Hello,

Reading the last patch notes on worldofraids today i noticed a thing

I had a search in this topic and noone talked about it, so i have a doubt

Will this change reduce the range of the polymorph spell itself, or this mean that between 8 yards it will result in a penguin, and over 8 yards i will see the usual sheep?

I really have no idea how to interpret it and it just sounds like a bug.

Interpreting it literally tells me that if you use the minor glyph, "Glyph of the Penguin", the range of your polymorph spell is reduced to 8 yds from 30. It just doesn't make sense.

That's most likely the mirror images' polymorph.

I guess it's the Polymorph spell from your Mirror Images. Don't they polymorph into penguins?

Checking the original source of the notes, wotlkwiki, they say it in this way

Pets
* Polymorph - Penguin - Range reduced to 8 yards from 30.

So i guess that it's the MI polymorph as stated above

I can confirm that the glyph does indeed increase arcane damage by 5/10/15%.

Arcane Missiles:

0 Stack: 1010
1 Stack: 1212 (20%)
2 Stack: 1414 (40%)
3 Stack: 1616 (60%)

With my PTR gear (only 1650 spellpower) with cooldowns popped I was seeing crits for 10-11k on a dummy which means arcane mages will potentially be able to hit that in pvp if allowed to stand and cast. A lot more mage whining is incoming I suspect. Obviously numbers will be much higher with higher end gear and raid buffs. Not that big crit numbers are everything but they're nice to see.

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Arcane Blast - The tooltip still lists its damage as 1256-1460.

Can anyone throw some dps figures out with the glyph and those arcane blast numbers?

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Slowfall - Has a 30 yard range now and can be cast on multiple targets at the same time.

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Arcane Mage AoE - Blizzard is coming out on top by a small margin when testing on dummies. I suspect in raid situations where there are 10+ mobs it'll be vastly superior.

I am assuming before you could only have Slow fall active on 1 person at a time, and now you can have it active on multiple people at once. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt it's an AoE spell now.

^

Yes, by that comment I don't mean to imply it's an aoe spell. Just that previously we could only cast in on one person (ourselves). Now we can cast it on as many friendly players as we like within 30 yards. We still have to cast it individually though.

Depending on what the mana situation ends up being like after the patch for arcane, I was wondering if taking incanter's absorption (and maybe the talent for mana shield?) could be a dps gain on any fight where there is a lot of raid damage going on. On something like KT where you can throw up a frostward which absorbs around 3700 if memory serves, (i'm at work and can't check) that should give 555 dmg, 15% of absorbed > spell damage, for 10 seconds. Is that enough to justify using a gcd on the ward as opposed to continuing your rotation?

It absorbs 1950+80.57%*SPower, coefficient is 1.5/3.5(instant)*1.88("healing" spell).

So with gear, if you absorb 4k for 523 mana, you get 600 SP for 10s, which adds about 9k damage according to Rawr.
You sacrifice 1 GCD, which is about 7k damage. So it's a small gain of 2k damage every 30 seconds.

It becomes a much higher gain when you're casting FW when running of Fire/Blizzard/Void Zone or to a Spine/Portal for more than 1 GCD (the first GCD is always used for Arcane Barrage).
If [Glyph of Frost Ward] works on the spell in question, the better.


There is also the thing that it actually does something (absorb damage), which the damage junkies will probably consider an irrelevant side effect

So, in completely stationary fights, it's a 1% DPS gain for 3 points, which is bad.
It's never picking worth over a even a semi-DPS talent if you only care about damage.
(I.e. "I never cast Frost Ward if I don't have the talent.")

In mobile fights with enough damage every 30s, it's a 5% DPS gain for 3 points, which is quite good.
It's better than Mind Mastery or Arcane Potency and much better than Arcane Mind, Incineration or Spell Impact.
(It's also much better than Arcane Meditation/Concentration/Meditation in 5 minute fights without JoW, but mana looks much worse in long fights or without 2T7 Mana Gems.)


TLDR on Incanter's Absorption
It's a very good talent if you take consistent damage and either cast Wards on the move or would cast them anyway for your healers.
The best place to take the points for it is Incineration. Or Arcane Mind/Meditation according to Rawr.
It's not worth taking if there is no regular raid damage, or if you would not cast Wards at all.

Roywyn:

How would it play out with a priest using pw:s on you? Makes me wish wards weren't on the GCD >.>

There don't seem to be a lot of fights where you take no damage at all, not as many where you can actually ward the damage.

