I leveled as Fire way back in the day. I still suggest that personally, I prefer the "kill them before they reach me" method. But that is a personal preference.

Frost is still my preferred levelling spec. Between the snares, the pet, and the damage reduction/pushback protection, it provides the least chance of you end up beaten to a bloody pulp if something goes not quite according to plan.

I've found levelling with each of the specs works though when things get "interesting" (Ooo hello respawns, or ah, didn't see your friends there) frost has many more "get out of jail cards" to play.

Can someone please translate the abbreviations used to describe arcane spell cycles.

Eg:
ABSpam024MBAM
ABSpam034MBAM
ABSpam04MBAM
Etc...

ABSpam - Hit arcane blast until your finger falls off
ABSpam04MBAM - Hit Arcane blast until your finger falls off, or you have a 4 stack of AB up and missile barrage procs, then cast missile barrage. If missile barrage is procced and you don't have any stacks of AB up (they fell off due to movement / you cast an ABarr, or you have 4pT8), cast missile barrage on a 0 stack.
ABSpam024MBAM - Same as above but cast Missile barrage on a two stack of AB also.
ABSpam0234MBAM - And on a three stack
AB4AM0234MBAM - If you get to four stacks and don't have a missile barrage proc, cast AM anyway.
AB3AM023MBAM - Only stack three arcane blasts before casting AM if missile barrage doesn't proc.
AB2AM - Oh crap all my mana regen is on cooldown and I'm OOM. How did I let this happen?

The important part to all of this is ABC - Always Be Casting (A-I-D-A). You don't stop to wait after an AB to see if missile barrage proc'd, you start casting AB again, which means you'll always be one stack behind on your missile barrage procs. That's why AB1MBAM doesn't really appear in the rotations, it's a rare bird.

Vaguely related to that, what possible reason could there be for Rawr indicating that I should be using ABSpam0234MBAM during lust, and going to ABSpam04MBAM without lust? 04 is higher dps, according to Rawr itself, than 0234, and I cant think of a haste benefit to the rotation change.

With AM and not using a channeling macro you run the risk of either cliping the AM or taking too long to start casting the AB (ie not always casting). We use tools like Quartz to estimate the server:client lag so we can minimize this.

Does anyone have a way in which we can evaluate how effective a person is at this? Some metrics of cycles per minute with a reaonable margin of error? If they are really fail, at some point a nochanneling macro might help them. The ratio of AM to AB is pretty simple (5:4) which would evaluate clipping, but how many cycles should occur in a fight is where I am having difficulty.

I am unsure how to adjust for things like Bloodlust, haste trinkets, accelerators, speed pots, haste rating etc.

When you reach enough passive haste rating that you go below one second casts when Icy veins and bloodlust/heroism are active, is it better to stop using them together (with trinket, AP), or is it better to still stack full cooldowns despite some waste of cast time to GCD cap?
In other words, would the benefit of multiplying AP and use trinket more outweighs the waste of cast time to being under GCD when IV or BL/hero could otherwise be used separately?

Reaching this level of haste won't be difficult if T10 4p and/or Black magic enchant are considered.

No, once you are under 1 second casts with IV and Bloodlust you should stagger them, ie use IV at the end of Bloodlust to extend the effect.

Has anyone ever seen or made an addon which will actively track changes to pertinent stats?

What I envision is a window that I can customize to show different pertinent stats (spellpower, crit, haste, etc.) and how they are actively changing during the course of an encounter (i.e. the spellpower increases based on incanter's absorption or the haste changes based on icy veins).

While it would mostly just have a cool factor effect (i.e. holy crap, my spellpower is at 4k after those buffs!), it could also have a utility factor (i.e. my haste with heroism is now above haste cap, I should hold off on icy veins until heroism is over).

It doesn't seem like it would be too complicated to write; however, I'm utterly useless at programming, so I would like input.

LiveDamage : WoWInterface Downloads : Buff/Debuff/Spell Mods

It doesn't graph it or save the data for later viewing, but is nice for a quick glance at your stats.

