The 5th missile in Missile Barrage seems delayed. Is it more dps to start Arcane Blast right after the 4th missile or wait it out for the 5th?

Also has anyone started to do the math on the new updated T10 set bonuses? The 2 set is a 12% haste increase for 5 sec after missile barrage is consumed. Looks promising for arcane mages.

That's not entirely true. If you are at 3 stacks and you haven't had an missile barrage yet and while casting your next arc blast, you may want go ahead and queue up an arc barrage for the next cast. The missile barrage then procs after the 4th blast lands, but you've already queue'd and cast the arc barrage. That eats the 4 stacks and then you have a missile barrage proc at 0 stacks.

Arcane Barrage is not part of the ABSpam04MBAM rotation.

You should cast Blast as soon as you can without clipping the 5th missile. That's typically ~100ms before it finishes casting, depending on latency.

The only time that I've found it to be a DPS gain to cast ABar over AM is if you choose to break AB after 2 stacks and even then its a MPS loss. As a general rule it is better to break AB with AM if you want to break AB stacks.

I'm curious why people hate on SotM so much. It provides 20dps with the first point and 15 more dps with each consecutive point. Which makes it worth 50dps overall. You have 3 points to play around with in the Arcane tree assuming Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft are the standard talents.

Now, those 3 points can go into Arcane Stability, Student of the Mind, Magic Absorption, or Incanter's Absorption. I think we can safely toss Magic Absorption out with the fights in ToC. I also think that we can toss out Arcane Stability as there isn't enough random aoe damage that you aren't going to flat out move out of, interrupting any cast you have going regardless.

So that leaves us with Student of the Mind or Incanter's Absorption. As stated above SotM is worth 20dps with the first point, and 15dps with each consecutive point. We've already determined that there isn't enough random aoe to justify Arcane Stability so how can we justify Incanter's Absorption over Student of the Mind. Aside from Twins, are there enough fights with enough random damage that you can waste gcd's on shields/wards and movement time to proc Incanter's Absorption in that legion flame across the room, and still gain at least a flat out 50dps across the board? Will you have enough mana to put up mana shield for things like leeching swarm, snobolds, or times when wards are on cd?

On a personal level, I feel that the answer is obvious. SotM is a better flat out talent than IA or Stability. It is a flat out dps increase and you don't have to worry about running across the room to stand in that Legion Flame, or having enough mana to use mana shield for leeching swarm. I know that Frostfire is THE spec for 25 heroic Anub, but I also know that IA is THE spec for Twins. We're talking about the other 11 (75% of ToC) possible boss encounters in ToC 10's and 25's aside from 25H Anub and all the Twins fights.

I disagree. Then again, I run 10mans with our healers being a restodruid (with Valanyr) and a disc priest. I always have a shield on me, and IA is generally procced. What I do is I get the shield then I make it proc by taking damage. How? Well its easy. On Beasts, you can run in and right out of a fire in p1, and into a poison cloud for a moment in p2 and p3 as long as they are up. For Jaraxxus just take a quick tip in Legion Flames. On Faction Champions stand in hellfire or run into Bladestorm and then blink out. Twins is obvious. Then Anubarak you could try to get a few stacks of the debuff perhaps, and this would constantly be damage taken. Might not be a good strategy in heroic mode, but it will suffice through normal.

Besides, spirit isn't that great for arcane. Although I would agree and say SotM is decent for fire, it really isn't for arcane. It provides crit which is of much less importance for arcane due to terrible crit multiplier. Also it provides neglect-able mana regen. so it really is pretty bad.

Even if MB hasn't proc'd?

You're not approaching this thought process correctly. You're arguing spending 3 talent points for 50 DPS. Considering the BiS list is calculating ~10k DPS how can you justify 3 talent points for a 0.5% DPS increase. To begin with, you'd be better off filling out the rest of Magic Attunement in the spec you linked. After that you might as well put those two other points in IA because you can either have a 0.5% DPS increase on all the fights, or you can have an actually noticeable DPS increase on Twins and reap the benefits from intelligent play on other fights with Fire/Frost/Absorbed Priest shield damage.

You're right, 50dps is a drop in the bucket when compared to the 10k bis is calculating at. And with intelligent play I agree that you can use your wards pretty judiciously and make use of IA. Would you get more than a constant 50dps on those fights using wards and shields? Just curious.

No but if it does proc on your final AB cast it is a DPS loss if you cast ABar and then MBAM at 0 stacks over casting AM and you get the proc at the same time. Since you don't know if you are going to get a proc off your final AB it is better to use AM unless you know that you can't stand still for the time it takes to cast AM. Try running the numbers through RAWR using Arcane Cycles. I thought that ABar may have been a better option so took the time to go through each cycle but was proved wrong.

I've always thrown an ABarr if I get 4 stacks without an MB proc, but I might just be doing it wrong. Its also been a while since I played Arcane, and I have nowhere near the mana issues I used to have.

