I'm fairly certain that casting LB would not overwrite HS. LB doesn't interact with HS at all until it explodes. The overwrite you are describing is, I think, because typically you'd have have a FB/FFB traveling towards the mob when you need to make the decision between using HS or refresh LB. If you've critted once immediately before, then there's a good chance that HS will proc again, which would make consuming HS a better option than LB refresh.

I don't really think this would be a big deal though.

Just got back to my mage and I've got a lot of monkeying around to do with rawr yet, but I had a question regarding the new imp scorch. Back in TBC, Manly or Vontre (forget who exactly) calculated that it was worth scorching if a mob would live longer than 10sec. This meant that it was useful on a lot of trash. Now that scorch is 5% crit instead of 10% more damage, I'm wondering if there is any kind of hard and fast rule on this. I'm mostly focusing on heroics atm, and even the bosses are dropping extremely quick because everyone is running around in Ulduar gear, so just wondering at what point I should stop scorching and just cast FFB. Alternatively, until I'm focusing more on real raids, would it be worth dropping my weakest glyph (FFB or Molten Armor, would have to see what rawr posits) for the scorch glyph if I'm running sans destro lock?

I realize trash/heroic bosses are pretty trivial, but it gets touchy to justify my spot in VoA/Naxx pugs when ignorant kids place so much emphasis on meters on trash.

Because LB is more DPS than Pyro. For my gear set LB is approx 9.7k dps. A hotstreak Pyro is only 6k dps. Not to mention that assuming only 1 target. Many of the boss fights in Ulduar have adds which pushes LB up even further. And it's not like you are discussing either/or. Just delaying the Pyro a second to refresh LB.

The Hot Streak counter resets on proc not on Pyroblast cast, so you can safely have a single crit before using your Pyroblast. Think about the sequence of events leading up to the hot streak proc: Cast Fireball 1 -> cast Fireball 2 -> Fireball 1 crit (1) -> Living Bomb crit (2) / Hot Streak proc.

Now after Fireball 3 leaves your hands you have two choices, Living Bomb or Hot Streak. Since Living Bomb is more damage per cast time, you want to cast that unless you are going to lose the benefit of Hot Streak. Since LB tick crits do not proc hot streak, the only way for that to happen is to have Fireball 2 crit and then to have an additional crit before you use your hot streak. There can be no "unscheduled" crits because your living bomb already exploded and your new one won't explode for another 12 seconds.

So you can safely finish out the sequence like this: Cast Fireball 1 -> cast Fireball 2 -> Fireball 1 crit (1) -> Living Bomb crit (2) / Hot Streak proc -> cast Living Bomb -> Fireball 2 crit (1) -> cast Pyroblast -> cast Fireball 3 -> cast Fireball 4 -> Fireball 3 crit (2) / Hot Streak proc -> cast Pyroblast. No hot streaks lost.

If instead the sequence goes: Cast Fireball 1 -> cast Fireball 2 -> Fireball 1 crit (1) -> cast Fireball 3 -> Fireball 2 crit (2) / Hot Streak proc -> Living Bomb crit (1), then you will only lose the hot streak by applying Living Bomb if Fireball 3 crits. So if you know that you are in this situation and your crit rate is over 50% you may be better off using the hot streak first. However, as a general rule you are far more likely to be better off re-applying Living Bomb first as this is, to my knowledge, the only situation where you are at risk of losing a Hot Streak proc and even then you will only lose it <Crit Rate>% of the time.

One thing to keep in mind, and I have a habit of doing this myself, is that with 4P T8, if you get into the routine of using Pyroblast instead of refreshing Living Bomb, you're occasionally going to run into situations where you don't refresh Living Bomb for more than a few globals.

Let's say you have 3 procs of 4P T8 (which results in 4 Hot Streaks being used). That's 5.2 sec (at 1.3 per global) of downtime on Living Bomb if you don't refresh it first. I get into the habit of using HS Pyroblast instead of refreshing LB due to the notion that I don't want to lose Hot Streak from an overwrite, but the realistic nature of it is that the actual occurence of an overwrite is less than unlikely.

One of the reasons I believe I do this, and many others probably do as well, is because we get into the habit of doing Fireball -> Fireball -> Fireball + Pyroblast and having Living Bomb explode just before the last Fireball lands. Now, if the Living Bomb critically hits, and the third Fireball does as well, what you end up having happen is that you use Hot Streak and then you immediately gain Hot Streak again. The instinctive reaction of course is to immediately use Hot Streak again, just as you would with 4P T8. However, Living Bomb has already exploded, and no more Fireballs are landing, so there is no way for another Hot Streak to proc. You can safely reapply Living Bomb and then use Pyroblast.

It's a very difficult habit to break, though I think it will get easier once 4P T8 is dropped.

A hasted situation should make it *easier* to get off your pyros in a reasonable time frame, not less. Haste doesn't speed up the lenght of the Hot Streak proc. During Hodir you can get off like 3 FBs and refresh LB and still get off your HS Pyro. I think you are placing far too much value on Pyro. The only thing that makes Pyro worth casting is Hot Streak. If Pyro was actually worth 25k, we'd all be stacking haste and casting Pyro all the time. But we don't, because it's not that great of a spell. If something is modifying your Pyro damage up to 25k, it's also going to be modifying your FB dmg and your LB dmg. I am not aware of any buffs that only modify your Pyro dmg. For me personally, I miss a ton of Pyros during Hodir because they aren't even worth casting - keep LB up and spam the FB button as fast as is possible = max dps.

