I just thought I should point out that, assuming you're nearing the enrage timer, 4pc T13 lets you squeeze in an extra Combustion during an Ultraxion fight (perhaps even two if you're fast in setting them up), for a total of 4 (5) Combustions over the fight's duration.

Last week, big week for me. But to the point.
As we were going for Madness last night i was wondering wich is going to handle better, Fire or Arcane. I was already Fire so i went in with it. But switched on to Arcane later. Then i noticed that Dragonwrath copied spell (AB i can confirm) does add a stack of Stollen time to the counter. After reading few pages back, it made clear why the counter on my buff did go up with a short delаy overall. (on hit). But when an AB proc from the staff apears it just added +2.
So if someone can make an observation, as i wont be able to in the coming days. Does Fireballs and Pyroblasts (!) add +2 when Dragonrath procs with them and they add a stack. Or the copy has a 50/50 on its own.

I had a talk with our fire mage and a shadow today about the importance of Dark Intent on the raid DPS.

Short version:

Before the shadow reaches his BIS HC setup (and approx. 3320 haste rating as goblin) the fire mage profits more from Dark Intent than the shadow (extra ticks with only 2845 haste rating as goblin).

Long version:
After several Dragon Soul raids our fire mage came up with the conclusion that Dark Intent (DI) would give him and the overall raid DPS better benefits than a shadow due to reaching the 37.5% haste cap as goblin (which is 2845 haste rating). Thereby all of his dots (Living Bomb, Combustion etc) would highly increase the raid dps because the shadow doesn't reach any comparable cap points and only benefits from the pure DI modification of dots and spellhaste. So we had a pretty long discussion about the mage's and shadow's gear, caps and DI with a short test on target dummies in OG. Here are the results:

Our (goblin) shadow has cap points at 1993, 2135, 3320 and 3560 haste rating (with DI). Actually he runs a 2920 haste rating with Fireland HC gear. Losing the DI in our current raid setup doesn't result in losing extra ticks on any of his spells.

Our (goblin) mage wants to achieve the 2845 haste rating goal. With the 2p T13 bonus and Dark Intent he currently reaches the 2900 haste rating mark, giving him an extra tick for roughly 1/3 of the fight.
He also pointed out that the currently best non-heroic gear setup would give him ~ 2887 haste rating (without the 500 from his buffing) - resulting in a guaranteed extra tick on each of his dots.

So shifting the DI priority from the shadow to the mage may result in more dps until:

- The mage either purchases BIS setup and buys the Bottled Wish trinket for points, guaranting the 37.5% haste cap without DI (3314hasterating as goblin) and making it a waste on him.
- The shadow reaches BIS HC setup with 3350 haste rating (meaning you have to kill the Spine HC etc) and up.

Like said, for (goblin) mages it is easy to access the 2845 haste rating via set and vendor trinket to gain additional ticks for all dots by DI (have an alt mage myself with 3set items and the trinket, sitting at 2800haste). Shadows on the other side do not lose additional ticks but dot damage. However in our setup buffing the fire mage resulted in 3-4% more dps (shadow lost around 1%, mage got 4-5% more damage).

ATTENTION:
- Encounters like Madness are special. Shadows may gain additional ticks due to the haste buff. Buffing the mage before the Warlords weakness phase may boost their Combustion DPS.
- Counts for goblins only.
- Doesn't calculate the mage 2p T13 bonus or the legendary procc.

So perhaps you can convice your raidleader and warlock, too. Or update at least the haste rating charts at the beginning.


PS: fixed typo about raid dps.
I haven't actually simmed the numbers yet. But you can compare the damage to similiar situations (back in FL where shadows and locks broke their 2500 mark). The damage gain back than was 3-4% (for one or two dots), fire mage damage may be buffed by 4% at least (due to having only ONE significant breakpoint at 37.5% for 3-4dots. I don't know how good Combustion scales with it...).

Have you actually simmed the numbers?

All the talk about gaining aditional ticks means absolutely nothing without understanding how much damage is gained by it. This means nothing and is probably completely wrong, 3-4% rDPS even in 10 man raids from a single mage means around 15% personal dps which DI doesn't provide.

This doesn't mean a good fire mage shouldn't get it over a bad shadow priest, what it does mean is that generic statements shouldn't be made the way you did.

