The dps requirement of Blood Council is very low. If you are juggling orbs then thats what you do - dps is a secondary consideration.

Anyone tried dampen magic on Sindragosa? Tried it for 1 attempt and the total frost aura hits for 3000; a portion is usually resisted (170 resist with buffs and auras, no magic absorption). 2nd attempt no dampen, total was still 3000, the average damage was on par with the dampen attempt.

Appears that DM and probably AM are not working on the frost pulses in a similar fashion (or non-fashion) as Twins.

/targetexact Kinetic Bomb

This helps with quick targetswitching and drop your MBAM on the bomb, it'll keep it flying for a good amount of time.

But yeah, like someone already pointed out. Like all council fights, It's really not a DPS race but a exercise in control and execution so don't be too worried.

Use 2 Ranged or even pets (even melee works, atleast the DK Pet one) to avoid moving, atleast when the kinetic bombs are well apart of each other. Your raid will controll the bombs safer with 2 players and even dps should be higher cause you don't need to move

@Klatchy

If you see no Reduce due to Dampen Magic, it's most likely that there will also be no +dmg with amplify magic. So buff your whole group with amplify magic. I wouldnt buff tanks due to spike dmg in p3. The dmg for the group which will be increased by amplify magic will be Frost Tomb.

I tossed around this idea for a while, in the end I decided that the safest way was simply to break the missiles channel a little later. So in the 200ms situation you describe (similar to mine), I would clip anywhere from 50-100ms into the red bar on quartz, depending on how stable my connection felt.

Cutting smaller amounts off the end of the cast to avoid clipping should produce more than just not cutting at all.

Since posting that, I've come to the same conclusion. I just have a larger margin of error on the AM channel to make sure I don't clip but gain some time back from the latency.

Under MBAM and IV/BL I don't even worry as the cast is so short.

Why would there be a soft cap? The use effect of that trinket hasn't changed, it's still a stacking haste buff for 20 seconds. As a side note, this is a terrible arcane trinket (terrible in general, really) compared to other easily obtainable items like [Talisman of Resurgence] or [Abyssal Rune]. You waste almost half of the buff time just stacking the proc.

Some Mage changes on the 3.3.3 PTR:

# Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.

# Talents

* Arcane
o Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.
o Incanter's Absorption: This talent now only grants additional spell power when damage is absorbed by Mana Shield, Frost Ward, Fire Ward, or Ice Barrier. The limit of 5% of the mage's health on the spell power buff has been removed.

* Fire

o Burning Soul: Threat reduction is now 10/20%, up from 5/10%.

* Frost

o Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.


* Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.


Looks like they changed most procs to auras (e.g. Elemental Oath is now an aura too). The "Burning Soul" change was long overdue (same goes for the IA change IMO). I'm pretty curious about TC on the fireball glyph change.

The fire threat reduction change is huge. Big ups on that. I haven't done the math on the fireball glyph change though.

The frost changes stick out BIG TIME to me. I brushed off the last frost changes as not nearly enough, but these might actually bring it close. Frostbolt coeff going up is a very signficant damage boost, and brain freeze being able to trigger FFB is HUGE.

Lhivera's done some math in the past to indicate that FFB on Brain Freeze is an improvement, but it is not "HUGE" more like 1-2%. Best example I can find is here (and you can be sure he'll be crunching the numbers ASAP):
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Frost 3.3 Analysis (PvE)

Regarding the new Glyph of Fireball (0.15 seconds off the casting time):

Base Cast Time 3.5
Improved Fireball -0.5
Glyph of Fireball -0.15
New Cast Time 2.85
Haste Percent 22.8070175438597
Haste Rating 747.841865105263
Casting Speed 1.2280701754386

Improved Fireball talent (5 points) alone is worth 546.4998 Haste Rating (16.66%), or 96.4411 per point (2.94%). There are a few ways to look at the glyph. The first is if you start with 3.5 cast time and remove .15 seconds, in which case it would take 4.47% haste (or 146.82 haste rating). The second is if you start at 3 second cast (which means 5 points in Improved Fireball), in which case it would take 5.26% haste (or 172.57 haste rating) to go from 3 to 2.85 seconds.

Going from 3.5 to 3 seconds requires 546.49 haste, as I mentioned. However, going from 3.5 to 3.4 seconds (1 point) requires 96.44 haste, so I use that instead of 109 (546.5/5). So depending on how you look at the value of the glyph, it can be equivalent of varying amounts of talent points -- IE, 146.82 / 198.72 (2 points in Imp Fireball). The end result is that this new Glyph of Fireball is the equivalent of 1.47 points into Improved Fireball talent.

