The most helpful predictor might simply be a line of text that calculates "Predicted Tick" based on the past ticks + current crits, and then include an approximation of what will be lost to munching. Something like this:

[Total Crit Damage] - Expected Ignite Tick: [Total Crit Damage * 0.4 * Mastery / (Duration of Ignite Buff / 2)], Expected Ignite After Munching [That value *0.75].

This could allow for the mod to track damage lost to munching in the same way that it tracks unused hotstreaks and early LB refreshes. (Keep a running total of crit damage, and one of every ignite tick, and output how much was lost at the end)

I'm not sure how to post a full excel document in this forums, so here is a google documents link to my calculations. Its for a single rotation, obviously the more you use the chain, to more often you'll get access to the increased crit chances of fire blast.

Here is hoping this link works.


For Fire Blast I used 42.86% as the coefficient, and for Scorch I used 51.2%, as those numbers were posted on wow head as being the correct coefficients for the spells in question. Fire Blast is getting an additional 8% crit from Improved Fire Blast, and scorch doesn't have any additional crit, so the base crit is just that.

For the calculations on how I figured out the minimum and maximum damages with the crit accounted for I used:

(((Spell minimum/maximum damage * 240%)* crit chance as a decimal)+(spell minimum/maximum damage * non crit spells as a decimal)

So for fire blast, at 5,000 spell power, and 25% base crit the equation is (((3,098 * 240%) * .33) + (3,098 * .67)) or 4,529.28 damage, minimal.

That same equation is repeated at the different spell power levels, as well as crit levels to give the totals throughout the spreadsheet.

Now, in the 4:1 ratio, I simply took 4 scorches to every 1 fire blast, and added them together to get the minimal damage, so at 5,000 spell power its merely ((4,360.50*4)+4,529.28) which equals 21,971.28 damage. For the crit I averaged out the chances evenly per spell, so that you had something like this, for the 25% crit chance ((25%*4)+33%)/5 or 26.6% overall. While that average remains the same, no matter how many rotations you use, this does translate into more crits over time, so in 100 casts (80 of them scorches, 20 of them fire blasts) you have an expected 20 crits from scorch, and 6.6 crits from fire blast, while at 100 casts of just scorch you would only expect 25 crits from, averaging out to about 1.6 more crits (or 2 if you round up, as you either crit or you don't, you can't half crit) which can translate to more pyroblast!s due to hot streak.

Its not a huge increase, as indicated on the spreadsheet itself where you can compare the rotations side by side, but with the additional crit, i feel that while when one is forced to move, adding a fire blast to every 4 scorches will increase the overall movement DPS, as long as you have the mana available to spare on fire blasts, which with the current PTR changes, that mana becomes available.

Of course you still want to keep living bomb active, and pyroblast! every proc.

I tried to include an Ignite predictor into CombustionHelper but in the end I had no way to have an accurate estimate of it.

The prediction ranged from calculating the expected ignite without taking munching into account, to taking the last result and applying an predetermined percentage off based on a average of ignite loss from WoL like Inoko suggested (though his formula don't take in account 3 ticks scenario). I even tried to simulate munching by taking in account the timestamp of every critical hits but the time reported by combat log events is notably inaccurate too...

Both solutions leaded to completely inaccurate numbers as the first would give higher results than it should due to munching, the second one would be lower because of removing damage even when no munching would occur. I decided not to use theses formula because I prefer to not give wrong results.

Now, if we want to have a report of actual munching this is completely different and doable but not in the scope of what I wanted to do with my addon : help improve fire playstyle.

Thinking of it, having all the users of CombustionHelper (35k+) know how much damage they lost due to buggy mechanics may be a good way to show Blizzard that this problem is the biggest we have currently.

I was actually accounting for the 3 tick situations by using "duration of ignite / 2" in my formula, but it's still a complete estimation and crap shoot. It would be useful mostly to see "well, if... then... I'd have done ... more..." but it's probably a serious pain to implement, and results in a lot of feature bloat. It's potentially (and even probably) not worth it to have Combustion Helper track lost ignite damage, but I think as a community it would be beneficial to find a way of tracking/estimating lost damage across a given fight without parsing the log after the fact. I also think knowing how much was lost (and possibly when it was lost) would help us figure out strategies to minimize lost damage, such as weaving scorches or fireblasts (both of which are probably ineffective) by tracking when it happened, and such.

But yes: I'm not sure that any of this is actually within the scope of Combustion Helper.

I'll get in touch with Zaldinar to include his ignite parser into the next version.

An easier and potentially more useful addition would be to just show the current ignite tick when it procs. Technically you don't need to predict much in advance for combustion as it doesn't matter if you combust at the start of an ignite or the end or it, you still get the same result.

A prominent display of the first ignite tick would give you a good guide as to when combustion should be hit, and you will have a good 4-5 seconds to hit it.

EDIT: It pays to have the most up-to-date version of things. Yes, combustion helper does already do this.

Hi guys,

This forum has been my favorite resource for years now and I really apprecaite all the work you guys do to help us glass cannons make the most of our potential, keep up the great work!

