I have had the overwhelming feeling that I've been missing something obvious for a while now. I've read and re-read the arcane thread here, but something eludes me. I've been playing around in rawr and I have a few minor gear issues I'd like to work out (for example, I plan on replacing my bracers with boe soon and putting the int enchant on them. In a few days I should have enough daily marks for the moonwell trinket.) However, what simc and rawr say my nuke dps should be and what logs say it actually is--well, there's a huge difference.

tl;dr - My nuke dps is significantly lower than it should be. If someone could take a gander and let me know what I'm missing, I'd greatly appreciate it. If it has to come with a slap on the back of the head, that might help too.

Here's Tuesday Night's WoL.
Here's my armory.

Oh, and the Beth fights--I was assigned to stand at the bottom and aoe, so I'm in fire in arcane forged gear. It wasn't pretty, but it was probably more effective than attempting to aoe them as arcane.

Edit: Thank you in advance for your time! <3 from Mal'Ganis.

ETA: My nuke dps, I mean the burn phase dps. I apologize if this was vague!

ETA2: Ohmygosh. I'm leaving this up here as a helpful hint for anyone who might have the same herpderp I had.. I should have been starting fights with a burn phase, and using burn phases multiple times during fights. I feel so silly. Hopefully this silliness will help someone else!

A quick question regarding Arcane.

I just dropped my Frost offspec (which I was keeping to give the raid Replenishment when our Resto Druid wasn't around), and am having a blast with Arcane. However the conservation phases are the one bit I'm not understanding that well. The question is: How important is it to stay close to 100% mana? Does dropping to 90% or even 80% (if trinkets proc or you just don't get AM to activate) hurt your DPS so much that you should, for instance, clear your stacks with Barrage instead of Missiles? It really seems that I'm a god for all of 20 seconds, then my DPS drops significantly while I'm conserving mana.

A few other less important questions: When do you use Flame Orb? On cooldown as with Fire and Frost, or save it for regen? In those regen phases do you use Missiles every time it procs, or build up a couple of stacks of AB first? The Arcane Mage Compendium isn't that specific.

1. Its totally usual that your burn phase does much higher dps than your conserve phase - the naming has a reason
2. In general the more mana percentage you have, the better - as long as you never reach 100% (using your mana is more important than maximizing the mastery gain!).
Play around with it, you will find out how high you can go (~90%). Int procs temporarily reduce your mana percentage of course, the critical point is when they expire, because your mana bar "jumps" back up again - and should not reach 100%.

Hello dear mages,

I have a question concerning the arcane mage rotation during the execute phase of a boss. We are currently progressing Beth'tilac heroic on 10 man and did get to some cruel ~500k wipes until now. We pop heroism when the boss is at 50% health and by the time heroism fades our mage always announces "OOM, no more healing on me".

We have some very obvious issues with some of our dps, mainly because of gearing issues, but I wondered if our mage could somehow improve his rotation as we apparently are heavily dependent on him not underperforming. His dps seems okay, but we are wondering about the mana issues he has during the most important situations of the fight.

This is the log for Beth'tilac HM phase 2: World of Logs

It might well be that he is doing everything right and we just lack overall dps on other positions but we just wanted to take all possible options of improvement into consideration.

My apologies for not having him posting this himself but he lacks the necessary language skills to do so and I don't think that my understanding of a class I have never played in a raid environment enables me to give him correct advice on this matter.

He fucked up, Nhel. He must think that his burn phase *must* coincide with lust, which it most certainly does not. He should be using his burn phase ASAP and simply playing arcane like normal, ensuring you use all your mana as the boss dies. This is not a Beth'tilac specific concept. If he can align lust to suit his burn, that's great, but there is no reason he cannot perform the conservation phase during lust.

An arcane mage should not be below 90% mana with Evocation cooldown over 30 seconds away (encounter specific circumstances not-withstanding).

edit: here is a video of an arcane mage doing Beth'tilac. Lust is cast at 30%, but you can see the mage does not go oom during lust, and then finishes the fight with a burn phase. PowaAuras between the player and target unit frames show spell cooldowns - Evocation is the blue spiral.

I am having similar issue with dps being way down. I use two burn phases depending on how long the fight is. 1 right at the start of the fight and a 2nd one near the end. assuming I can stand still long enough to execute



The haste calculation is a big help. I don't have a 4pc set bonus as of yet and It would seem that even my haste is to high. It leaves me taken out haste and put that into crit,mastery or hit. It may well be that I am lacking the crit needed to get my DPS up where it should be given my gear. I only wish I knew how to cut and paste my Armory but alas I am not that computer smart. will post results should it pan out.

Doing Alysrazor last night in 10-man used combustion with a ~130k ignite on the boss (+LB etc.)

The resulting Combustion did 8 million damage over its duration pulled aggro on the boss and wiped the raid.

This would have been fine if it were not for the fact that I had Mirror Images up, popped them when Alysrazor was at 45% energy and they had only been up about 5secs when I pulled initial aggro and then aggro straight back off the Tank after he taunted. (just to clarify it was me that got the aggro, not the images)

Not entirely sure how the threat mechanic of Mirror Images works, but have never pulled aggro with them out before. Could someone clarify how exactly they are supposed to work and if this is to be expected?

(Needless to say I used Invis in future attempts)

Never had problems with pulling aggro while mirrors are up.
But I noticed since 4.2 that sometimes instant invisbility won't reset my threat, i.e. start with burn: pop burst stuff, mirror images, lucky chain critting, overtake the tank in threat, pop instant invis a second or two before mirrors disappear, omen says my threat is gone, come out of invis after mirrors gone, suddenly well above the tank in threat again, dead/tank has to waste a taunt.

Luckily this happens very rarely in Firelands and only regularly in ZA on the fourth(?) boss (the totem guy) but it still makes me kinda paranoid.

After having a ton of Heroic Alysrazor wipes myself, and some ridiculously strong Combustions - I can say this has never happened. I think the most likely explanation is that your recollection of timing for these events is simply inaccurate. The difference between 45% energy and 50% is only a few seconds, but furthermore, could've been slightly less than you expected if the adds managed to channel a few ticks in that time.

That may explain the initial threat, but how about the threat again after the tank had taunted, on myself not my images.

Can anyone confirm whether Tricks of the Trade does anything on Alysrazor's burn phase? I know that there is old documentation pointing it is disabled when Arcane Power is on but I suspect it is also disabled for Combustion altogether or at least when any trinket is on (or when damage modifiers are on the target). My very anecdotal evidence (seeing relatively the same DPS) says it does not do anything but I can not confirm it hence the question.