Meditation depends mostly on whether you care about the rather paltry regen it gives and whether you're plentiful on the spirit gear (which amazingly, all T6 level gear seems to be). Arcane Impact is indeed a wise choice, I'd even argue for Magic Absorption in cases with low SP availability.

Ultimately, your spec will depend on how much you need Imp Blizz. 2 points spent in the 6 total you can spec it up with are mandatory to make tier selection (unless you go for imp. Nova) and then the question really becomes "do you need more AoE CC, or do you need more AoE power?".

As a curious side note, while I'm impressed I gained a stalker I'm even more impressed he didn't realize I wasn't even referring to him. With four-five infractions in the previous page and a multitude of people banging the "I pwn, therefore my spec is bettar" drum I only vocalized a generic demand for improved standard of posting.

The autority in this forum do one hell of a job at keeping the playing field level, you only need to look at the banhammer to realize: Each one every day must see dozens of reports and have to act on anything up to five accounts. Forcing them to work overtime simply because certain posters are under the impression this is like a gray version of forums.wow-europe.com and that threatening, chest-beating and general pointing to their armory mixed with "lol get 2100 Arena before you post noob" attitude is selfish and ruins the experience for everyone.

Keep EJ Tidy. Read The Rules.

For those concerned about 40/0/21: another link you may want to look at , if you did not already is Man Out of Time - Theorycraft-o-Matic
It's an awesome tool for a quick comparison of talent speccs and has made my life a lot easier.

There is something funny about your sim Vontre. I turn on Judgement of Wisdom, and DPS from all of the arcane specs and fire goes down.

I've just used Vontre's simulator (really nice stuff) and for arcane specs it isn't good I must say, but maybe in the near future we'll have some of that fixed.

Also seems that wherever the word "Arcane" appears it irritates many "posters" so coming here to get info about anything that has arcane points in the build will end up being shooed away.

As Fandoth said the casting is very erratic on 40+ points in the arcane tree (it took me about 1 month to accommodate with the 30% meditation in 2.3) so it takes time if you want to get "the results" that the "different" people get. As I'm trying to see the dps and stuff I don't know if the Arcane Blast cycles can really be modeled since I get the same dps and dmg live as in the spreadsheet, even though it's not a patchwerk scenario standing still and dpsing 100% of the time and I'm casting more ABs than the cycle pointed by the spreadsheet .


From what I've experimented the past week, I found out that a powerful mana regen tool that arcane has is magic absoption talent (since you will have at least 12k mana if 40+ points will be used in arcane). Only had tried it at Vashj but will do more this week. So it's a good talent because most hits that a mage will receive will be ranged magic hits, but that isn't the thing, the thing is that the magic dmg most bosses have is binary and +68 to all resists (without gimping dmg) together with the prismatic cloak talent (4% reduction) will get you to somewhere at 18% magic dmg reduction (I may be faulty in calculating +68 resist being 14% reduction) and that means you will fully resist 18% of the forked lightning hits from vashj (more if you'll be tanking the strider). I personally got from 3k to 9k mana in the vashj fights and I was never kiteing the strider.

At Al'ar I've experienced the same, that is many times resisting the 1 flame buffet he casts before the tank gets back near him after a flame quill, Void Reaver's Arcane Orbs (being hit by an orb is not viable, but pointed this just for reference), Solarian's Arcane Missiles and Light of the Astromancer.

Also from what I've seen the magic dmg received that isn't binary is in the range of 0-1.5k and the dmg that is higher than 1.5k is binary thus making that talent really nice for mana returns.

I don't know if is adequate to post here this kind of info but since it would be useful for mages, I thought this would be good. So if anyone knows more about this can confirm it since I've just recently really thought about that talent and how will it affect a mage (because of the nice mana returns I've started to look at lately), and also at this point don't know if you can collect this kind of information from WWS .

EDIT:68 resist from magic absorption talent (10), improved mark of the wild (33), cloak enchant (7), mage armor (18).

Selun you missinterpret. Said "posters" don't shoo away people getting info on arcane. Said posters have an inherent hatred for posts in Theorycraft threads which profess 0 theorycraft, "I didn't do the maths but" and hearsay combined with circumstancial evidence for mitigation of the terrible image arcane has in our impression.

Until someone turns up with a parsing -proving- arcane to truly be competitive all this commotion is speculation; I'd like all the arcane mages to stop going on ad nauseum with theories about how all sorts of things make them seem worse than how they allegedly are, but untill I see a WWS proving it, there's no merit in the statements.

As for Magic Absorbtion, I've run it in the past; while I dumped it long before we got to Vashj I can't say I was taken aback by it's effect. It very well might provide substantial amounts of mana in certain fights, particularly for uber-size arcane mana pools. Perhaps the arcane exponents have not looked deeply enough into exploiting it's AB-feeding potential.

