Are they exactly the same parameters? Eg, they may use different defaults in places, such as encounter time.

That would be the first thing I look at. The rest though may be differences in how the engines treat various mechanics, such as DPS estimation for trinkets or cooldown timings.

I believe the answer is that he is looking at the "fireball" dps rotation in rawr, and not his the simulator's theoretical total dps for the given fight. What you are seeing I believe is that if you are sitting there spamming fireball, you will do 1695 DPS. Magegraph is telling you what your theoretical dps for the simulated fight would be, however, not just your DPS from spamming fireball during the fight. Rawr also tells you this (and can even break it down further if you select the correct options), but it's further up in the panel, not in the spell rotation dps section.

Thats a very good point. I've had another look at the numbers, and within the 'solution' section Rawr is giving me a DPS figure of 2040. This is against the Magegraf value of 2049, so by looking at the correct numbers the two tools tell me pretty much the same thing.

However, that now leaves with 350 DPS to make up to where I should be at

Manly already gave you the answer. Your activity is unlikely to be 100%. Try putting different values of latency, fragmentation and interrupt frequency into Rawr. Double check the number of spellcasts it estimates in the solution compared to your WWS. For my own situation I find latency of 0.25 gives me much more realistic values in the solution than the default 0.05 and this corresponds with what I generally see on the Quartz bar: 200-300ms.

Still, 350 dps seems quite a large amount. Is that just a case of badly stacked cooldowns, or also a case of pressing the button harder?

Or shitty lag, or bad fireball:scorch ratio, or simply not hammering the cast button fast enough, giving the impression of lag. Or, ultimately, in fights like Az'galore, the 15 sec it takes to position the boss, get in place, and start casting. It's a lot of wasted time and dilutes the resultant logs. Remember, many DPS meters start counting from "Entering Combat".

I may be getting off topic but this might interest other mages too:

You probably know about Navuud's Concoction. My question is, can resisted procs from this buff trigger Eye of Magtheridon?
Considering the buff can be stacked multiple times, the trinket could be up most of the time.

Nope. A few issues here.

Your first bit is right. Gaining 1% crit (or 22.7 crit rating) will net you, on average, an extra 2k damage per 100 casts.

The second bit is confused though. Lets assume now that instead of that 23 spell crit rating, you tried on 23 spell damage. How much damage done would that add per 100 spell casts? Frostbolts in this build have a .8 coefficient and you have a flat 6% damage increase. Crits have a 2.25 multiplier. Now you will have some crit rate, call it R.

.8*23*100*1.06*((1-R)+R*2.25)

At 0% crit rate that 23 +dmg would gain you: 1950 damage
5%: 2072
10%: 2194
20%: 2438
25%: 2560
30%: 2682
40%: 2926

My armory

Alright to the question. my guild is currently doing SSC/TK and I am concerned that I am not doing enough damage. It might be that my expectations are too high, but I tend to be around 6-9th place. I know i won't be the best but i would like to know if there is anything i can do to improve my total damage. I use the generic 5 scorch and 8 fireball, but the other mage we have with us almost never will use scorch so I'm stuck gimping my dps for the sake of him more so. He tends to be on top of the charts (This is his armory.) I know I can improve my damage with more in improve fireball and molten fury, I tried the (2/48/11) spec but I ran out of mana <b>WAY</b> too fast. I rarely have a shadow priest in my party and not usually a shaman either. I don't know if JoW is on but for the most part I'm on my own. I usually have a boomkin in my party to my crit is about 36% so I do get mana back from crits a lot. I guess the thing I want to know is: Is it my gear that gimps my damage or something else.
If there is anything else you need to know to help me, just say so and I will do my best to get that information.

It's partly gear, and mostly spec, that gimps your damage, in my opinion. Losing molten fury is massive...and 3/5 emp fireball is just gimping your main nuke. You don't really have much in way of haste, so if you're having true mana problems as 2/47/11+1...you either aren't mana potting every cooldown, or chain-mana-gemming. Going 18 points into arcane just puts you at a massive disadvantage, dps-wise.

So you are saying that the lose of damage is mainly me being scared to run out of mana?

To be honest I can't give you playing tip advice without you providing us a WWS report or at least commenting a little bit on your playing style.
Also you seems to have logged out in PvP gear. Do you have a different shoulders, robe, and bracers for PvE?
Your pants are not enchanted. A [Runic Spellthread] is a must. If you have the money, gem for a [Chaotic Skyfire Diamond].

The second armory profile posted is not even hit capped. He's speccing arcane yet wears fire damage items. I sincerely hopes he has a "trash set" on and have a different "hit set" for bosses,

With regards to spec. At your gear level I would consider strongly to go 10/0/51 frost since you don't have the gear to go arcane yet (you need 2p T5) and you're having mana troubles.

You should never gem for crit.
but first you should:
Enchant your shoulders
Enchant your gloves with +20 spell damage
Enchant your bracers with +15 spell damage
Change your crit gems to [Veiled Noble Topaz] until you get to 10% hit
then gem [Reckless Noble Topaz] or [Reckless Pyrestone], or if you want to go crazy with mana, go with [Brilliant Dawnstone] or [Brilliant Lionseye]

On bosses you should cast Arcane Blast until you get to about 30% mana then cast frostbolt to regen mana until you can afford to do Arcane Blast again. Rinse and repeat. Make sure you pop IV/Trinket/AP when you're casting arcane blasts.

To expand on the math here, it's helpful to look at the problem using algebra and plugging in the numbers at the end.



We consider the change in E as we add +damage or +crit.



After some canceling and rearranging, we have...



