The Arcane thread - Page 138

Emh · 05/01/09, 5:13 PM

Originally Posted by Gravenimage

Who else needs Pandora's Plea other than Shamans? I was counting on that being fairly easy to get, though I'm obviously overlooking something.

I had a little argument last night over it with someone, and he was saying that it is a healer trinket and should go to a healer. It seems to be best-in-slot for healadins and resto shamans, a nice trinket for resto druids and an ok trinket to priests.

The drop rate is 18% from H Mimiron, so roughly once a month.

Selun · 05/02/09, 4:10 AM

For me Flare of Heavens is BiS togheter with the Pandora's Plea while Scale of Fates comes in 3rd. In the current version Rawr has the item ID from wowhead and also it's effect isn't recognized when loaded from armory so I just added in the 850 SP/10 sec with 10% proc chance on spellcast (just like Sundial) and it seems to be the best.

My Rawr Optimizer shown me this set with a score of 6950.76:

[Collar of the Wyrmhunter]
[Sapphire Amulet of Renewal]
[Conqueror's Kirin Tor Shoulderpads]
[Pennant Cloak]
[Robes of the Umbral Brute]
[Unsullied Cuffs]
[Conqueror's Kirin Tor Gauntlets]
[Leash of Heedless Magic]
[Leggings of the Enslaved Idol]
[Boots of Fiery Resolution]
[Pyrelight Circle]
[Signet of Manifested Pain]
[Pandora's Plea]
[Flare of the Heavens] the item can be seen on armory since in wowhead it's not updated.
[Staff of Endless Winter]
[Scepter of Lost Souls]

Stamina: 1466
Intellect: 1680
Spirit: 786
Armor: 2210
Health: 21443
Mana: 28188
Crit Rate: 57,26%
991 Crit Rating
185 Hit Rating
649 Haste Rating
2971 Spell Power

Status: Score: 6950,76, Dps: 6948,62

Starymrahl · 05/04/09, 2:26 AM

I'm trying to free up some filler points in order to fill up Incantor's Absorption and possibly to throw a point or two into Magic Absorption. I'm thinking of reducing points in my Arcane Mind talent. I haven't seen anyone discuss this possibility. The way I see the Arcane Mind talent is that 0.3% per talent of, let's say 1000 base int for argument sake, is roughly 30 added intellect which equates to 510 mana (just going by rawr) and 6 spell power via the Mind Master talent. I have tried removing the point in RAWR and I see that it equates to roughly 30 dps drop per talent point removed from Arcane Mind. But I figure that for any fight with resistable spell damage and absorption possibilities that if I resist even one spell, that refunds 1-2% of my base mana per spell resisted (or roughly 223-446). And the incanter's talent would result in an actual increase of dps everytime (at the cost of the mana lost via mana shield); however, I still haven't really figured out how to test that via rawr. I saw the discussion about adjusting in the survivability tab; however, I don't see any correlating adjustment to my dps regardless of the number that I put there or the number of talents I put into Incanters.

Anyways, I figured I would spawn some discussion on the issue, both on the possibility of removing points from Arcane Mind and the possibility of putting points into Magic absorption. Thanks much.

Kavan · 05/04/09, 4:24 AM

Magic Absorption works only on full resists, that happens very rarely. Incanter's Absorption is worth it if you get a priest to cooperate with you, but you shouldn't use mana shield for it. To get the value for Incanter's Absorption in Rawr make sure to have incoming dps more than 0 and also available absorption.

Xmasman · 05/04/09, 7:07 AM

On fights like Ignis, Hodir, Mimiron and Razorscale i have to use frost/fire ward to survive. And if you have skilled Incanter's Absorption your damage goes also up.

Naieth · 05/04/09, 9:07 AM

Originally Posted by Xmasman

On fights like Ignis, Hodir, Mimiron and Razorscale i have to use frost/fire ward to survive. And if you have skilled Incanter's Absorption your damage goes also up.

I agree. There's been a few times where my fire/frost ward has absorbed a rather huge blow, that results in massive mana back and is less healing overall that is needed on you.

Thinking about it, I'd really like to see the possibility of that mana return mechanic becoming baseline and tweaked to work in fights without AoE and fights with AoE. It would be entirely unique and very mage-like. Possibly have the Fire and Frost ward return mana equal to the amount it has left to absorb if it fades(Example: Fire ward costs 500 mana to cast and absorbs 2k Fire damage. Whatever absorption is left after 30 seconds is returned as mana. In Frost/Fire damage fights it can break through damage and not return any mana at all if you don't get the 30% proc, and in other types of damage fights(Yogg-Saron for example) it just returns mana based on how much is left to absorb at the end of it's 30 second duration.)

