Then my question again is: What is higher DPS FFB -> Fireblast -> LB or FFB -> FFB (LB explodes and is down for 1+second) -> new LB

I could be reading it the wrong way but would it not be best to refresh living bomb over using a hot streak as well?

Both hot streak and living bomb have better damage / cast time than ffb. Hot streak has better damage / cast time than living bomb yes - but living bomb is on an effective 12 second cooldown where as the hot streak buff is up for a good amount of time. This would also prevent ignite bugs.

Edit: to be clear this would only be if your current cast did NOT have the potential to refresh the hotstreak buff.

The only time its bad to hold on to a Hot Streak is if you've crit 3 times in a row and you're casting a 4th (hot-streak proc'ing) spell and still have the hot streak buff up. In that situation you're in danger of killing your last proc but refreshing LB doesn't put you in that situation so its a non-issue.

hi guys,
i have a little question. is it a good idea to use living bomb under IV+heroism?
well the GCD also profits from IV+heroism, but it at least for me it LOOKS like spamming FFB (dunno, around 1,7 sec cast) and HS pyros under heroism does more DPS.. please help me

Refreshing LB should be priority over the hot streak if you had to choose between them at the same moment, since in the 2 GCD window where you cast them both the pyro will do the same damage no matter when cast, but the living bomb will do more if cast early. It's a minor tradeoff, couldn't see it really amounting to more than 1 living bomb duration over the course of a fight, but to be nitpicky about it that's the order.




Frostfire so far is really nice, I dig how much damage it does but can see my cooldowns are not being used to their max. I'm trying to wrap my head around the timers I have to use with this spec. I used to throw them all on one macro for the sake of the old 20% MF range, with a separate 2 minute macro to use intermittently, but now I have combustion and berzerking (woo trolls) on 3 minute cooldowns, icy veins on a 2.4 minute cooldown, and a use trinket on a 2 minute cooldown, with mana gem on 2 minute cooldown that I can't just pop at the very beginning following living bomb/2scorch if I give a damn about mana... It seems like a really clumsy juggling job. Throw in my proc trinket and suddenly it feels like I'm not stacking things effectively anymore, and sub 40% when it comes time to bloodlust it feels like I'm not in a good spot with this musical chairs buff situation. Should I just be throwing everything I got at the boss from the start and ignoring it if it comes up again until 35%? It isn't as effective as it used to be. On top of this certain fights allow me to squeeze a third use out of the trinket if chained, and occasionally three icy veins, but not stacked.

Anyone else sorta lost on what to do?

I'm only using stopcasting to keep me from casting a long pyroblast when it's not instant-cast (by putting /stopcasting after /cast pyroblast). Sometimes I think I get a Hot Streak proc when I didn't.

The problem with this is what happens if that other mage dies/DCs during the middle of a fight? You are stuck not giving a 10% crit buff to yourself and the rest of the casters, I would keep the glyph of imp scorch for the just-in-case moments if anything.


Interesting point. We should be hitting plague wing (right?) tonight in Naxx25 I will give this a shot. I've only done Loatheb one other time and it was without any replenishment buff so I was kind of screwed from there anyway to not use living bomb (and even had to debate usage of HS procs)!

Wrong thread.

Hmm, for the sake of it I fired up rawr and gave myself an item with 3000 crit rating, which raid buffed pushed me to 100% crit rate, LB is still a dps increase though a very minor one compared to when you're not crit capped.

In fact it was about 0.5% dps increase for my spellpower (I didn't check scaling with more of it) which is very very minor, and in reality can turn into a dps loss if you aren't perfect with your clicks or have some lag due to LB cast being instant and suffering more from lag.

In an attempt to determine how much actual damage I lose to ignite "munching," I created a little excel file:

http://smilingmen.freehostia.com/nax12-2-08.xls

Numbers used in calculations were taken from:

Wow Web Stats

Any fights where less than 5,000 damage lost I attributed to because of mobs dieing early, so I excluded them from the % at the top. Came up with total % of damage lost due to ignite munching of 2.27%. Some fights I calculated I did a little more ignite damage than possible, but probably due to rounding or some kind of parsing error. On a fight like Loatheb where I thought there would be the highest percentage of ignite damage lost, I only lost around 1.1%, which may not even be any loss of damage at all if taking into account any ignites still on the boss after he died. On all bosses I used hot streak pretty much as soon as it proced, usually right after a frostfire bolt.

In regards to the cooldown stacking... i was just about to post something to that effect. I think it will get better once i get rid of my usable trinkets, but there is still mana gem, IV, and combustion to consider and i have no idea how to stack them properly.

Also, what is the best opener for a fight? Last night i was doing scorchx2, use trinket and pop combustion, cast mirror image, then spam FFB until combustion is gone - i held off on LB until combustion was up so it didn't use it up. I think I might not do this when i have a higher crit rating, but for now at around 29% self buffed - hot streaks still seem a little too rare.

Are you guys using LB with combustion? Maybe it's worth it for boss fights with alot of adds?

I get what you're saying, but I think you're simplifying things too much. I was taking very much the uncertainty of a crit in consideration at the time of cast. What i mean by that is, the FFB is in mid air at the time you need to decide which is the next spell to cast, and at that point in time it isn't 100% clear what the obvious choices are. If you living bomb, you could end up losing the 'free' 4th combustion charge because the living bomb cast time allows the ffb to land and eat up the 3rd/last combustion crit, disallowing you to use your 4th combustioned hot streak.

I realize the case seems simple firsthand if you know the relevant info, but what isn't as much clear is when you don't. I realise I put up a point of contention whereas the answer seems immediate and obvious, but the actual math might give more interesting results when you take into account the probability of non consecutive crits from combustion.

