Ulthwithian

Pheroz: As I'm sure you know, Arcane was originally the utility tree and almost certainly not ever intended to be a 'main tree'. The reason that Arcane, as a tree, is confused is because it has to grow against its base, as opposed to Frost and Fire, which have grown with its base. In that vein, your suggestion to simply scrap the tree has merit, in that the base would be thrown away, to start afresh.

From my reading of the current tree, the Arcane tree manipulates time to a much larger degree than the other trees. Netherwind Presence, Missile Barrage, Presence of Mind, and even Arcane Barrage point to this bailiwick. Yes, the other trees have some small part of this (Brain Freeze and Hot Streak), but that is clearly overshadowed by Arcane's number of talents. Ironically, Arcane Blast used to be this way, but then they changed it.

The only other 'glue' that holds Arcane together is metamagic (Counterspell, Dampen/Amplify Magic, Focus Magic, etc.). I think Blizzard has realized that this isn't enough to devote an entire tree to.

 

Lutfisk

What about a castable dot somewhere deep in the arcane tree, possibly replacing/changing either slow or arcane barrage. That way we would have to drop the arcane blast debuff to cast the dot. And of course tune its dps so that it's worthwhile to cast it.

 

Pheroz

There are a lot of different ways that they can go with the arcane tree. Whether it involves adding new spells, changing existing spells (Imagine a reworked slow that both slowed the target AND sped you up), or just rebalancing the numbers. I have no doubt Blizzard will do something so that arcane DPS isn't:

Step 1: Push Arcane Blast key
Step 2: Push Arcane Blast key harder
Step 3: Repeat

But they need to do something.

Missile Barrage as a talent demonstrated everything that is problematic with the current arcane implementation. It assumes your casting nonarcane spells. That alone drives me a little bonkers. I have no problem with cross tree synnergy. Having a deep frost talent that lets you pop off an instant fireball is fine. A frost talent that encourages you to use a fire spell is fine. Likewise, an arcane talent that would encourage you to use a nonarcane spell is fine. But MBarrage doesn't encourage you to do so, it just assumes that you probably are. Also, it gives you a reason to cast arcane missiles. That's not the problem, the problem is that you need a low percentage proc to have a reason to cast arcane missiles. Finally, it's a dps increasing talent, but it's a DPS loss. Spamming AB will let you proc a missible barrage letting you pewpew off a double speed Arcane missiles, but that DPS increase is a loss becuase you'll love your debuff stack. Just another neat arcane tree idea that falls apart on several levels and fails to be worthwhile.

Blizzard has to reevaluate how they want the tree to work. Becuase I don't think they have. There is a clear plan for fire based on the talent tree. You can say the same about frost. You can't make that statement about arcane.

To take it further, I'm not saying there has to be 1 way to spec and play arcane. It could even be as absurd as the rogue weapon masteries. Imagine for a second if the arcane tree was redesigned, so you basically put talent points into an arcane talent that buffed your nonarcane filler spell. IF the arcane tree had a Frostfire specialization, scorch specialization, and frostbolt specialization as talents, and was balanced around using those talents to determine what your optimal arcane rotation was.

But they need to do something so that talent points in the arcane tree determines more about how an arcane mage does his/her DPS, then the mechanics of a single spell.

 

Lhivera

That wouldn't really fit, in my mind. They gave Frost Mages a pet, which is a warlocky sort of thing, in TBC. They're giving Fire Mages a DOT, which is also a warlocky sort of thing, in WotLK. They're giving Demonologists a DPS cooldown, which is a magey sort of thing, in WotLK. I don't think you'll see a similar off-class-flavor addition to two different trees in the same class. Could be wrong, but that's my instinct.

Think they just need to make sure that:

- Blast/Barrage/MBAM cycle puts out DPS competitive with Frost and Fire
- Blast Spam is a short-term mana-burning thing, not a sustainable thing
- The tree scales properly

...and Arcane is pretty much OK.

At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy, people can't eat them. But we're not, because people can't eat them.

 

Sroneous

Honestly, I am surprised that each missile in arcane missiles does not refresh the "arcane blast" debuff.

 

Malfeas

I don't think the solution to the AB-spam situation is nearly as black and white as most people are claiming. We do not need to be stuck with the one button playstyle, yes, but we also do not need to make it cost absurd amounts of mana making it totally impossible.

