1000 spell damage and hit cap are achieveable without even getting kara gear I think... So if a mage doesn't have that unbuffed you should really reconsider how much he's dedicated.

Eventually your progress will most likely not be decided becuase of 50 more or 50 less spell damage, it's going to be decided by wether the person is doing his best to maximize his damage and not dying to various fight elements (get out of the fire, don't get hit by the whirlwind, don't stand in flame patches, spread out on certain fights, etc etc). Usually, though, the ones that work on their gear to the best of their ability will also be the ones that do good DPS and don't die in fights - but it's not as much becuase of the gear as it is because of the mentality. Gear does help of course.

When I look at someone's gear I focus more on figuring out if his choices look like he knows what he's doing (stuff like 8 crit/hit/anything gem would be a red light since you get better with 9 damage, or if you need hit, 5 damage 4 hit gems). Anything that is upgradeable should be either achieved (look at wowhead.com to look for upgrades that don't drop in raid instances...) - dedicated players that maximize their dps will not run around without an icon of the silver cresent, epic gem from heroic mechanar, and full crafted spellfire+spellstrike (unless they already have better which is not doable until T6 or at least 4/5 T5 bonus which you'll probably skip). Again it really depends how long your players had been 70, but for someone that had been 70 for a while there's no excuse for not having everything that can be achieved outside of raids. As I said, dedication outside of raids usually comes along with dedication during raids, and that's really what you should be looking for.

The only special thing you should note about gear in T6 is what had been said about having a stamina set. While spellfire and spellstrike are great most of the time, some fights (like the first one in BT...) will require 10k buffed HP. Of course this isn't hard to achieve with an arena item or 2 and/or some ZA or T5 gear. Make sure they're using stamina gear with good spell damage, though, and not some blue they gemmed with 12 stam gems and aren't socketing ressilience in the arena gear they use for stamina in PvE, obviously. A 2 minute cooldown PvP trinket will also go a long way (the 5 min cooldown is good enough for rage winterchill to break the freeze which requires extreme reflexes to heal though when your mages have low HP if you don't break it, and one break will usually be enough to last through this short fight - but for archimonde you'll need as many fear breaks as possible).

Just make sure that you really look at how they perform in raids - the ones that pay attention will rarely find themselves killed (and when they do get killed, something like recount or WWS can show you their death log and see if they died becuase they didn't avoid the damage or because they got no healing, which is important for you) and will be on top of the meters even if they don't have the best gear (although they usually will have everything that they could at least get themselves).

Why is "doesn't scale" so often thrown around as a reason not to use AM? So far as I can tell from everything I've read, it actually scales very well; with Empowered Arcane Missiles it gains more from your +damage than any other spell in the game (excluding CoD). The problem is that it starts in such an incredibly weak position, taking an entire five seconds to deliver its full damage. If you're seeing a plague of mages trying to raid via AM spam I can certainly understand why you'd want to curb that, but it makes more sense to do so by explaining why that's a bad idea than tossing out a vague comment about scaling. Of course, it is entirely possible I have missed some critical fact about the spell and it does in fact scale poorly in some sense; if this is the case, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

AM scales very very poorly. The reason is simple. The +dmg multiplier you saw on AM is applied to the full spell - ie: spread out over 5 seconds. If you scale that value to match fireball/frostbolt/AB cast time, then its pretty obvious that it is bad.

Then again, the fact that AM has very few DPS-increasing talents compared to the other builds, and coupled with the fact that its crits are only 175%, it gives a better idea of the overall picture. AM itself was never good; MSD and TLC were the major contributors to AMs DPS, both of which got heftily nerfed.

I thought they changed AM a while back to get 5/3.5 multiplier to the spell damage that is applied over the 5 seconds? (so 1/3.5 per second, which is still quite lower than fireball/frostbolt/AB scaling)

Yes, last time I checked AM gets 5/3.5, split evenly across the bolts. If you take Empowered Arcane Missiles that gives you a coefficient of ~1.88, or ~.38 per bolt. Just looking at +dmg/cast time, then, it comes out ~.02-.03 worse than Empowered Fireball.

Again, to be clear, I'm definitely not advocating the use of AM; when you take into account all of the additional fire and frost talents that improve Fireball/Frostbolt damage and crit multipliers, they easily outpace it. My original question was never meant to suggest that AM is a good spell, per se; merely that its problems had more to do with its inferior starting position re: cast time/damage than to its scaling. Of course, when phrasing my first question I had not been taking dps boosting talents beyond the Empowered set into account, which was patently silly of me.

