Does [Prism of Inner Calm] work in AOE? I am quite sure that it works for flame strike direct dmg, how about blizzard or LB?
That item reminds me of a talent suggestion by the devs a long time ago when tseric still ruled the mage forums. Of course it was discarded and became a passive 30% threat reduction, "burning soul", later on if I remember correctly :-)
I think I still have it somewhere, and will do some tests if I have the time.
Whether or not it works, reducing your threat by 150 when it's measured in thousands sounds like a losing proposition compared to just equipping a decent trinket.
Whether or not it works, reducing your threat by 150 when it's measured in thousands sounds like a losing proposition compared to just equipping a decent trinket.
That's for melee crits. Spell crits trigger Threat Reduction - Spell - World of Warcraft. The effect is reduced by Burning Soul and Frost Channeling, though I'm not sure how they stack - if at all - in relation to the trinket. Having one causes the proc to reduce threat by 900 instead of 1000.
Hi there, I have been evaluating Arcane v FFB v Fire since RAWR 2.1.4 and what I am getting is FFB and arcane are neck and neck on bosses at about the 5k dps mark (for my gear level). Now I would love to go arcane for the more dynamic game play, but I keep comming to the stumbling block of who applies scorch. As i see it, assuming 1 mage is the scorcher then that is a risk (if mage dies then scorch lost to all ranged)
From a raid perspective (assuming all but 1 mage are arcane) if all mages are about the same dps (or even say 100 dps appart etc) then the optimal setup is allways 2 scorching mages to provide the most stable dps buff raid-wide. I suspect this is not seen as much of an issue at the moment because the fights are all farm mode, little risk etc, but if and when blizz get their act together and get a Sunwell type raid up and running then do you not think 2 scorching mages is allways preferrable?
Fully geared mages are Evinald and Jesi with nearly best in slot in most areas, especially Jesi. These are talented players who were involved in the server first kill of Heroic Malygos.
The raid from 12-28 is showing them falling behind nearly every class, including elemental shamans at this gear level.
Just wanted to get a test of the community to see if other endgame raiding mages are seeing this.
It may be time to start seeing if GC/Blizzard are aware of the issue, if there is one.
I had a big write up about why those mages did what they did, but they're not as close to optimally geared as you say, and they've got terrible uptime on some spells. Jesi in particular is over-capped on Hit, unless that raid doesn't have a boomkin or sPriest, in which case she's undercapped on hit. That's wasted stat points there. (12.16~% from gear) The other mage has 10.29%, but he's also using the mark of the war prisoner. I don't know where you're getting the "almost best in slot" for these people.
[Edit: go here for an idea of what "best in slot" looks like, approximately.]
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I had a big write up about why those mages did what they did, but they're not as close to optimally geared as you say, and they've got terrible uptime on some spells. Jesi in particular is over-capped on Hit, unless that raid doesn't have a boomkin or sPriest, in which case she's undercapped on hit. That's wasted stat points there. (12.16~% from gear) The other mage has 10.29%, but he's also using the mark of the war prisoner. I don't know where you're getting the "almost best in slot" for these people.
[Edit: go here for an idea of what "best in slot" looks like, approximately.]
Looking at the Loatheb fight there and comparing critical damage to the overall Ignite damage, Evinald was 734 short on Ignite damage, which could be the last tick that did not go off due to death, Scorch used only 5 times. But, Jesi suffered like a 20% loss in Ignite damage. With the missing Ignite damage added, he should tie with the guy in 4th on overall damage.
I was playing with the TCoM, and oddly enough with my current gear it was telling me that an arcane build would be within 2 DPS of 0/53/18 while sustaining its own slow. I did however have to use glyphed molten armor. While I'm confident I would need mage armor to run arcane at the moment, I'm hoping that the TCoM is accurate with this, although I fear it isn't. Thoughts?
Anyone else noticing mages falling behind DKs/Rogues/Hunters/Locks and even Elemental Shamans at the end of fully gearing 25 man t7 content?
Not to discredit Dratine's heroic efforts at elemental DPS, but I'm fairly certain he didn't out DPS us on any of the fights in the 12-28 parse.
And as Inoko pointed out, our gear is still a good way from best in slot. Thankfully I was finally able to kill some hit by picking up the Vanq chest this week, which I've been trying to do for some time. Overall, though, I'm fairly happy with the state of mages....I find it far more annoying that my DPS is affected so greatly by the RNG of FFB spec than falling behind other DPS in our guild who are all highly skilled at pushing their buttons.
