Whoah, my mistake...I thought it was consistent across the board...I guess I get to save myself a little time tonight by changing my macro's.

It's not quite that bad - you can keep Ice Barrier, and put a point in Frostbite and a point or two in Improved blizzard and Frostbite (loses most of frostbite, but the Blizzard slowing is still significant). This also gives you Blizzard shatter crits. I think most 18/0/53 players would prefer this combination to Ice Flows.

As I said earlier, the option also exists to drop a few 1% DPS points from Arctic Winds, if you really want more of that frost flavour.

After TTW comes out, you might even consider dropping Brain Freeze in favour of a 21/0/50 build with Mediation and POM. Now you have a simpler source of mana regen, and lose one proc you will hardly be able to take advantage of.

As PintofBrew says, just spam frostbolts. Use a macro so that your pet targets your frostbolt target if he has no target. Summon your pet when you can, and you can also have buttons for Ice Barrier, Cold Snap, Ice Block, POM, Invisibility and Evocation whenever they might be situationally useful and/or you have the time to use them. That's probably the perfect action bar and spec for a mage with one tenth of a brain!

Well, that basically just raises the question: is two discretionary points what GC had in mind when he was talking about bloat? We don't really know.

That, however, goes directly against what GC said, which is that your utility/pvp/fun talents should be competing against each other, not against your DPS talents.

I think with clearcasting, brain freeze isn't really needed, although it adds a nice amount of mobility to frost. The DPS increase is at best about 2% and probably a whole lot worse (possibly even a DPS drop) as long as the current instance lag exists.

I'll try to post a bit more on my thoughts on frost raiding in the appropriate thread when I have a bit more time.

I haven't suffered much from lag using brain freeze, I think. I watch the Quartz GCD bar to see when I can start casting again after an instant. I accept there may be some loss, but I can't believe it is large.

One thing I tend to do with BF instants, if I am not short of mana, is to save them for a few seconds in case I get a FoF proc - if so, I use the instant in a Shatter combo.

I really don't trust Ice Lance for this purpose - if you do it less than perfectly it's a DPS drop, and even if it works perfectly, there is no real gain unless your crit without FoF is nearly 50%. I'm inclined to say don't bother with Ice Lance. The fireball, on the other hand, is still good if the combo fails, and very good if it works, despite the crit bonus only being 50%.

If FoF doesn't come up, I'll normally use the instant anyway, for the mana saving and the small DPS increase. Of course, I will hold onto it if I am expecting to have to move shortly.

When you think about it, BF in Shatter combos combined with BF on the move is a guaranteed DPS increase irrespective of latency, and you still get some of the DPM benefits. I'll leave it to the theorycrafters to figure out how good it is, but if you are mana-rich, it's a point worth considering.

I'm pretty sure that unless your lag happens to be extremely stable, the best way to max your dps is to spam the button for the next spell you want to cast as soon as the one you are currently casting might be finished on the server. Preferably using a G15 keyboard or similar so that you don't kill your fingers. I'm convinced that this has helped me improve my dps greatly, although I don't have any numbers. The way to react to Brain Freeze procs then is to just spam the fireball button as soon as you notice one until you actually cast it.

PoM doesn't offer anything to Frost. Making a 2.5 second cast (Frostbolt, no haste) instant (1.5s GCD, no haste) once every three minutes is hardly of benefit. Frostbolt isn't even a strong enough nuke (on a per-cast, rather than per-second basis) to warrant its use in PvP. You'll get more mileage out of PoM'd polymorph than anything else.

On our server, Naxx25 lag can sometimes be measured in seconds...so by the time you see the frostbolt going, the GCD should have been long gone already.

Naxx10 was just beautifully smooth by comparison today. There's no need to spam a button if your network latency is stable and the server isn't horribly lagged - the server side spell queueing gives you enough of buffer zone to cast with nearly ideal cast times. I usually have a 50-70 ms latency to the server with minimal short term variations, so unless the server is lagging, there's no need to spamcast.

Evocation. Invisibility. Situationally, it could be very nice to have them instant, Or Polymorph, as you say.

Failing that, burn it on Arcane Missiles or Frostbolt for a bit of extra damage.

I didn't say it was great, but I can think of worse ways to spend a talent point. If you are in a mana-short situation, POM/Evocation alone might be worth it. Look at all the folks crying about Evocation on these threads... if you could spemd one talent point to make Evocation instant, would you? Congratulations, you got your wish, and as a bonus you can use it PoM on other things instead if you choose!

Please don't suggest using Presence of Mind on a channeled spell. That doesn't work.

No, Invisibility's fade is not a "spell casting" mechanic, as Invisibility is already instant cast.

However, Prismatic Cloak does make invisibility instant.

