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.
Even if they can't be snared, the debuff stays on the target as a DoT, not certain but that might be good enough for TTW.
If you are levelling enchanting (and tailoring for that matter) while you are also levelling your character then neither is a money pit at all. I would actually say they are the cheapest to level this way of all the professions.
This is because you will naturally pick up cloth as you level and quest rewards can be DE'd to level enchanting free of charge.
It is when you reroll proffessions at 80 and try to level off the AH that both become a money pit though no more or less than any other profession I would say.
I have severe problems understanding (spell) haste. I have been reading about it and discussing in other forums but still things remain to be cryptical at least.
What i do know is the difference between additiv and mulitplicative hasterating and haste behaviour.
What i do know as well, is that many people write about the so called "diminishing return" effect of haste, referring to the fact that the initial casting time reduction in a haste stacking process, is in absolut bigger than the casting time reduction after already having stacked hasterating.
My assumptions:
The relative reductions hereby remain the same, therefore the dps increase has to be the same.
Lets asume i have stacked hasterating up to 3279 giving me 100% haste by only reducing the casting time by 50%.
Now that is what many call the diminishing return effect of haste. The Problem is, 50% casting time reduction results in an dps increase of 100% corresponding to the 100% haste i have. (Please ignore the Cap given that round numbers better illustrate the example)
So i do not loose any damage through stacking haste.
Ok, so now that i have spoken about the dps part of the problem here comes the resulting problem i have with the stat scaling.
Testing the issue in TCoM as well as in Rawr i came to the conclusion, that as the dps for haste initially remains more or less stable it then, while stacking more and more haste, begins to decline in dps value per point hasterating. The value for Spelldmg in contrast skyrockets.
[I as well found that the more haste there is (including Raidbuffs) the better crit gets. I also miss the explanation to this circumstance]
Assuming the diminishing effect does not apply, its clear that the dps contribution of one point hasterating remains the same, where the value of spellpower gets better and better, for it is "used for more and more spells".
Now why does the dps value of hasterating obviously decline? Which of my assumptions are correct and where can i possibly not see the the wood for the trees? Thx in advance.
Last edited by Karius : 06/05/09 at 7:59 AM.
Reason: adding a sentence for clarification
The DPS value of haste doesn't decline, per say. You can easily see this by simply modeling the haste effect (or by just doing the math). Think of this as a scenario between two mages who have exactly the same DPS. They have a 30 second window to do as much damage as possible. However, the second mage has 10% more haste. How much more damage is that mage going to do over the first mage? 10% more.
Now, he isn't doing 10% "more" damage, he's just doing the same damage faster. It takes him less time to do the same amount of damage, and because our constant is the 30 second DPS window, he will continue to DPS and surpass the first mage. This results in him doing 10% more damage than the first mage.
Now, whether he has 1% haste, 5%, 25%, or 100%, each point is netting him 1% more DPS. Consider on that spreadsheet I linked. I've set the haste for the second mage to 100%. By the time he gets to 145 seconds of DPS time, he's done 1009 damage (Molten Fury is factored in here, hence the decimals in the damage). It takes the first mage 291 seconds to do that same damage.
291/145 = 2.00x faster
Why 2x faster? Because he has 100% haste. His casting time has doubled (as you can see at the top there). His new cast time is 1.5 seconds versus 3 seconds. So 100% haste has given him a 50% reduction in cast time. Now, there's two lines to pay attention to here:
96 68% 680 3.33 320
96 36% 360 6.67 640
The first line is the first mage, and the second line is the second mage. The first column is the elapsed time, the second column is the percentage health of the boss, the third column is the health of the boss, the fourth column is DPS, and the last column is total damage done. Remember that the second mage had 100% haste? Notice he's done 100% more damage in the same time as the first mage? Let's ramp it up to 150%.
60 80% 800 3.33 200
60 50% 500 8.33 500
It's always consistent. The only time you're going to run into trouble with modeling here is when other factors come into play such as Molten Fury (which is why none of my examples above include sub-35% health lines). And of course you'll run into trouble when you have extreme amounts of haste.
However, to reach a 1 second cast time on Fireball (starting with the base 3 second cast), you would need 200% haste, or 6,558 haste rating. Now, to address the latter half of your post...
The DPS value of haste is in relation to other stats, those being spell power and spell crit (assuming hit is capped). As you stack haste, your ability to do damage increases in speed, as shown above. Therefore, the value of spellpower increases as well. Imagine having 100% haste and 0 spellpower. You're doing damage twice as fast, yes? But every point of spellpower gets multiplied in damage, and even more so in critical hits. Therefore, you may be doing damage twice as fast, but in relation to spellpower (since you aren't comparing 1% haste to 1 spellpower, you're comparing 1 haste rating to 1 spellpower)...