DPS Rankings
Rank Class
1 Shadow Priest
2 Fire Mage
3 Balance Druid
4 Elemental Shaman
5 Frost Mage
6 Arcane Mage
7 Feral Druid
8 Feral Druid (Hit Cap)
9 Survival Hunter
10 Retribution Paladin
11 Combat Rogue
12 Unholy DK (2H)
13 Assassination Rogue
14 Frost DK (2H)
15 Marksman Hunter
16 Beast Mastery Hunter
17 Enhancement Shaman
18 Frost DK (1H)
19 Unholy DK (1H)

Personal Rankings
Rank Class Uptime
1 Balance Druid 99%
2 Shadow Priest 98%
3 Survival Hunter 98%
4 Feral Druid 95%
5 Feral Druid (Hit Cap) 93%
6 Fire Mage 88%
7 Frost Mage 82%
8 Assassination Rogue 76%
9 Elemental Shaman 74%
10 Unholy DK (1H) 72%
11 Beast Mastery Hunter 69%
12 Combat Rogue 66%
13 Arcane Mage 62%
14 Unholy DK (2H) 60%
15 Marksman Hunter 57%
16 Enhancement Shaman 55%
17 Retribution Paladin 46%
18 Frost DK (2H) 41%
19 Frost DK (1H) 40%


*Taken from the EJ Warlock Forums*

So roughly 10% more uptime on a Shadow Priest vs a Fire Mage, but the fire mage's uptime will also depend on RNG. I'm assuming that 88% is an overall percentage based on a 5 min fight, but I can't be sure.

Shadow Priest seems to be the best choice, holding all other things constant besides uptime and dps gain of the DI'd target. So in order for the Fire Mage to give more rDPS than the Shadow Priest, the following would have to be true:

Fire Mage's DPS increase > Shadow Priest's DPS increase + (Warlock's DPS with Shadow Priest DI'd - Warlock's DPS with Fire Mage DI'd)

optimal reforge with DI equates to about 2500 dps increase for a fire mage - of course this number depends largely on what gear you have available and you rhaste threshold to take advantage of additional ticks of LB/Pyro and Combustion.

What I don't like about having DI personally is it forces you to stack haste and frankly I don't think the sims currently are correct... crit by far as showed me better results week in and week out.

Actually im running 2507 haste which means that with stacked 2t13 an DI im hitting the breakpoint for no-goblins(3004) for lb and pyro. actually i dont see any advantage in stacking more haste because the next caps are not so easy to reach.

Did i forget something or do you guys also think that 2504 haste(with available di + 3/3np + raid + 2t13) is the best cap for haste at the moment.

You have to move back and forth to the crystal on Morchok, there's almost not a lot of time when you are standing still.
Zon'ozz you have to move around during the tentacle phase, although it's not that bad to play as arcane in my experience.
Yor'sahj might be the worst fight in the entire game to play as arcane because of blue phases (and moving back and forth to kill oozes and the need for AOE).
Hagara I can see either way if you're stacking in the middle for ice phases, if you're not then fire is clearly superior due to being able to dps while running around the outside. Also, with 4T13 Combustion should be up for every burn phase.
Ultraxion you need many more people soaking Hour of Twilight on heroic so you'll likely need to play fire.

Haven't done or considered the rest of the bosses on heroic yet, although obviously for Spine you'll want to be arcane.

Looking at DPS Bot, Fire comes out well in the lead even with all parses averaged together, so it will likely maintain that spot or pretty close even with after the nerf.

SimC disagrees with this assessment, specifically for moving from 378 4pcT12 (no helm) to 384 2pcT13 gloves/shoulders. I would assume that moving from 391 back to LFR gear would be a DPS loss, however going from 391 to 397 should ostensibly have similar results.

Rawr has been doing funny things with my optimizations, pushing my haste to 2700+ and crit down to sub-1000 with both 4T12 and 2T13, so I decided to try several different layouts of gear and reforges in SimC. 2T13 comes out about 200 DPS ahead of 4T12 over 10000 iteration sims, based on 2005 soft haste cap. Both of Rawr's overly hasty optimized layouts performed poorly compared to reforging around the 2005 breakpoint and crit. I'm at work, so I don't have the relevant sim results on-hand, but can provide them if there is a preferred repository for such things.

There have been comments by the developers on same or similar concerns in this Rawr thread and this SimCraft issue. There's also some indepth information on situational advantages of Ignite procs by Kavan in this thread.

I don't understand how you arrived at the number of 5.9%. It is readily intuitive that a 6% nerf to barely half of your total damage cannot cost you almost 6% of your total damage. In fact 6% of 40.3% (fireball) + 6% of 7.8% (pyroblast) = 0.06*(40.3+7.8) = 2.886 or roughly 2.9%.

As you reasoned in the rest of your post though, this doesn't account for the reduction in ignites and combustion. Nonetheless, definitely doesn't change the overall picture.