Ah I think I was typing my response when you edited your comment so I missed it, I apologize. I was assuming 3000 and 3100 were average damages not also possible crits because otherwise none of these arguements would make sense. And my arguement was not 'circular' the numbers are the numbers. I only used them in context that would make sense i.e. boss encounters not short 3 cast fights. If you are going to consider 3 cast fights why not say crit is way better because theres a bigger chance to do more damage in those 3 spells.
I notice you only used your three minute cooldowns (IV and AP) once, and your two minute cooldown (trinket) twice during a six minute fight - technically you would have had time for at least two, under optimal conditions three stacked activations and at least another use of IV with Cold Snap.
As for your other questions, Magegraf/Rawr will help you with those - a quick check with Magegraf shows arcane spec well ahead if you can count on a shadow priest and still slightly ahead if you can't, so fire wouldn't help you much, and frost is even more behind. Get Rawr and import your character, then make different gemmings for your gear to see whether Int/Spi gems are really helping your arcane setup, and under what assumptions which armor is better (try 2-3 various fight lengths and the different levels of external mana regen like shaman totems, shadow priest or JoW).
You want to regem in either case: Get rid of your crit gems and gem for the correct hit cap, right now you seem to be hit capped for fire, but with your racial frostbolt only needs 114 spell hit rating after 3/3 in Elemental Precision, and Arcane Blast 64 after 5/5 in Arcane Focus (or also 114 after 3/5).
Last edited by Lord Loom : 07/26/08 at 6:13 AM.
Everyone always coming to Zathras with problems. Great responsibilities. But Zathras does not mind. Zathras trained in crisis management.
Fureur:
as 40/21 hope you are spamming just AB and just use FB to regain mana when you get low. You should Gem all yellow slots with Int and all Blue slots with Spirit. Mage Armor is the best armor to use. If you have 2pc T5 bonus fire/frost wont get close to your dmg if you get a big mana pool and your mana regen is high. For Arcane you need 76+hit which is very easy to obtain with out gemming for it. Always try to get in a group with Spriest and a Sham.
You should Gem all yellow slots with Int and all Blue slots with Spirit. Mage Armor is the best armor to use.
These statements don't necessarily hold true for everyone - which is why I think arcane mages like Fureur should evaluate their gear individually (the tools are mentioned and linked all over the place here), as group support and fight length really have a big influence on optional gemming.
Everyone always coming to Zathras with problems. Great responsibilities. But Zathras does not mind. Zathras trained in crisis management.
Ok, I have been frost for quite a while now and been using my t5 set all the time, but since ive gotten some good black temple loot I feel its time to respec fire. The aim for me is 5/5 mh and 8/9 bt for now and I wont be seeing sunwell too soon.
My armory is showing my pve raidset with the only difference that I will replace the gladiator blade with the badge blade.
The thing is I have 2 item slots that I am quite unsure of atm.
I do need hit, if I dont get it from items I will have to spend gem slots on it.
I have the hood of hexing and the t5 head, I am unsure how the 31 hitrate and 2 extra sockets weight up against the meta gem.
Next troublesome choice is the second trinket I will use the hex head as first trinket, as second I have like all available trinkets except illidans skull, I am kinda thinking of the ssc mage trinket, since I need the hit and crit is slightly better for a firemage as for frost. I also have the quagmiran eye, the blessing card and the icon of silver crecent.
Some backup would be highly appreciated because some things are a bit different for fire as for frost.
With all the spellhit you're lacking the [Hood of Hexing] does better for fire spec than your T5 helm (the meta gem also keeps you from purely gemming for damage, haste or hit), and [Serpent-Coil Braid] is also helping, but especially the latter can and will change as you add spellhit in other places. The badge dagger might only be a negligible upgrade over your spellblade due to the hit rating the spellblade has, at least right now.
