1) Put in a bug report that Blizzard doesn't proc the tinket. According to the tooltip it should. (I plan on submitting one myself.)

2) Trash on Razorscale goes down so easily I'm not sure it matters. If you are concerned with maxing it, slip in a Fireblast and an icelance here and there. Not sure it's really worth it though.

Illustration of the Dragon Scale did not stack with Blizzard -- be it the first tick or any ticks thereafter. This was the case back when I was Frostfire on Sarth 3D, the last time I can remember using Blizzard and paying attention to stacks on the trinket. This would have been back in March, so unless something has changed, I wouldn't be all that surprised if it isn't corrected (assuming it's a bug) on Eye of the Broodmother.

Oh, I totally agree. There are more instances than I can recall now where blizzard doesn't behave as expected in regards to talents, procs, etc. I just figure its worth needling the developers whenever these sort of things crop up. The issues with blizzard will likely never be resolved if we all just accept that it's an 'different' spell than all the rest.

The trinkets used to proc on each Blizzard tick, but I guess back then you could stack the Illustration trinket with things like mana shield, slow fall and blink.

The Blizzard chill effect is also exceptional in that it only procs fingers of frost, if the target can be chilled/frostbitten. For instance the Hodir trash Jormungar will proc FoF, but the elementals will not. There's a huge difference in DPS.

At least Blizzard can now crit.

I'm still hoping Blizzard (the company) will some day fix their namesake spell.

I was wondering if it's a good idea to put fireblast into your rotation as a FFB mage (i know it used to suck back in tbc)

Fire Blast should only be used if you are moving and the enemy does not need to have Living Bomb applied to it. If you are standing still, casting Fire Blast is not worth it for any spec.

Fireblast is however an excellent spell in Ulduar with all the movement, especially for FFB.
Whenever you have to move and dont have LB/Pyro, throw a fireblast!

You might proc hot streak as well, giving you even more mobile damage while already running.

This makes 4 piece t8 an even better bonus as well, in addition to the DPS increase. As it also increases mobility abit.
(fireblasting while moving, proc'ing hot streak, can often mean very little dps-time lost to movement)

The key to doing good dps (assuming decent gear and rotations) is to have as little downtime as possible, allways cast, even while moving.

There are a few small 2H/1H issues in RAWR when looking at alternative weapons. When you have a 2H equipped, you must be sure to also have a greyed-out offhand so that its stats can be taken into account. Slightly more subtle and easy to overlook, when the 2H has a staff enchant, this same enchant is used for any 1H weapons but then rendered ineffective as it isn't valid. This makes the equipped staff look much more favourable compared with alternatives. Swapping to 63 SP enchant gives the actual value of 1Hs.

I'm a fairly new Arcane Mage and I've been reading a lot here recently, 20% crit with MA, 350 haste (working on it).

Here's my questions:

Glyphs: Arcane Missiles, Molten Armor and Arcane Blast. Right or Wrong?

Rotation: ABx3 AM always or ABx3 [Abarr] MBAM ? There seems to me to be some discussion on this currently though I can't find anything difinitive.

If ABx3 AM is correct is there any circumstances when ABarr is preferred, other than using it while moving instead of losing your AB stack?

We don't play in RAWR. We play in dungeons, and work with what drops for us. The optimum will depend on what you have.


Sure, Ulduar stuff has a lot of hit, and that devalues items with a lot of hit. It's not reasonable to say that in general there's a 'wall' at 71 hit beyond which further hit is worth much less, though.

A "modest 20% uptime" means it procs every 50s on average What spells are you casting to get a proc on average 5s after the internal cooldown ends?

Once a minute is more reasonable, giving it a similar uptime to the 20s per 2-minute on-use trinkets. But the effect must obviously be considered less valuable per unit of spellpower, because it is not controllable by the player.

I'm not saying it isn't a very good trinket, and probably better on average than some of the alternatives. I just don't see the relevance of perfectly optimal sets to mages who don;t get to choose what items bosses happen to drop, or the logic of categorising items that are slightly less perfect for making an optimal set in RAWR as 'junk'.

first post ffb thread has all the answers.

The base damage is a set number chosen by blizzard. The displayed base damage usually never changes, exception being multiplier talents. A specific fraction of your spell power is added to the base damage (there are many exceptions but the general formula is spellCastTime/3.5) and then multiplied by talents/meta gem/debuffs/set bonuses in certain ways that aren't always obvious.

From what I gather they have a certain DPS goal in mind and try to balance the base damage along with talents, glyphs, gear, and rotations to meet the number. A Blizzard poster once alluded to spreadsheets they use to determine these things.

Manly put together a lot of the specific data in the Frostfire Bolt thread .

I have an age old question. It probably has been asked a million times ( search doesn't yeild anything ) Damage vs DPS... What to look for ? I know they should go hand in hand, but is DPS better than Damage done ? Or the other way around ? I always went with better DPS is prefered to Damage , was i wrong ?

You wouldn't compare "miles" and "miles per hour" would you? ("My car drives 50 mph." "Hah my car is better than yours, yesterday I drove 2000 miles!")

What good would a spec be that can do 1.000.000 damage with only 10 dps compared to a spec that does 500.000 damage with 5000dps.

To further clarify:
There are fights where DPM is king (general hard mode). There you want to maxime damage. And since you have 0 mana regeneration in that fight this means you have to optimize DPM.
And there are fights were dps is king: Razorscale landing phase.

The debate about total damage and total DPS is tricky just like the previous post. Depends on needs for a specific fight. And I use different words:
1. Do you need burst at a specific time?
2. Do you need mana management?
3. Do you need survivability (ie magic absorption specs)?
4. Are you on sheep, scorch or add duty?

