Ohi

If you're also on adds, adding:

/targetlasttarget [harm]

at the end of your macro will also automatically flip back to the adds, instead of having to target them manually.

Edit: Added second quote, can be used with both.

 

hypetech

For the second spellsteal macro, with /cast [target=focus], you don't need the targetlasttarget because you never actually change targets.

 

thatguyb25

I've got a question about my spell rotation for raids. Currently it goes as such:

LB > Scorch x 5 > FB while reacting to Hot Streak procs and re applying LB and Scorch.

Reason why I ask, is because I'm fairly well geared and barely braking 3k dps on Raid bosses in Uld and ToC 25. Fairly certain that My spell rotation is where I'm falling short. Any suggestions on a better rotation?

 

BeeLz

That's indeed very low considering your gear.
Your rotation seems right.
So you're either moving too much, not chaincasting, having a lot of lag or have a really bad raidsetup.

A wws or wol would help a lot to determine why your dps is that low.

 

thatguyb25

Please forgive my ignorance but what is a wws/ wol? Also Chaincasting? I might be doing it, though I'm just not that familiar with the terminology.

Also as far as lag goes, I'm rarely above 120 ms any time I play aside from WG. lol General even in my guild's 10 mans we run with a minimum of a Priest, two Paladins, a Shaman, and Druid (Resto or Moonkin) so everyone gets the right buffs caster wise.

*Edit* Added question about chaincasting.

 

BeeLz

wws or wol are both combatlog parsers ( World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis ) e.g. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
You basically just type /combatlog at the start and the end of a raid, make an account and upload it.

Chaincasting is basically spamming your casts before your previous cast has ended so you have no delay between both casts due to lag or whatever reason

As for your raid setup and buffs you want to have:

13% dmg ( warlock, unholy dk, moonkin )
5% crit buff ( moonkin, elemental shaman )
5% crit debuff on boss ( mage, non destro warlocks )
3% crit ( elemental shaman, mutilate rogue, ret pala )
5% haste ( shaman, wrath of air totem )
3% haste ( moonkin, ret pala )
3% hit ( moonkin, spriest )
3% dmg ( ret pala, bm hunter )
12% dmg on fireball ( any tank )
spelldmg ( shaman, demo warlock )
Bok
Spirit
Gotw


That's a lot of buffs and you basically want them all in a 25man raid.

 

Romple

Why do you use Soul of the Dead when you can use Sundial of the Exalted which is much much better?

You'd need to post a log parse for us to really figure out anything you're doing wrong in a fight. With your gear you should have no problem doing 5k+ dps on a patchwerk style fight with no gimmicks. There's really not much of a "rotation" for fire. Just spam Fireball while refreshing LB and Scorch (obviously reapply before the 5-stack wears off) and hitting HS procs whenever they're up.

Can you post a WWS or WOL or whatever your guild uses?

 

aceling

Highest dps profession for a caster in 3.2

Last time I looked about a month ago the highest dps profession for a caster was Tailoring.

Can anyone tell me where I can find the relative dps values of the professions for a caster in 3.2 now?

 

Ramsden

Sancus went over the current state of professions for mages here:

WotLK - Complete Mage Compendium (3.3 PTR)

Go there for the details. His conclusion:

 

katholdran

I am wondering if arcane focus applies the 3% hit to all spells or just arcane. I'm currently sitting at just over 17% hit from gear alone. I thought I previously found a post on these forums saying that it only applies to arcane spells, I can't seem to find that post anymore. I made it a point to get my gear +hit to the cap because I don't generally run with a SP or Boomkin. Any help is appreciated.

 

Gasillio

Arcane only. Precision however (If you were to go FFB/Arcane+IV) affects all spells. Although you are Fireball so that doesn't really matter haha.

 

aceling

I'm trying to find an up to date list of Item Stat Values for Arcane 57/3/11.
Gear level is full tier 8.5, mainly Uld25 gear, with TOC25 weapon and 1x tier 9.

Most recent I could find is:

04/23/09 - arcane 57/3/11

Item-Stat-Value:

Spellpower: 1,50
Haste: 1,49
Int: 1,12
Crit: 0,87
Spirit: 0,76
MP/5: 0,5

 

Wrendallyn

There is no set Item Stat Value list as the DPS value of each stat point-for-point varies heavily based on what buffs you have, type of fight (changing targets a lot, heavy mobility, etc) and how much of every other stat you have on your gear. For example, if you have 90% crit and 0% haste, another point of haste will be worth more than another point of crit than if, say, you had 90% haste and 0% crit. I know these numbers are impossible, but it's just for comparison. This isn't even touching the nightmare that is Hit caps.

The simplest way to know the Item Stat Value for yourself is to use Rawr, which has an option to view your character's current item stat value. There's a heavy bolded red warning on the bottom of it, though, outlining what I just said. The numbers there will change every time you change anything about your character setup.

 

Arbitur

First, does the Frost Nova glyph affect the water elemental's nova?

And second, what is the range on FM's proc effect? We don't particularly group our mages with this in mind, and I've been wondering if we should.

 

BeeLz

1st) I'm pretty sure it doesn't, They are both different spells so I don't see why they shouldn't. One is called freeze the other on Frost nova
2nd) The range is 50000yd according to wowhead, don't know if that's correct but it has a huge range nonetheless. You can get the buff from someone proccing it on the other side of a zone.

 

Pasture

There essentially isn't a range to worry about for Focus Magic. During leveling you could just throw it on a random passer-by leveler and still gain the benefit so long as they were in the same zone.