Other than the different hit-cap from the EP bug, gearing for fire isn't much different than for frost: Crit is something you pick up on gear that's just "better", but you don't specifically gem/gear for it in either spec. You should probably use a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet-like application to deal with gear questions in detail, but for a start you want to get some [Veiled Pyrestone] for your red and yellow slots. Spell hit rating is just too cheap to ignore.
Everyone always coming to Zathras with problems. Great responsibilities. But Zathras does not mind. Zathras trained in crisis management.
These statements don't necessarily hold true for everyone - which is why I think arcane mages like Fureur should evaluate their gear individually (the tools are mentioned and linked all over the place here), as group support and fight length really have a big influence on optional gemming.
I had 15k mana and well over 750MP/5 while casting with a Spriest and Ele Sham and I still needed more mana. AB spamming is only as good as the size of your mana pool. If you have to wait for the debuff to drop to keep AB spamming then your only losing dps. I mean you could put Dmg gems in your gear if you want but your also getting dmg from int. Do what you want I'm just saying the time I was a arcane mage i gemmed int/spi and I wish i had more just because i could run out of mana 1/2 threw.
I had 15k mana and well over 750MP/5 while casting with a Spriest and Ele Sham and I still needed more mana. AB spamming is only as good as the size of your mana pool. If you have to wait for the debuff to drop to keep AB spamming then your only losing dps. I mean you could put Dmg gems in your gear if you want but your also getting dmg from int. Do what you want I'm just saying the time I was a arcane mage i gemmed int/spi and I wish i had more just because i could run out of mana 1/2 threw.
As the previous poster stated, this is all situational based on the level of gear you are using. The key is to do optimal damage. Using haste/damage gems over int/spirit will prove more beneficial in BT/Sunwell level of gear. In the "Raiding as Arcane Mage post 2.4" thread Roywyn plugged in BT/Sunwell gear into Rawr and these were the results.
Sunwell gear (or: gear with a lot of haste)
1) +12 dmg ~ 11.9 DPS
2) +10 int ~ 10.4 DPS
3) +10 haste ~ 9.8 DPS
4) +10 crit ~ 8.8 DPS
5) +10 spirit ~ 6.5 DPS
6) +4 mp5 ~ 2.0 DP
Disclaimer: Roywyn posted this and I can't stress this enough: It's not a representative guideline but you should be able to figure out the optimal gemming for your character by plugging in your gear choices into Rawr.
With all the spellhit you're lacking the [Hood of Hexing] does better for fire spec than your T5 helm (the meta gem also keeps you from purely gemming for damage, haste or hit), and [Serpent-Coil Braid] is also helping, but especially the latter can and will change as you add spellhit in other places. The badge dagger might only be a negligible upgrade over your spellblade due to the hit rating the spellblade has, at least right now.
Other than the different hit-cap from the EP bug, gearing for fire isn't much different than for frost: Crit is something you pick up on gear that's just "better", but you don't specifically gem/gear for it in either spec. You should probably use a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet-like application to deal with gear questions in detail, but for a start you want to get some [Veiled Pyrestone] for your red and yellow slots. Spell hit rating is just too cheap to ignore.
Ok thank you, the reason I will change my weapon is because I want 1 frost (soulfrost) and 1 fire (sunfire) weapon.
Also I believe its better to gem pure +10 hit gems untill cap instead of +5/+6 gems because its easier to replace 1 +10 hitrate gem when you get +10 hit from items as it is to replace 2 +5/+6 gems.
Anyway thanks for your help, ill keep the za head till I get t6 and replace the trinket asap.
I posted on this thread about 1 month ago asking about being a fire mage. I have since gotten some new gear and have respecced fire. But now i have a new question. this is my armory link. The World of Warcraft Armory
I have spellfire gloves and chest in the bank that i am considering putting haste gems in and using over the current gear i have. I also have Anetheron's noose in the bank that i want to put haste gems in. the main question i have is:
How much spell damage do i need before i start stacking haste?
How much spell damage do i need before i start stacking haste?
