Mages Under-performing?

[volkanik]

Hey, need help analyzing my guild's Mages, they seem to be under-performing, but I don't play Mage, so I don't know what they are doing wrong.

Logs

[Ilhom]

The immediate thing I see is the EXTREMELY low combustions.
Gveers average combustion was 1722 on the kill. With 12 more ilvls I consistently get an average of 10k+.

00:02:35.680 Gveers Combustion Beastlord Darmac Tick 183

00:02:35.680 Gveers Combustion Beastlord Darmac Tick 55 (Multistrike)

00:02:36.544 Gveers Combustion Beastlord Darmac Tick 183

Gveers used a combustion that was ticking for 183 damage.

They most likely need to download combustionhelper or something so they can track their ignites. Also they should probably just stick with Kindling. It's practically the same damage as meteor for the fights fire is strong at, and I believe they are punishing themselves with poor meteor play and actually losing damage.

[Liandryl]

I am not a very good fire mage, but I can analyse their performance on Gruul as arcane.

First, Birtie is playing with Arcane orb over Prismatic Crystal on a ST fight, which far from optimal.

Second, both of them are using Incanter's Flow over Rune of Power in one of the easiest fight to use RoP in. They should learn to use it especially for Gruul.

Third, since you should use Prismatic Crystal on Gruul, you should not use the Glyph of Arcane power so that you can use them both together every 1min30. Even the mage gveers that uses Prismatic Crystal is using the Glyph. That is so wrong.

Fourth, looking at their mana during the fight, they both have done only 2 mana burn phase and they seem to not be using well their mana when they should be doing a burn phase everytime evocation is up(1min30) only. They Are using too much mana and drop below 80% mana often without having their evocation to use which causes loss of dps with our mastery working with mana %. They also don't fully use they burn phase everytime since I saw some 110k mana burn phase only when you should get to approx 50% to do evocation. The arcane mage burn phase is really important for our overall dps.

Fifth, I also see gveers' Arcane missiles average damage being pretty which may mean that he is using them without having 4 arcane charge which is to be avoided since arcane charge give 50% more dmg per charge if I am right.

All of that should give them a good boost in their dps if they learn quick.

[Ilhom]

You are absolutely wrong in that you don't use the Arcane Power glyph. It is very rare that you do not, and you need to know the fight duration in order for it to be comparable to a glyphed Arcane Power.

Imagine a 4 minute fight.
3 uses for 15s = 45s of Arcane Power
versus
2 uses for 30s = 1m of Arcane Power

and not only does it stay in full duration of Bloodlust, but also with your potion uses.

[nerfproof]

Yea both fire mages combustion is pretty low. Make sure they just arent using it after 1 pyro...they should be fishing for around 3 in a row before they hit combustion so they have a high pyro and ignite dot. Also I find Blast Wave to be a much better option than living bomb. For Beastlord they should be doing 30k a piece...not 23k.

[Liandryl]

You are absolutely wrong in that you don't use the Arcane Power glyph. It is very rare that you do not, and you need to know the fight duration in order for it to be comparable to a glyphed Arcane Power.

Imagine a 4 minute fight.
3 uses for 15s = 45s of Arcane Power
versus
2 uses for 30s = 1m of Arcane Power

and not only does it stay in full duration of Bloodlust, but also with your potion uses.

The problem is always the you need to know how long the fight lasts.
You can change it if you know how long the fight lasts each week to have better result, but unless you know it, I would rather have my Arcane power with my every Prismatic Crystal every 1min30. Using Arcane Power with Prismatic Crystal is really strong and should not be underestimated.

[Ilhom]

The problem is always the you need to know how long the fight lasts.
You can change it if you know how long the fight lasts each week to have better result, but unless you know it, I would rather have my Arcane power with my every Prismatic Crystal every 1min30. Using Arcane Power with Prismatic Crystal is really strong and should not be underestimated.

http://altered-time.com/forum/viewto...p=11063#p11063

That post hits the nail on the head. You can even read Komma's post explaining the damage difference is negligible.

