Flamestrike is just an awkward spell to cast, especially when you're dealing with rotating between ranks 8 and 9, trying to hit as many targets as possible, and so forth. Blizzard does a fair amount of damage without having to sacrifice any points. Naturally, Fingers of Frost would really help Blizzard out, but in a Frostfire vs Fireball duke-out, you sacrifice no points in Frostfire to be able to use Blizzard effectively. Flamestrike, on the other hand, only starts to become worthwhile when you have Firestarter. Consider that occasionally, by the time you've finished casting flamestrike, the tank has moved all the mobs out of the targeted area. Blizzard's radius is really what it has going for it.

Speaking of Flamestrike, I remember reading something about a 2.0s cast time. Whatever happened to this change? It really is necessary to make Flamestrike even moderately worthwhile and would still make the spell mediocre compared to other AoE abilities.

Straight Flamestrike spam isn't all that bad. It has very high damage when it crits, and if you rotate ranks 8 and 9, you'll be getting the most out of the DoT. With Blast Wave Glyph, you're also scoring two instant Flamestrikes (one every 20 seconds, another every 30 seconds). A 2 second cast time doesn't alleviate the problem with Flamestrike. The problem is that oftentimes mobs are so spread out or being moved that the DoT isn't allowed to tick, or you can't hit both groups with one Flamestrike.

The 2 second cast time was applied to lower ranks of the spell.

Fire rotation, not straight flamestrike spam. Ignoring fire's glaring issues with targeting and knockback for a second, I'm talking about coordinated usage of Living Bomb, Flamestrike (Mainly from Firestarter), Dragon's Breath, Blast Wave, and Arcane Explosion (, Cone of Cold). In 3.0 this was assumed to be on par with or better than Blizzard spam in terms of damage, but it has largely been ignored since Wrath launched. I'll do the calculations myself, but I need the exact coefficient splits for flamestrike and living bomb (in terms of dd vs. dot). The issue with the reticule size is largely overblown, in my experience.

Assistance requested!

3) Proc rate/cooldown on Judgement of Wisdom?



3.0.8 Changes

Mana Drains/Burns
Now work of a percentage of your total mana pool.

Judgement of Wisdom
Now restores 2% base mana per proc instead of 1% max mana.
No info on proc rate/cooldown yet.

Torment the Weak
Is now triggered by attack speed slowing as well. It also affects Arcane Blast now.
It should be up all the time on bosses now without casting Slow because the tank has an attack speed slow.

Arcane Overhaul
Arcane Blast debuff is now a buff and lasts 10s. It's stacked by chaining Arcane Blast and removed when casting any other Arcane spell.
It increases damage of your next Arcane spell by 15% and cost of Arcane Blast by 200%. Arcane Missiles get the damage increase for all 5 volleys.
A new glyph increases the damage bonus of the Arcane Blast buff by 5% per stack, up to 15% at 3 stacks.
Arcane Blast is now affected by Torment the Weak as well.

Arcane Playstyles
Early simulations gave the following recommendations:
AB-ABar is your normal DPM cycle.
It might change to AB2/3-ABar when you get haste capped at 33%.
AB*3-ABar is your DPS cycle.
AB spam is your burn cycle, however with a bad mana conversion.
Use MBAM as soon as it procs. Use Molten Armour.

Spec Performance
Without the glyph, it's about 4% behind Fire/Frostfire specs, with more mobility.
Fire with Torment and Frostfire as usual are now neck-to-neck.
Sources: Kavan, Vontre and some more for Arcane Style/Performance.

Evocation
Cooldown down to 4 minutes, 2 minutes talented with 2/2 Arcane Flows.

Elemental Precision
Is now 3% hit to all spells. No more double-dipping for Frostfire.

Dispel Resistance
Talents now only affect the dispel resistance of buffs and DoTs.
Winter's Chill and Polymorph are not protected by Arcane Subtlety anymore.

Procs items
Many items that procced on spell cast were changed to proc only on damage/healing spells.


Pyromaniac - 10% spirit regen instead of mana cost reduction per point.
Improved Blizzard - down to 20%/40%/50% slowing.
Arcane Flows - added -1/-2 minutes on Evocation.
Slowfall - castable on others now.
Blast Wave - Minor Glyph for -15% mana, no knockback.
Glyph of Arcane Blast - +5% damage on the Arcane Blast buff. Unknown whether it stacks to 15% with 3 stacks.
Illustration of the Dragon Soul - down to 20 SP per stack. About 10% better than Sundial/Embrace now.


[Edit]: Thanks for the test!
And the point of LB/AoE/Pyro is a very good one.

quick test on 77-78 mammoths about 2 minutes ago. Test server US Spanish (PVP)
Cleared talents
Spec into TTW +Fire down to but not including MF.

AM=906-907

Arcane missiles+chilled(Ice armor) =1015-1016

Speccing into MF:
AM=906-907
AM+MF range=1015-1016
AM+Chilled 906-907
AM+CHilled+MF range=1015-1016

Thus it seems that selecting MF still disables MF

The Pyromaniac change is nice and makes spirit of at least some value, but for the amount of spirit Blizzard keeps stuffing into our gear, it would be nice if it it was as useful to us as it is to locks.

