No. Icy Touch has a built-in snare effect, the talent just makes it more powerful. The only (tanking) classes that require talents are paladins and druids (although both of these provide the effect passively once talented, as opposed to having it tied to an active ability).

ok understood ty much

Technically wrong since the top DPS DK spec is currently a disease less blood spec.

Just make sure your holy and retribution paladins aren't judging the same judgement as the tank, as they will overwrite that judgement and cancel the attack-speed debuff. There is no way to tell that from the debuff-icons, so make sure your paladins talk to each other about who judges what.

Doh. That's something I'll need to remember when playing my paladin (she quite often tanks with healadins), especially when I have dual spec and when healing I can do the long range judgements.

Usually I judge wis and they judge light so I've gotten lucky so far. But I've not actually ever thought about that wrinkle.

LB ticks are proccing Sundial of the exiled. I have not seen an updated story on either of these in the last few pages.


The tick on LB also procs Lightweave.

Has anyone determined whether or not critical LB ticks eat combustion charges? It appears to be yes from what I just did.

E: couple edits from finding other info several pages back

On live, the egg procs on Arcane Missiles incorrectly. This has been fixed on the PTR to proc only on healing spells. I have had good mileage from mine but its days are numbered. No point in buying one now.

If LB is chewing up Combustion charges, would it be better to NOT re-apply LB when we are about to stack CD''s in Molten Fury Range, and give our primary nuke the crit chances vs LB DoT ticks? We already avoid re-applying when under BL as the lost CD for it is less than a main nuke.

In a duel between wasting a Combustion and letting LB drop, particularly as 3.1 is indicating the massive mileage the LB Glyph will grant us, rest assured, it's the Combustion that gets the short end of the stick. There is no possible way not having LB up can be beneficial, even if it means Combustion is a wasted talent.

Which frankly, I think it is. The only reason I consider it worth speccing is because past 30 talent points, there's no other talent that'll give you a single-target increase to take. If I found BW even vaguely useful for raiding, I'd spec that instead of Combustion, because I'm under the impression that in it's current state it's representing less than 1% worth of DPS increase.

I thought it was discussed that there was a point where we are considering dropping LB? Primarily under high haste conditions, Bloodlust/Icy Veins and full raid buffs, where wasting the GCD on LB was worse than casting another FFB/FB. Does the DoT tik hit that hard?

On Simulationcraft Living Bomb is listed with 10088 Damage per Execute Time, so quite some nice Damage and i think even in haste Situations LB should be kept up all the time.

I think it is not fair to compare a 1.6 - 1.7 sec Fireball with a 10k Living Bomb because with that much haste LB is dropping to 1 second so the Damage you need to compare are about 16k-17k.

Living Bomb at GCD will equal to ~ 10K DPS

Theory Craft-o-Matic suggests that Living Bomb is still worth casting at 100% haste. Not sure if that includes the Living Bomb glyph or not.

I think the thing to look at is crit values. As your crit values get higher and higher, which in a fully raid buffed situation on some fights, LB does lose out. At 60% crit, LB&FFB meet, crit values any higher and it's a loss to cast LB at high haste(near GCD)

Set it up with crit at .6
LB+dot for FB and for FFB with +3WiF
FB and FFB for the same specs.

Theory Craft-o-Matic


Now bump the crit to 70%
Theory Craft-o-Matic

There is a tipping point for casting LB, but I think it's propbably only visible on a fight like Loathb, where our crit is boosted by external factors. Personally, I think 60% is as high as I have seen, except on Loathb. Based on that, your right LB is currently worth casting even under high haste, EXCEPT when crit starts creeping up over 60%.

Looks like this sheet does not count in the new change that the LB Dot can crit? Or have i missed that?

I'm extremely sceptical of this theory. I'm willing to concede that if multiple haste effects are going off and your primary is so low the LB would be bumping GCD perhaps it's worth delaying LB reapplication until the haste effects mean you're not wasting part of the haste on the 1.0sec buffer. Then again, it's extremely debatable whether you're losing as much output by dropping LB as you are gaining by not casting it despite bumping on the buffer. And this is without considering Glyphed LB.

Ultimately, we're splitting very fine hairs here, and a sim could sway either way easily. With Glyph of LB being the largest DPS glyph in our arsenal, I'd side with the lock-style refresh LB as soon as it drops theory.

Ok, to answer the two questions on whether it's worth dropping LB in extreme haste/crit conditions:

1. Open Rawr
2. Go To Options>Effects>Bonus Crit Rate: set to 1
3. Edit the wand you're using change it's Haste Rating to something improbable (I picked 4000)
4. Go back to stats and check the DPS of each spell/combo you wanted to test.

For berevity I'll give out the results:

Spell:DPS
Fireball:12944 (cast time is 1.16sec, I doubt anyone would ever reach that, maybe in Shadow Crashes)
FBPyro:13503 (yes it's still worth casting it on proc)
LB:15111

FBScPyro:13217
FBScLBPyro:13424
--Note, these rotations include rescorching that's why they are lower.
--Note, under heroism rawr drops LB off.

Conclusion: Your normal rotation is still the one with the highest DPS (unless you're also under heroism), yes the difference between it and just FB spam is very low but then I picked conditions that no mage would ever experience.

Solbergb: I totally agree. As time progresses, firstly with Hot Streak, then with Glyph of Fireball, then LB crits accounting for HS, and now with Glyph of LB, not to mention the good old 15% fire damage -> 10% crit scorch transformation, Combustion has lost its appeal massively over time. I'd sooner see it turned into some kind of passive buff along the lines of "when you crit (bonus crit chance? minor bonus damage? something else?) happens. Because as it is it's effect can be influenced by so many things that it's practically a case of "activate Comb, wait 5sec, it's gone".

On the topic of LB, I believe rawr slightly overvalues it since it gives it 100% uptime; in reality if you play well your uptime will be in the range of 80-90% simply due to LB going off in the middle of another cast.

Due to the descrete nature of spells it's somewhat relevant to to all the spells rawr calculates, however, LB is much more vulnerable since it's damage is executed over 12 seconds. I tried fiddling with the DPS numbers rawr provides to see if it would be worth casting scorch earlier in case LB is going off sooner then a FB cast finishes, off the bat it seems like no.

This type type of question might be better answered with Simcraft modeling, I'm not sure how spells are modeled there but if they are infact being 'cast' during the simulation, then it would be interesting to see what's the theoretical maximum uptime and maybe tone down the valuation in rawr.

Would it be useful to include an option to specify LB uptime? I'll have to redo the math on all cycles because of 4T8 anyway so might as well throw that in while I'm at it.

Definitely! It's not simulated but would still be a lot more informative.

It should be possible to calculate how many FBs, Scorches and PBs you cast on average (depending on haste, crit and delay) in 12 seconds minus GCD. Multiply each number with it's cast time (1 second + delay is cap) and add them together. Devide that number by two and we have the average time we need after an LB runs off until we apply the next one, don't we?