With only 302 haste rating under full haste effects you have 1.06 sec casts for AB and MBAM without berserking, so I'd suggest only using two of icy veins, berserking or speed pot at a time when you have bloodlust up.
2.5 / 1.06 / 1.05 / 1.03 / 1.3 / 1.2 / (1 + (302 + 250 + 500) / 3279) = 1.06

In fact you'd need --- passive haste before you have to start worrying about the gcd cap.
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Edit: fixed

Guys i just put black magic enchant and i am also have problems with haste cap etc.

What i mean , my stats are:
haste rating 933 : 28,45%
My base cast time is 1.84s on AB
i put black magic(250)
i am troll mage that means berserking 20%
and i can open IV also 20%

With IV and berserk together , bm enchant and with my base haste i can have 1.2 cast time ,, that ,means with totem on raids (5%) i can catch gcd? That means when shamans open BL i must dont use IV-Berserk ? (i am thinking to use IV berserk without bl and with bl i can drink a pot or something)

Is there any solution? i mean what is the cap and if i dont use that enchant is better ?

Ty for understanding!

You're forgetting the bonuses with the T10/2pc which grants you 12% haste for 5 seconds and procs approximately every 10-12 seconds for a raid-geared arcane mage (an effective +5% haste) as well as the Netherwind Presence which grants an additional 6% haste. Additionally, Shiatans is a troll mage and is therefore also calculating the haste values with berserking.

Therefore Without Berserking:

(2.5 / 1.06 / 1.03 / 1.05 / 1.3 / 1.2 / 1.12 - 1) * 3279 - 250 - 500 = 63.66 (64 haste to GCD cap)

Edit: i guess the "effective" haste for the T10/2pc wouldn't really be significant to determining GCD caps so I used 1.12 instead of 1.05

Make a macro that swaps out your weapon with Black magic for a weapon with 63 SP on it that way you wont hit GCD

Has anyone else noticed a loss in DPS as arcane since 3.3 came out?
My starts at 2545 Sp 30.1% crit 459 haste and 312hit and a 56/3/12 spec...I seem to have lost almost 1,000 points of dps...Am I the only one to experience this?

The 8% haste from a fully-buffed raid still won't put you under 1s, but heroism will. Just don't use IV or berserking during heroism and you should never have problems clipping the GCD.

With Scorchio no longer tracking Missile Barrage I did notice a drop off of DPS for a little while at the start of 3.3, however it picked back up again to normal levels once I got used to the new addon trackers I use now. It's possible you could be overspamming Arcane Blast without noticing MBarr procs and evocating more often.

There's no 1000dps loss from any change in mechanics. However, 1000dps is approximately the amount of damage that you would gain from CoE/E&M/EP. Have you checked your combat logs to see if this is being applied?

Has there been any BiS list made for Arcane or any other mage specs for ICC yet?

I don't know if you mean to say that 312 hit is above or below where you want to be as arcane, though neither of those judgments would be accurate. The soft cap for arcane can be insanely low. 3% from the frost talent, 3% from the arcane talent and 3% from raid utility (misery, imp. FF), bring the hit cap down to 8%. If you're alliance and you're a draenei or have one in your group, you can bring it to 7%. At 26.23 hit rating per 1% at level 80, that's 210 and 184 hit rating respectively.

From there you can just start taking points out of hit talents to make up for the the abundance of it on gear. 312 isn't that bad at all, and I've seen mages with even more than that do a hell of a lot of DPS.

A good starting point without using 277 loot will be to pickup 4/5 Bloodmage set with the crafted tailoring pants. Then spend some frost badges on the haste belt and fill in the rest using rawr.

With the new AoE spell cap mechanics, is Arcane Explosion a definite winner over Blizzard now in aoe situation in which you'll hit the cap? (e.g. Onyxia Whelps)

I hit Ony today and the difference in time that we needed to AoE down the adds was so significantly longer.. I was using PoM+Flamestrike followed up by Blizzard and was almost crying seeing the aoe nerf in full effect.

Since I read that crits are not included within aoe cap, does that mean that I should PoM+Flamestrike and spam arcane explosion afterwards?

What? The way blizzard works out damage in AoE with more targets then the damage cap (now 10 targets) is exactly the same except now the cap is considerably larger (the damage you'd do to 10 targets rather then the old fixed caps), unless I'm gravely mistaken in no way should you have nerfed dps against Onyxian whelps.

As for Blizzard vs AE, as any other spec you should be [FS + Blizzard] but for Arcane it's going to be tight and depend largely on what your haste is at as blizzard will gain much larger bonus's from haste.

