*edit after manly's response* So obviously I was a bit mistaken in this regard as well, originally I was saying that fireblast can have a spot if you cast it immediately after scorch. After taking what Manly is talking about into account fireblast pretty much should be used only if you are moving around and still want to do some damage.


The mages who say to go for int/spi are pretty much on track, the reason being as arcane the more mana you have the more damage you can do regardless of the fight, you can ALWAYS use more mana regardless of the length of fight because of the nature of arcane blast. The mages who gem differently usually do so not because its the optimal way to gem, they don't want to spend a few hundred gold every time they respec back and forth from fire and arcane just to keep their DPS a bit higher.

With regards to your mage friends comparison, I don't know where he got his numbers from but what Id imagine he's talking about is how much spell hit relates to spell crit and spell damage. To make this clear, this isnt how they relate to each other in terms of DPS or anything like that. The way spell hit works is you will always want to keep it topped off at 16% but beyond that point it becomes worthless (Im sure you already know this just restating it). With spell hit, the way we gear is we'll just switch out gems whenever our numbers go higher or lower to give us the same cap. So I'll often switch Veiled Noble Topaz and Potent Noble Topaz for each other. Since they both have the same amount of spell damage and they both offer either 4 spell hit or 4 spell crit, we can now say that when comparing spell hit gear to spell crit gear, 1 crit=1 hit just because of how interchangeable they are. If you wanted I can do a similar comparison with spell damage gems vs hit again. I'm sure you're noticing that with my comparison 1 hit=1 crit whereas your friend said 13 hit=16 crit, this just changes based on which gems you are using. The underlying concept is the same, your friend isnt talking about how hit crit and damage relate to each other in terms of DPS, that is virtually impossible to do 100% accurately because of the nature of crits, the more spell damage you have the more effective your crits become and vice versa, theres never one 'perfect' comparison for the two variables. All he's saying is when you're trying to choose your gear and determining how much spell hit is worth before you're maxed, it's the above ratio.

The way you want to do your AB rotation isnt really spam AB then frostbolt some and start AB up again, that looks good on paper but the main problem is that if you do this you let your AB debuff run out and thus lose your increase in DPS from that. What you instead want to do, is AB a few times, frostbolt, AB a few times, frostbolt and keep repeating the process. The key is no matter how often you cast FB, you want to at the very least cast AB enough to keep the debuff up. In this case, I cant really give a perfect rotation to use either because it depends on how long the fight is, if you have a really long fight you'll want to frostbolt more and arcane blast less, if its really short you're gonna get closer to 100% AB spam. The one thing that is worth mentioning here, when you are first starting your AB spam, you want to do AB -> FB -> AB -> FB -> AB -> FB. The reason this is important is because there is a slight delay between when the AB is cast and when the debuff is applied. The casting speed of the spell is calculated at the start of the cast, the cost of the spell is calculated on cast. So when you do AB AB AB the first AB works right, the second AB still has the slowest cast time and yet you pay for it as if it was an AB with a reduced cast time. If you split up the ABs with frostbolts, you then get the increased speed you should get from the spell cast.

hi. this is my first entry
this looks like a very competent forum, my friend gave me the tip to visit this site.

of course i reached the hitcap of 164.
you say after hitcap haste is the more important than +dmg.
whats the relation?

is haste 2 times more important than +dmg? so it is 2:1

and crit? imo 1 critpoint is worth 0,7 dmg

please give me a relationship to these parameters

nice would be a gearlist such as follows (for shadowpriest)


shadowpriest.com :: View topic - Best Raiding Gear Available

i am going to raid bt, hyjal soon and i have to know which items i should prefer

ty very much

It varies on your gear and spec obviously, but for PvE Fire specced mages the stats work out something like

1 haste = 1.1 dmg
1 crit = 0.7 dmg

ok ty

i found lootrank.com

question how to handle this:

Loot Rank

for mage. i specced 10-48-3 (i know that 2-48-11 makes more dps but i have a lot of crafted items, so i need a good mana efficiency)

i tipped in (everything unbuffed)

i have the citcap (166) and skilled 3% in the frost tree. do i take 166 or 202 for this simulation?

+dmg 940
crit 27%
haste: 0
mp5: 0

how can the spellstrike hood be better than the head of illidan?
score of spellstrike hood is 8284 and from illidan 6793? i am confused

also the programm suggests 3x 10hit stones although i dont need all 3.

i dont understand that

Never seen that loot rank site before, but from what I gather, it doesn't actually do any theorycrafting on its own, it just allows you to enter your personal ranking of every stat and prioritize loot based on that. You'd still have to use a TC app like Rawr, Theorycraft-o-matic, Vontre's spreadsheet, etc. and manually enter the values.

Max DPS is a bit simpler. I can't vouch 100% for its accuracy but it seems pretty good to me for the cookie-cutter fire build.

I've found Max DPS to be inaccurate at best and downright wrong most of the time in terms of how it ranks things. Its gemming parameters are also insanely irritating and difficult to work around. Rawr.mage is the best gear modeler that I've seen, although the Optimizer module it runs isn't always 100% either (it returned an "optimized" set that was less optimal than the set I already had modeled).

