Mage Discussion

[Smigel]

Hey all,

I've been reading up on some of the Mage theorycraft and I thought I'd post here to see if anyone is interested in some discussion. If anyone has any suggestions, feedback, or corrections please post them.

Arcane:

My main spec is Arcane (57/3/11). All the raiding I have done since 80 has been in this Arcane spec. It's great because it has very high single target damage, high burst damage, and a very low hit cap. The 6% we get from talents basically means that we're going to be hit capped in any kind of epic gear, as far as I can tell. Arcane isn't exactly the most mobile spec, as we don't really have DoT's we can throw up, so all of our damage comes directly from casting. If we're not casting, we're not doing damage. (And your skill in Staves probably isn't even close to 400 so don't try that) We have Arcane Barrage for on-the-move-damage, but it's not much, and it will kill any Arcane Blast buff stack that you have.

The rotation that I have found works best is to spam AB until you have 4 stacks, and if AM has procced by then, use AM, then go back to AB. If you get to 4 stacks, and AM has not procced, you have a couple options. You can continue to spam AB (mana intensive), or you can clear your stack with a slow AM. In what I've read, it is considered a DPS loss to use Arcane Barrage to clear your stack, and it's better to use a slow AM. I have not personally measured this. Formerly, I would spam AB until 4 stacks, them AM, and then Barrage, then back to AB. Recently I have eliminated Barrage from my rotation completely (unless I am moving and have < 2 stacks of the AB debuff). My DPS has been better since I eliminated Barrage, particularly when I pop any of my cooldowns or during Heroism.

My absolute highest DPS comes by straight spamming AB. For instance, if a boss is down to about 10% health and I have cooldowns available, I will pop Icy Veins/Arcane Power/Talisman and go straight Arcane Blast. This is extremely mana inefficient, but it's not a bad thing to *try* to have going OOM coincide with the boss going down. If the boss dies and you have a significant amount of your mana pool left, you may have missed out on some damage.

One other thing that I just recently started doing is trying to time my Evocation at the last second of either Icy Veins or Heroism. This is just off the top of my head, but I think Evocation usually takes about 8 seconds to channel. If you pop it during Icy Veins, it will be down to about 6 seconds; during Heroism it will be closer to 5 seconds. The benefits of this are twofold: 1. Faster channeling means back to casting faster means more DPS 2. You are less likely to lose a tick or all of your Evocation due to a raid mechanic. No one ever told me about this, but it might be old news. Great trick though.

An AoE trick I use: If I have a mob that's going to be around for a while (like ICC trash) I will start with a Blizzard, pop Presence of Mind, Flamestrike them, and then back to Blizzard. You may lose a GCD during this, but the added DPS is pretty nice. Additionally, if you were to cast a Rank 9 Flamestrike followed by a rank 8 Flamestrike, the DoT's stack. Theorycrafters will say that Flamestrike is our best AoE when executed correctly (even in Arcane spec) however, since so many people's DPS is so high, worrying about AoE-ing trash really won't matter in the long run. It may be better to just go straight Blizzard and have the spare time to finish up some whispers.

Gemming for Arcane, Runed Cardinal Rubys take priority. If you have an item that gives a Spirit bonus for gemming correctly, it is probably more beneficial to just go straight Runed. If the bonus is spellpower, there are a couple good gems out there (SP/Crit, SP/Haste I think). These are good for getting to the bonus while actually adding stats that we care about, and also for making sure your meta isn't broken. Gemming for intellect isn't necessary.

Fire:

I don't know very many fire Mages, so I'll keep this relatively short and general. If anyone has seriously raided fire then please share your experience. Fire apparently was the raiding spec in BC, but I wasn't around then so I don't really know.

The most popular spec for raiding Fire is 18/53/0. There are a couple of variations here, it kind of depends on if you want to sacrifice some range for spirit. Fire has very good multi-target DPS, benefiting DoT's and a bunch of crits. Unfortunately, Fire has a very high hit cap because it doesn't get any help from specs. Unbuffed you're going to need 440+ hit rating in order to be hit capped. This will be less of a problem in 25 man raids because you will likely have a Dranei buff and a SPriest/Boomkin buff. I have tried using Fire in a couple of raids, but I do not have hit high enough to really test this to its full potential. Thus, my DPS was much much lower than when I use Arcane. Much of this is also related to the fact that I am just learning the Fire rotation and likely have many huge leaks.

