FIRE/TTW spec and Scorch in a 25man Raid

[icetoken]

Hello, i know Arcane vs Fire/TTW is the hot topic today, but I have another question/help I'd like to bring up. I've switched from a slow progression 10man guild to a 25man guild that is focused on progression (to an extent) since 2 weeks ago. From our raid lastnight, the 2 Arcane mages were doing pretty well and were pretty well ahead of me (which I still argue have to do with my lag and my lack of experience on the new content). Since this guild does not have the same people running in every raid every week, there seems to be alot of times that there's no Affliction Warlock (I believe...I don't see any ISB on the WWS for the 2 locks that ran) and no other Fire mages in the run. I haven't brought it up with the RL as of yet (I want to get my facts first) but for other guilds out there that do 25man's in a similiar situation, do you,

(a) Put up Improved Scorch at the risk of lower dps?
(b) If so, how signifigant is the loss of dps (what's more important to a raid team in your opinion, my amount of dps or my buff)?
(c) If you do stack Scorch, do you swap out the Glyph of MA for the Glyph of Scorch? Or just leave it, click on the Scorch 5 times?

I believe this may be a noob question, just trying to catch up to the rest of the mages out there since I seem to be behind. And yes, i did do a search prior to this but it seems like the posts are fairly out of date (the one's on this subject anyway).

[Xacez]

I put up 5 regular scorch because raid dps > personal dps

[kmp1331]

If you're fire spec and there are no afflic locks, put up scorch stacks to help the raid out. The faster the boss dies the better everyone's dps looks.

My scorch stacking glyphs: Molten Armor, Living Bomb, Imp Scorch.
I took out the fireball glyph (+5% crit on fireball, but no fireball dot) in exchange for imp scorch because your 1.3ish second scorch cast will give you 5% crit on all of your fireballs, living bombs, and hot streak pyros. Switching the glyphs is a negligible dps difference but major raid damage help.

[DJet820]

Your glyphs should always be FB/MA/LB. And yes, always scorch if there is no lock with the debuff available. If you ever do happen to run with another fire mage, have him help you stack it to make it much quicker. It's not hard to keep it up yourself.

[DirewolfX]

Fireball/Molten Armor/Living Bomb glyphs AND maintain scorch. The 5% crit from scorch will give you AND your raid more DPS than not putting it up, even with conservative cycles to maintain it. You only take a small hit (< 6 seconds) of fireball time by not using the Imp. Scorch glyph, unless you're terrible at keeping scorch up. The extra crit from the Fireball and Molten Armor glyphs is better in the long run than the DPS difference between 2 fireballs and 4 scorches in the beginning of the fight.

[Scot]

Hello, i know Arcane vs Fire/TTW is the hot topic today, but I have another question/help I'd like to bring up. I've switched from a slow progression 10man guild to a 25man guild that is focused on progression (to an extent) since 2 weeks ago. From our raid lastnight, the 2 Arcane mages were doing pretty well and were pretty well ahead of me (which I still argue have to do with my lag and my lack of experience on the new content). Since this guild does not have the same people running in every raid every week, there seems to be alot of times that there's no Affliction Warlock (I believe...I don't see any ISB on the WWS for the 2 locks that ran) and no other Fire mages in the run. I haven't brought it up with the RL as of yet (I want to get my facts first) but for other guilds out there that do 25man's in a similiar situation, do you,

(a) Put up Improved Scorch at the risk of lower dps?
(b) If so, how signifigant is the loss of dps (what's more important to a raid team in your opinion, my amount of dps or my buff)?
(c) If you do stack Scorch, do you swap out the Glyph of MA for the Glyph of Scorch? Or just leave it, click on the Scorch 5 times?

I believe this may be a noob question, just trying to catch up to the rest of the mages out there since I seem to be behind. And yes, i did do a search prior to this but it seems like the posts are fairly out of date (the one's on this subject anyway).

ick.

[Mightymage]

If you want to use imp scorch glyph then replace your MA glyph not your FB glyph.

