That bug isn't new, it's been present since "Empowered Fire" was introduced. Just only on rank 1 before, now on both ranks.

Frostfire Bolt DoT gets 5% of your spell power per tick. 5% + 1/2/3*5% = 20% per tick with 1/2/3 Empowered Fire.

Also, Rank 2 DoT overwrites Rank 1 DoT, but not vice-versa.

TNRH - The New Hot Rotation
FFB2 - 3*FFB1 cycling. Spec is some Frostfire variant 0/51+/15+ or what they are these days. Keep up Scorch, Living Bomb, use instant Pyroblasts.

Rank 1 doesn't have a downrnaking penalty (it's level 75, you can test it in game), so this cycle gets still very hard hitting Frostfire Bolts (with 80 less base damage from downranking) while keeping up the FFB DoT that has 20% scaling per tick.
You can/have to adapt that to haste procs or when you cast something else.

Try to use it, enjoy it and don't tell anyone

I guess that's the upsides to make up for normal ffb tick never actually ticking under spam condition ? Of course when you do those rotations its a hell of a lot different how many dots you get to tick.

Seriously though, FFB ought to tick more often than once every 3 seconds.

Yes, the idea is to make use of the DoT that would never tick when spammed.

It should be doable with some practice and a decent DoT timer that allows filtering for ranks (or spell IDs).
Also, you don't get punished too much if you clip it on occasion. Nothing like Arcane Blast spam where a 0.5s slip would wreck your DPS (before Blast spam got stomped anyway).


You'll lose about 80 base damage per cast, that's about 200 if you include crits but not the other modifiers which apply to the DoT as well.
Without Empowered Fire (some experimental Frost or Arcane heavy builds), you'll gain 30+5%*SP every 3 seconds. Not worth it until you get huge amounts of spell power.
With Empowered Fire, you'll gain 30+20%*SP every 3 seconds, which makes it worthwile at 1k spell power or more, pretty much always.

If the DoT bonus gets removed from Empowered Fire, cycling won't be worth it until you break well beyond 3-4k spell power.

Someone asked about AoE above, I think the best AoE right now is improved Blizzard with full frost talents. Mobs are slowed to a crawl, frostbite and fingers of frost proccing and giving you nice crits thanks to shatter. It fills my screen with a sea of large numbers. I am having huge amounts of fun with frost spec again, I was fire all through Sunwell so it makes a nice change of pace for me.

We ran Molten Core last night just to get the achievement of killing Ragnaros (it's not retroactively awarded). I was unbuffed and using 0/0/61 spec. He is vulnerable to frost damage and frostbite procs, so I ended up with over 9100 DPS on Raggy. Getting back-to-back 15K frostbolt crits at hasted cast times on frost vulnerable mobs is fun. He died in less than 25 seconds. If you take enough frost mages, you can probably kill him in the time it takes to type "all out nuke". Also tried frost in Kil'jaeden, I was easily able to keep up with and sometimes overtake fire mages. Because the mobs die so fast now, neither living bomb nor ignite can shine fully, so frost turned out to be the ideal spec for dealing with the orbs and reflections.

I'm enjoying how completely broken any kind of PVE or PVP balance is in this patch, as many of us reading this forum had anticipated. I wasn't in our Brutallus kill last night, but an enhancement shaman, an arms warrior, a retri pala and a moonkin had higher DPS than every pure DPS class except for our warglaive rogue. A retri pala just two-shotted my shaman friend in a battleground. Looking forward to Wrath and level 80 where this kind of brokenness will hopefully taper out and some semblance of balance will be restored again.

I had it awarded retroactively but I think that might be because I still have my 8/8 T2 and I guess if you still possess loot from a boss, the award system recognised that.

Indeed, that is correct, unfortunately I and a lot of my guildies have sharded all our loot from vanilla raid dungeons to reclaim bank space, so we are just going back and clearing them all again now for fun. Same goes for some of the 5 man dungeons, but I'm not bored enough to go back and reclear Wailing Caverns yet.