One of the things I'm truly hoping for with all my heart is for WotLK to make it a modular talent and grant level/2 or level/3 all resist rather than the pathetic flat +10. I'd find it hard to justify not getting if it was 35 all resist.

Just a note about Magic Absorption, Prismatic Cloak will have no effect whatsoever on it as it just reduces the value all damage taken by 4%, and has nothing to do with whether it hits or not.

No, prismatic cloak is just a 0.96 modifier to all damage taken, regardless of type. It's completly unrelated to resist mechanics.

edit (proof): It works identically to defensive stance for warriors, see effects on Defensive Stance Passive - Spells - World of Warcraft and Prismatic Cloak - Spells - World of Warcraft .

No Selun, you are misunderstanding.

Prismatic Cloak reduces all damage by 4%. This is not added to any resists, or to your armour value. Whatever hit you take, 4% of it is subtracted as it hits you : so a 1000 point fireball would only hit you for 960 damage. THEN you apply the effects of resists.

Also, due to the way resists work, unless the spell being cast is a binary spell, Magic Absorbtion won't work - as unless you have 300+ resists, you won't be fully resisting anything. You'll be getting plenty of partial resists, but they don't count for Magic Absorbtion. Off the top of my head, the only spell effects that are common enough to count AND where you wear enough resists to actually be resisting them would be Anetherons Carrion Swarm, Kaz'Rogals Mana Drain and Azgalors Silence.

Magic Absorption returns mana on every full resist

Prismatic cloak reduces all damage taken

There is absolutely no relation between the 2.

Actually, with 200% crit damage (for easier computation), you only need 33% crit for your crit damage to equal your non crit damage on paper. That said, I prefer deep frost myself. Arc/frost just loses too much damage if your winter's chill bitch dies, is benched, doesn't show up, gets effectively cc'd by mob or just plain respecs.

I might add Hex Lord Malacrass to that list because of his periodic 0.5s cast 20x Spirit Bolt volley (Shadow damage). Hex Lord is also a fight that benefits greatly from Dampen Magic. I'm sure most folks know this, but figured it's sweet information if you don't.

Just out of curiosity anyone know the difference in DPS between Bracers of Nimble Thought and Cuffs of Devastation? For mage DPS.
Thanks

Asking for DPS difference between items is pointless; items DPS generation is dependent on everything including buffs, spec, spell, target, stats, debuffs, mama's pie etc etc.

If you have questions direct them to "Mage: Help Me Please" and not to Sweet Info. As for the DPS, get an elementary theorycraft system like Lhivera's, put in your stats with either bracer and see.

Don't be lazy.

Acording to my calculations Bracers of Nimble Thought is about 10 dps better than Cuffs of Devesation for me. Maxdps.com supports those calculations.(Hitcapped, ~38% crit, ~1300 spelldmg)

maxdps.com seems to use wierd gemming (at least when I tried it), which makes it rather bad. Also it does its own calculations and doesn't allow you to "force" stat values like lootzor does (and lootzor ALSO messes up the gem choices so it's not really a viable alternatiev).
I would think that by now they would make lootzor able to allow you to force/change certain gems in items and set values for haste and meta gems, or at least have some other web-tool of this sort pop up that would allow all of these... For now I just copy the stats of all the items I might ever consider to the appropriate class spreadsheet and make them calculate the value of each item based on how the spreadsheet evaluates these stats. Because not only I know maxdps.com has some flaws (plus whatever flaws i don't know it has), and on a spreadsheet I can actually see the calculations and verify their correctness.

No way, dampen magic is what you want for hex lord. Get it on the whole raid (except maybe the tank) to significantly reduce shadow bolt damage because it happens in many small hits.

Wasn't his volley changed shortly after it went live to be unaffected by dampen?

That would probably explain why AMP is the usefull buff in this fight and not dampen. Overall I think we all know what would be best in either case, it's just a matter of how the fight actually works.

When considering amp/dampen, remember some abilities are simply unaffected by them (and I think there are cases where an ability is not affected by one but is affected by the other, although that could use verifying).

Additionally, just plugging the two items into Lhivera's theorycraft won't help when one item has +hit and the other does not. In fact, any time you change two items you may affect the balance of several other item choices in your gear. I eventually just wrote a matlab script to do a brute force comparison of all of my available items to let me see the best combinations of my gear.

There's an extremely beta version of it Here, but it's fairly user unfriendly at the moment and only supports the cookie cutter frost/fire specs*. There will be updates to it eventually, but it may still be useful now for anyone who has a general knowledge of matlab** and is willing to take time to figure out my horrible syntax choices.