In a raid situation I can comfortable cast living bomb + pyroblast before my in-air frostfirebolt lands, seeing you have more haste than me you should be able to do the same unless you play with rather high latency.
So this should only be an issue with 4t8 bonus.
Even refreshing scorch ( which doesn't have a travel time ) after a critted FFB and pyroblasting right after the scorch seems to not overwrite and proc a new hotstreak if your scorch critted.

Hotan posted the numbers in this post:

Generally speaking, the only way to reach this is with a significant haste boost (General Vezax). Even with Bloodlust and 50% starlight haste on Hodir, you won't reach it. You can reach it with 100% haste and Bloodlust up on General Vezax, but generally speaking, there's no real reason to use Living Bomb on General Vezax anyway.

Fireball 13k dps ? Theres definately some debuffs/buffs involved here. By that I mean, those numbers are for a highly specific scenario, not a generality.

He was probably including the ignite damage, since that's what Rawr takes into account too when you pull those numbers straight from Rawr. Actually, 13k for a Fireball without ignite seems very low. Anyway, I don't think he meant DPS -- he meant actual damage (probably without ignite, now that I think about it).

Oh yeah, I somewhat mistakenly inferred that those were dps values, whereas they are total avg damage. I thought the scenario was something like 1s cast time for all spells, hence why all spells were relatively close in terms of dps.

Well, you didn't mention anything in your scenario that made HS overwrites more likely, only that it "also sometimes happens". I did agree that if HS is likely to be overwritten then there might be a case for consuming that proc before LB refresh. I think it doesn't really matter, because even if your HS counter is one one your are still not that likely to crit and get an overwrite, while LB is higher DPSC regardless.

I'm not sure who says a single point in stats matters, but a couple of thousands of damage (if even that) is not exactly a big deal in a raid scenario. RNG would bury it.

Thank you very much for that information. I assume that in my situation, replacing fireball glyph with improved scorch glyph would be less of a damage loss than if I were stacking scorch 5 times and possibly more than once during the fight. Would I be correct? I don't know if anyone has done the math, but I have not been able to figure that part out for sure.

Well you need to consider that should the debuff drop then it's not just your dps that will suffer, it'll affect all casters until it's back up. Same goes for the ramp up period. Of course, it's not so bad if you have other fire mages to help with the stacking.

Yeah, it's all about how many mages you regularly run with. If you're the only mage in your raids, then I'd probably go with Scorch glyph. Don't trick yourself into thinking it's a DPS boost, but it's not a significant DPS loss either. You can see this by changing the glyphs that you use in RAWR. Personally, I find the ease of applying Scorch to multiple mobs, post phase changes etc. is well worth it in 10 mans and when I'm the only mage in 25 mans. When there are 2 or more mages in 25 mans, then we just assign 1 mage to be the "three scorcher and scorch maintainer" and it's worth it to stay with straight DPS glyphs.

I just carry 1-2 of both the scorch and FFB/FB glyphs in my bag and switch it out based on attendance. Glyphs are cheap enough that it's a small price to pay compared to what we spend on epic gems/flasks/food etc.

Has anyone noticed the change to Impact? This used to be an indefinite buff - if it proc'd it would stay until used. It now has a 10 sec timer. That's a pretty big change to fire PvP and makes me wonder if it's a counter in some way to multi-target LB for balance issues.

At 10 secs, it's a pretty big nerf compared to an indefinite buff, but it's interesting to think that Bliz needs to balance fire PvP - I didn't think any mages really played fire in PvP. Or were frost mages going 13 deep in fire for Impact?

I don't know how it was on PTR, but the Jaraxxus buff behaved the same last week. That is all 10 stacks at the same time, spellstealing one at a time and time not refreshing.

I know that last week it was also such that you had to spellsteal multiple times. I know that last week (I didn't do it this week since I couldn't make the start of raid) me and another mage each did 5 spellsteals each time the buff was applied.We didn't have mana issues, and the time lost DPSing definitely was more than made up by the +dam% modifier.

Now I am not sure if it was simply having 2 mages spellstealing (a third did some spellstealing, but not much) that alleviated the mana issues, but I do see the potential not recouping lost DPS time when you have to spellsteal all 10 stacks.

I am definitely not sure what the benefit to waiting to spellsteal it could be. I honestly can't think of any benefit to waiting, if you plan to spellsteal at all.

I find that spellstealing it myself is worth it because of the huge damage% modifier, but at around 12 seconds total to spellsteal it all it really could gib your tank. Its probably better to have shamans purge at least a few of them if you only have 1 mage, because the fight really isn't that much of a dps race.

I think if you have multiple mage and everyone takes a few stacks, it works out OK. On our kill this week, we had other mages, but they probably didn't focus target Jaraxxus or have a macro to spellsteal from their focus target, so I ended up spellstealing 42 of those buffs during the encounter. Having one mage do it all is too slow, too mana intensive and by the time you have them all stolen, there's very little time left of the buff.

Focus spellsteal is definitely useful there.

Our Jaraxxus kills have had 1-2 mages each, so the offensive shamans and hunters were dispelling also, to prevent tank/raid instagib. It's hard for me to get 3 stacks before they're all gone. /sadpanda

Then again I have been on the receiving end of fel lightning ~4sec after the buff was gained. I'm certain with 5+ stacks remaning, I would have died, but with 0 I continued to live.

This topic was brought up by gaerthe in the Arcane thread, but it seems to have gotten lost in the back-and-forth bickering.

Considering the buff to Arcane in 3.2.2, which class should be responsible for applying the 5% spell crit debuff? Would it still be a greater dps loss for a warlock to spec affliction or demonology over a scorching fire mage? Let's assume Arcane goes live in its current state.