The lower geared mage looks like he just hit 80. His damage is going to be terrible for a few weeks until he can grab some Naxx 10 stuff and heroic/emblem gear. Frost while he's still working the heroics would be fine, as winter's chill applies the crit debuff, but a switch to FFB would be needed once he can pump some decent numbers.

In most of the raids i am the only mage in our guild; after reading all forums and checking charts; unfortunately fire is the way to go for me. You think with %10.76 hit chance without raid buffs; is it worth to respecc fireball instead of frostfire? Dummy tests give various results i am confused. ( we do have razorice in raid always)

(confused because i dont have raid buffs on dummy; only asked a tank to put ensnare thats all)

You need 14% hit as fireball spec with a boomkin/shadowpriest in the raid, which you are no where near. So I would spec FFB for now.

As alliance you only need 13% with Heroic Presence. Just get the [Ward of the Violet Citadel] and replace two yellow-slot gems with +hit and you're good to go with fireball.

I love playing my mage, but I seem to be lacking a bit in terms of damage. Gear really isn't a problem, as it seems I'm geared for whatever I want to do right now, but I'm only doing almost 3k as Frostfire and this week, I tried out Arcane... which was about 300 dps shy of what I was doing as FFB. [An Armory Link]

I usually run with a full contingency of raid buffs, haven't yet tried Flask of the Frost Wyrm, but any suggestions?

I hate to ask, but running an older mac I cannot use rawr at all. I am wondering if anyone would be willing to plug my armory in and give me an idea of what my item budget would be at say at one minute intervals up to 5 minutes? Assuming all standard raid buffs, stat food and flasks.

The World of Warcraft Armory

Character name - Gukreb
Server - Zul'jin

Just using the updated version of Rawr. As arcane I noticed it optimizing me for some hit gear...

Trying to get me capped at 14%.


Does Elemental Precision and Arcane Focus stack? I was under the impression that it does. Not sure if RAWR is bugging this or not.

Thanks.

E

Whats the conversion for spirit to mp5? How much spirit per point of mp5? And so on. Tried searching for the usual terms and got anything but.

1 point of actual mp5 = how much spirit? 1 point of spirit = how much regen, and how does that then reduce to in-combat regen? And on and on.

I'm level 64, leveling as arcane because its fun, and if I so choose, I can oom myself faster than you can say 'noob.'

But this spec kills something if you just stare at it hard. Good times.

Do you have Misery checked?

I did check misery... but if my math is correct, and if Manly's OP is correct... the hit cap would be (17 -3 EP -3 AF -3 Misery) so 8%. RAWR is itemizing loot for a 14% hit cap with AF and EP talented.

Anyone else have this issue?

So it's been over a month since I last played my mage (my guild needed me to go back to tanking).. but I'm finally taking her back outa retirement. It seems that quite a lot has changed though, most notably with the recent 3.0.8 patch. Now, I'm trying to dig through all the threads and posts here and catch up, but... I need a spec within the next few hours for a Naxx-10 raid. The above few posts seem to indicate that now, more than before, gear plays a factor in what spec to play. It makes sense of course, cause mage has always been a case of needing gear to support the spec.

I'm currently FFB spec'd with mostly heroic/badge level gear. Armory is: The World of Warcraft Armory

I've been debating one of three things. Staying FFB. Modifying FFB and getting TTW. Or going arcane. Just need help deciding...

I believe so, but I am having difficulty confirming. I asked in this thread and was told it does include it, however. Unsure.

Maybe I didn't look hard enough but I wasn't able to find the answers to these questions.


What is the soft crit cap (describe it, not a %)?
What % is the soft crit cap?
As a raiding mage, what does it mean to me (IE how do I interact with it... gear\gem for it...)?
Does it affect specs in more then one way?

I only raid 10 mans with my guild and I am spec'd 18/53/0. My guild usually has a warlock and a boomkin (sometimes) as ranged caster dps. The rest of the dps is usually rogues/hunters/death knights. Is 1 to 2 casters enough reason to stay 18/53/0 for the scorch debuff or is it acceptable to be arcane for my raid comp?

There is no such thing as a soft crit cap. Crit rating, the same as any other dps stat, has a certain value for any mage. These relative values of any stat can be found easily by using rawr.

