Averiel

Scorching too early is always a DPS loss. LB uptime will never be perfect, but you can get it pretty high without gimping yourself.

I would Fireball, LB, then probably another 2 LB's before refreshing scorch unless of course...the fight requires you to refresh early (Dodging a flame wall in OS would be an example).

 

Magelove

I do use my cooldowns as often as possible, but boss fights very rarely go over 4 mins nowadays, so what i mean is i use icy veins + arcane power at the start of a fight, and then because we have a ffb and fb mage heroism is popped at 35%, which is when i use my cooldowns again. What i really want to know is if a macro is capable of tracking a bosses health and activating at a specified point.

 

semata

I don't think this would be possible, let alone legal. I was under the impression that macros/addons cannot decide what to do for the player; otherwise it's too much like botting.

It wouldn't be too hard to look at the boss's heath and pop those cooldowns at 35% though.

 

Masnie

The real solution would be: tell your raid to stop using Bloodlust at 35%, as the effects of using it then are insignificant: Execute effects and the use of cooldowns
It's usually better to lust early (threat permitting) so everyone can sync their cooldowns with it.

 

cbags

You can however use addon's to tell you when a boss is nearing Molten Fury Range.

I have Parrot set up to put a big "Molten Fury Upcoming!!!" in the center of my screen when the targets health is at 35-40%. This way if I need to reapply Scorch, I can do that before I pop my CD's, and not have to waste time when under IV/BL(if active) Scorching.

Silent Justice, Kilrogg US

 

Decemba

why is there no thread for this?
18/53/0 will be best for mages come 3.1/ulduar

 

Pheroz

Becuase there was very little to discuss of the spec that hadn't already been discussed in the frostfire thread, so concerns with that spec were raised in that thread.

 

Gwendoline

Actually there is a thread about this : Upcoming mage changes in 3.1 it contain the comparison for the various builds. 3.1 is still as of today an upcoming patch and its implication are covered there.

 

Toabo

Short answer: No.

Long Answer: For bosses, theoretically you could do this with the procedures outlined above: unequip Curse/Embrace, Arcane Explosion to pre-stack Dragon Soul, re-equip Curse/Embrace, drink, tank pulls, you attack boss. However, your window for doing this correctly is short. The stack will fall off after 10 seconds. However, swapping trinkets will put you on the GCD, so it's really only 8.5 seconds. And since you'll need to cast something immediately in order to preserve that stack, you probably want to build at least another second in there as a cushion against lag, so that's 7.5.

Now presumably you want to start the fight at full mana or very close to it. Arcane Explosion is ~722 mana per cast, but drinking is only about ~432 mana per second. Blessing of Wisdom is around ~22 mana per second. Passive mana regen rates on a mage vary, but since you'll be w/n the 5 second rule after your last Arcane Explosion, so you're mostly looking at in-combat regen rates; so figure another ~22-25 mana per second. So basically for each Arcane Explosion you cast, you'll need to drink ~1.4 seconds to recover that mana. So 7.5 seconds of drinking time means you'll be able to recover about 5 Arcane Explosions worth. Now if you stack Arcane Explosion slowly (AE, wait 9 seconds, AE, wait 9 seconds, etc.), you can get more out of the passive mana regen and possibly add another stack while still allowing time to drink to full mana; however, that means knowing even further in advance when the pull is going to happen.

The knowing in advance will be tricky as well. If the tank pulls sooner than you expected, you could end up with your Curse/Embrace unequipped. Or you might have to cut your drinking short and start the fight a 2-3K mana in the hole. If the tank pulls late, you risk your stack falling off. You'd then be forced to use Arcane Explosion to maintain it (burning more mana and potentially proccing Curse/Embrace) or to attack the boss before the tank (a generally bad idea).

So yes, in theory, you could try pre-stacking Dragon Soul. In practice, the gain from pre-stacking is probably not worth the risk.

 

Averiel

The only fight where I see pre-stacking IDS would seem ideal...would possibly be a speed OS10 3D kill.

Not too sure about Ulduar, but depending on your spec, getting a 10stack might be quicker than you think such as a fire mage without Scorch Glyph...etc.

 

Lightbender

Any information regarding whether glyph of living bomb would be a useful choice considering things like using up combustion procs?

 

Kelfar

Useful choice for what? Its the best dps glyph we currently have(well will have in 3.1) and the spec Enthorn modeled in rawr doesn't even take combustion since its such a low dps increase.

 

lgtcount

What would you pick up instead though? SotM is hardly any crit rating/talent point so it doesn't seem worth it. Just curious, not doubting that with LB glyph Combustion's dps sucks, I totally agree, just not sure what to pick up instead.

