Inoko

Threat isn't an issue for us on Hodir. Once we get stormpower, some lights and the fires up, we blow bloodlust, I mirror image and blow all my cooldowns, and with storm power + all that I usually end up way ahead of the tank and the other casters (10man: boomkin, destro lock) as frostfire. Then once MI Fades, the tank taunts, I invis, and he has a massive threat lead. Proceed to pew pew. We got the rare cache this way, and no one ever had to consider their threat, so... Yes.

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Frah

What spec could I persuade 1-2 of my locks to go so I don't have to keep scorching? Or is it less of a dps drop for me to scorch and them be their highest dps spec?

 

Hotan

It is less of a dps loss for you. The spec of choice for Shadow Mastery is Afflcition as far as I know.

correlation =/= causation

 

Zerstorung

This ^. You dont even have to Invis really. Just one thing to watch out for, if for any circumstance you must run near melee range, then may be a better time to pop MI since if you pull, there wont be enough time to get the boss taunted back before he smacks you.

 

Tharia

Do sheeps still break randomly in raids? I have not really noticed it in Wotlk (perhaps because you almost never use polymorph these days). I remember Sunwell where it could be quite annoying and one of my fellow mages claimed they still break without damage sometimes. Or did they fix that when they got rid of 1%spellmiss cap?

 

Shaewyn

I've never noticed it. But, on the other hand, I never noticed "random breaking" in BC either. I'm willing to bet (a lot!) that it's not random and someone's just not owning up to AOEing them.

Get an addon to tell you who broke your sheep, then yell at them. Big Brother or Scorchio can do this.

 

Mintrol1

Yes sheeps do randomly break. As they did in TBC.
Happend yesterday in Ulduar. A sheep broke after 15sec or so, no AoE or any attack hitting the sheep.
But the change is quite low.

 

Urquell

I noticed recently that sheeps breaks more in hero instances then Ulduar... strange

 

BeeLz

both meta/ruin and affliction use improved shadowbolt. The loss of a lock going destruction -> meta/ruin is usually bigger than a mage keeping up improved scorch. If you don't raid with an elemental shaman, you should however have 1 meta/ruin specced lock for demonic pact.

 

Mintrol1

Might be related to the fac that you don't have enough hit in hero.
I'm not sure , but it seems that sheep is considered as a kind of Debuff over time, so the effect applied is calculated over and over again. And with not enough hit (or Arcane Subtlety talent & Arcane Focus) can be 'resisted', causing sheep to break early.
Tough this would require a lot of testing do those really have an effect or not.
But the sheep breaking issues in game does give an indication towards them having an effect.

 

Morthoul

I've never had a sheep break early since Patch 3.0 removed the unavoidable 1% miss chance. Even prior to 3.0 it was extremely rare since being 99% hit capped for non-boss mobs is trivial, but since 3.0 it outright never happens.

 

• Seonid

The Heartbeat Resist mechanic still exists though as it is governed by your +hit, if you are hit capped the mob will never make the resist. We saw the same in Vanilla when Arcane Focus (the 5 point version) was bugged to the extent that it removed the 1% miss chance for Arcane spells.

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Ehooee

All the AOE splash damage spells make it much more difficult that it was...

Concecration (nothing new)
D&D
Living Bomb
Diseases

It depends how much your group is willing to lower their dps to facilitate cc. People who have 1 button cycles with AOE in them have been a common source.

 

lionelhutz

For the "shatter" talents....

How does WoW define "frozen" targets, a target with a chill effect? or Targets frozen in place with Frost Nova?

 

Enthorn

A frozen target is someone with a freeze root on them, procced via Frostbite or via Frost Nova (or Ice Barrier breaking), or through Fingers of Frost. I also hear a number of Death Knight abilities can "freeze" enemies as well and this should count. Note that the status of being frozen is calculated at the time of spell cast finish. If a frostbolt finishes casting (or an ice lance) before the freeze wears off, the target will still be considered frozen.

 

Geglash

Indeed, Hungering Cold and Freezing Trap makes the target count as "frozen".

 

Shoein

I'm using Kyth's frostbolt build for GV hard. I was looking at cycles in rawr with full buffs and 300s fight, set up like in the rawr mage thread.

Here's the output for sequence:

Summon WE and FrBFb 1min
Summon WE again
15s later use icy veins
At 2min mark WE dies and you're solo
At 4min mark you summon WE
WARNING: ICY VEINS DURATION TOO LONG
4:20: Hero+IV+WE+Fb
WARNING: ICY VEINS CD NOT READY
4:45: Hero+IV+Speed+WE+Fb

----

Ok, so seeing this bothers me.

There's no mention of cold snap anywhere here, yet it's used to summon the WE at the 1min mark. Also, IV isn't popped in the first min, which seems to me to be removing part of the benefit of cold snap. The placement of the first IV so far into the second person It's also recommending not using fireball with BF procs during the hero/iv, which is cool.

I would rework this sequence by putting IV with my first WE and cold snapping it was summoned. Then I'd IV again as soon as the first IV was up (depending on threat, we have like a full minute to use this again so it's not a big deal exactly when).

