Yes, that should be the correct thing if Deep Freeze cannot proc Fingers of Frost.
Has anyone checked that actually? If not, I'll probably do some Frost Nova + Deep Freeze tests to confirm/deny.


In my old sheets, Ice Lance and Deep Freeze could still proc it, chance was 10% and Ignite was the off-spec of choice.
That makes instant Fireballs less attractive, but still a DPS gain.

The calculations for Fireball on FoF charges are very awkward now though.

I still think that we should plan around using instant spells to squeeze a 3rd charge out of Fingers of Frost.
In that case, instant Fireballs are quite effective when Deep Freeze is on cooldown.

I mean, if the purpose of Fingers is to allow Shatter Combos on bosses, and Shatter Combos rely on exploiting casting mechanics for more crits, then clearly the same is meant for Fingers!

So, I'll have to rebuild the frost models from scratch, kind of.
That's why I'm going to wait one more build to see what stays and what goes.


Oh, slightly off-topic:
Focus Magic does not seem to proc on healing crits.
It feels like I'm the only caster who actually runs instances, so I usually toss it on our healer and never saw it proc.
So, that talents currently reads "3% more Inspiration procs" for me



Man Out of Time - Lhivera's Mage Reference (WotLK Edition)
That's your TCOM, isn't it? I know that you're updating most of it, but how accurate is the shield scaling data?

Also:
Looking for a mage with 4/5 Frostfire who could check how the 5% increased critical strike damage works.

I'm assuming that whether it can or not, it's not supposed to, since it doesn't apply a chill effect. As it stands now, test results are probably not reliable, since Frostbite can proc Fingers of Frost, and it seems pretty clear it shouldn't. (Different issue from them being linked.)

The difference, though, is that Shatter Combos on freezes rely on exploiting game mechanics. Shatter Combos on Fingers of Frost rely on exploiting network mechanics. I think that's a pretty important difference. Obviously, it's something we'll try to do anyway, and should find the numbers on, but it's not a good reason to accept the current design.

That's the reference I'm working on with WotlK data, and it should be considered a work in progress, it's definitely a bit outdated. In particular, I think some of the mana costs are a few points off.

I have no particular reason to believe the shield coefficients have changed, but I should note that I didn't test them myself; I took the numbers from what I considered to be the most reliable sources during PTR phases when those coefficients were being adjusted.

The old TCOM is located here:
Man Out of Time - Theorycraft-o-Matic

The new one is located here, and I only just started work on Sunday, so it's a long way from completion and at any given moment may be entirely broken:
Man Out of Time - Theorycraft-o-Matic (WotLK)

So, with more and more gear coming up, new enchants, I took a look at what gear will look like at the end of 25-man T7 content.
Naxxramas, Malygos, Onyx Sanctum on 25-man mode, all expensive enchants.

For Naxx-10 gear, I used the values of old enchants. Seems okay, since you may not have every item from Naxx-10, or aren't drowning in Abyss Shards for expensive enchant.

The values for a Naxx-10 kit then were (Undead base stats, no gnome/human racials, fully buffed):
2200 dmg, 269 crit, 294 hit, 500 haste; 1216 sta, 1027 int, 602 spi
18941 HP, 18396 Mana, 5.86% crit from rating, 12.93% crit total, 11.21% hit, 15.25% haste


The values for a fully maxed out Naxx-25 kit then will be:
2819 dmg, 393 crit, 339 hit, 600 haste; 1273 sta, 1195 int, 494 spi
19513 HP, 20920 Mana, 8.56% crit from rating, 16.64% crit total, 12.92% hit from rating, 18.3% haste from rating

The increases come mostly from gear, better enchant and using the new Totem of Wrath are the smaller gain.

You're 1.9% hit overcapped as Horde, 2.9% as Alliance. You can get up to about 25 more spell power equivalent from dropping hit gear, but not more.
The rest of the gear would simply be "best-in-slot" even without the hit on it.


At that level of gear, even Frostfire Bolt does 9000 damage on average.

With that kind of gear progression, we should actually have a look at what happens when we get closer to 4k spell power.
We don't even use epic gems yet.

On further testing of Firestarter as single target dps increase:

Gear:
Damage: 1239 damage
Level 77 mage with 77 spells, Spec: Spell impact deep fire

Crits ignored for testing purposes

Fireball average damage: 2750 non crit.

