VERY good news for testing purposes! Now the only issue I can see with them is since they're not instanced, possibly having to wait for someone else to finish testing so you don't leech the debuffs they're placing on the target.

We currently can't reset talents at the Dalaran mage trainers, for some reason, but it's still a quick matter to port to the old world and back for testing. We will be very easily able to nail down the exact hit cap for +3 mobs soon.

This was my leveling spec at 70:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator

Add points to elemental precision for levels 71, 72, and 73. (My gear is raiding gear, so I had the hit rating to cap vs +3 targets anyway if I wanted to solo higher level mobs; adding EP makes up for the hit rating decay as you level. I find hit comes in handy even for leveling since you can "skip ahead" zones more easily if desired, and if asked to go to a higher level instance you won't be gimped nearly as much.) If you like to AoE farm, points can easily be sacrificed (perhaps from shattered barrier; at the moment its freeze is bugged not to count as frozen) to pick up imp blizzard. After 73 it's up to personal choice, I've been adding imp cone of cold now for 74-76, since if a mob *does* get close (due to lack of procs) they're usually low enough that an improved CoC would kill them whereas an unimproved one does not. Imp Water Elemental's mana regen is currently bugged to have about a 3 yard range, so those points aren't very useful except in instances, which if you're walking into the expansion in raid gear will all be undertuned for you until you get closer to 80 and can afford those three points anyway.

SimulationCraft updated based upon latest Beta news. In some cases this means that it does not match current Beta push:
(1) Some talents are implemented as described rather than how they are working (or not working as the case may be)
(2) Some of the "homogenization" has hit yet, but it was implemented anyway: Judgement of Wisdom, Earth and Moon, etc
(3) Blue posts have stated that Mind Flay is getting completely retuned. My implementation matches that of Arcane Missiles.

I also generate Google Chart output now.



The Fire Mage is unfairly dropping down the charts because I've been having sustainability issues with him (under my possibly flawed assumption that Replenishment does not stack). The Enhancement Shaman in the chart below is not waiting on mana.... but cooldowns.



A quick overview of the relative gear used to create these charts:



There are a variety of other charts listing DPCT, sources of regen, up-times, procs, etc......



Now if the mechanics of the game actually stand still for just a little bit I might actually be able to add support for the next class.....

All spells depending on specs have a "cooldown" multiplier that I pulled by experimenting with Rawr.
I used a Sunwell Kit with Skull/Sliver, 1 Heroism, and DPots/FCaps if appplicable I think.

I then entered a spec - like 2/48/11 Fire with an additional 2 points in Spell Power to emulate Burnout.
I looked at it's total DPS with and without its cooldowns - Combustion, Molten Fury (behaves like a cooldown) and Icy Veins.

Those 3 accounted for 7.5% DPS I think, so I gave 0/51/20 a 7.5% modifier on top of everything, to account for these talents combined with optimised cooldown stacking.
Of course, Wrath changes things, but those should still be good estimates for cooldown multipliers.

The mana numbers are a bit off, it doesn't really matter when those are just ballpark estimates for what is sustainable and what is not.
We don't even have the slightest clue how gear budget will be mid/late game.

Arcane Blast off-spec
Empowered Arcane increases the coefficient from 71% to 80%. That at 12% relative increase on scaling.
The crit talent is another 10% more total damage. There are also no othe specs that have both 6% talents (Impact/Incineration).
It doesn't seem much, but these 3/4 talents add up enough to push off-spec Blast spam down to the other nukes in other specs.
I was quite sceptic there too.

50/3/18 has Icy Veins over 50/21/0. Not much, but it adds up, that's about the 3% more you see.


I'll need to clean up some more things before putting up something similar for lower gear.


Hm, what do you mean? Waiting on Stormstrike/Shock/etc. cooldowns?

For the mana issue: I think the best bet would be to just pour more mana into the raid.
As far as I know, Replenish and JoW are separate, so you get mana from both. (I did a few days ago.)
That might help, not sure.

I'm guessing FFB pulls ahead of fire because it's so much more mana efficient?

What I would love to see from these theorycraft calculations is a reasonable idea of the dps spread based on proc and crit rates. While 'average expected dmg' is good to know, it's not what you are going to experience on any given boss fight. I think this is important as when comparing specs, it's useful to think about what top-end and bottom-end I am bringing to a raid.

The more procs we rely on, the wider this spread is likely to be between specs. With crit rates approaching the 40%-50% area the deviation from the mean crit rate is also going to be higher. The spread will also be higher on Fireball than Frostbolt as your 'sample' on Frostbolt in any given raid situation is higher due to the reduced casting time. Higher 'sample' means less variation from any sampled variable - such as crit rate.

For example, my gear has about 33% crit on it as a fire mage. Given a 6 minute fight and say about 120 fireballs, 80% of the time my actual crit rating on the boss fight will be anywhere between 38.5% and 27.5% - that is a huge spread and a significant top-end.

With the changes to hot-streak in fire and MBarr in Arcane, there are two other proc % spreads that will feed into this. I feel like a reasonably expected high-end dps for fire may be pretty big.

Are you assuming the FFB cost on live (with double-dipping on EP and Pyromaniac) or what it probably "should" be.

