Has anyone done any test on switching rotations for certain fights? It seems that some fights a 4AB Missiles is the higher dps but on other fights it seems that AB until Missile proc (use as soon as it procs) is higher dps. I can't seem to figure out the difference per fight and haven't came to a conclusion on which rotation to use.

Forgot to add, in 4 Piece T9. I haven't gotten a chance to test T10 yet and that is the only discussion i can find about rotations.

Hi

I had a discussion with a guildie about spirit vs crit for arcane mages.
He told me that it was silly to gem with spirit, and that crit gems gave me more punch.

His argument was that I only get a fraction of crit rating from spirit:
35% from plain Molten Armor
20% from Glyph of MA
15% from T9 2 Pieces effect
Total of 70%

And in a vacuum, a +10 spirit gem would only give me +7 crit rating vs a +10 crit gem.

My argument is that, when we put that single gem scenario in a raiding enviroment, I get this:

Gem Value: 10 spirit + 37 (Gift of the Wild) + 80 (Prayer of Spirit) = 127 * (1.1 BoKings) * (1.1 Student of The Mind) = 153.67 Spirit
Of which, the 70% crit rating is 107.57.

Am I wrong? With my roughly 600+ spirit I get around 11% from Molten Armor.
I know that as soon as T9 gets phased out and Cataclysm itemization rolls in, Spirit is on the way out for mages, but I really would like to know if I'm right in this one.

Please help enlighten me.
Thank you

Spirit vs Crit, crit probably wins... However if they're ever competing for a gem slot, you're doing something wrong. Spirit is a blue stat, and Crit is a yellow stat. Crit is competing with Haste for yellow stats, and Haste easily beats Crit. So your 3 primary color stats should be Spellpower, Haste, and Spirit. Gems should be chosen based on whether socket bonuses are worth it, and which is better for you, Spellpower or Haste.

Why are you adding GotW and PoS to the value of a single spirit gem?

The value of the single gem in crit rating would be:
10 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 0.7 = 8.47

And as Astrylian said, spirit is blue, crit is yellow, you'll never have to make that choice.

[Disclaimer]Obviously, the optimal dps rotation is to snipe your arcane missiles perfectly; however, the wackiness of the T10 bonus and my low latency gave me a reason to do some number crunching.[/Disclaimer]

I've noticed that the T10 bonus doesn't appear to affect the arcane blast immediately following the MBAM if you somehow clip the cast (stopcasting doesn't work). I did the math to see at what point it might actually be a dps increase to add in a [nochanneling:arcane missiles] modifier to your arcane blasts.

I used a nominal haste rating of 700 to do the cast time calculations, assuming 6% Netherwind Presence, 5% sham-haste, and 3% ret-haste buff.

w/o T10	1.7971 sec
w/ T10	1.6046 sec
delta	0.1925 sec

Having a latency of less than half of the delta (correct me if I'm wrong) should be enough to offset the delay in client server communication. The dps time value of this isn't just the difference in cast times between the arcane blasts - how badly you're clipping the missiles also plays a factor. The worse you're clipping your last missile, the better it is, since you're spending less time casting a missile that never fires. As an additional bonus, using a nochanneling macro would make this a nonissue.

Conclusions about whether or not to use the macro are quite nuanced: If you find yourself habitually clipping the last missile in a MBAM *AND* as long as you have less than half the latency of the difference in cast time between 2PT10 hasted and non-2PT10 hasted arcane blasts, you would be better off using the macro. If you don't have a problem clipping arcane missiles, it will be a dps loss to use the macro. If your latency is higher than half the difference in cast times, it's inconclusive.

I should mention that as you stack on additional haste modifiers, the gain in cast time is going to shrink, and the latency required to ensure a dps increase is going to go down as well. If you use it, I'd keep a modifier key bound to cancel the nochanneling condition for when you have additional haste buffs.

