You can pretty much just expect to have the necessary snare for TTW in any 25 main raid environment. The bosses are immune to the snare effect but TTW will still be triggered. For a list of what triggers TTW I recommend doing a search on the forum. It has been mentioned several times.

Hi, I have a question about gems (arcane pve)
Rwars keeps telling me that my meta should be the one that adds 21 crit and 3% more crit dmg (I do have 4 pieces of tier 7,5 so it all stack).
However, I can't see how that beat +21 SP and +2% intelect... anyone can confirm if what is rwar telling me an actual dps increase?

3% crit is way better than any meta gem. Look at the first page of this thread.

Also the 2% int is only better at extremely high intellect values. Something around the realm of 7000 intellect.

If Rawr is telling you that the Chaotic Skyflare is better, then its obviously an increase in dps, Rawr was specifically designed to tell you such things.

On a different note, with the upcoming changes to mage armor and arcane meditation, do any arcane mages have an idea of what we will be changing glyph and talent point wise. By that i mean i can see a few options. Firstly, We take the new 50% mana regen in talents, and replace glyph of mage armor (for those who use it) with glyph of molten armor. Or do we go 70% mana regen with mage armor and glyph, and spend the points from arcane med elsewhere. Im really struggling to decide what would be best. I am however going to try and run current content without either mage armor or arcane meditation to see how i fair first. My gear is somewhat decent-ish, still upgrading in 25 mans. Has anybody found mana problems with dropping all sources of self regen?

I used a WWS log of a recent Loatheb fight and filtered out every critical hit. I sorted all of this by spell and entered it into a spreadsheet. I took the total crit damage, actual ignite damage, and expected ignite damage, to find how much ignite damage I had lost.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...tfy19Iy8YC4Wcg
(Don't expect everything in there to make perfect sense. Some parts of it are very disorganized.)

Short summary of a 4:52 Loatheb kill:

Total damage: 1,672,723
Total crit damage: 1,110,935
Actual ignite damage: 392,257
Expected ignite damage: 444,374
Lost ignite damage: 52,117

There was a website months ago that parsed logs and did this same thing, albeit in a much easier manner. It would be interesting to compare the results. It is a significant amount of damage lost.

Currently, I am going through and color-coding everything based on the ignite interaction. The lines in red signify spells whose ignite damage was discarded. The light blue lines show the last ignite damage done before a rolling ignite stops (and these lines are shown in yellow, when a new application of ignite has started).

The far right column has the individual ignite ticks added up, with each being an alternate color to show which amounts are added to the rolling ignite. The bright blue number is the first tick after a new application of ignite. Following this is an alternating green/cyan. Each color shows the groupings of damage that were calculated by the game to reach the actual ignite tick. Then, the actual ignite ticks are highlighted yellow, and matched with their corresponding place in the log.

For instance, you can see that ignite ticked for 6003 damage, and then ticked again for 8619. A number of spells did damage inbetween these two ignite ticks. The spells that were included in the 6003 are colored cyan in this case. The numbers after that are green, and they are the spells that were calculated to reach 8619 damage for the next tick. To break it down:

Between the 6003 tick and the 8619 tick, four spells landed that crit: two frostfire bolts, a pyroblast, and a living bomb explosion:

Frostfire 13,058
Living Bomb 4,589
Frostfire 13,081
Pyroblast 10,443

The ignite damage of all of these is 16,468 (5223+1836+5232+4177). We add all of this up, minus the third Frostfire Bolt (5232) and we get 11,236. We then add in our last ignite tick, which was 6003.

(11236 + 6003) / 2 = 8619.5. And thus we know that the second Frostfire Bolt was the missed one. Of course, you could just look at the time stamps and get the same information:

19:56'41.906 Ignite
19:56'42.864 Frostfire Bolt
19:56'44.302 Living Bomb
19:56'45.335 Frostfire Bolt
19:56'45.399 Pyroblast
19:56'48.007 Ignite

It's not always the second spell that is skipped, nor does it always result in lost damage. Sometimes it can result in an entire ignite tick being added twice.

My main in TBC was a deep fire mage, first clearcasting, then icy veins fire spec.

I've seen a lot of FFB and Arcane mages around as of late, and as I don't play my mage anymore, havn't had much chance to test out specs.

My question is, can I still be competative as a deep fire build mage, compared to the FFB / Arcane mages?

Unless you let your Ignite fall off at the end of the fight, you may be missing some of that expected Ignite damage. It's common to build 10k ignites on regular fights, a fight where you effectively have 100% crit rate could easily have an Ignite ticking at the end for large amounts. (This is why I end Loatheb with AB spam for 5s)

You really ought to use ZIT rather than try and recode the same functionality with a spreadsheet that works outside of the game. At least thats just my opinion.

If you want to have a more contextual and thorough analysis of how the case happens, then again, a spreadsheet is the wrong tool for it.

Was ZIT the add-on or the website that parsed logs? Do you have a link to a working version of that program? Unfortunately, I can't do a search for "ZIT" on the forums.

A spreadsheet is all I have at the moment to do the calculations on a large scale. It's just something to kill time for me, rather. It's pretty accurate, but it is time consuming to go through and calculate which individual ignites were eaten. I mean, it's easy to do a running total and see that by this time in the fight, X amount of ignite damage had been lost. But it takes more time to figure out which spells were overwriting others. In that regard, it's sort of a challenge.

ZIT (Zaldinar Ignite Tracker) works in-games. Havent tried it recently but i doubt it wouldnt work. It tells you exactly which ticks were extra ticks, and which were lost. The website you upload to was only if you wanted to compile information together, but by no means required. I don't think i ever got the page to work :/

In short, yes, if you are referring to the fire TTW spec 18/53. The old TBC fire spec is really FFB now. For playstyle, FFB and fire TTW play exactly the same way, you merely sub out frostfire bolt with fireball. Fire TTW is not a good starting raid spec though, due to its high mana consumption and need for hit.