With the reduced mana cost of AB and increased rate to make MB procs, I don't see a reason to throw an Abar at the end ever.
Abar is reduced to movement situation only, and that assuming your PoM+AB isn't up.

With the increased proc chance of missile barrage (assuming it goes live), isn't the 4pt8 set bonus essentially wasted on Arcane? In order to get the full benefit of MB you have to have AB stacked, and with an 87% chance of a proc after 4 stacks whether or not the proc is consumed when you cast it seems irrelevant.

In regards to the 4 piece T8 bonus....Will the AB charges be consumed and just the MBarr is preserved? Or will both be preserved? If the AB charges are not preserved, then I agree with Radu that the 4 piece bonus is garbage for an Arcane Mage.

The AB stack is consumed as AM starts to channel and was done so as to remove the "clipping" technique, even if the MB proc is maintained by 4T8.

I guess what I am saying is that if they are extending the AB stack to 4 and making other changes to the Arcane "world"...might they be changing the retention of the AB stack as well? Or are you speaking from experience on the PTR?

The t8 bonus is a bit of a moot point. In a few weeks when these Arcane changes go live we'll be wearing t9 anyway.

Actually, the mage AI doesn't seem to be playing the spec correctly. The 57/3/11 mage in that test cast 115.1 Blasts and only 44.3 Missiles*. That's less than four Blast spells per Missiles spell - only 2.6. The 58/18 mage cast 109.5 Blasts and 42 Missiles (about the same ratio). The AI isn't properly stacking Blast to four, which is the recommended play-style. I suppose it's casting Missiles as soon as it gets a Missile Barrage proc.

For reference: SampleOutputPTR_Details - simulationcraft - Project Hosting on Google Code

fake edit: Actually, I think I'll try to set up a comparative simcraft of "Cast Missiles on proc" versus stacking to four. The subject has been math'd to death, but I want to look at a proper simulation.

I've not been managing to follow all of the theorycrafting so bear with my questions please.

Why do Arcane mages favour haste? Is there a soft cap where it isn't that handy to stact? Would an Acrane mage gem for haste rather than Spell Power?

I'm not sure why you are recconning the FFB and Arcane sets to be interchangeable. The general aarcane builds I've seen have access to both Precision as well as Arcane Focus which increases thier hit rating by 6% while the FFB spec I've seen from teh FFB thread only have access to Precision.

Haste is more useful than crit for arcane but never better than spellpower. The general priority is Hit to cap>SP>haste>crit>int, spi. The actual values will vary depending on your stats; at some point if you stack enough haste, crit might actually match haste. I'm not sure for arcane. Rawr indicates that it's true for fire at least, crit will overtake haste once you reach a certain level of haste.

In regards to gear for ffb vs arcane, there's so much hit available from gear that it makes FFB and arcane almost interchangeable. I've actually foregone focus because I had too much hit with the gear that I had in early Ulduar/late Naxx when I was arcane.

With the proposed 3.2.2 changes it seems that Arcane Barrage is now a situational spell, only to be used when you are moving. It has no place in DPS rotations. This seem to be a sad state for a 51'st point talent. There have been many suggested idea's on how to fix Arcane Barrage, but it is what it is right now. Which leads me to question if it is worth spending the a point on a 51'st point talent for a situational spell. Yes its only one point, but perhaps it could be better spent elsewhere.

3.2.2 doesn't make arcane barrage any worse than it already is. It may not be part of the main rotation, but it is still useful while moving and when "finishing" mobs with low hp. You can say that's situational, but it can make a pretty big difference on a fight like Thorim. Enough to merit spending a talent point anyways.

I agree. You very often find yourself having to move around with no spells to cast. Mimiron, Hodir, Thorim, XT, and other battles require you to be fairly mobile. I'm fire so I basically have LB and Fireblast. If LB is already up and FB is on cooldown all that time spent moving is resulting in 0 DPS.

Having Arcane Barrage means you'll be doing SOME damage while moving. If you end up casting 20-30 ABarrs while you're running from Mimiron's pewpews you'll end up doing an appreciable amount of damage more than had you not had the spell.

There's nothing wrong with situational spells. There's no question it won't be part of Arcane's primary rotation since MB will almost always be available but you'd be pretty silly to not take the spell.

