Having read diligently all the great thread's here, posting a few questions, really loving the high end discussions...I realize I might be kind of overthinking my play/spec's etc.
We have been in Kara for what seems like forever, and I am finding that there are few drops left for me that really get me excited. I was 2/48/11 after that came out, and hitcapped(sadly with some gemming, not gear alone), but I was typically only behind the Elemental Shammy on damage, and not by much. As 2.4 approached, the talk of 40/0/21 being the dominant mage spec seemed to litter most mage type threads....I listened, and obviously I switched to see what it was like. I like it a lot, bigger numbers, less dependency on group make up, and still being in short fights has seen me now topping our raid meters, and really...getting little support. I have been in with the melee classes for the last few raids, but still did well, and wasn't having much trouble with mana.
I have access to 2/3 Spellfire, and have mats for the robe, when I get to 375(just switched to tailoring a little while ago) most likely this weekend. I have 60 badges or so saved up and was thinking about the [Fused Nethergon Band].
What I just don't know is...How relevant is my spec at this level of the game?
I have played as most of the fire builds, and liked them, and now as arc/frost, I think that regardless of how I do it, I will be above all of the mages in my guild(unfortunately, only 3 regulars), I haven't gotten any of the T4 drops, but every time I look at them...they just just don't get me all that excited.
Spec isn't hugely important in Kara. If you're doing well with arcane, great! However, I don't think most people would recommend arcane without 2pT5. If you're able to get 3/3 spellfire, you'll see a decent increase getting that and switching to fire. Spellfire gear will last you well into T5 content, if not beyond.
Besides that, badge gear can also do amazing things for you.
Thanks Maxi and dblaikie for clearing my doubts and for your input. Also, i should had stated earlier, that i want to drop spellfire tailoring, since i doesn't have access to high end raids.
So, in that case, will i be better off with my current s3 helm with studious wraps, or should i wear my t4 helm + t4 glove for the bonus?
i am currently in a guild that is working on vashj/kael and were doing pretty well, int he first week we are getting 3 tainteds down pretty well before becoming overwhelmed by everything coming at once.
but anyway i am currently doing about 850 dps with my gear and spec. I am 50/0/11 spec ans am using ABx3 AM cycle casting AM when i get clearcasting and icy veins when it pops up, bt i think that i can do more than that, closer to 950/1000 dps on an average boss fight.
my armory is here and here (hopefully) is a WWS page of a recent Alar kill.
any help in improving my gems, enchants, gear, and anything else would be helpful and much apreciated.
I have a question regarding getting to the 164 Spell Hit Cap for a frost mage.
My current gear spell hit is 116 (including +9 socket bonuses assuming I get this) and I am Sha’tar Revered so I can get the Glyph of Power +14 spell hit enchant so I am needing to make up 34 spell hit.
Socketing gems for spell hit, current gear has:
Two red sockets (could place Veiled Nobel Topaz with +4 spell hit or Veiled Pyrestone with +5 spell hit)
Seven yellow sockets (could place Rigid Dawnstone + 8 spell hit, or Rigid Lionseye +10 spell hit, or Veiled Noble +4 spell hit or Veiled Pyrestone +5 spell hit)
Total eight blue sockets but no spell hit gems usually fit blue sockets, but I have five blue sockets where placing a different gem won’t effect socket bonus for spell hit (but would effect spell damage gained from Glowing gems or Int or Crit from others)
Enchantments for spell hit:
Hands, Spell Strike has +15 spell hit but would loose Spellpower and its +20 spell damage
Legs, Presence of Sight has +8 spell hit and +18 spell damage (from ZA) but would loose +35 spell damage from Runic Spellthread
What would be the best way to use gems and enchants to get the extra 34 spell hit I need to without sacrificing spell damage now or when the epic gems become more readily available on my server in a week or two?
No doubt the answer is staring me in the face, but I am darned if I can figure it out. Thanks for the help.
First, recall that due to bugged EP, Frost spells get 6% hit so your hit cap is only 126. So with the gear you described, the glyph should be enough.
