There is a search function on the forums. type in "rolling ignite" and scroll down to see....[Mage] Rolling Ignites: are they back?

Got it, thanks ! Weak search engines found on most forums unintentionally swayed me from using the search function, but I shall definitely use it more often on EJ forums now.

Yes, now that I read the thread, it is indeed pretty obvious. The only free tick I got was 1307. The rest of the crits were simply delaying the ignite tick and stacking in a bug-free manner.

I have one last question regarding this matter. Since the last post on that thread dates back to January, I was wondering if there is any consensus reached regarding whether or not to gear (haste & crit wise) or pop cooldowns in a specific manner to take advantage of this bug as much as possible? Or are we just treating it as a nice bonus which happens-if-it-happens when the situation allows it?

Yea im kinda just starting BT and stuff and i was wondering

I have my spell hit capped(its 167 atm) and i know you have to have a certain amount of spell dmg before you can start stacking spell haste

and what spell damage should i start stacking alot of spell haste/spell dmg gems or like spell haste/stam gems

Hey guys. I am currently running BT as 40/0/21 spec and have my 2 piece tier 5. I have been able to top the damage charts nearly every raid so I really don't have any questions on how to play the spec but rather on when to drop the 2 piece tier 5. I am at 2 pieces of tier 6 right now but can only wear one piece in order to keep my T5 set bonus. When would you guys recommend dropping the 2 piece T5 to go to my T6. Also whether I would still be able to kick out the same kind of damage output if I were to stay arcane after dropping the T5 or whether I should most definitely go fire.

You can't let go of two-piece T5 set bonus, ever. The 20% damage increase added to AB is essential for the arcane spec to work & provide an acceptable amount of DPS.

There's also something about the mana usage increase not increasing so much per application of the AB debuff, making the difference in dpm between 2-piece T5 and none two-piece not so big. But I can't find any post on it right now.

You could try experimenting with IV/Deep Fire after you've acquired 4-piece T6, the difference between the specs before then shouldn't be so substantial.

For as long as you raid arcane you will ALWAYS need to the 2pt5, for the exact reason Amrahil mentioned. The 20% increase to the mana cost of AB applies to the BASE mana cost of the spell, and is NOT modified by the debuff applied by AB. The 20% damage increase, however, is just that, a 20% increase in damage. Hopefully you got the shoulders and either the helm or gloves for your 2 pieces, as the pants and robe are by far inferior to other options.


If you want to drop you 2p t5, you will need to go fire, but I believe arcane will out perform fire until you get 4pt6, although I am not quite certain.

Actovision is correct. This is a totally inappropriate thread for the queries it's attracting the last week. Everyone with a "Help Me" question seems to be attracted to this thread and there's no obvious reason why.

Re. Arcane T5 vs Fire T5:

There are untold megabytes about this shitty conversation even in this forum. It's different. Period. You can not compare them. At T5 level, they do different things in different way, and since you're probably on your way to T6, nobody cares what you spec as a stop-gap on your way to Fire.

Re. Haste: Your item-level is such that it really, really won't matter. You will not be able to discern a difference. Haste becomes significant when you begin cooldown stacking very accurately, and if you're beginning BT, you aren't and don't need to. You can analyze it deeply, but the simulation for one will not represent your gaming, for another will not be relevant and finally will not in fact show you any discernible difference.

Treat haste as roughly equal to spell damage for any level of spell damage you're likely to have. It might be a little higher or a little lower but you probably cant tell the difference in how fast enemies die. On gems haste and crit are often the tradeoff (because both are yellow), and haste is always better than crit for the amount you get on gems. Go with spell damage when the gem can have red in it, because gems give a little more red spell damage than yellow haste.

I have a few questions reguarding the tailor crafted mage sets. There may very well be a spreadsheet comparing them already, but for some reason, I am unable to open any of the spreadsheets . Anyway, my guild has just started raiding in BT and I am still wearing my entire Spellfire set, is this viable? With the new badge gear released in 2.4 I know there are some gloves and robes that have been released, but I'm not sure if there would be a significant enough dps increase in switching to them. Any thoughts on if what I currently have is viable or if I should continue to farm SSC/TK level raids for other gear?

Are you trying to open them with OpenOffice? I haven't specifically tested the Mage sheets but the Hunter sheets are only very irregularily updated for OOo - which is a shame anyways, should be opposite ^_^.

