I call shananigans on Arcane and FB, I'm sticking to good ol' FFB. It's tried and true, and considering we're talking about Blizzard here, best thing anyone could say. I mean come on, page 6 of the Product Catalog that came in the WotLK box, they spelled Arthas as "Arthus", and they made the flogging character.

Arcane is generally doing more DPS right now. It can change at any moment, and if it does, respecs are cheap. At any rate, it's nice to change things up once in a while. Not sure what printing mistakes have to do with it.

I don't understand the point of your post. Is there something you're trying to say or imply, or are you just vending whine?

You can "call shenanigans" on whatever you like. Fact remains FB remains competitively better than FFB for reasons which are plausible and logical, and Arcane is only over-board due to (1) an extremely over-powered Glyph (2) the incredibly short encounter durations we're seeing (3) a mechnanic which is close to impossible to re-work without (another) arcane overhaul (to the tune of "AB doesn't buff ABarr" or something equally idiotic, which would make the longest tooltip even longer).

The arcane blast -> arcane missiles -> arcane barrage combo is very easy to fix so that the arcane blast only powers up AM and not the following arcane barrage. You simply remove the AB debuff when AM fires and replace it with a buff that only works with AM and not any other spell. It does mean you add one new debuff into the game, but it can have the exact same tooltip and icon as the AB debuff, so you don't need to add new strings to localize etc.

I think the question is wether the current behavior is intended or even "somewhat intended" or simply a bug.

Illustration of the Dragon Soul:
Molten armor does not proc on melee... however it also no longer eats combustion (untalented).
Mana shield doesn't proc it, even though it's considered a healing spell in terms of scaling (? I think ?).
Mirror Images don't proc when they cast, of course.
Cone of cold procs once per cast (even if it doesn't hit).

edit: One disadvantage now to the AE spam is that it will also proc your other trinkets, which would potentially suck.

edit: Ok, another thing, I'd like to recind my previous statement on TC for live servers... I realize now that TC'ing on the beta, even though it's a moving target, is pretty awesome. 3.0.8 is the first patch that I've seen PTR --> live, and the ptr TC stuff makes a huge difference.

You might not realize it, but I actually proposed that it should only stack once per cast so as to remain balanced with what it is supposed to be. It is a lot better (design-wise) than it was.

Theres still the mini loophole of AE spam to pre-stack, but thats costly enough that I think its fair-game. It does sadly allows it to always stay active, which detracts from the balance point (where conceptually it is clearly meant to have a stacking time and to drop off when you have no target for 10s, which in this case won't happen on a boss fight).

The only glaring details I see there is that blizzard should stack it once, and that AM should only stack one. Thats about it.

I agree with Maje, but I guess you're supposed to switch trinkets all the time depending on what you are doing etc...

Speaking of which, I wonder if the riding crop issue has simply been forgotten and it's working as intended that level 80 players ride slower than level 70 players. The reason for essentially removing them from the game was that people forgot to swap trinkets before going into combat...

I had the Darkmoon card in TBC and almost never used it because the charge would drop off so often during slow periods in so many boss fights. The pre-nerf dragon soul trinket was at least easy to keep up since I would usually ice barrier during pauses and that would be enough to maintain the charges.

Anyone tried a 53/18 or 51/20 spec for scroch? I tried once and found it very difficult to keep up scroch in my ~11sec cycle.

I don't see why it's a problem. Half-way through your 3rd cycle you'll cast a scorch. The only time you can't cast Scorch is after the AM and before the ABarr. At any point that's not that junction you can inject a Sc between either the ABarr and the AB, the AB's themselves, or the AB and the AM. It will neither influence your AB buff nor your possible MBAM. The only thing you'll risk, is wasting a Clearcasting, but do you seriously give a shit?

Don't think that just because you're rotating you have to "finish" the rotation to inject. You wouldn't wait till the rotation ended to move out of the fire, why are you bothering with completing the cycle when refreshing?

Oi Oi, useless post earlier on my part indeed. Now my chance at redeeming myself (tehehe). I did a little bit of testing out on the boss target dummy in Darnassus (So Molten Fury wouldn't be up). Then I respec'd to arcane, did about 15 tests for each spec, that being starting at full mana with 3 gems up and all that jazz, without anything but mage armor/molten armor up. Glyphs weren't beneficial to either spec, didn't switch out gear either, and my dps was actually lower, by around 15%.

Rotation for FFB was just spam FFB, put up living bombs and refresh scorch, throw in instant pyros when it's up (FFB, FFB, if both crit after casting the 3rd FFB I use Pyro then use pyro and continue with FFB)
Arcane I did the rotation that a guildy told me to use that he has been using with great results, that being ABx3 -> AM and cut off the last missle with ABar, and just keep doing that and use mana gem whenever I'd get the full effect with 2-T7.

