See this is why you guys (and girls) and this thread totally rock. Obviously I've misunderstood the intention of Scorch. Irony is I felt like I left the house without an article of clothing last night when I was playing, I kept reaching for the Combustion and Scorch keys.

So as far as Glyphs go, assuming I'm, on average, the only FF mage in a 10 man.

What glyphs would you recommend then? I sacrificed the Scorch Glyph in favor of the LB Glyph. Is it worth spamming scorch the 5 times, am I better reverting back to the Scorch Glyph, or is it basically an even trade?

Living Bomb is your best glyph, you woudln't sacrifice it. Your choice is likely the molten armor glyph, although I beleive enthron has made posts at about what level of spirit is required for the Molten armor glyph to pass the main nuke (fireball/frostfire) glyph.

Generally speaking, if the fight is going to last over a minute, its better DPS to not have the scorch glyph and just ramp up the debuff stack by having to cast scorch 5 times at the start.

This is based on math found in the 3.1 changes thread around page 65. It may slightly change for you in a 10 man setup depending on whether or not you can expect Mark of the Wild, Divine Spirit and Blessing of Kings.

I swapped between arcane and ttw/fb up to Yogg p2. I only had mana issues on XT as arcane, but cooldown stacking on the heart offset it by a large margin. So far arcane seems to edge out fire on fights like this, especially Hodir where I get large mana returns from frost warding in addition to cooldown stacking while in a damage buff. I will have to see how arcane works on General this reset, the other ttw/fb was able to hit 8800dps for the fight with some luck being close to shadow crashes.

Thanks, I'll start digging for that post. But you reminded me of another good point. You're more likely to use Mage Armor in a long fight for the mana regen.

Casting scorch once for the full buff is nice, and at a cast rate of 1.5 seconds (x5), that's 6 seconds more you have to spam FFB (or two more @3sec/cast) which normally counts for at least 50% of your total damage output.

Even without reading Enthron's post, I think I'll take your advise and drop Molten Armor for the Scorch Glyph leaving me with LB, Scorch, and FFB.

--thanks

Just as a general note, there is a lot of redundant information here -- make sure to read before posting. A lot of discussion has already gone on about the FM change for example. The thread is lengthy, but most of the offending posts have occurred in the last few pages - try and do some reading before posting the first thing that comes to mind.

Thanks.

As Sancus pointed out today:

Depending on how good your guild is, and how busy your tank-types are, you may not be able to actually get melee slows on targets like Mimiron's head (P3 and P4; you'd need a DK who isn't too busy if it's going to happen, since he can't get hit by melee attacks in the air) or the tentacles on Yogg (or possibly even Yogg himself in P3, although that's at least easy as long as you have a tank who follows directions. P2 to get TTW would require leaving a melee up top and would reduce their effectiveness at taking care of the little tentacles, since they'd have to run back and forth to refresh the only-for-mages melee slow.)

So depending on your strats/comp, mages may have no choice but to have their second spec be FFb, since it's our only raid spec that doesn't depend on a melee-range debuff. Unless you prefer to lose ~10% dps rather than whatever the drop to FFb is.

(color me unimpressed at the design decision to make a mage-based ranged class depend on a melee-range physical debuff.)



(As an aside: trainable focus magic would, in one fell swoop, solve the FFb dps problems so easily and wouldn't overpower any other spec since they all want to go deeper to pick up TTW anyways.)

Did I miss something (which is possible) and FFb will now trigger TTW on a boss? Last I heard it had to actually affect the mob, and bosses can't be snared.

I believe he is referring to trash on the Yogg-Saron fight, where there are tentacles coming out of the ground that need to be tanked/killed. They may not be bosses per-se, so they would be affected by the "slow"of FFB.

Oh all of these fights can be addressed. I'm not asking for help here. I'm informing people about something that I don't think most mages are thinking about. Maybe you all are and I'm behind on threads. But usually I pick up at least a few tendrils of the main discussions via some method.


Mimiron: have a DK willing to keep up Icy Touch on the head

YS: FFb perhaps, or just have a DK (again) up top who is dps'ing the other tentacles and keeping up Icy Touch on the Crushers


The point is: how many mages and how many guilds are thinking about this?

