Just as a rule of thumb, not to be taken as gospel. Just like Vontre made a note that +hit is worth almost 3x +crit until capped. Clearly, that is not quite as accurate for arcanofrost or arcanofire specs, who value crit higher (of course +hit would still be worth more until capped, but it changes the relative value slightly).

In any case, just make one for the 10/48/3 and 10/0/51 cookie cutter builds. This thread is meant as a reference for all players. The TC thread is for the advanced TCing about other potential specs and new tricks that pop up.

Do a table for <900 damage, with and without hit cap. Another for 900-1000, another for 1000-1100 and one for 1100-1200. If someone with less then 900 dmg uses that table, they are probably a relatively new player (or a new mage in any case) and it will point them on the right track at least (if left to their own devices, they might stack +crit over dmg or hit, for example). If they are not not min/maxed perfectly, that's not such a big deal at that level. If someone has more than 1200 dmg, they are probably at a high enough skill level to already know this info.

You can have relative values listed without a 5 dimensional table. You use one of the stats, +dmg or dps is probably best, as a baseline, and just show the others as relative values to that. Like, at XX dmg, non-hit capped, 1 haste rating will be .4 dps, 1 dmg will be .3, 1hit will be .8 etc..

It would take a little bit of effort, so I was mostly posting to see if anyone else had seen the tables that already existed, and we could just add it.

Right, I did the actual theorycraft a while back and was pretty much assuming at least 2 fire mages in my statement. However what you didn't consider is that the tail end of your damage is stronger and more powerful than your initial hits due to molten fury and fire blast. In practice pre-scorching is multiplying your execute finisher, which is considerably more powerful than an initial fireball in non-execute range.

Correct; I deliberately fudged a lot of factors. Basically it comes down to how much you'd fall behind by scorching, vs. how quickly you'll then catch up when you start the fireballs. If you're the only fire mage, stop if another scorch would keep you from casting 3 fireballs; if there are two, stop if you can't cast 2; in either case, stop on a full stack, naturally.

One of the things I find noteworthy is that it's really hard to notice the difference, if your raid isn't exactly pushing. Take the Lurker trash, for example - several identical large packs of trash. The big mobs seem to last right about at the 10-second cusp for us, but sometimes it's 9, sometimes 11. A two-second difference is hard to notice when we're chasing down techs, watching our sheep, handling occasional loot, and setting up for the next pull. And scorching first is saving us much less than that, per mob. Any time we gain from that is likely lost from bathroom breaks, not to mention the time drain that is a wipe.

It could make a difference in ZA timed runs, of course.

Is it higher dps to 2 x fball, 1 x imp fire blast [1/3], or is it only a positioning / finishing spell now, given the increases to fireball? Obviously, any spell haste that you have will make fireball spam a more convincing rotation.

For the sake of theorycraft, I've forked over the gold to clear my talents. I shall have a table of ranges and means shortly.

Arcane rotation isn't outdated. >_< Its the only way to play arcane now in patch 2.3 with AM spam dead. And it remains very competitive. In fact, that style of play gets a new meta gem and increased mana from arcane meditation so it can spam arcane blast more often. So, it was buffed as well, though not on the same level as fire or forst was buffed obviously.

But for progressing, it is competitive once you get two piece T5. and remains so until you reach probably BT and start getting four piece set bonus or other T6.

Ignoring mana cost, firebalst depends on your spell damage. You can easily see (or calculate if you want to be sure about average values) if youre fireblast is more than 1/2 a fireball and go by that. Calculating the DPM loss is more difficult and requires a speradsheet level of work, but I can guarantee you it's high and significant at any gear level.
In many fights the DPS increase probably isn't worth the positioning requirement, especially with higher gear levels.

There is still one Arcane Mage and due to getting 13% curse of shadows (the fire Mages never get CoE), he is pretty close to them in damage. It sucks that it takes 13% damage buff and wearing 2 Tier 5 to be competitive to Fire, but it works well for him.

Another note is he doesn't have to respec Frost for Illidan, although shatter and iceblock are nice tools to have.


I have parsed quite a few Frost Mages, the EP talent gives 6% hit to all frost spells (although it could be fixed anytime), I think that is worth putting up there until it is fixed, so Frost Mages don't go over 10% hit.

Once again I notice the age-old Meta or non-Meta head argument raging.

Granted, T4 & T5 have badly distributed stats. Does nobody ever wear the engineering head? It's pretty darn sweet in terms of item budget allocation.

I know engineers are a minority but I for one am not taking off the goggles (or the CSD) for a long while to come.

I have absolutly no idea why there are some people that give the new meta game less credit than it deserves.

Someone said "It's only a 1-1.5% increase in dmg". This is actually true (dependant), but I dont think the poster knows exactly how big that is.

Let's do some math around the CSD to see exactly how good it is, and why the T5 helm can beat the Cowl from VR when you're hit capped, or will get hit capped with either of them (And seriously, if you can loot the headpiece from Vashj, you should be able to reach closer hitcap values without putting 8 hitgems in a headpiece - Not to mention how easy it is to cap as arcane for example) Let's even look at how it would look in comparision if the last piece for the 4set bonus was the helm.

I'm going to use my own dmg from our last Vashj to kill show just how good it is. Remember CSD scales with crit, so a firemage would probably get a greater value in the right group.

527816 total dmg

251940 LB crit dmg
59279 CL crit dmg

311219 total crit dmg over 610 seconds.
RED dmg = 9071 (1.72%) 14.8 DPS.

So how good is 14.8 DPS exactly?
1 spelldmg is roughly 0.33DPS~
14.8DPS = 44.8~ Spelldmg.

(assuming reaching hit cap with the stats given through the helm, distributing gems and stat items diffrently in other pieces)

Cowl from VR:
73 spelldmg
21 hit rating
39 crit rating

Cowl of Tirisfal:
99.9 spelldmg
40 crit rating
5 hitrating

27~ more spelldmg
1 more crit rating
alot less hitrating

Assuming you somehow get capped through the headpiece, the T5 helm beats the Cowl from VR because CSD is so good.
Let's assume that the head piece was the last piece you swapped to get the 4piece setbonus, then I dont think there is anything to discuss really. With 40%~ crit you can atleast count on a static 50dmg~ gain from the setbonus, and suddenly when you swapped from the cowl to the T4 headpiece you made a 80+dmg upgrade - Just like that!

Doesnt matter what value you want to give it. If you say it's X% DPS that's enough. When I translated it to +dmg I merely did it to show how good it is, and it is easy to convert DPS to dmg not considering what you are using so..

Spellstrike is indeed better than T4. It's when you're closing in on T5 4 pieces it gets interesting to replace it.