• Astrylian

Thanks for the response. Since she's Frost, and they're arcane, they're definitely going to do more AE damage than her, so should she be using AE or bloodlusted blizzard?. I'll see if we can get her with a shaman for that phase, so that she can have bloodlust and spam blizzard (bloodlusted blizzard will [partially] make up for her lack of AE improving talents, right?)

 

Kaimani

From looking at your WWS parse, it would seem that Raena's arcane explosion provides better dps than her blizzard, so unless mana is a serious issue you may want to tell her to use nothing but AE. If you want to try bloodlusted blizzards that may also be workable, and if you're burning bloodlust during phase 2 it would probably also be worthwhile to give it to warlocks too for seed of corruption.

Another factor that will keep you behind other mages is simply 'missing' some of the weapons with your aoe. For instance, she hit devastation and the phaseshift bulwark (two of the weapons that tend to die slower than the others) 14 and 28 times respectively... so perhaps she just wasn't hitting the axe as often with her aoe. I used to dominate the weapon phase myself simply because I would position myself carefully so as to hit every weapon possible without getting cleaved by the axe.

Also, going into the weapon phase with full (or almost full) mana, as well as your potion/mana gem/evocation cooldowns ready to go is pretty key so you can aoe ferociously for as long as possible, and then go into phase 3 with a decent amount of mana left. I noticed in the parse you linked that Raena's evoc was interrupted early (she only got 2 ticks for some reason). Losing several thousand mana in this fight is a pretty big setback.

 

• Astrylian

Good tip about missing some of the weapons. I think she kept alternating between blizzards and AEs last night, because she couldn't tell which one to use, and the other mages were telling her that the dmg would be roughly the same, but to use Blizz since it costed less mana.

 

andastra

The best thing to do is to finish phase 1 with full mana. If judgment is up on Telonicus, wanding while staying at max range would help. Slowly AE to position herself at the start then spam it once she's hitting all that she's supposed to be hitting. Hit her highest mana gem and an optional mana pot sometime during AEing. Once out of mana, step out to a safe spot and evocate. It should be done before phase 3 starts. For bloodlust/heroism, I'd recommend giving them to warlocks for seed of corruption as opposed to mages.

 

Frostitute

Ok, I have a similar situation as above, however I've been a variant of fire since TBC came out, currently I am in a guild that has recently started working on Kael'Thas, I have a few questions.
First: I respec'd last week to the 33 arcane /28 fire spec that my roommate is currently using in MH (3/5 + 4/9 BT- armory link The World of Warcraft Armory ) normally he has a SP along with an elemental shaman making up for his lower spell hit rating to a degree), I guess my main question is, is increase in AE damage worth it compared to deep fire with my level of gear?

I had previously been 11/47/3, my gear has substantially improved since I was deep fire, here is a link for WWS to 3 bosses in TK, and the first 2 in SSC we did tonight WWS..., I think the numbers from tomorrow night's raid will be more important in determining actual DPS differences especially once I hopefully get my T5 legs tomorrow as the numbers tonight were terribly skewed by a very long Solarian kill and my computer freezing up during VR(not an accurate fight to judge to begin with), at that point the rotation for 33/28 will be 3x AB scorch until the debuff is gone, Also, if deep fire proves to be better what would an AOE rotation be like for that spec, as compared to AE spam with the extra 6% crit for the hybrid spec.
Thanks for your time,
Chris
Edit: I forgot my armory link... The World of Warcraft Armory
I have a few other gear swaps I can do to get closer to 202 hit, they include
Thottbot World of Warcraft: Brooch of Unquenchable Fury Sitting in the bank as well as,
Thottbot World of Warcraft: Lamp of Peaceful Radiance
Thottbot World of Warcraft: Scryer's Bloodgem I don't see this being of any significant benefit at this point.
Looking into crafting Spellfire Gloves as well, getting S1 blade in a few days...
Some Kael + Vashj (only 2 guild kills so far), attempts WWS Wow Web Stats

 

MaddHawk

I have a question about what weapon should I stick with while raiding. My guild is currently farming Karahzan to gear up the guild in general for 25 mans. We have our main Kara group also working on clearing ZA, and on this past Tuesday we did our first 25 man run in Gruul's Lair with a few spots pugged for proper raid makeup. Our raid in Gruul's Lair was an astounding success with both Malgaur and Gruul down, which both fights were new to the vast majority present.

