I guess your questions boil down to these two. No you would not socket for spell hit in yellow. If you have access to epic gems, irrespectively of what the socket colour is (barring fantastically exceptional socket boni, eg T6 head) you'd use +12dmg. If you must have the socket bonus and it's yellow, go for crit/dmg. While +9dmg -is- strictly better than 4crit/5dmg the difference is minor and not of any significance at your level (you mentioned kara, so I'm assuming pre-T5). I think you're just swamping yourself in a sea of combinations, which you shouldn't do. Take which gear has the best dmg-equivalence, make sure you're not past hit-cap and stick with it. Scenaria like "if I take off Ruination and sub in Divine Inspiration, regemming for hit, but take off cenarion-rep ring and put on Recurrence, while I replace Foretelling boots (gemmed for hit/dmg) with shadowfrost (2x+9dmg) while I...." will only annoy you and serve little purpose.

I think you're swamped with options and you're using only one paddle: "Hit is best". Yes it is, but I'm sure that swapping gear around while you might be past the cap you certainly won't be consistent on spelldamage/crit through the setups, neither will you be consistent on stamina, something which is particularly lacking if you're on the spellfire therapy.

Strictly answering your question though of "would you still socket for spell hit to fill a yellow socket and then rearrange your gear to stay near the cap" I can't say. I'd do whatever necessary to produce the maximum spelldamage at hit cap, with the most reasonable crit rate. Asking if you should juggle gear to fit sockets sounds extremely vague. It depends on the gear and it depends on the sockets. Would you socket a hit/spell with a socket bonus of +5dmg and have to replace say, Ashyen's Gift - Items - World of Warcraft with Exarch's Diamond Band - Items - World of Warcraft ? No you wouldn't. It's entirely dependent on your setup, your spec, your encounters, the rest of your gear and most importantly, what are the options open to you.

As for "comparing the package of Mana Potions + Icy Veins vs. Clearcasting + Destro potions." you're still comparing apples to oranges. What do you want me to say? Mana pots are more mp5 value than clearcasting, but IV is more DPS than Destro pots. So what? Which is better? You can't compare them: One car is ugly and goes fast, the other is pretty and slow. Which one is the better car as a package. Apples != Oranges.

I think I can speak on behalf of the rest of the mage TC community however when I say, No, Clearcasting in lieu of Icy Veins for full-fire, for PvE raiding is not a valid choice. Destro pots are entirely irrelevant on this issue. The assumption that you won't be able to Destro pot because you'll be busy mana-potting is situational and inaccurate. If you want some circumstancial evidence: Unless we're AoEing, I find that with one shaman (of any type) I don't drink any mana pots over SSC/TK. Either BoW or Mage Armor are enough to stave-off evocation till very late or at all. Mana spring, Mage Armor and BoW all give circa 50mp5 and for me one of them is enough to keep me floating with chain-gemming and Evo. Two of them are enough to ditch the Evo entirely. Sometimes rarely, I'll down a pot instead of Evo if the fight is going late or is at a critical point (eg, Vashj P3, Leo >15%) but even so. Losing Clearcasting is not a problem.

In general, no. You take the best gear you have, then socket it afterwards. Sockets are mostly useful to get to the cap. If you're hovering around the cap, then it's worthwhile to see what happens if you replace an item then resocket to reach the cap. But usually it will be a definite upgrade (as in from the next tier) that will cause you to replace an item and rework to the cap.

I hope you're being sarcastic, or else possibly referring to [Cowl of the Illidari High Lord]. The socket bonus on [Cowl of the Tempest] is hardly worth gemming for. Your idea, however, still stands. You should always socket for what gives you the biggest benefit. Thus, if you are below the spell hit cap with ideal gear, put in spell hit gems until you reach that cap, then use damage gems. Ignore socket bonuses unless you get a noticable benefit from meeting them, such as spell hit or damage, but never stamina.

Whoopsie, was thinking of the Cowl and T4, couldn't decide between them, decided instead to do a typo. You are correct, the Cowl is worth it, others mostly aren't.

Pintofbrew: You're right, I did not give enough information, so here's more. These tests were done on my normal realm, not the test realm. There were no other debuffs on Dr. Boom, and nobody else was hitting it at the time.

To give a better indication of the sample sizes, here are the DPS values of each "test run" again. In parentheses is the duration of that test run, in seconds.

DPS - Arcane: 1054 (72), 1112 (84), 959 (80), 1027 (81), 1008 (108), 1114 (118), 1091 (108), 983 (108)

DPS - Fire: 1002 (168), 865 (115), 865 (124), 853 (150), 945 (128), 952 (95), 994 (135), 925 (130)

In some of the attempts I had Innervates, which explains the difference in duration.

