angayelle

I saw an addon during WOLTK beta that Manly used to check ignite munching but can't seem to find now. Anyway i don't know if it's still accurate to get a report of the damage loss/gain for 3.0.9...

Does anyone have a link for this addon or a similar one ?

 

Saphya

Regarding the question whether or not to buff Amplify (or even Dampen) Magic on the Sartharion tank, Roywyn answered this:

Unfortunately that isn't very conclusive to me. My raid refuses me to buff either Amplify (in fear of the tank dying because of increased breath damage) or Dampen (in fear of the tank dying because he gets reduced heals). Now, that doesn't make much sense to me, because logic dictates that you should either buff Amplify or Dampen because they are symmetric in their up- and downsides.

Has anyone tested if the extra damage on the breath is modified? I'm still trying to figure out what is best in this case. I'd like to link a WWS showing our bear's deaths from flame breath, but apparently this log expired today

We use (10-man version) a bear tank and a restoration druid + shaman as healer if that makes any difference (3 tank 2 healer setup).

And is "Twilight Torment" modified by Dampen Magic? In that case it might be beneficial to buff the DPS with Dampen Magic.

 

the_nell_87

Speaking as a healer main, the fact that they both have downsides is exactly why they shouldn't be used. Sure, extra healing received on a tank would be great, but if they're taking extra damage as well, the effects pretty much cancel each other out, making the buff worthless.

In general, if a fight has 100% physical damage, amp magic should be used at least on tanks. And otherwise, neither should, unless there's a clear advantage to using one over none.

Specific to Sartharion's breaths, amp and dampen magic change the damage of a large spell by a tiny amount. If the damage was small and periodic, dampen would make a significant difference, since it would reduce the damage taken on each small hit. But on one large spell, it'll make almost no difference.
Whether dampen would in fact reduce the breath damage by 200 or 1kish due to modifiers is irrelevant, because either way, the breaths are still massive, and the tank needs to be topped up asap. Which may not happen with reduced healing.
But exactly the opposite is also true. The nature of the breaths on sarth means that the tank should avoid using any cooldowns until vesperon's disciple is up. Giving the breaths before and after that extra damage is just going to cause your healers extra headaches.
It's best to leave both the breath damage and healing received unchanged, as it's easier on everyone.

 

Swindley

I have an opinion on this, having tried all 3 specs on Sarth3d.

I was Fireball speccs for a while, but went back to FFB. It is slightly lower single target dmg, but it has a few advantages on this fight. Of course the better aoe is one, but also the aoe tank might move abit around, forcing you to recast blizzard and wasting mana. And that's the thing about FFB, you can actually recast whenever it's needed because it has extra mana to burn. (fire can really hurt here if you have to keep recasting blizzard when tank moves out of a voidzone, not to mention random dmg clipping your evocation)

Also it has icy veins, allowing you some burst on demand for the first drake to kill him before the 2nd set of adds. Fire might be slightly higher single target dps, but it has no burst on demand at all, and the aoe is worse. (I found flamestrike totally unusable on this fight wich adds being spread out too much and also moving around).

So the argument to go Fireball for single target DPS is not 100% black and white when there are targets that needs to be burned down quick, making the DPS of FFB+icy veins higher than Fireball/TTW for the duration of Icy Veins. Of course, FFB is also more random with crits, which could work both ways when talking about burst.

Arcane kinda has it all with burst, aoe and flexibility, but we're keeping a couple of mages as scorchers.
We'll see what happens when warlocks can bring the debuff.

Actually, I'm also slightly worried about arcanes good scaling with haste over things like crit and int, because even though it's higher DPS; it also burns mana faster, and if enough haste means you have to switch to lower DPS cycles, then some of the gain is lost when getting better gear.

 

Isambard

When I saw that our frost mage gained 118k from frost warding at Sapph, I assumed that was due to the extra damage absorbtion from Ice Barrier, but a closer look (as well as rereading frost warding talent) revealed this:

21:33'27.469 Wishmistress suffers 752 Frost damage from Sapphiron Frost Aura. (800 Resisted)
21:33'28.391 Wishmistress gains Frost Ward.
21:33'29.469 Sapphiron Frost Aura was absorbed by Wishmistress for a moment.
21:33'31.657 Sapphiron Frost Aura was absorbed by Wishmistress for a moment.
21:33'33.469 Sapphiron Frost Aura was absorbed by Wishmistress for a moment.
21:33'34.719 Sapphiron Frost Breath was absorbed by Wishmistress.
21:33'35.172 Wishmistress gains 99798 Mana from Frost Warding.
21:33'35.578 Sapphiron Frost Aura was absorbed by Wishmistress for a moment.
21:33'37.047 Wishmistress gains Ice Barrier.