We all agree that you want to avoid LB exploding during combustion, however, casting LB during combustion can be tricky when taking into account the uncertainty of whether or not your LB cast might cost you a free crit.

I'm trying to get a decent balance between frost and fire so I don't have to go with the standard 0/58/11 builds that are out there for FFB. I realize that this will sacrifice some DPS, however I'm not exactly sure how much. I've only just begun using Rawr.Mage (ie I'm a Rawr noob) to calculate these numbers so I was going to see if anyone had additional input.

Here is the build I'm looking at.

I took out Hot Streak, LB, and Burnout.

In the frost tree I wanted to get down to Ice Barrier. I've been a frost mage since the game released 4 years ago and I'm reluctant to give up that shield.

I think you should read the thread before posting, as 0/58/11 is far from the average build. Also, the "simple questions / answers thread is stickied at the top).

Also, I don't think this is the right place to talk about "Builds that do less DPS but are more fun for me" - sorry, but this is a theorycrafting thread, not a "I like Ice Barrier".

If you want to play as frost, play as frost. You aren't going to find a magical build that combines high DPS and unique frost abilities. If you're a raider, you play frostfire because it's the best for your guild. If that doesn't bother you / doesn't matter, then play frost as you enjoy it more.

If you are going in for raiding, you will be giving up quite a bit of dps by dropping those 3 talents, fyi.

I think the point was that not that you cancle your current cast. The point is that you don't start casting a pyroblast with a cast time (You clicked the button without the hotstreak buff present).

I believe that you can input your own build in Rawr (it will show as custom). You will also be able to view the amount of dps you will gain (or lose) through the talents that you have (or have not picked) by using the drop down menu on the right panel.

I would recommend the following:

#showtooltip
/cast Combustion
/cast Icy Veins
/use 13
/cast Mirror Image
/script Stopwatch_Play();
/stopwatch 28
/cast Frostfire Bolt

To open up, LB then imp. scorch (if no frost mage present in raid), then blow it all. At 28 seconds the audio queue will tell you to use invisibility and reacting with perfect timing should see your MIs disappear just as you leave combat from invisibility.

After then with no cooldowns to blow and the tank having a full 30 seconds of aggro generation, I would be surprised if you were able to meet the tanks aggro before invisibility is off cool down again.

You're better off not to gamble by saving invisibility but use it in conjunction with all your CDs.

PS. Also handy fighting this way because usually all CDs are up again for when the boss is below 35% and they can be stacked with molten fury.

I use it because I find with IV popped my FFB spam usually consumes all charges before LB ticks out if I LB right as I blow my CDs.

Not to sound rude, but this is a poor build for raiding DPS. The variations of frostfire builds are discussed thoroughly in this thread each with their merits weighed. The first thing that jumps out to me as a mistake in your build is picking up both Winter's Chill and Imp Scorch. This is a pointless decision since they offer the exact same buff. WC is slightly better than imp scorch for very long fights. You've also picked up Arctic reach and Flame Throwing. If you're going to be using FFB exclusively then there is no reason to pick up any range increasing talents as none of them affect FFB. The extra DPS increase from the improved blizzard radius would be minimal, at best.

In short, you're going to be giving up LOTS and LOTS of damage by going for that shield. If you're interesting in maintaining the shield, it's likely you'll need to raid using frostbolt instead of FFB. A discussion over the matter can be found here

So until they fix the FFB bug, what would you say hit is worth after you get 11%? If SimulationCraft gives the total damage done by Living Bomb at 11% and a negligible amount by Scorch, does that reduce Spell Hit's worth to about 12% of its previous weighting?

I do exactly what you described, popping a potion of speed as the tank pulls, 2x scorch 1x living bomb then pop a similar cooldown macro (added my /use mana gem to it also cause of 2 t7) and I too never had problems with LB eating combustion charges because I almost always have 2 crits in the first 3 ffb+combustion casts and then finish it all off with a ffb+pyro on the 3rth or 4th ffb cast (wich is way before lb explodes with potion of speed+icy veins popped)

But now were geared up pretty well we have come to a point where you can only use your cooldowns (3min ones) once during a fight, getting the patchwerk under 3 min achievement today for example. Since mirror images dont benefit from molten fury I guess ill have to seperate them from the rest of the macro and use them together with my 2 min cooldowns at the start and then use full cooldowns (excluding mirror image, including 2 min ones) at below 35%.

I think we agree that using mirror image at the start is in almost any situation the best thing to do, because the start is propably the only time you could possibly grab agro if you get some crits with both 10 sec trinkets procced and cooldowns used and it really helps not having to worry about the 14k+ ffb/pyros your bursting out during that time. I find this much more likely as needing mirror image at below 35% when your in molten fury range because the tank should be well ahead of you at that time (and if he aint you can grab a hand of salvation at 40%).

I would like to know how any mages in endgame guilds are doing on the threatmeters atm. At for example thaddius, heigan or grobbulus or even sapphiron after the first flight phase. Do you use invisibility at all? At around what percentage of your main tanks threat do you finish a fight normally, and do you even notice the burst in your personal threat in molten fury range or are you that far below tanks at that time that its insignificant? When do you use mirror image?

[Item not found!] has a 15s cooldown and 10% proc chance. Exacly like Timbal's.

Log to prove it on http://elitistjerks.com/997107-post5.html and following, value of the proc is around 50 DPS.
Which makes it a very unspectacular trinkets. Stats beating Bolts is why enchants beat tailoring too.