The results were amusing: the rotation don't seem to matter.
The "Fishing" mage cast Blast until it had four stacks of Blast and a barrage proc and then Missiles. The "Twitchy" mage used Missiles as soon as it got a Barrage proc (or if it had four stacks of Blast). "TwitchyFisher" cast until it got a Barrage proc, then cast Missiles. The "Static" mage stuck to a rote four Blasts, Missiles rotation. "Dummy" used a 1:1 Blast-Missiles rotation, because I wanted to get a sense of what each spell's base damage was like. He's included in the Focus Magic circlejerk, but every mage's Focus uptime was 100% so I don't think he affected the results.

If this is accurate, it would be best to use Barrage procs ASAP for the mana efficiency (Twitchy's mana bar is noticeably stable in comparison to others').

Here's a RAR with all of the Simulcraft config files.

On live, I use arcane barrage for three situations.
1) If an add will die before I can cast AB and MBAM is either not up or would be wasted, XT spark or Freya lasher or tree, usually.
2) If I have to move or stop casting (ground tremor), especially if I have AB stacked and no MBAM proc yet.
3) If during a burn cycle I haven't gotten a MBAM proc after several AB casts to reset the stack.

My thinking is with these changes, AB spam during burn cycles should be much more sustainable and cost effective, which eliminates situation 3. Also for situation 2 given the time it takes to ramp to 4 ab stacks, it might be better to just resume AB casting after you've repositioned, depending on how many stacks you're up to, and assuming the stacks aren't going to fall off based on time (rarely if never happens).

Also, is there a reason the simcraft arcane spec being tested doesn't have arcane flows? I would think the decreased AP cooldown would make a big difference in the results.

Ghostcrawler made a statement about mages, especially arcane. Finally he picked up his old "pace yourself" comment.


Those are good questions and sadly I don't have time right now to answer them all. I will try and address the infamous "pace yourself" comment.

First, I'm talking about PvE here, and that means I'm going to skip over Frost for the moment. Sorry. We know how Frost should work in PvE and we need to get it there without making it too good in PvP. With the Arcane changes in 3.2.2 mages should now have two viable raiding specs again, which is an improvement. I ask that you not derail this thread into a Frost discussion.

To be brief to the point of simplicity, we see the Fire playstyle as being more about lining up your cooldowns to maximize your damage (and that improves trinkets as well as spells). Mana is a consideration the way it is for most mana users, but shouldn't be at the fore front of every decision you make and you do have ways of restoring mana if you get into trouble.

Arcane is a little different. We want Arcane to care about mana more. Sorry if that offends casters who think their output should be unlimited, but if it really bugs you, I suggest you try Fire. A lot of Arcane mages like the way mana works for their spec, and Arcane Blast is pretty obviously designed with that gameplay in mind.

What we're trying to do is give Arcane two rotations: the low mana, lower dps version and the higher mana, higher dps version. The first rotation would mean doing things like keeping Blast at 3 stacks, and the second would mean going into 4 stacks. Your trade-off for going to the expensive rotation would be that you could do higher dps than Fire if and when you had enough mana to keep that cycle going. This then becomes where the player skill of Arcane comes in -- knowing when you can afford to step it up for max dps and when you need to pace yourself.

I say all that because we're still tweaking the Arcane numbers for 3.2.2 and that might include increasing the mana cost of stack 4, since the free Missile Barrage procs are already a pretty generous mana break as it is. I know some players will try and keep the 4 stack Arcane Blast up all the time and will then call it a class design problem when they run OOM. That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for. We also might lower the duration of the Arcane Blast buff / debuff to make sure Arcane Barrage is the clear choice for when you are time constrained (like say you have to move or do something else).

This means we are asking a little more out of Arcane mages. To be honest, some of them responded negatively to the Arcane buff in 3.2.2 because they felt like they had to sacrifice too much of what they enjoyed about the playstyle (which includes mana as a potentially limiting resource). We are trying to nail that sweet spot while still boosting sustained Arcane dps.

The goal is NOT to push every mage into Arcane next patch because it's the new flavor of the month for highest theoretical dps. We don't want you to have to regem and everything whenever we come out with a new patch and a new spec is on top. We want you to have a choice between Fire and Arcane (and maybe someday Frost). Arcane will "beat" Fire sometimes, but not all the time.

I know that's a lot of philosophy dumped quickly, and doubtless it will spawn a lot of other questions, but that's the idea in a nutshell. Try and take it at the high-level spirit in which it is offered instead of trying to read too much into every word I chose.