On a long fight where your entire mana gem is consumed, is it better to consume a PoM mana gem cast or cast AB and deal with the cast time? It seems to me that the longer cast time (2.3s in my current gear vs 1.92s for AB) should be enough to reduce downtime i.e. Evocating. You really only get about 1k mana if you use it once vs. a possible stacked 4 AB with crit buff. The mana can pay for possibly a stack of 3 AB which in my gear comes to
Max AB - Hit not crit is 10206 damage.
10206 - 10206 * 18% = 8369
8369 - 8369 * 18% = 6863
6863 - 6863 * 18% = 5628

So for a 3 stack I calculate about 20.8k damage worth of mana. A PoM'd Crit AB in my gear maxxes at 20.0k. My calculation though only is good if you are hardcore going oom and need that extra mana. I really can't think of a good way to theorycraft the benefits of doing this though. Any thoughts?

Well, to phrase it "your tanks suck" would make no sense, but please consider this: This is a forum dedicated to high-end raiding, and optimizing performance. This means that DPS, especially single-target DPS done to bosses, is valued higher then anything else because, at the end of the day, that is what get mosts bosses killed.

If your raid is struggling with something, getting utility talents like BW or DB might be a good idea. But chances are that, if your raid was working properly, there would be a way to work arround that easily enough. Healers shouldn't be dying to stuff that can be pushed back anyway - thats what tanks are for.
Same goes for Threat/pushback: Of course, you can live without it. But having to invis might be a DPS-loss. Having to get a salv might take it from classes that might need it more (like warriors). Not having pushback-protection might hurt on a variety of fights. Why take all these limiations?

High end raiding is in many cases about pushing it to the maximum. 100 dps might make a lot of difference on any given boss. Of course, if your raid needs you to DB on any given fight, by all means go for it. But chances are that means that your raid doesn't work in a fundamental way in some other place (most likely tanks), and you won't be able to push the hardest encounters of the game.

If you're finishing up worms, why wouldn't you just use the normal gem cast while Icehowl is coming in? The crit buff does remain if you use the PoM on conjure gems though.

I did a search through the posts and saw one person pose the question, but I haven't seen a response, so I'll pose the question again.

In which encounters (out of ToC) does the pushback reduction from arcane stability benefit the mage?

Presumably, you can benefit from pushback reduction during Faction Champions if you are being melee attacked by something and you aren't running away. Additionally, I presume that you can benefit during the Twins fight; however, I'm not sure if it would only assist if you are hit by the balls or if it also benefits the mage against the constant AoE damage taken.

None, the constant aoe from twins does not cause pushback, also well it may help very occasionally on FC when the ranged npcs attack you, it really doesn't do anything for the melee since they shouldn't be hitting you in the first place.

And what about Anub'arak phase 3?

Leeching swarm and penetrating cold do not cause pushback plus why the hell would you be arcane for anub in the first place.

Why wouldn't you be arcane for anub? I haven't seen this line of thought before so if you could share with us why Fire/FFB/Frost would be better choices?

Well for the easy-modes it really doesn't matter what spec you are, and depending how geared you are 10-man hard probably doesn't matter either although it is better dps to go fire or ffb. The main thing is # of targets, for 10 hard and 25 easy you will have 3 targets most of the fight, anub and two adds. Here the advantage is being able to roll LBs on all 3 targets. Another advantage for fire/ffb is that anub is at 30% and below for a lot longer than the actual health he has at 30% because of the healing he takes so molten fury is even more powerful. On 25 hardmode you have 5 targets (4 adss and anub) and you need to blizzard to help kill the adds fast so most of your damage comes from rolling LBs and blizzarding, the best way to do that is with frostfire spec. The molten fury part is also even better for 25 man hard since his leeching swarm becomes stronger as well. There is never any advantage to arcane on the fight and the only reason to use it would be if your overgearing the fight so much you don't want to bother changing specs.

You could stay Arcane for Anub'arak 25 heroic, if you were selfish. You'd be making other people work harder to handle the most important parts of the fight (AOE'ing adds down) for no good reason, especially since mages are one of the stars on this fight because of our superior FFB AOE.

If your guild outgears the encounter, it might not be an issue as mentioned above.

Given the fact that you've got 3 similar equiped mages in a given raid setup, who would go on "scorch-duty" to provide the utmost raid-dps achievable?

The one having the biggest decrease in dps when speccing into fire or the one having the slightest decrease?

Or would you even consider to have a 'lock respecc to provide the 5% buff and keep the mages at max dps?