So I searched the thread for talk about Arcane Stability and other such discussions but I didn't find any discussion that was truly informative, so I'd like to raise the issue here. Would a spec such as 68/3/0 be a viable dps substitute for 57/3/11? Here's my arguements:

1) Talent points: The only truly useful points in frost are precision and icy veins, and the talent points that reduce the CD on icy veins. For AOE, Ice Shards is useful to increase blizzard damage, but it's not a deal maker/breaker. As for Precision, I am drowning in hit right now and I don't think that's likely to change with more ICC gear. I know it reduces mana cost as well, but I think 3% (even multiplied to the 4th AB) isn't an issue to worry about with 30k+ mana pools.

2) Assuming you don't spec into frost and don't have icy veins, hitting the soft haste cap becomes less of an issue. With 2pT10, this seems like an issue likely to become more important as people have a combination of IV+BL+2pT10 and hitting the barrier.

3) ICC has significantly more possibilities for pushback. AoE damage and auras are more likely to reduce dps. (Side note: Does festergut's AoE produce pushback?) Therefore, Arcane Stability should be more valuable.

4) Festergut's AoE would be another perfect element for IA usage, so I'd really like to keep that in the spec. However, no acceptable substitutes exist for the extra talent when you don't put them in frost. The only thing I can think to do is put them in Magic Attunement, Stability and perhaps SotM or Prismatic Cloak.

Love to see some debate on this. Thanks for your answers

While I agree that the value of Arc Stability has increased and will probably continue to increase in ICC, speccing out of frost is not the way to do it. Beyond the benefits that you pointed out, Icy Veins itself reduces pushback by 100% and is valued at almost 350 points in Rawr. As for the haste cap, you stagger the haste buffs to deal with that. And 3% hit/mana reduction is still pretty huge.

I would like to promote this discussion though and focus on what is the best way to obtain 3/5 arc stability (the "optimal" amount). Obviously, you could move two points out of IA but it has its value. The same can be said of Magic Attunement.
In my opinion, the best method may be to remove two out of IA (because you are dependent on other classes for the shield most often) and one out of Magic Attunement or Arcane Mind (45 DPS decrease per point).

Either way, until we find out more about the second (and third and fourth) wing, it may still be too early to change this particular part of the spec because the only pushback (besides melee attacks) I've seen thus far are during Marrowgar's bonestorm and the two trash mobs just before Death Whisperer.

Had a quick question I have an arcane mage with 3 pieces of tier9 232 lvl items and I have a 245 chest and 245 legs so I was curious would me dropping 1 of my 245 pieces to pick up a 4th piece of tier9 and get the 4 piece bonus be a dps increase my mage is Aikero in the same guild as my DK on my signiture if you need to inspect me before answering thanks for your time....

Yes, it would be a dps upgrade for you to replace your i245 pants with the i232 T9 ones. Just loading you in RAWR real quick it shows that to be about a 100 dps upgrade for you.

Also, since you are talking about increasing dps and PVE then I'd replace the +resil enchants on the head and shoulders with their PVE counterparts. The Fetish of Volatile Power trinket that you have is really bad. Go get the Abyssal Rune from reg ToC; RAWR shows that as a 150 dps upgrade for you. Get your chest enchanted with +10 stats and replace the +10 stats gem that you have in that - mages should always gem runed for red slots, reckless for yellow slots, or purified for blue slots. Mostly you'll want to gem runed unless the socket bonus is good, like it is on your helm.

I've seen no mention of ABSpam34MBAM as a good spell rotation to use with 2*t10. From what I can work out it would give the best uptime of the 2*t10 proc both in terms of proc numbers and not wasting any of the duration of the buff. Out of interest I used RAWR to input the rotation and it came in at pretty much a mid way point between ABSpam234MBAM & ABSpam4MBAM both in terms of MPS & DPS. Interestingly it was above ABSpam24MBAM in both DPS and MPS. Has anyone else checked it out? or have I just got an abnormal result?

After doing some clearing of the new wing (only got one boss down so far), arc stability is looking more and more valuable. Quite a few of the trash mobs as well as some of the aoe tick damage from rotgut and festergut have pushback effects on them.