1134-1336, and 0.2. It's Fire damage, not Frostfire.

It's been a few builds since I rechecked those values, but they'd obviously have to change a lot to make it stronger than NP.

In that case, will we have to keep the DOT up to 3 stacks? Even if we have to cast FFB without Brain Freeze?

Currently on beta and live there is a problem with the brain freeze talent and fingers of frost.

If you have 2 FoF up and brain freeze has procced, an instant cast FFB will consume both the FoF instead of just 1.

500 iterations each in four configs.

Saving FFB until you have an FOF proc seems to do about 1.5% better than using it on the fly.

Using it on the fly has very marginally better endurance, going OOM for the first time about five seconds later in the encounter.

If we replace Molten Armor by Mage Armor, will it be possible to obtain the crit cap ?

In premade lvl 85 gear (Full 346 items) and 3/3 Piercing Ice, we have about 16% crit unbuffed. You can do a little reforging with premade gear (swapping haste -> crit) to push it up very slightly. Bringing it up to ~23% might be possible in later tiers, but seems a little out of reach now. We'll need more seriously crit heavy items, such as Bell of Enraging Resonance - Item - World of Warcraft , to really reach the crit cap early on (without falling below the hit cap). I'm using the Bell currently and hovering around 18.7%. Whether I should immediately reforge Mastery -> crit (until we reach the crit shatter cap) is something i'm still unsure of. Going by Lhivera's recent comments on stat comparisons, it appears the answer is yes?

But yeah, ultimately we're trying to suss out whether it's possible / practical to reach ~23% crit - then use Mage Armor full time to render mana trivial (And swap to Glyph of Frostfire Bolt). As I posted on Official forums, you wouldn't even need to spec into Master of Elements if you use Mage Armor and could get this to work, potentially freeing up 2 points for placement elsewhere.

Apologies, this was meant to be edited into the above post but instead created a new one.

Here's some tangible information to give people an idea of how Mana is playing out on Beta for Frost. This was a ~7 minute Al'akir attempt that just got into Phase 3 (about 25%). For reference, Al'akir 10 has ~30 million health and phase 2 lasts from 80-30% and has a soft enrage. The results and sentiment below is indicative of all other similar length attempts throughout the night. Present in the raid were 2 Frost mages and a Warlock. We all handled our mana differently, but even us Frost mages went about it in a completely different fashion

1 - Frost Mage 1 (Me) I used what i'd consider the 'standard' Frost spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

- Used Molten Armor 100%
- Used Glyph of Molten Armor / Frostbolt / Ice Lance

My mana breakdown according to recount for the attempt looked like this:

I was barely keeping mana afloat by the time phase 3 started at 30%. On a mana-desperation level (with 10 being a disaster) I was about a 7, but rising, because I was anxiously waiting for my Gem/Second Evocation cooldown to come back up before I felt safe again. And any interrupts for Evocation are obviously going to be very punishing when mana is strained like this.

2 - Frost Mage 2: Used a spec without Master of Elements, something like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

- Used (Unglyphed) Mage Armor 100%
- Didn't have Master of Elements
- Used 0 Gems, Pots, Evocation
- Used Glyph of Frostfire Bolt

He had zero mana problems, never dropped under 75% mana. Mana was totally an irrelevant resource for him that required 0 thought or management.

3 - Warlock. Our Warlock dominated on DPS, but the point here is about what his mana looks like

The main conclusion from my post to draw is not about the numbers, it's about how big the pendulum swings are between Mage and Molten Armor.

Using Molten Armor will require you to pull out every trick you have to keep on top of your mana. You might need to reconsider whether 3/3 Enduring Winter or 3/3 Arcane Concentration are considered unnecessary or optional. All these issues come up because you really want that 5% crit from Molten Armor.

If you use Mage Armor, however, the pendulum swings the other way and mana becomes largely irrelevant again. Don't bother even speccing into the above talents, and don't worry much about Evocation, Gems or whether you raid even has Replenishment in it.