Is it expected that a frost ward should completely resist Frost Breath as well as remain intact for the next aura tick? Is this a new mana regen scheme? Or is this just some sort of WWS bug?

 

willem11

the mage didnt die, so it seems he did absorb everything. Very strange indeed.

Edit: Found the reason, Frost warding: Increases the armor and resistances given by your Frost Armor and Ice Armor spells by 50%. In addition, gives your Frost Ward and Fire Ward a 30% chance to negate the warded damage spell and restore mana equal to the damage caused.

fun but risky ;P

 

Sinless

My personal preference is definitely FFB with this fight.

1) Higher burst for 1st drake.
2) Much better AoE due to whelps being tanked-on-the-go because of lava waves.
3) Much better mana efficiency which you direly need in this fight due to replenishment not being readily available as in 25-man and more importantly the fight itself being very long and AoE heavy.

 

◊ manly

ZIT - Zaldinar Ignite Tracker.
Zaldinar somewhat let go of the project because nobody uploaded parses from the mod, problem is, I don't think I was ever able to. Also early versions went crazy over ffb crits ;P

------------
Also yeah, I can't imagine anyone in their right mind not recommending 0/53/18 derivatives for sarth.

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.

 

Dorrinal

I've got a question for the people recommending FFB for Normal Sarth3D.

I've only done the 25-man so far and Arcane is working the best for me. My damage on Tenebron is sufficient, and I can blow all my cooldowns during Shadron to move through whelps quickly (PoM+MI+FS, Blizzard) and get to Shadron sooner (when I blow IV+AP and dump my mana). After that burn phase I have the luxury of picking a good time and place to Evocate and the rest of the fight is cake.

How does it change for us mages in 10-man? Off the top of my head I'd guess you cannot guarantee a Replenishment but doing an endurance fight like Sartharion without one strikes me as the mother of all nutpunches.

 

Thegoodman

Well, for a fight like Sarth 3D, the fact that it is long is a bit misleading. There are a few burst phases that are short and outside of that, DPS is not overly important.

I have done Sarth 3D as Arcane with no Replenishment and while I was OOM multiple times, I felt like my own contribution was nearly as worthwhile as it would have been with replenishment. The burst damage on the drakes combined with the threat reduction talents makes Arcane especially good for Sarth 3D since the drake portions are definitely a DPS race.

The replenishment issue is going to be much less prominent in 3.1 with a few the changes to talents that provide it (for both new and existing classes that have the ability).

 

◊ nathanbp

Assuming that you aren't taking another mage with scorch and that there are other casters in the raid, you probably have to supply scorch. So that means you can't spec Arcane. Out of Fire and FFB, FFB has better burst for the first drake, and better AOE for the whelps. Personally I've run 10 man 3 drakes fine as Arcane as well, but we usually bring 2 mages.

 

Dorrinal

Scorch! Of course! How did I miss that?

Using Rawr, I can swap in the 53/18/0 spec and check "Maintain Scorch" and my damage comes out to the same as FFB's spec. Admittedly I haven't modeled the Sarth3D fight properly so the actual result may vary but I'd call Arcane + Scorch "worth an experiment" on your next Normal Sarth3D.

 

Xinhuan

Nobody has pointed this out, but I believe it is a really bad idea to get Frostbite when combined with a talented Blizzard. For the same reasons why you do not want to cast Frost Nova on adds (that spawn semi-randomly too), rooted mobs on Frostbite procs tend to attack and kill healers that they are right next to if they aren't in melee range of the tank.

Frostbite + Talented Blizzard is generally fine for most instances as mobs come from known directions and there is usually little movement for both the tank and the healer. However in Sarth+3, the random nature of where the adds spawn plus the random direction of the lava wave on top of random void zones makes the fight so mobile that Frostbite procs are probably a risk that shouldn't be taken.

Edit: Add Sarth+3 context.