The last bit is extremely important, especially with these 2 mages in the logs who, constructively speaking, are not exactly the best players.

[Deleted]

I am not a very good fire mage, but I can analyse their performance on Gruul as arcane.

First, Birtie is playing with Arcane orb over Prismatic Crystal on a ST fight, which far from optimal.

Second, both of them are using Incanter's Flow over Rune of Power in one of the easiest fight to use RoP in. They should learn to use it especially for Gruul.

Third, since you should use Prismatic Crystal on Gruul, you should not use the Glyph of Arcane power so that you can use them both together every 1min30. Even the mage gveers that uses Prismatic Crystal is using the Glyph. That is so wrong.

Fourth, looking at their mana during the fight, they both have done only 2 mana burn phase and they seem to not be using well their mana when they should be doing a burn phase everytime evocation is up(1min30) only. They Are using too much mana and drop below 80% mana often without having their evocation to use which causes loss of dps with our mastery working with mana %. They also don't fully use they burn phase everytime since I saw some 110k mana burn phase only when you should get to approx 50% to do evocation. The arcane mage burn phase is really important for our overall dps.

Fifth, I also see gveers' Arcane missiles average damage being pretty which may mean that he is using them without having 4 arcane charge which is to be avoided since arcane charge give 50% more dmg per charge if I am right.

All of that should give them a good boost in their dps if they learn quick.

question isnt a burn phase as long as you have time left on your AP? once you dont have AP there is no point in burning mana? thats what ive wread before, is this statement wrong then?

this is in the mindset of non glyphed AP, i even have never glyphed it.

[Deleted]

You are absolutely wrong in that you don't use the Arcane Power glyph. It is very rare that you do not, and you need to know the fight duration in order for it to be comparable to a glyphed Arcane Power.

Imagine a 4 minute fight.
3 uses for 15s = 45s of Arcane Power
versus
2 uses for 30s = 1m of Arcane Power

and not only does it stay in full duration of Bloodlust, but also with your potion uses.

When using PC glyphed vs unglyphed comes down to personal choice, because pairing them up makes PC so strong that it's actually ok to lose some AP uptime. Think of it like saving FO for every PC when playing frost.

For any other lvl100 talent yes, glyph AP

Yea both fire mages combustion is pretty low. Make sure they just arent using it after 1 pyro...they should be fishing for around 3 in a row before they hit combustion so they have a high pyro and ignite dot. Also I find Blast Wave to be a much better option than living bomb. For Beastlord they should be doing 30k a piece...not 23k.

For aoe-heavy fights like Beastlord, Thogar or (arguably) Blast Furnace, Living Bomb is considerably better than BW because you can gain a lot of boss damage by spreading LB on the adds, triggering a lot of explosions when they die.

question isnt a burn phase as long as you have time left on your AP? once you dont have AP there is no point in burning mana? thats what ive wread before, is this statement wrong then?

this is in the mindset of non glyphed AP, i even have never glyphed it.

Burn phases are tied to evocation, not AP. You should enter a burn phase (which more or less means not casting Abar) every time Evo is a close (10-15 seconds ish) from being off cd, which conveniently lines up with PC and unglphed AP. This also makes unglyphing AP very attractive when using PC. With unglyphed you should never run into the issue of being too low on mana with AP still active, it sounds like you are doing something wrong. With AP glyphed it can happen; in that case you should just evo back to 100% and go back into conserve with AP still going.

The reason you want to burn mana is that you do a lot more damage at 4 arcane charges, not because of AP; the longer you can stay at that 4 mark instead of resetting with Abar and building back up again, the more damage you will do. Obviously AB spam with the odd AM cast isn't sustainable, so you want to use evocation at around 50% mana. If you can't use evocation, you'd rather stay at high mana to benefit from your mastery as much as possible.

I hope that made sense.

[Liandryl]

question isnt a burn phase as long as you have time left on your AP? once you dont have AP there is no point in burning mana? thats what ive wread before, is this statement wrong then?

this is in the mindset of non glyphed AP, i even have never glyphed it.

