And even better thing would be to end with arcane blast instead of stop casting at all - I believe even at 0-stack it's better than arcane missles or frostbolt for fire mage.

@Sima: yeah thats true, better to cast something then nothing at all indeed, but I thought we mages had enough inteligence that we didn't really need to point that out, edited post to reflect this.

@Curii: Well waiting 0.5 seconds is an idea but if living bomb is on the target it might crit and reset ignite, for the moment I just keep an eye out for an ignite tick (I get it displayed on my screen with msbt) while your casting an fb, you should see one eventually so you can then assest if its getting rather high and might want to let it run its course or not.

An addon like that would be awsome, like a bar counting down for 4 seconds with the damage your ignite is at displayed on it, so you can queu your next fire spell accordingly. Living bomb might pose a problem during the fight, but in the last 12ish seconds the boss lives your not gonna refresh living bomb, so if you didn't have time in the fight to let ignite tick, you'll have time at the end.

I've been wondering this for quite a while:

If Living Bomb is so prone to cause Ignite Munching, why not skip it all together, and work towards a gear setup reliant on causing a lot of Hot Streaks instead?

Living bomb is not more prone to munching then any other spell. Munching happens when 2 crits are close behind each other like fireball crit followed by a insta pyro crit, or a fireball crit followed by a living bomb crit, munching will always happen in what ever fire spec / gear you are, till they fix it which will hopefullt happen in cataclysm.

Living bomb is a good dps spell, missing out on it and making more hot streaks will nerf your dps no matter what even if you count out the munching.

In theory yes, your scorch will hit instant and the pyro will have travel time so there is time enough in between that they aren't to close to each other, but then again, you'll loose a hefty portion of dps not applying living bomb and scorching in between.

lets say scorch is half the cast time of fireball but only 1/4 the of the dmg, it certainly isn't half the dmg of a fireball
so for every 2 scorches you do, you'll loose half of the dmg a fireball would do, so the extra pyro's + less munching you might get out of it would have to make up for 1.5 the dmg of the fireball you didn't get to cast cause you scorched + the dmg of living bomb you're missing.

Which isn't the case cause you only have like 6% more chance on pyro (this number might be off can't check atm). you'll loose dps even if you have less munching and more pyro's.

example: (fireball cast time 2 seconds, scorch 1 second, gcd 1 sec)
fireball crit (10k)
fireball crit (10k)
hot streak
Scorch crit (2.5k)
pyro hit (15k)
fireball crit (10k)
hot streak
Scorch crit (2.5k)
pyro hit (15k)
fireball crit (10k)
hot streak
Scorch crit (2.5k)
pyro hit (15k)


This sequence is 14 seconds
your total dmg is 111.5k (40k from fireballs, 45k from pyro, 7.5k from scorch, 19k from ignite)

Now lets see the same with no scorch and adding living bomb. (not gonna put in the ticks cause that doesn't change the time nor the dmg, i'll just subtract half of the ignite dmg due to munching)
Living bomb (I don't know the total dmg it would do compared to the other numbers but lets say 10k for easy math )
fireball crit (10k)
fireball crit (10k)
hot streak
pyro (15k)
fireball crit (10k)
fireball crit (10k)
hot streak
pyro (15k)
fireball crit (10k)
living bomb boom (crit)
pyro (15k)
fireball crit (10k)

This sequence is 15.5 sec
total dmg : 129k (60k from fireballs, 45k from pyro, 10k from living bomb, 28k from ignite but lets say its only 14k the rest got munched)

Thats a difference of 17.5k dmg in 1.5 second, while everything critted, this is a very rudementary approach though, the extra crit chance on scorch has been neglected, but as you see with extra fireball casts instead of scorches you make up for the munching even if half of the ingites get munched, even if scorches would do half the dmg of a fireball.

I have a simple question and I assume this is the best place for it.

I am a returning player who simply wants to play casually doing 5man heroics until Cataclysm. My question is simply this: assuming you were only going to run heroics with mostly AE (and wearing T9 gear) what would the optimal spec be?

I realize ultimately it doesn't matter as 5mans are trivial, but as with most of us here on EJ we enjoy getting the most out of our characters in any given situation. It is a fun exercise to try to figure out what the absolute best AE/trash spec might be.

Any help would be appreciated!

At a casual 5-man level, frost has the best survivability, AE, and control. Arcane is a close second, so choose the one that best fits your play style.

I would advise your mage to specc fire (even if his gear isn't "high-end")
Just keep a Living Bomb on every Val'kyr up, cast Fireballs on a single Val'kyr and use your Hot Streak proccs as soon as possible.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

That should significant increase your damage on the Val'kyrs.

I don't think that this is accurate, particularly when you are talking about someone who hasn't been developing a gear set for Fire and is in a 10 man which doesn't have the full caster buffs. Arcane should remain that mages best bet for burst on the Valk and if the shaman and DK are similarly geared to the mage then he should always be at the top of the damage done to the Valk unless he gets picked up. Perhaps he is spending too much time moving or not targeting as fast as he can? Given how easily we can position ourselves with blink to avoid defile or drop it appropriately perhaps the mage just needs to concentrate on keeping movement to a bare minimum and being ready for the Valk as soon as it spawns.

Since the mage can see the timer for the Valk, he/she can either have a 4-stack MBAM ready to go, or a 2/3 stack of AB ready to cast another AB or two and then unleash MBAM. Even after that initial ABs/MBAM with just 1 stun and a constantly slowed Valk there will be enough time for at least another AB4MBAM. Additionally, the Arcane mage has several cooldowns that they can bring to the table for additional burst. If he/she has the 4T10 bonus then his cooldowns would be MI, AP, IV, PoM, and possibly Berserking. Those cooldowns can be used in different ways depending on what is better for the raid. They can be staggered so that only 1 or 2 cooldowns is used per Valk for slightly better burst on all of them, or they can be saved so that if one of the other good dps gets picked up they can all be popped and increase the burst a lot on that particular Valk. He can also use PoM for when he has to move, or he can save it in case there is a nearly dead Valk that is in danger of dropping someone.

Does your guild use any type of logs? If he is not fairly undergeared relative to your other dps or pretty new to learning the fight then its very likely that he's doing something wrong and he just needs to work on either his rotations, cooldown usage, movement, etc.

I have to agree with Wilderness81 on this one.

One thing besides the already mentioned MI, AP, IV, PoM Cd's I could suggest is for him to bring engineering to 450.

Hyperspeed Accelerators - Spell - World of Warcraft combined with Arcane Power is just imba.
And considering the very small timers on HSA and AP one of the CD's should always be up to use.
Maybe try to let one of the non-dps classes do the slow/snare/stun part so you gain dps and therefore down the Valkyr faster.

I'm running around 9-10k dps as Arcane in ICC. When I switched to Fire for LK I was sitting at 6-7k.
If you don't have a ele-shm or moonkin in your raid setup and not the greatest gear, rather go Arcane and use CDs on the Valkyr. You need at "least" a crit rate of 50-60% raidbuffed for fire to get interesting.
Well if your fire mage is the only one to down the spirits in P3 and you don't have a warlock or shadow with you thats another story...

I've been looking at the bis lists for both specs, and I notice that rawr is coming out with using purified cuts in every blue slot. Currently I was taking any that were 7 spell power or above, and I am curious if this is really the way to go on even the 5 spell power socket bonuses.

I was doing some napkin math on it, but that amount of spirit seems quite trivial in regards to crit rating. Seems like straight spell power would be the way to go.