Thank you all for your information. It was sort of my suspicion, but didn't want to approach her without the facts to back me up. I'll do my best to guide her here too

remove please

Basically nobody ever bothers to check how much hit is worth because it's obvious it's always better than sp under the cap (unless you waste some of it like you said). The problem is you can't just give hit a value and go with it because then you'll end up above/under the cap. In reality the value of hit depends on how much hit you get on gear. The best you can do is either to use the optimizer or just try to swap pieces yourself out of what you have available and see what combination gives highest DPS, which will generally be the combination with highest sp/crit/haste that gets you very close to the hit cap.

If you ignore hit completely and still get hit capped (often the case with arcane) then you have it even easier - you don't need to consider hit at all (until you get an "upgrade" that lowers you under the hit cap, then you'd have to check again which other non-hit items you'd have to swap in return to gain that hit and whether or not that swap will increase dps or not).

I'm not sure this is the best advice. 50dps is a pretty small increase to completely abandon a tradeskill for. She obviously is not a crazy serious raider, so advising her to dump a tradeskill for a minor dps boost is not very appropriate. A proper spell rotation can be a 500-1000dps increase... dumping a tradeskill and leveling it from zero for a 50dps personal increase (not even a group increase like leatherworking used to be) is a hard pill to swallow.

Besides, FFB has fewer 'save me' abilities than frost or arcane... 2000 health is not insignificant when you're out of the world of theorycrafting, and into real raid fights.

I'd agree with this. I'm herbalism/alchemy on my mage, and while I definitely acknowledge that its not the best combo for high end raiding, there are MANY other ways to get 50 DPS, and the pitiful little heal has actually kept me alive many times during a vortex on Maly when a healer can't get a heal off on me.

As another mage with herbalism/alchemy, I have to agree with Gnomage. Changing tradeskills is the lowest priority item in terms of increasing damage output. If you want to min/max out every last drop of DPS, then you want to go Manly's route and constantly change tradeskills depending on best benefit, but not many people have the time, money or inclination to do that. It's definitely not a must like Epiph says; I'd just offer it as a suggestion but not push the issue. There's many other things that can be fixed first.

Another thing is to switch targets fast. I target another mob while my last spell is casting on a mob that is about to die. Fights with adds usually have a larger discrepancy in damage done as some people are much slower to switch. Especially on spells with long cast times like ffb, people have to make a judgment call on whether that last ffb is going to land or if it's better to switch targets.

I know where you are coming from, but the EJ boards are probably the last place to look for sympathy for keeping a tradeskill that has no inherent dps advantage when there are other ones that do.

In the real world of raiding, every small dps advantage helps - it's not just theorycrafting. She might not be in this situation, which is fine, but no serious raiding mage is going to have herbalism as a skill.

If there's multiple mobs you really shouldn't start casting a spell if a mob is at 20% HP or less since by the time your cast ends and with the travel time of our main nukes, chances are that it will never land. I'd even shift earlier if you are the scorch bitch so that you can get scorches up on the next target while the rest of the raid finishes off the first target.

Of course, this becomes a problem if too many people are doing it - I have been in some groups with some very good players who all do exactly what I am doing and the first mob ends up sitting at around 10% health until somebody notices it.

So mmo-champion has a complete 3.1 list of changes up on their site today. Looking like there won't be any more changes coming in this patch. Given that fact, is FFB still the way to go, or is it changed to fireball spec? I had heard ffb wasn't viable in this patch, but after reading the last dozen pages or so I never saw confirmation on that fact. Anyone mind steering me in the right direcion?

Well -- as often (always?) running your gear through RAWR is a good way to answer this question. For me at least, the DPS difference between FFb and Fire TtW was <100 dps even on a 3 minute fight. So I plan on spec'ing FFb for learning fights because it is less fragile on long fights (evocation), and has a much stronger AOE. But YMMV.

I didn't meant to say it was a common problem - just sharing an anecdote about a funny situation that cropped up when everybody was playing 'aggressively.'

I wanted to add one thing.

The above tips are all good and work well, especially for more advanced players. But with good gear and differences like theese, the problem is often more simple. A basic how-to-chaincast lesson.
Not everyone knows that the server can queue spells after your current one, meaning they try to time their spells perfectly, or even wait untill the spell is finished casting, which even with quartz isn't optimal. Be sure she is actually hitting her buttons quite abit before the spell ends. She can even spam her buttons if she wants, it's fine.
I myself tend to spam the keyboard like a frantic monkey at the end of spells, probably faster the dps required at the moment, which is of course not needed, but it does help me miss as little time as possible. (ping can also vary slightly from cast to cast, so trying even to time it perfectly with quartz can be a bad idea)

When you see people that are 1-2k dps behind their potential, it's often abit naive to go "but you're missing 3% spellhit!!" when all it would do is up dps by 3%. It might be in this case that several small gear mistakes adds up to a big ammount, but often it's simply a fault in playstyle.