1 haste rating = 1 / 32.78998947 = 0.0305% haste
So 1 haste rating is increasing your DPS by 0.03%. This is a miniscule amount. On the other hand, 1 spellpower gets multiplied and increases your damage by a great deal more. This is why eventually haste is worth more than spellpower. The easiest way to think about this is: eventually causing damage faster results in higher DPS than causing more damage slower. You want to use your spellpower faster instead of just using more spellpower at the same speed you're at.
Crit is a special case because it's in relation to its cap, 100%. It does have a diminishing effect, due to the notion that as your chance to crit increases, your chance to not crit decreases. At 1% crit, you have a 99% chance to non-crit. Yet you had a 0% chance beforehand. At 99% crit, your chance for a non-crit is 1%. Thus, going from 0% to 1% gives far better results than going from 98 to 99%, because your chance to non-crit has changed far less (it's the whole, "it would have been a crit anyway -- in the case of 0 to 1%, no, it wouldn't have been a crit; in the case of 98 to 99%, yes, it would have been a crit, 98% of the time).
Haste and crit are very similar in terms of how they scale and "diminish".
You have to remember that if you think of percentage increases in DPS, the right way to consider is to take your current DPS and compare it with the DPS after the changes. Going from 0% haste to 10% haste is indeed a 10% DPS increase, but going from 10% haste to 20% is a 9.09% DPS increase etc.
Crit is very similar, but of course no one has 0% crit chance and there's a 100% hard cap on crit chance as well. However, your DPS behaves like this:
damage = (1-critChance) * hit + critChance * hit * critModifier
If you increase crit by 10%, your relative DPS increase is:
increase = ((1-critChance+.1) * hit + (critChance+.1) * hit * critModifier) / ((1-critChance) * hit + critChance * hit * critModifier)
increase = ((1-critChance+.1) + (critChance+.1) * critModifier) / ((1-critChance) + critChance * critModifier)
As you can see, the ratio is unrelated to how much you hit for and only depends on your existing crit and your critModifier (also, the formula above does not cap crit at 100%).
So, for frost with the meta gem and no T7x4 bonus, the critModifier would be 2.09 and the player might be at 47% crit chance before upgrades. The increase is:
So in fact, except for the crit cap of 100%, crit scaling is identical to haste scaling (in terms of percentages of crit/haste) if the crit modifier is 2.
Haste and crit are very similar in terms of how they scale and "diminish".
You have to remember that if you think of percentage increases in DPS, the right way to consider is to take your current DPS and compare it with the DPS after the changes. Going from 0% haste to 10% haste is indeed a 10% DPS increase, but going from 10% haste to 20% is a 9.09% DPS increase etc.
How are you figuring this?
I don't think it's accurate to look at the difference between 10% and 20%, but rather the difference between 0% and 20%. You wouldn't say "My DPS is only increasing by 19% because I gain 10% DPS increase from 0 to 10% and 9% from 10% to 20%." The end result increase is 20%.
At 10,000 damage per cast, 3 second cast time, DPS is 3333.33. For a 2.72 sec cast, DPS is 3666.66. For a 2.5 sec cast, DPS is 4000.
Going from 3333.33 to 3666.66 is a 10% increase. Going from 3666.66 to 4000 is a 9% increase. But going from 3333.33 to 4000 is a 20% increase.
I've heard of some mages on my realm using these macros and was wondering are they worth trying out vs the standard fire rotation for those who have issues with low frame rate? and if they are worth using could someone possibly recommend a good one for me, i usually tend to sit around 5-8 fps throughout most of ulduar 25 while dropping lower on certain close density fights like auriya. Frankly I'll take any recommendations i can get, i've got my gear in good shape I just feel i could still be doing more dps even with my poor framerate.
I've heard of some mages on my realm using these macros and was wondering are they worth trying out vs the standard fire rotation for those who have issues with low frame rate? and if they are worth using could someone possibly recommend a good one for me, i usually tend to sit around 5-8 fps throughout most of ulduar 25 while dropping lower on certain close density fights like auriya. Frankly I'll take any recommendations i can get, i've got my gear in good shape I just feel i could still be doing more dps even with my poor framerate.
There really aren't any good macros to help with a TTW fire build unless you want to make one that macros combustion to fireball or something.
Stopcasting macros don't really help you because in general it's better to finish casting the wrong spell than to stop casting a spell you are already casting.
You cannot make a macro to cast pyroblast automatically when hotstreak procs. It's impossible because blizzard purposely made it so you couldn't set up conditional actions based on buff/debuff checks.
Alternates between rank 8 FS and rank 9 FS to maximize dot stacking.
#showtooltip
/cast [target=focus,harm,exists,nodead] Living Bomb; Living Bomb
Casts living bomb on my focus target if it exists, is not dead, and is an enemy target, otherwise it casts living bomb on my target. useful for any time you have to switch dps from a main target to some adds/etc. I learned the hard way that this is bad if you have a focus sheep macro.