There is no minimum level of spell damage you need before you can gem for spell haste. It's also inadvisable to 'stack' spell haste; haste is only rated equivalent to damage in rare cases. [Reckless Pyrestone] is best used in a yellow slot to pick up a damage socket bonus, provided you are already hit capped. As with any equipment question, plug it into Rawr.
Praetorian: I once pointed out that the proper Roman numeral for 500 was D, so they should really rename themselves <Clan DIX>. That didn't go over too well. Sebudai: Imagine a combination of Life Grip, Death Grip, Disengage, Typhoon, and Thunderstorm. It would be like the Large Hadron Collider of WoW.
^^^ Well actually, haste is more likely to work out to be very close to spell damage, sometimes better, sometimes worse, at most itemizations. See my prior post for the math and some examples. See RAWR for your own itemization.
"stacking haste" beyond things like rekless pyrestone and choosing equipment with more haste but similar haste+spell damage itemization is not normally done to improve DPS radically, but rather to improve gameplay in interrupt-driven scenarios while retaining similar DPS.
In looking at the "Fire Vulnerability" debuff on bosses on WWS reports, does this number increase every time the debuff is applied (ie: each time scorch is used) or only to a max stack (thus I'd want to see the number 5 here, no more no less) or each time a new stack begins (thus 4 would mean 4 new stacks had to be started)? Trying to improve mage DPS as best we can, since mages are uh.. the least good.
Opinion is a medium between knowledge and ignorance.
I have gem'ed most items with int/spi gems because we don't have an active spriest or elemental shaman in our raid group at the moment and so I am trying to get every little bit of regen I can grab. However, Rawr suggests that using pure +dmg gems is better dps for me (1-3 dps per item).
I am mainly raiding entry T6 content (3/5 MH and 2/9 MH) and have currently no access to T5 head/chest (we kill everything in T5 except Vashj and Kael).
So, the question is: should I go with my gut feeling and stick int/spi until we have support casters sorted in the raid group or should I take Rawr's suggestions as the only truth and regem?
[10:05:49] <Nat> how do u know if a unicorn is a virgin?
In looking at the "Fire Vulnerability" debuff on bosses on WWS reports, does this number increase every time the debuff is applied (ie: each time scorch is used) or only to a max stack (thus I'd want to see the number 5 here, no more no less) or each time a new stack begins (thus 4 would mean 4 new stacks had to be started)? Trying to improve mage DPS as best we can, since mages are uh.. the least good.
I'm fairly certain that you "want to see the number 5 here, no more no less", but I checked our last Brut kill and WWS showed only 4 :S
Originally Posted by Caryna
So, the question is: should I go with my gut feeling and stick int/spi until we have support casters sorted in the raid group or should I take Rawr's suggestions as the only truth and regem?
Basically if Rawr is telling you spelldamage gems are better then they are, provided the fight is exactly the same as you've entered it in Rawr. Often people first using Rawr don't realise that it assumes heroism, a 175mp5 spriest and exactly 300 seconds fight, while it doesn't default to having mark of the wild nor kings. So make sure you fill in everything properly. A good suggestion is to set up several Rawr characters each with different parameters and see what would give you the best benefits. Or perhaps your guild is struggling on a particular boss and you want to max your dps on that one. Remember that the choice between intellect gems and other gems depends heavily on the fight length. Try filling in some different values for that and see how the relative value of int gems changes.
The whole reason for this discussion is that hastes benefits will become more prevalent the longer an encounter progresses. Im sorry you cant argue with that, its simple math. Stop thinking of damage as a linear function and think of it as a step function and you will see what I mean.
If it's such simple math, write a proof, don't prove by handwaiving. I'm very much aware of damage being a step function, I think it being a step function causes quite some confusion amongst people that aren't very well trained in maths. (Even the more pronounced theorycrafters on this forum come up with fallacies often enough.)
I think you didn't fully comprehend what I meant with "But since the length of a fight modulo cast time is uniformly random distributed" in my post a page or two back, because if you did you wouldn't still be arguing the same point.
I'm willing to give a detailed explanation if you're interested, but it'll take me some time to write that all up. Guess I could even wrap it up nicely so it can be put up in one of the mage FAQ's around here.