As a matter of fact, this is what happens when you consider the expression . That is, this is the % increase in damage done (or DPS).

Let's solve this for the added +damage.



If we add crit chance, this is equivalent to adding +damage.

Just a couple things to bear in mind: the +damage coefficient for a non-empowered Frostbolt is 3/3.5*.95 or about .8143. The crit bonus for a Spell Power + Ice Shards build is 1.25 (from 225% crits). The base damage for Frostbolt is 623.5.

Madolezz,

Here are my suggestions:

1. You need to get your spell hit closer to the 125-130 range. An easy item for you to do this with would be the badge ring: [Fused Nethergon Band]

2. Hopefully its possible for you to get another piece of T5. With your current spec, this would allow you to start casting Arcane Blast as your main nuke with Frostbolt as your filler for when your getting low on mana.

3. Ditch the crit gems and regem for damage. Possibly gemming for intellect is ok too with the Arcane spec.

4. If you can't get another piece of T5 then you should respec to the standard fire or frost specs (recall you will still need to get your spellhit up to 165ish for fire and 126ish for frost). The 40/0/21 spec is for spamming Arcane Blast with two pieces of T5 for the bonus.

Hope that helps.

I think a big part of the reason I go oom, when generic spec is that i don't usually use a lot of mana pots, but I will start trying to use them more often. I don't know what you need to know about my play style, tell me what you need to know and I will do my best to answer it. I use the 5 scorch 8 fireball rotation, and no I do not have any other gear, what I'm wearing is what I have. I am going to try out 2/48/11 and just try and deal with faster mana loss, so that should help some.


As for Smoldering he uses fire spells, and is speced mostly arcane for the improved spell damage and other things like that. He does not use a different set for trash and does not use arcane spells. As far as I can tell he is kinda of like the "Raid Frost" spec of 40/0/21 where you are technically arcane spec but you use frostbolt as your main spell. Except for the fact that he spams fireball at all times and never scorch.

Kasac: First of all, arcane/fire and arcane/frost builds died quite a while ago in regards to speccing arcane and using a different school. While 40/0/21 can put up some decent numbers with frostbolt as a primary nuke when another pure frost mage is around, the standard way to play it is as an AB spam build with frost as a pure backup.

As to your problem, the main reason he is beating you in damage is because he has about 300 dmg on you and around 9% crit. My guess is that you are looking at trash a lot, as it should be somewhat closer on bosses, but his gear will still outpace you. On trash it's typically not worth scorching, unless you are fighting some of the bigger mobs that last more than a couple fireballs, like bog giants. Hope that helps some.

It was bugged? Been working perfectly for me for months. Of course, it's only useful for AoE, very poor on single-target damage.

I expect he's referring to the behaviour where the first cast after the proc doesn't get its cast time reduced. (when proccing from non instants)
i.e. 2.3s frostbolt --> proc --> 2.3s frostbolt --> 2.1s frostbolt.

It's not really a problem with the trinket itself, but with the casting and item proc mechanics, but I can confirm that this is still the case as of the current patch.

That's just because haste is calculated when you start casting and your second frostbolt is already half-casted by the time the first one crits and procs. With arcane explosion the damage is front-loaded so the proc will affect the next cast.

I've always wondered why people even consider using this for single target if they are using fireball or frostbolt. It's simple maths to see that with, say, a 40% crit rating that the chance for this trinket not to proc is 80% on your next cast. Which means it's 64% chance not to proc on your next 2 casts, 51% chance not to proc on your next 3 casts, etc... And since the proc duration is short, it's just not going to be up very often when using long cast spells.

An 18/0/43 build w/ a Boomkin and Elem Shaman can reach 50% chance to crit with Frostbolts. Also, if you are able to be flexible with your gear choices you can stack haste over spell hit (spell hit cap is 89). A decent amount of spell haste (10% -ish) should allow 2 casts per proc even with the aforementioned "bug". This would give it approximately a 50% up time, which is essentially 72 passive spell haste, making it a terrific trinket. Espeically for the most mana efficient raiding spec.

If 1 Mage is stacking Winter's Chill, an additional Mage who is 40/0/21 could also benefit equally as much from Frostbolt spam; while still being able to mana dump at the end of fights with Arcane Blast.

Whether a spell crits or not is determined on the end of the cast. So the server doesn't have to wait for the projectile to hit before determining procs.

Scorch has no flight time, and AToI has the exact same issue that it doesn't affect the next cast after a crit.
It works for instant spells because the 1s+ GCD after a crit is enough to proc properly.

Nature's Grace (druid talent, -0.5s cast time after a crit for 1 spell) was explicitly fixed to affect the next spell right after a crit.
Mystical Skyfire Diamond and Skycall totem work properly for the next spell after a proc.

Arcane Blast has the same issue as AToI, which kills AB3FrB3 style rotations and forces you into spam or (ABFrB)3FrB2 stlye rotations.


If AToI affected the next right after a proc, it would work quite well for Frostbolt Spam, affecting 3 casts per proc.
~55% uptime, ~77 haste average was quite good when ZA (Hex Head) wasn't around and Illidan wasn't farmed out yet.

If Winter's Grace makes it live, or at least into beta, AToI will be very strong in this combination.


[Edit]: At Adhira
My Armoury is a trash set and I usually had ToW, we ran with 1-2 Elemental Shaman. I had Temp/Chro/MABand to swap, and 2 spare pieces that I could regem for hit if I dropped any lower or had to raid without ToW.

I nearly edited my post to say this exact same thing. AToI will be an interesting trinket to hold on to for the upcoming expansion. Even Fire builds are going to be very crit heavy so this could have potential there as well.