This macro uses your mana stone and continues casting your main nuke. If I was in my frost spec it would use my mana stone, cast icy veins, and cast frostbolt all in one click. My main nuke is on my mousebutton1, I usually bind this to shift-mousebutton1 to minimize cast time interruption. Unless there's a burn phase in the fight, I pretty much click this as soon as my mana hits 80% (75% if I had 2pt7.)
/use Mana Sapphire
#/use Potion of Speed
/use Potion of Wild Magic
/cast [spec:2] Icy Veins
/cast [spec:1] Fireball
/cast [spec:2] Frostbolt
This macro does the same as above except it adds a potion of speed or potion of wild magic (depending on which I comment out.) I usually bind this to ctrl-mousebutton1.
I don't think it's accurate to look at the difference between 10% and 20%, but rather the difference between 0% and 20%. You wouldn't say "My DPS is only increasing by 19% because I gain 10% DPS increase from 0 to 10% and 9% from 10% to 20%." The end result increase is 20%.
At 10,000 damage per cast, 3 second cast time, DPS is 3333.33. For a 2.72 sec cast, DPS is 3666.66. For a 2.5 sec cast, DPS is 4000.
Going from 3333.33 to 3666.66 is a 10% increase. Going from 3666.66 to 4000 is a 9% increase. But going from 3333.33 to 4000 is a 20% increase.
We use these values to evaluate upgrades, so the most useful information is "how much is my DPS going to improve if I take this piece that increase my haste by 1% over this piece that increases my crit by 1%". If you say that 1% haste is always a 1% DPS increase, then equivalently 1% crit would also be a 1% DPS increase assuming 200% crits (just using that assumption to keep the numbers simple).
In reality, your upgrade choices depend on the amounts of haste and crit you already have (and the amount of crit you get from raid buffs).
The reason I'm pointing this out is I got the impression that you think that there's a difference to how haste and crit behave in terms of scaling. There are differences in how buffs stack with our gear stats, the crit cap and how hot streak behaves, but that's about it.
The behavior of our DPS for a single nuke that crits is essentially like this (this is also ignoring hot streak):
DPS = (base damage + spell power component) * haste component * crit component * hit component
Let's say we have the imaginary frost mage with truly bad gear (no meta gem) who crits 30% of the time on average and has 10% haste on gear. He can upgrade either with 1% crit or 1% haste.
Going from 30% crit to 31% crit: (0.69 + 0.31 * 2) / (0.7 + 0.3 * 2) = 1.31 / 1.3 ---> 0.77% DPS increase
Going from 10% haste to 11% haste: 1.11 / 1.10 ---> 0.909% DPS increase
Using your "relative to zero" notation, both haste and crit are a 1% DPS increase relative to no haste or no crit DPS, so that notation doesn't help our poor frost mage make an informed decision on how to ugprade.
BTW, here's how the chaotic meta gem would affect our poor frost mage: (0.7 + 0.3 * 2.09) / (0.7 + 0.3 * 2) = 2% DPS increase.
Finally, assuming you could choose to go from 0% crit and haste to a 20% DPS increase from crit and haste or a 40% increase with crit or haste, your relative DPS values would be:
Additionally, in Blizzard's eyes, 1 haste is 1 crit, but 1% haste is not 1% crit (simply because it requires more crit rating for 1%). Thus, when asking whether to upgrade with 1% crit or 1% haste, I'd suggest actually balancing that out... you may be upgrading, realistically, 0.91% crit with 42 crit, and 1.28% haste with 42 haste.
This topic seems to be in the wrong thread "Mage: Simple Questions/Simple Answers"
Haste value compared to Crit value has soooo many variables that it's impossible to say one is better than the other 100% of the time. This is a very complex debate which is far from simple...
Understanding the essential nature of how Haste and Crit function is however fairly simple and important to any caster that chooses gear based on those stats. Of course they flux relatively based on your current gearset and that is why tools such as Rawr are popular.
Still, knowing that when Blizzard says "percent" they mean percent off base for haste is preferable to thinking it is a percent increase of current or final (as with talents, meta gems and such) is good information even at the high level. It doesn't tell the whole story but it helps a lot and especially helps those that won't delve too deeply.
Of course not everything scales off of haste; Living Bomb being the obvious outlier there. Of course also not everything scales the same with crit and the interactions with Hot Streak, MOE and Burnout and/or Shards are somewhat complex and especially so when you try to factor in WiF, Incineration and so on for a given rotation. It doesn't mean one should give up the simple due to the complex though, it means that one can give a simple answer knowing that there is further complexity you are only modeling.
Hey, gravity on Earth isn't 10m/s^2 by a long stretch but it is a good enough kludge to work for simple stuff.