This post is referring to Frost, the spec that 'has it easy with mana'. Fire has much more severe problems (read the Fire thread for more info on that) and you can see immediately that using full time Molten Armor as a Fire mage - is simply not a viable option for these long encounters with the current numbers/balance in place. Also, I don't play a Warlock: but you can also notice that even if I used Mage Armor full time, in addition to every mana trick I have available, i'd still have pretty much the same mana gains as our Warlock (who was absolutely destroying us on damage).

The next thing some people will say is, "So why not just use conservative cycles? Why not just Improved Scorch more often? Why not just use Mage Armor more often?" The response is basically that many of these encounters simply don't have periods where you can afford to slack off, like Al'akir phase 2. You need to be pumping that solid DPS out for extended periods of time, or the raid will be forced to pick up your slack. Mage DPS isn't stellar as it is, so dropping down to lower DPS cycles might appear to help your mana - but it's hurting your raid. People will start thinking things like, "Why not just take a Warlock, he doesnt seem to have this dilemma". This is why there's also concern about Mage vs Molten Armor, which are we being balanced around? Or are we expected to swap constantly? What happen if the fight has an extended Kil'jaeden type constant burn, and you don't get those periods to conserve?

This is also the reason we're now curious whether it's practical / possible to reach the crit cap, use Mage Armor full time, use Glyph of Frostfire Bolt - and essentially remove mana from the equation as a resource that you need to care about.

That only gives you 5 seconds.
Delaying the use of Deep Freeze is going to be a DPS loss in all cases where the fight length might have allowed you to use it again if you hadn't delayed it. So as I see it, you must use Freeze as soon as Deep Freeze is available, unless your reactions are good enough to use an existing FoF Proc. In that case, you must use Freeze within 5 seconds to ensure that it's cooldown will be ready for the next Deep Freeze. The possible delay (max 5 seconds) of a BF FFB, which hopefully will be still available for Freeze charge 2, is far less of a DPS loss than the delay of a Deep Freeze.

We are basically locked into a fixed cast sequence on opening.
/castsequence MI, IV, FFO, Freeze, DF, CS, DF, FFO. Then it's FrB + whack moles...@20 sec IV, FrB + whack moles, then a fairly mandatory Invis at about 30sec.

After this, you really must use the DF CD as soon as it's up, or you will suffer DPS penalties. Using freeze on a BF would be a waste I think.

I am not able to react quickly enough to decide whether or not Freeze is necessary when Deep Freeze comes up. On Live I just spam a macro like this and madly click the floor under the target as soon as Power Auras pings to tell me it is ready. i.e, Freeze always goes with Deep Freeze.

/cast [nopet] Deep Freeze
/castsequence reset 10 Freeze, Deep Freeze, Icelance

The fight length is a major factor. We can't predict it, but the DF, FFO and to a small extent the EF cooldowns make for a large variability in DPS, especially on short fights. Although delaying DF may have no effect, it will never have a positive effect. For a 6 minute fight, 2 seconds average DF delay can be a 1% penalty, 5 seconds a 2%penalty. Much more for shorter fights. It's very granular.

Basically, if you have a charge when Deep Freeze comes up, use it, make sure you've cleared all charges, and then immediately use Freeze and eat the charges with Ice Lance (and/or FFB if BF is up). The shorter cooldown will mean that Freeze is ready again by the time Deep Freeze is up again.

One thing that may interfere with this is Frostfire Orb; in my experience, when FFO is active, you get absolutely spammed with FOF charges, and you probably don't want to spend a Freeze at that moment.

Ya, that was pretty much my assumption; that if you can use a Freeze in that 5s window and *guarantee* it will be back by the time DF is off cooldown then there's really no reason to not use it and either IL or BF/FFB.

I'm still curious as to the other question I posed though. If you have a BF charge and it's about to expire, is it worth using a non-FoF BF/FFB rather than just normal FB spam? Does it depend on glyphed vs. non-glyphed at all?

So, with those considerations in mind, should the optimal rotation/priority cascade from the initial post look something more along the lines of the following?