Anyways, can be that. Or your macro-security is set to "High". Set it to Middle - it'll ask every time you open a document with macros then, then just enable them when opening the spreadsheet.

As a rule the tailored epics have very good hit and damage itemization, at the cost of stam/int.

This makes them viable as raiding gear a lot longer than their Ilevel would suggest, as long as you don't die or run OOM in the boss fights. They're extremely fragile for PVP but might be used in moderation on a "burst DPS team" in lower rankings or in battlegrounds, especially if your other gear is PVP oriented.

In offense, they're roughly comparable to T5 or Season 2-3 PVP gear (if you're not arcane..2 piece T5 is pretty much essential for arcane near as I can tell). In stam/mana pool they're comparable to level 70 blues/greens. The badge gear will have similar or slightly better offense, but better secondary stats.

These are broad blanket statements. The correct answer is based on how you weight each attribute on an item. Some of this can be done mathematically (the ratio of crit to hit to haste can be calculated in terms of theoretical DPS if you postulate talents, current gear and shape of fight, this is what tools like Rawr and Magegraf do). Weight of stamina and int vs hit/damage attributes is more subjective, it's based on "do I die". "is my mana pool big enough" etc.

I've seen some people at the BT level of raiding mix in season 2-4 PVP gear in the other item slots to balance out the itemization. They don't consider themselves especially good at that range though, just not actively bad.

My question pertains to what i should do to maximize my DPS for my guilds current content. I am aware that 2pt5 with an arcane blast/frostbolt rotation out DPS's a deep fire build in t5 content, but as my guild is 4/5 hyjal and 4/9 bt, i have aquired 1 piece of t6.

At which point should i switch my spec from arcane frost to fire? With the swap of a ring and neck i become fire hit capped with nearly 1100 dmg, so gear itemization at my level wont really be a nerf between specs, im just curious when is enough enough when it comes to an arcane build and at which point in t6 content does fire outdo it?

Im just looking for some guidance on the matter as i was a raiding warrior for 2 years as of a couple of months ago, any insightful thoughts on the matter are welcome.

here is a link to my characters armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory

Different specs are going to excel on different fights. For example, arcane will likely beat fire on Akama (shortness), Supremus (fire resistant), and Illidan (fire immunities during p2). Fire usually does better on fights like RoS and Teron because of pushback. However, most fights will be dependent on your guild's overall DPS (as it pertains to fight length), RNG allowing you to dps (i.e. DnD on rage, carrion swarm on anatheron, fires on azgalor and archi, etc), and finally what your job is on the fight (are you dpsing adds on anatheron or the boss?). Point in case is that there is no clear cut winner in damage during Hyjal and BT, as it depends on a number of issues. More importantly, you should focus on a spec that you like and work on maximizing your damage output with that spec. You will see a higher increase in DPS by learning how to maintain as close to 100% DPS time in your chosen spec than you will by simply respecing in most cases.

Hello everyone,
Not to sound like a complete noob, I need some help.

Im a deep fire mage specced 2/48/11, w pretty nice gear, Hyjal, BT, 2 peice t5, t6 gloves. I have been working on my spell rotation for a while now, albeit simple really being a fire mage...stack scorch x5 spam fire balls lol...but for some reason my dps really isnt up to par. My AOE dps is insanely good, can get up to 1400 dps, but on single targets, my dps decreases significantly, sometimes only 800 dps sometimes. I try to stack scorch on trash mobs at least once to maximize fireball dps, but I really trully dont know what Im doing wrong. Maybe screwing up timing on dying mobs, and loosing alot of dps from maybe a fire ball that didnt go off maybe...to be honest i really dont know whats up with that. If anyone can give me some additional tips, or who were able to overcome a similar issue...any help would be immensely appreciated.

thanks.

Get the Mod Quartz and make sure you are wasting as little time as possible between casts. Use your cooldowns as often as possible and make sure they are available for the Molten Fury range. Use your trinkets/combustion/IV at the same time to maximize their effectiveness. Pot/Gem if you are going OOM. Use Flamecaps/Destro Pots if you have a Shadow Priest. Make sure your scorch stack never goes down. Get your spell hit up to 164. Don't worry about AoE trash, Locks will always win.

