I suppose there is probably a line to draw here as well. I'm talking strictly bosses, but on trash, and more importantly, on adds, Glyph of Scorch really shines. I haven't done too many boss fights in Ulduar yet, but on Razorscale, it has seemed incredibly important to kill Watchers as quickly as possible. Being able to apply a full 5% crit to the target in one go is immensely useful, as there simply isn't enough DPS on each watcher (being that there are four tanks and four groups) to trivialize their health pool. That could end up being an overstatement, because I've only attempted the encounter a few times in 25-man, but it's an example nonetheless.

Naturally, these targets and similar ones do die relatively quickly, and in that regard, scorching at all is still somewhat of a waste, but I would argue that if you don't have Glyph of Scorch, you shouldn't scorch at all on trash/adds that are going to die in under 30 seconds. If you do have Glyph of Scorch, there's no reason not to.

The point may be moot anyway. Just looked at the warlock discussions and it seems affliction is their top spec again so they will be applying the debuff and we won't have to cast scorch at all.

Excuse my ignorance, but why has the gemming/gear shifted from SP/crit oriented to SP/Haste for Totw/FFB spec?

What? You can't have a Frostfire Bolt set with Torment the Weak. Fireball (18.53 or 19.52) still favors haste gems. Frostfire spec (53.18) still favors crit gems. Nothing has changed in that regard.

Actually, there is a build with ignite, water elemental and TTW that uses FFB as the main nuke. I tried it on the PTR just for kicks. The DPS is lower than frost/TTW, but probably better than deep frost. It's essentially 18/12/41. I wouldn't recommend it, but I guess it's worth to mention it "exists".

If you put it that way, that any combination of x/y/z specs, where x + y + z = 71, "exists". I also really doubt that spec is "better" than frost/TTW because of lack of Burnout, Hot Streak, LB that makes the FFB have that extra "oomph".

Maybe I have missed it Enthorn, but I have checked your first Post twice. How long is the Fight Duration you have choosen?

So I finally decided to give fire/ttw a try, I put my character into rawr, change my spec, optimized my gear a bit with some extra pieces I had in my bags, and rawr showed my dps at about 6100, whereas with arcane my dps would only be 5347 or something like that. I ticked off all the buffs and everything just like I had for arcane.

So here comes patchwerk and what happens...1k drop in dps! Can rawr be trusted to calculate dps? As of now I am starting to lose faith in this tool, I mean it was way off.

Here are the parses:
Last Week as Arcane:
http://wowwebstats.com/vv45l6a3avbbe?s=71089-121490

This week as Fire:
WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

@marsui
In your second parse you actually did more damage than in the first parse. Also, the fight is a whole minute longer on the second parse. This means there's a lot more time spent DPS'ing outside of cooldowns, which will influence your numbers quite a bit.

@marsui

You probably assumed in Rawr that you had both an elemental shaman and a boomkin (raidbuffs!) in your raid.

Well, in the first parse you lack the ele and in the second parse you lack both the ele and the boomkin. Missing one of those is doable but missing both really hurts your dps/damage.

I didn't bother listing it, since I use 1 second fight durations.

Anyway, thanks for noticing -- it's actually 300 seconds, the default. I was setting it to 420 (7 minutes) originally. This seems like a better time. You know, maybe it is 420 seconds... I don't know anymore. Regardless of whether it's 300 or 420, mana still apparently isn't a problem, and this is without mana tides and 2P T7. I usually get at least 1 resto shaman in my group (2 resto shamans in 10-man, hilariously), and I suspect others may get the same, and perhaps even some innervates, but since I don't think innervates on mages is the norm, it doesn't make sense to add this in. Thus, if the fight is increased to maybe 8-9 minutes, you may see some mana issues, and definitely if there is some AoE in there. Chain casting Blizzard or Flamestrike can really burn through mana.