Here's a link to the Rawr site: Rawr - Home

Hello, I raid as an Arcane mage, 50/0/11,
Names Krakan off Jaedenar, I noted at the start of this thread that this spec, or a deviation of it (48/0/13) is "considered universally inferior to Arcane/Frost."

Personally I've found that in MH/BT I've always been top or near top of the damage metre, unless I didnt know the encounter and was concentrating more on not messing up, rather than dealing damage.

I was wondering how 2.4 changed that, when taking into account all the extra mana regen that arcane mages get now, also I was wondering how many mages here carry as staff that has a huge amount of spirit on, and a wand that has alot of spirit, so at dead points in bosses, i.e. Kael'thas when your running around, Supremus volcano phase, etc switch to these weapons to regen more mana?

There are many other problems with Maxdps. If we feed it fairly standard late T5/early T6 mage stats, lets say 1300 dmg, 30% crit, and 50 haste (fully buffed), these are the dps values we get:

(+) 10 Magic Damage: 5.83 dps
(+) 10 Spell Crit Rating: 3.47 dps
(+) 10 Spell Haste Rating: 7.24 dps

According to this a point of crit rating is worth less than 60% of a point of spell damage, and a point of haste is more than twice as valuable as a point of crit.

You can of course swap your stat values around until you get a contribution comparison more to your liking, and from there it will give you results in line with how you value spell power, crit and haste. I wouldn't trust it very far if you have to make an expensive decision, however, and there are better alternatives out there. I suggest Rawr.

In most cases 48/0/13 and 40/0/21 will be very close, the differences mainly depend on what raid composition you have usually. 48/0/13 favors situations with CoS, JoW, no CoE and gear with procs with no/short cooldowns.

Maxdps.com/lootrank.com Gentlemen there are numerous problems with maxdps.com and assorted sites designed to rank loot based on criteria you set. There is however, absolutely no point in looming over them, as Rawr gives a much more conclusive solution to the question of loot. Don't forget, assigning exact values and equivalences is not strictly 100% correct and with ever increasing numerical discrepancies may result in changed values. For example, we accept crit is 0.7 damage, but for very large crit rates it may be more accurate to sim to 0.685 or for very low 0.705. Setting in a flat equivalence is forcing yourself to compromise even before you've started to account for the program's short-comings.

Rawr will not only compare how items will affect your game-play, it will also break down how they interact with your own cycles if and where applicable and give you an optimized output display. Maxdps.com and lootrank are both severely outdated tools by now and utterly beyond the scope of TC today.

Krakan: As pertains to swapping weapons for regen, it is simply by and large not needed. Itemize correctly and you'll be looking at 750 OO5SR and 450 while casting. For the bosses that you need to move around, like Sup and Illidan and the like, you'll be so dramatically overflowing without swapping it's not even funny. We all say "as much mana as possible" but unless you're immobile enough and (here's the hard part) can maintain AB debuff you're wallowing in monstrous regen with nothing to do with it. Remember, high mobility fights have you more often than not ramping up, and ramp-up time is 9sec of rather pathetic DPS. That's 9sec, because unless you're rotating AB-filler-AB-filler, you'll do a 2.5-2.5-2.2-1.8-1.5 AB cycle rather than 2.5-2.2-1.8-1.5 cycle. Some bosses are an absolute nightmare. Archimonde, needless to say is a total disaster and Azgalore can only be achieved with massive shadow resistance because even with a huge nerf to regen/damage you'll still output much better by avoiding silences and the consequent drop of AB.

The other thing I've found out is that due to the nature of evocation you often end up wasting a good chunk of it. Not always will boss phasing allow you to evo exactly when you find it most comfortable -and- happen to be OOM at the time. Often despite evocating and finishing the fight with considerable mana I realize, looking back on logs, that the low-dps rotation that preceded the evocate was inevitable and no possible different timing could have prevented it, despite over the whole fight mana being in surplus. And that's not accounting for OO5SR/manaspring/SP which over Evos 6/8sec cast will probably fill you with more mana than what's left over from your evo's regen.

Having said all that, if you do go ahead with weapon-swapping, it'd be wizer to swap in spirit weapons as huge int makes spirit massively inflate regen value, whereas int gets square rooted and the regen from say, a further 25-35int you may possibly manage from weaponswap will be rather small and not particularly worth the hassle.

PoM-AB will only work if you're not getting a full Evo off. Ab debuff lasts exactly 8sec and Evo without T6 is exactly 8sec. If you manage to keep AB up while thinking you're getting all your Evo's worth, you're in fact getting 6sec of Evo and cutting the last channel short a fraction of a second before it ticks. Not to mention people in T6 may want to channel for the full 10 seconds. A worthy idea, however, using PoM for an emergency-reapplication. Perhaps worth making an "oh shit" pom-ab macro in case you can just slip one in after a silence, or a long positional reallocation.

As for supremus, thanks but rather than have the humiliation of dying on a rediculous boss I'd rather let AB drop. 30y range is too close for my tastes. You may be able to out-run him when he's focusing on you, but remember he may swap target to someone far away and sprint to close the distance, going significantly faster than you. What if as he's moving he swaps to you instead? or boots them into a rampart, ports them onto him, one-shots and then swaps to you? I'd rather focus on GTF Away from him on mobility phase rather than risk noobification. This is twice true given it's such a cake-walk fight.