You're right about the Scorch vs Fireball ratio. If I cut out the first 5 Scorches, the Fire DPS increases by 20-30. Let's take 925 DPS, add 4% for Molten Fury and 20-30, arriving at 1000 Fire DPS, compared to 1050 Arcane DPS.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that the tests I did are not very extensive. However, there is still a difference between Fire and Arcane to be explained. I can think of 2 possible options:

1) Stasistics. It could be that if I did 100 more tests on both Fire and Arcane, the numbers would turn out to be 1200 Fire DPS and 1000 Arcane DPS on average, on Dr. Boom. Then both these numbers would increase by about 250 DPS in raids due to consumables and buffs, explaining the theoretical numbers from Vontre's sheet nicely.

This is possible, but it doesn't seem likely from the test runs I've done. I'm sure a statistics wizard could tell us how (un)likely it is that more tests will lead to the proposed results.

2) Raid boost. For some reason, Fire DPS gets boosted in raids much more than Arcane DPS. Maybe using Flame Cap, Destruction Potion and a Trinket while Combustion is up explains this. Does it?

Maybe there's another explanation but I can't think of one.

I've done 2 Teron Gorefiend kills in the past two weeks, one as Fire and one as Arcane. Note that my guild just started in BT/MH so we don't have much ilvl 141+ gear yet.

1045 DPS on a 1% wipe on Teron, as Fire: Wow Web Stats
1262 DPS on a Teron kill, as Arcane: Wow Web Stats

On the Fire kill, I think I used Combustion+Trinket once, and Combustion+Trinket+Destruction Potion+Flame Cap when he was at 19%. On the Arcane spec kill, I still had mana left when Teron died, so I could've done slightly more dps by switching to AB spam earlier.

I've been browsing WWS a bit to find similarly geared guilds killing Teron, to compare. I found another Mage, with a bit better gear than I (1150 damage, 31% crit vs my 1100 damage and 29% crit), and somehow he managed to do make his fireballs hit for 3400 vs my 3000. On the armory he only has 2/5 Tier 6, so 4/5 Tier 6 is unlikely to be the explanition (though it could be).

WWS: Zorian - WWS
Armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm almost starting to think that I forgot to train the highest rank of Fireball

Any explanations for this are very much appreciated, because it continues to elude me, and that is rather frustrating. Maybe it is that I just suck at playing Fire, but in that case, I'd like to figure out how to improve whatever it is that is lacking!

There could be several reasons, but the major one in the WWS parses you have linked is the lack of CoE. As far as the dps tests on Dr. Boom, not much can be drawn from 2 minute or less tests. Fire has a ramp up time and also a ramp down time if you have to stop casting. The ramp down comes from the fireball dot ticking for 24 while you have stopped casting. This is insignificant on overall damage but will lower the DPS a tad.

Comparing your fire parse to Zorian's, the main difference is that he had both an elemental shaman and CoE. You had neither.

Elemental shamans are not only 3% crit. They also give 3% hit, which certain mages will take into advantage with subbing out hit gear and subbing in more spelldmg gear. Typical example of pre-T6 swap would be swap out Mantle of the Elven Kings - Items - World of Warcraft for Mantle of Tirisfal - Items - World of Warcraft . Not to mention shamans will also give a healthy +120dmg with wrath of air.

As for your dramatic difference between arcane and fire DPS, perhaps the DOT ticking away for a further 24sec is truly diluting your samples, it depends on your DPS meter, certain ones will display "on-the-fly" DPS which will fluctuate every 2 sec or so until you're OOC, using these and taking a reading when you literally stop casting will probably provide you with better results if indeed the Fball DOT is the culprit.

I've been playing around with 41 arcane 20 frost (no slow, imp AM) trying to see if theres any way in hell it'll work, but it's looking rather grim. Bolting nets me ~970dps, AM 935/1094 spam/clearcast, 3*AB 961/1135 for initial/first-cast start with buff (Add 20% for T5 to taste). Long story short? I remain sceptical, even AP-IV-Trink-AM spam isn't impressive any more. Going full frost and pulling out pet, then IV-Icon-Managem(serpent-coil braid)-frostbolt spam is producing massive burst, more than AP/IV/Trink/AM. Not to mention full frost has a 6:40 coldsnap, making 2*snap a definite possibility. For bosses that last ~9m, that's up to 6 IV and 5WE. Much much more than IV-Fire's 3 or arcane-frost's 3/4.