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - The New Real Top Mage Questions

I assume he meant to say "includes" instead of "improves", but as a fire mage, the only CDs I have is a Wild Magic potion and a Flame Cap. On-use trinkets are few and far between, most are random procs or stacking buffs. I assume he is referring to Combustion as a viable CD, even though it's been pointed out many times that the benefit of using it is almost negligible, even during a burn phase.

Maybe he's thinking on a larger raid-wide scale where things like PI and Heroism/Bloodlust are considered mage CDs?

Fascinating - I had not expected the difference to be so small.

While Twitchy (cast as soon as it MBAM Procs) seems to have a much stabler mana consumption rate, it also does not use Evocation at all, but the Fisher does. Would it be possible to have Twitchy use evocation and try to convert that into more AB Spam, assuming that that is higher DPS?

Edit: Actually, seeing as how the Fishing rotation did use Evocation, would that not be a (slightly) higher DPS rotation for the short term, and Twitchy being a more efficient rotation?

I hope they're careful about some of the suggested changes. Lowering the buff duration on Arcane Blast is just a bad idea. It had a short duration once, and it was increased because it was too restrictive. Likewise they need to be careful with what they do with mana. Simulations place Arcane 3% ahead of fire in a tank and spank fight (and consider fights with interupts and multiple adds where fire will push ahead anyway), but making stacking to four stacks overly prohibitive is just going to erode the dps gain. By all means make Arcane more about mana management but if the mana penalty is going to be increased then the dps gain needs to be increased too (since it won't be a standard dps gain if we can't always stack to four thus dps will be less than current 3.2.2 simulations).

They could raise frost bolt damage 20% and not only would it still not be a viable pve spec but mage representation still wouldn't break 5% in arena because destro burst is out of control, affliction is face roll easy, and mage's burst would still be lower than all of the other classes. I hate how Ghostcrawler constantly ignores frost for some arena reason, despite even top mages doing horrible this season.

They really failed at the "two rotation" thing with this recent change. I hope they give fire some buffs so it catches up with new arcane and I hope they get a two rotation thing in. It's good to know their intentions, and they did something amazing for mages with the living bomb change, but they really seem to be blindly modifying the mage class.

In an attempt to explain the results, I set up an equation to compare DPS of Arc rotations assuming Missile Barrage is up every time you cast Arcane missiles:

n = number of Arcane Blasts cast
b = Arcane Blast damage
m = Arcane Missiles damage


According to Dummy's output, b is 8884, m is 17395 (Corrected for Arcane Blast). Plugging this formula into Excel, you get the following:

Blasts Cast	Expected DPS
0*	6950
1	5881
2	5735
3	5822
4	6002

*MBAM spam.

Since one will never gain a Missiles proc while casting the first Blast (and without 4pt8 you'll never retain Missiles procs) it seems Greg's comment was right. If you get a Barrage from the first Blast, you stack past the second to increase your DPS anyway, switching between three and four-stack rotations. However, since Barrage is a proc, this is left up to circumstance more than player choice since casting Missiles without Barrage is such a huge DPS loss,* so you'd rather spend the time you could spend on "burn cycles" stacking Blast to 4 before using procs stacking blast to 4 to fish for procs as part of your default rotation instead. It's a pretty far cry from the stated intended design of Arcane, which requires a lot of player control to work as intended.

*e: The difference is goddamn enormous

Blasts Cast	DPS with Barrage proc	DPS without Barrage proc	DPM with Barrage proc	DPM without Barrage proc
0*	6950	3479	inf.	18.23
1	5881	3920	136.73	25.16
2	5735	4301	50	23.71
3	5822	4657	30.08	20.15
4	6002	5001	21.81	17.07

You just can't take that hit to your DPS.

Surely that's exactly what GC is saying they won't do..

Fire is the steady DPS spec, you know what you'll get in most fights just doing the optimum rotation.

Arcane will sometimes blow fire away when the planets align (cooldowns, mana management). However when things aren't in your favour, or you mess up your rotation/mana management, you'll be penalised and end up well down on fire..

For me if they can achieve that i'll be happy. It gives you a chance to think about what you're doing, and optimise your play for a specific fight, which is what most arcane mages find fun. Those that just want steady good DPS with raid utility will have fire to use.


It's also quite clear this is all very much a work in progress, and we'll see arcane change alot on PTR over the next few weeks.

Now we have a new quote, I can understand it ralated to FFB perhaps but it seems he doesn't know that fire mages (fire/ttw) have no cooldowns, Combustion isn't taken in the fire spec since the start of Ulduar.