Yeah. Real life uptime is going to be between 13-16 seconds even if you're trying hard to keep it up because you have to notice the bomb going off and then wait for whatever you're casting to finish before casting the next one.
My rule of thumb for my own gear spreadsheet is one living bomb per 15 seconds, which I think is fairly realistic for a mage who is trying to keep it up all the time without damaging his chaincasting. And yes, even with only one target, the LB dps numbers come in above any other use of that GCD if it tics to completion. With multiple mobs caught in the blast, it's even better, which tends to make up for the times it doesn't tick all the way.
which tends to make up for the times it doesn't tick all the way.
Not... really? It's lost damage when it doesn't tick all the way. That you get good damage when it's used for its intended purpose (AoE) doesn't "offset" losing the DPS anywhere else. After a few runs with your raid you should be able to guess how much time it takes a given thing to die. Hell, it's usually similar from pull to pull.
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You may or may not be wrong.
Gregory: You are attempting to compare cast time percents from the ideal case (once every 12 seconds) with damage percents from the real case (in Wizeowel's linked parse, where LB is cast on average once every 16 seconds). The mage in the linked parse spent 1.25/16 ~= 7.8% of the time casting Living Bomb, and it accounted for 9.8% of his damage, therefore it was worth casting.
Got it. But difference is pretty minor anyway. Wouldn't it be better just go for 2nd Icy Veins ?
Got it. But difference is pretty minor anyway. Wouldn't it be better just go for 2nd Icy Veins ?
I think you're going to have to elaborate on this. Are you saying "Drop Living Bomb, get Cold Snap for Two Icy Veins uses" ? Because if you're not, LB does nothing to make you not use IV. In fact, LB while under IV is just as good as your other spells, since the GCD is decreased as well! The only time it wouldn't be as good is when IV pushes your GCD under 1 second, so then LB would be a waste.
Anyways, if that's not what you meant, you should definitely explain yourself and not just randomly trail in to disconnected thoughts.
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Sure i'm talking about 50/21. May be in theory LB give some dps increase but it's almost not noticeable on practice or at least I can't find any evidence within WWS logs.
Got it. But difference is pretty minor anyway. Wouldn't it be better just go for 2nd Icy Veins ?
It's not "pretty minor" at all. In the example I linked, damage per time spent casting of living bomb was almost 25% more effective that anything else this mage was doing. Let's go back to that for a second and analyse what would happen if that mage would cast 4 extra FFB instead of those 8 living bombs. FFB total damage was 388885 and he cast 42 of them, so average 9260 damage per cast.
8 living bombs = 65k
versus
4 frostfire bolts = 37k
Now let's say he had another icy veins. That would mean say 2 extra FFB over the course of that 20 seconds. Unfortunately you can't really stack that extra IV with another trinket/cooldown since you've already used that with the first IV. So we have,
8 living bombs = 65k
versus
6 frostfire bolts = 56k
These are numbers extrapolated directly from the same WWS I posted earlier. So there is your 'evidence'.
Wizeowel, I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree that you should always keep Living Bomb up, but you are cutting corners with those numbers. The ignite damage is clearly going to be more from a Frostfire Bolt critical versus a Living Bomb critical. Furthermore, if the 4 Frostfire Bolts were all crits back to back, that's 2 Pyroblasts as well. It's not fair to just compare the average damage of just the spells in question.
However, using an average of 9260 isn't very fair either. His crit rate with Frostfire Bolt was 62%. Average non-crit was 4646, average crit was 12073. For simplicity, we'll assume 4 of the 6 frostfire bolts in question were crits, as this is closest to 62%. With ignite damage included (4829) it amounts to 16,902 damage for each crit. That comes out to 67808 damage, and then another 9292 from non-crits, amounting to 77,100, with hot streak procs disregarded.
Living Bomb crit rate was 63% and the crits did 8347 ignite damage, on top of the 59,046 (from DoTs and detonations). That's 67,393 damage in total.
With Living Bomb being added to Hot Streak's list, however, it increases the chances of a hot streak proc, and would make little sense not to be kept on a target. Despite the detonation every 13-14 seconds, it still helps fill in non-crit gaps.