Note time-scale:
Time Events
0:00 WE1,IV1, Coldsnap1
0:20 IV2
0:45 WE2
3:20 IV3
3:45 WE3
6:20 IV4
6:45 WE4, Coldsnap2, IV5
7:30 WE5
9:45 IV6

Granted, not many encounters last 10m, but damn will frost be good come 2.3.1.

http://wowwebstats.com/t3gsllrbbbfwq?s=254-526&a=2 One of our Teron kills and I have no tier6... Even so looking at our mages DPS as arcane, frost, fire, arc/frost, deep frost, you name it we've tried most things, nothing has been neither as consistent or high as fire (except gimmicky 2.2arcane and AB spam 2part t5).

I've been looking forward to testing a IV Firespec buuuuut with the coldsnap changes etc it actually looks like a deep frost miiiiight be the thing to be.

I've been 40/0/21 and now 10/48/3 - and I'm really struggling to convert my mana to damage as fire. I find that I just can't blow my mana as hard as I could with the arcane/frost build.

I don't have mana problems - our fights are short enough that gems + pots + evocate covers it easily (and I only just got SCB tonight).

Now, I'm sure that I must be doing something wrong.

Or, is it that the relative movement requirements in fights in SSC/TK/HS/BT mean that the ability to move around and "burst dps" from the arcane/frost build is superior.

Is the crossover point for fire a longer fight ? It certainly looks like I slowly start to pull back the arcane/frost mages over a longer fight (like 8+minutes) but by then - they've blown their mana twice over and I'm 100k damage behind.

(Yes I understand +hit, yes I know that frost has a phantom +3%)

What else am I missing ? I'm pretty mystified really.

Can you explain this? Has Frost a 6% Hit Chance?

Thanks

Kelmain

Kelmain: Check http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18441-m...tional_thread/

Quote:
"IX: Currently Observed Bugs
(Last updated 11/21/08)
- Frostbolt gains an additional 1% hit per a point in Elemental Precision."

Frostbolt is benefiting from elemental precision in it's pre-BC state of +6% hit.

Pewsey: It's hard to say at this level; While I appreciate the input of the more advanced mages claiming fire to be the shizzle, I can't say that I'm trailing behind the fires, quite the contrary. We're on Kael at the moment and I'm fully aware that my vision of frost being competitive with fire may be tainted by the not-so-highend content, but it's generally a close call either way, perhaps nudging closer to frost than fire in my experience.

I'd rather not get into the usual bullet-point "but bolt is 2.5sec thus gets cancelled less" and "I can freeze the murlocks if the pala gets watery graved" malarkey. It's so close, even in TC terms, that one movement too many, one lagspike more, and you're at the bottom of the pile.

I am currently struggling with this (although we are casual and not where you are endgame- just got vashj to 3% last night) - I went from deep arcane back to deep fire, and I went from pot/gem popping madness to leaving half my mana bar on the table. On many fights with a shadow priest, I don't even have to evocate. I am almost to the point where I think I would better serve the raid letting a healer take my spot in the shadow priests group.

I wish there was a way to dump my mana better, and I KNOW I could with arcane, but I really prefer fire and just wish I knew a way to do better damage. With molten fury, it makes no sense to spam AB at the end (especially with no arcane points talented), but I feel like I am leaving a lot on the table.

I really don't know what to do.

BTW, to all those saying that Arcane is dead as of 2.3... Check my WWS two posts up, and look at Kavan. Then look at the previous WWS logs for my guild. Kavan is 61/0/0, I believe, and has been for a long time. In every single night of raiding, you'll see Kavan 1st on the meters. And no, he doesn't outgear the rest of us. Someone should figure out how he does it.

Stop making "___ is good because ____ got number ___ in our raid last night" posts.

Excuse me, but I'd think that a consistent, months long record of exceptional damage, continued after the patch that supposedly would kill it, including WWSs showing the exact performance would be worth something.

Arcane is fine at the tier 5 level. You have 2 key fights that are very burn centric (Vash and Kael) and you have a severe lack of hit on your gear. Arcane is reasonably valid at this level, but it still requires a ton of mana potions, a tide shaman, and a shadow priest. Arcane is also going to shine on a fight like Kael'thas because your AoE is better. When you reach the tier 6 level it is indisputable that fire or frost are both significantly better than arcane. To echo many many other mages in this thread, at the tier 6 level and beyond arcane is dead.

Funnily enough, it's been months that people ask the same questions why their dps is low and all, but its as-if everyone forgot that the biggest factor in terms of dps is actually maximising dps time. This will have a far far deeper impact on one' dps than most theorycraft or gearswap you can do.

