Anyone who uses RAWR already knows this. It depends entirely on the stat buff provided by gemming to color. If the bonus is +7 SP then generally it is worth it if all you need is to use a yellow gem (since Reckless Ametrine is quite close in value to Runed Cardinal Ruby) but Purified Dreadstone is far behind Runed Cardinal Ruby and regardless of the stat buff it should not be used instead of Runed. THE ONLY exception is that for the 2 Blue gems required for the meta should be matched to blue slots if possible so that you can then pick up "free" gem bonuses

Once you get 2-piece tier 9 [Purified Dreadstone]'s are much more forgiving. In the last best in slot list i made it used 5 Dreadstones.

The armory is bugged with tier chests where it doesn't show it as part of the set, even though it says you have it equipped. I would say with 4pcT8 you would want to use HotStreak asap (assuming that Living Bomb/Scorch don't need refresh) so that you can get as many 4pcT8 procs as possible before the buff runs out. There should never be a time (other than the GCD of course) when you are not casting anything.

Here is some data from the 3.2.2 PTR and the current state of Combustion (old behavior + 50% critical strike damage bonus increase while active) World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Combustion Change 3.2.2 and Math

Basically, combustion behaves exactly as expected, a 50% crit damage increase bonus that stacks with CSD and other increases as expected using LB as a test bed for easy data collection.

This means our final FFB crit modifier under combustion becomes 3.7272 with 4pt7, and 3.689 without.

As much as I enjoy looking through 50+ pages of posts. Could someone post a link to a FB spec plz.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage...BlVF9m5,,10433
With 2 talents leftover to put in talents of your choice e.g. Flame Throwing for extra range, SotM, Arcane Meditation etc.

Quick question, the first post states that the coefficient for fireball is "3.5/3.5 + empowered fire". Does that mean fireball is (3.5+0.15)x spellpower?

To be fair thats not a fireball spec. "Crit coefficients" is something else. Check the "crit multiplier" formula, thats what youre looking for (first post has all the info). You can either check the table at the top, or the formula.

Is it worth changing the FFB spec to include 2 points in firestarter for a higher AOE dps rotation?

I'm considering dropping points from either 1. frost channeling or 2. MoE or 3. playing with fire, in order to pick up firestarter.

The rotation I'm considering is LB -> BW -> Flamestrike (r9) -> DB -> Flamestrike (r8) -> CoC -> Blizzard

With both flamestrikes instant casts from firestarter.

Also, any handy cast sequence macros that would spam blizzard until BW is off CD?

No, because AoE DPS is important in almost no encounters, while mana independence (frost chan, MoE) and honest-to-god 1% damage for 1 talent point (PwF) is a non-trivial aspect of absolutely every encounter.

Also, though I may be wrong, since last patch I believe it's more AoE DPS to spam LB on everything first and then start rotating.

Lastly, though most likely not as critical for raids, be aware DB's disorient overwrites Shockwave's stun, which if you're using a warrior for tanking may mean you'll pull much faster, particularly if you're in DB range, which is melee, which means your agro threshold is 110% rather than 130%.

Not strictly true - FFB is fairly dominant on Anub-25H (arguably the only challenging fight in the zone), but I still don't take Firestarter when I spec for that fight. Otherwise yeah, FFB's dead in the water, because in basically every other case it isn't worth it.

Jarlyn, In Faction Champions, do you use Arcane or FFB (ie slow kiting)?

The only encounter I can think of that AoE dmg is really good and needed in is 25H Anub. I was gonna ask your thoughts of building a FFB AoE type build. With Blastwave, Dragon's Breath, etc. Figured it might work. What do you guys think?

With a standard FFB build there aren't many points to play with to improve your AoE. Not that you really need to though. LB, Bliz and FS are plenty of AoE for pretty much any encounter. It's not worth nerfing either your mana regen or single target dps for slightly more AoE utility.

Well this spec will be for this encounter only, where most dmg done will be AoE and not so much single target. I was just trying to figure out the best AoE build. And I was thinking FFB spec has the best AoE dmg of all mage specs.

It didn't appear to me, that for 5 targets, speccing into firestarter was worth it. I may have eeked out a couple hundred more dps, but the mana usage was very noticable - and to be honest, using target reticals on instant casts where there are plenty of other AOE effects is very distracting.

That matches my experience, more specifically, I feel that using instant cast targeted AOEs is not particularly viable when they are as weak and have such a small radius as Flamestrike.

When you are on the GCD from a cast, you cannot bring up a targeting reticle for Flamestrike. That means that you are GUARANTEED to have around 500ms+ of lost time between every single one, because you have Blast Wave -> wait 1.5s -> bring up targeting, click on the target, and if you're off a couple inches you have to move your mouse pointer too. That's really really awful in terms of UI design, and the mana consumption of using a Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, and 2 instant Flamestrikes on every aoe wave is quite high also. I don't think it's sustainable on heroic Anub unless you are receiving at least 1 or 2 Innervates.

Theorycraft implies that doing this should still be a dps gain, but in practice I haven't seen any real significant difference between waves where I try to blast wave -> flamestrike(max rank) -> dragon's breath -> flamestrike(max-1). Then again, it's only a dps gain if you're actually hitting all 5 targets and it's often rather hard to tell, although it shouldn't really be that hard given the size of their hitboxes.

It's seriously doubtful. Even considering a 10% proc per target to proc clearcasting, that means you only have a 41% chance to proc clearcasting[5 targets, 1-(0.9^5)]. So that means that, on average, you're only getting +12.3% crit. Given that Arcane Explosion as Arcane Spec(according to Rawr - 5 targets) is roughly 10.9k dps in my gear, Blizzard as standard FFB is 13k dps. +12.3% crit along with the modifier is not going to give you 2k more dps on 10.9k, and to make matters worse, Living Bomb is considerably higher dps than Blizzard, and you don't have that at all as Arcane.

Even though the mana efficiency might be alright(40% clearcasting proc is pretty good!), the dps will be much lower except when you blow Icy Veins + Arcane Power, which you cannot even remotely do every single wave. So nope, this is going to suck compared to FFB.

Fact of the matter is that Arcane Explosion is a junk spell that suffered when it wasn't updated in any way to be competitive with the addition of crit to Blizzard in WotLK. Plus Blizzard gained even more from the fact that it has a much stronger crit modifier, too, due to Ice Shards and Burnout/Spell Power.

AE spam works best with tanks not-so-used-to proper positioning, when blizzard just not able to cover all targets. Essentially you dynamically correct blastzone every GCD, i used this technique back in Hyjal with great success.
Now it's not the best aoe dps because of scaling issues, but most sustainable and leaves more freedom for talent points distribution.

Thanks for the math Sancus. I just used rawr to confirm what you said - I artifically boosted my crit rate by 12% and AE ends up at 21k dps using an arcane build versus the 26k from blizzard in a FFB spec, which also has LB/FS/BW/DB of course. I'll try out the carpal tunnel spec to see for myself...

I picked up DB and BW in my ffb anub hm build, it seemed more valuable than taking 2 points in flame throwing really and plus, who can resist the urge to blastwave people off their flying mounts to plummet to their doom?

My guild has only made a couple nights of attempts on anub so far, out of curiosity do your guilds ever have problems with spider placement? I notice sometimes I'm able to hit all five targets with blizzard and others I'm not.

Ever since the anub adds were patched flamestrike is useless on anub hard due to its small range.

That's not correct, both one-tank and two-tank strat is still viable. We use one-tank still and it leaves FS an important part of the rotation.