Thanks for the help...sounds like I need to work on my timing.

Not that it is necessarily worth having a whole discussion of trash dps, but: I find hitting fireblast after the current mob hits 20% and just switching targets a few seconds ahead of the rest to get scorches up faster serves me well (assuming its dying so fast you couldn't actually get another fireball inside molten fury range), and of course scorching at the end of a mobs life rather than casting half a fireball (or even .95 of a fireball, they all do 0 damage, hell an ice lance does more than that). With a little attention you can do better than the next mage who may be mindlessly mashing the fireball fireball button (or maybe not if you are the only one bothering to scorch), but you can only do so much. A fire mage is not particularly well suited to trash dps given the nature of long cast main nukes and the power of the scorch debuff. Try not to stress over it too much and judge yourself on boss performance.

I am a reasonably well geared fire mage who has a question about improved scorch. I have read over and over again that stacking imp scorch is crucial to a fire mage's DPS. My question is: is this always the case?

Here is my armory link: The World of Warcraft Armory

I am in mostly ZA/Badge gear and and full 10/48/3 raid specced fire. My source of confusion comes from RAWR. When I load up my gear in RAWR 14.1, it comes back with 1125dps for fireball and 1112dps for fireball+scorch.

Anecdotal evidence I have seen in game seems to support this. When I find myself worrying about scorch too much, my DPS goes down. My strategy for my ZA run last night was to stack 2-3 scorches on the trash mobs, then fireball. For bosses, I would of course stack 5 scorches and refresh them after 6-8 fireballs. Is this suboptimal?

Thanks,

Smashr (Noria)

The higher dps figure for fireball assumes Scorch is constantly up on the target and you don't have to refresh it yourself. Obviously, if you do have to maintain it it's a slight dps loss.

A rule of thumb I use with trash is to put as many scorch stacks up that still let you fit in at least 2 fireballs before the mob dies. I think I read it on EJ but you can guess how impossible it is to search for it. Either that or just blow all your instants at sub 20% and you won't suffer the half-casted fireball loss.

http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t15726-m...improving_dps/
While the specific calculations there are a little out of date, the principles still apply. It calculates the number of seconds a mob has to live before stacking Scorch first is worth it.

There are 3 important factors to maximizing your DPS as a fire. The first is minimizing the amount of scorching you do. Every time you cast scorch instead of a fireball you lose DPS, so you should ONLY ever cast scorch at the beginning of the fight (to reach 5 stack) and then ideally fireball until <X seconds remain on the debuff timer (X being fireball cast time + scorch cast time) and then reapply scorch. When starting out, 8 fireballs will take you to this point, but as you gear for haste you can begin adding in more.

The second point to maximizing fire DPS is cooldown stacking. You almost always will want heroisms sub 20% to stack with molten fury, and you will almost always want to plan your cooldowns to have them up as well while still getting maximum usage out of them. In other words, if the fight is 5 minutes long, you would want to use your 2 minute cooldowns 3 times, preferably within 20 seconds of the pull, then 2 minutes later, and again 2 minutes after that; you would want to use your 3 minute cooldowns twice as well, but since you know you can only use them twice, you can use the 3 minute cooldowns with your first trinket uses, but when they are finished cooling down, wait to use them until the 3rd 2 minute cooldown pop at the end of the fight with your heroism (ideally).

The third and final note to maximizing fire dps applies to all DPSers and that is learning how to maximize your DPS uptime. There are very few fights in the game where you can immediately start DPSing and continue DPSing without moving until the end of the boss (Brutallus, and potentially Teron and Kaz'rogal are the only ones that come to mind). This is likely the most important of the three, as it will make 1 and 2 a whole lot easier.

As a side note, at my gear level (950ish spell damage) fireball without any scorch stack is fairly similar DPS to just spamming scorch. As spell damage increases fireball sans scorch will eventually pull ahead of scorch spam. But neither is desirable compared to a proper scorch rotation on anything that will live longer than 18 seconds or so.

Fretting over scorch will lower DPS just by casting too often yes, but also possibly by interfering with your timing by introducing too much thinking. If you heasitate .2 seconds on whether to scorch or fireball, you've just undone all the haste rating on your gear. This is also true of any fight with movement or judgement calls. Your DPS will improve as you do the right thing reflexively and keep smooth, steady casting up as often as possible.