Yea sorry I didn't clarify, I was talking about 25 man. In 10 man it probably just depends on if you can get a hotstreak proc and good ignite in the first 6 seconds so your entire combustion would tick during burn phase. If that is the case, you may see more DPS by using it then, otherwise spreading it to tombs would be your best bet. There is also less of a need for AoE dmg on 10 man since there are only 2 tombs, and many single target cleaves hit 3 targets.

Overall, in 25man, it's absolutely better to save for tombs, but in 10 man it's a little more unclear and probably depends on how strong a combustion you can put up that would get all it's ticks on the burn phase. Someone PMd me and said that hero/lust also factors in, but it really doesn't because even if you hero/lust a second or 2 before the burn phase starts, it would still be up when the tombs come out.

I believe this is correct. You would want to continue your burn on hagara getting a big ignite on the boss for the whole duration of feedback and combust as soon as feedback ends for the biggest combustion.

I'm not sure about casting Combustion after Feedback falls off, but if you cast it before it falls off then the damage doesn't go down after it falls off:

I believe combustion generally is not affected by +Damage boss abilities except through larger ignites, to prevent double dipping it. Especially since your log shows it not dropping in damage after Feedback fades, I'm confident in predicting that it doesn't even matter if feedback has faded before you cast combustion (although obviously your ignite better not have).

It's because Combustion sum the DOT. If the DOT is applied before the fade of the Debuff, it's logical that Combustion take benefice from it. We can assume that, with the Dot applied before the fade, a Combustion post Fade will still take it into account.

For the Hagara encounter, in both normal and heroic, there's a lot of movement in the Ice Phase where we have to avoid Frostflake and Ices Waves, and when we can go to the center. In this part of the fight, I don't see what have Arcane that can help more than Living Bomb and Scorch.

Combusting onto ice tombs on Hagara is much more of a DPS increase in 25-man than 10-man because there's a lot more of them. With 4pc I tend to go like this:

Pull -> Combustion early regardless of 2pc stacks -> if lightning, impact next combustion onto tombs, if frost phase goes long use next combustion for feedback if ignite is greater than 60k -> use appropriately from there

Tombs are usually the better option because the shortness of the DPS window before a lightning phase and the low health of the add make it rather possible to not have 10 stacks of 2pc bonus available. You're almost assured to be able to blast wave -> impact tombs as well for massive DPS (and higher raid DPS by breaking them faster).

I tend to arcane blast the lightning add just before it dies to refresh my stack as well. On 10-man I'm uncertain of how long the phase lasts compared to 25, where it's possible for the phase to end a few seconds after it dies with vaguely decent coordination, even our 25-man alt/casual raid was able to do it.

I assumed since it was a debuff it wouldn't snapshot it when Combustion was cast, however, according to nathanbp's logs it looks like as long as you cast combustion when feedback is on, once feedback falls off, the ticks will continue to reap the benefits, because the Ignite is actually what is being captured.

If mechanics allow, optimal use of Combustion would be to get the highest ignite possible and combust towards the end of the feedback phase, as close to the end as possible, then to impact that combustion onto the tombs. However, I'm not sure combustion itself lasts long enough since she focus assaults first and then you must wait for the tombs to drop before impacting to them, coupled with the fact you need an impact up the second they fall.

However, if it is indeed possible to combust at the end of the phase, then spread them to the tombs, I'm curious if the spread would inherit the large feedback ignite ticks, or just be normal ticks. I'm leaning towards them probably inheriting those ignite ticks in the combustion since the Combustion just compiles and snapshots all the dots at the time of the combust.

I will test if it's possible for you to hold combustion until the end of feedback, then spread them. If it's possible, I'll then see if they inherit the large tick value. You may also be able to wait a few seconds after feedback is down, given that your feedback ignite is still rolling, which would give you a much larger timeframe in which to impact the combustion to tombs. If anyone else gets a chance to test this before Sunday when I would be doing it, please post your findings here.

Thanks for the logs nathanbp. Good convo going here.

I have just removed the last 40 posts from this thread. Here's to hoping useful conversation resumes. Apologies for the delay in handling things and having the thread completely derailed. Thanks for your patience.

I had a question about combustion mechanics, with regard to when combustion will perform it's summing of dot effects. I'm currently having issues testing this for myself due to latency problems, but on my client when I cast combustion, it will have a slight delay (usually under 1s) before the combustion debuff appears on the target. If I have dots that fall off in the time between my pressing the button and the combustion dot appearing, do those dots contribute to the combustion? How do you all account for this "travel time" of sorts, if it is at all detrimental?

Looks like this has now changed in that the direct damage has been nerfed by 6% but not the DoT portion.

Source: US patch notes.

I don't think I understand it correct. Ignite munching does not really have an effect on your combustion. Ideally you want a big ignite-DoT rolling on the target, and munching only "overrides" other ignites, it doesn't affect combustion.

On a different note, I have seen people reporting fire blast not spreading fire DoT's under the impact-proc as early as 2010. Is this issue still not fixed? I can't get it to work properly, and I made an in-game ticket about it, though I don't think something will be done if it hasn't yet.