Another point that might be worth adding to test is Living Bomb crits on multiple mobs.

In an AoE situation, do 2 crits instantly grant a Hotstreak? How does this raise the value of Living Bomb in a FFB rotation?

Thanks!

Actually, thats a good question, although I wouldn't specifically aim for aoe dps. On bosses such as noth where you dps the boss and your living bombs will hit incidentally adds, it could be quite interesting to have living bomb explosions behave 'the good way' with hot streak, and grant you an almost guaranteed hot streak.

However, my expectation would be more towards any 2 consecutive crits (which is more or less defined as per the combat logs) would give hot streak, so basically just getting a bunch of crits from living bomb wouldn't be enough -- the amount and timing of the non-crit would affect even more hot streak.

I just went over to our old friend doctor boom on the EU PTR (for easy AoE sampling) and tested it out and that is indeed how Living Bomb interacts with hot streak. Two consecutive crits, as per reported by the combat log, will proc hot streak off 1 LB cast. 20minutes of just leaving LB on Dr. Boom and every single explosion stayed within this rule.

So Living Bomb, when it catches other targets beyond the primary one, will provide more hot streak procs than otter spells.

To clarify, Living bomb giving the following results in your combat log WILL give you a hot streak:

hit
hit
miss
crit
crit
hit

On 6 targets; 2 crits together = hot streak. However;

hit
crit
hit
crit
hit

will NOT give hot streak.

I don't quite know how to figure out if amp magic will work well for a particular encounter.

For starters, it's tough to set baselines for damage vs certain abilities because of differing stats from week to week and small sample sizes. Do I have to read the whole wotlk naxx thread in order to find out this sort of stuff, or is there a condensed post for mages?

Finally, understanding the incoming damage breakdowns in a wws is hard. A guide on that would be really helpful.

edit: I think this is the right place for this thread... I read page 100-172 of this post and I'm starting page 1 on the simple answers post, but I don't think this would have a "brief" answer. If this needs to be moved to that thread, no worries.

I believe it would be safe to assume that if the changes to ToTW make it to live then we can include the %dmg bonus from the talent in all boss fight calculations for the affected spells.

But the bug on molten fury is still active isn't it ?

I'm tired of waiting for this to be fixed........ I'm disabling Molten Fury in the sim when taken in conjunction with Torment the Weak. Once the bug is fixed, I'll revert the change.

For my gear level, and for a few specs, here's some raw numbers for burst AOE. These hold up fairly well as I vary gear within the "blue green" to "nax25" levels.

What I have not done is run the numbers for a fully talented deep frost blizzard, which I think is significantly better than the various frostfire type blizzards.

We'll use untalented arcane explosion spam as the baseline. So if a value is "1.25" it means "about 25% more damage than arcane explosion spam". Flamestrikes don't assume downranking for dot, and only assume 25% dot "uptime" if used as instant, 50% if used as "spam". You can do a bit better than that in real play in a sustained aoe situation, but I did these calculations for bursts of 6-10 seconds, looking for spike aoe damage, not sustained dps.

One odd thing is that frost nova actually does better DPS at current gear scaling than arcane explosion for less mana and also helps with blast wave knockback, so I included it in the "nonfirestarter spec" bursts for comparison. Likewise on the frostfire I show a "shatter blizzard" spec vs the more normal spec without it, where you spend those points on mana efficiency/threat. These are rough estimates, gear dependent but should give a ballpark idea. 1.78 doesn't mean "1.78" it means "in the ballpark of 2/3 to 4/5 more damage depending on gear. The error bars are large, but the relative placements are probably right.


Spec1: Generic arcane/fire. 18/53/0 fire utility talents moved to aoe talents
assumes no torment of weak uptime, about 50% uptime on arcane focus
1.05 Arcane explosion spam
2.33 dragon breath/firestarter flamestrike/blast wave/firestarter flamestrike
1.78 dragon breath/frost nova/blast wave/cone of cold
1.34 flamestrike spam (3 seconds per cast, no downranking)
0.99 blizzard spam.

Spec2: Generic frostfire. fire utility talents moved to aoe talents, shatter needs another talent point for imp blizzard
1.00 Arcane explosion spam
2.33 dragon breath/firestarter flamestrike/blast wave/firestarter flamestrike
2.10 dragon breath/frost nova/blast wave/cone of cold (assumes shatter)
2.00 dragon breath/frost nova/blast wave/cone of cold (no shatter)
1.30 flamestrike spam (3 seconds per cast, no downranking)
1.30 blizzard with shatter talents
1.24 blizzard without shatter talents

The above numbers also assume you've figured out how to target flamestrikes efficiently in the gcd's or during
cast time. I've found that with practice this is pretty efficient and mob motion is predictable so it's not a horrible
assumption, but you can shave a bit of the top burst rotation if you don't believe that assumption.

So the takeaway is if you are arcane/fire, arcane explosion is better for sustained aoe than blizzard, but probably your best result is taken with flamestrike and downranked flamestrike, alternating between rank 8 and rank 9. That kind of rotation and also assuming full dot uptime, not half, would probably put it into the 1.5ish range on the scale. For burst the firestarter talent is an extremely well spent two talent points.