Having played 40/0/21 through all of SSC/TK/MH/BT and the opening Sunwell bosses, I know that the AB spam spec can be both interactive DPS-wise as well as more than a simple one-button faceroll. It is partially sustainable, while not being totally mana-prohibitive. So I have to ask now...why don't they just keep that balance?

Make AB's mana cost increased. Not by ridiculous amounts, so that it is a pure, sudden mana dump, but enough that we know that there is no way we can last the entire fight without dropping the debuff. In comes Missile Barrage and Arcane Barrage, both perfectly reasonable ways to drop your debuff, while keeping your dps within the flavor of the Arcane tree, making Arcane self-contained and independent of Frost and Fire. Both are technically dps losses vs. spamming Arcane Blast, but so was nuking Frostbolt in between Arcane Blasts in BC.

The only difference in balancing is that where we could go to nuking AB x1/FB x2 in BC and still keep the debuff up while conserving serious mana, Blizzard simply has to balance the spec around the intent to completely lose the 3 stack every once in a while. Balance so that Missile Barrage is higher DPS than Arcane Barrage, since it requires both a proc and stationary casting. Arcane Barrage can be used during movement or if Missile Barrage is not proc'd.

Problem solved, imo. With changes to mana battery classes not increasing return with increased dps, the mana balance should remain largely identical throughout all of WotLK (I assume mana pools from LK's first raid to its last will not scale nearly to the extent raid gear will.) Forced debuff dropping should also bring Arcane's dps closer to that of Fire or Frost. I just don't see why Arcane Blast needs to be either fully sustainable or completely unviable when we played through all of this first expansion somewhere in between. And for those that complain that having to switch up your abilities on a mana consumption basis is undesired, I would say that seems to be the same boat that Fire is in right now, as well as the stated intent of the developers.

Thoughts?

 

◊ manly

Take a look at the following:
http://elitistjerks.com/886190-post1262.html
Ok, now let's just pretend that arcane blast doesn't exists for a second. That means arcane does 3600 dps, which just so happens to equal-out frost spec. Fire spec beats that with 3950 dps, using a perma living bomb rotation which is unclear whether its sustenable for fire spec.

It also just so happens that barrage rotations are better suited for:
1- movement fights
2- spell pushback protection
3- threat

Point is, giving up the 350 dps difference between the best fire rotation vs the standard arcane rotation isn't giving out much for all of the above. I think as it is its somewhat fair, although maybe just a bit low on dps. Its the same dps as frost, just that instead of irking towards survivability your err towards a more raid-friendly side of things.

Let me repeat that. I think that arcane non-AB dps is already competitive to the best deep fire and deep frost specs. (given the option to make up for the lower dps by some amount of AB spam)

Now, if you want to allow arcane dps to do better, theres the option of AB spam. The only logical way to do this is to make AB a pure mana dump spell (ie: high DPM or high DPS spell). This is the direction they went towards when they made AB have a 3s debuff. They want you to either use it unstacked, or use it fully stacked. Its high DPM or high DPS, not both. You want the option of AB spam, well, then you want to make sure it doesn't severely outdo the other specs. The problem isn't so much the dps. I couldn't give much of a damn if AB dps was increased another 20%. However, the stacked mana cost of AB really ought to be severely increased, somewhere towards what grayrest hinted; 1500-2000 mana stacked. That means very roughly around 15% base mana cost (15% -> 26.25% -> 37.5% -> 48.75%) instead of the current 9%.

With that, arcane spec can still fully compete with the other specs, without overpowering them. They would overpower the other specs in flexibility, whereas fire/frost has the upperhand for raid buffs.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Ivorthemage

Yep, if you want to ensure AB is situational or rotational, while still being useful as a mana dump, your only choice is to up the mana cost until it cannot be spammed continually, with raid support, for more than a minute or so.

So long as you do that, you have a lot of flexibility to allow for different rotations, but if you make AB spam affordable no rotation in the world will be worthwhile unless it does *more* dps than the currently too-high AB spam.