Burn phase should be done on CD because it's not because you have Arcane power that you do it, it is because you have Evocation.
It allows you to spam AB with 4 stacks and your AM to have high output then to regen all mana in no time. The reason why you would want AP at the same time is to boost your AB that will already deal a lot of dmg during that phase.

- - - Updated - - -

You are absolutely wrong in that you don't use the Arcane Power glyph. It is very rare that you do not, and you need to know the fight duration in order for it to be comparable to a glyphed Arcane Power.

Imagine a 4 minute fight.
3 uses for 15s = 45s of Arcane Power
versus
2 uses for 30s = 1m of Arcane Power

and not only does it stay in full duration of Bloodlust, but also with your potion uses.

After doing a good read and having a look at top logs for arcane mage, it seems really situational and as said earlier, you need to know the duration of the fight pretty well to know which would be better.
True, you can have the highest uptime with the glyph, but you lose the combo with PC.
Overall, on fight that last between 3min30 and 4min30, the Glyph seems better like for example Gruul, but the thing is that their kill time are with top guilds which I am not in so unless you have cleared multiple time, it's really all about what you prefer to play.

I have seen the top Arcane mage on Flamebender killing it in 3m25s without the glyph so.. Uptime does not always mean better, but it sure is important to consider it.
I will take a look at this in the future. I was using it only on certain fights, not many tho.

[Ilhom]

No one is understanding my point. I'm not arguing that every mage should always glyph. I'm saying these mages should because you can never go wrong with glyphing AP. You can go wrong with unglyphing if you don't know what you're doing.

"I'm not saying that it should never be unglpyhed, because that's not true. But you need to be certain of your kill times, or you need a fight mechanic that needs more frequent burst dps, for that to be worth it. Unglyphing when you don't know exactly what your kill time will be, for no other reason than you like to sync it with PC, is just risking losing out on uptime for no additional gains."

Meaning, you need to have a good reason to unglyph it for a specific fight other than "it lines up with crystal"
and yes, Flamebender is a pretty good fight to unglyph because the 2nd/4th/6th etc use of AP comes up when dogs are coming out, which is pretty much the most important part of the entire fight. That justifies a solid reason other than "it lines up with crystal" because as mentioned in the altered time thread that I linked, unglyphed and glyphed arcane powers are basically the same amount of damage assuming same uptimes.

and to quote Komma
http://altered-time.com/forum/viewto...p=11270#p11270
"There are a few notable exceptions such as saving FO for PC, but these exceptions require gigantic gains - FO basically does 100% extra DPS with PC. This kind of synergy strength is not the norm. For example, using AP with PC only adds 20% to the damage done on 12 seconds of PC, and the same can be said for syncing with Bloodlust. These synergies are usually tiny (Less than 0.5% of overall damage), and players place too much emphasis on them."


So going back on the topic like I've said already, these mages don't seem like the greatest players, so they should just stick with the glyph so they do not sacrifice uptime on AP.

[ZenithWOW]

The glyphed vs unglyphed Arcane Power doesn't matter too much. I simmed myself for a 4 minute fight and it was a ~200 DPS difference. For beginner players, it might be easier to keep it unglyphed when using Crystal so that the CDs line up together with Evocation.

Working on maximizing Combustion, as mentioned earlier, will yield much more significant improvements.

[Pixelexip]

I also see very low living bomb damage which means all of your other classes are cleaving the adds to fast for them to take advantage of living bomb explosion onto the boss/ they dont know how to get 2 to 3 explosions out of each set of adds.

[Weektwo]

Hey, need help analyzing my guild's Mages, they seem to be under-performing, but I don't play Mage, so I don't know what they are doing wrong.

Logs

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

Getting back to the abysmally low combust tick's... As someone mentioned, downloading combustionhelper and understanding how to use it will be a massive step in the right direction. Looking very quickly it looks as almost they are using it without any thought to the current ignite value.

Have them check out the add-on CombustionHelper or look around for a weak aura string that shows current ignite value to loosely aide in when to combust.

