Correct me if I am wrong.

The older lvl45 [Brilliant Wizard Oil] will out dps the lvl55 [Superior Wizard Oil] with this build. This just seems crazy we would have come up with mats from content that is more then 2 years old to get the most bang for our buck.

Input needed.

You are correct, but you can't use weapon oils on level 80 weapons, so it doesn't matter.

People might be a little tired of seeing Patchwerk parses but having broken 5k+ with still a ton of missing gear upgrades and a non-lucky crit rate (only ~2% higher than the theoretical crit rate on this parse) I am curious as to what future might hold for this spec.

As we discuss on our guild forums, I foresee a harsh revisit of Frostfire spell towards the end of Ulduar content patch.

And heres the problem with that line of thinking. It doesn't matter what amount of upgrades you need. If you have either [The Turning Tide] or [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] the upgrade is so vast its the near equivalent of upgrading half your gear in one piece.

In any case, we can't predict the future. Rogues have always been gear dependant, so I expect a major power reshift in ulduar. If we end up below rogues in single target dps, then I wouldn't expect any change. In any case, yeah, 330% crit multiplier with ~55% crit rates is bound to make people question what exactly is going to happen with new gear. The real thing that should have an impact is the amount of socketed gear. The more socket-packed a gearset we can build, the more retarded we can exploit the crit multiplier (or rather, the aberration that is the ilvl formula).

I doubt we will see any single item contribute more than 2% crit in the future essentially giving all casters a gear crit cap. My rough estimates for crit percentages are below.

Fully Raid Buffed:
9% crit from Talents
17% crit from Gear (~1% per item)
10% crit from Intellect (fully raid buffed even 1660 intellect is an overestimation)
5% crit from Aura
10% crit from Debuffs

That is 51% crit. Am I missing something? Even if I am, I can't imagine ever getting over the 60% crit mark. On the other hand, other classes will continue to stack other damage modifiers that scale well with their respective class.

My point is that Mages appear to be doing really well right now because it is easy to get to ~40% crit in raids. Where as other classes may scale well with stats other than crit more so than our own. Of course we too will get more spell power and haste, but crit is our best bet at this point and I have a feeling we will plateau before other classes because of it.

I think Warlocks from BC are an inverse situation to our own. They started off with relatively bad DPS but scaled extremely well with gear and stacking to a point where they they went from top 5 in a Karazhan run to number 1 in Sunwell. I am not screaming that the sky is falling at all, I am very happy that we are doing well early here in WotLK but keep an open mind that the gap will close between ourselves and other classes at no fault of our own.

Did you count glyphs and added some for combustion? (and possibly focus magic while were at it)

You can use the Grid feature at Zaldinar's TCoM to compare the DPS outputs of various specs at your selected gearing values. This should be able to answer all your questions.

Blue post by GC today.

It looks like the 6% EP bug will be fixed soon.

looks like I am back to either considering ebonweave or dying curse.

I have the numbers for these items at home... it is incredibly substantial. The Turning Tide was contributing ~950 DPS out of the 5800 DPS optimized. Second place was in the 700s.

That trinket was contributing ~250 DPS. The next best trinket was ~150-170 DPS, if that. I'll post the numbers later tonight, once I removed the 3% ghost hit and factor in slow slave for a fireball build for comparisons. It's the fact that you have an ilevel 226 item amongst an entire set of ilevel 213 items (save for a few things, like the ilevel 226 cloak).

My numbers suggested something more along the line of 400 dps. In fact, I posted something about this in the benefactors bar. Let me link

http://elitistjerks.com/f30/t36654-w...3/#post1007289
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Well ok, lets try and put things in perspective.

Using my crummy gear, heres the values of all the wotlk mage trinkets

[Illustration of the Dragon Soul] - 400 dps - sarth25
[Sundial of the Exiled] - 250 dps - emblems
[Embrace of the Spider] - 245 dps - naxx10
[Forge Ember] - 215 dps - 5man loot
[Dying Curse] - 200 dps - naxx25 (which is sadly unusable because thats far too much hit rating. Also its being undervalued because I can't make use of the hit. Actually, I'm not aware of any single mage gearset that can use half the hit rating.)