I noticed this being discussed recently and wanted to add a question to the mix about how to best determine when to pop combustion now that we know that ignite is highest contributing dot.

Firstly, great job on this addon, I think combustion helper is fantastic and has definatly helped me increase my dps through its use.

My question is based on how ignite is shown on the addon. I can certianly understand how difficult it would be to anticipate dps figures so I was thinking that if we knew where the ignite originated we could better determine the most optimal time to use combustion. We get ignites from dot ticks, FBs and Pyros and because we would always want the big pyro/fb crit to use Combustion, is there a way to show where the ignite comes from on the helper panel?

Ie: Could there be 3 buttons under ignite that say: Tick, FB, Pyro that light up as the ignite is triggered and change accordingly as new ignites overwrite the others?

Breaking it down that way, it is pretty clear that trinkets with spellpower procs are better contributors to combustion damage than a P! dot.

After running the numbers again, I made another spreadsheet.

Here it is, and it shows you side by side the mana you would be using on the different rotations, the mana you would expect to get back from MoE, and the mana you would expect to get back from blessing of might, base regen, and Master of Elements. All mana values are in mp5, to make it easier to understand.

The total mana wasted sections is the percentage of mana you could've used on fireball instead while running that chain. It shows pretty clearly the value of Improved Scorch, which we all already knew, but it also shows us the mana value for the PTR change. Compared to live, your using 20 - 30% less mana per cast, which while expect due to the drop from 12% to 9%, once you factor in MoE, BoM etc it's nice to show exactly how much mana this change is saving us.

Please let me know if there are any mistakes, I'm pretty sure I corrected all the formulas to show the correct values.

I want to highlight that you are talking about improved fire blast, and including fire blast in a scorch rotation. I'm not sure about something here. Take for example G6 vertically "Fireball Spam PTR" and horizontally "% of mana wasted when compared to fireball spam on PTR". I don't see how fireball spam costs anything but 100% of fireball spam. Can you clarify that please?

This question have been asked to me several times, so i'll respond to it for once. Yes, I could show which fire spells made criticals strikes as they land, so we could know without waiting 2 secs for the ignite report damage if it's worth using combustion or not. Sadly this won't be accurate enough as munching could still happen and eat that big pyro/fb crit you saw...

Do you want to be sure to have a big ignite by waiting for the tick to register or gamble and take the risk of wasting combustion on a munched ignite ? On a 1min cd combustion I'd take the latter, not on a 2 min cd.

If you still want to to gamble, then you can use whatever floating combat text addon you want and setup it for showing only big crits.

On the topic of Combustion, I just did a quick test. If the direct damage portion of Combustion crits, the value of the Combustion DOT is calculated without the ignite from that crit.

The OP was given a quick brush-up to be a little more accurate for 4.06. This includes some minor and moderate changes such as:

- Downplaying the importance of "Mana Management" requirements after 4.06
- Explaining why "Scorch Weaving" is largely no longer necessary
- Removing "Mana Constraints" as a weakness of the Fire spec.
- Changing "Improved Scorch" from an essential talent to Optional/Situational (We'll get a better feel for this in a few more weeks)
- Noting that Arcane Concentration might provide mana efficiency which is no longer necessary
- Removing references to Mobile Scorch being tied to Molten Armor
- Notes to Enchant Bracer with the new Int enchant, switch to the new Meta gem, get rid of all blue hit gems (if anyone still used them to activate the now obsolete meta) etc

References to the actual words "Haste Cap" were downplayed and used more carefully, as usage of the phase got a little out of control and taken out of context. In hindsight, we should have called it something more like "Haste Step" instead.

The main things to consider for this patch, both ingame and how to present to the community are answers to these three questions

- Crit: "What's going on with the value of Crit rating?"
- Haste: "Exactly how good is Haste now ? How much should I aim to have?"
- Mastery: "Flashburn was buffed in 4.06, so how valuable is Mastery now? What about the recent Ignite Munching discussion, how much does that continue to devalue Mastery - even after these buffs?"

It's important players know that various tools (eg SimC) are now introducing more accurate Ignite Modelling, and this is a large factor driving the recent reshuffling of Crit value. Although i've been reading all the relevant posts, i'm not yet sure how accurate the SimC/Rawr developers consider their Ignite Munching models. We're aware that actual:expected is a 'much closer' ratio now, but just how close? The Combat Ratings section of the OP has notes on Crit stating the following, which should be sufficient for now until more details are available:

As for Haste/Mastery, i'm not sure what's the best information to present or put forward yet. Any suggestions? For those with a fortè in this area, what's your summary of the most important changes pertaining to Haste/Mastery that the community should know about for 4.06. And how/why do these changes alter/influence their Relative Value? Will review the various responses and edit points into the OP as necessary.

As far as ingnite munching goes for Rawr, it is not actually modeled, but just a user parameter in the options. I have defaulted it to 35% based on some simple observations, but it should be easy enough to change if it doesn't reflect what people are seeing in practice.

The general consensus for both Rawr and Simcraft post 4.0.6 seems to be haste > crit > mastery; two facts contribute to the ratings, the first is that both now model Ignite munching (different method for each) which is ~around~ what logs look like which results in both mastery and crit getting devalued and the second fact is simply mana availability which is where crit gets devalued slightly.

