What is the general preference though? Like I understand swapping but does anyone have some info on the damage difference or some kind of chart/table of the difference?

The preference goes to Molten Armor, but only if you know you don't have problems with going OOM. If you never (or rarely) go OOM, then the extra crit from the MA glyph is good. Along the same lines, if you don't go OOM, then the extra mana from glyphed Mage Armor is not providing any benefit.

I don't know how well non-glyphed Mage Armor works for mana regen in spite of arcane's heavy mana usage. If I had to use it often, then I would want the glyph until I knew that I was no longer having mana isuses.

Perhaps i'm misreading your comment, but how does this make sense? The astute Arcane mage will most certainly make sure the extra mana from glyphed Mage Armor provides beneifts, namely gets used up in high spam rotations. Whether it's as good as Molten Armor i'd love to also know, but good mages won't be aiming to let mana just sit there and get wasted. At worst, it'll be burnt off in AB spam combo's every 2 minutes and then evocated back to full again.

This is an extremely valid question. Arcane converts mana into dmg so I would be very interested to know which yields more DPS. More mana = a more mana intensive rotation and arcane has such a low crit modifier anyways.

Well, seeing how it has such a low crit multiplier, i would think that adding 10+ arcane blasts to your rotation @ 60% damage modifier would rule the roost. Especially if you gear for even more SP/Haste. I mean, over the course of say a 3 minute fight, the mana from Mage Armor alone would be around 12600, thats 9-10 or more arcane blasts that you could spam. you could keep up a rotation that is like, ABx3/Abarr, and do ABx3/AM/Abarr when missle barrage procs. Or just do a few ABx4 rotations instead of ABx3.

It just seems to me that Arcane just doesn't scale well with crit, where as you have almost complete control over converting Mana to damage.

Well, I think an easy way to answer the question is do you only run 25mans? or do you also run heroics/10mans? If you run other stuff beyond just 25man, I'd glyph for mage armor (and that is what I've done.) Getting the right group make-up in a 5/10man for mana regen is far more difficult than a 25man. In the 25mans we nearly always have replenishment going off, but in my 10man? We are lucky to have 1 hunter. Never a SP, no pally, only sometimes a shammy. You shouldn't need someone else to tell you which armor and glyph to use. Go try it out, it will probably be pretty obvious to you after you've run with the spec.

Unless your cleansers are on auto-pilot; or feel like spiting you. Both already happened to me this week.

It was definitely buffed (several people claim to 30 yards). Magic Attunement is a must-have for that fight.

While 40% thread reduction is likely overkill for geared tanks, I feel 20% is a must. My personal preferences:
Arcane Stability (4); pushback kills whole Missiles if under 100% reduction (and our pallies don't spec Imp Conc Aura, otherwise I'd have put 3 only).
Arcane Focus (2); I'm over hit cap.
Student of The Mind (0); 15-50 spirit is not worth much regen, esp. using Molten Armor.
Arcane Subtlety (1); 20% threat reduction seems necessary and enough.
Magic Attunement (2); mobility/flexibility = dps (and for Heigan).

YMMV, but Rawr generally gave me results where for long fights, Molten Armor with a high DPM rotation, did better than Mage Armor with a high DPS rotation. But of course, that depends on your raid buffs and the actual fight duration, and whether or not you get hit by Detonate Mana, or Evo standing on a fissure :-/


Important note:
If your ping is too high to avoid clipping the 5th missile, consider googling for "wow latency hack"; that will halve your ping, but may also negatively affect the rest of your internet traffic.

That's what I got, and I couldn't make sense of it, see my reply in here.

However, with varying ping in the order of 70-400ms and missiles going off not even at fixed intervals I assume it's safe to get about 50% combos than to clip 2 missiles accidently. Plus, for my equip, the damage from the last missile is aout the same as the 60% buff to Abar, so clipping it will result in no damage gain. (small dataset done in IF, so numbers might not be 100% correct)

No, you're correct. I didn't take AB spam for a mana dump into account. I was considering only the standard ABx3/AM/Abar sequence and not straying outside of that, which I guess isn't always best for the reason you stated (wanting to spam AB when necessary).