 

kzn

I've looked at the last 5 or so pages of the threads that looked like they might be relevant but couldn't find an answer for this, so:

I'm guessing that the SampleOutputPTR on the Simcraft site atm isn't up-to-date cause of the build #, but the 7000+ gap between that build and the latest build that MMO-Champion has notes on has me confused if they're using the same number to indicate revisions. That said, is Arcane still going to be the highest DPS spec for a mage (assuming scorch from elsewhere) in 3.2.2 or have the latest ABlast changes made Fire/TtW the best again?

 

medloh

Thanks for all the Freya +3 tips. I went deep frost with all the blizzard slowing talents and Frostbite and it seemed to help.

One thing I noticed is that Frostbite never seems to root Snaplasher anymore. Can anyone verify this?

 

Gukreb

My guild is currently moving into Uld-25 content, and Hardmode-10. Unfortunatly using my current FB build I am so far outstripping my tanks threat that I am having to spend a good portion of every fight doing nothing more than keeping Scorch up and waiting on invis to pop again.

Basically what I am doing is starting the fight, getting Imp. ScorchX5 up, then DPSing until i overtop the tanks threat but haven't pulled aggro yet. At this point I hit MI and keep the burn cycle going until 2-3 seconds before MI is done, then pop invis wait for it to completely tick, then jump back to the DPS race. For low hit point mobs this normally ends up with me being just behind the tank in threat when the boss dies. But if the boss has more than 3-4,000k hp I wind up overtopping the tanks threat again. However this time I am at the top of the threat meter (Omen) with no way to drop back down, and spend the rest of the fight just keeping scorch up and makeing sure I don't die.

My question is this; is there anything I might be doing wrong or could do differently to eliminate this problem?

A few possibilities as I see it:

1) Drop FB for Arcane, since it has major threat reduction
2) Switch to FFB (does it have any threat reduction?)
3) Could Omen not be working right? Such that it doesn't wipe my threat properly when I invis?
4) Could this just be a tanking problem?
5) Is there a buff out there that can reduce a mages threat other than invis, if so I don't know about it.

My responces to the above are are that:
1 & 2 just end up with me doing the same DPS spread over the fight, but allow me to keep doing lower DPS longer.

3) I am pretty sure I have omen configured correctly, but if someone has seen a glitch here I would love to know
4) Not much I can do here
5) I'm a newb

 

Extrudedcow

I'm inclined to say #4. It sounds like you have a good handle on your threat management abilities. After looking at your armory, I don't see anything more you can do to reduce threat besides swapping to arcane.

I would suspect either your tank is missing a key component of their threat (talents, key buffs/debuffs, poor gear itemization), or your raid's rogues and hunters aren't misdirecting.

Remember, if you stay outside of melee range you won't strip the enemy off a tank until you hit 130% threat. If you continue having threat issues, bugging paladins for a salvation can be a big help.

 

Romple

You might want to save your invis for a little later in the fight if possible. (Unless tank aggro gets wiped during the encounter).

If you use invis early when the tank only has 300k threat or so, you'll be right back up there in no time. If you use invis halfway through the fight when the tank has three times the threat you'll have a lot more room to build threat before reaching critical levels again. If you get a shadow crash early in Vezax you'll shoot above the tank in no time. Sometimes it's better to hold back a little bit early on and it will allow you to do a lot more later.

Also, a lot of bosses CAN be taunted. So ask your tanks about that and coordinate with them. Tell them when you're about to go nuts and they can often do things to help reduce risk.. And as Cow said, Hand of Salvation goes a long way. And in the long run, your tanks TPS is more important than his threat right now. If he can build a big threat lead on you and keep his average TPS up you should never really catch up to him.

 

Healixor

My mage alt is about to reach level 80. What is the fastest way to get my mage ready for heroics and raids? Spec arcane so I will be hit capped fast, or doesn't arcane scale well with low gear?

I've seen statweights for the different specs, but which are more important when you haven't got end game gear.
F.e. Hitcapped -> 10% haste for GCD -> stack SP & INT until you reach... -> more haste & crit

 

Gasillio

Fire/Arcane or more commonly referred to as Fireball spec and Fire-TTW spec is indeed better than Frostfire Bolt spec (FFB or Fire/Frost). This is because it scales better with gear and such due to the better nuke. Frostfire Bolt is a terrible nuke unless it crits. This is because of the insane crit multipliers within the spec. Fireball, on the other hand, has a higher base damage which is further improved through the Arcane talent Torment the Weak, which gives 12% more damage on your "nukes" if the target is slower. For raid bosses, the target needs to have attack speed rather than movement speed slowed, which will always occur if you have a tank or a death knight.

For Fire/Arcane, you stack haste over crit, although crit isn't terrible since hot streak still occurs. But haste is better.
For Fire/Frost, you should stack crit over haste, although some haste isn't terrible due to your nuke casting faster you have more chances for it to crit.

 

Wrendallyn

Spell hit cap is 17%. If you have Imp Faerie Fire or Misery on the target (generally, if you have a Spriest or Boomkin in the raid) then this is lowered to 14% that you are accountable for. FB/TTW has no hit from talents, so they must deal with the full 14% from gear. FFB has Precision, so it needs 11% from gear. Arcane has Arcane Focus and Precision, so it needs 8%. The person you were talking to probably assumed you were including the draenei racial aura, but you weren't, so you can ignore them.

Sancus' post compares specs in BiS gear, but only after 3.2.2. The General Mage Discussion and Information thread's first post is outdated, so I don't know where to find any raw data about live. I suggest using Rawr with the optimizer.

 

Anaxo

There is no minimum or exact amounts of haste/crit/spellpower you need to reach as a mage, for any spec. Sure, depending on spec you may prefer haste over crit, but that doesn't mean you ignore crit entirely. The only stat you need to cap is hit. And there is never any reason to stack int as a mage since it will come naturally as a result of gear; if you are socketing [Luminous Ametrine] over [Potent Ametrine] or [Reckless Ametrine] you are doing it wrong.