I saw this and I have a question about it relating to dual-specs. Assuming that in a dual-spec world it is reasonable that serious raiding mages will have 2 boss specs (and ignore a pvp spec) what motivation is there for a mage to stay frost during a boss encounter given GC's comment above?

I'm looking at this from a raid leader point of view. Suppose I have a mage that raids frost. We clear trash, everything is going fine, yada yada. OK, time for a boss encounter. Shouldn't I ask that frost mage to press his dual spec button and go fire? And if he refuses, isn't that much like a hunter saying "no thanks, I'm not summoning my pet this boss"?

I can't think of any reason unless the boss is a gimmick encounter (Vashj) where a frost mage has a non-dps related advantage.

The dual-spec thing changes the basis for a lot of the theorycrafting about the "best spec" IMO. Mages aren't 1 spec anymore--they are two. If it is a stand and nuke fight, hit your fire spec button. If it is a mobility based fight, hit your arcane spec button. People keep arguing that "all mages will spec fire". Isn't it more like "all mages will spec fire AND arcane and they will use the best spec depending on the boss"? Yes this means you don't get a pvp spec but pvp shouldn't be a concern for a serious raider, right? What am I missing?

Maybe I overread it, but has anyone noticed that the crit chance is NOT increased on Clearcasting procs (as 58/3/0)? It works with PoM though. Can someone confrim this or is it just not showing up, but being calculated correctly?

A second note: Are there any conclusive results yet on which snares may activate Ttw besides slow?

Depends on the encounter, depends how big the dps difference will end up being when we go live, depends on how picky you are as a raid leader. Personally, I wouldn't force anyone to go fire if the difference is the 5-10% region. This also depends on whether it's farming mode or learning mode of course, in which case max dps is often a requirement.

I seriously doubt they will leave frost trailing by alot as it would kill the spec entirely for PvE. As I said in the beginning, it's a delicate issue. I would love to see a complete dps normalization and in addition further develop the different nichés of the specs. Sadly fire lacks a strong identity which prevents them from balancing it this way.

I'm considering playing an arcane/ignite (51/10/0) build for 70 pvp, however, arcane is so talent-heavy that I'm having problems deciding between maxing Mind Mastery and Missile Barrage. From my chosen build, it looks like I have 8 points to spread between Mind Mastery & Missile Barrage. I'm leaning towards 5/5 MM & 3/5 MB, but I am not really set on that.

I know pvp is largely based on play-style, but can anyone help me with the number / theory behind which might provide the best dps boost in a pvp setting?

Here is the full build I'm looking at: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Yes. I know I'm skipping Arcane Stability, but with my play-style, I find that the majority of the time I use AM in PVP, I am not focused and I had to get rid of those extra points for ignite some how...

I've got some test requests for the new patch, can't do them myself this week-end.

- Precision + FFB: Do you get resists with 11% hit (gear/buffs/aura) + 3/3 Elemental Precision with FFB?
Just a quick Recount check/screenie after a Naxx raid will suffice, with how much +hit there was.

- Pets and +hit: Get +17% hit from gear and get 3 full duration Water Elementals and Mirror Images.
Note misses if there are any (Recount check).
If pets get the +hit now, the next question would be whether Elemental Precision affects them as well (unlikely).

- Judgement of Wisdom: Cooldown? Personal/raidwide? Stacking with other paladins' JoW?

Thanks Aikiwoce for your initial tests on the changes so far

So they are saying that snares and freezes will be sufficiently useful that it won't matter to raid leaders if the mage is fire, frost or whatever as long as they use their abilities to help the raid. Otherwise, there is nothing to compensate for.

