So are we just maxed out with the damage we can do compared to rogues? If he doesn't have a parse then i can just wait it out for another few weeks before i go gemming all of my gear again.

I really don't see how lesser geared mages could be getting more out of the patch than more geared mages. Scaling was increased via burnout and hot streak so mages with better gear should most definitely be putting out more damage. Rogues, hunters and warriors got some pretty big improvements but honestly rogues and hunters were already significantly outdpsing everyone before 3.0. Some of the hybrids increased but some are still lower than mage potential and warlocks didn't get much if anything from the patch. I seriously have a hard time understanding how you could be so low unless your raid runs with lots of warriors/hunters/rogues or you just had terrible luck with rng which is entirely possible given how short the fights are now. One run is hardly a reasonable sample size to start drawing conclusions from. Instead of talking about how you absolutely got killed, post damage meters/parses so we can see what is going on. From everything i have seen, looking through wws parses, mages have gotten a pretty sizable increase in damage potential

Wow Web Stats mage at #3 with 3600 dps (pretty much a 1000 dps increase over the average mage parse pre-3.0)

Wow Web Stats mage at #4 with 3500

Wow Web Stats mage at #1 with 3800

Yes there are lots of parses with mages doing 2800-3200 but there are also lots of parses like the ones I just linked. Even the 2800-3200 parses show a decent increase over what we had pre-3.0. RNG has a huge effect on dps for mages now with hotstreak and one run is hardly indicative of what the class is capable of pushing.

Honestly even when they do get dps balanced on beta at 80, I doubt it will be very balanced at 70 because they really aren't trying to balance things for 70. The way things are right now on live at 70 isn't even really indicative of how they are right now at 80 on beta.

oh give me a break. You linked parses where one of the mages had %66 rate, the other had %75 crit. I hate to break it to you but those don't happen very often. And on that %66 crit parse you posted the mage STILL ended up 4th. Imagine having that sort of unbelievable crit run and still not be able to get the top.

Here is a parse of our latest brutalis fight. The people above me have about the same level (t6+) gear that I have. My crit rate was average on the fight.

this was this past week AFTER patch 3.02
Brutallus


now here is a parse BEFORE patch 3.02
Brutallus

The big difference is that all the other classes got huge bumps (especially meelee) and we seem to have stayed where we were. Now if it's something we can find out about a different rotation and set then I'm all for it. But don't give me this garbage about how we are fine when the numbers are overwhelming clear that we aren't.

Dhaalamar your parse just shows that you are unlucky. 45% crit and 0 hot streak procs, or the parse is broken and do not take into account pyroblast or you simply didn't pyroblast on hotstreaks?

With hotstreak procs, your dps should be higher than what you achieved prior to 3.02

I had enjoyed using Rawr in the 1.x iterations, but 2.0.2 seems to be very bugged. I will take the rating of [The Lightning Capacitor] with a grain of salt, as I have a very limited T5/Badge setup, but it hasn't been worth much recently so to see it rated above [Icon of the Silver Crescent] and [Dark Iron Smoking Pipe] (which i had to reenter the proc for) is odd. The Darkmoon Card: Crusade is totally broken, and I am unsure how to edit it to work again. I am not really concerned with getting 100% out of every piece of gear (I'm frost b/c things die too quickly and Blizzard is OP in short AoE fights) as I know that we will be going from SSC/Eye to BT/MH and then to WotLK, but I still would like to get understandable results about the gear that I do have.
If this is in the wrong thread I would appreciate a point to where it should be, but the TC I (and my guild mages) have been doing is based on this and vontre's graph so we would like to know what we should be looking at/for.

Edit as on q was answered (thank you Layton)

Did you by any chance, need the blue to activate your meta requirement? This will easily cover the 73dps.

With the fear of posting something that most already know (but i could not find anything about it)..

Have anyone noticed how much [The Lightning Capacitor] procs right now? It procs of my blizzard like i've read somewhere before.. but it also procs of the dot on my fireballs! I noticed last night when throwing a fireball at a target dummy and watching the ticks that suddenly after 2-3 ticks i suddenly got a proc from the lightning capacitator. It looked kinda fun, i was standing there dooing nothing, and suddenly my char made a "castin movement" and did a 1k'ish lightning.

Damage and patch 3.0.2

Most of you ran a 2/48/11 spec in 2.4 and now run some 0/50/0+11 variant.
You'll notice 2 very significant things.

First, the damage of your average Fireball hit has gone down. A lot.
That's the result of the changes to Misery and Improved Scorch and some other raid buffs.
None of the new talents increase the damage on your average crits.