Dragon's Breath average damage: 1400 damage non crit
0 damage: for 1100 non crit

Blast Wave: 1550 damage non crit
0 damage: Server died dunno

Flamestrike: 1350 damage, 4 347 damage ticks = 2738 damage
0 damage: for 950 non crit and 175 (x4) non crit ticks

The above was tested with the same gear, at level 77 i used 75 blast wave, 72 flamestrike, and 75 dragon's breath

Totals: 4140 damage (4300 when blast waving) dragon's breathing/flame striking single target on cooldown, vs 2750 fireballs (cast in the same time)


--------------------------------------------------------------------

Quick pro/con of Firestartering
Pro:
Completely useable on the move
Completely pushback resistant
6% extra crit chance for all 3 spells over fireball
Flamestrike does NOT have to be cast immediately (10 second buff)
Flamestrike DoT is affected by the +damage of when it's cast
Extra time for your Pyroblast DoT to tick
Allows you to minimize Ignite bug penalty, save this combo for when Hot Streak procs, and cast the hot streak after one of the instants

Con:
Only 80% of the combo's damage can crit
Lose ~20% and most of the advantage if boss moves out of flamestrike
Less Hot streaks (but Pyroblast dot ticks longer on average)
A little mana intensive

Overall if i had to guess there's about a 5% dps gain to be found Firestarting atm, i wish i had level 80 spells (wtb non lagged beta) to test it with, but i'm fairly confident flamestrike is about to be in our rotations

It would be fairly ironic that firespec using such a playstyle would have worse DPM than arcane.

If anything else, much depends on what happens of spell impact.

The problem is gear, in particular the scaling of AoE.
If you had 0 spell power, then Blizzard would do more DPS than Fireball spam in a Fire spec. I wish I was joking there.

The damage of AoE is quite impressive, but scaling is not. 1.2k spell damage is honestly not much in Wrath context.
Fireball gets 115% spell damage. Dragon's Breath + Flamestrike gets 43% as direct and 48% as damage over time.

When you get to 2.2k spell power, your DB+FS combo will break even with Fireball.
Any more, and you'll start to fall back. That's actually without Spell Impact.

Ghostcrawler has said that maybe nothing will be done at all. I'm under the impression that they want mages to manage armors according to the situation... burn with molten armor, and then if you have to get conservative, switch to mage armor. I know it's not the simplest and most min/max solution, but that is the direction the game is heading now. There will always be the min/max players, but the benefits of it will be trivialized with the upcoming changes.

What Major glyphs are ideal then? I would assume that for a fire mage, essential would be:

Glyph of Fireball
Glyph of Mage Armor

But between the three below, I'm not sure which one is ideal, which presents problems with trying to juggle armors. If you're going to use molten armor, of course you'd want the extra 2% crit (and it might be far superior over the scorch glyph anyway). But if you're using mage armor, then perhaps the extra mana would help, slightly. And who knows what other glyphs will still come out.

Glyph of Molten Armor
Glyph of Mana Gem
Glyph of Scorch

And then there's entirely situational glyphs...

Glyph of Polymorph
Glyph of Remove Curse

Considering the glyphs, this might get REALLY annoying for min/maxing your performance. And for calculating, for that matter, but I suppose some folks arround here enjoy this.

Just imagine the variables. Before, one would ask: "You have a shadowpriest? You have a shaman? KK, use pots first, then gems, if it's totally necessary, use evocation". There was hardly a situation where a mage would have to wear mage armour even without a shadowpriest, and there were no situations where it would be benefitial for a mage to specc deeper into arcane. This is of course considering fire, but that's only fair, since fire was (for any mage clever enough to craft some gear, spend some gold or farm some instances to pass 700SD-gearlevel) pretty much the all-purposes-high-dps-specc.

Now, we will have to think about a multitude of factors, most of which probably still aren't even finalized yet. I am ignorant to how the mana-batteries will work in the end, I must admit, but you can probably put the regen from that down to a pretty standart number. That number alone might make or break speccs.
From there, we get into much bigger troubles. Overall mana-usage of the speccs might be quite easy to calculate, but both fire and arcane do possess a form of "dumping" mana (AB and LB, respectively) which supposedly will drain at least enough mana to make us think twice about using it. This of course opens up a whole world of calculation about when to use them (in the case of AB at the current state the answer would be "never", if I got that correctly), and which regeneration talents to take in order to sustain, say, Living Bomb.
"Hey, thats still easy", I hear you say. Ok, We got mana usage of Fireball, we got DPS-gain over DPM-loss of Living Bomb vs. Fireball. Fair enough. And now we check these against the options of going either deeper into arcane or frost as an offspecc (bets now are high on arcane, of course), the regen or cost-decrease they give us. And then we need to check again which armour will be best for DPS. Wearing Molten Armour glyphed no matter what, and adapting LB-uptime to our mana-situation? Wearing Molten Armour glyphed but switching to Mage Armour when we need to keep up LB? Wearing Mage Armour glyphed constantly to even remotely balance our mana-regen to our usage? Wearing Molten unglyphed, but switching to a glyphed Mage Armour for faster regeneration??? Glyphing both Armours and missing out on a third glyph (probably Scorch?)??????