In the end, maybe it's a wash between both types of armor? Would you necessarily want to dump mana with AB spam if you used Molten Armor? I suppose it would be situational, yes? (Sorry for the confusion.)

EDIT: On the other hand, if you could still spam AB for your mana dump while using Molten Armor and still not go OOM at inopportune times, then Molten would be my choice. FWIW, I'm using Mage Armor for a while only because my gear isn't at the level of many others here. I hope this is coming out the right way so as to make more sense.

Slightly on a tangent, but i'm thrilled with the choices we have to make regarding Molten vs Mage armors as an Arcane mage - it's refreshing. Both feel viable, both are useful and both are fun. This was not the same feeling I had as a Frostfire mage regarding Armor, namely "Stick up Molten Armor always, except when practically forced not to". There wasn't much choice or fun involved.

Edit - To respond to the below post, I think it's a given that epic alchemy trinkets will be introduced with 3.1, possibly tacked onto a fleshed-out Frostborn rep for Ulduar. Hopefully we Alchemists get a useful trinket.

Quick note: with the 3.0.8 change to [Crazy Alchemist's Potion], it is now effectively 4300 mana and potentially a haste or destro pot in the same bottle (plus some usually irrelevant health). A mana and DPS proc combined is pretty big for arcane. I think this beats enchanting's 1 spell power lead over alchemy's flask bonus pretty easily, at least for arcane mages. The current ilvl 200 alch trinkets do not increase the mana or health received, but I'm only using mine because my hit trinket is useless right now. Hopefully the epic BoP alch trinkets will be able to take advantage of them. I'll whip up a large batch tonight and do some testing.

I find it hard to believe many geared mages are able to stay below 11% hit. In most cases I'd have to replace very good pieces with subpar ones simply because they don't have hit on them, but provide a 10-20 dps boost. I think peace of mind is worth more than that, so I sacrificed 3 points in AF for full pushback protection (very much worth it in many fights) and the 2nd point in threat reduction (worth it when your dps hybrids decide to try out tanking and aren't very geared/skilled).

Also remember, on some fights Mage Armor may be ideal for that extra resist and coupled with Mana Absorption + Pally Aura, you could be sitting at ~200+ resists for certain schools of magic. This potentially could lead to some full resists -- which is more mana returned (20k mana * 2% = 1k mana returned per full resist).

First let me apologize for asking a question that has most likely been stated several times, only I'm a little confused on the actual figure. I have read ALL the threads in the mage section, and I suppose it's just a matter of being innundated by numbers. So for my lack of ability to absorb all the information at once, I apologize in advance.

I have been playing a mage for a little over 6 months now, and up until WoTLK I was frost/arcane. Since the expansion dropped, I have specced FFB and been gearing for that build.

I've found I don't like playing FFB spec...

So with the new promise of the arcane build, I am very excited to go home & try it out.

Since I was gearing for FFB, my hit rating has climbed to 343 (mostly due to gems in sockets), crit is 13.34% (before molten armor), haste is 401, and mana regen is 383, bonus damage 1645 unbuffed.

When I spec into 57/3/11 - what should my hit be (my toon is Draenei)? I am really just looking for a "typical" figure to base my gemming around, since I seem to have it in my mind that I will be over hit cap when I respec. Am I correct? I have seen figures ranging anywhere from 7% to 17%, so I'm really unsure as to exactly where the cap is for arcane.

Thanks in advance for being patient with me.

It's in the first post. 183.6, or 184, is the number for a mage with all 6 points of hit talents, misery, and goat aura.

As an alchemist mage, then, is there any point at all in using Runic Mana Potions instead of the Crazy Alchemist Potions? It strikes me that Crazy Alchemist potion is better in ALL scenarios. It's cheaper to make and restores the same amount of mana along with some health and a potion effect. It seems like an all round win.

Thank you

No reason at all, even if there was no DPS proc. They're cheaper and provide health in addition to mana. And it's not that crazy, this is an intended benefit of a profession.