Wizeowel, I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree that you should always keep Living Bomb up, but you are cutting corners with those numbers. The ignite damage is clearly going to be more from a Frostfire Bolt critical versus a Living Bomb critical. Furthermore, if the 4 Frostfire Bolts were all crits back to back, that's 2 Pyroblasts as well. It's not fair to just compare the average damage of just the spells in question.
However, using an average of 9260 isn't very fair either. His crit rate with Frostfire Bolt was 62%. Average non-crit was 4646, average crit was 12073. For simplicity, we'll assume 4 of the 6 frostfire bolts in question were crits, as this is closest to 62%. With ignite damage included (4829) it amounts to 16,902 damage for each crit. That comes out to 67808 damage, and then another 9292 from non-crits, amounting to 77,100, with hot streak procs disregarded.
Yes you are right, I forgot ignite damage and that brings the value up. I made the same mistake as Gregory did in his initial math.
So indeed this mage in the example could be better off speccing IV? If that's what the WWS shows then what conclusion should we draw? And why then do you agree that LB should be kept up? What factors do we need to consider, is it the uptime of LB? Or his high FFB crit rate? Or just fact that this is a top5 Patchwerk parse i.e. good gear and raid stacked has a relative negative effect on LB? We already know that on Loatheb you should drop LB from your rotation after getting the spore buff, but does top gear approach this cut off point anyway?
Edit:
Firstly, I should mention that that WWS is a double parse; they have heroism twice; so the numbers aren't 100% although look pretty solid. Also it doesn't show that Evinald cast Icy Veins, which is a bit weird.
Secondly, Rawr shows FFB-Pyro-LB as the optimal rotation for Evinald given his gear and raid buffs, over 250 dps above FFB-Pyro. It calculates this at 5605 dps which is pretty damn close to the WWS. So I tried with a cold snap spec and Rawr correctly suggests to stack the double IV on top of heroism, but it comes out at only 5534 dps.
So looking for the reason I notice that Evinald should have only average 54% crit rate on FFB. Whereas the WWS says he has 62%. So is this just that I picked a lucky WWS for him?
If one of those Frostfire Bolts doesn't crit, it's 12,256 less damage. If a living bomb doesn't crit, it's 3900 less damage. It takes 1 global cooldown to cast living bomb, versus the base 3 seconds for a Frostfire Bolt. Living Bomb has a 4% higher crit rate than Frostfire Bolt (World in Flames gives 6%, Frostfire Glyph gives 2%). That is more or less why I would always keep Living Bomb up. This is also why it's been suggested to skip Living Bomb on Loatheb, since you're dealing with a near 100% crit rate in some circumstances.
If one of those Frostfire Bolts doesn't crit, it's 12,256 less damage. If a living bomb doesn't crit, it's 3900 less damage.
I would be astonished to see 3900 more damage from a LB crit. My numbers suggest something more along the lines of half of that.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
His Living Bombs crit for an average of 4173. Add 40% for ignite damage, that's 5842. Subtract his average non-crit of 2419 and you have 3423 difference between crit and non-crit. Unless I'm way off, that seems accurate.
Ah I see, I just opened up the first WWS log I had on hand, it gave me 4x 795 and one 3467 crit. 3467 / 1.8175 (to get back the non-crit value) = 1907.57. 3467 * 1.4 = 4854. Eye-gouging it (4854 - 1907) gave me somewhat different numbers as you can imagine.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
That curse would be not removable, 880 damage on average before buffs/talents. With CoE, FI, partials, and as Arcane or Fire Mage with PWF/ArcInst, that would be 1013 total damage at most.
The 63 Spell Power enchant adds 77 DPS for a Fire Spec of 2 builds ago in Naxx-10 gear.
That means over 15 seconds, the full Black Ice duration, it would add 1155 damage.
So, um, yay? Even if the enchant proc had no cooldown and reprocs didn't reset the tick timer (like on Deadly Poison or Affliction/Shadow talents) and the proc was always up, the spell power enchant would be better.
It would however be useful when AoEing to curse all mobs you hit. If all the extremely favourable conditions above were true, something I don't believe.
Even being a slightly older post, you can just bring up the Wowhead page for more information and do some quick math to show that you're better off with the spellpower enchant.