Elemental Oath/Moonkin Aura can influence your DPS greatly. Make sure that when you're selecting something like Elemental Oath, you're also selecting Totem of Wrath for both Spellpower and for Spell crit. And yes, Rawr is actually very accurate. If it helps, look at every buff you received over a fight. Next, change the fight duration and your DPS time to match what a parse (wowmeter or WWS) is saying you had. I've done this numerous times, and if you have all the settings correctly, the DPS listed in Rawr should be 100-400 DPS ahead of what you did in game. If it's behind, then there are fight mechanics at play you aren't accounting for (Thaddius, Malygos, Gluth AoE damage, etc.)

And you where using LB rank 1 not rank 3.

I see alot of spec related questions over the past 2 pages.

I'd be really interested to see some revised BiS setups with known Ulduar gear now that 3.1 is live. The latest proposed BiS list is from Enthorn and was posted over 20 days ago. It doesn't seem to include T8.5 and he mentions some unknown variables that are better understood now. I'm not the best with Rawr and there are alot of new items out there, so I'd really like to promote some fresh discussion on this topic.

Enthorn, i've seen some posts of you, and about mana regen, What do you choose?

Arcane Focus 2/3
or
Master of Elements 3/3

basically for fights with heavy aoe skills... and long duration ^^

And the Living bomb glyph is still better than scorch? ( if have 2 or more mages, you can choose who is gonna use scorch )

Ty for advises.

Master of Elements is better hands down. Arcane Focus only reduces mana for arcane spells, and you really shouldn't be using Arcane Explosion much for AoE these days for any spec. On my WWS, MoE is usually the 2nd or 3rd highest mana regen source, after Refreshment and Mana Gems.

hmm...
thanks for the answer atua.

So, the basic rotation for AE spells is sth like that:
Flamestrike 8 > FS 9 > Blizz

or the dots from flamestrike changed since 3.1 ?
The LB explosion does a great AE dmg too...

Wrong topic to be asking in but yes that is correct. If you are the only person in the raid who can provide the +5% crit debuff than you should keep the Imp Scorch glyph, if not then 100% get the LB glyph as it is a bigger DPS increase.

Ideally you'd want a lock to apply the debuff but from what I've seen the majority are going fire destro.

If you're running with three mages, ramping up to 5 stacks takes little to no time at all so that shouldn't be an issue. Unless there are many times where you're switching targets, like the new boss in VOA where having that 5 stack from the glyph being very useful to down the add before it wipes the raid.

I apologize. I figured Glyph's management was a part of the Optimal Set for a FB.TTW build.

I will be circling back with my locks based on the coments

If I recall correctly...if you REALLY NEEDED to have the scorch glyph, it wouldn't be LB which you would be replacing but rather FB and possibly even MA depending on your gear set.

This seems to be the general way the numbers work out. I ran the numbers in another post; I'll shorten it up a bit here:

Disclaimer: All of these values were taken based on one character in Rawr in as-of-then best-in-slot. If you load your own character, the DPS value of Glyph of Fireball or Glyph of Frostfire may be entirely different than what its value is for this character. As such, your character may require more or less spirit to match the DPS value of Glyph of Molten Armor to FB/FFB glyphs. It simply doesn't work that anyone can take X spirit and say every character needs that amount for this glyph to be better.

- the crit from Glyph of Molten Armor is dependent on how much spirit you have, this is fixed
- the value of that spirit/crit (and therefore, the DPS value of the glyph) is dependent on the relative stat value of crit
- the values of glyph of Fireball and Frostfire are dependent on spell power, crit, haste, etc.
- all of these things taken into consideration, X spirit will always convert to X crit, but how that ranks compared to Glyph of Fireball or Glyph of Frostfire is something you need to personally look up in Rawr

Now then... on we go.

Glyph of Molten Armor converts spirit to crit at 1:0.2, which means at 228 spirit, you have 45.9 crit rating, giving 1% crit. The old glyph gave a flat 2%, which means we need 456 spirit to break even. But breaking even doesn't mean it's the best glyph, it just means we're not at a loss. In actuality, Glyph of Fireball is providing a static 5% crit (albeit only to Fireball, and removing the DoT), so this becomes our focal point of which one to replace.