With ~3000 spellpower, 60% Crit (~700 rating) and 36% haste (~800 rating) (in raid)

Blizzard hit avg = 886 | Blizzard crit avg = 1612 | Blizzard avg = 0.4 * 886 + 0.6 * 1612 = 1321.6
Blizzard avg dps = 1321.6 / (1 (tick per second unhasted) / (1 + 800 (haste rating) / 32.79 (haste per %) / 100) / 1.05 (wrath) / 1.03 (pally buff) / 1.06 (Netherwind)) = 1884.71dps

AE hit avg = 1335 | AE crit avg = 2475 | AE avg = 0.4 * 1335 + 0.6 * 2475 = 2019
AE avg dps = 2019 / (1.5 (GCD unhasted) / (1 + 800 (haste rating) / 32.79 (haste per %) / 100) / 1.05 (wrath) / 1.03 (pally buff) / 1.06 (Netherwind)) = 1919.5dps

Against multiple targets:

Blizzard = 1884.7 * 10 / number of targets = 188847dps / number of targets
Arcane Explosion = 1919.5 * 10 / number of targets = 19195dps / number of targets

It would seem that with the stats I mentioned AE is slightly better than blizzard. Blizzard however increases its dps faster then AE as you gear up due to haste. Either way however if you include error bars in my working, differences in gearing and RNG i would say they would end up about the same.

I did my calculations using a hand calculator so I imagine they're quite rough and someone probably could do a better job with a spreadsheet. It would also depend largely on other spirit, int, setbonus's etc which I haven't factored in, I just used easy numbers to make the maths simple.

Hmm.. Maybe I am totally misunderstanding the new as well as the old mechanics. While I guess this is not the proper place to discuss aoe mechanics, I'm pretty sure there is a good bunch of other confused people.

The way I understand the new mechanics is:
Blizzard has a cap of 200,000 total damage; 25000 per tic. Meaning during one full blizzard cast will divide its 200,000 over all the mobs you're aoe'ing. So with the 10 target cap, whenever you hit over 10 targets you'll do less damage on each single target but still the same 200,000 to all targets together.

So how did the old mechanic work?
As far as I know it had a way bigger target cap.. Meaning all mobs would get a full X damage. If the old damage cap was considerably smaller, then what happened when you hit that cap? (For some reason I never put any thoughts in this pre-3.3). Did Blizzard just stop in the middle of its cast? (In a case such as this Blizzard would have a way higher dps)

Hope someone can explain T.T I'm lost.

Hehe, sorry if I was a bit overwhelming before but I'll try and relay my understanding (which I think is correct) of the AoE caps, first I'll explain the old system

Old system

Every spell had a fixed and unique number that was in no way related to its individual target damage. For blizzard and most mage AoE I think it was around 40,000, the fire AoE spells were a bit higher I think. What would happen is that it would add up the theoretical damage (non-crit) of everything effected by that AoE, if that number was less then the cap each mob took full damage, but if it was greater then the cap, each mob took the damage according to this formula:


New system

It works exactly the same as what I wrote above, except the cap is now dependent on the individual damage of the spell. The cap is worked out according to this formula:

If Number of mobs being hit is less then 10 -> All mobs take the full damage of the spell

If Number of mobs being hit is greater then 10 -> All mobs take


Reason why this is an AoE buff

For almost every spell in the game, the old cap would cap before reaching 10 mobs. For example my blizzard will hit for about 7100 damage (no crits) over the 8 ticks per target. According to the old cap (it was about 40,000), and the old coefficient (I think it was 120%) I could do a total of 3000 * 1.2 + 40,000 = 43,600 damage (with 3000sp) over the duration of blizzard.

If my individual damage is 7100, this means I will hit the cap at 43,600 / 7100 = 6.1 mobs

Now with the new system i can do 7100 * 10 = 71000 damage over the duration of blizzard. This effectively means I can do amlost double the dps against large groups of mobs.


[EDIT] As for your comment about blizzard stopping half way through the cast, obviously that didn't happen instead blizzard (as well as other channeled AoE) works as if all the damage of the spell occurs at the same time, but is divided by the number of ticks (8 for blizzard) and is recalculated every tick.

The problem is, that the hard cap was way higher than it is now.
I saw major dps drops on Onyxia welps during AEing and also for blizzard. In fact, I never saw a significant reduction before the patch and now individual hits are ~.4-.5 of what they were before. I must mention, we used to bomb the two sides simultaneously.

Correct me if im wrong but the simple answer to this question, in the situation that it is asked is no, arcane explosion is in no way better than blizzard. Unless you found a way to wear plate, getting close enough to use arcane explosion would resault in a very swift death. Mathmatical calcutalions aside, blizzards advantage is the space that can be kept between yourself and mobs. There is no formula that i am aware of that can calculate dps of a dead mage.