Also so I've read that with a bunch of haste it's best to drop LB from rotation and just nuke with hot streak proc. What exactly is the amount of haste needed for when it's more dps to drop LB from rotation? (obviously this would only happen when heroism/bloodlust is up)

 

Andossus

Simple Question:

My mage is 60, what should i skill? Arcan, Fire or Ice?

 

Pheroz

If anyone has modelled this, I'd love to see it. But accepting it as fact that there is a reachable point where you have enough haste that it is a DPS increase to drop living bomb is a mistake. Just becuase it has been repeated around the internet doesnt make it true, unfortunately.

 

Enthorn

Hilariously, I don't even take Combustion now. It's something like 10 DPS. It's a bit more in 3.1, along the order of 22-28 DPS.

At 600 Spirit, the first point in Student of the Mind is increasing Spirit by 24. The second point would increase it to 642. Kings would increase this to 706, or 660 without. This means that the 2 points in Student of the Mind are providing an additional 46 Spirit, which is 25.3 crit, which is ~35.42 DPS. As spirit increases, this increases. Off the top of my head, I believe Rawr was listing 1 point in Student of the Mind as providing 18-19 DPS. This should be an average, since the first point is 4% and the second two points are 3% each.

Obviously, the DPS contribution of Combustion that I listed (22-28) is higher than that last point in Student of the Mind. Nonetheless, when you drop Combustion and put a second point into Student of the Mind, DPS does increase.

Lgtcount, you can find a lengthy discussion on haste and Living bomb here. For the record, that discussion is just from yesterday, and I pulled it up with a simple search of "living bomb haste." Many, many questions can be answered by searching for them, as they've already been asked. There are some very fine points made in this particular discussion that I've linked to.

 

irgendwer

Simple Answer:

Ice

 

lgtcount

They really need to fix combustion cause that's pretty rediculous... So far I haven't seen a single blue post about it though.. anyone else know more than me? Enthorn?

 

Enthorn

Combustion scales negatively with crit rate. If you had 0% crit rate, a 10% increase until you've crit 3 times would be immeasurable. You wouldn't be able to crit any other way. On the flip side, Fireball specs are seeing 60% base crit rates with Fireball. The increase of 60% to 70% is far less, because the chances of your spells critting at 0% is, well, zero, but the chances of you critting at 60% is high enough without Combustion that its DPS contribution is negligable.

With that said, the use of combustion is certainly not trivial in PvP where resilience is working against your crit rate, and you aren't receiving raid buffs. For this reason, Combustion was more lucrative pre-wrath, when crit rates weren't so high (40-45% vs 55-60%+ now).

 

lgtcount

Right I know but with the way things are now it needs some kind of fix imo. It's not too far down the tree that it needs to be awmgawesome but it shouldn't be so worthless that you don't even pick it up..

 

Dysthe

I've been playing around with PvP frost builds on the talent calculators for a bit, and came up with this (0/18/53) build as (I think) a fairly good one for starting arenas: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

My question is about the interaction between Molten Shields and Frost Warding. Since both talents now affect both Fire and Frost wards, do their proc chances interfere with one another? Can a spell be both reflected and absorbed with this talent build? If not, which takes precedence?

Apologies if this has been covered previously, I did a bit of forum googling, and only turned up results talking about the talents in a PvE DPS context.

 

Zerstorung

I was thinking, this may be a novel idea regarding Frostfite Bolt and I think it may be fun if Blizz implemented it. I wonder how the damage would turn out.

Glyph of Frostfire: While the Frostfire Bolt debuff is active, all damage dealt to the target by the mage is converted into Frostfire damage.

I think it would be nice because it would utilize a FFB spec, but add Fireball to the standard FFB rotation, making a total of 5 spells in the rotation. I'm sure the damage increase would be substantial as well. Think this is a suggestion that could be pushed?

 

Jept

Frostfire damage isn't any better than fire or frost damage on the average boss (high resist bosses excluded), this change wouldn't affect the rotations for any spec (except maybe increase totw fire dps on a fire resistant mob and deep frost dps on a frost resistance mob). The main damage increase is through torment of the weak for a fireball based build, and through the multiple frost talents for a frostfire build.

edit: more explanation

 

Moder

I have asked the tanks in my guild if they apply snaring debuffs for Torment the Weak and most of them do not. Where would it benefit me most to put the 3 points in TtW?

Current build

My gut feeling is Student of the Mind 3 for extra Spirit. Thanks in advance.

 

Tempest1

If you're in any serious raiding guild your tanks should be applying snares. If you're not and your tanks simply refuse to apply snares (not sure why they wouldn't) then you'd be better off going FFB as it doesn't rely on TTW and so will do more dps than an arcane without TTW.