To expand on Gwendoline's answer:

Average damage per spell (approx. BiS gear)
Fireball: 13,094.334
Pyroblast: 13,237.137
Living Bomb: 12,117.443

This means that there is no point that casting HS-Pyro stops making sense.

The point at which Living Bomb stops being worth casting is when your Fireball cast time falls below 1.08 seconds (13094/12117).

For comparison, in my current gear this occurs at 1.06 seconds. In general the lower your stats the lower this threshold will be, simply because each cast of LB benefits more from your +spellpower than each cast of Fireball.

edit: the +crit modifier shouldn't really change anything since LB has the same crit multiplier as Fireball.

My raidleader told me that Amplify Magic - Spell - World of Warcraft doesn't buff any ulduar boss spells. Is there any (dis-)approval for it?

Doesn't seem to be. We used it every pull on Mimiron hardmode for P2 (pre-nerf) and never noticed any ill effects, and that's a pretty wide variety of spells from a lot of sources. I don't generally find it to be worth the hassle to buff the entire raid except for Mimiron, but it's on our tanks for every fight in the zone.

[e] Since TBC I've never seen any empirical evidence that Amp Magic has ever affected any mob ability. As I said, I put it on our tanks in the raid for every encounter where tank damage matters in the slightest, but realistically I think if you buffed the entire raid for every pull you wouldn't suffer any adverse effects. Our healers do report it's noticeable for their heals, but on a raid-wide scale it's just a matter of time/convenience. Until we get a mass-buff version of the spell, it's always going to be one of those little utility things that basically just helps tank healers out.

I apply Amp Magic to the tank on General Vezax -- I suppose I should apply it to everyone, but I'm not sure if it increases damage taken from Saronite Vapors. Mark of the Faceless is physical damage, so it wouldn't affect that.

I apply it to everyone for hard mode XT and for when we did Crazy Cat Lady on Auriaya. It does seem to increase the damage taken from Frozen Blows on Hodir, but I have had trouble verifying if it increases the damage taken on Iron Council. Furthermore, I'm not certain if Dampen Magic reduces any of the damage taken on Iron Council either. I've tried to verify it, but incoming spell damage is inconsistent with and without either of them.

Though I used it specifically for Crazy Cat Lady on Auriaya (we did it with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 6 DPS), it can be used on any Auriaya kill. The feral defender will do shadow damage, but everything else is physical (guardian swarm, sonic AoE cone).

As far as we made 25er council HM, the amp magic on the mt worked very bad.
The amount of damage from fusion punge was higher than the tries before and after without amp magic.

Does Amp Magic increase the damage dealt by the Animus on Vezax HM?

Spellfire (rapid burst and plasma ball) is a combination of arcane and fire dmg, just like frostfire is a combination of fire and frost dmg. It is diminished by either fire or arcane resistance (the lower of the two) and not absorbed by Fire Ward.
Heat wave is normal fire dmg and therefore diminished by fire resistance and absorbed by fire ward.

IIRC, no dmg of any of mimirons parts is increased by amp magic. on our tries we usually buff the whole raid. at least we did before the nerf.

I'm starting to think the mage Q&A should have included a question about the mechanics of amplify and dampen magic. IIRC, back in the early days those buffs would simply add or subtract X from any magic damage and heal received. Then, with the Silithus air elemental "exploit", Blizzard started changing amplify/dampen buffs work. One thing is for sure: the tooltip really doesn't explain the spell.

Logically, if amplify magic doesn't affect the incoming damage from Mimiron, then dampen magic doesn't affect it either. But it is so? If it is, then dampen magic is a purely harmful buff in that encounter even though the tooltip could lead you to believe that it might make your health pool last a tiny bit longer before heals start landing.

I'll try looking at some combat logs to see if there's a reasonably easy way to see if damage is amplified/dampened.

If amplify magic is universally beneficial in a raid setting, then the followup question is why there's no group version with at least a 30 minute duration...

P.S. I looked at a combat log where I used dampen magic on the first phases of Mimiron. If I add up the damage taken + resisted + absorbed values, I can see a fairly consistent reduction on damage taken. For example for Napalm Shell, the reduction is about 144 damage per tick (ticks are normally 6k). One idea would be to write a combat log analyzer that tracks the aura gains/losses for dampen/amplify magic and then classifies specific hits by various spells into three categories (amplified/dampened/neither) to allow raids to compare the effects for better buff planning. It would be nice to get some of the guesswork out of the "amplify/dampen" game.

I agree, this would definitely be usefull.

As a recent player, in a recent guild I've been limiting the use of Amplify magic to:

1. The fight where the boss and adds inflict purely physical damage (e.g. Instructor Razovius in Naxx).
2. The fight where healing frequency is very superior to magical damage frequency and the main tank isnt at risk with a one shot attack.

Are there other cases in your opinion where Amplify magic would be usefull ?

I am also very puzzled by the 144 damage reduction per tick, it doesn t correspond to the amount of damage reductions I have in my tooltips (240 for rank 7 dampen magic). Could it be because only part of the damage can be reduced ?

Amplify only amps incoming raid damage if it is a direct damage spell. I have noticed that "volleys" are DD, and one of the only types of "AoE DD".

So it is no surprise Fusion Punch is amp'd. I would think that the Plasma cannon would be DD (could be tested with your ranged tank and using dampen, and comparing the results). One would hope both Amp/Dampen share the same mechanics.