Does using a 9s FFB rotation help any?
Tradeoff for going 18/51/0 +2?
Enabling JoW?

(I can't test any of this on my own right now... the latest simcraft build just exits with errors on this machine)

dedmonwakeen: I'm curious, why does your assumed arcane gear have 200 more haste rating than your fire/frost gear, with no other changes?

And what does simcraft assume is being done on FoF procs? Simply continue casting frostbolts straight through (giving two frostbolts +50% crit), or that plus a Deep Freeze (if not on CD) or Ice Lance as a "FoF-combo" utilizing the third "ghost charge"? (Actually I see from the output running it locally that no damage is attributed to Deep Freeze or Ice Lance so it appears to not be using combos. This should be modeled to improve frost's real final numbers. I tried to edit the actions line to make it do this, but what it seemed to do, instead, was replace frostbolt/frostbolt on procs with frostbolt/icelance on procs, which just reduced output rather than increasing it as it should have. It also didn't like me adding deep_freeze to the actions line at all with the fb_priority=1 requirement, which would perform better than ice lance when available.)

Also, the configuration file for WotLK assumes frost will have 18 fire for imp scorch. This is obviously out of date with the new raid buff changes.

Correcting the frost spec and increasing fight length to 360 seconds (which benefits frost greatly due to elemental uptime) balances fire and frost somewhat. Of course, a 360 second fight also increases fire's downtime to 9%. We'll definitely need to see where mana ends up really being in level 80 raids. (I find it surprising arcane blast spam is basically permanently sustainable, in fact more-so than fire! This goes counter to how I felt the spell was intended to be balanced.)

Also curious why Simcraft puts frostfire above fire and frost, but Roy's testing puts it below both fire and frost. Where is the disconnect on assumptions?

Hmm, also, you're only giving two glyphs to everyone. There are three major glyph slots. Switching fire over to using mage armor and giving it the mage armor glyph made it sustainable up to 10 minutes and beyond without affecting its dps overly much. Giving frost the molten armor glyph gave it a little more oomph while remaining fully sustainable because frost continues to be very mana efficient. Your fire spec is *completely* missing improved scorch, which is unlikely to really happen often since it would gimp you quite a bit in 10-mans and 5-mans where a frost mage wouldn't be present. I suppose you may be in the "respec every 5 minutes, it's no big deal" camp, but I prefer to find "one spec to rule them all" and avoid changing. (My respec cost was still sitting at 5g as of a month or so ago.) Overall I find the default assumptions a little "off" in a few ways.

nvm.

It's just a similar mechanic. Nothing he says and no changes on beta make any indication of such a change to things like Execute and Molten Fury.

Because I was fooling around with stacking Haste and increasing the "AB buff" duration to see if I could find a reasonable trade-off that they might implement...... and then I forgot to change it back.

The fb_priority option was to tell the AI to give priority to Frostbolt provided the Frozen buff/debuff would not run out before Frostbolt was finished casting. This was necessary for supporting Winters Grasp and the older duration-based FoF.

I would put the following in front of frost_bolt: deep_freeze,fb_priority=1/ice_lance,frozen=1 (frozen=1 prevents IL from being cast when the target is not frozen or "virtually frozen".)

However.... once the buff moved to being charged-based I ignore the duration because it is always better to use Frostbolt if you don't have to worry about the buff running out mid-cast.

I did not implement the ghost-charge because I assumed that since the buff stack is most likely client-side that they would be able to make this work correctly. The alternative is to support time-of-flight in the sim which would dramatically increase the number of events for some classes..... but that may be the only solution.

Yeah.... I just didn't know where to put them..... There didn't see any real good alternatives to improved single-target DPS, but I certainly haven't looked hard enough.

Back when it was at 40% of base mana, the missle_barrage/arcane_barrage/arcane_blast priority was doable.... barely.

It could be a scaling issue..... Roy was using much higher levels of Spell Power at equivalent crit/haste.

Tried that, and it lowered dps significantly. Looking closer to see why, I noticed deep freezes aren't usually critting (average damage 1823) so somehow it's either using them when FoF isn't up (which should be impossible) or they aren't benefiting from shatter (which they should). I am unable to apply frozen=1 to Deep Freeze. Taking out Deep Freeze altogether still resulted in a reduction in dps because it's using frostbolt/icelance (or possibly even icelance/icelance) on FoF procs instead of frostbolts. Frostbolt's overall average damage per cast ends up dropping precipitously.

It isn't a matter of time-of-flight, really, it's a matter of spell timing and client/server communication. In fact, I find it highly unlikely that the client rather than the server tracks buffs, since that would leave a wide open hole for client hacking to result in permanent buffs. I would be very surprised if this issue is fixable without completely revamping the current spell timing system. You could just add a setting for "number of FoF charges" that we could set to 3 to manually force that ghost charge and see what effect it has. Some way of forcing the AI to only use an instant for the last of the three charges would be necessary, though, and no available settings seem to do that right now.

There's something else, because this is what I get putting 3000 spellpower on frost, fire, and frostfire:

Pintofbrew, just for clarification about this.
On the current build, shatter barrier is triggering a spell just like Frost Nova, but targets are not considered as frozen.