I have recently been working on a gear comparison spreadsheet, that takes all of the relevant mage gear I can find and computes a single number representing all of the items DPS effecting attributes. This makes it very easy to compare one thing to another, particularly when you have something with +dmg vs another item that is +haste, ect. For the relative value of things I have been using Manoutoftime's calculator. And converting all of the relevant stats into damage as a method of comparison. Meaning that the "State relative DPS value" column is converted into +dmg.

The problem is now that I have most of the gear input, and a formula that takes into account most of the data (set bonuses, and gem slot bonuses including meta's are excluded) I was hoping for a critique from some of you. This is a long formula and it is likely easier to manipulate in excel, so I am including both an 'english' version, and a excel cell referent copy of the formula.

((F23*C$15*C$10)+(F23*C$16*C$9)+(F23*C$17*C$11)+(G23*C$10)+(H23*C$11)+I23+(D23*0.2762 5*C$10)+(IF(J23>H$16,H$16,J23)*C$12))

Where

F23 = # Sockets
C15 = Crit rating of the gems used
C10 = Relative Crit Value
C6 = Relative Spell Hit value
C9 = relative damage Value
C17 = Haste Rating of the gems used
C11 = Relative Haste Value
G23 = Item Crit Value
H23 = Item Haste Value
I23 = Item + dmg
D23 = Item +Int
J23 = Item Spell Hit value
H16 = Amount of Spell Hit till capped
C12 = relative Spell Hit Value

Or as a logical formula

(# sockets*Gem Crit Value*Relative Crit Value)+(# sockets*Gem +Dmg*Damage Value)+(# Sockets*Gem Haste* Relative Haste Value)+(Item Crit*Relative Crit Value)+(Item Haste*Relative Haste Value)+Item Damage+(Item Int*0.27625*Crit Value)+Whichever is lower (Item spell hit value or Amount of +Hit to cap)*Relative Hit Value)

A simplified version also can be used to compare different Gems, which can then be ranked according to the DPS increase they give. This formula is

B149*C$9+C149*C$10+D149*C$11+IF(E149>H$16,H$16,E149)*C$12

Where
B149 = Gem +Dmg
C9 = relative Dmg Value
C149 = Gem +Crit
C10 = Relative Crit Value
D149 = Gem +Haste
C11 = Relative Haste Value
E149 = Gem +Spell Hit
H16 = Amt of Spell Hit can use till capped
C12 = Relative +Hit value



My goal with this was to make item to item comparisons easier assuming Manoutoftimes relative values were correct. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. And if anyone would like to have the actual spreadsheet with all of the Gear entered and scores calculated feel free to send me a PM, I am happy to e-mail it.

Actually a 3s cast fireball is about the same DPS and DPM as arcane missiles if ignoring gear and talents (other than improved fireball). The only reason AM sucks is that it's effective coefficiency greatly diminishes when you take talents into account - even with empowered it still gains quite less DPS per point of spell damage than fireball which is significant at any realistic amount of spell damage. Not to mention the talents for fireball are quite better even before taking spell damage into account.

So yeah, it's not the base stats of the spell, it's the fact that it doesn't scale and that arcane talents are horrible.

Just the 1 would be great! http://elitistjerks.com/553918-post1.html

I was consistently top 5 with 950 spell damage and hit cap for 5/5 5/9...

My old guild kinda sucked. But still, you do not need a harsh minimum for BT or Hyjal, the dps requirements are extremely lax and any good player should be able to do fine as long as they are hit capped and geared in or around T4.

Arcane Missiles does not deal a ton of damage. It is however immune to pushback and will give you partial damage for interrupted casts. This is actually fairly useful. The problem is AM is also a huge mana sink, and arcane builds are all about smart use of mana ...

If you were say, geared in full Sunwell gear that would allow you to drop down to 76 hit rating or whatever your new cap is with only arcane spells, it could theoretically be a good choice. Switch to AM whenever meteor slash is about to cast, spam AB the rest of the time, for example. That way you avoid pushback. If your raids don't get curse of elements, an all arcane builds might be acceptable with specific gearing. This is less common though, due to the sudden viability of fire warlocks.

Has anyone done a dps value comparison of thenew Ember Skyfire Diamond over the Chaotic? Especially since you can maintain all red gems in your gear does the 14 spell damage and additional int compete with the crit/crit dmg bonus?

As a 2/48/11 fire mage i'm disapointed my spec doesn't play well in most SSC TK fights due to either heavy AOE needs or straight out immunity. My guild is on Alar now which has forced me to re-spec however i'm wondering how best to handle this fire bird...I have only 1pc t-5 and full Spellfire set. Does AB still outdps AM without 2pc t-5 and if so would FB still be a good filler even though my gear is towards fire/arcane dmg.

What spec and spell rotation would you use to overcome these gear issues?

