In a "normal" setting your casting priority has HS+Pyro and LB both on higher priority than FFB or FB. Some fights however change these settings drastically by increasing your haste (vezax/hodir). My question is, how fast would your FFB or FB have to be in order for them to do more dps than LB or a HS Pyro?

The point that FFB or FB would outscale LB and HS Pyro can be determined using DPSC (Damage per Second Casting). Using numbers from Manly's Spreadsheet on the first page, you gain a very marginal amount of damage by casting a Fireball instead of a LB when at a 1s cast (so small of a difference that RNG could make that LB better than the Fireball), and Fireball will never outscale an instant cast Pyroblast. Don't forget that Shadow Crash - Spell - World of Warcraft increases and Singed - Spell - World of Warcraft both effect magical damage done to the bosses.

Vezax is less about damage per second but rather damage per mana. As a fireball or FFB spec, I would never recommend casting anything other than fireball / FFB while you are in the shadow crashes.

For Hodir I would still maintain my normal rotation for simplicity's sake and due to the ability to cast living bomb while I'm running out of icicles.

The gist of what you're saying is correct, however, theres 2 small errors.

1- unfortunately my spreadsheet doesn't do GCD-capping. It allows sub-1s casts, and this is intentional since it sub-divises things like each individual dots/am/etc. like an independant cast, which can go sub-GCD. Nevertheless the spreadsheet should give a strong idea, just be aware of that.

2- Many many players forget that pyroblast is even stronger than most typical cases. The pyroblast dot does significant damage, and even on a mana strapped situation, if you know the pyroblast dot will run the full duration I am fairly certain you should cast pyroblast (note that I haven't bothered to open the spreadsheet to confirm this, since I'm at work and I don't have excel there). It will probably be slightly lower DPM than fireball/ffb, but nothing really big.

So I'm building a secondary spec specifically for Iron Council 25-man, killing Runemaster last. With the recent buff to Steelbreaker Last, this is the most realistic way to get Disks for Algalon. I spec'd this way last week and we were successful in killing the boss. http://http://www.wowhead.com/?talen...ubhcthf0Is:LiI

The reason for this spec is to have Imp Blizz for when he casts Rune of Summoning http://http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=62273 He spawns approximately 8 Lightning Elementals 2 at a time from this Rune and they each have 25k health. They explode if they are in melee range of people when they are killed, dealing 13k damage to everybody within 30yds. So getting them locked down is key.

I have 2 points left and was wondering if anybody had any other suggestions for the frost part of my spec as well as where to spend the last 2 points. Leaning towards Frost Channeling as I don't know how much more range I'll need or if shatter would be better.

EDIT: Normal spec is TTW/FB so I don't need the 3% hit from Precision

I seem to be unable to choose between TotW Fire and Frostfire so I looked up the Mages in Ensidia to see what they are using after having some time to feel out Ulduar. I noticed all but one is using a 0/40/21 spec, dropping Living Bomb to pick up Cold Snap. The dps advantage of 0/51/18+2 has been beaten to death but I can't help but raise an eyebrow. Is there some Hard Mode encounter which may favor the extra Icy Veins?

If by many you mean one. Only XT-002 has a period of time like that (and Flame Leviathan, but we don't get to cast spells at that). My guess on a Cold Snap build would be that it might help for Hodir hard mode (only 2 minutes to kill him + double ice block lets you ignore flash freeze?).

Being shot on top of Flame Leviathan.

Razorscale takes no damage in the air. Only damage done while he's on the ground matters. The trash is relatively unimportant.

The buffs from the NPCs in Hodir.

General Vezak's Shadow Crash zones.

DPSing Yogg Saron's brain.

You're right... only XT actually takes extra damage. In other bosses, it's you receiving a buff, or the boss being vulnerable to being shot at all. But the end result is the same... if you have repeated times during the boss fight when your DPS is much more valuable at that point in time than normal, double icy veins is more valuable than living bomb.

It's also notable that the two hardest bosses in the instance have this situation (Vezak and Yogg).