Please pay more attention to the mage mechanics before you suggest some of this stuff, gerryq. Invisibility, if you read the tooltip, is instant. The Fade Debuff is not related to the cast. You don't need to be arcane spec to know this, you need to use the spell once and read the tooltip.

Even thinking PoM would affect Channeling is rather short-sighted. Do you think anyone would bother with any other type of AoE if we could PoM-Blizzard? Or is it not obvious all arcane mages would PoM-Evocate, thus removing the only fundamental problem Arcane mage regen has in one fell-swoop?

Don't presume you came up with a fantastic idea that nobody else ever had, particularly something you've never done yourself. Even at the pathetic DPS return of PoM you're better-off speccing one point in BF.

Arguing a PoM-Poly is of any use is futile, because of the same usefulness is Brain Freeze. They're both only vaguely useful on trash, and even then they're a waste of a talent point.

Nowadays with Mirror Image, PoM-Poly really isn't that useful to start with. When would you need to PoM-Poly? When a poly broke, or an add breaks its CC, or you pulled agro from an AoE or something equally boring. MI will buy you enough time to Poly at your leisure.

I'm kind of confused about the downplaying of Spirit vs. Int for mana regen. Please see if I'm off with my numbers, or just my understanding.

If we use the formula 'MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(Int) * Spirit * Base_Regen)' for the calculation, it would seem that Mp5 scales better with Spirit than with Int.

fr'ex: 1000 Int, 500 Spirit would come to roughly 440.7 Mp5

To this, adding 10 points of Spirit would give 449.6 Mp5
and adding 10 points to Int would give 442.9 Mp5



What am I doing wrong here?

I know that Int is better for Evoc, but why is Int often refered to as the better mana regen stat?

Int is better because of replenishment. Most mana returned during a fight comes from replenishment, not passive regeneration.

In a good group, replenishment wins, but in a bad group you have to use mage armor and it's not quite so clear. If you use evocation, then intellect wins hands down.

Most of the simulations assume you have good a good group composition and that you play with good team players, so intellect comes out very strong.

For a 4 minute fight and assuming just 250 mana/5 with mage armor, you gain 12000 mana from mage armor. Looking at a 4 minute boss fight, I gained 6921 mana from replenishment, 3729 from judgement of wisdom and 3404 from my water elemental. (9433 came from 2 mana gem charges.) I did not use evocation.

Worst advice I ever received: get tailoring.

I'm max tailoring, max enchanting.

Enchanting is too profitable now for me to drop, but which of JC or Alchemy would be better for me to drop tailoring for?

It's a pretty tough call.

JC likely gets you +59 spell power and -24 stamina. It is also, in general terms, one of the most profitable professions.

Alchemy gets you +37 spell power and the Crazy alchemist potion, which is basically combo health, mana and speed potion. That potion is far more relevant for Arcane specs than for any other. While not as profitable, alchemy's perk is double length flasks/elixirs.

The ultimate min/max decision is JC. Alchemy is not as good, but not a lacking profession choice.

Thanks for the tips.

I am arcane spec and the mana return could very well tilt the scales for me.

I'll do some more looking into it.

I've heard tell that travel time spells such as FB or FFB followed immediately by a HS Pyro will munch the ignite ticks. From what I understand, scorching before each HS Pyro will stop that from happening. I have not, however, seen any math or conclusive evidence that this will be a dps gain. Can anyone confirm this?

This has already been asked, search is your best friend. To put it simple, overscorching to not get ignite dmg loss is not worth it, concidering how terrible a spell scorch is for DPS. You want to cast it as little as possible while still maintaining the debuff.

Sometimes the ignite bug also works in your favour, meaning it's actually not a huge loss overall from ignite dmg (from WWS logs and discussions on the matter here on the boards)

Short answer: No, it's not worth it. Just do your normal rotation.

So I'm the caster leader of my guild now and I'm trying to help out the other mages. The rest of the casters (except on the rare occasion we have a lock) seem to be all right but I feel like the mages could still do a bit better. I got them gem upgrades (only one had the right meta), a few enchants, and nudged them to download rawr.

I'm Thusly. Jamonlee(Arcane) is good I think but still has a lot of upgrades out there. Exorcizm(FFB) definitely improved after I got him the stuff, but Nehrza(FFB) is still under performing a little. Is it just gear or are they doing something wrong? I like having two FFB mages because they might not both always be there so we'll always have someone for scorch. Also, I know a couple of their talents aren't perfectly optimal but I'm not gonna be an ass over playing with fire or something. Feel free to let me know what I'm fucking up too.

WWS:
Wow Web Stats KT only
http://wowwebstats.com/uvednttv1vwb1 Naxx 4 wings
This is the point I helped them out.
Wow Web Stats Sapph/KT
Wow Web Stats 1 drake sarth