 

Ploppy

To me it seems the simplest way to establish AB as a manadump spell is to add more stacks to it. Make it stack 10 times and increase the debuff timer to longer than it is live today, maby 10 secconds there as well. If the spell was altered like this it wouldn´t be a matter of weaving the spam with one spell here and one spell there. The weaved in spells would be because you haveto get rid of the stack or the spell will drain you in the blink of an eye even if you´re fielding T9 gear. Blizzard didnt expect AB to be spammed, they believed this kind of manausage would be unsustainable. It seems dangerous to try and guess a number like 1500-2000 mana supposed to be just over the top of whats unsustainable and then see how it goes. We might very well have the AB story repeat itself over. Just send the max cost of the spell into the stratosphere and allow it to take a long time to get there. (The point of any manadump situation not being to get max stacked and stay there but to stack up as high as you can.) Besides solving the problem of how to design the debuff, the spell would also be shaped in a way that you could create fond memories with it "that time when you had a 20k crit cause you timed everything just right with some boss ability". Just like locks smile and remember their doom crits. Big numbers every once in a while are fun. One final point of this change is that with AB designed this way even fire and frost should be able to ramp up the spell doing more DPS than their main nukes. It simply gives any mage a tool to dump as much mana as they please.

Regarding Missile Barrage I´ve always thought since I first saw the talent that I hope they make AM the spell to interact with it. Well preferably all spells, but most importantly AM since that would tie Missile Barrage and other Am improving talents together. Especially if each tick was allowed to proc it. AM requires you to stand still and channel, a mage that is left alone to stand still channeling should be able to benifit from this and put out maximum pain in these situations. Just asume that AM has 5x5% chanse to proc the talent so 1/4 AMs proc it. That sounds like very easy figures to balance the DPS of AM around and the spell would regain a unique characteristic making it fun to cast. AM is simply the spell that on its own deals a bit less damage than balls of fire or frost but it has the power of procing.

These two changes would grant a very nice arcane casting cycle, one bread and butter nuke with some fun proc abileties, one mobility nuke and finally a good manadump. Sounds like a complete set to me.

 

Malfeas

I'd just much rather see Arcane Blast changed in a way so the spec is not relegated to relying on Fire or Frost nukes. Again, I agree it needs to be nerfed, but not to the point where it's unviable save for the last 15% of a boss. AB needs to become the clear choice as the off-nuke in a ABr/MBAM rotation, with the ability for it to become a main nuke for decent, but fairly prohibitive amounts of time. All the talents indicate that, and it gives the Arcane tree an all-Arcane identity.

 

Solisa

The only problem I see with this is is forces arcane to use Fireball/frostbolt filler instead of Unstacked AB. But that is quite minor. I think Manly has a good analysis of Arcane and what helps it to both equal and differentiate itself from Frost and Fire specs. It's just that AB is too sustainable on Beta currently.

 

solbergb

I'm sympathetic to this. I'd like to see fire aoe not require arcane explosion to do the majority of the close in AOE, and blizzard for long range AOE (as the flame strike dot won't stack, so it's kind of pointless to spam flame strike). I'd also like blizzard and flame strike to not do half or less of arcane exposion's DPS, especially considering the relative spell damage caps which can widen the gap even further. I'd like cone of cold not to be just an instant-strong-chill effect with high mana cost and low damage due to low spell caps.

What I would like to see and what Blizzard wants for AOE isn't the same thing though. AOE is very clearly not a single school proposition if you want to do it well and at the moment, close in AOE is very clearly supposed to be superior DPS and DPM to long range AOE. For fire, some of the Wrath changes are in the right direction. One subtle but important change for both fire and frost is the fire/frost debuffs applying to arcane, frost and fire damage and being crit based...so scorched up targets will suffer more no matter what AOE I use.

Single target DPS though usually is strongly school flavored, although the "instants" for both fire and frost overlap (both use fire blast, both use ice lance sometimes and frost now occasionally tosses fireballs). So I see where you're coming from. It seems like they are trying for that with the changes to arcane barrage and arcane missiles but I lack the theorycraft to judge if they've done it well. At the moment AB spam is overshadowing those rotations.

