Help me please? - Page 172

Doroteasenjk · 11/07/08, 11:17 PM

Originally Posted by Duravi

As far as round trip delay; you are queing your next cast to the server before your current cast (at its haste adjusted cast time) is even complete, unless that delay is longer than the time it takes your current spell to finish where is the lost time?

The delays come in a number of flavors. Quartz attempts to predict the lag of this cast based on recent history. If your lag changes during the cast, then you can fire too early, and your game tells you the spell isn't ready, or too late, and you have missed an opportunity. The former is a little more expensive as it may take a round trip to allow your game client to unlock the spell again.

More importantly, you get different cool downs running asynchronously, since some are affected by haste and some aren't. Fireblast cool down is not affected by haste, but cast time for Fireball is. If you don't have enough points in Improved Fireblast, you will be waiting a noticeable amount of time to cast Fireblast, or skip it this round completely. Similarly, Living Bomb has a 12 second effective cool down (since casting it earlier wastes mana and time); if you have LB as part of your rotation, there is a level of haste rating such that adding 1 to your haste actually causes you to miss the window for casting a new LB, or waiting a period of time, not casting.

Similarly, because of the many fights with movement required, such that the fight is really broken up into a bunch of 20 second, let's say, fights, you will find that you have to have huge amounts of haste before your delivered damage actually increases. Now, the use of Fireblast or Arcane Barrage allow you to smooth things over so that you can cast during the move, but the movement time has to be <= the GCD to allow you to continue to chain cast.

You can test this if your simulator can be set up to require you to "move" for 2 seconds every 20 seconds or 40 seconds or 60 seconds. You will find that haste rating has a very pronounced step function, with no benefit at all for smaller values at shorter times. You need a minimum of 5% at 30 seconds between moves to make a damage difference, and 2.5% at 60 seconds.

vishal · 11/08/08, 11:49 PM

Sorry if this has been answered anywhere but could someone please clarify if boomkin crit aura stacks with the buff that arcane focus gives or not.

thank you in advance.

dagee · 11/10/08, 1:10 AM

I am completely confused about something that I hope you guys can help me out with. There is another mage in my guild (we are both frost mages 61 points into the tree). Gear wise we are very similar. He may out gear me by a little but if so it should be failry insignificant. What bothers me is that he out dps's me by a lot but for the life of me I cannot figure out why. On paper I think I have the better stats. When it comes to an actual fight though we are not close. I plugged both of our information in RAWR and according to it we should both be doing about the same damage (~1230 dps self buffed) which again confuses me since he is way under the hit cap which according to everything I have read should make a huge difference.

Here are our stats:
Mine
Hit: 178
Dmg: 1061
crit: 14.4
haste: 158
int: 438
spirit: 150

His
Hit: 104
dmg: 1044
crit: 19.2
haste: 93
int: 514
spirit: 206

While I have not yet started tracking our fights it looks to me that we both pretty much do the same thing: spam frost bolt and firebolt when the instant cast proc goes off. Both of use our pets as soon as they are off cooldown and for all boss fights get to use them twice. We are in the same group and get the same buffs during raids.

Am I wrong and thinking that I should be putting out more dps based on my stats. Does frost not need a lot of hit? Has hit changed so that it is less important and I should change my focus on crit?

I am including a link to my armory profile but not his since it is probably rude to post his without his permission: The World of Warcraft Armory

Kandir · 11/10/08, 2:23 AM

Probably your friend is just playing more aggresively than you, and/or making smarter use of his cooldowns and such. Next time you play together, check out a dps measurement tool like Recount or WWS to get some statistics. How many frostbolts is he getting in the air? How often is he summoning his pet? How many times does he pop his trinket? Those are typical factors which set people apart, much more than gear actually.

blumpster · 11/10/08, 4:59 AM

@dagee

If I had to guess it is cooldown management. He is more than likely stacking his better during the Bloodlust. Keys are getting your pet out before it, and using double icy veins / trinkets within the Bloodlust buff. Also if you want to do more damage ignore Brain Freeze, it is not an increase in DPS unless you take Ignite and sneak it into the third phantom charge of FoF. Yes your stats are better, and yes you still need hit capped. You are golden, 177 is hit cap for 3/3 elemental precision.

Maje · 11/10/08, 8:48 AM

Originally Posted by blumpster

@dagee
If I had to guess it is cooldown management. He is more than likely stacking his better during the Bloodlust. Keys are getting your pet out before it, and using double icy veins / trinkets within the Bloodlust buff. Also if you want to do more damage ignore Brain Freeze, it is not an increase in DPS unless you take Ignite and sneak it into the third phantom charge of FoF. Yes your stats are better, and yes you still need hit capped. You are golden, 177 is hit cap for 3/3 elemental precision.

How did you come to the conclusion that Brain Freeze is a dps loss on regular conditions? Rawr at least for my PvE gear says it's a clear gain and that's not taking into acount that it's a free damage (0 mana) at the cost of a GCD, I don't see how Fireball with a cast time of GCD is a loss... I doubt the chance to proc FoF at the 1.5s (-) it takes to fire fireball can override it (this is without any fire talents).

And regarding Hit Cap, if you're raiding with a shadow priest or a moonkin you have 3% hit + 3% from EP means you need 11% which is around 138 rating, so if you have the buff change the trinket to something else.

dyelynn · 11/10/08, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by vishal

Sorry if this has been answered anywhere but could someone please clarify if boomkin crit aura stacks with the buff that arcane focus gives or not.

thank you in advance.

as arcane focus is an individual buff and not a raid or group wide buff, yes, they stack.

dyelynn · 11/10/08, 3:15 PM

Originally Posted by Maje

How did you come to the conclusion that Brain Freeze is a dps loss on regular conditions? Rawr at least for my PvE gear says it's a clear gain and that's not taking into acount that it's a free damage (0 mana) at the cost of a GCD, I don't see how Fireball with a cast time of GCD is a loss... I doubt the chance to proc FoF at the 1.5s (-) it takes to fire fireball can override it (this is without any fire talents).