Again it all depends on the gear composition / tier sets, but for t11 geared mage the stats are int >> spellpower ~ hit > haste > crit > mastery.

As far as Rawr is concerned, that order doesn't necessarily hold true because as you increase your haste rating via reforging/gemming/etc. there comes a point where crit rating becomes more valuable than haste. As Kavan said, Rawr doesn't use modeling per se to account for ignite munching, it's just a constant coefficient to reduce the amount of ignite damage, so I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with "having haste beyond a certain % increases ignite munching which makes crit rating more valuable beyond that point".

As I said ratings are very much dependant on your gear, the genereic sense I get from running simcraft and rawr in PTR modes is what I outlined above; it's possible that in some scenarious it might value crit higher than haste but that was always true which is mainly the reason why the mage forums don't have generic EP values. I have no clue how is that related at all, only thing I did was tried to explain why both devalue crit, which is because of ignite munching 'handling' (modeled in simcraft and a parameter in Rawr). I don't remember saying that at all, so I'm not sure how that is related either.

I'm sorry, I should've made myself more clear I suppose. Simcraft has an ignite model which proposes that ignite munching increases beyond a certain haste level, especially with 4PT11 speed bonus to fireballs, which ultimately devalues haste. I just wanted to say that there is nothing like this in Rawr, which means in cases when it values crit over haste it doesn't consider haste devaluation by increased ignite munching.

I've tried to carefully reword several references in the OP pertaining to combat rating relative values. We all know many people come to EJ looking for a 'magic number' to take away. But any numbers given, as people continue to stress, are often only applicable to characters with specific stats/levels of gear. Rather than EJ trying to provide copious numbers for multiple levels of gear, the emphasis is on encouraging people to educate themselves by using Simulationcraft and/or Rawr.

A more accurate way to ascertain the Relative Values applicable to you - is to load your character into Rawr, import your profile into Simulationcraft - or choose/make a profile that more accurately reflects your current stats, gear and encounters you're doing. Not by noting the values listed in the OP and blindly assuming they are equally applicable to everyone.

It is a little disheartening to read comments elsewhere blindly quoting any numbers given, and implying they are applicable to anyone and everyone. There should be some sort of added caveat stating something such as, "But to find out whether these values actually apply to you - load your character into Rawr / SimC and find out yourself."

Firstly both Simcraft and Rawr value haste higher at the gear level we're talking about.

Secondly the Ignite munching model in Simcraft isn't directly related to haste, what I mean is that there might be some indirect relationship between haste and ignite munching but I would guess that the relatioship is tangential at best; the vast majority of the Ignite munching is due to Living Bomb and Pyroblast! ticking (and some fireball + p! sim.crits) I very much doubt there would be any decrease in valuation of haste simply due to Ignite munching.

I feel as though this may be a bit specific to mages that are either troll, herbalists, or possess an on use haste trinket. Through Wizeowel's guidance :-), I feel a bit enlightened after spending some time with haste values. Just to state the basics of haste...

Spell Duration / ( Base Tick Time / ( 1 + Haste % in decimal form)) = Total Number of Ticks Rounding Up

My newfound enlightenment is in regards to on use haste abilities and Combustion. It is my understanding that haste will not have any diminishing returns with dots and will provide more ticks as haste increases. Using the above formula, each 10% haste will give Combustion another tick. I advise updating the OP and reflecting how powerful these on use haste abilities can be when used in conjunction with Combustion, and even more importantly Impact.

I have not yet been able to find a way to sufficently model the value of trinkets such as [Heart of Ignacious] and their relative value for both single target and aoe situations.

Was looking over trinket choices, and i noticed something interesting.

As of right now this thread is saying the 2 BiS trinkets are Volcanic Deck (which is hard to argue against) and the Atramedes Trinket. I had a hard time thinking that this would be the case because this thread, and all caster threads to be honest preach "int is king", so why pass up an int trinket?!

Did the math comparing the normal versions, but the difference between the two would even greater if you added more intellect to the Mirror.

Following numbers are based of the "relative values" section of this thread.

359 Mirror - 321 int / 1926 Mastery proc (20 seconds / 2 min internal)

321 int's relative value = 1036,7016

321 Mastery's relative value = 394.4127

So the trinket's "relative value" dps wise is 1431.1143.

359 Bell - 321 crit / 1926 spell power proc (20 seconds / 2 min internal). And lets reforge the crit to hit, to give it the maximum value you can give an item (assuming you need hit, it is our best secondary stat).

128 hit's relative value = 314.8416

193 crit's relative value = 268.1928

321 Spell Power's Relative value = 761.0589

So the trinket's "relative value" dps wise is 1344.0933

Basically, Mirror > Bell, unless obviously you have 372 bell and 359 mirror blah blah. Just making a note because I personally was curious, and I thought I would share my findings. Also, DMC:V is our best trinket, considering it's 12 second's of 1600 int, on a 45 sec internal (which comes out to be over 400 int) and it still has mastery which can be reforged to hit. So unless you are in need of hit, I would use Mirror / DMC:V.