So am I doing anything wrong, could arcane actually be that dependant on glyphs, and what's the deal with FB nowadays?

Arcane Missile clipping got hotfixed. Before you could apply the +60% buff to AM and then ABarr, but now AM will consume the AB buff. Also, the Arcane Blast glyph made a huge difference to arcane dps seeing as its +5% damage being applied 3 times.

As you know you used to be able to stack these pre-combat with slow fall pre 3.0.8 which was great because it was mana efficient. I found that now arcane explosion works to stack this trinket pre-combat, but blizzard does not.

Using arcane explosion, stack this trinket pre-combat and space the stacks 8-9 seconds apart to allow for the 5 sec rule to mana regen between stacks. Assuming you are fully raid buffed you will regen a lot of the mana back. You can pop a mana gem to make up the rest of the difference start of combat. With the length of fights these days I pop one in the beginning of fights with my combustion and IV anyways, even at full mana for the spell power bonus.

Anyone have a better way to stack this trinket pre-combat?

I personally don't think stacking it pre combat with AE then using a mana gem is worth it. I have a macro tied in to all my CD's including mana gem, for the t7 SP bonus, and generally when it's stacked to 10, I pop all my CD's and start blowing stuff up.

Having to wait until mana gem comes back up just seems like a waste of time if you ask me. Besides, it's only 10 casts.

Since we're on the topic of trinkets, I have [Dying Curse], [Sundial of the Exiled], [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] and I'm trying to get [Embrace of the Spider]. For FFB or TTW FB, which two should I use, I'm thinking Dying Curse and Dragon Soul, any input?

It largely depends on hit. Dying curse and Illustration would be the best combo if you can use the hit on Dying Curse. (If if not, i'd replace it with Embrace of the spider when you get that. This goes for basicly all specs, as I've tried it out in rawr with different combos, specs and level of gear.

I am trying to get Embrace of the spider myself to replace my Sundial of the Exiled, and the dying curse is excellent to use on a 19/52 spec because of the 13% hit needed. (with Draenei) But for arcane I actually prefer getting to 10% hit and skipping arcane focus, because it frees up talents for pushback protection and enough hit is extremely easy to get on good gear anyway, basicly without gimping your other stats.

I usually spam AE, sit down and drink and refresh it with a frost nova or an occasional AE until we pull.

If you can use the hit then Dying curse + illustration, if not Sundial + Illustration.

I agree AE + drink between charges is the best way.

First of all I had to read the WoWWiki article on ignites to understand this topic and therefore my very limited knowledge is based on those information as I did not find any good answer about it here (but maybe I'm just too dumb to use the search engine correctly).

In my understanding an ignite gets "munched" whenever a spell without travel time crits during the travel time of another spell that is also critical. If this was indeed correct then only LB and FBlast (or an instant FS or Sc with some serious haste *sigh*) crits could get "munched" by the crit from either FB, FFB or PB.

If this is infact the case then you cannot avoid ignite munching very well anyway and it wouldn't be "too bad" to overwrite a much weaker debuff. Worst case would be FBlast and simultanous LB crit being overwritten by PB.

I'm not a genius concerning the maths about this, but wouldn't this mean that assuming(!) a 2.5 sec cast and 1 second travel time on FB / FFB there would a 40% chance of a LB to get munched (not taking into account an exact rotation, ie. no HS).

It is a very "raw" attempt of mine to unstand this and I would appreciate if somebody could correct me / give me some feedback on this because with about 60% crit and HS now proccing from LB as well I'm wondering if there is a good way of avoiding too much damage to get "munched".

There were absolute masses of threads devoted entirely to Ignite's behaviour before the class-specific restructuring took place.

Currently, there is a non-negligible amount of damage lost to Ignite Munching, however the game is ballanced around that (or more correctly, despite it) and the nature of HS and LB is such that now, bothering with Ignite Munching is more of a DPS loss than it is a gain due to less lost damage.

Would regemming a few sockets with +16 hit gems so I'm at around the same hit with Dying Curse, using Embrace instead of DC, be worth it?

I'm just a fanatic for stacking large amounts of haste. Power Infusion (Disc priest gives it to me all the time), Icy Veins, Hyperspeed Accel, a speed potion (if I have any) and then heroism, lots of damage.

Wich is exactly when I rolled a mage. I did not read the mage discussions before and therefore I probably missed that. There are no public viewable archives here on the forums, are there?

Thanks for responding anyway.

Details of ignite munching has been recently explained, in easy-to-understand detail, in the FFB thread. You might just have to dig through it a bit to find it.