I'm not really familiar with how to view uptimes of spells in Wowmeteronline, as we just recently started uploading our reports there, but looking at LB uptime on our private Stasis reports it's generally in the neighborhood of 70-80% (for the dot portion, obviously). Doing a quick check of recent raids, ~81% seems to be our upper limit, which could possibly be a product of the haste value we're at (all around 400ish), and the last dot (the explosion) being counted as a different spell in the combat log. I'm sure there's some room for improvement, but if this qualifies as "horrible" uptime in a real raid situation then I'm definitely missing something.
I'm not really familiar with how to view uptimes of spells in Wowmeteronline, as we just recently started uploading our reports there, but looking at LB uptime on our private Stasis reports it's generally in the neighborhood of 70-80% (for the dot portion, obviously). Doing a quick check of recent raids, ~81% seems to be our upper limit, which could possibly be a product of the haste value we're at (all around 400ish), and the last dot (the explosion) being counted as a different spell in the combat log. I'm sure there's some room for improvement, but if this qualifies as "horrible" uptime in a real raid situation then I'm definitely missing something.
You know, there is an idea here that can be sparked here for Blizzard to make Living Bomb a little more different than a warlock's Seed of Corruption. Maybe on LB explosion crits, the LB has a chance to refresh itself and the mage can cast another Living Bomb, yet not on the same target. It would make LB more unique, and really improve it.
No, I picked a few random fights out of there to use for LB Uptime calculations and found it to be under 70% on two of them. They were likely just "bad" fights for that sort of thing. I quite over-exaggerated with "horrible" uptime, obviously. Unfortunately, when someone comes in here and says "MAGES ARE DOOMED AT THE TOP END BECAUSE OF THIS ONE RAID AND YOU KNOW THE SKY IS FALLING BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE I HEARD OF AND THINK ARE GOOD DIDN'T DO SO WELL!" Well, when that happens, it's my knee-jerk to find every single flaw there is.
To be fair, you do quite well, as Patchwerk shows, and you did about what most end game mages I've seen on WWS for sapphiron, which was a particularly low LB Uptime fight. (I calculate LB Uptime in WoWMeter by # of explosions * 12 seconds, discounting fights with multiple targets that will screw up the explosion count) But from what I've seen of most mages on sapph, 50%~ish seems to be about normal for LB there.
Anyways, long story short: the sky is not falling, and you guys just had the bad luck to be the fight that someone tried to use to show it was.
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Incanter's Absorbtion is currently working with the spellstealable bone armor buff in naxx (1.2million absorb). This can give anywhere between 5k-135k spell damage depending on the amount of mobs on you.
I have been having an on going argument with people in my guild about the value of hit for mages currently. As all of you know, in wotlk became not quite as good as it was in BC. The one thing most people don't seem to understand when I try to explain it to them is the math in this game. Hit rating only improves your hit percentage, which itself is only an improvement to your overall DPS over time. In short fights hit is more valuable but in any long (boss) fight your hit percentage basically tells you that if you have say 95% hit chance you will do 95% of your max normal damage over any long fight. I have been getting much criticism from my guild for trying to argue this. I have also been gemming +18 spell power gems instead of +15 hit rating gems, as after running the calculations on fireball it gives me more DPS (used an online calculator and also did calculations myself). This is because its +18 spell vs +15 hit (if both were the same hit would beat it, but they aren't) this is the same for gear in general.
Comments? preferably agreements? and possible ways I can talk to my guild without getting into a shouting match?
I'm not sure I follow what you are arguing with your guild about, but here's what I can tell you.
Hit is still the best rating and until hit capped 1 hit rating > 1 sp. Hit rating is also no more or less valuable from the duration of the fight. The exception to this rule is due to a bug (which may be why these dps calculations are showing you the results they are) with FFB double dipping into Elemental Precision and getting a 6% hit bonus. Because of that bug, you can hit cap on FFB but not Pyro/LB/Scorch, and when you hit that point hit drops in value significantly.
Secondly, and more importantly, hit is simply another stat on gear. You SHOULD NOT sacrifice sp just to get hit cap. The best way to figure out which gear is worth using is to download and run Rawr.
Finally, yellow gems are complete garbage; you should never use them. In your yellow slots you should put veiled [orange] gems if you are not hit capped or potent/reckless if you are, and in red gems you should almost always put runed [red] gems.
Incanter's Absorbtion is currently working with the spellstealable bone armor buff in naxx (1.2million absorb). This can give anywhere between 5k-135k spell damage depending on the amount of mobs on you.
I didnt believe it when I first heard it, but it was quite funny to watch a mage solo heroic Military quarter in Naxx by clever use of said mechanics: YouTube - Naxx Heroic Military Wing soloed Mage
Obviously unintended, but amusing to watch and an impressive display of player ingenuity in mechanic-twisting nevertheless.
