I have a question regarding Theralion's Mirror and how it affects the arcane mage cycle if it procs.

Initially it usually procs at the initial burn phase. But the procs afterwards almost never occur at the same time as the burn phase.

Now I am wondering, if it procs while your in your mana neutral phase, do you start spamming abx4 for the duration of the buff, to go back to some very efficient abx2 am/ab cycle to regain the lost mana before the burn phase starts? Or is it better to just completely ignore the proc?

Also, is it worth delaying your burn phase untill it procs, and if so, for how long? I am aware the proc chance is only 10% so delaying the burn phase to wait for the proc, even when the internal cooldown is nearly finished might be tricky?

ConfusedMage/Milkshaker,
Now I'm just trying to help here, so if anyone finds issue with my comments, please be nice. That being said:

1) Unless the Armory is messing with me, it seems you bought the spirit bracers with your Valor. There are some very nice Hit + (some other secondary stat I can't remember) bracers you should buy. Emberfire, I think.

2) The gist of the rotation (in a patchwerk style fight, blah blah blah disclaimer) is to basically blow your wad at the pull so that you are jumping so far ahead damage-wise of everyone that your conserve phase will bring you back in line with everyone else. Once you come off CD on evoc and burn again, you will jump back ahead during the burn, then fall back in line during the conserve, rinse/repeat. The hope is that your burn phases will put you far enough ahead that you'll finish on top. It's almost the reverse of fire back in the day where you started slow on damage, and slowly crept up the meters the longer the fight went on due to more damage at 35%.

3) You don't have the T11 4pc, so (and other posters correct me if I'm wrong, I know you will) you should be forged to as close to 17% hit as you can reasonably get, and somewhere around 1768 haste so your AB will be at 1.00 second during Time Warp/Hero. Everything else should go to mastery/crit. I'm too lazy to check your reforging right now, so you'll have to do that. A mod like ReforgeLite from Curse should help you achieve this. Since the only other haste buff you would really get would be the 5% from Shadow Priests or a Shammy, you can test this yourself at the target dummy. Forge to that haste number, go to the dummy, pop TW and check the time on your AB. Should be as close 1.00 second as possible.

4) This is where most mages get tripped up, and something I'm still struggling with: lining up CD's, mana, and evoc. IMHO, this is what separates the wheat from the chaff. All things considered, you want every burn phase to go the same way every time. Pop CD's, AB AB AB ftw, evoc at 35-40% mana, then go into the conserve phase. Sounds easy, right? The issue comes in where either A) you are overzealous after the burn phase/evoc, and continue to burn through your "conserve phase" mana or B) you're no lining your burn phase and/or evoc up with the fight mechanics of a particular boss.

For A): Some mages have a hard time getting into conserve mode properly, and continue to spam AB to "eek out a little more damage", when they're really just shooting themselves in the foot. You end up having like 60% mana to start the burn phase when you do this, and screw up the whole rotation. I've done this on occasion and seen myself lead a meter on a boss when I did it all right and lined everything up properly, then seen myself end up 4th (in a 10 man) when I screwed up and did not line everything up properly.
For B): You'll just have to get more experienced with the fights. You have to do them enough times to know that Boss X is gonna do his big move at this time, and I either need to delay evoc, or conserve a few seconds before/after, etc. in order to line up your CD's/evoc.

Lining up CD's and evoc and conserving properly are a huge part of what makes up the Arc mage. Is spamming AB hard? No. Is managing mana, CD's, evoc, and staying alive as the squishiest class in the game hard? If you want to top your meters while also providing value to the raid, yes.

Oh, and it sounds like you're hitting AM every time it's up, and (again posters, correct me if I'm wrong) that's incorrect for the burn phase. Burn phase (in a Patchwerk-style fight, blah blah blah disclaimer) is AB ftw till 35%-40% mana. In that scenario, AM is a big DPS loss, and is probably accounting for your big DPS drop. AM is for mana conservation in the conserve phase. I don't think I've ever hit AM until after evoc.

Would anyone mind sharing their current rotation on Normal Rag? Right now i'm using a AB3-4, ABar, AM rotation in sustain and popping PoM, Rune of Zeth, Mana Gem, Arcane Power, in quick succession for my burn phase.

A breakdown of phases would be helpful too, I've been worrying about my under performance on the fight, placing in the 40th percentile, never quite being able to break 17k. In fact, i under perform on quite a few fights, and i've been experimenting with rotations to put me above some of the other raiders but I haven't been able to nail anything down.

You can find some of my records here Carlfartlord - Epeen Bot - RaidBots - Web Tools for WoW Nerds

First of all, are you trap duty? If you are, try blinking as soon as you go into the air and resume your dps rotation.

Also, correct if I'm wrong, but you using AM on burn phases? You spamming AB right? If you're not spamming AB on burn phase, read OP.

Rune of zeth is quite weak for arcane mages (most on use INT trinkets are). If you got other better trinkets such as MWC, Shard of Woe and Theralions Mirror, replace it. If you dont have shard of woe, your on-use trinket has to be MWC.