Another thing that also adds up on non-patchwerk style fights is how you handle movement. Preferably moving during GCD, fireblasting if you have to move etc, does make a rather big difference over the course of a fight.

Basicly as mentioned earlier, a very agressive play, trying to cast as much as possible in the fight.

I completely agree, I left this out of my initial post of #1073 beforehand because she was looking for the major DPS increase, and with a lack of gear I assumed a lack of mage knowledge so just put the simple stuff in.

Casting aggressively is totally key in FFB spec. Go with the opener and instantly cast FFB, don't wait for a Pyro proc. Also, keep track of when your crits are hitting and take into account every spells hit rate with all boss debuffs. Mine ends up at a 54% crit with FFB and 58% with Scorch if I recall from my last Malygos fight. You should always track crits. Since Hot Streak procs off of a double crit, you should be able to time it well. When I see Hot Streak proc for the first time, I always cast another FFB before allowing it to land, if that crits too then chances are that I should get another Hot Streak straight away. That's 3FFB crits which is 30k damage, and if both pyros crit, that's 50k damage. It's always fun seeing your DPS rocket up by 100-500 at the start of a fight and everyone goes 'Wtf he was 7th just then'.

Just before your cast ends, about 0.5s-1s depending on your latency, just spam your button until it starts casting then stop. Take a second to check out procs and crits. This allows me to keep track of all crits whilst having the best uptime, I am never not casting except on LB and Instant Pyro GCD.

Also, once you have done a boss a couple of times you should know all the mechanics, make good use of them. For instance Malygos. As he flies up into the air I know I can cast another 2 FFBs, and then I spam scorch even if LB is down. Dependant on latency you may get no scorches off or you may get three. When in the air I always cast Fire Blast, Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath. Hopefully pyro procs too. That's why scorch spam beforehand is good, since I have a 58% crit chance with it I have a higher chance of getting all 3 to crit, pyro in the air and if Fire Blast crits that's another pyro. My damage done is always very high but my DPS is not so good because of the instant casts in the air.

You will always find new ways to up your DPS or DD on fights. Another good trick I discovered only a few weeks ago is on Grobbulus. When I get the injection, I'll always make sure that Grobb is a blink away when it comes off. This means I can blink to Grobb and cast DB, and as I'm running away cast BW before returning to my normal rotation.

Some things come naturally to up your DPS or DD but if you don't strive for it you won't get it. Mages are extremely versatile so make good use of it.

I'm an FFB mage who beats Arcane mages on DD when they outgear me. It's not hard - Just think.

Why would you ever delay your Hot Streak in order to cast another FFB? All you're doing is setting yourself up to lose a proc if Living Bomb explodes.

Early this morning Rawr 2.2.0.7 was released containing 3.1 updates for Mages. Immediately I noticed with my current gear FFB spec has jumped above arcane by nearly 300DPS with just the talents and the glyphs changed. It jumped further when I applied the needed gear to reach the hit rating mark for FFB.

I began playing around with different settings and notice Rawr values the Living Bomb glyph to be about 200 DPS. This seems massive for what the glyph does. As you know the glyph allows LB to critically hit but does not proc instant Pyro Blasts nor does it cause ignite to tick. Just with some napkin math this 200dps increase seems huge. The glyph alone greately adds to putting FFB over Arcane and I want to see if anyone can confirm these values before I go off getting Pyro happy in our first Ulduar raid tonight.

Like I said, I read ahead (I do use Power Auras to make it easier) so I normally wouldn't delay it if Living Bomb was about to end.

If you can get a perfect average cast time without spamming, I think that's proof enough that there is a tiny buffer. I'm pretty sure the buffer is there. I don't call it a spell queue, since a queue implies more than one spell.

Strange, given current (3.9) BiS gear for both specs I show them almost exactly equal, with FFB ever so slightly ahead, but nowhere close to the numbers you claim.

The living bomb explosion or other aoe effects (eg, fan of knives is up, etc) tends to clean those up.

Anther thing that can mess up chaincasting is stopcasting macros. My wife was wondering why she cast so many fewer shadowbolts on her new warlock than her peers and we found out the stopcasting was clipping her casts. (the char was an alt that dated back to the days when stopcasting macros were normal and she never updated her macros) She took them out, installed quartz, practiced a bit and her shadowbolt #s improved a lot.

Im going to handle duel specs with this logic:

- A haste focused Arcane spec/gearset, specifically designed for burst DPS
- A FFB spec/gearset, more mana efficient but comparable/acceptable(still looking at rawr) DPS compared to the textbook Fire/TTW spec.

It will be nice to have the flexibility to change your playstyle to suit the nature of the DPS required for bosses. Sustained high DPS, or focused very high burst at specific times?

It's a quite simple test, if you can start a new spell quite some time before the current should complete (just click once abit before quartz say it should be completed) then there's a spell queue.

However, It doesnt work after instants, which makes spamming that button a good idea.

I agree with spamming improving dps in general as well, not only on instants. Maybe the earlier the server gets the command to queue, the better, or something like that. I guess you could test it in a more controlled setting with several casts and a timer.