The problem is each boss fight is unique so there is no simple answer. I am assuming you are asking because you are either evaluting yourself on some sort of meters, or evaluating others, or your trying to figure out what to say when a pug group is asking for your DPS?

Those who get to do adds, or ignore single dps tactics to do AOE just to pad the meters distort the baseline in which you may be comparing yourself or others to.

Further, there are so many gimic or buffs from various fights, if your talking to someone what DPS would you use...how about use the DPS from a Hodir fight in which you got the buffs? Or use the "true" DPS on the General fight that is only counting the casting time? Both will be hugely inflated. Or give your tank and spank DPS from patchwork - but how many fights are just tank and spank - is it a fair key statistic?

I have seen some good tools in which the parse upload tracked deaths, bloodlusts and you can plot raid DPS or individual graphs. Then you can see when the true performance is happening. Its almost a fight per fight basis.

Personally, if I look back at a boss fight, I look at total damage keeping in mind is it padded with AOE or not. Also, comparison should be made to the same class on the fight. Contrary to miles and miles/hour...a boss fight is a limited distance .

If your answering a group who want to know your stats, I think SP is still the best neutral stat to give. It gives and indication what level of gear you have. This also indicates your degree of success (ie being able to get gear in the first place).

Well it is to compare myself yes and to know where i stand when looking at WWS parses also know what to say when questioned about DPS/Damage results by non-mages . Thanks for the explanations, it's clearer now.

Look at your damage done versus everyone else's damage done taking into account DPS time (you'll have to eyeball this, since I don't know of a log site out there that weights damage done by DPS time). Take Freya for example -- in my 25-mans, we'll engage her and half the DPS starts hammering away at her as she heals. And I'm not just talking about rogues/warriors who aren't sacrificing mana to DPS. There's mages, warlocks, hunters, going full blown. Naturally when they switch to adds for first phase, Freya is back to full, and their damage was absolutely meaningless.

Meanwhile, I've been waiting for the first wave of adds before doing anything. Their damage is going to be well ahead of me, naturally. Furthermore, you have to rule out certain things (and take things into account), as others have mentioned -- like AoE. Living Bomb is nice, but you're not going to catch up to a rogue spamming Fan of Knives against detonating lashers, and arcane explosion is just a waste of mana on that fight. Instead, I would try to frost nova whatever adds I can so they one-shot the rogue so I can pass them on the meters. Err... disregard that.

One thing I pay attention to more than anything else is the percentage of damage I've done in a fight versus others, and how it correlates with past fights. I know for instance that I can do 20-25+% of the damage on Hodir (well, that's easier in 10-man, more difficult to hit that percentage in 25-man). So if I look at the logs and see 15% this week, then damage done and DPS mean very little, because both of them were lower in comparison. From there you need to look at certain things. For instance, how many Storm Power buffs did you receive? Were you spending time in Starlight buffs? Did you have mana issues? Etc.

I generally have learned to just ignore DPS altogether. It's pretty meaningless to me. At the same time, damage done doesn't really mean a whole lot to me either. There are far too many factors at play during fights that can influence damage done significantly. It's a fantastic measure, naturally, but, for instance, being able to hit all three units in Mimiron phase 4, or hitting all 3 units on Kologarn, can obviously inflate your damage, similar to Freya.

At the same time, getting lucky on Auriaya and being the first one to AoE the adds every single time she uses swarm can inflate damage. You could be in the middle of an attack, whereas a rogue may instant FoK them all. On 10-man, they could all die before you even get a cast off since they have ridiculously low health. (Of course, they don't all appear at once, so this isn't exactly true, but it's the principle.)

This is a question I went through the other day when trying to figure out what fights to place emphasis on for apps as far as dps goes. For basically every fight in ulduar you can evaluate how someone fares against the environment, checking to see if they are getting hit by stupid stuff. But it is more complicated to evaluate one's dps because there aren't that many fights where you can effectively do it. I think XT Hard-mode for someone not on sparks, Mimiron, and Yogg (hard-modes included) are probably the best three ways to do so. Mimiron and Yogg both involve alot of situational awareness well keeping up a high amount of dps, and aside from very rare things like getting constricted in a spot where you can't dps or getting brain-linked to someone who is far away the dps is pretty controllable making those fights a good measure of who can do high dps well dealing with environmental dangers. Some of the fights you listed have parts where you can do good dps (conservator dps should be high for you unless you are frost for lasher utility, as well as hodir dps should be high providing you have high uptime on the storm power buff) and you can look for those specific things but to look at the fight as a whole and evaluate dps isn't that productive like you said.

The problem with that analogy is that it fails to account for a realistic situation: we've been running Naxxramas for 5 months and it's completely puggable. [Dying Curse] drops from 4 different bosses. Several players either have it or could easily pick it up after a run or two. If you have it, there is next to no reason to upgrade to either [Elemental Focus Stone] or [Living Flame].

It is also highly probable that most players were hit capped before entering Ulduar. An item that drops that has 36 more hit may look appealing, but the argument is that the proc on Dying Curse is substantially better than the proc on either of the other two trinkets, so much so that it's more beneficial to simply find hit elsewhere and keep using Dying Curse (in the event that you drop hit). And this is not to mention that [Eye of the Broodmother] and [Scale of Fates] are both better than Living Flame as well.

The T8 helm, gloves, and legs all have hit on them. There are tons of wands with hit on them. There are tons of waist items with hit on them. You can find hit on so many different items that, yes, realistically, even though you work with what drops for you, it is very easy to get hit capped.

During XT-Hard mode, if you cast FFB on a life spark, is that enough to activate TTW?

I don't think they can be snared (because I tried), so you most likely need a tank to apply the debuff. Do you kill those sparks alone? If that is the case I would just spec FFB.