 

PSGarak

A friend of mine once proposed an interesting thought experiment that showed that it's quite impossible to prefer having neither amp or dampen on the target. It goes something like this: Imagine that rather than buffless being thet baseline and amen/dampen being buffs, you have, say, dampen as your baseline. Then you can either amp once to bufflessness or amp twice up to current amp. In any situation where you want to put amp on, ie any situation where dampen is not desirable, then since amp is a worthwhile tradeoff you should be willing to use it again and go up to putting amp on the target.

Equivalently: Put dampen on all your tanks. Cancelling the buff is exactly the same as casting amp on them to cancel the effects. Therefore, if either of them are desirable, both of them are desirable. You can leave the dampen off, or you can cancel it off, but if that's worth it than it's worth it to make the same decision again to put amp on.

There are two possible counterarguements I can come up with. First, is that the difference between amp and dampen is small, so that if all three states are roughly equivalent you might as well choose the one that's easiest. The second is slightly more nuanced: if you are very close to a crossover point where both healer-mana and insta-gib are dangers to the tank, it's possible for the tank to be in the optimal situation in the buffless state. This means that dampen is undesirable for mana reasons, amp would be desirable for mana reasons but puts him into one-shot range.

Both of these situations are very difficult to do and rely on very tight balancing. In most cases, the tank deaths are from healer-mana xor one-shot. If the problem is one-shots you use dampen, if the problem is healer mana you hit the whiteboard to find which is better depending on spell coefficients.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Saphya

We did Sartharion10 +2D tonight (with a somewhat poor setup I must say) and I have some WWS-data to show:

Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

Well, in all of those failed attempts something different went wrong prior to the death of our bear, which caused our healers to be either distracted or killed. But most of the time when the Sartharion tank dies, he gets some heal but not enough to bring him to 100%. I think Amplify Magic would have been better in this specific situations (I buffed the other 2 tanks with Amplify but not the druid). I don't know if it would have made any difference, though.

 

Roywyn

1) That's a great argument that I've used myself a lot to convince tanks to not click it off. Just because it makes perfect sense and is logical doesn't mean in convinces people however! If your guild or your guild's tanks don't want it, you're in a long process to make them get used to it. It's easier to win your healers over because they easier trust you say it doesn't increase most damage (since the damage intake isn't exactly their job) and bigger healing numbers don't exactly make them unhappy!
Tanks are usually the tougher nut to crack since the damage intake is their domain. You need a certain amount of trust and knowledge authority to win them over.

2) That's not exactly true about one-shots. Often, one-shots have a timer or cast time, so you can use shield on the tank. Amplify increases damage by 240. Healing is increased by 255, that means a shield is increased by 206 untalented, 237 with 17 Disc and 354 with 50 Disc. There also are damage reduction effects for the tank to consider.

So, if you're able to predict and shield your tank though spikes, the spike doesn't really increase with Amplify Magic (if 17/0/54 is viable or a Disc Priest is around). The remaining major factor is encounter multipliers, and whether they multiply the Amplify penalty or not. Buffs that increase magic damage done or debuffs that increase magic damage taken. That's where you have to look at logs and trust your gut feeling.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

willem11

Arcanes threat reduction talents are useless on sart+3, the dragons are tauntable so there is no way imaginary you can possibly overagro. I pop all cooldowns+mirror image on tenebron, when mirror image ends im on about 150%+ of our warrior tanks threat, all he does then is mocking blow and all agro problems are sorted. You might overagro while aoeing small adds but arcane talents dont work on flamstrike/blizzard anyway.

About the burst, I believe ffb has better burst then arcane.

 

◊ nathanbp

If the drake turns and breaths the melee, it's a wipe. Just because the mob is tauntable doesn't mean that out threating him isn't a problem. Our warriors (and fire mages) have threat problems at least sometimes on the first drake for Sarth.

I also don't know how you can think FFB + Icy Veins (+ nearly useless Combustion) is better burst than Arcane + AP + Icy Veins.