For Al'ar the first 3 kills I just went a 10/0/51 build or 18/0/43 build ages ago.

Fires only bad place is al'ar and ye murlocs on morogrim favour arcane but who cares !

Use Rawr, it's really not hard.

At Black Temple/Hyjal Summit gear level for a fire spec, ESD ~ 17 dmg, CSD ~ 50 dmg (total value, stats+special). MSD ~ 27 dmg.
Even if you factor in the loss of 12 damage (2 purple gems), it's still far better than anything else.

My guild may be doing something wrong but I find I have to stay arcane for Solarian, TW, Hydros, Alar and recentley we took down RWC in MH for fun...which, again I needed to spec arcane. Seems a shame that the best spec is usually not viable for the types of fights i'm in.

Why did you need to stay arcane for those fights? The only fights currently in end game that fire performs poorly in are Al'ar (obvious immunities), Supremus (lots of partial resists, but I find only warlocks and non-fire mages are doing very well on that fight anyway), and Illidan (p2 - elemental immunities). Unless you are talking about speccing frost, but that wouldn't make sense either because you listed alar. I don't see how fire would be bad for solarian, tw, hydross or rage tho. Really, with the exception of Alar, it seems you have a misconception that you need to be arcane for any fights involving AOE, and that's just simply not true.

Also, again speccing arcane without 2pt5 is not recommended at all.

The less mana you have, the less excuses you have for arcane. An arcane mage loses a lot more DPS than a fire mage does when you take away their shadow priests. Arcane is the "2.4 and decked shadowpriest give me so much mana I can burn it on AB and do good DPS" and not the "I need the mana regen" spec. If you don't have 2/5 T5 and don't have mana to burn on ABs arcane will simply suck. That's why even with full support on bruttalus (6 minutes) arcane mages still fall a bit behind unless they get at least an innervate (which isn't worth it when you could just do that damage as fire without innervate - at least if arcane did *better* there would be a point to be arcane and get innervated).

So don't spec arcane because you need mana - the opposite. If you need mana spec out of arcane and into fire.

Yeah I read you my dps sucks when not doing aoe as acrane, and I would never spec that way unless needed just seemed to me that on heavy aoe fights it was better to do ok single target dmg/good aoe/ and not go oom v.s. great single target dmg/ ok aoe/ go oom...but I hear ya i'll stay fire and do what I can on aoe when I can.

I don't see why you connect fire with going oom and arcane with not going oom, it's the exact opposite, with arcane always going oom due to spamming AB to get any reasonable DPS while fire can only spend as much mana as fireball costs. Your extra int and regen from the arcane tree are a joke when compared to the mana inefficiency.

Yeah arcane will AOE better but to be honest even on morogrim the fight will probably be decided more by doing a bit more DPS on him than doing a bit more DPS on the murlocs that get mowed easily anyway.

With a shadowpriest, it's impossible to go completely oom as arcane. The mana regen is no "joke" as you say. Spamming frostbolts (not ideal but still non-trivial DPS) you actually gain mana over the duration. The ability to use your mana pool quickly allows you to push out a lot more DPS over shorter fights. While i'd agree that anecdote is not proof, on a personal basis I do believe that arcane is doing more DPS for me than fire on 4/5 5/9 so far. (still using mostly T5 level gear).

Yeah you have more regen but since your frostbolts are so low DPS compared to fireballs and fireballs will never really run you oom either, fire spec handles lack of mana much better than arcane does. It's really not that comlicated - arcane needs insane mana usage to keep up arcane blasts or otherwise it's forced to use much lower dps frostbolts, while fire can always use fireballs that are not much under the dps of arcane blast and still not go oom - even without a shadowpriest if you use pots gems and evocation you'll last a while.

Both arcane and fire on most fights will use all their mana, except a fire spec will use additional mana for reducing the evocation time / gem useage / pot usage to increase DPS time / flame cap usage / destro pot useage, while an arcane spec will use every drop of mana it can get to use arcane blasts because it's simply a better use of your casting time and cooldowns. Since arcane uses mana so much better to increase DPS, it also suffers the most when that mana is not there - as in it suffers when the fight is longer and/or a shadowpriest isn't present.


On a side note did anyone actually calculate wether evocation for arcane is actually worth the 8s channeling time? I mean I agree it's almost safe to assume that it's worth spending 8 seconds to gain ~6k mana to spam ABs with instead of frostbolting, but hadn't seen anyone actually making sure it's worth the 8s channeling time. Does rawr (and possibly other simulators) try the "don't use evocate" as an option?

while i'm not sure about that, I always try to time evocates to hit the tail end of icy veins so it's only a ~6 second cast