If you are frostfire, you'll probably never use arcane explosion, and flamestrike is only a marginal increase over non-shatter blizzard, and similar to shatter blizzard. Which means you probably won't use much except blizzard unless you need mobile AOE or have a reason to desire a 3 second windup before the spell drops....but flamstrike is still a solid alternative in the rare circumstances when it's convenient. Again, if you want burst aoe, you're probably best off spending all four points but because your frost nova and cone of cold are better, the gap isn't as large between "With firestarter" and "without firestarter".

None of this considers mana burn. For the record, flamestrike and blizzard are about twice as mana efficient as arcane explosion spam for either arcane/fire or frostfire, largely because of the mana reduction talents in those trees not applying to arcane. The burst aoe rotation is only sligthly cheaper than arcane explosion spam - the base costs on those spells are pretty high. It's actually not a lot less efficient to do the blizzard or flamestrike spam than to just do a normal deep fire rotation (it is more expensive than a frostfire rotation). This assumes enough targets to fairly reliably get a crit on each tic for blizzard and on the main blast for flamestrike to get moe payback, so 3-4 victims is ideal. Blizzard gets a lot less efficient if they don't hold still for 8 seconds, flamestrike does a bit better than reported if they stay on the small aoe for the full 8 sec.

You'll note I left living bomb out of the comparison. That's largely because it does identical damage for all specs consideed and is highly situational on whether it's useful at all. In the range of sub ten second burst I was looking at, it's essentially useless. In real play, I've used it in all of the scenarios and rotations, usually on a secondary target from the main dps focus target, so it would live long enough for the burst to go off.

seems fixed to me

Noticing that Pyromaniac will be losing mana cost reduction for improved mana regen, I have a few questions.

1) What is the mana regen for Pyromaniac in 3.08? (% mana regen while in combat?)
2) What is the progression of the mana regen stat?
3) Will it stack with Arcane Meditation and Glyphed Mage Armor?
--3a) If it stacks, what is the effect?

The point for 3a is that I read that Pyromaniac's mana regen is 10%/20%/30% mana regen while in combat. Thus if you have 30% from Pyromaniac, 30% from Arcane Meditation, 30% from Mage Armor, and 20% from Glyph of Mage Armor, would the mana regen in combat be capped at 100% or less, allow 110% mana regen in combat, or not allow AM and Pyro to stack?


Also, I am looking into this Ignite Munching condition. I have not seen it happen to me at all with casted spells. I have had combined crits from casted Fire spell + Fire Blast and the Ignites flawlessly worked. The only time I have seen a glitch in Ignite was when Living Bomb's explosion crits concurrently with a casted fire spell that crits.

In the LB Ignite glitch I had on the live realm, I had two independent Ignites ticking on my combat log and the one LB exploded twice, both critical. The Living Bomb's Ignite was ticking separate from the Scorch that critted concurrently.

In the case that Living Bomb is causing the Ignite glitches, my hypothesis is that debuffs and buffs are processed on a separate thread than player actions. With all player actions going through one thread, there is absolutely no concurrency issues between casted spells because only one happens at a time in whatever order. With Living Bomb causing Ignite and controlled on a separate thread, then you have concurrency issues. Thus the Ignite Munching is not Ignite Munching but Living Bomb Ignite Glitch.

You truly ought to reread the ignite thread I started on the matter, because living bomb ignite munching is very much part of the ignite bug, and it lays out pretty clearly why.

It is possible they put an intermediary fix to alleviate ignite munching a while ago since the amount of reported ignite munching has been very low, but it doesn't means they are all gone.

Manly, I found the post, but it mostly comments on Fireball + Pyroblast on Hot Streak. I have 3x Fireball crit in a row with a HS Pyroblast that critted, but I guess either my haste rating is not high enough to cause the said glitch or otherwise.

Again, the only instances where there is a glitch occurs when Living Bomb is active. I did take pictures of the combat log on the glitch. So I can write in text what it says if it could point to another issue.

Shoot, I have had one instance where Ignite did no damage, but what happened was I scorched and Fire Blast chain critted the target quick enough that Ignite kept refreshing leaving the target dead before the first tick could happen.

One of the thoughts I have for reducing Ignite Munching is for Ignite to detonate after X number of refreshes or when Living Bomb explodes on the target.

I think we should do all theorycrafting based on either current ptr releases, or current live releases, and make no assumptions about anything other than what we can play.

As well, we should make a separate forum for game design concepts (from the QQ to the enlightened), basically to clean up the TC threads. To be honest, I learned a lot about game design from several people here, and it was really neat, but it took a long time while I was trying to figure out how to play my class.

Since I seem to recall 4T6 affecting specifically Fireball, Frostbolt and Arcane Missiles, I don't imagine it would provide any boost to Scorch or Pyroblast whatsoever.

Quite. Cunningly, a zero percent gain in 6% of your total damage output is zero. That stands for the T5 item you also mentioned, specifically refers only to Arcane Blast.