The unpleasant options are somewhat looming there. I can already imagine how, for true min-maxing, one will be forced to not only reglyph, but also respecc (regem, for that matter?) for every single boss or group-setup (whereas only the first one would be practicabel in a raid-situation, and its still bad enough that we would have to "exploit" a mechanic which is obviously ment to make you chose for at least one evening at a time). By increasing the number of viable talents, they have of course made life more interessting, but also more difficult, and numbers harder to figure out due to the interdependance of talents, glyphs and spell-usage.
Its sure nice that they want us to think about our mana apart from begging our raidleader to give us a shadowpriest (gets easier when you are, in fact, leading the raid), but its not as much fun when you are facing possible situations like: "As long as I can keep up LB with Molten Armour, I do the best DPS ingame, but as soon as I use Mage Armour, I suck, because I should have specced and glyphed differently", and you start counting the seconds on every single fight to optimize yourself for that. We really need a 2-minute or so cushion to every fight before mana starts being an issue, otherwise mana will be the only thing we ever think about.

"Forced" is an interesting term to use here. Let's be perfectly clear: nobody is forced to squeeze every last percentage of performance out of every possible situation in the game, minute by minute. Blizzard isn't just sending a telegram here, they're sending a flight of planes armed with skywriting smoke: nobody is supposed to be optimal for every situation they encounter as they move through a raid dungeon. Your choices give you strengths and weaknesses. You and your group are intended to work with those strengths and weaknesses, not spend all your time and gold avoiding them.

Here it is. It seems nothing but the new fact is here :

Everybody knows that on live, casting AM after clearcast was bugged and only affected the first Missile.

But now, it affects all the shots, and if an instant is done right after, like Arcane Barrage, the instant is affected too.

So here is the idea : When Missile Barrage procs, trying to wait for a clearcasting before lunching MBAM-and-then-ABar makes this combo simply great dps, just as a macro for PoM+MBAM-and-then-ABar is.
And the PoM+MBAM-and-then-ABar macro is also great cause ABar does'nt consume PoM debuff so the next AB is instant, then 1.5sec cast only, just like a 3 Stack Arcane Blast on 2.4 Live.

With this kind of rota, I think that just an increase of the Missile Barrage proc chance and/or making Missile Barrage procs from ABar would make Arcane really competive.

Got some try with a high Missile Barrage proc rate (50% of AB procs it, so it's like 25% chance to proc with bot AB and ABar) and with this it was a real high dps, far higher than fire or frost, and still mana efficient. Not as efficient as frost, but far more than fire, for lot more dps. So maybe even without changing the % proc chance, just making it procs from ABar + the new Arcane Potency system would make Arcane spec as good as Fire.

Fire mages don't need imp. scorch glyph as long as there is a frost mage in the raid and therefor can take fireball, mage and molten armor glyphs.
Frost mages will use fostbolt, water elemental and one of the armor glyphs.

From the mana numbers on lvl70, frost and fire mages don't seem to need mage armor at all. JoW, replenishment and restoshammie seem to cover all the 10/51/0 spec external mana needs quite nicely, without the mage having to resort to mage armor regen. Deep frost spec traditionally spends mana even slower than fire does, so it shouldn't be even less of an issue for frosties.

I don't feel opting to not get Imp.Scorch glyph is viable. On fights with frequent restacks it adds some quite respectable amounts of dps, compared to glyphless fire mage or frostie. Not to mention the pure trash / 5 man / 10 man / grinding utilities that come with having your own fast-stack crit debuff.

Has anyone heard anything about Hot Streak stacking? I crit with 4 consecutive scorches last night and was able to cast 2 instant pyroblasts

It refreshes, doesn't stack. Just came out of Loatheb a few minutes ago and if ever that was the opportunity for it to stack, it would.