 

Omgimcrap

I am sure I have seen a post somewhere that suggests the preferred orser for badge upgrades but I can't find it anymore or I was imagining it!
I've used my first 25 badges on the Ward of the violet citadel. I am coming up to 40 badges soon and am wondering whether to keep saving for the chest or whether to splash out on trinkets?
Current chest is [Ebonweave Robe]

and trinkets are [Cannoneer's Fuselighter] and [Mendicant's Charm]

I am only raiding 2 times a week and we are still progressing at 3 - 4 bosses each time so am unsure what upgrades may or may not be coming my way but I know you can't rely on drops.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks

 

Thegoodman

There are threads for "Best non-raiding mage gear" and "Optimal Mage Gear" that will tell you all you need to know about gear. Use Rawr to determine which upgrade you should get next.

 

Dorrinal

You'd make your drake tank and whelp tank much happier if you don't use your cooldowns on Tenebron so your threat's under control. Save your Mirror Image for AoE so the whelps and blazes stay in one place. Use cooldowns on Shadron instead -- trust.

If you think FFB has better burst than Arcane you are greatly overestimating the value of Combustion.

 

willem11

In the ~100 attempts it took us to kill sart+3 I overagroed on almost every attempt, causing the warrior to mocking blow immedeatly. I think my warrior tank knows exactly when my mirror image fades and I have never seen any of our melee die because of this reason. So I really believe the risk of the melee dying is very, very small. Or maiby the melee in my raid possition themselves better then yours, or my tank is better. Anyway the taunt gives the tank about 50% more threat making the overagro issues of our other dpsers far smaller also. So I believe overagoing/taunting surely is a good thing in this case. My tank was totally happy with me overagroing, I asked him multiple times and he said he had it totally under controll.

Apart from this, combustion is far from useless, it gives me 2 hotstreak procs and 5 crits (3x ffb 1x pyro 1x living bomb) exactly when my +damage trinket procs+other cooldowns are up, this is awesome. I also believe ffb scales better with haste cooldowns then arcane does.

We cannot kill tenebron in time if we do not use cooldowns/heroism on tenebron. So ye.

Anyway im talking about 10 man here, 3 tanks, 3 healers, 4 dps. It might be totally different in 25 man. Maiby thats why we have different opinions on whats best. Not sure how the dps requirement on Tenebron differs in the 25 man.

 

cbags

If your tank has a relatively recently upgraded Omen...they can see your "virtual threat" as if the images weren't there, or at least I can see my own. I know when to pop invis, so I would assume they can see you as well.

 

Kelfar

I also have an issue with regards to 10 man sarth 3 drake and threat issues.

We are currently running this set up for 10 mans, we have had about 5-6 hours of attempts and are on the cusp of getting it and then people start playing sloppy because its late and we have to quit for the night.

This is the group setup.

Prot Warrior on drakes
Prot Pally on whelps/blazes
Feral Druid on Sarth
Moonkin
Me(FFB mage)
2 Demo warlocks
Holy priest drake tank healer/aoe during twilight torment
Resto Shaman raid healing
Holy paladin sarth healing

The problem I am finding is that what we do is on tenebron is pop our CD's and potions but not our bloodlust, but if I don't use mirror image I am going to pull threat, so I save mirror image for about 50% on tenebron and then he will be dead before the threat is back on me. I talked to my warrior tank about this and he said to use mirror image during shadron because he can just taunt on tenebron, but the only time I am coming close to pulling aggro is the last 10% or so on tenebron when shadron has just come down and he is trying to pick them all up and I would rather not pull aggro and get breathed on.

AOE aggro isn't an issue because the 2 demo warlocks pop demon form and kill the whelps/blazes while the moonkin pops starfall and the moonkin and I just single target dps shadron while my LB helps take care of the whelps.

Is there anything I can do to control my threat? Does my tank just need to "L2P"?

We get tenebron down fast enough so that there isn't a second wave of whelps but it just seems that if I didn't have the threat issues I could burn a bit harder. Also if there are any suggestions for the group composition I would love to hear them.

 

◊ nathanbp

From my experience running 2 healer 3 tank Sarth 10 as FFB, I never had aggro problems past the first drake, so I would use mirror image there. (On a side note, are you getting Vigilance?) Are you really in danger of pulling aggro off Shadron? I guess with our setup I am AOEing adds while the tank builds threat on drake 2 while you get to hit it right away. Also with 2 healers pausing dps during twilight torment is pretty common, so the tank has a lot of time to build threat over me. In your situation I'd probably use MI on Tenebron and save invis for Shadron if you have to use it. Or just get Hand of Salv from the pally for the end of Tenebron.