Just did a pug heroic naxx on my alt and a mage in blues who had poor DPS to begin with respecced as shown in the video to tank instructor, he did about 25k DPS for the fight. It can be a great way to clear the place, just keep two or three DK's tanked 30 yards back and have the mage solo clear all the trash. With innervates to keep him going you can probably stack the buff up to where the trash will die in a few arcane explosions if there's no limit to the absorption buff.
No doubt will be considered an exploit, but it's easy content to begin with and sounds like a fun think to try before they hotfix it.
Ergzay, one major argument you can use: if a spell missed - it didnt crit.
Also, never ever gem for hit. Only hit on gear itself should be used, thats the way of squeezing more ilvl budget value toward sp, crit, haste and whatever else from gems. All ratings on gems have same values, while different ratings have different item budget lvls.
Comments? preferably agreements? and possible ways I can talk to my guild without getting into a shouting match?
There might be some discussion if your were a few percentage points away from hit cap and you didn't want to sacrifice a strong piece of equipment for a small amount of hit.
However, looking at your armory profile, you are far, far away from this point. 0/71/0 is a horrifying raid spec, especially with 105 hit rating. Not only are you leaving a ton of dps on the table in misses, but you will probably be missing a large portion of your non-dps spells (CS/Poly/SS).
Get elemental precision. It's a no brainer. Get a helm with a meta slot. Go read the pre-raid gear thread. You need to get started on the right path now before you can start worrying about trading a few points of hit for sp and have it be relevant.
Thats what I'm working on. I need better gear in general (I find it very hard to find heroics), but I'm talking more for convincing others than making myself better right away. I'm going to be re-speccing Fire/Frost quite soon, I just like deep fire for leveling and questing (I'm into theorycrafting, but I'm also a Lore nerd).
@Einhander and @Raencloud, ok thats interesting. I've had people all over telling me to dump my spell gems for hit gems and to say put orange gems in red slots and put yellow hit gems in yellow slots. I knew that was wrong as the numbers don't line up.
What I was meaning is, when a fight is short and say you get off 10 spell casts, if you have a 97% hit rating and you miss one spell you just had an effective miss percentage (looking back) of 90%, but if a fight is long (over 100 casts) then you will most likely miss around 3 times, and as the fight gets longer and you get more spell casts you will get closer and closer by round off to 97% and your dps becomes more consistent.
Ergzay, one major argument you can use: if a spell missed - it didnt crit.
Also, never ever gem for hit. Only hit on gear itself should be used, thats the way of squeezing more ilvl budget value toward sp, crit, haste and whatever else from gems. All ratings on gems have same values, while different ratings have different item budget lvls.
I think for a frost mage orange gems with spell damage and hit are decent value in yellow slots, assuming the colour-matching bonus is good for you.
What I was meaning is, when a fight is short and say you get off 10 spell casts, if you have a 97% hit rating and you miss one spell you just had an effective miss percentage (looking back) of 90%, but if a fight is long (over 100 casts) then you will most likely miss around 3 times, and as the fight gets longer and you get more spell casts you will get closer and closer by round off to 97% and your dps becomes more consistent.
Sure you have an effective hit of 90% for those 10 casts, but just as a long fight will normalize, so will many short fights. You may in fact experience no hits for several short fights in a row, but you may also get a fight where you miss multiple times. You need to realize that there isn't some counter that resets every time you get out of combat. Every time you cast a spell, a roll is made. If I'm not mistaken, it works a little something like this (behind the scenes of course):
Assume 50% crits, 3% miss.
/roll 100
If 1-50 --> crit
If 51-97 --> hit
If 98-100 --> miss
You can get bad luck and miss 10 times in a row, albiet it would be unlikely, and by the same token you could also get good luck and not miss for 1000 casts in a row, which again is unlikely. Anyway, my point is that if you miss in a short fight, it will have a bigger impact on your dps because there are less spells cast to normalize it. However, assuming short fights of 10 casts, you should still only miss 3 times in those 10 fights, so while 3 or 2 or 1 of those fights see a decrease in dps, the other 7 will appear higher, but if you look at the whole picture it still normalizes.
I think I'm rambling now so I'll stop. Hopefully you get the picture. And Einhander is partially right imo. You shouldn't gem for hit if you can help it, but if you can't obtain good hit gear, putting orange hit/dmg into yellow slots is a good idea and better than running under hit cap. I would still never put anything but red gems into red sockets though.
It's two-roll system for casters. First roll determines the hit, and only then second roll determines if it crit. Thats why i said that "no hit - no crit".
It's a pretty ancient info by the way.
Let me make it clear, I'm arguing against always going for hit. There seem to be too many nazis that go for saying, "YOU MUST BE HIT CAPPED NO MATTER WHAT! HIT CAP NAOW!" <_<; I argue that that there are many situations when you shouldn't go specifically for hit, and that you should always calculate it to make sure you are taking the right stat.
12/30/08, 6:05 PM
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