 

Ploppy

This sounds as if you are asuming AM will remain uncastable. Thats what the seccond suggestion was about. If AM is allowed to proc Missile Barrage of each tick and has its DPS balanced around this AM will be the best nuke for getting the most out of your Missile Barrage talent. It will add incentive both to spec Missile Barrage in the first place and to use AM like fire and frost mages use their nukes. Plain and simple the main nuke. Another nice effect I think you would see from this is the arcane tree revolving more around haste than crit as seccondary stat to +damage. Haste would increase the procrate and thereby scale directly with Missile Barrage kinda the same way fire has talents that make the tree scale better with crit. This is offcourse a personal opinion but somehow haste seems like an apropriate atribute of arcane.

 

Pheroz

Going back over manly's post, It looks like things with arcane are functional alright, provided an nerf to AB. I just thing the tree is so poorly designed, but if the make the numbers work, i'll suck it up and deal.

The one thing that is concerning, going back to Roywyn's post that manly linked is the scaling of frost.

http://elitistjerks.com/886190-post1262.html

Am I reading this right:

Frost starts a little behind fire (no arguments there) but gets less DPS from every single relevant stat. So isn't frost going to fall further and further behind as our gear improves from Naxx-10 and beyond?

 

Lgs

Exactly. It's not even close.

Gnomes are creatures of destruction.

 

grayrest

From memory, AM spam in 2.3 was 17% behind fire and the MSD added 20%. If you've been reading the blue posts, they're quite unenthusiastic about putting a lot of damage on a single talent and I'd guess that getting AM up to a viable primary nuke would be quite a bit over the damage budget. I further suspect that they don't want to give us back that particular feedback loop. AM spam was kind of fun in 2.3 because it was novel, but it wasn't fun enough that I'd want it back as our primary means of doing dps. I'm also not terribly attached to an all-arcane rotation. I consider the use of nukes from off trees to be part of the tree flavor as long as most of the damage is arcane.

Mana return in LK is tied to gear improvements, which scale much slower compared to mana return in BC, which was tied to dps scaling. Moreover, Blizz has a fairly free hand in controlling it by simply not itemizing gear for int. Unlike with SP/haste/crit, I don't see people up in arms if they simply shifted the item budget away from stam/int and towards the other stats on gear. I posted the following explanation on the official forums, but I think it's pertinent here.

A full set of 10 man Naxx gear provides ~20k mana and 600 spirit assuming both Arc Mind and SotM. With the current spirit, replenishment and JoW mechanics, this will produce an effective 1887.5 mp5. Adding 50%, since that's a fairly extreme upper bound for three tiers, to get 30k mana and 900 spirit results in an effective 2641 mp5. This is only a 40% increase in total regen.

In BC, by comparison, you go from ~400 mp5 when paired with a t4/tailored spriest and wearing t4 to ~950 mp5 in SWP, an increase of 240%. The spriest going from 600 dps (150 mp5) to 1600 dps (400 mp5) accounts for most of that.

The AB currently on the test server in a 40/3/18 spec at 20% haste burns 2045 mp5, which puts us OOM at the 10 minute mark without using pots or evocation. Upping the pentalty per stack to 150% per debuff (1617 mana fully stacked, 1568 with just Arcane Focus, 1411 with Frost Channeling as well) ups the burn rate to 3386.5 mp5, putting our Naxx geared mage OOM in 60 seconds of spam and our super geared mage oom in just over 3 minutes. In practice the spam will be less than that due to the extremely high burn rate of IV+Bloodlust+AP.

I don't think we're going to see the same jump in raw stats going through 3-4 tiers of raid content than we did going from 70 to 80. As for the unlimited stacks, balancing it sounds like a mess and the RNG aspect of critting vs not critting towards the end doesn't strike me as desirable.

 

Gediablo

Maybe AB damage is fine, and frost and fire is just too low damage? In level 80 5 mans I can't keep up with either retri-palas and bm-hunters as either frost or fire (players from my guild on live that I usually have no problems beating on live). Only with arcane (and 2xtier5) I can compete with them (unless the latency is too high so stacking the AB buff isn't possible). Looking at the full Naxx25 combat log posted here a while ago the arcane mage didn't look too high either compared to other dps classes. The frost and firemage looked very poor, however.