Up until Gruul died I had been using Staff of Infinite Mysteries off of Curator. With this staff I was sitting at 128 spell hit, +1003 spell damage, and +169 spell crit rating (14.98% no molten armor). When Gruul died he dropped the Bloodmaul Magus Blade which I recieved. At the moment I have it equipped and the spell haste, badge reward, off hand. With this I am down to 105 spell hit, up to +1057 spell damage, and up to +194 spell crit rating (15.87%). I am hoping the next time I am in Karahzan the spell hit off hand from Netherspite will drop.

I consulted a raiding mage from the top guild progression wise horde side on my server, and his recommendation was to use the sword and make up the +hit else where later on. So my question to the maging community here is, should I continue to use my staff and suffer the loss of damage and crit rating, or use my new sword and just make up the hit rating later on?

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[80:Kyrielle]: Death has begun his assualt!!
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[58:Death]: **** YEA!!!

 

Dustwhisper

There is only one single staff worth using in the game (bar crazy people that like the S3 one) which is the illidan staff.

Use onehander + offhand (i prefer flametongue seal over the haste one but that's me). For your progressionlevel there are two onehanders in ZA that are better than prince/gruul one. Wub's cursed hexblade and the one off zuljin which are both quite good on the way to the najentus one.

The best way to makeup hitrating is to use veiled noble topaz (4 hit + 5spelldmg). Also make sure you have the hitgear available at your gearlevel (full spellstrike, ashyen's gift, ruby drape of the mysticant from prince etc).

 

Pintofbrew

Frostitute: 33/28/0 is a controversial spec to say the least: Many mages advocate against it pointing to the uncompetitive simulation outputs (and I'm one of them) while others swear it's the dog's for end-game.

Fact remains: You waste heroism with 33/20/0. Neither AB nor Scorch gain from it, and Fireball isn't as competitive as Scorch in 33/28/0 both because the increased Crit is more valuable in that spec and because you don't spec Empowered Fireball. You will not have Icy Veins when the next patch is out. This alone will be a major boner. Conservative estimates put IV as a 2.1% increase and that's a worst-case scenario. Should you plan to stick with it, however, I'll have to inform you that the point of AB rotations is not 3*AB, (something else) till AB runs out. That will net you a DPS loss; What you should be doing is 3*AB, (something else) untill AB almost runs out. Point being: If you have 3 stacks AB when you start to cast the first AB of the next cycle but it runs out before cast is finished, you'll cast @ 1.5sec and pay default low mana cost, and get 1 stack of debuff. This way you get to cast debuff 0,1,2 on your first rotation, but 3,1,2 the rest of the time. Refer to http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18441-m...tional_thread/ for more info.

Maddhawk: The sword/offhand combo is quite superior to the Curator staff. Yes, you lose hit, but the gain in hit will not make up for the total DPS of switching to a lower item-level setup, particularly one with so heavy stats. Your hit rating is quite low, and at your level it's hard to get up to spec easily. Good sources of Hit are Veiled Noble Topaz - Items - World of Warcraft and the Scryer's Bloodgem - Items - World of Warcraft . Probably the easiest source of Hit will be the Spellstrike set, which for a starting mage is absolutely imba Spellstrike Pants - Items - World of Warcraft , Spellstrike Hood - Items - World of Warcraft . If you must, Cenarion have an exhalted ring with plenty of hit Ashyen's Gift - Items - World of Warcraft and if your server is quite active perhaps you can nab a Pattern: Boots of Blasting - Items - World of Warcraft or Belt of Blasting - Items - World of Warcraft off the AH. Depending on server activity these vary from "never on AH" to 600-800g each. If possible, grouping with an Ele shaman will also help a lot.

PS. Curator staff also looks like a toasting fork.

 

Cwealm

Maddhawk- Your hit rating is so low you might want to consider swapping out the badge offhand for the offhand from netherspite if it drops.