And regarding Hit Cap, if you're raiding with a shadow priest or a moonkin you have 3% hit + 3% from EP means you need 11% which is around 138 rating, so if you have the buff change the trinket to something else.

On my dummy tests BF was about a 25dps loss. That's subject to making smart use of the spell, meaning, using the proc with FoF up for the increased crit chance, ect. With Frost spec, the fireball crits for 150% without ignite. The fireball also has no damage increasing talents to support it, unlike frostbolt. Obviously i'm offering anecdotal evidence and opinion, not RAWR math or wws reports, but simply put, the fact that it's free to cast doesn't really help me, because I've no mana problems on my mage with SCB, mana gems and WE... and the GCD it costs isn't quite just a GCD because chain casting frostbolt somewhat reduces latency to 0 and the only benefit the fireball would have would be in movement fights.

With 61 talents and a hugely bloated frost tree, I just don't think there are enough points to support BF as a dps increase worth picking up. Of course we're talking lvl 70 raiding spec because for pvp or lvl 80 specs the game changes entirely.

asys · 11/12/08, 11:59 AM

Pre-3.0.2 my fire mage was quite high on the overall raid DPS but after the 3.0 patch things seems to be stalled. I've played around with my gear and spec quite alot, and looking at my dps on for instance Dr.Boom I cannot seem to feel else that my dps has been lowered.

I've used the following talent builds:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Armory link: The World of Warcraft Armory

My hit rating in raid would generally be around 165-177 with Draenei and SPs available in raid for extra hit.

My dps in a 5man last night was ~900 where as it used to be 1100+, and in raids I used to push 1500-1700+ dps on all out bosses like lurker.

While playing with rawr 2.0.3 it seems that it's reading the stats of the PVP neck wrong, and that it wants to enchant my offhand?! And also it seems to want to use crit gems instead of haste pushing crit to 44,91%, hit to 14,07% and 104 haste rating?

Has the mage dynamics really changed this much to make crit > haste > spelldmg? Using pure +crit gems vs +spell haste/dmg. Is RAWR wrong in it's assumption? I can easily say that I dont even do near the supposed 2605 dps RAWR thinks I should be doing.. 1450 today on Dr Boom.

Rotation usually used would be
2x Scorch (glyphed)
if Hotstreaks then pyroblast else fire ball, repeat until scorch is needed.

When reading the forums over the last few years the mage threads been quite nice and ones conclusions after reading usually managed to up my raid groups dps quite a few levels. Now, with 3.0.3 things are very scattered and it's hard finding the right spec's, gem's and enchants. Does anyone else feel the same? Have anyone found a good level 70 raiding spec that pre-SWP pushes a high dps yet? At 70 now I do see a lot of +hit 3000 (300 resist) from bosses in BT, even tho I am hit cap'd. And while reading around I cannot see a good reason for this either.

I know WOTLK is just hours away, but I would still like to understand where things changed so drastically at 70 that it would seem nerf our dps. I know I was very haste hungry and that this dont seem to be a good thing anymore, but with 132 haste, 171 spell hit and 230 spell crit rating I would think my dps should have been somewhat higher.

Anyone who can point in the right directions?

solbergb · 11/12/08, 12:39 PM

in most of the current models for fire it is more like spellpower > haste ~= crit but it depends on exact gear levels and weightings. Prior to the patch it was more like spellpower ~= haste > crit. You may be overgeared for haste.

One thing that might be causing your performance issues vs theoretical performance is that the current fire rotation requires riding the global cooldown more, instead of chaincasting spells with cast times. In the latter case, you can usually reduce latency to pretty much nothing and get full benefit from haste. On instants though, knowing when to start after the GCD is up is pretty much an art....you'll lose much of the benefit of haste on your pyroblast procs if you can't start up the next fireball precisely 1.24 (or whatever) seconds after it's launched. Still most of your rotation is 3 second cast time spells, so that shouldn't be a massive decrease in DPS. Just a mild one.

Neither of the builds shown is going to be very good at trash, especially in the post 3.0 "we aoe all trash" situations, so I'm assuming you are focused on boss killing dps and not on overall raid dps when making this complaint.

Perhaps you're a victim of the RNG effect caused by slow cast spells combined with short duration fights. Have you checked your WWS stats to see the following.

1. Does the actual crit rate match your theoretical crit rate (if lower, you were just unlucky)
2. Did you cast as many pyroblasts as you received hot streak buffs? (should be identical...not lower, not higher)

dyelynn · 11/12/08, 1:11 PM

another thing you need to think about, is fire's greatest benefit over frost was molten fury. however, with boss encounters being much shorter now than they were pre-3.0, you don't have as much time sub 20% boss health. thus you don't get as much molten fury time.

try speccing full frost and see how it is with near 100% WE uptime

hypetech · 11/12/08, 2:32 PM

Originally Posted by dyelynn

another thing you need to think about, is fire's greatest benefit over frost was molten fury. however, with boss encounters being much shorter now than they were pre-3.0, you don't have as much time sub 20% boss health. thus you don't get as much molten fury time.

try speccing full frost and see how it is with near 100% WE uptime

Molten Fury was changed to sub-35%