Second, you should put out more damage than before.
You've got a lot more crit scaling than before now. You also have a lot more crit than before through raid buffs.
You however have to be on your ball to use everything that you got.
You'll need a buff tracker or very good ears, a DoT timer and a lot of mana through JoW.

I've gone 0/50/11 and noticed a large improvement in my DPS in Sunwell last Thursday, I also noticed mana issues but I was able to manage them for the most part. I have held off changing over to gemming for intellect and spirit thus far, as I am interested to see how I go in Sunwell tonight before dramatically changing anything

Alot of the people complaining about increased RNG don't seem to be taking fight duration (or to be more specific number of casts) into account nearly as much as you should. There is really no fight on live that is going to last you much over 3 minutes so unless you do the fight several times and average it out your variance is going to be higher mainly due to this. Hot streak does increase your variance some but fight length or multiple iterations of the same fight will quickly bring hot streak close to its "true value". If brutallus were still a 6 minute fight you'd be getting very similar variance (% of your total dps wise) to the amount you experienced pre-3.0. Also when comparing different wws reports I notice people are just assuming these raids have every buff covered; they dont, many are lacking as much as 5-10% crit that isnt being covered, and some people are using self buffs like flasks, oils, etc... well others aren't. If you are wearing the best sunwell/bt gear, and have all raid and self buffs covered, rawr puts you at ~60% fire crit (for fireball) at level 70. That means saying someone who got ~65% crit rate was "extremely lucky" is bullshit, especially with combustion and world in flames this can easily be close to average for them, if your at 40% crit thats not variance its lacking something, whether it be raid buffs, self buffs, proper gear, proper talents or a combination of those.

You forgot to mention that Arcane Mages ONLY get a base 50% DPS increase with fulltime crits, which goes up to JUST a 75% DPS increase from Spell Power talent( crits value = base * 1.5 ). Which means that Arcane Mages will scale the least well based on getting crits; worse than any other spec.

Further since deep Arcane Mages are Spell Haste soft-capped at 33% (maximum haste before [AB, Abar] starts stacking up the AB debuff), and soft-capped at 11% hit (17% - 3% talents - 3% raid buff), the ONLY avenue open to scaling deep Arcane with gear, gems, consumables is with crit, the least effect scaling stat for Arcane.

So, yeah, Arcane mages WILL have significant CRIT scaling problems compared Fire, Frost, Frostfire mages. Not to mention compared to most all other casters.

Don't mean to be rude but without a WWS report or something of that nature
is just worthless anecdotal evidence.

Wow Web Stats here it comes. Armory still hasn't updated my character though, but I can send you the rawr file if you want.

Is there some kind of brain-damage rash going on these last few days?

I fail to see how the WotLK Talent Discussion is furthered one single step when all we're doing is discussing WWS parses and RNG, and half the blue posts from the last month have been "WE'RE WORKING ON DPS OUTPUT" or "PRE-WOTLK ISN'T BALANCED".

Is it honestly that complex to understand that with a Beta build on live, no, you're not Working As Intended? Or are people just feeling the need to whine about (a) a class that may have unfair advantage with 60 talent points and a wotlk spec over one which doesn't as much and (b) radically changing mechanics which result different play-style or execution.

It's not just each class that has changed with respect to the others, it's that combined with the way each class has changed towards consumables, available gear in certain respects, bosses, and the huge nerf in boss HP. Claiming your class has been forgotten, miss-tuned or isn't competitive is arogant when you know what you're playing is not what's intended, just a stop-gap to keep you happy (and out of WAR), and provided you're not actually benched, it doesn't really matter.

Tonight I spec'ed a pure scorch only hot streak (+ living bomb) spec to compare it to the fireball/scorch I had been testing the previous couple of nights.

For myself, with Karazan level gear, it was a definate damage upgrade (while also being more random)

The higher crit rate (and faster spell rate) resulted in signifigant hot streak gains, and at my gear level, Pryo's really stand out in adding to my fight DPS.
There was also better longevity from the use of scorch as well as the mana refunds from the improved crit rate.

This isn't anything that's going to apply to the majority of you all with the raid environments or gear levels you are in, but I thought I would still share. It might be something that becomes a viable choice for some of you with your first WoTLK 10 mans when your spell damage and ratings are back down in the dumps? However, I'm just guessing there, as I'm not very familiar with the new spells. There are also good looking fireball based talents in the first 20 of arcane that will become available to a 51 fire build as we level up.

