To be honest, with SOW it seems not bad to use mana shield just for burn phase, coz manawise you will never be lacking (and, aside from that, mana shield is off gcd cast during burn phase providing you got a glyph)

I understand the reasoning behind this viewpoint (of Ward being a dps loss in all situations other than Sinestra). However if this were so cut and dry then I would expect the top parses for Majordomo to reflect it.

But when I look through the top 25 Arcane parses, only one of them was not using Mage Ward at all, and about 5 more who only used it from one to five times during the encounter. The remaining 80% of the top parses are using Mage Ward roughly 8 to 10 times during the fight - which is pretty much equivalent to keeping it on cooldown while the boss is in scorpion form. And during our own progression on this encounter, using wards seemed to be a meaningful dps boost (anecdotal, I know).

If using Mage Ward were even a minor net dps loss, then I would very much have expected to see players who are using it heavily on Majordomo to not be holding the top parses. I realize we only have a single week of data to look at, but an 80% correlation is rather strong.

I am not aware of any detail of this fight that would make MW/IA more powerful than usual. Perhaps because the scorpion phases can be lined up with burn phase cooldowns, and dps during cat phases is depressed due to occasionally losing range (both factors causing scorpion phase dps to contribute much more to our overall total)?

The person you quoted said "mana shield" while in all instances you referred to "mage ward". No one here (that I am aware of) is arguing mage ward should not be casted, just that mana shield is a waste in most situations unless you are absolutely positively going to die unless you don't cast it.

I said Mana Shield is not worth it cause it costs you heaps of mana, Mana Shield only becomes worth it when you have Essence of the Red during Sinestra, because then it doesn't cost mana, ya feel me? I parsed top 25 for Majordomo for Arcane and of course I used mageward, you use it before the pull, while you're running and right before a burn phase.

Mana shield on the other hand, is NOT worth it because of the mana cost.

Also, you can avoid losing dps on Domo when he leaps by watching his energy bar and targeting a spawned cat before he jumps and switching back to him when he gets in place.

*My parse has since been bumped off the top 25, but meh.

The problem is clearly that the T12 4-piece bonus does basically nothing for Arcane. The fact that it was even implemented in its current form shows that they can't possibly be aware of this, and so eventually I think they will catch on.

Most of what I've been hearing from simcraft's etc is to just run 2pc with legs and either helm or chest and then just use offset pieces. If you're trying to stack more mastery it's better to go with the helm/legs and offset the rest. However, it isn't worth breaking t11 4pc until you get some of those pieces in heroic versions unless blizzard decides to break the t11 4pc bonus

No you use chest legs and the off set cowl/shoulders/gloves You get more mastery because with more hit, you can reforge haste/crit pieces to mastery.

Well according to the gear set I obtained by selecting all heroic (391/397) gear and optimizing this, then running said gear set in Simcraft, haste pulls ahead greatly by then. arcane_bis_hc.html

Unlike in my current gear, where there's barely a difference between haste/crit/mastery.

I have also noticed increase of haste value after breaking T11 set on my simulation sheets, but yours doesnt seem right. Gonna make a simulation with your picked gear and check.

It was mentioned in the fire thread that it comes up for 15 seconds, does 4casts of fireball for fire mages, and has around a 45 second ICD.

And pent, wow I'm shocked. I'll have to check some numbers myself then.

talking 378 and 391+

Pre-t11 4pc haste was better than mastery, and you have to consider that the 4pc gives roughly 1300 haste for AB. Even with t11 4pc mastery is just barely above haste so losing that naturally would make haste a better stat.

The big thing is haste isn't that much better than mastery if i'm remembering right haste is at around 2.1 and mastery at 1.95 so they're close but haste is a bit better.

That being said it depends a lot on an individual's gear as to when you should/shouldn't break T11 4pc I only have heroic chest/legs (we got bad rng on shoulder/glove) so going to a 378 setup is going to give me different numbers compared to someone else considering that a few of those pieces would be going from 359 to 378. Now someone with full T 11.5 4pc would probably need at least a few of those pieces to be heroic before it becomes worth it.

It's the big aspect that i dislike about generalizing information because it really is gear dependent and not everybody has identical gear setups.

@Eylirria I've heard it's more around 500 dps instead of 200 but there hasn't been a lot of actual testing afaik