I guess the dying curse was meant to be the intermediary nuker trinket of choice. Problem is, I just can't see how I could conceivably use it with any ffb or deep frost build. There is no possible way to use 71 hit rating on a trinket. So all trinkets are relatively equal in terms of dps, then theres the IDS that stands far out of everything else. And 150 dps is a fairly non-trivial dps boost.
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I think the webstats of Stars with a mage doing 6.5K+ dps and another in the same parse doing 3.7k on Patchwerk is telling ( granted there was a gear / skill gap between them), but the largest difference was a 40% crit rate vs. a 75% crit rate.

Anyhow I started a thread about this on the official forums, I hope it gets some attention:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Mage]Make Ffb/Fire damage more consistent

I don't see why people keep bringing this up. If you don't like swingy dps play another spec. Fireball and arcane are somewhat going to be close (or better for fireball), without having so much swing in dps.

Variability is going to happen when your main damage source requires a crit, as well as relying on back to back crits for one of your next highest damage abilities.

To make it more consistant they would have to:
a) itemize for mages to have 100% crit
or
b) lower the critical strike bonus and remove hot streak.

A will never happen and B would make the spec useless... The whole point of FFB is scaling. Just wait till the next tier of gear comes out, I'm pretty sure that ffb mage will be top dps in game.

Scorch is another factor in the equation. If there's a parse with one doing 6.5k and one doing 3.7k DPS, I'd be willing to wager that the 3.7k DPS mage is exclusively keeping scorch up.

[Dying Curse] is better suited to a warlock than a mage, particularly for affliction. They're not speccing for destro hit currently, so they tend to need a bit more. Personally I wear Mark of the War Prisoner to hit 289, but I consider this a temporary inconvenience. We run 2 spriests and a moonkin always (and at least 1 in every 10 man I've done), so 289 is where I'm stopping. Plenty of hit upgrades still out there, and a gem to fill a slight shortfall which also supports a larger spell power or crit upgrade is acceptable to me.

Are you having issues with seeing every mages LB's? Quartz doesn't have that problem but EBB does. Of course Quartz's problem is no filtering. Is there a custom EBB filter that can be created?

Another option is to use Power Auras. I use it for scorches, LBs and Hot Streak. It has an option to only use your spell, which I enable for LB and disable for scorches.

Well, [Dying Curse] is a very good trinket if you can use the hit. For my gear set it shows as
Illustration: 348 dps
Dying Curse: 289 dps
Mark of the War Prisoner: 226
Embrace: 220
Sundial: 213
Forge Ember: 185

And even if in your current gear you can't benefit from it, it might be better to use some none +hit items and use it, in fact rawr does suggest it in some cases, granted if you have all the best gear you probably won't be using it.

I ran rawr for a frsotfire mage with all the buffs and being a JC and enchanter (I removed Misery to simulate the 3% hit loss from precision) rawr doesn't select [Dying Curse], however changing [Cincture of Polarity] for [Leash of Heedless Magic] and using Dying Curse intead of the Sundial yields almost the same dps with 1dps difference.

So you would rather loot a trinket for 1 more dps over a class that truly needs the hit ?

Of course not, but as you said earlier we can't sit and wait for only the best gear to drop, we bid on what we can use at the time and as an in the meanwhile trinket it is very good.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it would probably be a perfect piece to swap for if you lost or don't have misery or IFF.

From a design standpoint I don't think the problem with Illustration or Tide is that they contribute so much DPS, it's that they contribute so much more than the 2nd in slot, and have low drop rates. This makes mages (and everyone else that can use them) really dependent on the loot RNG for performance.

It reminds me of when our rogue looted DST, and went from the middle of the pack to dominating the meters.