Don't you see that's exactly the work you've set out for yourself by including ilevel 277 gear? You'll need to compile a new list every time new loot is discovered.

What I'm suggesting is that, if you're already going through all the work of compiling new lists every time a new wing is released, you might as well direct those efforts toward a more practical purpose. That is, you should compile lists representative of the BIS gear currently available in preparation for the next wing.

2T10 is worth ~500dps to a good Arcane mage. It's almost certainly optimal to get Shoulders+Gloves first, as you're limited by Emblems of Frost, and those are the cheapest way to get 2T10.

You should also try and be aware of how many badges you will have when the arena season will start. You should totally get the shoulders with your first 50 badges. If you guild runs voa as a group before or after a main raid you will have a good chance at getting the gloves/legs without having to use badges on them. That is of course assuming that the new VoA boss's loot table is going to work the same way as the first three did.

One may also want to consider which pieces of T9 they are currently using. The T9 robes were the piece to exclude to get the 4pc bonus because of the poor itemization. With this in mind, acquiring the shoulders or gloves first (and equipping them) would lose the 4pc T9 without gaining 2pc T10. Whereas, spending the extra badges on the robes first means you can equip them right away and still keep the 4pc. Then you can shoot for the shoulders or gloves after and gain the 2pcT10 when you lose 2pcT9. It goes without saying that your current robe vs T10 Robe is also something that should be considered if this is the path you're choosing.

Of course this is moot if you choose to buy the piece and not equip it.

Zymm, Deathwhisper drops a nice set of shoulders, that provide a significant boost; those shoulders (Shoulders of Mercy Killing or something?) plus 4T9 (pick up the chest), beat 4T9+Merlin for me, by a wide margin. That said, that may be because I've been hit starved for a while now (which is incredibly odd, as arcane).

WowArmory has actually put up all the loot available with this patch. The 5, 10, 25, normal, and heroic mode loot are all listed, all wings accounted for right through to the Lich King. The BiS list posted includes this loot, there shouldn't be anything new to discover.

This is also what I had in mind. Having any of the 258 tier pieces also changes which you might want to get right away and which you could wait on.

I guess I stand corrected... Armory said "All the new dungeon and raid items released in Fall of the Lich King (Patch 3.3)" and I assumed as much. Is he going to be patched in sometime later? Do we know that he's going to drop things that are not on the armory already? There were a lot of items listed that came from chests, not specifying boss encounters, might the Lich King just have a cache instead of a lootable body?

I believe it's expected that Lich King loot is half a tier higher then the rest of the instance, in all 4 difficulties (5-6ilvls), based on one item being discovered in PTR by data mining, that was never seen drop anywhere, that was between tiers in ilvl. There's none of that 'between tier ilvl' loot on the Armory, and all the other chests are tied to specific bosses.

I think is it best to get the chest first.
The chest is very good itemized with high spellpower, haste and crit. 95% Of mages run with 4/5 tier 9 using everything except the chest since its the worst itemized and budgeted tier piece of the set. For that reason you see all mages using Merlin;s robe or other 245/258 chest from toc25. By buying the shoulder or hands first, it wont do anything since you will most likely have to break t9set4 bonus, and will need to wait for having 2 pieces to upgrade, at minimum 120 badges.

At best it is a 30 dps increase from merlins robe. But atleast you can start using and and and as soon you get 60 extra badges you will be rocking. Now, If you're mage has already a 258 chest, it will be a dps loss and for sure you have to wait for shoulder/hands combo.

Compared to suggestions herein, I am half-assed or even stupid. I say this to preface the fact that I consistently do 5.9-7.3 kdps on single target raid mobs in 25 man situations running 57/3/11 set-up. I am primarily gemmed in sp/spirit or sp/crit gear. I dont really aim for more, and am only posting to suggest your math might be off. According to what I am reading here I should be doing around 4 kdps. The large discrepancy suggests to me that theory-craft has gone awry somewhere. I dont have the math skill to track down the problem, simply trying to tip you guys to it. Although it might just be an anomoly of mixed mid-level gear. A sweet-spot so to speak.

Wrack. Runetotem. Half-assed arcane mage.

Err... Who are you talking to, and what is saying that you should be doing 4k DPS?

Any proc rates confirmed for Nibelung staff from IC25?, my initial impressions are that it is reasonably good, but the dps output leads me to believe it is probably more of a gimmick and may not be worth the loss in other stats for arcane mage dps? Any thoughts?

...Will probably still use it however as having a cool angel pop up in random heroics wins.

Wowhead reports it as being 1% (you can see the effect page here).
The staff is very situational because of it's lack of crit or haste. It is very good in multiple target fights like Anub'arak, because the effect can proc off of your living bomb ticks, but not as good in single target fights.

No, I was saying that I am really bad at complex math, and that according to what I am reading my dps should be half of what it is. It was just a heads up that actual evidence is not fitting what is being said, in hopes that someone who is good at math can find the paradox. Or that there may actually be several paths to where we are all trying to get to. I am just saying the root thread info doesnt fit what i am seeing with 5 pieces of 200 gear and only 1 piece of 245.