I was looking forward to trying some of this out, especially since frostfire is my favorite spec currently. However there are a few things worth noting:

1) without the rank switching, you still get many ffb dot ticks. Every time you refresh living bomb you get one tick. Every time you refresh scorch (if you have to), you get a tick. Every time you do instant pyro, you get a tick. Sometimes you can get more than one if you have to do multiple of those in a row.
2) even with rank switching, you can't have 100% dot uptime. There will roughly be 2-3s downtime between reapplications if you go with the 1xrank2, 3xrank1 sequence.

I haven't done thorough testing, but from what I have done just on training dummies, its really more of a pain than its worth. I feel more like an affliction lock than a mage at that point, and every time i tried rank switching, it always seemed my dps went down. Of course I wasn't perfect at it, but I wasn't terrible either.

Are you sure its really worth it to try and do this rank switching of frostfire bolt?

Seems to make it even more useful to throw out a scorch before a pyro on hotstreak procs as someone suggested earlier in this thread as it helps to avoid ignite losses as well as refreshing scorch and getting you an extra FFB dot tick.

I'd like to illustrate a point about how silly DPS is with 3.0 crit rates. By that I mean assuming reasonably proper play, mage DPS is completely RNG/luck-based - the old adage about praying for crits is more applicable than ever.

WWS of our Brutallus kill. Hobo, Vulk and I all have fairly similar gear/stats, we all had the same group buffs. None of us played amazingly well since we weren't sure of fight length, but look at the gap in DPS from top to bottom. The number of spells cast on the boss is very close, but the only difference is our crit rates (and in the order in which those crits happen).

I don't have many WWS parses at present, but everything we've seen from beta indicates that kind of variance will happen all the time, particularly given that a lot of encounters (now and in Naxx) aren't long enough for your crit% to even out. I'd really prefer to see things stabilized and re-balanced accordingly, because as it stands the largest factor in mage DPS is pure luck.

[e] also, Arcane mages with the broom mount are pretty awesome. Insta-invis -> insta-mount -> insta-escape from anything. I ran Arcane in BT (and MC/BWL, fwiw) and it's terrible DPS right now, but it's great fun in PvP.

There was way more than just crit RNG at play in that parse. Your and Hobo's numbers are pretty close (within 10%), but Vulk's are much lower, and it isn't (just) due to his crit being significantly lower.

He missed 3 times, which means he wasn't hit capped. Maybe the RNG was extra-unkind to him since that amounts to 5.2%, but it's significant. His average hit was also 250 lower than Hobo's, which seems to indicate either a larger gear difference than stated or less buffs/consumables in use. He actually cast nearly the same number of hot streak pyroblasts as Hobo did, despite 25% less crit. Crit certainly made a difference, but only maybe half of the 30% disparity. (By my quick math, if he'd had the same 65% crit rate as Hobo but still only 12 hot streak procs, he'd have done 450k total. Closer, but still significantly behind both of you due to lower damage per fireball, uncapped hit, and less total casts.)

Actually he also had 9 hot streak procs according to the buff counter, but cast 12 pyroblasts. If he cast 3 with a cast time, that could have had a significant effect on his dps as well.

I tested it myself, with 3.0s (totally unhasted) FFB cast-time, doing FFB2, FFB1x2 results in almost 100% uptime on the dot.

With any amount of haste, then use FFB2, FFB1x3 and you should have near full uptime (or enough that rank switching is still good).

/castsequence reset=combat/target FFB2, FFB1, FFB1

Sure, you can have "100% uptime" but you miss the last tick of ffb with even the slightest amount of haste. And really, who isn't going to have at least some haste on their gear?

Also, that macro is not really good. Due to the dynamic nature of the new fire/frostfire build, it almost never goes down like that. Whether its recasting a scorch or living bomb or hot streak procs, you rarely get that sequence unless you are just straight spamming ffb. Of course, I have never used a cast sequence macro myself, but I'd assume it wouldn't reset the sequence if you cast something else in the middle, even if it did, it wouldn't be great due to hot streak procs.