The only cap there is, is the 100% crit cap, wich can be made easier to achieve with certain raid buffs in very special fights. But apart of loatheb there is no way you will ever get close to 100% crit as a mage.

Here's a question which I have been wanting to answer for ages but have never thought of asking here.

I use quartz to keep an eye on that latency so I hit the button the earliest possible moment and don't loose too much dps due to latency (Not using stopcasting btw).

This makes it so that I am constantly having my eye on my castbar when I'd love to keep my eyes on the gameplay itself, specially as I raid lead pretty often. I have believed that it often leads me to a small loss of dps because I cant keep up a proper rotation when I am in situations where leading is required.

Does anybody have any good suggestion to overcome this problem besides throwing the castbar in the middle of the screen or keep spamming buttons to make sure they are hitting asap except on AM?

I recently started looking at Recount on my Mage. My Mage, Rashied, Moonglade, Europe, finally gets to visit Raids for a change and I started looking at Recount since I tried out a 57/3/11 from my old deep all arcane spec I played with for years. I noticed different numbers in dps for different mages on Mirror Image. What is the cause for this?

I myself have made it the habit to build up ABx3 then pop PoM+IV+AP so I am stacked out at max on crit/haste/bonus before I pop my Mirror Image after which I continue AB spam untill Missle Barrage proc + AM or when Mana is an issue ABarrage and rebuild. I noticed MI does around 360 dps for me then while it sticks at around 150 dps for other mages. So basically what I want to know is: Am I wasting time popping MI at that point or do I simply get lucky with the RNG. Does MI inherit your mages crit/hit/haste/spellpower on cast?

For frost there is a soft crit cap in the sense that a FoF proc pushes you over 100% crit, thereby wasting your critrating for a certain percentage of your spells.

Try a head-up display mod. I use IceHUD. I've got little transparent bars in the middle area of my screen that show me my health, mana, my targets health/mana and my cast bar and latency. This is a really old picture, but you can see the HUD, just barely, in the middle of the screen - When I enter combat the bars get a little less transparent.

Just remember the reason why FFB has a high crit modifier is because of the talents that you have in Frost as well. By losing these core frost talents for FFB, your FFB's will start critting smaller. You also lose IV which is very nice to stack at 35% with BL for a burn phase.

I wanted to ask questions about trinket choice on specific fights, since I do not have an Illustration yet.

My 3 trinkets are: Sundial, Dying Curse and Embrace.

I am currently playnig 18/53/0 so Dying Curse is one of my obvious choices for the hit rating (currently at 13.86% sigh), but I am debating on which fights would I use Embrace and which fights I would use Sundial.

Embrace: 3D, Anub, Widow, Maex, Patch, Grob, Gluth, Thad, Noth, Instructor, 4H, Saph (haste is nice during air phase to continue dps)
Sundial: Maly, Heigen (the proc benefits me during dance phase), Gothik (I usually manage to scorch a little before add dies)

Unsure about:

Loatheb: Embrace allows me to toss out more crits faster, but will it get to a point that I start losing ignites. If that's the case, I would use Sundial for bigger crits (although its passive crit is a bit worthless on this fight)

KT: I have huge mana issues on this fight. KT loves to detonate me. I am leaning towards Sundial.

Do you guys agree or disagree with my choices?

If I had Illustration, I would have Illustration/Dying on all the time >.<'

I've been playing as Frostfire for about 2 months now and I like the spec but I'd like to try out Arcane, but I'm not too familiar with the mechanics of TTW. My concern is TTW depends on other people keeping up debuffs (as well as another mage on scorch duty, which is of greater concern). I know Thunderclap is one debuff that works for TTW, but are there others that I should be looking for? Is Thunderclap a debuff that a good tank should have up on the boss 100% of the time?

Sometimes we have a druid tanking and they have Infected Wounds. Does Infected Wounds count towards TTW? What other buffs count? Rogue Poisons? FFB Chill? Is there enough slowing effects going around that I can assume close to 100% uptime?

If I may make a suggestion, the Arcane thread may benefit from a list of debuffs that affect TTW.

its on the 2nd page of the arcane thread... search function is your friend.