Its also notable that you should be sending melee rather than casters on ys (edit: brain).

I haven't gotten that far, so that subtlety was lost on me.

I have been seriously considering going cold snap as well I thought the living bomb glyph would change that. Honestly I saw a huge negative effect on my Living bomb crits eating up my pyro/FFB ignites anyone else having this problem?

Do you have actual proof of this? Have you actually taken a log and calculated the expected ignite damage, actual ignite damage, and lost ignite damage? And then do you have logs of ignite loss before Living Bomb glyph? Otherwise it's largely unsubstantiated claims based on anecdotal experiences.

I did an 18k pryoblast crit tonight followed by a 4k living bomb crit and it ate my pyroblast's ignite. It ended up ticking for 500 instead of 7000 or something. I'm convinced the living bomb glyph munches my ignites. Wish I had proof but I forgot to take a screenshot, I discovered this with the eavesdrop addon btw if anyones curious.

Forgive my sarcasm (and likely the infraction it's going to get me), but seriously, your proof that Cold Snap is superior to Living Bomb is an anecdotal recollection that you saw the LB glyph consume one ignite, one time? Occasionally HS Pyros will consume Fireball/FFB ignites. Should we stop using Pyro and just faceroll FFB 100% of the time too?

If you have some actual evidence that supports your claim, then fine, we'll talk. Otherwise we get need to get past this train-wreck of a derail.

The reason I ask is that I do have almost empirical proof (relatively, since this is based on a few fights, and your finding is based on one spell, one time) to base my rebuttal on.

04-22-2009 - Deconstructor - 1.75% damage loss
03-06-2009 - Loatheb - 3.02% damage loss

To get the damage loss, we compare the amount of ignite damage lost to the total damage of the fight. I use the total damage of the fight instead of the actual ignite damage because it's a better representation of how much damage was lost over the course of the fight. The reason being is that I'm not terribly concerned with how much actual ignite damage is lost compared with the total ignite damage. If I did 400k ignite damage and lost 30k, that's 6.9%. But ignite is not 100% of my damage, so that's a biased percentage.

Now, I've seen a lot of numbers floating around with people saying ignite overwriting accounts for a 10% DPS loss. Following what I just covered, it's easy to see how 10% could be reached (although it's still a bit exaggerated). Players have said it's worthwhile to interweave other spells (scorch in particular). Yet my own findings seem to take things to far ends of a spectrum. In one instance, we have a nearly 100% crit fight (Loatheb), with Pyroblasts nearly on a 2:1 rotation (for every 2 spells, we have a pyroblast; the ratio isn't exactly 2:1, and fluctuates due to Living Bomb crits).

On the other end, we have an instance where ignite damage is, possibly, being naturally lost due to the target dying, or 'phasing' out (for instance, going into and out of the short heart phases on deconstructor, or Living Bomb hitting targets that die shortly after). This would account for a small amount of ignite damage, but not enough to offset the fact that glyph of Living Bomb hasn't added any more ignite loss. That is to say, we expect ignite loss to be higher on a fight like Loatheb, because nearly every spell is a critical hit. Note then that the Loatheb fight was pre-3.1, yet on Deconstructor, ignite damage loss is lower, despite having Glyph of Living Bomb.

Now, this certainly matters, because you suggested dropping Living Bomb for Cold Snap. Not only is FFB lower DPS than Fireball (and that isn't to say there isn't a time and place for Frostfire), but Living Bomb is accounting for upwards of 15-17% of damage in a fight (ignite damage included), and more if there are multiple targets. It's arguable that this damage doesn't matter against targets that don't die -- for instance, adds on Kel'Thuzad, but against whelps and elementals on Sarth 3D, it certainly adds up.