 

Kaimani

Regarding 33/28, since I used to raid in Hyjal/BT with such a spec... the increase to aoe from spellpower and arcane impact ends up being underwhelming due to the fairly restrictive damage cap on arcane explosion, and the not-so-trivial contribution that molten fury adds to deep fire's aoe capacity.

I used to love 33/28, but with the introduction of Icy Veins its going to be VERY hard to justify anymore, and it just doesn't scale as well when you get past T5 gear. It does have slightly superior aoe, but the single target output is just plain random at best.

 

MaddHawk

I am very much hoping for the dagger off Jan'alai, Wub's Cursed Hexblade, and the Netherspite off hand to drop this week. My guild currently has yet to make progress to Zul'jin so my chances of getting the sword he can drop is not good. My server is extremely active and full, as we are one of the half dozen servers getting "Locked" at prime time with log in ques in the hundreds. I will have to keep my eyes open for the "of Blasting" recipes.

This does raise a new question with the mention of the Belt of Blasting. Would it be better to use that belt over my Spellfire belt? And if I can obtain it, does anyone have any socketing recommendations for the blue socket? A Veiled Noble Topaz would be the logical choice for the yellow socket.

[58:Death]: [Death] has earned the achievement [An Honorable Kill]!
[80:Kyrielle]: Death has begun his assualt!!
[70:Medeoan]: Death has begun to stalk the alliance!!
[58:Death]: **** YEA!!!

 

Frostitute

Allrighty, thanks for the advice guys.

 

Pintofbrew

maddhawk: yes equip Blasting over spellfire, and equip the badges gloves over spellfire too. The set bonus is great on SF but +dmg only goes so far (and the same can be said of gear with 0 stamina)

Personally I don't think the sword off Zul'jin is better than the dagger off eaglehawk; I'd take 13hit and 20crit over 29haste anyday, and twice in your setup.

As for the Blasting's blue socket, given the bonus is significant, get a stam/dmg gem for it. Same for the badges gloves. Only other blue options are Penetration (does nothing in PvE), mp5 (doesn't exist in combination with +dmg or +crit or +hit) and spirit (lol). So 6sta/5dmg is your man.

 

xiaoxin21

Regardless of spec, arcane explosion will normally do more damage than blizzard (unless bloodlust). Arcane also have the distinct advantage of generating much less threat than frost so your mage can AOE much earlier. Also I would think bloodlust is not that useful in the weapon phase for mage. It is better to use it for p3 when you need to down the advisers pretty fast.

 

• Astrylian

Yep, that's exactly what we ended up doing.

 

Dustwhisper

For what it's worth from what i can see from maxdps.com and spreadsheets zul'jins comes out ontop of wubs by a small margin though admittedly I'd rather have hit/crit than haste kinda.

 

MaddHawk

Well, wish me luck then for tonight. We'll see if Jan'alai drops it. On my gloves though, I do have the tier 4 gloves. Should I use them over Spellfire or get the badge gloves and use them instead?

[58:Death]: [Death] has earned the achievement [An Honorable Kill]!
[80:Kyrielle]: Death has begun his assualt!!
[70:Medeoan]: Death has begun to stalk the alliance!!
[58:Death]: **** YEA!!!

 

Dryssa

Use Spellfire until you get Tier 6. It's that imba.

And Pintofbrew, consider using the 'item' tag to make your posts look prettier :P (Nathrezim Mindblade - Items - World of Warcraft vs [Nathrezim Mindblade])

 

• CureFC

I recently inherited a mage that is in extremely basic gear. My main is a resto shaman with Illidan on farm, and I've raided as elemental also. In short, I'm familiar with general spellcaster theorycraft and understand the relative value of the various stats as pertains to mages after perusing several threads here.