Here's a quick summary of the Fire rotation as I understand it (for single target). Start with Scorch in order to get the Fire crit debuff, then throw on Living Bomb, then spam Fireball (and Pyroblast whenever Hot Streak procs). Your highest priority is keeping LB on the target as well as the Scorch debuff. Also, if HS pros at the same time as LB running out, refresh LB before firing off a Pyroblast.

That's about it for Fire. There's a lot of theory out there, but like I said I haven't had a chance to test it much. I'm going to save it for Heroics because Fire is fun, and a nice change of pace.

If you want to talk gear, there's a ton of info out there. The simplest thing to do (for Arcane) would be to get 4pc T10 (hood, chest, gloves, and shoulders), and Leggings of Woven Death. The T10 pants are the weakest in the set, imo. Once you're dressed, you can move on to your flair.

I'd love to hear other people's rotations, thoughts on gear, gemming suggestions.

[Smigel]

There's an interesting post out there that addresses Arcane mages with the 2pc T10 bonus. I don't have the link anymore (read it yesterday), but if anyone is interested I'll go looking for it. But it does some analysis on the Arcane Blast -> Arcane Missile rotation, looking to optimize the DPS. The 2pc T10 set gives you 5 seconds of haste after your Arcane Missile spell finishes casting (provided you had the proc for it).

The argument in the post is that the proper rotation with this 2pc bonus is to spam Arcane Blast until Arcane Missiles procs, and then cast Arcane Missiles as soon as it procs instead of waiting until you have 4 stacks. For example, when you first start DPS on a boss, Arcane Missiles procs off your first Arcane Blast. You would then cast Arcane Missiles, then back to Arcane Blast until AM procs again. They were able to show that this rotation had *slightly* higher overall dps than the traditional way of waiting until 4 stacks of the AB debuff, even if Am had procced previously. The difference wasn't huge, it was mabye a 5.7% DPS increase with optimal conditions. In a fight where you have to move constantly, like Rotface, you wouldn't likely see any significant difference in numbers.

This is still up for debate, but I thought it was an interesting piece. It may actually hurt your DPS, I'll have to try it out on a dummy to see for sure. However, I am thinking that the difference in DPS isn't going to be large, but that this modified rotation will save you a lot of mana. It may be good to start with this early in fights. If the fight is going well, switch to the 4AB stack. If it's going to be a longer fight, wait until a little later when you are better able to gauge when the boss will go down; and try to run OOM at the same time.

Ok, I think that's about it for my random mage thoughts of the day.

[Smigel]

echo! echo! echo! echo! echo! echo! echo!

[Smigel]

I wanted to give a little summary of my experience raiding as fire. I apologize that I don't really have any numbers because I didn't save any of the Recount/Skada data. So I'll try to stick to how fights went and fun factor.

I just recently picked up Sister Svalna's Aether Staff.

http://www.wowhead.com/item=51582/siste ... ther-staff

which has a bunch of hit rating. Previously I had been using a dagger/off-hand combination and mainly raiding as Arcane because I didn't have enough hit to give Fire a serious chance. With this new staff, and a couple of raid buffs, I was suddenly hit capped at > 440. I was able to try it out on Professor Putricide 10man, but didn't really have any kind of baseline for comparison because I would die at various times during the fight whether Arcane or Fire. I later managed to get in to an ICC 25 PUG and decided to see what I could do.

So here's my Fire Spec ICC 25 PUG Trip Report: For this raid, we had a couple Moonkins, which gives a 5% spell crit chance, so I didn't have to worry about keeping Imp. Scorch up on the targets. I was in a group with a Dranei which gave me the push I needed to get over the hit cap. This is one less thing to worry about during the fights. We wiped twice on trash, /facepalm, but one shotted every boss but Rotface, which took 3 attempts. Fire was great AoE on trash. Just keep up about 7 Living Bombs and then reap endless Pyro procs. Maybe cast a flamestrike(s) to get ticks rolling initially.