I totally agree that the arcane spell rotation doesn't make much sense at the moment - making both barrage effects only usable while loosing the AB buff. I hope they change the rotation of arcane to something similar to the boomkin making the best dps and dpm rotation a mix of 2-3 spells. The harder to master the better the result should be. And increasing the mana cost of AB isn't going to happen either - Blizzard realized that you cannot balance a spamable spell doing high damage at high mana cost - they are doing all they can to make sure you cannot buff a player infinitely to make them overpowered and instead making sure everyone got all the buffs they can get always. They made that mistake with the current AB on live, which is currently is higher damage at higher mana cost - and clearly they don't want that again in WotLK. They want to normalize the dps of the classes, not just over 8 minute fights, but also over 60 sec fights, and a mana dump skill with extremely high damage is working against that goal. So they are making AB more sustainable with less burst. So far they just did a poor job blending this change into their new skill tree - like making Arcane Missiles, Missile Barrage and Arcane Barrage useless.

Seeing the mage community demanding a nerf to the arcane damage I fear will leave mages in a poor state in WotLK. Blizzard said several times that they haven't even started balancing the damage of the specs and classes, but only focused on playstyle so far - and I think we all agree that the current playstyle of the arcane mage on the beta isn't a good solution. I would rather discuss how to make the arcane rotation fun, than comparing numbers that already admitted by Blizzard isn't balanced at all yet.

 

frosty

Another way to virtually raise ABs mana cost is to go one step back and make arcane spells unaffected by MoE and Frostchanneling again, which would increase the mana consumption by 10 or ~15%. That, however, will have a rather uncomfortable side-effect on any other arcane spell rotation too, so it's not necessarily the best or single solution.

But it would also eliminate the need to spec 18 pts. into side-trees, which is something where i was always wondering about the game designers intentions: Frostchanneling and MoE currently totally cannibalize the 'gimmick' talents in the arcane tree, b/c an added 10% efficiency for nukes (from Frostchanneling for example) is much better than anything else you get when spending those 7 pts. (IV->Frostch.) for additional arcane talents.

 

Axira

After playing around with a deep fire build a bit, it dawned up me that haste was actually gonna become a rather bad stat for future fire mages. Why?
1. It does not give any DPS increase at all to our hot streak pyroblasts or living bomb. Basically with the stats-distribution philosophy that exists in TBC, more haste in alot of cases just means less critrating or less spelldamage. However, both these stats are together of much more importance to a deep fire build than haste. Or at least that is how I perceive it.
2. It just causes us to burn our mana faster, and we do not really want that.

The philosophy behind a deep fire talentbuild at the moment in my opinion seems to be the following:
"Slow and big hits". Or to be more precise, favouring both spelldamage and critrating over anything else.

Now deep fire builds have also been given a mana-dump with Living Bomb. Meaning that the more mana you have to spare, the more you can keep up this extra source of DPS. This mana-dump however gains nothing from haste, on the contrary, the more haste you have, the faster you'll burn your mana, the less you'll have left to keep up Living Bomb.

So what do deep fire builds need most ... spellpower, critrating and mana. And keeping this in mind I started to browse some of the available gear at L80 and my attention fell on gear like Bindings of Yearning, Wraps of the Persecuted, Cloak of Averted Crisis, Serene Echoes, .. etc. You can catch my drift. (You need to search the items yourself on Wowhead: OMG IT'S ALMOST HERE since I appearantly can't directly link them here.)

So I started wondering about how bad that mp5 -really- is, in contrast to what the sentiment of people is towards it at this very moment in TBC. Most likely it is rubbish yes, but it can't be worse than gear with +spirit and +haste rating on it instead, because spirit wouldn't give us anything at all. The following ofcourse already caught my attention and I'm happy to have such a source of numbers:


But I'd also like to know the numbers for:
*Fire spec with mana limitation, spending mana on more Living Bombs (extremely mana-starved), while using molten armor
38 mp5 = ???
58* spellpower/50 critrating = ???
58* spellpower/50 haste rating = ???
58* spellpower/50 int = ???
58* spellpower/19 mp5 = ???

*Besides that, I also found it odd you were comparing 100 spelldmg with 100 of other stats.
As far as I know 1.167 spelldmg = 1 of every other stat in terms of stats value distribution, unless that has been changed somewhere along the line.

So you might wanna add "117 spellpower = ???" to the list as well to make it more correct and complete for an overview of stats comparison.