♦ Seonid · 05/04/09, 9:55 AM

Another option is using the 11 points in Frost, moving the two from Ice Shards into Frost Warding which will also return mana and has less reliance on another class or requiring a full resist. Though obviously you still need the 30% chance.

Light4 · 05/04/09, 11:18 AM

Originally Posted by Seonid

Another option is using the 11 points in Frost, moving the two from Ice Shards into Frost Warding which will also return mana and has less reliance on another class or requiring a full resist. Though obviously you still need the 30% chance.

I got about 20k Mana back from 6 Firewards used in our Ignis (25) fight last night. It's definitely worth it. It also worked similar well on Hodir(10) with Frostwarding. In conjunction with Incanters Absorption the wards are actually very useful for Arcane.

Zeldyrr · 05/04/09, 12:35 PM

I've been trying out an Incanter's build:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

(1) To pick up two points in IA I dropped two points in Arcane Focus. This is one of those cases I didn't use RAWR/theorycrafting to make the decision. First, I'm smothered in +hit. I'm alliance so I get +1% hit there. We always have a SPriest/Boomkin around. So the only real loss is the 2% mana savings. If I played perfectly and always hit (near) zero mana before an evocate the 2% would make a difference in my DPS. Since I'm not that good, it should have no impact.

(2) I only put two points in IA after reading comments here that the shield maxed out with only 2/3 points. After raiding with it, I realize I have no good way of knowing if this is true. Checking the character pane during a fight is iffy. World of logs doesn't seem to tell me how big the IA buff was. How are people checking this? If I have to put a third point in it, I will have to use RAWR to figure out what is the best choice. (I can't drop a 3rd point in Focus, as you need 5 in the first tier.)

(3) Frost/fire ward is definitely very useful on some fights. I dropped the two points in shards, so my blizzard AOE suffers but mages don't really bring AOE anyway.

(4) Be wary of spikes. With lightweave on the cloak, T8 2-piece proc, and IA I was spiking over 4000 spell power. Stack Arcane Power and aggro was a mild concern, even with 20% threat reduction.

Overall, I'm enjoying the build. If you have access to a disc priest who is willing to PW:S regularly I'd love to gather more real world data on it. (And even if you don't, Frost/Fire ward on many fights will have you swimming in IA procs.)

Gediablo · 05/04/09, 5:01 PM

I'm currently testing alternative arcane specs to Icy Veins specs. I have been 57-3-11 the last months. Here are the reasons for me doing this:

1 - I'm currently hitcapped with just 3% from talents and my gear. This means that in usual tank and spank situations I use 11 talent points for pretty much no other gains than Icy Veins.
2 - In my experience Ulduar fights in general got more natural dps breaks where you can evocate without huge dps loss. The time saved when evocating on last sec on the veins is in other words less significant in Ulduar than in Naxx in my eyes. On top of that I got 20% haste in gear not counting buffs from my Embrace of the Spider and Scale of Fates and Heroism, so my evocation is already relatvely fast.
3 - My guild usually does AoE pulls like angry gorillas - sometimes this means super fast clear - other times it means loose mobs and the occational casualty. It sounds worse than it is - my point is: not a lot of coordination, strategy and marking - more like just tanks get what they can and everyone go all out AoE before all the mobs even reach the tanks and the tanks sometimes building aggro on the same target(s). In other words - sometimes a mob or two slips from the tanks and they have to move around a bit getting out of e.g. blizzards. In other words I think I too often waste both mana and/or dps with blizzard AoE and I too often find myself as either the n00b pulling the mobs out of the AoE with aggro (unless images are up) or nowhere near top 5 AoE dps.

So last raid I tried someting else. I maxed arcane subtlety (instead of just 1 point) and maxed world in flames and went all out AE spam with the occational PoM->flamestrike. To be honest I was somewhat surprised at the impact it had on my trash damage. AE is in my eyes much easier to hit all AoEable targets with, even when the targets are spread a bit a part. And the AE threat is just a joke - even when taking into account that you are practically in melee range with the mobs I felt much safer, than I ever did when mainly using Blizzard for AoE. No cleaving Ulduar trash is also an important factor here by the way. Bottom line is that I like AE for AoE and find myself doing better with it than when using frost or fire AoE spells - and much better than I thought I would after looking at AoE theorycrafting numbers.

I also went magic absorbtion that raid, but to be honest I got very disappointed with the low amount of mana I got back from it - like 967 mana on a full Mimiron fight and 6728 mana total on all trash. Was I just extremely unlucky or is it really that bad for PvE? The partial resists of cause helps the healers a bit, but not worth the points for in PvE in my eyes at least.