Marrowgar would generally be an Arcane fight because there's very little movement, and he's more of a tank and spank boss than any other in ICC (that I've seen - with the possible exception of Saurfang). There were 3 mages in the group, all of us similarly geared. One guy had the 4 piece T10 bonus, and the other 2 of us had only the 2 piece bonus. They were both arcane, so I figured I would see how I stacked up. I ended the fight between the two other mages in Damage done. I think I got lucky in this fight because I didn't get bone spiked once - I didn't see when/how many times they were spiked. Being able to cast the whole time certainly helped my dps when comparing to Arcane that fight. So pretty much I figured out that I had a lot of fun trying to balance Living Bomb uptime with Pyroblast instant casts (still need to train myself to refresh LB before using Pyro). Something about hurling Fire appeals to me way more than blasting with my mind (my idea of Arcane). The animation of Firey death barreling towards the boss can't be topped.

I was excited about Deathwhisper. There's a lot of movement in the fight, so Fire should stack up very well with LB ticking and the occasional instant Pyro while moving - constant DPS and big crits on the boss where as an Arcane mage might be able to throw up a Barrage or two when running. I kept Living Bomb up on Deathwhisper the whole time, and the adds I would throw LB up on whichever I tabbed to first, then Fireballed the Fanatics. Add management wasn't great in this group (we didn't assign groups to sides beforehand so everyone just kind of went wherever), which was good for me because it meant that my LB usually managed to tick all the way down for some extra AoE on my side's adds. LB explosions are especially great because that's when Pyro will proc. My strategy for that was to finish my fireball cast on the current target while tabbing to whichever add had the most health and then proceeding to Pyro them. Phase 2 of Deathwhisper went pretty smoothly. I was highest damage done among the mages, but the 4pc T10 guy died some time early in Phase 2 I think.

Gunship battle wasn't anything special. I was in a cannon and hopped over to DPS the battlemage. We had a Kingslayer in the group, so we did it on heroic and got 277 phat lootz.

For Saurfang we debated for about 5 seconds on difficulty and decided to go back to Normal mode. I decided to go back to Arcane. The burst damage from Arcane Missiles is really nice for the blood beasts. Also having Icy Veins/Arcane Power popped at the same time is just cheating.

For Festergut, Fire worked out very well. I kept LB up the whole time and tried to save Pyro procs for when I had to run to/with the Spore so I could throw them while in transit. I was happy to be fire because I got vile gas several times during the fight. I don't remember the numbers for Fester, but our DPS was great. We didn't even come close to the enrage timer. I had a lot more fun during this fight as Fire than I have with Arcane, mostly because I felt that I was taking advantage of the major difference in Fire vs. Arcane. Not casting = not DPS-ing with Arcane. So while I had a lot of casting downtime here, I still did a lot of damage. It's probably a mental thing, but I felt accomplished, and that's the fun of the game.

After Fester, we had 5 people drop group. Our Warlock was upset and DC'd because I had won 2 rolls on items and he hadn't won any :-/ We replaced them and gave Rotface 3 attempts before downing him. On our second attempt we got him down to 1.1% before he wiped the raid. I went Fire for the first attempt, but decided to go Arcane for the second two. Arcane was higher DPS for me according to recount, but it's hard to judge when you wipe. The third time he killed most of the raid. We had about 7 people alive (myself not included) when he finally went down and everyone /cheer'd. Several people had to go after that so we went and got the free badge before Dreamwalker and called the raid.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Fire and put up pretty respectable numbers compared to the other Mages in the raid. I think that on the whole, I could have done more Damage/DPS with Arcane, but I don't know if it would have been significant in the long run. Of course if you're running up against an enrage timer or you're clearing new progression content, you want to squeeze every last ounce of DPS that you can. But if that's not the case, then you can just play what you like and have fun with it. I like that there's a little more challenge to the rotation than 11112 11112. I'm currently trying to gear myself towards a main raid spec of Fire. I'll still admit that Arcane is better DPS on most fights, but it simply isn't as enjoyable.

Sidenote: As far as theorycrafting goes, many people say that Fire will surpass Arcane on most any fight at very high levels of gear (i.e. ICC heroic gear). However, most people aren't anywhere close to that so you're left deciding what you have more fun with and/or what is most appropriate for the fight at hand. On MMO-Champion the consensus is something like Arcane for everything up until LK Normal, Fire/Arcane (whichever) for LK Normal and intro ICC Heroic, and Fire for anything past the first 4 on ICC Heroic. I thought it was interesting that Paragon didn't even have a Mage in their World First Lich King 25 Heroic kill.

[Smigel]

Maybe if we're lucky Stormi will come in and share her experience as a Mage vs. the Lich King.