This is indeed a possibility. I covered it under the "optimizing evocation" section of the original post.

As I mentioned in the other thread (I think), the core idea is sound, what is troublesome is the fact that successfully pulling this off is heavily contingent on gear, i.e. how many real AB4 casts can you do post evocation at 100% and still remain in 'gem range' (as an example, with the gear the heroic premades have in beta, a single AB4 cast eats ~17.84% of maximum mana per cast, preMP5).
Due to this, I see this as a strategy which will might become a realistic possibility further down the line, in higher tiers of gear. Naturally, it is hard to tell when exactly this point will be, given the dearth of information concerning what kind of gear we will be getting in Cataclysm. We will probably be able to make this call when we get better information.


While I'm here I just wanted to field a few questions and observations and make a few points concerning Arcane at 80 in 4.01.

We must force ourselves to remember that Arcane will be very different in terms of what is viable and what isn't at 85 compared to how it is now at 80. The reason people are seeing rotations such as "AB4+" being totally viable for a "conserve phase" is due to the immense stat inflation that happened in the latter part of WoTLk. Blizzard has mentioned many times now that they intend for this situation with stats being so far out of whack to not happen again in Cataclysm. If they are successful, we wont be able to maintain AB4+ rotations for so long. It will also not take so long to burn through our mana during a 'burn' phase.

We must also remember, the mana costs relative to mana pools will also be very different at 85, since base mana between 80 and 85 is being increased by over 500%! (base mana at 80 is ~3268, base mana at 85 is ~17418). Now a well geared mage at 80 should have around 35k mana. For a similar spell cost to mana pool ratio, he would need a mana pool of over 180k at 85! Now, this may happen, but I feel that if it does, it may be way at the end of Cataclysm, around patch 5.01, where the majority of Cataclysm raiding is already complete.

The key point we must digest is that Arcane is a spec whose playstyle is very sensitive to your gear. Given that the spec has obviously been designed around the gear blizzard feels we should have at 85, I purposefully wouldn't place too much weight into how arcane is playing at 80. The warped stats, warped spell cost to mana pool ratios and overall imbalance at 80 is an artifact of the "moving to a new expansion" process. The phenomenon will self correct very quickly when Cataclysm drops, and is in no way shape or form indicative of how Arcane really does play.

For now though, I guess we can just have fun spamming ABs into targets and seeing big numbers without too much of a care for our mana.
I can assure you though, from playing my 85 mage on beta and from looking at spell costs and mana pools, we wont be able to do this in Cataclysm. Not initially at least. Not by a long shot.

If you mouse over spirit in the character sheet it still shows MP5 gained from spirit and in practice there is a constant flow in mana regen aside from your mage armor tick every 5 seconds. I'm pretty sure spirit is doing something because there's no way I'd be seeing the regen I am with just 3.6% of my max mana returned.

The mana is coming from somewhere, and it matches very closely to the spirit tool tip. Is that tool tip wrong? If so, where is the constant influx of mana coming from when mage armor is off? I'm seeing about 390 MP5.

So I have yet to raid this week, because my guild is qqing but I have some questions about rotation in a raid base environment. As far as our burn phases to sustained phasing goes, after our initial burn phase how long do we wait until we burn again. With evocation being 30 seconds longer of a CD do we wait to pop AP when the CD reaches 15 seconds to time it with evo, or is the mana we are returning in a raid situation enough to allow us to burn through as soon as PoM and AP are back up, then evocate once it is available again. Now on top of this we have the mana gem which is sharing the same CD timer as evo, and is used in the inital burn phase after AP and PoM has already been popped, so this once again leads me to ask, to we just simply sit on PoM and AP for 30 seconds to wait for the SP buff from the gem, and the evocate that is available.

Mana regen (as it is listed on the character sheet) is based on spirit, however, mana regen in combat (listed as combat regen) is not. I reforged spirit off of my gear into mastery, and my mana regen went down but combat regen did not.