Probably because the two together are greater than the sum of the individual parts.
MM adds spellpower, which means that the spell (as a whole) is hitting harder, which increases the flat dps contribution from crit% (because it is a percentage dps increase being applied to a spell that now hits harder due to the MM spellpower).

His numbers-per-100-points assume that no other stats change, though. So when you change two of them, you have to take into account the interactions between hit, crit, haste and spellpower.

That'd be my guess at any rate (not having access to his actual sheets)

Edit:
Damn. Beaten to the punch. By like, an hour. I took entirely too long with the reply window open

The thing is, AB is now more sustainable than ever. Regen becomes less important when you are able to spam 100% AB on most fights. Not to mention AB needs to be changed in some way such that a one button playstyle isn't overpowering every other spec in the game by such a large margin. Something's got to give.

MP5 is garbage when you have JoW/Replenish going around.

Trinket is at most 25 mp5, or 5 mps. That's the same as ~20 intellect would give you, and 20 intellect would add ~8 damage from dmg/crit on top of it.


So, that trinket is as effective as a "54 dmg + 20 int" trinket. Hot? Not.


If you have JoW/Replenish, Intellect is by far the best Mana stat and it adds a significant amount of damage.
Mp5 and spirit are dead weight for mages in the current system.

JoW/Rep are actually bad design, because they make Intellect vastly better than MP5 for healers, and probably better than even spirit for priests/druids. Not sure there, but it's far closer than it should be.

Self buffed on the PTR, I was able to constantly spam Arcane blast for well over 60 seconds, without any raid support, mana gems, or potions. So it's definitely lending itself to even more of a 1 button mash-fest than any other spec, because with the current state of things, it doesn't pay to use any of your missile barrage procs or Arcane Barrage, since you will inevitably lose your entire AB stack.

A potential fix, I believe, would be to allow the debuff to stack more than 3 times, but exponentially increase the mana usage vs damage done. Once that is done, if the AB debuff was made to only drop one at a time (instead of losing the whole stack no matter what), then that could open up tons of possibilities on different rotations, as you could essentially use Barrage or Missiles to drop one/two/etc stacks of the debuff to maintain your mana.. If your truly in one of those situations where you really want to dump mana, then letting it stack up unrealistically (say, 1500-2000 mana a cast for the "topmost" stack) will be a true mana dump.

It's only slightly better than mp5 in terms of regen unless you're doing something particularly special. Holy priests won't switch due to their aptitude at cheating the 5sr. Druids probably won't, but for disc priests, I'm pretty sure that int is close if not better due to their +15% int talent and ability to triple-dip from it. Crit heal->wand->wait till the tank takes a hit->PWS->Penance gets you Replenish, Rapture, and JoW at the same time. Alas, Int vs Spi doesn't really seem to be a common choice. It's mostly hit vs crit vs haste if the naxx gear is anything to go by.

My estimates show that a 3 stack of AB is going to have to be in the 1500 to 2k range in order to prevent it from being spammable and bring arcane dps in line with fire. It's not that unrealistic.

I'm going to assume that the beta server economy is really, really screwed up then -- not surprising, with people transferring whole guild banks over to fund their experimentation. An inscriber told me mats for Glyph of Icy Veins were running about 500g this weekend.

As I understand it, most mats on the beta are currently placeholders. One mageroyal and some parchment. I know if I was playing on the beta server, I would pay good money to not have to run around Loch Modan farming mageroyal.

My assumption is that the mage glyph mats will eventually be quite similar to the non-placeholder mats posted for Druid glyphs.

Druid glyphs require 1 Parchment and 1 or 3 pots of a common ink.
You can level enchanting by milling herbs of one level into pigments (no skill-up from milling), then making ink from pigments (skill-ups) until it turns green/grey, then turn that ink into (druid) glyphs.
Every 25 points, you get new ink recipies and new glyphs, of which the druid version requires the new ink.

Glyphs for all other classes require 1 Mageroyal, 1 Moonglow Ink and some parchment from vendors.
Moonglow Ink comes from the pigments that you get from lowbie herbs. Ride once over Elwynn and you have a stack or 3.
Mageroyal is a pain because you can ride all through Barrens/whatever and only see other herbs, but no Mageroyal.


When milling herbs, you also have a chance to get uncommon pigments from herbs of that level.
You can get lucky and get 1-2 every time, or you can get none out of 3 stacks.

From Wowhead, it seems they are only used for items (off-hand books), tarot cards, darkmoon cards (?) and vellums - the things you can place enchants on and AH them.

So, unless they change their mind, Glyphs are not likely to require uncommon pigments.
And common pigments will likely end up rather cheap, as has been noticed.


I leveled Herb/Insc on a Death Knight. Basically rode around for 1 afternoon when the Northrend server crashes every 10 minutes to level herbing to 300. I got the rest while leveling through Outland/Northrend.
The herbs you get from leveling herbalism currently are more than enough to level inscription.

There might be some bottle-necks at low level, because Azeroth herbs are 5 levels, whereas Outland and Northrend herbs are 1 level each.

EU has one server (PvE), for all language regions, money is a joke there. 500g? People offer that for portals
Chat however is way worse than Barrens.

I see many suggestions on how to "fix" arcane blast. Longer debuff,increased mana, decreased DPS and many more ideas. What is the end result we are looking for?

perhaps a good solution would be to make all specs as close to even as possible and let individual play determine who does the most DPS.

The major problem with AB at this point is that it doesn't know its own purpose. Blizzard wants it to be a mana dump for a tree based around mana, but the issue is either it's going to be so powerful it will just be used as a main nuke and rotated with something (See: 2pct5) or it will not be powerful enough and you'd be better off just sticking with a normal rotation rather than lose the dps to ramp it up just to burn that last bit of mana as the boss goes down.

The reduction on debuff time seems to imply Blizzard doesn't want it to be rotated with anything, I can see no other design reason for such a reduction other than to punish Arcane further on movement fights, which seems to run against the homogenization they are working for.

As it stands AB really needs to be made into a main nuke type spell for people to use it on a standard fight, because it's too cumbersome to figure it out as a pure mana dump. The only way I can see it truly realized in its mana-dump-only type use is for the mana cost to be greatly increased, but then you'd only be "dumping" for about 10 seconds before you are completely out of mana and useless. Honestly I'd prefer it to be completely absurd mana cost rather than having the situation you currently have on Beta where it's fantastic dps with a one button play style.

Greyrest on the beta forums just posted an excellent summary of what the issues with arcane are and what needs to happen to fix it.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Report] Arcane spell rotation testing

Basically arcane blast needs to either be equivalent dps to fireball and frostbolt when spammed OR it needs to cost too much mana to support more than a short time before filling with other spells (mana dump phases alternated with mana regen phases). The former doesn't make much sense to me, since it removes the unique arcane blast mechanic from having meaning, and thus removes the point of the spell. The latter "feels" like the real intention of the spell, but it currently costs far too little mana when fully stacked and is thus indefinitely sustainable (or at least as long as fire's dps is, when taking into account arcane's regen talents).