The reason I asked earlier was because I was looking for a more in depth analysis of Molten Armor vs Mage Armor, beyond my point of testing (since my testing is very limited)

As for which one I personally chose, I am currently sitting on a Glyphed Molten Armor (I mainly run 25s only) but I noticed even with everything ideally (+ heroism) mana has still been a problem. The gear on my mage is still not yet feasible to ask for innervates over other players (such as the healers) so therefore I think I will be swapping to Glyphed Mage Armor.

As for hit rating, its a smaller amount than FFB spec so therefore we should be able to pick up more dps stats (or utility stats). I will have to relook into getting some more spirit on my gear and swapping some stam/int pieces to stam/int/spirit (the items with the spirit itemization) which us mages have originally or should have been passing up to warlocks and priests previously.

1 crit rating = .509 spell power

230 crit rating = 117 spell power

1 mana/5 = .2 spell power

Therefore you need 585 mana/5 from glyphed mage armor.

Looks like mana mangement and using Molten Armor is the way to go isn't it.

After a relatively smooth Sarth3D kill last night, I was a lot happier with 5/5 Arcane Stability. The DPS is comparable or slightly higher than FFB, though I firmly believe this can be attributed to max Stability (as Lava Strikes are plentiful). You are exactly right that Arcane has higher burst on demand than FFB, which is very important. I ended up #3 on that fight. So, Arcane isn't quite as bad as I made it out to be, I just needed Arcane Stability.

Something that needs to be discussed, I don't believe the static stat weights that most spreadsheets and simulators give towards which stats to stack is accurate for arcane. They're all derived from static simulators using static rotations, which is the anti-thesis of arcane. I consider arcane a 'throttle spec', whereby dynamically changing dps rotation on the fly adjusts mana consumption up or down depending upon the situation and mana remaining with matching changes in dps.

In my personal opinion, spirit is heavily underrated for arcane. Let's take a theoretical mage where your primary stat is raw spellpower, followed by spirit, then intellect. Haste is a competing stat that should be factored in last because of its direct impact in influencing how much one can throttle within the cooldown windows of evocation and other mana recovery methods. I'm contending that the more MP5 you have with glyphed mage armor, the more dynamic the 'throttling' becomes allowing higher overall dps. My personal goal is to achieve 1000 MP5 after I've maximized spellpower wherever possible. Any other stat is secondary, and being 1-2% under the hit cap is fine if I get enough spellpower/mp5 from the exchange.

I was pulling 4500+ boss dps consistently in 10-man naxx last night with a 68/3/0 PvP build. My gear is predominately 10-man raid, one T7.5, two T7, and one heroic blue. I've always been arcane, I leveled arcane, I raided as arcane even with FFB was FotM. My gear is already ideal (imho), with spellpower first and spirit second. I'm worried that if I switch to a pure PvE build and get better gear, that I might start going above 5k dps in 10-man, and 6k dps in 25-man, prompting Blizzard to nerf something. However I think Blizzard might appreciate heavy use of spirit and leave it alone to some degree, as I've seen many mages in better gear (albeit FFB gear) barely break 2500 dps as arcane.

ABx3 -> (MBar proc) -> ABar is a fine static rotation, albeit boring and easy to simulate. However I change this rotation depending upon my mana reserves and where my cooldowns to get mana back sit. If I'm high on mana or my cooldowns are available and I have ABx3 debuff up but MBar hasn't proc'd yet, I will cast AB#4 and maybe even AB#5 in an effort to proc it before dumping the stack. Even as costly as the mana is, fully stacked I've seen AB crit for 13-15k+ back to back many times (5.5k - 6.25k dps) in 10-man, and I save myself the cast time of non-stacked AB debuffs 'resetting' the rotation when you fail to achieve MBar proc. If you utterly fail to achieve MBar proc (it happens), slow cast the missiles and clip the debuff with ABar as usual to reset (this is fairly mana neutral). This strategy is especially worthwhile in gimmick fights where you manage to stack sparks on Malygos; I saw a pair of 67K arcane blasts back to back and had to slam invisibility.

Remember the goal is to always end the fight with less than 10% mana remaining, and arcane is the spec which gives you deliberate, controllable throttle to achieve this.