I will test my talented Amplify on Hodir hard-mode tonight. will be doing a fair few attempt and parsing it. Will alternate on even/odd pulls to try and make it easier Will post the results of which abilities are considered DD (we don't bring many healers so it could be a real benefit either way, either a larger healing buff, or lessening the inc raid damage)

*edit*

We actually downed Hodir real quickly. We've been attempting this hard-mode for a few weeks. Just my luck, my sample too small to try a comparison.

I didn't see this anywhere after a search and it should probably be updated on first post if/when confirmed ....

Latest PTR patch notes has the following tidbit :

"Trinkets: Various trinkets which did not work properly with channeled area-of-effect spells will now work with those spells. This includes (but is not limited to) Illustration of the Dragon Soul, Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and Egg of Mortal Essence."

Has anyone on PTR confirmed Illustration now works with blizzard?

[Illustration of the Dragon Soul] doesn't work with Blizzard on the PTR (at least not on empty, nor on a target dummy). I guess the patch notes are not in sync with the PTR build. I didn't see any [Embrace of the Spider] procs either.

Blizzard has a new ground animation though that looks quite nice.

Hotan's numbers are correct. The one piece of information missing is the effect of the cast queue. When dealing with massive amounts of haste, instant spells will not "enter" the queue. A spell with a cast-time will. You will end up with far less "server rejects" by spamming a cast-time spell (ie: Fireball).

On Hodir, with 16% haste from gear, 3% from Swift Retribution, 5% from Wraith of Air, and 50% from Starlight, Fireball and Frostfire bolt would have 1.59 second cast times. When Starlight was 100% haste instead of its current 50% haste, those would drop to 1.19 second casts.

With Bloodlust, that's 1.226 cast time with 50% starlight. At 100% starlight under Bloodlust it's .91 seconds (which gets capped to 1 sec casts and GCDs). I haven't looked at the parse in question, but I'm guessing he might have had a bit more haste from gear and the fight may have taken place under old Starlight. I'm not sure exactly when it was switched from 100% to 50% off the top of my head.

Actually this isn't true, I've been tanking regulary the P3 as arcane, (using talented Mage Armor, resistance flask and Magic Asborbtion), and the behaviour of Fire Ward is kinda weird on Spellfire.

When using Fire ward you have 2 possible cases:

Fire ward won't be affected at all by the damage, it will stay up for the 30 seconds and fade.

Fire ward will be affected, and will be affected for every spell until it's consumed.
In that case it can proc Frost warding (I've seen up to 13K mana gain per full absorb, sometimes even 3 times in a row ) and of course Incanter Absorbption.

I think it was related to beeing in / out of range of our paladin fire resistance aura but I've no evidence if that's really the reason.

My current hypothesis is :

If your fire resist > arcane resist , Fire ward won't be affected at all.

If your fire resist = arcane resist, Fire ward has 50% chance to absorb Spellfire.

If your fire resist < arcane resist, Fire ward should absorb every time (has to be tested).

Will try to get some logs the next time we are on Mimiron HM.

This actually makes a lot of sense, given the behavior of the Frostfire bolt.

FFB will damage a mob according to the lower of its resistances. A mob with high fire resist gets frost damage, and vice versa.

Assuming Spellfire works the same way, if you have high fire resist, the spell would do arcane damage and Fire Ward would not apply. If you have high arcane resist, the spell would do fire damage and Fire Ward would be activated. Which is exactly what you describe.

Sounds like a pretty safe conclusion about that particular mechanic.

It was fixed quite a long time ago (a week, maybe two after 3.1). As soon as the target player crits (at the point where you'd get the temporary buff), the buff will fall off them.

Made a small update for the things for 3.2, there aren't many changes that change everything upside down. As always, correct me or notify me when something is wrong or missing. I'll try to get a table in for set bonus estimates, and I'll clean up some of the bloat.

Kavan updated the mage module with the LB ticks proccing HS, rawr values the change at around 3.6% increase to fire dps. The more interesting part is it shifts the value of crit upwards by around 8% compared to the previous valuation, which makes crit superior to haste for fireball builds.

For frostfire crit was already better then haste, the 3.2 change makes it slightly superior to spellpower.


-- Glyph of LB is now completely overpowered compared to the other glyphs by a factor of 2.
-- Please note that the values are for a specific of gear set I used, they might differ a bit.

I just want to note regarding the Rawr model that the new hot streak model could use some experimental validation. The cycle model used for comparison calculations works based on computing the number of hot streak procs and then assuming that a certain percentage of them cannot be utilized (due to delay in registering that a proc happened and two simultaneous hot streak event streams, direct casts and living bomb).

In the advanced section there's a tool to compute the amount of wasted hot streak procs that is using an exact model for the FBLBPyro cycle (about 400 states big dynamic cycle). From my testing it looks like about 25% of procs get wasted according to this model. I haven't done extensive testing with this so it would be valuable to examine this under different gear sets.

A few things I noticed:

You can no longer put up Focus Magic and switch dual specs. If you do this, the FM buff will stay on your target after you switch, but will remove itself after they crit (i.e. instead of activating, it goes away).

Also, you can no longer 'Arcane Shatter'. This was removed a long time ago which has resulted in ABar no longer being tagged on after an ABx5AM cast.

They hot fixed that shortly after 3.1 came out. So that isn't new.