So now I'm considering other places to put my talent points. These points are the ones I think I will keep - leaving me 4 points to spare for e.g. student of the mind, incanter's absorbtion or even prismatic cloak (I think it at least would help the healers more than magic absorbtion). Since we have a disc priest in most of our raids, I think I will try maxing incanter's absorbtion out for next raid.

I was wondering if any other arcane mages actually tried doing something similar in Ulduar or if everyone still insists on 11 points in frost and Blizzard AoE due to Rawr telling them to? I at least want to experiment a bit more with this non-IV and non-blizzardbuild - to me it is at least both fun and surprisingly effective.

Kavan · 05/04/09, 9:07 PM

Well I'm running an Incanter's Absorption build right now. When I decided to give it a try in Ulduar I first thought I would drop the frost tree investment to get the points needed and go with a 68/3 build that I've been running for a while before. In the end I decided to run things through Rawr and optimize talents with some constraints on what talents I wanted to have and I ended up with a build that kept Icy Veins and dropped some regen talents (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft).

At the start I was very skeptical about running with only one point in arcane meditation and molten armor. But it turned out to not be bad at all if you have good raid support. So much of our mana regen is intellect based that the spirit regen plays a very small role. If you add in the paltry mana to dps conversion it's actually not that surprising. In the start I just thought I'd experiment with the build, but after two weeks of playing with it I think I'll keep it. I also haven't found a good way to get the value of the talent from actual parses, I guess I'd need to parse the logs directly to get the total absorbed amount.

aliengrey · 05/05/09, 12:49 AM

Prismatic Cloak for PVE...why?

Heaven · 05/05/09, 3:51 AM

Originally Posted by Zeldyrr

(2) I only put two points in IA after reading comments here that the shield maxed out with only 2/3 points. After raiding with it, I realize I have no good way of knowing if this is true. Checking the character pane during a fight is iffy. World of logs doesn't seem to tell me how big the IA buff was. How are people checking this? If I have to put a third point in it, I will have to use RAWR to figure out what is the best choice. (I can't drop a 3rd point in Focus, as you need 5 in the first tier.)

You should definetely go for 3/5 in arcane stability (100% puchback resistance with imp. conc. aura) and 2/2 in subtlety (you will need that 40% agro reduction when AB spamming under AP and heroism with 4900 spell damage). And you need 3/3 in absorption, since in the majority of cases your SPD from IA will not be capped by 5% of your health (it will happen only during combined asborption by both Fire/Frost Ward and PW:S). You will also need to drop one point in Arcane Mind, since it is the smallest dps increase (according to RAWR).

Here is the build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

According to WWS, the average uptime of IA in Ulduar is between 10 and 30%, depending on fight.

I've been looking for an addon to track my current spd in game and the only one I found is LiveDamage. It is s small line of text which shows your SPD for several schools. I dragged it just above my cast bar so it is always in close visible range. On several occassions (i.e. when getting Napalm Shell on Mimiron, etc.), combined with T7/T8 and trinket procs, I was flying at over 4900 SPD, which is just insane. It is a wonderful time to blow AP and just do AB spam. I'm easily topping damage meters on fights like Ignis, Hodir and Mimiron, exceeding 6k single-target dps. And Frost Warding helps a lot with mana regen.

I would really like to see a better addon, something like a bar (or even a speedometer!), which would show max possible SPD and the current level of SPD, it will allow mages to adjust thier rotation accordingly.

Laekoth · 05/05/09, 4:03 AM

Kavan, i would highly suggest you drop points from prismatic cloak and put them into arcane stability. For a few fights such as mimiron the dps loss from pushback would be extreme without them. Prismatic cloak is also worthless for pve raiding as long as there is any other talent that would increase dps. I have also switched to an incanter's absorption build since we picked up a disc priest (which i talked into spamming shields on me), and i've been pleased with the results.

Heaven, I've been using SL data text to track spellpower during an encounter. As you suggest it's been nice being able to time c/ds around IA and trinket procs.

Kavan · 05/05/09, 4:22 AM

I don't know, I've raided with 5/5 stability all until 3.0.9 I think. I thought I would miss it a lot but I don't. Looking at Mimiron I get about 1 hit per 20 seconds of dps time on average. Value of stability at this interrupt rate is very low and in practice I haven't noticed anything that would contradict with this. When you add in the shields it's actually even less of an issue. The points in prismatic cloak are just personal preference, I find instant invisibility quite useful. If I would go for stability I would most likely move back to 68/3.