I do realize though that this is a bit of 'alternative' or unusual theorycrafting, since mp5 is generally frowned upon (and even imagining it might be a decent stat already is making me feel sick (because this will bring up other issues with how our L80 Tier sets are itemized)). But i'm just curious how good it'll really be now in mana starved situations. Which is how the new fire build should be played like; keeping Living Bomb up just as much as you can so you'd end the fight with 0 mana left the exact moment the raidboss is dead.

And I think that under these conditions we could be badly surprised, and keep in mind that I'm talking about itemstats here and not about gemslots. Ofcourse if you could pick an item with much more int instead of mp5 instead, that int would in all cases be better due to the replenishment scaling. But in terms of gear you never have such choices. Atm the main variation and choice we seem to have on non-set cloth items is: +haste/+spirit or +crit/+mp5 ?

 

Xentropy

Those numbers would be irrelevant, because Roywyn's other numbers established firmly that in a mana-starved situation, using mage armor in order to increase living bomb uptime is superior in every case to molten armor and diminished living bomb uptime.

If you can maintain living bomb 100% of the time with molten armor, use molten armor. If you lose any meaningful amount of living bomb ticks to lack of mana even including evocation, use mage armor. The 5% glyphed crit loss is regained quickly through extra living bomb ticks.

So far, half the theorycrafting says fire mages will be using mage armor, half says they'll be using molten armor. Things are a bit in flux at the moment and we don't know what the average boss fight length is going to be. It's quite possible that half the fights will require molten and half mage, which means (assuming one glyph used on improved scorch and one glyph used on fireball) if you don't have Inscription, you'll be carrying around a stack of each armor glyph to swap on each boss. Luckily they look like they should cost about the same as an elixir, not a flask.

As for whether you prefer haste or crit, haste will remain the superior dps-scaling stat, but if Blizzard succeeds in somehow finding a balance where mana cost vs regen is important (a difficult proposition for many reasons that have already been covered here many times), crit could end up being preferred for its superior dpm.

 

Zaldinar

Haste gives the same proportional benefit to a instacast Pyro that it did before. Pretend Pyro does 1000 damage at a 5 second cast or 1.5 second instacast, and add 5% haste:

1000 / 5 = 200
1000 / (5 / (1 + 0.05)) = 210
210 / 200 = 1.05 (Go figure eh?)

1000 / 1.5 = 666.6666...
1000 / (1.5 / (1 + 0.05)) = 700
700 / 666.6666... = 1.05

And actually, it gives a bigger raw number DPS boost, 10 vs 33.3333...

So depending on how you like to view gains, either in raw DPS numbers or in proportional gains, haste is either just as good, or better.

To truly model the game, we first must research it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...icId=109841969
Proven TheoryCrafting Stuff, chain casting in a PTR near you soon.

 

Samuel

I always thought of the arcane tree as being the best at shifting dps around in time. If that is the idea behind the arcane tree then a mana dump makes a lot of sense and for short bursts I would expect Arcane to easily be top mage dps.

It is just blancing everything that is probably difficult because someone is going to min/max everything which isn't really a problem unless it leads to people wanting to stack mages.

One mechanic I thought of was ramping arcane blast up would trigger a 30 second buff that when it expires prevents arcane blast from ramping up for another 30 seconds. Not sure if that would lead to a "fun" play style or not while providing a sufficient nerf to arcane blast spam.

 

dedmonwakeen

If you are comfortable running a cmd-line tool, you can explore these raid/gear scenarios yourself with SimulationCraft. No fancy GUI. No armory import. Just a text config file...... It is up to date with the latest beta info.

Please bear in mind that it does not "solve equations" for you as Roywyn has done.... giving very nice guidelines for spell/gear trade-offs. It is just a simulator. You plug in a scenario and let it rip. You change the scenario slightly and see how things differ. Obviously much harder than simply referencing one of Roywyn's posts....... but handy if you have a very specific raid-confg and/or class-spec and/or gear-point questions

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

Axira

Ofcourse, but add to that the idea that you'd have to sacrifice a certain other stat to get haste. (Thus less critrating or spelldmg, thus less hot streak procs or extra damage on the pyroblast). Or the fact that living bomb doesn't get anything from haste.

 

arch

Axira, haste will still be the best stat simply because fireballs constitute the largest chunk of our dps. What you're looking at is basically a TBC affliction lock scenario. Despite speccing into the "DoT tree" shadowbolt still is the largest portion of their dps.

You also have to remember that haste lowers the gcd.