Ok - nice one. Not sure how I managed to cast 2 instant pyros then =/

When they introduced molten armor we were used to having mage armor for raids. It was a useful addition to have a spell you could use it for fights where you didn't expect to have mana problems. Thoughout TBC we seem to have forgotten this, presuming that we must use molten armor always for maximum damage. Rather than looking at molten/mage armor as a damage/mana tradeoff, many thousands of posts were made about the uselessness of spirit on our gear and about mages needing VT to even compete with other classes. The fact remains that we have an extra tool at our disposal apart from evocation and gems to use for mana management. It's fairly easy to calculate yourself the tradeoff between these various tools and Roywyn has also maintained a useful post on these forums which estimates the values for you; I'm sure he'll continue to do so.

Speaking of switching armors mid fight: you say it's not viable. However, it's often very possible to start a fight with molten armor, pop cooldowns, use mage armor for 3 minutes, and then switch back when your cooldowns are up again. At level 70 you only would need 35mp5 I5SR to get back the cost of the switch itself, anything above that you have to judge as a tradeoff of +X dps from extra crit or +Y dps from not going OOM.

My personal opinion is that many mages just set-and-forget molten armor at the start of the raid and this is just like hunters who never use viper because they can't see past the short term dps drop. Whatever spec you are as a mage, you are not precluded from using mage armor, nor are you prevented from having various alternative pieces of armor in your bags with more/less int or spirit.

Humour me for one moment and consider that the dps issues with arcane specs are resolved. Is there anyone on beta who could tell me if there are any rotations that are viable mana wise with the current state of AB?

Also, would Mage Armor, Mana Gem and Arcane Power would be the usual Major Glyphs?

A lot depends on how the issues are resolved to be honest.

The current state of affairs, from what I understand, is that arcane's highest dpm rotation is Blast->Barrage, and arcane's highest dps rotation is Blast spam. Thus we have the same old mana consumption regulation that we used to have with frostbolts.

Not sure where Missile Barrage fits in.

I wouldn't go any deeper in it at this point though, because there is at least one key talent in the tree which doesn't look like it works as intended (TotW).

Glyphs-wise, Molten Armor glyph is unattractive with arc's low crit bonus, and there don't seem to be any other glypjhs benefitting arcane, so yeah. The only exception might be Arc/Fire spec, if arcane mage also ends up as scorch stacker (then he can use imp.scorch).

These are from my spreadsheet, using Roywyn's Naxx 10 gear setup, no Torment, Spell Impact working:

53/18/0 - ABr->FB/MBAM - 3649 dps, 318 mps
53/0/18 - ABr->FrB/MBAM - 3599 dps, 300 mps
53/3/0+15 - ABr->AB/MBAM - 3386 dps, 284 mps

The rotations are my shorthand for: Arcane Barrage, fill with AM if Missile Barrage procs otherwise fill with the appropriate bolt.

Fire can pull slightly further ahead by hit capping with 2% more hit. It can also maintain scorch with insignificant dps loss. If my mana calculations are correct, both are fairly close to mana neutral with glyphed mage armor. We could probably get pretty close to workable with molten and just Arc Med, but the mps numbers there don't include the AP bursts.

With the current glyphs, you're looking at glyphing (Mage|Molten Armor)/Fireball/(Scorch|AP) for the fire minor (you'll be maintaining scorch if no frost mage) and (Mage|Molten Armor)/Frostbolt/AP for the frost minor. The numbers above include the appropriate fireball/frostbolt glyph.

Missile Barrage fits in by being a significant dps increase for poor dpm:

ABr->AB - 3152 dps
ABr->FrB - 3403 dps
ABr->FB - 3461 dps
ABr->Sc->FBl - 3471 dps
ABr ->MBAM - 4710 dps

Edit: And AB spam is worse dps than any of these rotations. Do not stack AB at 15% damage/300% mana per stack.

I'm starting to wonder if anyone worked out the numbers between fireball spam + hotstreak vs fireball spam + scorch/hotstreak on proc. In other words, would it be a better dps increase to cast scorch every time you want to use hot streak ? Also, if the numbers are better (I'm assuming here a 100% ignite loss in case of fireball/instant pyro), then what if you put 1pt incinerate over 1pt world in flames for the spare point management.

You mean:

T+0.0 - Cast 1 Starts
T+3.0 - Cast 2 Starts
T+4.0 - Cast 1 lands, crits
T+6.0 - Cast 3 starts
T+7.0 - Cast 2 lands, crits
T+9.0 - Cast Scorch instead of Fireball
T+10.0 - Cast 3 lands, may or may not crit
T+11.5 - Scorch lands
T+11.5 - Instant Pyro
T+12.5 - Pyro lands

To avoid getting stomped on?

I haven't done much on seeing how bad the ignite situation is with hotstreak yet other than a few thought experiments. Is it really as absolute as every time your hotstreak pyro and corresponding fireball hit?