This could possibly change when you get 2p t9, so check withnrawr.

[culanap]

Using imp scorch glyph because you're afraid that scorching 5 times will hurt your DPS makes you retarded. It's not like scorch does 0 damage.. Plus, scorch glyph is 100% useless after one scorch, so no point in getting that at all.

Scorching 5 times at the beginning of the fight (after LB of course) will NOT hurt your DPS by a lot on a boss fight. In the long run, those scorch stacks will boost your DPS so just do it.

[Link3492]

If necessary, as in there is no afflic warlock doing ISB, it would benefit you're raid for you to be Fire/TTW spec. But as previously stated, you're glyphs should ALWAYS be Molten Armour, Fireball, and Living Bomb. Scorching does do less dps then a fireball in its spot, but the dps gain for the entirety of the raid is more important. And, while you're stacking your scorches at the beginning you still have a high % chance to get 2 scorch crits in a row, netting a hot streak proc, so it's not going to damage your personal dps much.

If there is a Affliction Warlock, play Arcane, as it is much more stable and consistent then fire.

EDIT: See bold.

[DirewolfX]

If necessary, as in there is no afflic warlock doing ISB, it would benefit you're raid for you to be Fire/TTW spec. But as previously stated, you're glyphs should ALWAYS be Molten Armour, Fireball, and Living Bomb. Scorching does do less dps then a fireball in its spot, but the dps gain for the entirety of the raid is more important. And, while you're stacking your scorches at the beginning you still have a high % chance to get 2 scorch crits in a row, netting a hot streak proc, so it's not going to damage your personal dps much.

If there is a Affliction Warlock, play Arcane, as it is much more stable and consistent then fire.

EDIT: See bold.

Umm... no. RNG is an excuse used by bad mages to explain why they suck. Fire is plenty consistent, if you're not bad. Besides, with 70%+ chance to crit, there's barely any randomness anymore.

Fire and Arcane are comparable... choose the style you like better.

[Eijnar]

As the previous posters mentioned - If there is no lock with imp sbolt stay ttw/fire since raid dps > your loss. So get dual spec one with ttw/fire and the other with arcane.
And use FB, LB and MA glyphs if you use scorch is it either because you are bad at keeping the debuff up or you slack immensly.

My 2 cents

[Jbeezydasnowman]

/Sigh

So many posts on here could be avoided if people would just freaking use RAWR.

[Grisan]

If there is a Affliction Warlock, play Arcane, as it is much more stable and consistent then fire.

This is not true. Arcane DPS is pretty unstable and inconsistent. It also highly depends on optimal cooldown usage and the encounter mechanics, movement etc.
Fire is high DPS and very consistent if you have semi-decent gear.

Iff you want high and reliable DPS with a few cooldowns you can use during Heroism/Bloodlust and good AoE damage (which is helpful for some encounters) you should use FFB otherwise go for FB/TTW

If you are specced fire you should always apply the scorch debuff if no warlock is doing it.

After Patch 3.2.2 Arcane is showing very good results and can outperform Fire/TTW in single target scenarios, but it still is not as consistent as fire.

[Muffinator]

Sorry to hijack and sound like a noob, but how does TTW work on bosses that you can't uses slows on?

[holkim]

Its not only slow that works, all tanks (ofc if they specc it, and they should), can apply snare/slow debuff on mobs.

[Illum]

Sorry to hijack and sound like a noob, but how does TTW work on bosses that you can't uses slows on?

TTW comes into play whenever there is a slow/snare effect on the mob, which includes both movement and/or attack speed slows. Most every boss in the game is vulnerable to one of those debuffs which are produced by the tank...Eg. Frost fever, Consecration, Thunderclap, Infected wounds, ect.

[Arcdragon]

TTW comes into play whenever there is a slow/snare effect on the mob, which includes both movement and/or attack speed slows. Most every boss in the game is vulnerable to one of those debuffs which are produced by the tank...Eg. Frost fever, Consecration, Thunderclap, Infected wounds, ect.