Damage as a step function also affects crit and spell damage.
Haste is not special.
That's the point he seems to be missing.
Fights have three components:
1. Time
2. Damage dealt
3. Monster hitpoints
You can derive any of these from the other two, because in the end damage dealth >= hitpoints, and anything > hitpoints is wasted. For monsters that heal, time and hitpoints become dependent rather than independent variables. For fights with pushback/movement phases, damage dealth becomes a time dependent variable (you do little or no damage in certain fight phases, so whether you end slightly before or slightly after a phase is a big deal)
Assuming a single spell rotation, damage dealt and time spent is based on damage/cast, which is a step function.
But whether small changes in spell damage, crit or haste matter in a given fight have to do with how those steps land on the hitpoint total.
If you think of a "step" in two dimensions, time is "wide" and damage is "tall"
Crit causes some of your "Steps" to be taller more frequently than not having crit.
Spell damage causes all of your "steps" to be taller
Haste makes your "steps" narrower, without influencing how tall the steps are.
Steps getting "Taller" may result in fewer total steps, reducing time. Crit is more random than
spell damage, but sometimes that's a benefit and sometimes it's overkill.
Steps being "narrower" lets you get in more steps in the same amount of time.
EITHER can cause a nice breakpoint with monster health, or EITHER can waste a lot of damage in overkill and lose a lot of the benefit. (smaller, more frequent "steps" tend to have less overkill issues than individual big "steps" but the differences in a single point of rating are so slight as to make that effect insignificant)
Which is why we take the monster health out of the equation when comparing gear, because it's essentially random where the tail end of the mob health is compared to when the steps land. This is especially true as the spell damage itself is random, and the variance is large enough that the impact of small amounts of haste or spell damage are tiny compared to random fluctuations.
What is left to compare is DPS - if you average out all the "extra height" and "narrower steps" and divide by a fixed amount of time, which does more absolute damage? All three contribute. Over MANY casts, however, you'll get better performance with higher DPS, no matter how you got there. For an individual fight, the randomness of the spells, the randomness of crits, of the 1% resist rate and pushback/movement will matter more than any small changes in your gear. The reason Magegraf and RAWR have fight durations as an input is that cooldown management and debuff stacking can greatly influence individual fight DPS (a fight that starts and ends with all cooldowns blown will show higher DPS than one with the second cooldown period not entered at all, etc)
Basically, i was toying with this spec with magegraf, and it consistently shows me a 30-50 dps difference between 0/40/21 and 2/48/11, in favour of the latter.
Thing is, i don't understand where this difference is coming from. If someone broke it down for me, it would be helpful.
I am thinking about this 0/40/21 spec - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Compared to normal fire/veins, it loses 2% crit of dps, a bunch of mana talents and threat reduction on arcane.
In return, it gains Cold Snap and some non-raid utilities in form of shatter and stronger Ice Lance.
No matter how much i think, i can't see why would a 2nd Icy Veins in MF range result in less dps than 2% crit.
I ran magegraf tests on 5 min fights with resto shaman and 200 mp5 shadow priest as support.
I think the real question is, why drop 2% crit instead of (the far inferior) incineration?
It's called Bloodlust, not Heroism. What kind of pansy name is Heroism, anyway?
<Bad> Dragonmaw US www.damnwesuck.com
12/13 [25] Heroic - Recruiting exceptional players.
I think the real question is, why drop 2% crit instead of (the far inferior) incineration?
You need to take the first point in incineration to fulfill the 15pt requirement of imp.scorch. The only alternatives at this point are imp.fireblast, imp. flamestrike, pyroblast and impact. Horribe as it is, incinerate is still better for pve dps than all of these.
You need to take the 2nd point in incineration to fulfull the 20pt requirement for Critical Mass. Alternatively, you can put that point into MoE, but i am not at a stage of evaluating the mana issues of this spec yet.
I guess the real question is - what spec exactly is used in magegraf as 0/40/21.
