation will allow him to maintain the 60% mana bar that he currently is at. But a mana positive rotation will allow him to quickly regain mana back to 100% and "burn again". In this way, the Arcanist's cycles become one of 'burn and regen'.

The 'skill' will be knowing just how much 'regen' to do without incurring too too large a DPS loss (obviously the mage can 'tweak' the target mana % he wants to be at, e.g. he can figure out that he doesn't need to be at 100% mana for his next burn phase, but can make do with being at 85%, for example. This calculus is totally reliant on the individual mage's 'skill', an aspect that is woefully missing in the current Arcane model).

Naturally, a 'mana regen' cycle will come at a hefty DPS penalty. Similar to how Arcane mages of today must exercise 'skill' in knowing when to stop spamming ABs (or 'fishing'), the Arcane mage in this hypothetical will have to know when he has spammed his 'regen' cycle enough to store enough mana for another round of the 'burn' rotation. Now granted, this all hinges on the fact that a alternating "burn - regen" cycle produces more overall DPS then a constant 'mana neutral' cycle, but that is not too hard to balance with just the numbers. It will be easy, if such a 'regen' rotation exists, to balance the DPS and DPM outputs of the various cycles to ensure that a mana regen followed by a mana burn cycle is never superseded by a straight and simple mana neutral cycle, if used correctly (and that is where the complexity comes in).

This complexity is what I think people feel will lead to the "depth" that is somewhat lacking in the spec right now.



Now true, in a patchwerk type fight (as in one with no boss specific timings, or no real external input), what you say is totally correct. That being that you only really need a mana neutral rotation. But, what I am saying is assuming that Patchwerk type fights won't be the norm in Cataclysm. I could be wrong, but something (call it a hunch) tells me that boss fights in Cataclysm will be more than just "tank and spank". At least, that is my hope.


At the end of the day, the point isn't just to make the spec 'work', but to make the spec 'fun and engaging'. Mana neutral rotations 'work' but they really are quite boring both in principal and in their possible applications.



Personally however, I do feel this entire tangent is somewhat irrelavent.

I feel we have passed the point of trying to push the point of making "Arcane more interesting", since Blizzard has started their numbers pass. So I guess we should just focus on trying to make the best of what we have, even though the playstyle is somewhat straightforward, obvious and rather boring right now.

edit:
forgot to mention:
(emphasis mine).
The mana regen cycle would not have a 'cooldown'. It would always be available. This is important since it really forces the mage into the 'decision making process' of when to stop 'regenning' and start 'burning;. Think of it as an extension of the warlocks 'life tap'. It is always available, but the lock doesn't want to spend too much time tapping, since it cuts into the time he spends DPSing.