In raid setting it seems to be around 10% haste to fireball, somewhere around 4-5% dps buff to fire, not enough to be viable but a buff is a buff.

EDIT: This is wrong btw, since the glyph works on the base cast time the haste from the glyph is around 5%, which works out to about .7% dps buff.

In all likelihood, the new glyph would be applied before haste. Thus, we can simply think of it as a 5% multiplicative haste buff. Which replaces a 5% crit buff. However, given the high crit damage of Fireball and the Hot Streak procs, this new glyph looks about at par with the old one to me...

Rawr tells me that in the BiS-264 set I made, current Glyph of Fireball is worth 2,91% of my damage (360.72 out of 12370.93). A 5% multiplicative haste buff = 5% more damage on Fireball, which is 62.5% of my pre-Ignite damage, which means the new glyph is worth 3.13% of my DPS. But, that is before factoring in Hot Streak. A loss of 5% crit + a gain of 5% haste probably gives around 5-10% less Hot Streaks. On the mana side, the new glyph is a clear loser, with the loss of MoE returns and higher MPS consumption of the hasted Fireball.

Unless I'm mistaken, if Blizzard intended to buff Fire this way, they missed the target completely.

With combustion cooldown down to 2 minutes, and IA only being affected by mage spells, I think we might be looking at a possible closure of the gap between FB/TTW and Arcane and this is a very welcome change for those who got a little tired of the same 2 button rotations since the beginning of 3.2. Anyone has done any math on this?

Edit: Rawr only gives about a 200dps increase for Combustion in its old form, which means the combustion change might not make such a big difference.

I'm not sure how you got to 200dps for Combustion it's less then 1% dps increase in the old form, maybe 1.5% in the new form with 2m CD, it makes Combustion a talent worth taking but doesn't do anything to change which spec you'll be using in PvE.

EDIT: regarding IA, it wasn't modeled in simcraft/rawr (modeled in rawr if you set it up this way), anyway it wasn't the talent that made or broke Arcane, it just made it overpowered when abused with Sacred Shield and such. It is not a 'nerf' to arcane per se.

Interesting post from GC regarding fire buffs:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - 3.3.3 Mage Changes
However, I still feel that fire suffers from way too many quality of life/core mechanic issues even if it were theorycrafted to be equal to arcane in dps (poor target switching ability, long base cast time on main nuke, poor burst ability).

What changes did you include? Only the ones on the current PTR or also the ones from the blue post?

For my gear magegraf still shows Arcane to be vastly superior to Fire (even when using higher iLevel hit items).

Could you link your profile?

It's the blue posted changed with pyroblast buffs.

I put in my armory's stats manually because importing my character from armory didn't work.
The Arcane profile used is Vontre's Magegraf (added 63 SP to make up for Black Magic not being in magegraf yet). You can already see that even if you 'freely' cap your Fire hit (just manually add ~200 hit so all specs are capped no matter what), Arcane is still ~200-300 DPS superior to Fire. I also put in my Fire gear's stats (using the marrowgar25 ring and TotGC25 bracers with hit) and compared it to my Arcane gear results and got a difference of ~4% which is still a lot. If you want me to I can also link you my Fire profile, I currently can't log into WoW so it'd take a while.

Edit: It's actually matching your results considering you also inserted a hit-capped profile. However you need to consider that Arcane allows you to swap some hit for haste/crit/spirit. In your first magegraf you also had the option to automatically adjust the stats to the hitcap, adding it in again would be really helpful in this case.

Yeah that's about right. Obviously your arcane gear isn't going to give good results because of the hit cap. 300 dps difference at 12000 total is 2.5%, which is acceptable, but you can get closer or further numbers depending on your specific gear setup.

As I edited in, that 2.5% is only true if you can't swap any of your hit rating for some more useful stats when speccing Arcane so I don't find it to be an accurate comparison. It's probably safe to say that Fire will still be a theoretical 2.5%-5% behind Arcane depending on your gear choices, which most likely still is too much for most people especially considering the other advantages Arcane has.

Gear can change dps a ton. Fire for example favours spyglass over arcanes choice of reign of the unliving. Odds are peoples arcane gear also lacks crit

It is probably worth finding out using BiS fire vs BiS arcane to see the real difference between the 2 specs.