Wrack. Runetotem. 6.5kdps.

So flamestrike got fixed, and it's baller as hell. It's now 2 second cast instead of 3, which is a lot lot of increase to its dps. It's not good to rotate against a single target (I checked), but it's worth using if you get full application of the strike and 8 second dot on two or more targets. Yes, two. This is true for both fire and frost specs, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it's awesome for arcane too. Amazing for 5-mans. I haven't done any radius based comparisons against blizzard or AE, though.

With my FFB spec/gear I've got 925 haste. This gives me a 6.24 second blizzard and a 1.56 second Flamestrike for a total of 7.8 seconds back to back. So alternating Blizzard and FS work out almost perfectly. Start with FS, the dot will tick for 8 seconds. After the Blizzard, immediately start your next FS and by the time it hits, it should be just as the last dot is ending, give or take a tenth of a second depending on latency. These cast times are unbuffed, so it might not line up quite as perfectly in the raid, but it will be close.

I tried out Firestarter for the first time on Anub'arak last night with a FFB spec. Although it was only 1 attempt it seemed to have some positive situational results.

My general rotation was:

LBx5 (4 burrowers + Anub'arak) -> Dragons Breath -> FSR9 -> Blast Wave -> FSR8 -> [Blizzard]

What seemed to make this very effective was when the adds were able to be AoE'd for ~15 seconds or less. The application of 3 very powerful DoTs (LB + FSR8 + FSR9) with the strong ignites built up from the 5 fire spells gave me incredible burst over the 8 or so seconds they were ticking in addition to also blizzarding.

That said tho if there was any packs we struggled with (ie took longer then 15 seconds) the burst dps of Firestarter dropped acutely.

As has been mentioned there is also the awkwardness of Firestarter which needs to be handled. I macro'd

to make it easier but it still required good timing to bring up the targeting-circle right on the GCD. For mages who are fond of keyboard mashing I'd imagine pressing it too fast would cause the ring to appear and disappear, but I didn't have much difficulty with it.

Intuitively it would seem that with Flamestrike's reduced casting time this would have in fact reduced the effectiveness of Firestarter, however because of the concurrent buff to AoE these instances of ~15 seconds AoE are more common making Firestarter stronger. Also its insanely mana efficient, not that that really matters on Anub'arak tho.

Anecdotal experience (and not remotely a large enough sample size), ran ICC 25 man semipug on my alt, and a boomkin picked up the staff. During Saurfang fight the boomkin had 3 valk's procced at once.

It's hard to imagine that that reflects a 1% proc rate, but this could be an anomaly or a bug.

I wasn't running meters, but he claimed it constituted 4% of his dps, which is pretty impressive (though he could have been shitty dps).

Hopefully we'll see someone running serious numbers on it soon

So, for the sake of argument I wanted to ask the mechanics of Ignite. (I'm fairly ignorant to mage mechanics)

So currently I've been told that Ignite suffers for being double taxed, and I wanted to know if that was true/intended or should it even be intended? (I don't think any ability or talent should be getting double taxed, its pointless and unnecessary)

As in, your initial critical fire spell is partly resisted, then Ignite calculates its damage from that partly resisted spell, then the Ignite ticks are also victim to being partly resisted.

I would personally be pretty damn annoyed if that's true -.- I can't think of one logical reason as to why any sort of critical strike bonus talent should fall victim to that.

Yes Ignite is "double taxed", as it says in the tooltip of the talent it does additional damage based on the damage of the spell.

[22:42:56.617] Wizeowel Living Bomb Anub'arak *2242* (R: 121)
[22:42:59.232] Wizeowel Ignite Anub'arak 449

The first tick is 20% so you can see that 2242 / 5 = 448.4.

That only qualifies as 'double taxing' if the ignite ticks themselves can be partially resisted or are reduced by a given damage reduction effect other than immunity or absorption. Which to my knowledge no damage reduction effects reduce ignites damage at the moment. Otherwise it's normal reduction the same as any other crit damage increase effect.

Oh my, a first post.

Ahem, our guild had several attempts on Anub'Arak 25H earlier today and I was trying out the new and flashy Flamestrike-spam "-rotation", which yielded some promising data.

Here, a WoL log of the wipefest. I applied Living Bomb on all the four adds as per usual and then just started spamming my macro of FS8+5xFS9, sometimes reapplying LB on an add or two since they seemed to be going down really slow this time. My raidbuffed FS cast time was something close to 1.4sec and I was playing standard 18/53 TTW/Fire.

Comparing my own dps in relation to our resident op unholy dk, Academos, it looked pretty amazing. Pre 3.3 I had usually been significantly behind him while playing an Anub-specific FFB. This time I was, when I didn't screw up targetting or something else, really close or sometimes even right on top of him. Granted their dps took a hit in the patch but still.