Is there a point where spell pen becomes a valuable stat? I ask because a warlock in my guild is always topping dps charts and he is destro spec. I understand that chaos bolt ignores resistance and curse of elements reduces resistance on targets.
I decided to experiment with some spell penetration gems and had mixed results. In my combat log, even with frostfire bolt I see my spells being partially resisted.
Is spell pen a waste in pve and if so, why do so many pve items have armor penetration for melee?
Or am I better off having so much crit and spell power, that whatever is resisted is compensated by having greater spell power?
No, spell penetration is presently of no use in PvE. Further, as of last patch Chaos Bolt should not ignore immunities anyhow if I understood the notes correctly.
In PvE as a Mage you want:
spellpower
hit
crit
Peripherally, you gain from int, spirit, mp5 and stamina in terms of how they affect the three core stats or how they affect your survivability or longevity. One can and should add in runspeed for real fight simulations but otherwise this is what we do. We deal damage (ruled primarily by spellpower but now SP is largely given by iLevels) and we either do so faster (haste) or with greater impact (crit). Crit is far more expensive in iLevel terms but feeds into talents and so is more spec dependent and even encounter dependent.
Spell Penetration as a PvE stat has been useful in exactly three relatively modern fights that come to mind and never even in those three was it worth gearing for. I will put a small caveat up there on the modern part as I had great fun with Skeram's stick back when vulnerability wasn't taboo. It still was probably not efficient but damned if it wasn't fun.
At present though, even if they did put in a XX resistant fight you would always mathematically be better respeccing than gearing for penetration. So far, to my knowledge, none of the ulduar fights have that mechanic anyhow.
So do I just ignore the partial resists in my spells, being confident that they are theoretically hitting hard enough to justify being resisted?
The partial resists you see are level based and can not be mitigated.
Originally Posted by Crowl
If you have to control a robot dinosaur that fires lazers and there's a time when you shouldn't be shooting those lazers then the encounter is clearly flawed beyond hope of fixing.
Ok so I am now a 71 frost mage. I love the aoe and survivability I have but all my points are in frost. Should I start wputting some in fire or arcane now? I get the comments I should do both but what is better to choose from. I plan on raiding later at 80 but I would like to stay frost since its all I know at the moment?
Ok so I am now a 71 frost mage. I love the aoe and survivability I have but all my points are in frost. Should I start wputting some in fire or arcane now? I get the comments I should do both but what is better to choose from. I plan on raiding later at 80 but I would like to stay frost since its all I know at the moment?
If you read from pages 4 through 7 in the frost thread, you will notice a trend to put 18 points into Arcane to pick up Torment the Weak. Take a look at the different specs given.
Is there some kind of list showing what DPS a mage should be doing, either based on gear score or what instance you are in? This is probably hard to estimate with different specs and the way encounters work. I am just looking for a number to shoot for so I know if I am doing something wrong.
Thanks.
Is there some kind of list showing what DPS a mage should be doing, either based on gear score or what instance you are in? This is probably hard to estimate with different specs and the way encounters work. I am just looking for a number to shoot for so I know if I am doing something wrong.
Thanks.
Emperical data is useful but not necessarily something you should feel bad about if you can't match.
Is there some kind of list showing what DPS a mage should be doing, either based on gear score or what instance you are in? This is probably hard to estimate with different specs and the way encounters work. I am just looking for a number to shoot for so I know if I am doing something wrong.
Thanks.
Rawr will tell you what your optimum dps should be, given your gear and information about the fight.
Originally Posted by Crowl
If you have to control a robot dinosaur that fires lazers and there's a time when you shouldn't be shooting those lazers then the encounter is clearly flawed beyond hope of fixing.
Ok so I am now a 71 frost mage. I love the aoe and survivability I have but all my points are in frost. Should I start wputting some in fire or arcane now? I get the comments I should do both but what is better to choose from. I plan on raiding later at 80 but I would like to stay frost since its all I know at the moment?
It's up to you - I wouldn't bother right now as you can always respec to a raid spec when the time comes for raiding. Frost raid spec is generally 18/0/53 with only one point in Enduring Winter (due to a bug in the way Replenishment works). You spec into arcane to get Torment the Weak which adds 12% to boss damage, and you can pick up Clearcasting and your choice of some minor bonus arcane talents as well.
Until you start raiding, you can go full frost if you want - it will probably be better for levelling.
Frost performs very well levelling and in 5-mans and heroics. It starts to get passed out by other specs once you start raiding, but it should be viable through Naxx, especially in 10-mans. It depends on your raid too - whether frost survivability is a major asset or not depends somewhat on your healers' abilities. I suspect that if your guild is not terribly elite, frost may be much better for raiding than its reputation suggests!
06/04/09, 11:37 AM
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