What I'm unsure about is how to spec her for alt-Karazhan and such. Her gear is horrendous - in the neighborhood of 490 damage, 105 hit rating, 155 crit rating. Obviously improvements in gear will happen pretty quickly with a few Karazhan and heroic runs, and at that point I'll very likely spec 10/48/3 (or fire/IV after 2.3). Until then I'm not sure what to do - I've seen people toss around mentions of heavy arcane specs for the pre-Karazhan crowd but I never see any strong explanation of how to use those specs (obviously most people here are long done with them). For example in a 40/18/3 is it AB + Scorch rotation? Is 40/0/21 going to outdps a deep frost WE spec at my gear level (and what if there's a 2nd frost mage putting up Winter's Chill)? Deep arcane has a ton of "helpers" for people with low dmg/hit/crit, but the WE serves the same purpose in many ways with its base damage compared to mine at the moment.

I've plugged my number into Vontre and Lhivera and I've seen good numbers from 43+ frost as well as 40/0/21 with an AB/Frostbolt cycle. I really have no preference how I spec for now, it's just a temporary thing, but my guild is filled with a lot of strong players and I don't want to be the total clueless scrub even if we're just clearing Kara on alts.

I tossed around a lot of questions there but really it boils down to: if you're gear is miserable and you're new to the class but not the game, is there an overall recommended spec and/or spell rotation?

 

Touf

I'd just go frost. Not so much for Kara, but if you ever get dragged to ZA as a filler, you'll be thankful for it. Ice Block will save your butt.

It's basically frostbolt spam, and getting as many WE's as possible. Try to time it so your pet doesn't die.

 

Cwealm

Excuse me for being a total nub, but how do you do that?

 

Inoko

And I say "Just go fire," especially if you don't want to spend a lot of time learning how to use spells. (Example: How to keep your elemental alive so you can max DPS.) I'm one of those "Frost haters," though.

You should be able to get better gear than you have without even heroics, though. Make sure she's got one of the better normal-mode swords (I like [Greatsword of Horrid Dreams]) with a +40 spellpower enchant) and if you can, exalted CE has a nice +Hit/+Damage ring ([Ashyen's Gift]). Enchants go a long way to helping your gear, so revered Sha'tar for the head enchant, and find a scryers tailor to make the "Crappier" spellthread (5 Primal Mana) or go all out and get the "Best" one (10 Primal Mana, 1 Primal Nether). If she's not a tailor, make her one, and get the Spellfire Set if you go fire, I don't really reccomend the Frozen Shadoweave as much, it's not as good (in the long term).

Do the Shadowmoon Valley quests for the Helm of Second Sight, it's a good filler item with some nice gem sockets so you can stuff some more +Hit in if you need.

But yeah, 500 damage/105hit/155crit is something you can easily surpass.

[Edit: Cwealm --> {item}ItemName{/item} with [] in place of {}]

 

Vhad

I've always been a bit skeptical towards haste rating, as such I'm having a hard time accepting what Lhaviera's TC script gives me for trinkets with my gear. It's telling me that AToI is a 85 dps upgrade, next to Hex and Skull at 77 and 73 something. I just can't get that to add up, so I tried doing some math on it there's no doubt it's correct, but would like to hear from the people on this board.

I'm currently using the Skull and Icon, the Icon I calculated to be 43 + ((20/120)*155)) = 68,83 static dmg.

AToI I assumed a static 40% crit rate, which would be similar to my raid stats, I've 35% selfbuffed, and can almost always count on a moonkin in my group. With that I got AToI uptime to be 50% of 40% crits = 20% uptime. According to the TC Script 1 haste rating is 1,25 spell dmg for me, put it all together and I got 181,25 spell dmg from the proc, and then 20% uptime would be 37 spell dmg. I reckon it takes some better modelling to get AToI to be exact, I just can't do it my self, so if anyone has it I'd like to see it.

What!?

 

andastra

I'm not sure if you've done this, but for trinkets like Skull and Tear, you have to use the hit rating you would have if you don't have the trinket equipped. If you did, just disregard what I said.

 

Plankel

Well Vhad, I have no idea what you did, but I just plugged your armory data into lhivera's TC site (love that function) and it gave the following:

80.04 The Skull of Gul'dan
72.20 Hex Shrunken Head
56.50 Icon of the Silver Crescent
50.41 Ashtongue Talisman of Insight

Either you ran into a bug or one of us entered something wrong cause these numbers are way different