edit ^^ what he said, beat me to it

At the level of gear you describe the spell damage is too low, and you've not included the effects of any raid stacking (CoE, Boomkin, etc) which may be why the result seems low.

Frostbolt's coefficient penalty for snare always applies, so whether or not the mob is snareable is a moot factor.

0/0/61 is not a raid spec imo, 10/0/51 or even 17/0/44 is better. There is no use in improves nova/shatter, permafrost, improved blizzard, icebite, improved frost barrier at all at brutallus. Why not benefit from the extra mana/resistance you can get from arcane so you dont require a spriest at all/can use more destro pots/dont have to evocate.

Apart from that I dont like these 'look I outdpsed a rogue with 2 glaives' arguments, especially when you only show a 2 min 30 attempt. I am topping damage meters in my guild by 30% sometimes, this shows more about the other dps'ers as about myself tho and does not prove my spec/gear choices to be superior to another random mage.

There are many logs of fire mages dealing 2.5k dps on a kill of 6 min with similar gear as you, and on a 2.5 min attempt with 2 heroisms this number will be even higher. I dont quite understand the combatlog btw, it shows you used 4 destro pots, 4 icy veins, 4 mojo madness buffs and 2 heroisms all within 2.5 min. Seems like impossible to me =D

Anyway fire is and will be supreme to frost at least untill the next patch. And the 'but my damage is good in the first 2 minute' argument is nice on terron or akama but doesnt work at brutallus.

Willem11,

You appear to misguidedly believe I am trying to argue that deep frost is a better overall DPS spec than IV/Fire, please read my post again and realise that this is not the case.

I appreciate your sentiments that, "0/0/61 is not a raid spec", but frankly once you have the core DPS talents in frost, what you spend the last handful of points on has no bearing on your raid DPS as long as you are not going oom - Which is not so in my case where we have a spriest in our group and I am comfortably able to chain destro pots/molten armor/brilliant wizard oil/blackened basilisk without resorting to mana regen items. You really needn't try to explain to an end game content mage that you can't frost nova/shatter on Brutallus. As I mentioned in my original post, I play this spec because I both enjoy playing it in and out of a raid environmnt and can also put out competitive DPS, not because I am laboring under a false apprehension that this is the best raid DPS spec.

"Apart from that I dont like these 'look I outdpsed a rogue with 2 glaives' arguments" Again please re-read my post, look at the WWS I posted and observe that I have not suggested I "outdpsed a rogue with 2 glaives", at any point nor do I believe I could over the duration of a normal fight. I was merely allowing people who do not know the spec and gearing of my guild members to easily interpret the WWS data and provide a point of reference to which they may be familiar. It is a snap shot of the raid's progress at around 40% of the fight and again, as I mentioned in my original post, a deep frost mage could expect to be ahead at this point in the fight but will fall behind as the fight draws on.

Please take the time to actually read what someone's saying before trying to burn down their house.


I'm not sure why this appears to be as it is of course not possible. I believe I used 2 Icy Veins, 2 destro pots, 2 Hex Shrunken Heads, 2 mana gems (Serpent-Coil Braid) and received 1 heroism as well as a couple of drums in this 2:30mins. It looks like the data has doubled up some how.

It looks like 2 merged logs with about 1 second between the two clocks. I'm guessing your raid leaders merged this due to the Kalecgos fight. The problem is that although the WWS parser is quite good at weeding out all the double casts in merged logs, it's not going to catch them all.

Checking the combat log with filter "source=orixa and spell=frostbolt" you can see that there are several instances of frostbolts which do similar damage but have 1 second between them. Therefore you have to conclude that this merge was quite inaccurate and that it is likely severely overreporting your total damage.

...

Im sorry, but I dont understand the point of the first part of your first post then. Your trying to say frost is competitive on brutallus, but on the other hand your saying it is way worse as fire. Whats your point then?

Back when I was playing Frost in T5/Low T6 content I had the same results as Orixa generally. I would pull ahead by some distance of the other mages due to WE/Coldsnap/WE at the beginning of the fight but the fire mages would generally outperform me by the end of the fight.

Maybe i've missed a post but has anyone figured out a decent arcance spec for the next content patch?
The change to arcane focus will raise our hit cap and spell power is out of reach at the moment.
Fire doesn't look like an option either at my guilds level of progress (at council at the moment).

Is anyone else out there struggling with the change of talents?

While PTR is up with 3.0.2, stuff is still changing on beta which may go live. There's still many things in flux right now, check back in a month when it looks more stabilized.

I am playing my alt mage a lot lastly and noticed one thing I don't really understand because it does not fit with how aggro works, to my understanding.

The situation was the following. Pull of 4 mobs in Magisters' Terrace heroic.

• A Magister (the one with the spell haste buff), marked as first target.
• A warlock, marked for sheep.
• A mage guard (melee with the "globes"), marked as second or third target.
• And a forth mob I don't remember.

I was standing right next to our warrior tank, waiting for him pull. After he pulled with his gun the mobs started to move/cast. I immediately counter-spelled the Magister to not let him stack up his haste before moving. Then, I wanted to sheep the warlock.

The magister and the forth mob followed the tank, es expected.

But, and that's the part I don't understand, the mage guard, a melee mob, approached and killed me. He should have followed the warrior because the warrior was the first to be added to his aggro list and I casted nothing but a counter spell to another mob (which followed the tank). I was using molten armor and I was not buffing or eating/drinking at that time. I was not using any food or oil or anything.

That, unfortunately, happens "fairly often".

I know that there are mobs with what I call "line of sight" aggro. The shadow priests in Shadow Lab always prefer targets they have line of sight to over targets they don't have line of sight.

Now, I normally play a tank or a healer or my lock. As healer or lock I normally stand as much in the background as possible. Therefore, the mage-playstile of being a ranged caster and standing in front to sheep the mob before reaching "chain-lightning-jump-range" is new to me (as warlock I can always fear the mob away from the tank before seducing it. Therefore timing is not as crucial).

Yesterday we were running Blood Furnace heroic. I tanked on my warrior. At the beginning of the instance, right below the stairs is a two pull of Skull Enforcers. I marked one as first target and the other as sheep. I pulled the first target and after the started to move the mage sheeped the other. The first target, which was hit by my gun, turned right and approached the mage. The Skull Defender was not charging the mage with a random aggro charge, he was walking up to the mage. The mage was not drinking at that time (because he already sheepd the other mob) nor casting anything (I would have seen this) not buffing (I would have heard that because I play with sound and mage buffs are quite "noticable"). He also confirmed that he didn't do anything.

Are there that many "line of sight" aggro mobs, even melee, and I just never noticed?

Did blizzard change anything to the aggro system?

Any idea?