You've read the chart wrong (or it is in fact incorrect), but the 2011 breakpoint with lust is without the 5% raid buff. The next tick during lust with 3% from NP and 5% from raid is at 2212 rating (7 extra ticks).

If you get DI and have the two piece bonus (500 additional haste rating when fully stacked), you can gear for 2168 haste and get an 18th tick during lust.

These are for everyone but goblins, of course. I think they are the only breakpoints I can see people aiming for though. The rest seem too far out of reach.

I've done a quick test of this using LFR hands and normal chest for the 2pc bonus. Using Fireball, Pyroblast, Pyroblast! and Frostfire Bolt with 213 hits and 32 misses none of the misses granted a Stolen Time buff. This is only a small sample size and if I get time I will do a longer test. The report can be found here.

The OP has not been updated nor has it addressed my question. Is a hard cast Pyroblast worth casting now with the increased DoT damage? Doing a simple test dummy run, casting Fireball (2.09s) hits for ~20k whereas a hard cast Pyroblast (2.92s) hits for ~25k and the DoT on average does an additional average of ~27k. Granted we run the risk of having a Hot Streak proc at any time and making that extra .9s of casting a waste.

The DoT does similar damage to Living Bomb of which we try to maintain a high uptime. I would assume that given known high AoE fights, such as Yor'sahj and Hagara's Ice Tombs it would be worth casting if the DoT is not already present.

A cast pyroblast will consume your hot streak proc without benefiting from the reduction in cast time. That makes it a pretty poor filler spell. It is probably still worth hardcasting if your hotstreak dot drops off.

A couple of quick, very small samples in Arcane and Fire spec casting Arcane Blasts show that a miss still does not apply a stack of stolen time. Arcane Log, Fire Log. Despite the sample size I feel this does confirm our theory that a miss will not grant a stolen time stack however if I can find time I will perform some larger test to be sure.

I've been playing my mage since Ulduar, and it's always been arcane for me. The recent buffs to fire were just too hard to ignore. I do my best to do my research and optimize my dps. I've been using Rawr to optimize my gear and reforging and combustion helper to guide me through my rotation during combat. My dps seems fine, but I dont seem to get those big combustions I see other fire mages getting. I see ignites of various sizes. I downloaded Mybigignite and the combustion with hopes, that it would simplify as to what a good ignite is, or when to pop combustion, and they ask for ignite thresholds which ends up being mostly what I downloaded the addon for. I know how to track all of the dots, and I can obviously read the ignite number on the combustion helper. I guess I'm just looking for what screams great combustion to fire mages, when and why do they hit combustion? Whats a considered to be a big ignite? Yes I know this is gear dependent, just hoping Im missing something or someone has a friendly suggestion that will help.

Right, I was only implying that it is worth casting to keep up the Pyroblast DoT.

You could AB a frost pylon in the Ice Phase to keep it up. Atleast now we know it's not on spellcast but on spellhit, stacks of Stolen Time are accumulated. Thanks for testing it, as I hadn't had the chance to get T13 x2 - set yet.

This is not correct.

You can easily test this by casting scorch until you have a crit ( to set up the first crit, reduce testing time ). If you have one, cast a Fireball followed by a Pyroblast. If the Fireball crits while you are already casting Pyroblast, you will get a Hot Streak proc. But the hard-casted Pyroblast will not consume the Hot Streak buff.


Hard casting Pyroblast can easily be tested in SimulationCraft. Just add a extra line actions+=/pyroblast to the action priority list right above Fireball and add some conditions, for example if=!ticking , remains<cast_time or remains<cast_time+travel_time

Things you have to consider is the mana consumption of a hardcasted Pyroblast ( and going oom, also watch out for that in the sim ), other special benefits for Fireball ( tier12 mirror images ), faster stacking of Tier13 2pc, and especially the possibility of hot-streak procs directly after your hard-casted Pyroblast, thus rendering the dot-part of the hard-casted Pyroblast nearly useless, massively reducing its DPE, possibly reducing it's DPET below that of Fireball. Because this last part would be extremly complex to analyze/compute and greatly depends on your gear & raid-composition, I again advise you to simulate it.

Once you have [Insignia of the Corrupted Mind] I can't see how starting a boss by spamming AB could possibly be considered viable, since you'll be gaining multiple extra combustion ticks if you use it with said trinket procced anyway.

The only way spamming AB could be a DPS increase is if you guaranteed know the exact fight length before pulling (ie. you know you are going to hit enrage) and are 100% assured that doing so would give you an entire extra combustion by shaving the ~40 seconds off the cooldown of your second. And consider, that fire isn't just spamming fireball/HS pyro, you are also keeping LB up and casting flame orb which require globals. Foregoing LB, HS pyro, critical mass debuff (if someone else isn't putting it up), flame orb, ignite and potentially the extra combustion ticks of damage (should the trinket proc early) in order to spam AB for one extra combustion during the fight probably won't be worth it. You also, as previously mentioned, don't know if you'll get that extra combustion or not due to RNG, it may come off cooldown but if you don't get enough crits to have a decent ignite, it's meaningless since you can't use it.

Insignia generally procs within the first 10 seconds of every pull I've done with it equipped on my mage as well.

AB should never ever be used unless you somehow need a guaranteed refresh of your stolen time stack as it's about to fall off, for instance in a Hagara fight where the lightning phase lasted 25-27 seconds after the add died where you couldn't DPS anything.

For it to have any effect at least one of the following should be true:
1. Your haste is tailored so that at 10 stacks exactly you gain an extra tick on Combustion.
2. Those extra seconds saved translate into another activation which normally wouldn't be available.

#2 is flaky since it's very much dependant on the fight length and simc. uses a variable fight length _around_ 450 seconds, I would say go with 1. For example try with 1505 haste.