When I am the only mage in a run, and adding in the Hotstreak and Living Bomb timings, things also become a lot simpler to manage by dropping fireball. One less spell to use and one less important timer to try and protect (scorch)

Does anyone have a parse (of a relatively skilled mage) from a patchwerk kill on beta when from before they made ffb2 dot scale? Or even after really, as long as you aren't doing rank switching. I'm curious as to how many ticks you get on average without switching. My gut feeling tells me its more than you would think, which also tells me that rank switching isn't as big a dps increase as others are making it out to be, especially with the lost damage of using ffb1 instead of ffb2.

There seems to be a fire approach and a frost approach.

Deep frost with fully talented blizzard procs a lot of crits and slows their movement to a crawl. For sustained, safe AOE talented blizzard is very good.

The fire approach is something I've been playing with. Take all the same fire DPS talents you'd take for any deep fire build and add in blast wave, dragon breath and firestarter. In group play at level 70 nothing much will live past a flaamestrike-dragonbreath-flamestrike-blastwave-flamestrike combo if there is any other aoe in the party. In solo play, you can do some pretty nasty things with rotations like this:

(edited because I did not read the living bomb tooltip and was doing something dumb)

Flamestrike at extreme range+living bomb target 1.
Either drop blizzard between you or just strafe/change position to allow for good cone grouping/LOS pulls
Dragon breath flamestrike-blastwave-flamestrike About now the living bombs is starting to go off. This will disorient the target if it doesn't kill them, buying you more time to set up more boom or fix your bars. Arcane explosion or other instant spells like fire blast can pick off any stragglers. Frost nova or cone of cold to buy time for living bomg to tick off, cooldowns to come back and/or to repair heath/mana. Ice block lets you repeat all the firestarter spells

The blastwave knocks them back just far enough that the GCD for the last flamestrike has time to tick and they're all in position for it as it drops again. The dragon breath disorient doesn't break for fire dots running. For a little extra survivability you can add impact to the mix, although proccing stuns can break up the smooth charge of the mobs to you just like it can with frost AOE grinding and frostbite done the old way, pre 3.0.

In group play the blast wave isn't too bad...if there is a wall nearby they won't move at all, and if not you can usually position so they aren't knocked very far away from the tank..and if he's still got aggro they'll just come right back...and if you pulled aggro they'll come right back through the tank slowly, so he can pick them up. If the blast wave might be a problem though fighting elites you'd stick to dragon breath, flamestrike and living bomb passed around to different mobs with arcane explosion as filler.

I've been using the above patterns to zerg the lower level Hellfire Peninsula dungeon elite pulls. If I do it right, I can pull 4-5 of them and win. Even if I spaz, pulls of 2-3 are safe. If I lead with crowd control, replace the first flamestrike in the above list with "sheep most annoying enemy+living bomb a different target". When doing this kind of thing I use PVP gear...something like 11k health, 240 resilience and 950 spellpower.

This kind of behavior does burn mana fast, but I can aoe mobs with 18000 or so health and the limiting factor is still my health bar, not my mana bar. You do have to drink or evocate between pulls.

If you're not doing elites, they won't survive a simple flamestrike/dragonbreath/flamestrike/blastwave combo.

Did LB get changed this weekend to allow you to LB more than one target at a time?

Delete - beaten by shamroq

I've run into this a bit myself. Once you start casting the slow pyroblast it will cost you more DPS to abort it than to follow through. Although in my case I can't blam lag. I blame remapping my keys and not being used to it and the new rotation yet.

Yeah here the parse

WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!!

Our dual glaive warrior was WAY ahead of the rest, but I personally was really dissapointed with 2600dps (had 2350 pre-patch). As you see I did not miss a Pyro on hotstreak.

I've been playing with this too, and scorch/fireblast/hot streak with living bomb wove into both rotations

On my spreadsheet, it should be comparable to a fireball/scorch/hotstreak rotations at the kind of gear levels where in 2.4 you did 1200 DPS (as opposed to the 2600dps guys that most people are talking about). That's a bit higher than your gear level, which would imply it would work even better for you than it does for me.

Fireball just plain scales better than scorch with better gear levels, primarily from the 3.0 cast time with 3.5s damage coefficient and the imp fireball talent.

When I actually play it, I'm having issues remembering to fire blast when it comes up, riding the global cooldown instead of having the built in cast-time latency thing that lets me chaincast smoothly with fireballs and being careful to not accidently hit pyroblast when hot streak is not procced. So my two "WWS log" type results are kind of pointlss at this point, because the guy at the chair can't hit the keys right for the spec. In spite of my fumbling, I'm doing significantly more damage, but not as much improvement as my spreadsheet would indicate by a large margin.