And how much do you trust your tanks/melee to be able to do that, or are you just going to spec FFb as your alternate spec?

Me, I trust them to be able to do it at least for the easy modes, and I know our raidleader will be okay with the changes. But I'm not sure that's true for every guild out there, and I'm less certain it'll be doable on hard modes where you can't as easily tell someone to just do less DPS. I'll know as we get into them in their buffed state.

I know plenty of friends who won't be in a position to trust their tanks though, because it requires multi-tasking moreso than usual.

I did the FM talent switch several time but for the vast majority of the week I stayed Fireball/TTW and I can only say there were a few fights for me that I had "dire" mana situations (needing to evocate).

Razorscale: No mana issues.
Ignis: No mana issues (although I was mostly just shattering constructs).
Deconstructor: Needed to evocate. (Will probably use FFB on this fight for the better AOE)
Assembly of Iron: No mana issues.
Kologarn: No mana issues.
Auriaya: No mana issues (surprisingly since I did a lot of AOE). btw this is like the Felmyst of Ulduar...Mages pad your damage meters!
Hodir: No mana issues.
Freya: No mana issues.
Thorim: Not enough info (was only in for 1 attempt and we killed him that attempt and I died at like 40%).
Mimiron: No mana issues through 3 phases, did evocate for Phase 4 to be safe. There's a lot of down time between phases as well so your mana can regen a bit and mana gems can come off cool down.
General Vezax: I tried FFB for this fight a bit since it's a lot more sustainable but for some reason I always did better with Fireball so I switched back and we killed him. I did have to stand in a saronite vapor pool a couple times near the end of the fight but I imagine that's fairly normal.
Yogg-Saron: We didn't get to kill him this week but Phase 1 I didn't have mana problems and Phase 2 seemed shaky depending on mana drains not getting cleansed but I would say you would definitely need to evocate in Phase 2 at some point.

MMO-Champion has posted that today's patch will officially fix this so that it no longer works.

Lets assume that the melee are unable to keep the snare up. Can some math be done to show whether or not it is beneficial to have one mage spec FFB while the other two stay FireTTW in order to keep the snare up for his fellow mages?

Seems to still work. Put FM on an AFK guy, switched and it remained on him.

It may only check for those in your party/raid. If you could redo the test while partied with the FM'd person that would be excellent.

I just tested it and I believe the FM is removed when the person crits; apparently the game now checks if the mage has the talent before giving him the temporary 3% crit.. if he does not, the buff is removed.

Ya, it was hot fixed last night through this way.

Ah, I gotcha.

I think the best (only?) course of action is to make sure your raid leader/tanks/melee understand the spells/talents/abilities that trigger TTW and how that effects your DPS. I trust my raid leader to make the decisions from there. I think/hope the guilds who go into Ulduar hard-modes are more likely to think these things through than the average raid.

On Mimiron, say you have a DK dpsing the feet does pestilence spread the disease, and the slow, to the torso/head? Wouldn't seem to be too much of a DPS loss, if any, for them to keep it up if it did.

I've been curious if anybody's been able to test our new 4 piece bonus to see how worthwhile it is.

I roll as FFB spec and then I guess since no real known data is known about it for Rawr, it has me wearing 2 piece tier 7 and 2 piece tier 8.

Actually the 4t8 is already in rawr (unreleased version), the problem is that it's exact values aren't known (procrate, cd). It's currently modeled with 10% procrate, which makes it mediocre at best, weaker than what 4t7 was; playing with values at 20% proc rate it becomes quite good and equal to 2t8 bonus.

Its less then 10%. Tried Rawr with my gear (endgame 25 naxx except sword and os trinket) i go from 6169 dps with fireball specc to 5746 without torment talent. As frostfire with same gear i end up with 5947. So its not that big of dps different.

Starting last night, Improved Scorch falls off targets after 3-5 seconds instead of lasting the full duration. I have plentiful logs to demonstrate and I'm gathering snips now for a bug post. Has anyone else noticed this?