Is the character linked on your profile the one you're talking about? Because that character appears to have 190 spell hit, well over the cap. He could replace all his +hit gems and +hit enchants and still be frost hit capped.
@Strasner:
You should definitely get Arcane Power. If you pop a [Glyph of Power Word: Barrier] on your helm you can steal a point out of Arcane Focus (or Imp. Blink or Prismatic Cloak, neither is very valuable in PvE). Also, don't gem for crit. As arcane you benefit the most from +int/spi/mp5, since the more mana you have the more AB spam you can do. And don't worry so much about getting those +stam socket bonuses unless you really need it.
Blush, yes, I currently do have 190 spell hit. I used to have 164 before the last patch and an "expert" told me there was a mage nerf and I needed to get it up to 202. Before that another "expert" said that once you get to more than 800 damage on a frost mage you should stack spell crit but I have largely recovered from that set up. I am still trying to assimilate all the information in the various threads on this site, but found today that Rawr works thru Fusion/Windows on my Mac so that will be a help.
In general is it advantageous to up stats like spell hit via enchants first and then gem up? And is it ok to throw plus damage gems in blue sockets?
In general is it advantageous to up stats like spell hit via enchants first and then gem up? And is it ok to throw plus damage gems in blue sockets?
Personally I wouldn't get +hit enchants unless I really needed them, and then I would only get the gloves. The ZG enchant is too much work. Gems are cheaper, and you can get more granularity.
It is definitely ok to put dmg gems in blue sockets - you should only worry about socket bonuses when that bonus will result in a better stats. So don't worry about socket bonuses for stamina (unless you really need it), or when the socket bonus is something weak, like the +3 crit in [Hatefury Mantle]. I have that and I put 2 +dmg gems in it.
Replacing Spellfire belt and gloves with Studious wraps and Belt of blasting is a good idea. There is some dps increase due to massive +hit on Blasting, you are no longer bound by the set, and get some nice stats from the gloves.
I can't seem to make the math come out right on this, but I would love to break my spellfire set to give me a little more flexibility in talent spec.
When I add up the win loss columns I get (trading spellfire gloves and belt for studious wraps and belt of blasting) My gloves are gemmed veiled noble topaz and my belt runed living rubies so I:
Lose - 161 dmg (incl set bonus- this will vary with int but I calculated the set bonus at raid buffed int= +33 spelldmg), 41 crit, 0 sta, 28 int, 8 hit
Gain - 126 dmg (socketing all runed rubies) 21 sta, 22 int, 55 crit, 23 hit.
So overall I lose 35 dmg and 6 int in return for 15 hit, 14 crit, and 21 sta. I'm hit capped so I can regem 15 hit elsewhere so I trade 20 dmg and 6 int for 14 crit and 21 sta. Yuck. That's not what I envisioned when I spent all the gold and badges.
With some fancy regemming too complicated than I want to bother you with I can improve marginally on all that and gain the socket bonuses - but not for much (if any) net dmg increase really - so it still seems to be a net loss in dmg/dps for me. In fact I'm not sure how it would be a significant dps increase for anyone even if you weren't hit capped already because the extra 15 hit over your gemmed spellfire wouldn't compensate for the massive loss of +spelldmg.
It leads me to believe I am missing something critical, does anyone see it?
During the last few months I've played a bit back and forth between Fire, Frost and Arcane type spec's. And I can't seem to get arcane to be a viable option much at all. While testing on Dr. Boom both Frost and Fire seem to outperform in the long run.
2/48/11 (current spec) - seems to be giving the most DPS output in-game, in-magegraf.com and in-rawr type simulations.
deep frost - seems to be coming quite close in game atleast, but not so good in the out of game simulations?!
deep arcane w/fire - seems to be a viable option in many calculators and TC sites, and other ingame mages says that "firemages cant compete" ... But for me this doesnt seem to be matching at all.
Current gear - (The World of Warcraft Armory)
Gives roughly 139 spellhaste, not to much crit, but taps the spellhit cap when raiding. As I do have 3x T5, 2x Spellstrike, and to much time on my hand to try out stuff (lol) I would like to hear people's opinion about the current armory kit vs respecing and using 2xT5. When raiding my trinkets of choice will be either: Serpent-Coil Braid+Hex Shrunken Head or Darkmoon Card: Crusade+Hex Shrunken Head. Depending on raid build up and encounter. And several rings to switch around with.