If ABarr is not part of the AB04MBAM rotation, why do we spec into it? to throw while we're running out of a fire? or would that GCD be better spent just popping another AB?

Actually, I also queue ABarr near the end of my ABx4 when there hasn't been a Missile Barrage proc. Unless you're not specced into ABarr. Reason being:

Edit: The above quote was posted on the 09/24/09. See the post/s below for more recent changes.

Unfortunately you're quoting something that was stated before they fixed MB delay so that is not accurate.

There is a simple explanation for that. I'll take your math for granted that you get 50 dps out of 3/3 Student of the Mind. Again, sparing all the math and opening a random parse from a random boss fight these days, even if you assume an average mage dps of 5000, (which is way lower than what it currently is in your typical ToC or ToGC raid), this means you are spending 3 talent points for less than 1% dps increase. As a rule of thumb, a good dps increasing talent gives around 1% dps for each point you put in it, and usually more. Thus, the utility you get from other talent points will easily outshine a measly dps gain for 3 talent points.

First of all: please excuse my bad english.
Does spellqueueing work with "/cast [nochanneling Arcane Missiles] Arcaneblast" after AM?
Or do I have to interrupt the missiles, when the latency is reached and cast AB manually(back to stopcasting)?

@Fast Jack: This has been said many times, but don't use nochanneling unless you completely suck at timing your casts properly. Nochanneling requires that the arcane missiles are done casting CLIENT SIDE before allowing you to cast arcane blast. Using quartz and properly timing keypresses allows you to cast about 100ms sooner (exact number depending on your lag) without clipping any missiles. You don't have to use an explicit /stopcasting, either; you just cast your arcane blast and it'll automatically interrupt the missile cast. Quartz will tell you when to do so.

@Several posts above: Also said many times is that using arcane barrage to break your arcane blast stacks when necessary hasn't been optimal since something like 3.0.9. An unhasted, no missile barrage arcane missile is far more mana efficient and about the same dps, so a far better option. The only time you should ever hit your arcane barrage key is if you're forced to move and/or your arcane blast stack will fall off before you're able to make better use of it. I wish people would stop bringing up out-of-date information. Rawr makes standstill rotations pretty clear, and Astrylian/Kavan have been trying to drill this into people's heads for weeks now.

The only question I haven't seen answered, and which would be a much more pertinent one, is whether to use arcane barrage if forced to move a short distance with 2-4 AB stacks. Certainly if you'd lose the stacks (or have a high chance of losing the stacks), use ABar, but if you have only 3 seconds of movement or less to do, is it more optimal to save the stacks and cast the 4th AB and then MBAR after the move? You do *no* dps for a longer period of time, but start at a later (higher dps) point in the normal rotation after the move. Isn't as cut-and-dried as the normal standstill decisions. I'll try to napkin this out a bit when I get home from work.

Since it doesn't happen all that often that I have to move in such a way/time that my Blasts Stack would fall off, I like to save my PoM for those situations. That is to say I agree with people who say the only time to Abarr is when your stack would fall off due to movement, except I try to PoM/AB on the run, and try to only use PoM for that situation.

Seems to me like a greater dps-loss than other tactics. If you always save your POM for situations in which you MAYBE have to move, you constantly drop the option to shorten your rotation every POM-cooldown. Of course you solve the movementproblem with this tactic in a very nice way but I think the trade off ist too big. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The movement model will only be able to give you very basic answers to the value of movement speed enchant, nothing more complex. I'm working on a cycle solver that would compute optimal spell selection in presence of movement, but that is not quite ready yet.

POM is not a big dps-increasing talent. Its advantage is that it is instant cast, not that it shortens your ABs by any significant amount of time. For example, for me a normal Arcane Blast is about 1.9 seconds, and a global cooldown with my haste is around 1.2 seconds. So really I've only "shortened my rotation" by 0.7 seconds every 1.4 minutes.

So instead of using POM to shorten your rotations, you can exploit the talent in other ways. One is for movement situations as mentioned before, but another situation where POM is useful is if you're on your third stack and still don't have a MB proc. Use your POM for the fourth stack and you'll have time to react to the proc (should it proc), instead of having to go up to a "fifth" stack like you normally would.

Okok, I get that. But what happens with this argument when fights gonna be longer in Icerown? When we don't talk about 5-7 minute fights but 10-12 minutes? Then we have something like 5-6 seconds of saved time. I know I talk about peanuts but do you get the idea?
An the argument trying to avoid the fifth stack by using POM is not really a solid one to me because all you (and me and every arcanemage) get is another AB done what only means more damage. Of course that someone can manage his manapool in that way not running oom AND budget those fifth stacks sometimes. Another effect of your second advice ist taht you DO shorten your rotation with that

Something to think about with POM is that it also increase the crit-rate of the next spell with 30% (assuming you don't have a clearcast proc already). Hence if you want to use POM as a damage cooldown and not save it for movement, it's best to use it at 3 or 4 stacks of AB, since the extra 30% crit gives the most bonus damage at this point.