Because Glyph of Molten Armor scales with spirit, you get a much higher return from it as your spirit scales with gear and buffs. This means that it won't be offering nearly as much DPS in a 5-man setting as it will in 10-man, or 25-man (unless you specifically stack classes for these buffs). If that is an influencing factor, then I would replace Glyph of MA with Glyph of Scorch, due to the possible variance. However, if all you do is 25-man runs, or your 10-man run is well stacked, then obtaining 700 spirit isn't difficult at all. Look at our spirit sources, minus equipment:

Base: 179
Enchants: 10+20 = 30
Buffs: 80+51 = 131
Total: 179+361+30+131 = 340
Student of the Mind: 340*1.07 = 363.8
Blessing of Kings: 363.8*1.1 = 400.18 * 0.2 = 80.036/45.9 = 1.74% crit

How much more spirit do we need then?

Well, let's look. Glyph of Molten Armor is adding 246.47 DPS in our optimal set. You can roughly get this by multiplying the crit rating that it is adding by our stat value of crit. Crit is valued at 1.5 per 1 DPS. This set is listed as having 824 overall spirit. Multiply that by 0.2 and you get 164.8*1.5 = 247.2. Glyph of Fireball on the other hand is listed as 201.72. Since Glyph of Fireball really isn't going to change in value as much as Glyph of MA will, we can just leave it and work from there.

201.72/1.5 = 134.48/0.2 = 672.4 spirit needed to match Glyph of Fireball.

672.4/1.1 (kings) = 611.27/1.07 (SotM) = 571.28 - 340 (base+enchants+buffs) = 231

Thus, we need 231 spirit from items, fully raid buffed, for Glyph of Molten Armor to be as good as Glyph of Fireball.

Now it's simply a matter of looking at your equipment and seeing whether you have a total of 231 spirit from items. Some items you will have spirit from simply because you want the set bonus, or because there are no better alternatives. Take a look at the 4-piece T8, including the off-set hands: 66+33+50+64 = 213. Anything past that is surpassing Glyph of Fireball's value. This would be the 64 spirit on boots and 84 spirit on staff, which are giving 29.6 crit rating.

Keep in mind that we're only looking at the spirit value affecting Glyph of Molten Armor, so while the boots and staff only give 29.6 crit at 20% conversion, it's 81.4 crit at 55%. And Glyph of Living Bomb is so far ahead, it's not even worth calculating (especially since the value of Glyph of Living Bomb should increase as your crit increases from Glyph of Molten Armor, depending on where the DoT gets its crit rate from). Thus, it's merely a question of gear progression or raid composition I believe, as to whether or not you replace Glyph of Fireball, or Glyph of Molten Armor.

Edit: Actual numbers from Rawr.

If we start at 824 Spirit and remove 80 spirit (Divine Spirit) then remove Student of the Mind (throw 2 points in Magic Absorption for instance), we end up at 682 (824/1.07=770-88=682). Now look at Glyph values again in the Comparisons chart and you'll see Glyph of Molten Armor is at 203.12 vs Glyph of Fireball's 202.13. We lost 142 spirit (out of 824 total) and suddenly the question of which Glyph to replace isn't so easy to answer. It should be apparent though that Glyph of Molten Armor's scaling is far superior to Glyph of Fireball. Increase spirit by 10% (824->906) and Glyph of MA goes from 246.47 to 271.67 -- a jump of 25.2 DPS from a gain of 82 Spirit. Glyph of Fireball actually decreases by 0.25.

Frostfire:

Glyph of Living Bomb: 413.07
Glyph of Molten Armor: 262.72
Glyph of Frostfire: 172.19
DPS: 7228.65 (includes Focus Magic via dual spec)
Spirit: 820

Minimum spirit needed for Glyph of Molten Armor to surpass Frostfire: 732 (raid buffed), at which point:

Glyph of Molten Armor: 171.31
Glyph of Frostfire: 171.11

Are you sure the Staff is better than 1h+oh combo? :O