One thing I have noticed on Lady Vashj attempts are that it takes the mages very long to bring down the elementals, would a arcane spec be more viable while learning this encounter? My current spec and gear works well enough for Al'ar now so shouldn't be needing to respec frost for that every now and then. But is Frost an option on Vashj/Kael'Thas while learning and improving the initial kills?
@ asys
I recently returned from a long absence from WoW, and joined a new guild of buddies where the majority had never even attempted Vashj. We learned the encounter from start to finish with me handling about four spawn locations with a part time healer. I did this entirely as a deep fire spec with about 900 +dmg unbuffed. A few things to remember: often totems are not in range so you must be hit caped, perfect your spell rotations to minimize dps losses, try to have a full bar of mana going into phase two on vashj, and pick the best healer and make sure they're healing you to ensure a fast relay of the core or else take it on yourself to have an intimate knowledge of what your partner is going to do. I went as far as knowing that my healer wore briefs and we had the encounter trivialized in a few attempts.
As far as, "firemages can't compete," I've never seen this to be the case and unless a fight is almost tailored to arcane, fire is king. Molten fury has plowed my guild through a good number of bosses on progression night.
I think you're right and with your current gear setup, there's no reason you shouldn't be breaking 1k DPS active on fights(note on A'lar you effectively did less than 600DPS over the full fight's duration). I recognize that Al'ar is one of those fights where you're not going to have the best damage-in time ratio and a lot of movement is involved, but even still, your damage-in should be exceeding 1k dps(especially with 2 piece tier 5 and AB spam)
Playstyle Wise-
First, I'd remove AM from your rotation as it will significantly decrease DPS. AB is your bread and butter. I'm not quite sure if you were having mana issues... in the 16 minutes of the fight's duration, you only used 3 mana potions, 2 iterations of your mana gem and took two ticks of evocation. Are you having mana issues? If so, better use of your potions, gems, and evocation will help remedy your long term damage. You only used your Icon once that fight... considering it has a 2 minute cooldown, this suggests to me that you're not using proper cooldown management.
Gear Wise-
Some immediate upgrades which will allow you to perform better:
Spellstrike hood>Unimind Headress(Get it glyphed too!).
Vindicator's neck(With spell haste) with the 12 damage PVP Gem
Also, Gem for Spell Damage, Haste, and Int. Drop hit, crit, and spell pen as you should be able to hit the 6% arcane cap with your current gear/head enchant.
I debated posting this in the 2.4 TC thread, but seeing as it has quite possibly been theorycrafted to death, I figured I'd play it safe and ask here. As a note, I searched first - but "gcd latency" turned up pretty much every single thread here.
With the GCD/latency changes some time ago (and the subsequent minor changes which gave us even more flexability), it is now possible to take the /stopcasting out of "/stopcasting; /cast Fireball" macros that many people had. (Old news, I know, but bear with me.)
I'm really curious as to just how effective this addition has been. How possible is it to negate 90% or more of your latency with this change? I've had good success with negating the effects of latency when I'm single-target DPS spamming, but two things elude me:
1) How much latency can be negated? All of it? 95%? 50%? Or am I wrong to even try to stick a number to it? Theoretically, as I understand it, once the adjustments to the initial change went in it was made possible to negate 95%-100% of the effects of latency with my primary spells (scorch, fireball). Does that have any weight to it? Assume an average of 200ms latency, I find that to be a reasonable average.
2) Instant cast spells, notably AE. Because of the implimentation details, the client starts your GCD the very second you press a spell, and then cancels that GCD if the server says "nope, sorry, not casting that right now." Due to the instant client side GCD of 1.5s, I'm not seeing a way around latency when using AE. Should such a thing be possible? I'd tenatively say no, but I'm really curious if anyone knows of any tricks to help that.
Last edited by Sbo : 04/27/08 at 1:32 PM.
