This.

Had I brought Ice Barrier glyphs with me I'd have used them -- instead I forgot them in the bank and figured I'd use them the next round if we got a kill.

Ultimately the small increase in WE dps wasn't worth it for what I thought would be worth it: a bit more damage absorbed by ice barrier.

We honestly didn't expect him to die as fast as he did, it was about 6 hours total of work going from no clue about the fight to a kill. Our first night we didn't even have everyone respec'd into mana-efficient and damage-reduction specs (although all the mages were, and some others as well.)


(Warning: long pontification follows)

The options didn't exist in rawr to do deep analysis of which spec is better etc. at the time, we went with what we could figure out by a mix of forcing Rawr to pretend it was in vezax mode (which is harder than you'd think) and some napkin math.

It's hard to shift your brain out of DPS mode and into pure DPM and survivability mode.

We killed him our second time into "Phase 3" (animus dead) -- had we taken longer, we probably would've actually had the data to evaluate those last 5 points in frost versus Arcane Mind. We talked about them for sure, but at that point no one knew how long the fight would last, how the shadow crashes would go (remember you can get very random shadow crashes and your DPS can vary wildly), and how critical it would be to be able to dps the last 10% or whether the melee would be fine at it.

This is a case where just looking at the numbers isn't necessarily what you want to do.

The fight is over once the Animus dies as long as you haven't had him heal too much (i.e. he's not at 30-40% health) and your healers were smart.

The critical part of the phase is doing DPS during the Animus and living.

That is why we went deep frost: Ice barrier and Frozen Core. (and why I'd have glyphed it if I'd brought them with me -- it just didnt' seem critical enough to head back to the bank at the time, as we weren't wiping due to DPS or even deaths to the Animus, but still to people making bad decisions.)

The math said that FFb would probably have enough mana to make it to the end, but having ice barrier, at least the first night when we were trying it (we killed him over the course of 1.5 nights, so there wasn't a lot of time for deep reflection), seemed to be very key for P2 if your health started to fall behind -- well-worth the mana spent.


An important thing to realize when you're looking at an early kill by any guild before videos, discussions, and tools are out is that people are not yet certain how long the fight will last, they don't know what characteristic each phase will have, they don't have the strats nailed down, etc.

This is why you see first kills with odd specs, and why you should rarely just blindly copy them. Understand why they made the choices they did, and see if there's more information available now for you to make a better choice. Don't assume they're necessarily right just because they did something -- they might have had incomplete information or may even have just plain made the wrong choice.

The only true error is in not learning how to make your second kill better.

I was thinking about this, and figured maybe the starlight debuff could be used more efficiently on Hodir.

HODIR
Doing some really quick-n-dirty modifications on my spreadsheet: (using 2800 spell damage / 1s gcd cap / 2x cast time (starlight buff), +50% damage (singed), no 4pct7, standard fb/ffb spec)

spell	dpsc	dpsc w/ +135% crit (storm power)	cast time	---	dpsc w/ lust	dpsc w/ +135% crit (storm power) + lust	cast time w/ lust
ffb	14212	29715	1.2035	---	17103	35761	1
lb	17834	35712	1	---	17834	35712	1
hs-pyro	16576	33838	1	---	16576	33838	1
hs-pyro (+4 dots)	18520	35781	1	---	18520	35781	1
fb (using fireball spec)	15645	32667	1.2035	---	18828	39313	1

Also, the numbers for lust would equally apply to icy veins.

In other words

Situation	cycle
No buffs	lb > hs > ffb/fireball
starlight	lb > hs > ffb/fireball
storm power	lb > hs > ffb/fireball
bloodlust + starlight	lb > (hs if no pyro dot) > ffb
bloodlust + starlight + storm power	ffb/fireball (also you may want to take this opportunity to pop combustion)

Also, do not stack bloodlust and icy veins (and quite possibly speed potions) together while using starlight.

so do you think fb-ttw or 0/53/18 is best for hodir then? And this means 0/53/18 is better than 0/50/21?

Lets say you are 0/50/21 and you are aiming for hard mode which is 180 sec kill. Now, to LB be dropped from rotation you need to have Starlight, Storm Power and some kinda of haste buff at the same time. What haste buffs do we have? Bloodlust (40s), Icy Veins (20s x2), Speed Potion (15s), in total 95 sec. So basicly if you will manage your cooldowns well and avoid two haste buffs at the same time, you will need to drop LB from rotation in more then half of the duration of the fight.

Is it worth it? Need to do some more math.

That was inexperience with the fight. We had other mages who made different choices who'd run OOM (and perhaps some who were less good about never casting outside of shadowcrash and *that's* why they ran OOM.)

I decided I didn't want to go hard OOM as long as our numbers were 'good', so when it was clear P1 was going very very well, I eased off on my casting so I'd have more mana for P2/P3.

Now having seen the fight all the way through, I won't make the same choice again. But at the time I didn't know.

We haven't tried Vezax hard on 25 yet, however we did kill him on 10 man yesterday (hard mode) was a lot easier then expected. I was specced FFB (normal spec with Imp. Blizzard for Molgeim) was thinking of going frost for it but decided to try FFB first; the kill wasn't fast at all somewhere around 7 minutes (somewhat crappy group composition) and I was able to plain spam FFB (ignoring LB and HS) during P1 and start with HS and LB when the add spawned, ended with around 2k mana which means I could be more aggressive in P1.

Not sure how this information translates to 25 man, but guessing I would say FFB can be sustained in 25 the downside is the lack of survivability Frost can bring.

Another thing with using the "ghost" FoF is that it's highly dependent on latency. Losing even a couple of FoF frostbolts to Ice Lance is going to be a dps loss. At my ~300ms latency (I'm playing in Australia on US servers), I can only land about 2 in 3 ghost lances correctly.

Welp in that case I'm pretty sure theres no exception cases. Use the normal rotations.

Although thinking back about this, there IS one exception to the rule, during storm power. You do not want to recast LB if it won't explode during storm power.

So I've been wondering lately... I would think that all of the people who are even part time raiders to be hit capped. With that do you think that all this Uld gear that seems to have so much hit is a hint from blizzard that hit cap will be increased and almost needed for perhaps the new raids to come in WotLK?

I really ask this because when loot drops rawr doesn't take into account future hit ratings that will be required for new bosses and what not so it never seems necessary to get the gear that may be needed in the future which simply leads to disenchating all the new pieces with high hit.

Any thoughts at all?

Edit- I also was wondering if maybe anyone thought that perhaps it may be worth it to start collecting some of the better high hit pieces that could be swapped into place later.

There's absolutely no precedent for bosses requiring more hit as new raids are released, which is why no one is discussing it. There are a lot of items with +hit in Ulduar, but that's mostly because there are just a ridiculous number of drops in general. If you have too much hit, roll on [Ironmender] instead of [Leviathan Fueling Manual]. Managing your gear, gems and enchants such that you're at the hit cap without going over is part of life as a mage.

My advice to your concern on wether world of warcraft will bring in an increased hit rating requirement is to simply ensure that your gear alone makes you hit capped. Gem with Reckless and runed. Then should the time come that it is increased. you simply only have to re-gem. As most mage gem slots tend to be yellow/red and any high end gear will hold around 6-8 slots. Your looking at anywhere between 48-64 additional hit with Vielded gems. As mentioned earlier in this forum dont used pure hit gems. I can't imagine such changes would mean any more than 48 additional hit-rating is required.