Pointing out an arcane mage topping meters consistently on one fight only indicates, to me, one of 2 things:

1- the spec is better - the fight is better suited for arcane spec (and/or, up to the wipes)
2- the player is better - whichever mage tops meter plays more aggressively

If you attempt to compare 2 specs, then you can't really compare 2 players unless you know for a fact both play perfectly. Playing perfectly is not something common. I can pick up almost any given one of my fight and there's always a minor thing I know I could have done better. Usually I only know this right after the boss dies and notice I mistimed my cooldowns (common example: I often flamecap/combustion/trinket on the pull during teron. if we have > 25k rdps then my cooldowns won't come back up in time. then again our shamans seem to like popping bloodlust at random intervals). There is a ridiculous amount of minor optimisation one can do to max dps that have nothing to do with the spec. Small things like minimizing movement on gurgtogg. Or trying to move exclusively for 1.5s when fireblast is up. Minimizing movement on gurgtogg can total up, for example, a gain of 3 seconds of dps time. 3 seconds is enough to give you something like 20-30 extra dps (warning: I did not do any math to come with this number).

This is also why I somewhat enjoy teron - player skill is eliminated from the parses. All that remains is 1- who begins the earliest to dps 2- better 'stopcasting' (ie: pre-push your cast key and release it once you hit the red bar rather than the intuitive press on red bar. you would be surprised to see how much time you gain doing that simple change). However, like any fight, it will cater to one build or another. With this said, it does favor firespec, and greatly hurts frost, unless you consider 40/0/21+2pct4 a spec and that you have a deep frost/WC mage.

Now with all this said, there is no way to know whether or not looking at one parse if it is the spec or the player that explains the performance. If it is the player that explains a good performance, then that means that player could have had better dps with a better spec. We cannot know looking only at the parse. If the performance is good due to the spec, then every mage of said spec should have good dps (close together - assuming they have the same skills, which you will rarely see).

Why is it that lots of people seem to assume that a mage topping meters is due to his spec and not his 'skills'?

Astrylian, the reason why Nurru is criticizing your post is because damage meters and WWS are all relative to a guild, therefore they don't constitute as proof of anything. Is Kavan #1 because arcane is good, or is he #1 because everyone else sucks? Most often, it's the latter reason; this is not even mentioning any possible raid stacking issues (COS but no COE, for example.)

It's safer to say, arcane is doable at the T5 level with many drawbacks (most importantly, requirement of a good shadowpriest, and AB ramp-up time), but otherwise deep fire is the current king.

Edit: Manly's eloquence > mine.

Come on guys. I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but I'm not some run-of-the-mill noob coming in here. It's not one fight, it's *every* fight in our tier (SSC, TK, ZA), and I completely understand the point that it could be that everyone sucks compared to him, which is why I said to look at all of our WWS logs. This isn't baseless hearsay and circumstantial evidence. I said that he's managing to pull it off, and here's the mountain of WWS parses to document it, and someone should figure out how he's doing it.


Anyway, this wasn't my reason for posting here; I'm looking for help with optimizing Raena's performance. So far I get that she needs to maximize her dps time. It's currently decent, but not great, it looks like. However, looking at actual dps while she's dpsing, she's the lowest of the mages, significantly, even lower than the guy who was undergeared to start with, and just had his account hacked and just got all his gear back yesterday, completely unenchanted and no gems. Is she not chaining her frostbolts together fast enough? Does she need to use her water elemental at different times, or more often? Or should she be chugging destro pots? Was she using the wrong spells at any time? Anything you guys can offer to assist, I'd really appreciate.

I doubt too many shamans into T6 are still going to be using 2 piece T4, considering how weak the gear is in stats and itemization. I know once I got to 4 piece T5 that I'd never want to use 2 piece T4 again.

Before I continue trying to solve my severe hit-cap issues, can I get a quick confirmation that this is still the case on PTR?

Astrylian, on that fight you linked, she has 68k AE damage and 20k Blizzard damage. The other two mages have 166k AE damage/10k flamestrike damage and 121k AE damage/9k flamestrike damage respectively. She's just not AEing enough. If your strat in phase 2 calls for AE and you gather the weapons correctly, the people AEing would demolish the dps of people using mostly single target. I've looked into the other attempts and she just doesn't AE enough compared to the other mages.

And yes, mages can easily top the meters if you have rogues that can't break 1k dps and hunters that can't break 800. 1200+ dps from those classes on Kael with T5 gear is easily obtained. Skill and just plain aggressive play makes up for a lot of damage difference, especially in fights with lots of moving and multiple targets. I remember doubling the damage output and dps of similarly specced and geared mages in my guild on fights like Lurker and Vashj (especially on the stage 2 portion).