I've got a question, hope you can help me peps

I enjoy playing as fire mage but all mages around are arcane or going arcane. The set bonus from t10 also says go arcane.. and here is my problem

My stats as fire (unbuffed no AI and Molten Armor either)
* Bonus Damage:2756
* Hit Rating: 357
* Crit Chance: 33.69% - fire is 39,69
* Haste Rating: 695
* Mana Regen: 208
You can check my gear at armory. I know that my trinkets sucks but at the moment i am quite unlucky with new one dropping (for example anubarak one or spyglass)

Warlocks wanted to go affi 3.3 and they did at start (which ment mages didnt had to do scorch) but suddenly blizz give nerf to their spec and they all changed to destro. Altough this doesn't change my thinking still. If i would go arcane i would like to know what is the cap for haste at the moment at what amount im catching gcd. Also is it worth getting blackmagic instead of spellpower ?? I got some arcane gear

My stats in arcane are around this:
* Bonus Damage:2950-3050 (question of what trinket i use either Embrence of Spider or Talisman of Voalite Power hc version)
* Hit Rating: 331
* Crit Chance: around 38%
* Haste Rating: 744
* Mana Regen: ??? - cant remember neither the spirit amount.
I switch my offhand for that spec and that's all i still use the same trinkets etc. I know my belt and boots suxx for arcane whats more i got too much hit.

I would like to get some tips what to change in first place. All answer will be nice also the constructive crytisizm )

AE is better than blizzard if

a) the number of mobs is high enough to have clearcast proccing continuously
b) you're not specced into higher critical damage of frost spells in the frost tree (I know there are some players including me who put the points rather in warding)

I am pretty sure that the new cap does not change that. Cbags is probably right in the way that using FS+X will increase AOE dps due to the dot components.

Above is the formula used to calculate haste rating caps depending on cast time (2.5 sec for arcane blast/missiles), desired cast time (1 sec to activate the GCD cap), and various percentage haste factors.

Here are some common numbers to plug in and their results. I'm going to take Netherwind presence, 5% Shaman haste, and 3% Boomkin/Retadin haste as a given. You can recalculate by dividing those out of the percentage haste factor product if you so desire:

Buffs up	Product of percentage haste factors	Effective haste rating cap
Icy Veins, Bloodlust, Tier10, Power Infusion	2.4035	131.55
Icy Veins, Bloodlust, Tier10	2.0030	813.67
Icy Veins, Bloodlust	1.7884	1304.8
Tier10, Icy Veins	1.5407	2041.5

Special table for trolls:

Buffs up	Product of percentage haste factors	Effective haste rating cap
Icy Veins, Bloodlust, Berserking, Tier10, Power Infusion	2.8843	<0 (bad idea)
Icy Veins, Bloodlust, Berserking, Tier10	2.4035	131.55
Icy Veins, Bloodlust, Berserking	2.1460	540.82
Tier10, Icy Veins,Berserking	1.8489	1154.8
Icy Veins, Berserking	1.6508	1686.8

You can see that the cap drops off dramatically as you lose one of the percentage haste factors. Keep in mind that you can't stack Arcane Power and Power Infusion, so if I were shooting for anything, I'd think that the 813 value would be appropriate to call a soft cap. Also, you'll have to subtract any on-demand haste rating buffs (ie [Shard of the Crystal Heart] as well as any proc based haste rating effects (ie [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Black Magic]) from the effective haste cap if want it to apply to situations when you have those buffs.

Lastly, just remember that any soft "cap" is not the end-all of haste. Unlike hit, you'll still derive benefit from haste outside of the times where you're able to stack all those buffs.

Thanks for that Valindil. I am now fully up-to-date with the new mechanics, however one thing that still bothers me is that the theory doesn't seem to match the way it is put into practice. Theory tells us that the current mechanics are giving us a big increase, but I have to side with Light4 on this; I as well have never seen a significant reduction of my blizzard before the patch and my aoe dps seemed considerably lower (although theory tells us this is more of an 'optical illusion'). I guess from this we could assume that perhaps the aoe damage cap actually used to be way higher instead of lower?

The Ony10 run I did was with a semi-crappy pug, but even then, I have never seen the whelps go down anywhere near as slow as it went before that.

I guess I should be considering transferring my 2 points in frost warding into ice shards now >.<

You are wrong, I have been using AE as my AOE since Hyjal. I have yet to have a problem with using it
for raid trash, other than possibly trash like some in the military wing. It does good AOE damage and it is cheap on mana. Unless your just an idiot you wont die, although I have gotten impatient a few times and started AOE before tank had enough aggro. You would have the same scenario with blizzard, if you dont allow the tank to get enough aggro your gonna pull. Sure you have more distance for the tank to taunt, but why make him work more.


If say we have a soft cap on haste of 813, will we be seeing that taken into account in RAWR soon?
Seems at that point RAWR would shift priority to sp/crit gear. Right now after optimization RAWR has
me at 1164 haste.