I'll take a closer look at the logs when I get home.

Edit: have them use kindling over meteor.

[Deleted]

haha n0b mages


Infracted for Spam

[NPI]

Its not neccessarily about maximizing combustion ticks. I tried to be fire in the Darmac encounter, but the problem was that my tanks never kept the boss near the adds. In a similar case, you use combustion whenever boss is near adds, which can lead to smaller ticks, but at least they tick on more targets. This can explain low combustion tick damage, still they can do nothing to improve it. Only you and your tanks can do by positioning boss/adds properly.

You have to understand that fire AOE is about spreading (=copying) dots from a main target to other targets. Most fire DOTs needs a target who lives long enough, so normally the boss is the main target. When the adds dying living only for seconds, that can hurt fire aoe. If the main target is not surrounded by adds, that also hurts fire aoe.

[Ilhom]

Except your main source of damage on adds is going to be Living Bomb and not combustion. You shouldn't be sacrificing a lot of boss damage to do a mediocre combustion to try and kill a trivial mechanic of the fight. Having a good combustion line up with adds is just icing on the cake, otherwise you're attempting to pad and it may not even work in your favor.

[Deleted]

I think they just lack the understanding of mage mechanics, such as spreading dots with fireblast, utilising critstreaks with combustion etc.

there is a good firemage guide in this forum they should read through, it helped me alot.

Im an average mage ( although decent gear) but one thing i learned early is not to burn your pyroblast procs instantly, when you get pyroblast procc wait for heating up to proc again and then cast fireball followed by pyroblast, this will for sure increase their dps, aswell as giving some sweet crit streaks for that big combustion we all love.

im not allowed to post links yet since i just registered. but we have some loggs on warcraftlogs from our raids. where you can see what me and my mage buddy is doing.



[QUOTE=volkanik;32528956]Hey, need help analyzing my guild's Mages, they seem to be under-performing, but I don't play Mage, so I don't know what they are doing wrong.

[Deleted]

and to quote Komma
http://altered-time.com/forum/viewto...p=11270#p11270
"There are a few notable exceptions such as saving FO for PC, but these exceptions require gigantic gains - FO basically does 100% extra DPS with PC. This kind of synergy strength is not the norm. For example, using AP with PC only adds 20% to the damage done on 12 seconds of PC, and the same can be said for syncing with Bloodlust. These synergies are usually tiny (Less than 0.5% of overall damage), and players place too much emphasis on them."

Aye, a lot of mages seem to not understand that the orb both hits twice as much and gives twice as many procs when you use it on the PC, so orbing PC gives enough damage to justify the 50% less uses, whereas AP has nowhere near that synergy, if AP let you also hit the nearest target with your AB then it'd be a no-brainer, it doesn't however which leaves them very close.

- - - Updated - - -

I also see very low living bomb damage which means all of your other classes are cleaving the adds to fast for them to take advantage of living bomb explosion onto the boss/ they dont know how to get 2 to 3 explosions out of each set of adds.

That's really more about dropping bomb on boss ~5 seconds before adds appear so you can let it blow fast and then get a new bomb up which blows on death.

- - - Updated - - -

Its not neccessarily about maximizing combustion ticks. I tried to be fire in the Darmac encounter, but the problem was that my tanks never kept the boss near the adds. In a similar case, you use combustion whenever boss is near adds, which can lead to smaller ticks, but at least they tick on more targets. This can explain low combustion tick damage, still they can do nothing to improve it. Only you and your tanks can do by positioning boss/adds properly.

You have to understand that fire AOE is about spreading (=copying) dots from a main target to other targets. Most fire DOTs needs a target who lives long enough, so normally the boss is the main target. When the adds dying living only for seconds, that can hurt fire aoe. If the main target is not surrounded by adds, that also hurts fire aoe.

In the case where the mage had a combustion ticking for 163 damage, no, just no. That's not even a fireball hit's worth of ignite. It means they're doing it wrong and seemingly just popping it on cooldown with no regard for anything stacking near boss or building a good ignite dot.