I'm curious as to how this affects the actually fireball build though. Is it worth it to do FFB, FBx3ish while keeping up living bomb/pyros on hostreaks? Even with going into arcane? If TtW works with ffb on bosses now then I would think it would be pretty awesome, if it doesn't, then I'm unsure if the dot portion would be worth it in the rotations.

Just a thought here, since DPS focused FFB builds are basicly just slightly differently tuned deep fire builds it could perhaps be worth to weave in some fireballs to get more dot uptime? I mean unless Im missing something major about how those 51 points are spent in an FFB build it seems 51 points in fire ought to produce decent fireballs too. (and you would get dot ticks of those as well since the glyph setup for an FFB build has to be FFB, Molten and Scorch glyphs)

I indeed did cast 3 pyroblasts. Bad lag+spamming pyro for Hot Streak can do that, and it is quite annoying. I wasn't hit capped because after changing my gear to my raid set-up the server crashed and I got rolled back. Did the entire instance in my BG gear because it was so damn easy I didn't even notice. My BG set only swaps out the rings/neck/wand/trinket so it wasn't a big difference but did put me well short of hit cap.

After doing BT as frost spec, I see no reason to be any other spec though. Did 3878dps on Teron and was above or close to 3k most every other fight. It is also way better at trash considering everything gets aoe'd down, and when bosses are little more than glorified trash mobs trash dps is worth spec'ing for. Here is the WWS report from BT and the MC/BWL we did afterwords. For a good laugh check out Rag. It's over 9000!

The thing is currently with the FFB2 dot ticking for ~400 with pure premade gear getting even 1 tick of the dot (which you will when chaincasting 3 second FFB2, but not with haste) is well worth the dmg loss between the initial hit of FFB1 and FFB2. In addition to that macro i also have inidividual buttons assigned to FFB1 and FFB2 to manually adjust my rotation when hotstreak procs occur or when i renew scorch and/or living bomb. I've never used castsequence macros in the past but i believe if you add 1 into the reset conditions (reset=1/combat/target) then the macro should reset whenever you stop to do anything else.

Checking the log, Vulkaire and Jarlyn had similar average hit damage on all spells while Hobo's was 10% above.
The misses and pyros have been mentioned, what remains is the crit RNG.


Fire and RNG
What happens when someone goes from 0% to 100% crit?

For a frost mage (and pretty much every other caster class), it's a 100% DPS increase.
Or, well, Balance Druids scale a bit better too due to Nature's Grace.
For Fire Mages, it's roughly a 200% DPS increase.
For Frostfire Mages, it's roughly a 300% DPS increase.

So, yes, Fire and especially Frostfire Specs are very vulnerable to RNG.
You'll absolutely wreck meters if you're 20% above your actual crit rate like in Synless' Naxx-25 parse.
You'll also pretty much suck if you can't get a crit for the life of it. Seen some 2.4 Sunwell Destrolocks with 17% instead of 40%crit.
Imagine that happening to a Frostfire Mage. Painful.

The same happens for Axe spec Warriors with Deep Wounds and and perhaps Sudden Death on top.


Frostfire Bolt Weaving
Replying to some comments above.

If you have absolutely no haste, you just spam FFB Rank 2. But you're also doing something wrong with your gear or group.

Fireball is a waste of mana, time and DPS in an FFB build. FFB is always better to cast.

As for DoT uptime, you'll likely end up with a 2.5s FFB cast time early on, giving you 3 ticks over 10 seconds.

Also, FFB weaving isn't really hard. Play a Haunt lock for one day, then come back.


Ghetto DoT timer macros
When trying out a Haunt warlock, I found the following macros pretty helpful:
The button is UA, and when you press it, it becomes a question mark until 15 seconds later. Added that for the other DoTs as well.

It worked surprisingly well for me, it turned "DoT Timer watching" into "Whack-a-Mole".

It should work for FFB too. Make a button for a 9s timed rank 2, click it everytime it lights up and spam rank 1 on another button otherwise.