And how much DPS is Icy Veins contributing? Even if you dropped Glyph of Living Bomb, you'd still be losing more damage than ignite loss is causing. If Glyph of LB is adding 350 DPS, then theoretically it's adding 105k damage over the course of a 6 minute fight, if LB has 100% uptime of course. Some actual numbers though:

My critical damage from Living Bomb was 143,951, plus another 57,580 for the ignite damage. That's a total of 201,531 damage from Living Bomb critical hits (DoT and detonation). I lost ~38k ignite damage that fight. But we know that ignite munching was happening before Glyph of Living Bomb, so it's reasonable to conclude that Glyph of Living Bomb is adding a substantial amount of damage that far outweighs the ignite loss that it could possibly be causing.

To get the above numbers, I had a friend graciously write a program for me that parses a WWS log and outputs lines that I can directly put into my spreadsheets. It turns this:

Into this:

My spreadsheet further parses all the damage and the ignite ticks. So if you have a log aliengrey of the fight in question on WWS that I can filter (I need to filter out specific spells) then I could tell you your exact ignite loss. (WWS won't break down your critical damage from your non-critical damage, but my program and spreadsheet will. I'll further be filtering out Living Bomb DoT from explosion damage.)

That's not good proof. You should go into your wws reports, look up your total crit damage from fire spells and compare that with your total ignite damage. If ignite is significantly lower than 40% of your crit damage, then there is a problem going on. It also has to be significant, because you'll lose some ignite damage from mobs dying while you still have an ignite tick remaining. Otherwise, the assumption is that damage losses and gains from ignite balances out in the end.

You can list Mimiron too in his flying machine.

I wouldn't recommend Mimiron without LB:

* It's a rather long encounter.
* Moving in P2 and P4 makes you want to have instant casts.
* One extra IV is not going to make a huge difference in P3.
* LB explosion is nice in P4 as it can hit all 3 targets (extra damage and HS procs).

Hard-modes (most of them at least) so far have required different specs than the streamlined ones, at least for optimal performance. My guess is those Ensidia mages are either speccing that way for Algalon or were for Firefighter, Algalon I couldn't tell you why but Firefighter there would be some advantages to that spec. For normal modes there would be no advantage to using the kind of spec they have on armory atm. It's not generally a good idea to look at a top guild like exodus or ensidia and take their spec as a "good one" without understanding which encounter they are currently working on. Other than 3 watcher yogg and steelbreaker last IC I have respecced for every other hard-mode we are working on or have completed for that specific encounter.

I noticed that threat becomes an even bigger issue with 4T8 once again. It is more RNG dependent than before. Having like 4 Pyros in a row results in quite a big damage AND threat spike. MI can save you for a while, but Invisibility isn't always possible in Ulduar (especially if you are going for hard mode kills).

A failed invis in Mimiron P1 often results for me in stopping DPS, 1 or 2 HoS and sometimes even Ice Block.

Vezax is basically: nuke, MI, invis, 1 or 2 HoS + a few intervenes from the MT during kiting phases, MI and Invis again... (FFB specced + having Vigilance + no 4T8 yet) It can still get very close depending on Shadow Crashs and Saronite...

Either our tanks are bad (which I personally don't think they are) or 10% threat reduction really isn't very much...

Well, 10% threat reduction isn't much and aggro can be a problem when you're lucky with rng, even without 4t8.
However I'm pretty sure mimiron is tauntable so just make the tank taunt when you're at 120% threat.
General vezax might be a problem, but just let the tank get a headstart, don't dps until first shadowcrash, then go allout with MI and use invis when you're about to pull aggro, After 1 invis threat shouldn't really be a problem anymore unless invis fails. Make sure the hunters and rogues give MD, tricks of the trade to your tank.

This is exactly what I do. I even wait with the first MI until 120% threat or something to give the tank a little more time. Also: Taunt has DR now which can quickly result in an Ice Block on the 4th Taunt if I don't get any HoS (Ignite ftw).

I do get PI on cooldown and our tanks often have to tank in survivability gear rather than aggro gear. So that is probably it.

Comparing damage meter and threat meter it especially strikes me, that Shadow Priests have no threat issues at all but do pretty heavy dps for a hybrid. I think Blizzard should really have a look at damage dealers' threat management again.