I think the real question is, why drop 2% crit instead of (the far inferior) incineration?
You should actually try the things you recommend and figure out why they don't work.
2/48/11 is marginally better 0/40/21 exactly because you have to give up 2% crit to gain Cold Snap. An additional IV is nice, but the actual damage added is less than what the additional 2% crit in Fire would give you.
0/40/21 has a place in several fights where a second Ice Block is more important than a small damage loss.
I don't know what 0/40/21 spec Magegraph uses, but the only choice you actually have is swapping one point from PWF to Pyromaniac, which makes nearly no difference.
Every mage tool or sheet has 0/40/21 very slightly below 2/48/11, because the 2 points you drop from DPS talents are worth more than Cold Snapped IV.
You should actually try the things you recommend and figure out why they don't work.
2/48/11 is marginally better 0/40/21 exactly because you have to give up 2% crit to gain Cold Snap. An additional IV is nice, but the actual damage added is less than what the additional 2% crit in Fire would give you.
0/40/21 has a place in several fights where a second Ice Block is more important than a small damage loss.
I don't know what 0/40/21 spec Magegraph uses, but the only choice you actually have is swapping one point from PWF to Pyromaniac, which makes nearly no difference.
Every mage tool or sheet has 0/40/21 very slightly below 2/48/11, because the 2 points you drop from DPS talents are worth more than Cold Snapped IV
Hmmm, cold snapped IV is basically worth 2 extra fireballs in Molten Fury range in most scenarios.
By the crudest of calculations, in order for 2% extra crit to outscale 2 extra fireballs in MF range, you need to fire ~120 fireballs.
That's about how much our mages normally fire on a fight, comparable in duration to Brutallius hmmm.
Okay, i think i got it, thanks.
P.S: incidentally, it seems the spec in magegraf contains exactly 0 points in Playing with Fire, opting for MoE and Pyromaniac instead. Which is fair enough.
You need to take the first point in incineration to fulfill the 15pt requirement of imp.scorch. The only alternatives at this point are imp.fireblast, imp. flamestrike, pyroblast and impact. Horribe as it is, incinerate is still better for pve dps than all of these.
You need to take the 2nd point in incineration to fulfull the 20pt requirement for Critical Mass. Alternatively, you can put that point into MoE, but i am not at a stage of evaluating the mana issues of this spec yet.
I guess the real question is - what spec exactly is used in magegraf as 0/40/21.
>< sorry, beta trees got my head all kinds of messed up so i didnt even know what i was talking about.
Sort of unrelated, but could anyone confirm whether frostbolt is still getting 6% hit from elemental precision, or if it's been fixed down to 3?
Last edited by mako : 08/02/08 at 1:40 AM.
It's called Bloodlust, not Heroism. What kind of pansy name is Heroism, anyway?
<Bad> Dragonmaw US www.damnwesuck.com
12/13 [25] Heroic - Recruiting exceptional players.
Ok I'm really confused I have been reading about different build several days and can't for my life say what build my gear are good enough for. Any tips and comments are most welcome!!
My guild are on a more relaxed schedule right now and I though I should use that time to try and see if I can find a build that really suite my current gear.
I have been playing 2/48/11 for a long time and other mages in my guild use the 40/0/21 spec and we are very close dps/dmg wise.
I was thinking about if the 40/0/21 would increase my dps/dmg output or just be a pain concerning my mana pool and low crit.
You can see my stats and such in the armory see this link Maqisad
Basic I got 1233 spell dmg arcane/fire, 154 spell hit and 20,38% spell crit.
I have been reading maybe to much so now I'm just confused if 2/48/11 is really the build for me right now or if I should try an arcane build now that I got two T5 (shoulder and gloves).
All comments and hits/tips on what I should do about my mage is welcome! And I know my gems is messed up right now, will go for hitcap if I go back to 2/48/11 and if I got what it takes to go arcane I will lower hit to 124 and go for more crit I think.
07/25/08, 10:40 PM