Reason: titlelol
1) How much latency can be negated? All of it? 95%? 50%? Or am I wrong to even try to stick a number to it? Theoretically, as I understand it, once the adjustments to the initial change went in it was made possible to negate 95%-100% of the effects of latency with my primary spells (scorch, fireball). Does that have any weight to it? Assume an average of 200ms latency, I find that to be a reasonable average.
How much Latency can be negated does not depend on your average lateny but on your latency's stability. You can have 1000ms latency and - as long as it is absolutely constant - negate 100% of it. But if your latency jumps from 0 to 1000ms and back and forth you will in average have 500 ms between your casts and can't do anything about it.
How much Latency can be negated does not depend on your average lateny but on your latency's stability. You can have 1000ms latency and - as long as it is absolutely constant - negate 100% of it. But if your latency jumps from 0 to 1000ms and back and forth you will in average have 500 ms between your casts and can't do anything about it.
Oh no doubt. My latency jumps from 100ms to 200ms, sticking around 170 in a raid. Once they tweaked the changes, is perfectly manageable to negate most to all of the latency involved. I was just simply wondering if anyone had looked at exactly how much latency they were negating, be it 90% or be it 100%.
The guild my friend and I have been in for a few months recently decided to stop raiding and go casual (there was a lack of dedicated raiders so the GL/RL got fed up and called it quits). Since we attend college together, we move to guilds together which is making it difficult to find a new guild since I'm a mage (obviously) and hes a rogue. Because of this the only raids I'm doing are kara, ZA, gruul's and the occasional mag. Anyway, on to my question.
Taking into consideration the raids I'm currently able to run (full clearing all of those), what all is there I can try to get to increase my dps? I have the DMC: Crusade that I can switch out if the fight will allow me to keep the stack up for a good amount of time. I'd really like to try to pick up either the Blade of Twisted Visions or the Wub's Cursed Hexblade and cover the missing hit with my gems (I'm capped with my current gear). My big question is how are my gems? SHould I leave them as they are or should I ignore the socket bonus on some of them and go for more spell damage (or maybe spell damage + spell haste)? Any help is appreciated =D
My Mage plans to stick to 5-man content, with little, if any, raiding. I know that 5-mans are hardly the pinnacle of progression, and have plenty more room for error in performance/spec, but I always like to maximise what I do. 5 mans obviously have rather different requirements than raids - group stacking is not an option, mana consumption is less of an issue due to short boss fights and lots of trash, AoE/kiting skills are required more often, etc etc.
Am I right in thinking that Frost would be the best spec for this? How should this affect my gearing (apart from much lower hit cap)? As far as Badge gear goes, how should I prioritise? I'm a Tailor, so I'll probably be getting Frozen Shadowweave + Boots/Belt of Blasting.
If you're good at ZA I'd suggest clearing to chest 3 until you get the caster ring from that, or maybe use the mag ring to tide you over in the meantime. I'm going to assume you have the cape from prince somewhere, using it as well as another hit ring should bump your hit up enough to drop it elsewhere. I'm also going to assume you are willing to socket with your own purchased epic gems, as well as obtain some BT patterns. I used RAWR mage and here is what I came up with:
Hood of Hexing: Spinel/Reck Pyrestone/Glowing Shadowsong
Loop of Cursed Bones or PVP haste neck: Reck Pyrestone
Mantle of Nimble Thought: Purchase pattern and hearts from BT guild, or ZA shoulders (Mantle of Ill Intent)
Ruby Drape of the Mysticant, also try to get the haste cloak from ZA chest 1 (Shadowcaster's Drape)
Tormented Demonsoul Robes: Reck Pyrestone
Bracers of Nimble Thought: Purchase hearts and get one made
Studious Wraps: 2x Spinel (1x since you already put the pvp gem)
Belt of Blasting: 2x Spinel
Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons: 2x Spinel
Boots: You can leave those alone, as the badge boots are a minor upgrade. Try to pick up the haste boots from ZA though, better flexibility to drop hit depending on group comp.