[Discerning Eye of the Beast] is non-unique since its an heirloom item. This means you can equip 2.
However, something I didn't expect is that the mana regen works if you have 2 trinkets (both will proc) and most importantly, it has no ICD. I am literally making mana out of farming mobs...its quite awesome in ways I can hardly describe. It's almost sad that I still kept sitting in between pulls because I'm used to do it everytime, even though I am still at 100% mana. And it works on AOE too.
<Eej> YOU"RE GONNA PULL
<Eej> IF YOU SQUEEZE OFF ANOTHER ARCANE BLAST
<Spectear> You've obviously never played with Manly.
<Spectear> That's hardly a reason to stop DPS. Very Manly Staff
My first question is regarding crit rating vs. haste rating (or rather Reckless vs. Potent gems) in a FFB spec. I spent most of Burning Crusade raiding on my destro warlock and so have this idea in my head that haste is pretty much always going to be better than crit. Now that I have leveled up a mage I am finding there to be a much more fuzzy line between the two stats. I have Zaldinar's TCOM telling me that haste is slightly better than crit, and both Rawr and Vontre's magegraf telling me that crit is slightly better than haste, but in all cases the difference is VERY slight (I used the same stats and buffs in all 3 simulators, basically a mage in pre-raid level 80 gear, hit capped). I guess my question is this: in practice will it really matter if we choose Reckless over Potent or vice-versa (assuming a worthwhile yellow socket bonus)? Just remembering back to my Sunwell raiding days on my lock, and seeing myself ripped-off by RNG over and over again....20% crit on a M'uru kill when I should have closer to 40%....I am tempted to favor the haste gems over the crit gems because haste is more 'reliable' and the simulators are showing such a small DPS difference anyway.
Question number two is regarding all of the various cooldowns that mages deal with. On my warlock I only ever had to deal with 1 or 2 trinkets and the answer was simple in most cases: use them every time they are up, stack with Heroism when possible. But with the mage I have Combustion, Icy Veins, Mirror Image, 2 trinkets, Mana Gem/Flamecap, potions, etc. and many of them have different cooldowns. The beginning of the fight is easy enough, use all of those things at the same time. But after that when they all come off cooldown at different times I don't know what to do. Do I wait until Combustion or Icy Veins is up to use my trinkets again? Or do I just use everything separately as they become available? Is there any combination of cooldowns that is worth waiting on to use them together again? Or would that just result in a net DPS loss?
Thanks in advance for your responses!
Last edited by Kimmee : 12/21/08 at 4:30 AM.
Reason: adding title
[Oracle Talisman of Ablution] also has no internal cooldown, and, while the tooltip doesn't specify, I've observed the mana return to be a whopping 5% of maximum. It's a particularly handy trinket in CoT: Stratholme speed runs, since you can just run around using Arcane Explosion on the little zombies instead of drinking.
[Discerning Eye of the Beast] is non-unique since its an heirloom item. This means you can equip 2.
However, something I didn't expect is that the mana regen works if you have 2 trinkets (both will proc) and most importantly, it has no ICD. I am literally making mana out of farming mobs...its quite awesome in ways I can hardly describe. It's almost sad that I still kept sitting in between pulls because I'm used to do it everytime, even though I am still at 100% mana. And it works on AOE too.
...No ICD? And non-unique? And stacks with itself? I'd imagine this is a bug/oversight, but may very well be intentional [the devs seem to know how much we hate leveling our fourth/fifth/w-e character] and things like farming trash...so if they don't intend to repeal this, I'll certainly be looking into this for leveling alts and farming
Originally Posted by Kimmee
My first question is regarding crit rating vs. haste rating (or rather Reckless vs. Potent gems) in a FFB spec. I spent most of Burning Crusade raiding on my destro warlock and so have this idea in my head that haste is pretty much always going to be better than crit. Now that I have leveled up a mage I am finding there to be a much more fuzzy line between the two stats. I have Zaldinar's TCOM telling me that haste is slightly better than crit, and both Rawr and Vontre's magegraf telling me that crit is slightly better than haste, but in all cases the difference is VERY slight (I used the same stats and buffs in all 3 simulators, basically a mage in pre-raid level 80 gear, hit capped). I guess my question is this: in practice will it really matter if we choose Reckless over Potent or vice-versa (assuming a worthwhile yellow socket bonus)? Just remembering back to my Sunwell raiding days on my lock, and seeing myself ripped-off by RNG over and over again....20% crit on a M'uru kill when I should have closer to 40%....I am tempted to favor the haste gems over the crit gems because haste is more 'reliable' and the simulators are showing such a small DPS difference anyway.