Having done normal Rag a few times, I would say:

Phase 1
- start your first burn phase as soon as trap is hit (this assumes you have IA talent);
- try to evocate only when magma trap and knockback are on cooldown. This is very basic but if you dont get full evocations, your dps will suffer. Watch your DBM timers;
- depending on your raid dps, you will have to choose about doing your second burn phase or saving it for transition (saving for transition may be required if your raid have issues with sons);

Phase 2
- try to watch closely timers on engulfing flames and seeds to avoid: a) movement on burn phases; b) evocation interrupts;
- always use blink to go in/out for seeds detonations;
- always 4x AB -> AE for AoE on adds;

You have to recast your mana gem. Do it on 2nd transition phase. Don't waste a PoM on it tho.

Phase 3
- save all dps CD's to use under heroism/BL/TW
- blink is you friend while kiting meteors;
- always use PoM + AB, Fireblast and Icelance while moving from meteors.

I would never cast mana gem during a transition phase. I'm the hammer defender in my comp. I position myself near the hammer, build an AB 4 stack on rag before he despawns, then use POM AB immediately on a son of flame as soon as it spawns. This way, I keep AB4 going into transition and then pop AP and a trinket and tee off on all of the sons of flames that are over 50% hp and come into my range. You may or may not chose to use POM to make your gem. Basically it comes down to if your raid ever calls for a stop to dps on rag to make sure the second transition does not occur during seeds. If this tends to happen in your raid then cast your managem then, otherwise, I'd POM it earlier.

Note on movement: Assuming you have Incanter's Absorbtion (get it if you don't), use mageward during times of movement when you don't want to reset your AB stacks with ABarr. There is a lot of fire damage that will proc your incanters absorbtion which usually results in around 2k spell power for 10 seconds. Phase 3 will not find much use for it unless you happen to stand in fire, but phase 1 and 2 as well as transitions are all very good times to keep this buff rolling as much as possible while moving. Never waste the global on mageward when you are standing still.

Flame orb: Generally speaking, it would appear that the best way to use flame orb is any time it is off CD and can get all of its ticks off on a target. Do not use flame orb while AP is active. You want to maximize the number of ABs you can get in while under AP. Other than that, just use FO on CD. The only time you might consider using FO as a mana-regen tool would be to allow for a mini-burn during a trinket proc, like theralion's mirror. I'm not sure if its even proper to use it in that manner, but I just haven't simmed it yet.

Can someone tell me which forum the discussion of Arcane "mini burns" with Flame Orb happened on? The earliest posts on EJ about it are discussing MageManaBar's support, so it must've already been discussed somewhere before that. There's no theorycraft about it on EJ that I can find, except Kavan's mention that he couldn't find a SimCraft list that benefited from it.

I'd like to read the original discussion and see what evidence or arguments there are in favor of it, if it's still available.

I don't remember there being any theorycrafting evidence in its favor. The consensus has always been that Flame Orb allows for hyper regen cycles, but whether it's actually good to use them has not been established. Any argument would have to heavily rely on the actual numeric values of hyper regen cycles.

If you take a neutral cycle as baseline you have dps of dps_raw_neutral * (1 + mana_adept). You have to then compare this to a combination of burn and hyper regen which gives dps_raw_burn * (1 + K * mana_adept) * mps_hyperregen / (mps_hyperregen - mps_burn) + dps_raw_hyperregen * (1 + K * mana_adept) * (-mps_burn) / (mps_hyperregen - mps_burn). K represents mana percentage at half burn, the rest should be self explanatory. Plugging in the numbers should give the answer.

Since "On Use" trinkets dont stack anymore, before getting SoW is it a dps increase to only have 1 "use" trink for burns and the other should be something like dmc volcano with random procs? Right now I use soul casket and moonwell chalice, but i cannot use them together, decreasing the effectiveness.


Something I have been doing is using soul casket for the burn phase, and saving the chalice for a miniburn when i get a good intellect proc from lightweave or power torrent. Is this bad? Critique Please

Hi there,
I would like to ask you about molten armor, I have seen few mages on videos using it during first burn phase and then switching to Mage armor. Is this a good thing?
My personal opinion is, that 3% crit is not worthy of like 21,6% mana gain from Mage Armor during 30s burning phase.

I'm not sure what next patch you're referring to, but it currently does not count as a DoT and will not proc the trinket.

With the new transmogrification feature coming I spent some time looking at older sets like most and noticed that the T3 2Piece Bonus lowers the cd of evocation by one minute and you could have it stack with your current set's boni if you have Frostfire Ring - Item - World of Warcraft and Frostfire Sandals - Item - World of Warcraft.

Now as far as I can tell from the wowhead entry for the bonus (Evocation - Spell - World of Warcraft) itshould work regardless of character level.
You would obviously lose quite a ton of stats:
For me (raw, unreforged): -430 int, -162 mastery, -169Hit, -95crit, -149haste, -50haste(ench.)

But I wonder if Evocation on a one minute cooldown (ie: burn ad infinitum) wouldn't far outweigh the loss of stats? Unfortunately I don't have any T3 so I can't try it out myself