Ring1: Mana Attuned Band or Band of Crimson Fury
Ring2: Same as you have now
Trink1: Darkmoon
Trink2: Hex
MH: Hexblade, try to pick up the sword of Zul'jin as well
OH: Same
Badge Wand: Spinel
Using all of the first choices here leaves you with 12.92% hit from gear, which should suffice. Compared to the gear you logged with, you have the same 1141 damage (1221 with Crusade stack), drop 2% crit but go from 17 haste to 149. If you get a Draenei in your group (you should, shamans are awesome) you can use Blade of Twisted Visions over Wub's Cursed Hexblade. With all of the above, it's going to be very tough to upgrade your gear any further without going into T5+ raids.
So I expect you will see a dps decrease if you replace any (or all) of those items as you've suggested. When I did the maths I had to replace both the belt and one other item with a superior piece. The increase in both upgrades might then outweigh the 35-45 spell damage you get from the set bonus.
In my case that extra upgrade was [Vestments of the Sea-Witch]. After regeming a lot I ended up with about +8 hit, +5 spell damage by replacing spellfire belt/robe with blasting & vestments. The gloves alone are still better than studious wraps or gloves of the aldor so I still wear them. I switch to studious wraps when I need the extra stamina or when I go frost.
I can not agree with you totally. I recently switched out all my Spellfire set for [Item not found!], [Enslaved Doomguard Soulgrips] and a [Belt of Blasting]. I ran the numbers through rawr and ended up just 3dps below the Spellfire gear while I gained quite some stats and don't have to worry about +hit for a long long time.
So yes, you do lose a very tiny amount of dps but not as dramatic as you make it sound. Add to that the gain of stats and more freedom in your gem choices. But then again, I am just an entry level raid mage (killed Magtheridon for the first time last night, sitting at +1060 fire damage unbuffed and 4 points over the hit cap), so my views might change later.
[10:05:49] <Nat> how do u know if a unicorn is a virgin?
How much of a DPS increase would it be for me to time my trinkets + cooldowns for 20% instaed of just macroing it and casting whenever possible? I play on an Oceanic server and latency is around 300+ ms
I've been respeccing forth and back for a while but i can't really find a solid solution...
This is my current gear The World of Warcraft Armory
(if by any chance some pvp gear is on)
i got 4 x T6
no t5 available.
and some enchants on weapon/rings and regemming left to do.
So i was wondering if it would be worth it to respec to arcane and get 2 x t5 a.s.a.p since it apperently wtfpwns everything in our raids
I was wondering if anyone could pass on some advice to me.. I have recently aquired 2 x T5 bonus and was orignally 2/48/11. I have decided that for mana regen and for my guilds raid make up i would like to try either full arcane or some sort of 40/0/21 build. This sounds easy however for some reason i have had to socket so much of my gear with + spell hit to hit 164 for cap, that i seem to be lacking in other areas for recount and dont feel im as effective as i could be in raids.
Here is my armory The World of Warcraft Armory (please excuse the current build as i was having a play with it this morning)
Any advice would be appreciated as i dont quite feel i have got to grips with gemming right and getting the most from my gear.
Unless the socket bonus is damage, and higher than you could get in slot by gemming just for damage, you can ignore the socket bonus'. For your Spellfire gloves you could easily replace the Y/B sockets with +9's or +12's, which is a +8/+14 damage bonus, while losing 10 Stam and 4 Hit.
@Att
What is your raid composition? How long are most of your boss fights? Are there other fire mages in the raid and you're coordinating your scorches? Are you not getting SPriest/EShaman/Moonkin buffs while the other guy is? Are you using flamecaps & destruction potions? What about saving combustion and IV for the last 20%? I think with 4xT6, fire should be at least competitive if not being slightly better than arcane.
@Fella
Well if you want to go 40/0/21 you only need 10% to hit because of ghost hit. So switch to a different neck if you have access (like a crit or the new shatter sun one). Switch out that awful green gem out of the helm (you should never ever wear green gems as a mage). Oh and don't worry about socket bonus, since most of them are awful. You should really thinking of getting rid of that 12 stam gem in your robe.
And then maybe replace the spellfire gloves, the new badge ones are extra nice.
04/25/08, 4:12 PM