Question number two is regarding all of the various cooldowns that mages deal with. On my warlock I only ever had to deal with 1 or 2 trinkets and the answer was simple in most cases: use them every time they are up, stack with Heroism when possible. But with the mage I have Combustion, Icy Veins, Mirror Image, 2 trinkets, Mana Gem/Flamecap, potions, etc. and many of them have different cooldowns. The beginning of the fight is easy enough, use all of those things at the same time. But after that when they all come off cooldown at different times I don't know what to do. Do I wait until Combustion or Icy Veins is up to use my trinkets again? Or do I just use everything separately as they become available? Is there any combination of cooldowns that is worth waiting on to use them together again? Or would that just result in a net DPS loss?
Thanks in advance for your responses!
1) You will notice the difference is slight, barring Murphey's Law. I.E. the RNG is your best friend and worst enemy at the point you are gearwise. Go for whichever feels better for you...crit will keep you RNG happy or sad, while haste will provide a consistent DPS boost that doesn't very over fights.
2) Generally speaking, the DPS boost from your various cooldowns doesn't matter until extra haste that isn't constant comes into the equation...that's a generalization and not entirely correct, but is meant to say 'hitting them every time they're up should be "just fine" '. This is more in relation to being denied a cooldown on any one of them is often more of a loss than the DPS you gain by holding off for another cooldown. That said, watch the rate at which your cooldowns are coming back. If your trinket comes up five seconds before one of your class cooldowns...wait for it! There's a distinct point where 'worth waiting for' and 'loss of DPS' occurse, but you'd need a very precise math model to do it, and I'd bother the simulator workers to get on top of that Until we get a definitive answer based on cooldown math showing us the exact order to hit buttons [or prepare a macro] at the start of a fight and the correct 'wait/don't' numbers, stick with 'Hit them as soon as they're back, unless they come back very close together', using a second rule of your own creation [5? 7? 10?]. As frost, I have a WE to worry about as its own seperate issue, but for you as FFB it should just be a matter of 'too much time till it comes up, click/hotkey' or 'oooo, so close, I'll wait 5s to hit my joint macro'.
I notice these trinkets that give you mana back if you kill something that would give experience or honor. Well, let's say you are farming and are level 80. No experience to be gained here, nor any honor. Will the kill still proc the mana return?
I notice these trinkets that give you mana back if you kill something that would give experience or honor. Well, let's say you are farming and are level 80. No experience to be gained here, nor any honor. Will the kill still proc the mana return?
Yes, hence my comment about farming. At any given level, a foe that grants experience or honor is essentially the same requirement for Warlocks gaining a soul shard: it must be green or higher, no greys.
Can someone clarify the mechanics of partial resists on raid level bosses? I've done some searching but haven't found much beyond "bosses have innate resistances, deal with it". In browsing recent WWS reports I've noticed a staggering 5% - 7% of damage mitigated due to partial resists in my own and the other casters' DPS. We're all hit capped. (Sample parse). Is there any way to lower those partial resist numbers other than swapping on some spell pen. gear? I always went with subtlety on my cloaks (essentially useless now with the new threat mechanics) - is spell pen a better option to go with now?
12/17/08, 8:10 PM
Until we get a definitive answer based on cooldown math showing us the exact order to hit buttons [or prepare a macro] at the start of a fight and the correct 'wait/don't' numbers, stick with 'Hit them as soon as they're back, unless they come back very close together', using a second rule of your own creation [5? 7? 10?]. As frost, I have a WE to worry about as its own seperate issue, but for you as FFB it should just be a matter of 'too much time till it comes up, click/hotkey' or 'oooo, so close, I'll wait 5s to hit my joint macro'.
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