Questions:
Does that sound like a better start?
Why do they stack hero+speed pot+IV?
Can WE benefit from hero? (edit: yes)
Does WE have to be up before hero is cast, in order to benefit from hero? (edit: yes)
Does WE benefit from speed pot? (edit: no)
Does WE benefit from IV? (edit: no)

 

Hotan

It definitely doesn't make sense to use Cold Snap when Icy Veins is off cooldown in a normal situation. So in that way I agree with you for the start, however I doubt casting Icy Veins is doing a single thing towards your dps given the fact that you will be GCD capped, and your elemental doesn't benefit from Icy Veins.

Using Potion of Speed doesn't make sense to me to begin with. On Vezax-Hard, I am at .98sec Frostbolt cast time with only a reasonable amount of haste. Therefore any additional haste effects are wasted on me, and only benefiting my Water Elemental. Using Potion of Wild Magic makes significantly more sense to me. Like I said before Icy Veins isn't doing anything for you anyways, so who cares. Regarding heroism, you aren't benefiting from this either, however your Water Elemental will benefit.

Water Elemental does not gain any haste from you. Regarding other stats I'm not 100% sure, but from what I can recall it used be that stats were inherited at summon only. At some point pets were made to dynamically change stats whenever your stats change, rather than inherit your stats at summon for their entire lifetime.
I just conducted a very non-scientific study of this characteristic. With 2175 Spell Power I had two waterbolt hits, one for 1266 and one for 1217. With 2550 Spell Power (2175 at time of summon) I had two waterbolt hits, one for 1537 and one for 1540. At face value this looks like a pretty clear case of dynamically inherited Spell Power. It would take a very intensive study to determine anything regarding crit, since you need a large sample size.

For a creature to receive a spell effect, the creature must actually exist when the spell is cast.

Heroism will benefit your Water Elemental, the cast time for waterbolt will drop from 2.5seconds to 1.92seconds.

correlation =/= causation

 

Shoein

Yeah you make good points for sure. In a general case, though (not including molten fury) is there any benefit to stacking speed pot and hero, or should you generally keep them separate (not looking at GCD-capped)?

That said, thanks for a solid reply there, a lot of really good stuff.

 

Hotan

It does make sense to stack these, your speed pot effect will benefit more casts.

Not directly related to your question, but probably good information somewhat related to the topic:
There was a thread somewhere on these forums discussing stacking heroism/bloodlust for execute effects (Percent of health, rather than time based, effects). The math attained from that thread actually proves that stacking heroism with execute effects does not shorten the duration of a fight. It feels counter intuitive, but if you think about it for a bit it does make sense. This is less true for personal buffs, although if everybody in raid used a personal buff we would be back in the same situation.

correlation =/= causation

 

Enthorn

Shoein, Kavan said this about Coldsnap:

Hotan -- I remember that discussion, albeit I don't know where it took place, but I did post in it, and one of the things I posted was an spreadsheet demonstrating Bloodlust at various stages:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...tfzEK-om2679LQ

Ignore the first set of columns and skip to the columns that start at I through Z. The first set of columns starting at I shows a fight without Bloodlust. The fight ends in 291 seconds. The next three fights show Bloodlust starting at various times (beginning, halfway into molten fury, and full molten fury range).

No matter when Bloodlust is used, the fight ends in 277 seconds. Essentially, Bloodlust just decreases the time needed to reach 35% range. You can look at the cast time and damage done as figures of the entire raid.

However, this isn't all entirely accurate, because what this isn't taking into account is procs. You have a much, much higher chance of everyone using their cooldowns in sync with everyone else in the raid at the start of a fight. And there's a much higher chance of procs overlapping as well then (45 second cooldowns overlapping with 2 and 3 minute CDs). This is only possible at the very start of a fight.

So generally the answer is: because there is no benefit to bloodlusting at the end of a fight, in the sense that it doesn't cause the fight to end quicker, even with Molten Fury and Execute abilities taken into account, then there is a sound benefit to bloodlusting at the beginning of a fight, when everyone is guaranteed to have cooldowns available for syncing with each other.

 

◊ nathanbp

I'd suggest going Frostfire instead of Frost for Vezax hard. Being GCD capped really hurts as you have no way to push out extra dps on Amicus. If you don't use Living Bomb or Pyroblasts until after the Amicus spawns you shouldn't go OOM as Frostfire. If you decide to go as Frost you should know that the Water Elemental benefits from Shadow Crash as well, so you should make sure yours is always in a Shadow Crash. It can take hits without dying so just put it on passive afterwards to bring it back in.

 

◊ manly

Personally I did every vezax hardmode using the same ffb build I use on most boss fights. I just weapon swap + flask swap + dark rune and that pretty much covers it. But then again if you are a-ok with borderline exploits you could always abuse the mana pot bug and just get free gas mileage anyway.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Dustwhisper

What flask do you use on this fight and what mana pot bug?!

I did my first GV Hard mode yesterday and well we actually whiped after Animus was dead due to bad mark/shadowcrash failures nonetheless! With TTW+Frost spec I went down to ~50% mana before animus, I saved my coldsnap for animus, also made sure I had WE and IV ready for him to burn him as much as possible. I'm quite unsure if that's the way to go as maybe just using everything pre-animus might be more optimal... Dmgwise I always ended behind two of the other mages though they are both in 4p t8.5 and uld gear while I have no uld gear I still don't think I should be that much more behind them. I'm pretty sure my output on animus was higher but that was mostly because of my stacking on him compared to them.

 

Pasture

What flask are you using? Mp5 is a no go so I'm guessing you use the BC intellect flask instead?

And like the poster a couple of posts above I'd also be interested in hearing about this mana pot bug.