(Incoming shameless plug) Lhivera has put his seal of approval on the project, and will be hosting the final version once I'm happy with the user-friendliness of everything. He's also mentioned a script he's writing to help pull in data from the armory for it.

Notes:
* - I don't acknowledge Incinerate's 0.2% dps increase as a valid use of two talent points, so the current version of the software doesn't include it in its Scorch calculations. (The final version will)
** - The program runs in Matlab, but it's being developed with Freemat and Openoffice so that anyone can use it regardless of platform or financial status (legal copies of Matlab run for over a thousand dollars). The readme explains the tweak to make the code work in Matlab, but I'm too lazy to figure out why Excel breaks the system. Just use Openoffice Calc for that part of the setup.

This. Spirit bolts have been unaffected by dampen/amplify for a few months now.
Was changed either at the end of the PTR, or at one of the first rounds of changes/fixes after it went live.

I'm pretty sure any ability I've seen so far is either affected by both or by none of dampen/amplify. But nothing is impossible.
There are a lot of abilities that are unaffected, for example Naj'entus 8.5k bubble (amplify tank/melee/squishies), Netherspite's abilities, Sharaz' Vile Beam (FA is affected though, every tick is amplified by 120, or 30 since most hits are 75% resists).

But that's going off-topic, there is an thread for amplify/dampen somewhere

I'm not low on hit; it's just what I happened to log out with that day. I have several sets of gear (don't we all?). In my "Raid Fire" set I believe I have 163 hit, over 1100 fire damage, and around 35% fire crit. In my "I'm going to blow trash mobs up" set, I have maxed out my fire dmg at 1151 (self buffed only) and have around 37.5% fire crit.

I also logged out in my haste gear for the first time earlier in the week so wowjutsu would pick up my loot and give us credit for a boss downing or two.

My raid fire gear is pretty damn good; it's all SSC/TK level epics with 1-2 BT/Hyjal level items.


We are currently (newly) 5/5 Hyjal and working on the very fights you mentioned in BT. Improved Amp Magic has become particularly helpful on Archimonde, and it was kind of fun to read some of the other threads I found here about amp on that fight as we took shots on him, use it on the fight, and get our first kill shortly thereafter.

That aside; I have spent the last week rocking a 2/48/11 fire spec as opposed to the 50/0/11 arcane spec I'd previously been using (where I actually did have magic attunement). My dps took a noticible hit. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting. This seemed to be the results of a number of things:

1) Hyjal trash AoE: did more dmg (2709dps vs. 2380dps) using arcane explosion spam as arcane than using AE + BW as fire. Do I need to stop using AE and start doing Flamestrike? I've always had a hard time justifying Flamestrike, too many times the damn mobs have moved by the time you get the cast off. Maybe I need to rethink this?

WWS Parse link - Arcane spec: WWS Loading...
WWS Parse link - Fire spec: Wow Web Stats

2) Shorter boss fights: I had plenty of mana left on most of the boss fights as fire and still did not do as much dmg as I do in an arcane spec (roughly to the tune of 50-100 dps on boss fights), . It made me feel like I could have been doing more dmg with a more intense AB spam (read: squeezing more ABs into a typical 4xAB, AM, Scorch rotation). Interestingly enough we killed bosses a lot faster as a group when I was fire (probably a side effect of knowing the encounters better). Most fights are lasting less than 4 minutes at this point, which IMHO would fully support something more like a solid 6xAB spam followed by the regular rotation.

Anyways, I would love some feedback because I have the sneaking suspicion I am connecting the wrong dots to end up deducing that arcane is still better dmg.

@Karlizeth:

The reason why you saw a decrease in DPS is probably because of incorrect cooldown management. It seems like you were popping your cooldowns whenever they were up. For example on Rage Winterchill, you popped your icy veins immediately and then your trinket about 15 seconds after icy veins have already expired. You used your destruction potion before the bloodlust and you did not sync it with your combustion. The only way for fire mages to compete against other DPS classes is by stacking the cooldowns available to us and taking advantage of molten fury. That's the challenge of the fire spec: proper cooldown usage and predicting when you will get to execute range. For a fight like Rage that lasts about 3-3.5 minutes, you only have time to use combustion and icy veins once and your 2min trinket twice. Ideally, you should pop your 2minute trinket early on and refrain from mana pot/mana gem use. Use your flame cap CD a few seconds before bloodlust is used, to take advantage of the full duration. Use your Icy Veins/Combustion/Trinket/Destruction potion once the boss reaches 20%, NOT when bloodlust is first used. By properly stacking your cooldowns, you should be able to significantly increase your DPS.