Fire/Frost ward work on:
Sartharion (lava meteors)
Faerlina (Rain)
4 Horsemen (Meteor)
Sapphiron (General frost damage)
Kel'Thuzad (Frostbolts)

The only fights where you probably won't take any damage at all however is only:
Patchwerk

Would a priest or someone else providing absorption for these fights justify the talent? I'm thinking it would be too much of a hassle and not enough of a gain in these cases, considering arcane has few spare points, if any, as is.

So far for me the issue with using the wards in the raid damage fights vs just trusting my healers is the GCD and to a lesser extent mana cost. I'll pop one up sometimes if I'm moving and don't have anything better to do, but usually there is a hot streak or living bomb or fireblast available even then.

Sometimes I'll pop one up before the pull if I'm pretty sure I'll be taking damage very early in the fight. For adds, killing them with aoe is usually a better use of my gcd's/mana than warding myself.

One thing I would be interested to see in rawr that it is not currently doing is modeling of hyperspeed accelerators in the same manner as it models on use c/d trinkets, currently it is only modeling this enchant as a passive haste bonus which I believe with proper c/d stacking is a significant underestimate with the upcoming changes to it.

I just tested this again with a full stack of AB debuff and it doesn't affect the tooltip damage at all. It's still the same figures as I listed earlier (which are a good 200 damage higher than on live).

Has anybody checked how an arcane spec will perform in comparison with the other 2 with the glyph now that it is known to stack?

Which meta gem will be better for deep arcane mages?
Ember Skyfire Diamond or Chaotic Skyflare Diamond?

If I have synthesized what I have read here correctly the consensus on the optimal cast cycle for Arcane in 3.0.8 will be this:

1. Base sequence of (ABX, AM, Abarr) being careful to get the Arcane Shatter at the end. Move during the GCD after Abarr.
2. As X (in ABX) increases, so does DPS, as long as the chain of ABs is interrupted to consume procs of Mbarr efficiently.
3. X should change dynamically during the fight responding to mana pool and fight duration. I presume that X should also increase during periods of buffs like Heroism, AP, and IV, since your mana pool can't sustain a high X and you want to make it count when you do lengthen the AB chain. These buffs will multiplicatively interact with the DPS boost from a longer AB chain (confirm?)
4. AP + IV should be macro'd and used every cooldown. The time to use a mana gem (wth t7 bonus) is right before this macro. The time to use Evocation is in the last second of IV after using this macro.

Are there any mistakes in this summary? Thanks.

This statement is off a bit as there is much confusion in the forums about this. As the math has shown, you want to buff MBAM even at risk of losing a proc.

Think of it this way... 20% more damage on your MBAM vs 20% chance to get a MBAM. The mana difference alone should make it obvious. Add in the ABr combo, and the decision to take "20% damage" instead of "20% chance" wins out on more damage as well as being more mana efficient.

A simple and strict rotation of ABx3 AM ABr will intrinsically consume the MB procs at the optimal time.

There have been simulations showing this burn rate can be kept up for the entire fight, but should you need a low burn rate, AB ABr and on MB proc AB MBAM ABr

2T7 bonus puts click-trinkets on CD. Using the trinkets and the gem afterwards allows stacking (can anyone confirm that it's actually stacking and not only overwriting?)

That makes a lot of sense, Mentalfloss. By the way, I have a question about how POM interacts with the consumption of the AB buff stack. Suppose that for your burst cycle, you make a macro like this:

Stack AB and use this macro to start your burst. The POM, of course, applies its 30% crit to the AM. Then you still have it sitting there waiting. What if, instead of casting ABarr to get the Arcane Shatter, you use that POM-AB instead? Does it:

1. Leave you with 0 stacks of AB (because after using it the fifth Arcane Missile hit and the stack was consumed)
2. Leave you with 1 stack of AB (because the AM consumed the stack and the POM-AB started it over), or most intriguing of all,
3. Leave you with a full stack of AB, because it refreshed the stack before it could be consumed?

If the third option is what happens, that would be incredible; you could just do another Arcane Shatter on top of the first one. But it seems unlikely. Anyone tested this?

^

Just tested what you asked. As far as I can tell after a few attempts using POM AB before the final missile lands does cause the AB to benefit from the 60% increased damage but doesn't contribute toward a new stack. After POMing a Blast I was still left with zero stacks of the buff which surprised me. I expected it to cause one stack.

It'd be nice if someone else could test two. Shatter combos aren't that easy.

Thanks Pasture. That result I thought was rather likely -- after all if it is the fifth Arcane Missile hitting the target that consumes the stack, an AB hitting before that would contribute to the stack that is then almost immediately consumed. I guess then the correct thing to do is complete the shatter with Abarr.

POM in that situation still gives you the benefit of shaving a second off of a cast sequence that is within the burst cycle, in addition to the 30% on AM. So that does seem to be the best place to use it.