Not to say the Extract is great or anything, but FFB mages have more dot ticks than one would think. Check any WWS and you'll see FFB and pyroblast to have a significant number of ticks relative to ignite and bomb. If you look at it in terms of total dot ticks over the course of a fight, sure, shadow and affliction people will have more, but the difference is not what it used to be when considering future trinkets like these.

I'd say you'd do better to say 2 of 4 crit, and maybe assume a pyroblast in there half the time, but maybe you do have a 75% crit rate. Also it isn't proccing every 45 seconds any more than the Extract procs every 15. My uptime shows it's up about 1/6 of the time, consistent with modeling that says it procs "a little faster than once a minute".

Regardless though the numbers are big enough that the exact model doesn't matter. 6k every 60 seconds is still a bigger number than 1k every 20 seconds. The sundial has a much greater impact, it's an extremely good trinket.

More interesting is to compare the Extract to other marginal trinkets that you might have if it is your SECOND trinket option. I'm much more interested in how it compares to Cannoneer's Fuselighter. It provides significantly more crit which may cancel out some of the 1k damage/20 seconds inferiority to the on-use fuselighter spelldamage.

Given the value of crit to frostfire, it's still a better trinket than any leftover BC trinkets. It just probably isn't any better than the Fuselighter, which means you should really let the warlocks have it and only roll if it is unloved and your second trinket sucks.

My last tests on that were a loooong while ago.

I got the same damage increase from "+50 fire power", "+50 frost power", "+50 fire and frost power", by having belt with fire power and gloves with frost power, and wearing them separate or conbined.
That was long ago though, when Spellfire et al. were school specific.

Also, there are no more "Fiery Wrath" greens either, there are 5 different kinds of same "of Spell Power" greens now.
Like the distribution of [Coldwraith Robe] for example.


FFB doubledipping from Mind Mastery is odd and makes sense at the same time.
MM used to be only +fire/frost/arcane power, now it's +all damage. Not healing though.
FFB also doubledips from Amplify/Dampen Magic. (Be careful when testing because 2/2 talented Dampen causes FFB of a naked mage to drop below the "50% damage reduction limit" and cap it at 50% instead, so you get odd numbers.)

So there might be a connection with different between offensive and generic spell power.

Offensive spell power items?
Are there any items left with only offensive SP procs? FFB might double-dip on that too, for interesting results.

Adding MM+FFB to the TC list.

Opinions vary - it isn't always a dps tool. The most common use for me is to pop when AOEing the first trash pack and a second pack wanders into the blizzard before the tank has control of it. This means I may not have it off cooldown for the boss fight until 30s to a minute in anyway. It doesn't matter what your spell damage is compared to the tank's potential threat generation...he has not yet had a chance to react to the situation and he'll need a couple ticks to get control. (this is less likely to happen with a death knight and especially a paladin tank, but not impossible)

I tend to preserve mirror image for aggro unless I know there is zero chance of pulling aggro (eg, Patchwerk, Heigan) as it isn't a very big DPS increase, but when it is a simple tank and spank, yeah, pop it early and when you think there won't be raidwide damage for its duration, use on cooldowns under same circumstances.

If there's any doubt of the outcome though, I tend to save images. I've had a few bosses go down in heroics because I saved it and the tank died but I was able to dps for a bit longer while the critter worked through the images and I've survived some badly timed living bomb explosions right after threat wipes by having it on cooldown, saving ice block for more serious emergencies. Likewise it sometimes let me DPS when aggro for whatever reason went into the orange zone rather than backing off and invising. Being able to do that is probably worth a lot more DPS than whatever the images do.

There are also rather a lot of fights in Wrath that have adds harassing the DPS or healers, and I like using the cooldowns for those phases so I can aoe or zap the adds with impunity not worrying about personal injury.

So I guess for me, the key is how confident am I in the fight mechanics. If I think there is any chance at all they'll be needed in the aggro-mode, I preserve the cooldown. If the raid instead succeeds or fails purely on DPS and whatever the healers/tanks are up to I'll treat them as a dps cooldown and use whenever I think they'll survive long their whole duration and are not on cooldown.

Regarding rotation...I tend to open with living bomb while running to my DPS location. Our tanks have a tendency to pull while everyone is running around (which is fine on farm, it speeds things up). If it really is a standing fight I'll open with scorch to get the raidwide crit buff out there. I don't rescorch on pyro procs unless it's getting near time to scorch anyway, what I do instead is try to smoothly chaincast whatever I was casting before and finish it with the pyro proc. The studies of ingite muching I've seen so far seem to show that sometimes the error is in your favor, sometimes against, and absolute numbers are small so I figure interrupting my smooth casting is a bigger sin. I assume my mana can always stand living bomb, but I don't cast it unless I think the mob will live for 12 seconds.

One thing I do is abandon the frostfire rotation in movement fights or fights with a lot of interrupts unless I'm 100% certain I can cast the whole spell. Partially cast spells hammer your dps, and a pure scorch/pyroblast/living bomb rotation is a heck of a lot closer to a scorch/pyro/lb/frostfire rotation in DPS than pure scorch was compared to a scorch/fireball rotation in burning crusade. Likewise when not AOEing trash, I tend to use a lot less frostfire bolts as I treat "creature death" as an interrupt and prefer faster casting spells. I use frostfire bolts on trash after I drop a living bomb, mainly, when the mob still has most of its health, then switch to faster spells for the last third..or move on to another target with LB+scorch+frostfire.