Consecrate does not snare, you might be thinking of Judgements of the Just which is in the prot tree.

But yes, any tank that is specced properly and tanks correctly will always have an attack speed reduction debuff on their target, as reduced attack speed = hit less frequently and thus less damage taken.

The problem however, is not everything is tanked like oh say.. The head and torse of mimiron, Onyxia in phase 2, the ice blocks in Hodir, the power sparks in malygos, the airborne adds in malygos, saronite clouds in Vezax and several other things.. the list goes on but Blizzard seems to either not realise this or doesn't care that mages are at the mercy of tanks to ensure that all single targets are being snared at all times =)

True, in a 25 man raid there is usually at least 10 death knights who use icy touch, but not always in 10 man raids.

Maybe 10 man raids just aren't important enough to care about or maybe Blizzard likes mages to be a second class of casters with the least raid utility of all classes, the least mitigation who need others to hold our hands in order to do decent dps.

I know some rogues will say they have the least raid utility, to which I say L2ToT and hunters may mention sniper training. I'd pick that as a mechanic over TTW anyday.

[icetoken]

Thanks everyone for the info, I will maintain LV, MA and FB glyphs and start the rotation LB, Scorch x5, FB till hot Streak and see how it goes. Somehow in my mind it seemed the time it takes to scorch 5 times was taking away the time I could be doing FB's, but overall I can see, it's worth it and overall It'll add up to more dps and keeping my raid happy!

I do use Rawr actually and maybe I read it wrong. I was reading the Spell Info on the Stats page showing me the dps for each rotation and it tells me that the FBLBPyro > FBScLBPyro. But I guess it doesn't take into account the raid as a whole.

[DirewolfX]

Consecrate does not snare, you might be thinking of Judgements of the Just which is in the prot tree.

But yes, any tank that is specced properly and tanks correctly will always have an attack speed reduction debuff on their target, as reduced attack speed = hit less frequently and thus less damage taken.

The problem however, is not everything is tanked like oh say.. The head and torse of mimiron, Onyxia in phase 2, the ice blocks in Hodir, the power sparks in malygos, the airborne adds in malygos, saronite clouds in Vezax and several other things.. the list goes on but Blizzard seems to either not realise this or doesn't care that mages are at the mercy of tanks to ensure that all single targets are being snared at all times =)

True, in a 25 man raid there is usually at least 10 death knights who use icy touch, but not always in 10 man raids.

Maybe 10 man raids just aren't important enough to care about or maybe Blizzard likes mages to be a second class of casters with the least raid utility of all classes, the least mitigation who need others to hold our hands in order to do decent dps.

I know some rogues will say they have the least raid utility, to which I say L2ToT and hunters may mention sniper training. I'd pick that as a mechanic over TTW anyday.

The only meaningful target there is the head/torso of Mimiron.

Ice blocks on hodir die in seconds to the people with Storm Power (and only have 100k hp anyway).
Saronite vapors are lol--they have even less HPs; like 25k.
Onyxia is a joke and loot pinata.
Malygos is old content and doesn't matter because you can outgear it from H ToC and Emblem of Conquest gear. (Plus Power Sparks are another lol)

Mimiron's torso can be hit by DKs (Frost Fever) and enhance shamans (Earth Shock), so that can be covered with a little planning.
The head is a bit trickier, but our pallie tank sometimes drops a judgment on it. I wonder if Thunderclap will hit it, but I haven't checked.
(Phase 3 doesn't matter, you should probably be helping with assault bots when there's no melee on the head anyway).

[Muffinator]

The only meaningful target there is the head/torso of Mimiron.

Ice blocks on hodir die in seconds to the people with Storm Power (and only have 100k hp anyway).
Saronite vapors are lol--they have even less HPs; like 25k.
Onyxia is a joke and loot pinata.
Malygos is old content and doesn't matter because you can outgear it from H ToC and Emblem of Conquest gear. (Plus Power Sparks are another lol)

Mimiron's torso can be hit by DKs (Frost Fever) and enhance shamans (Earth Shock), so that can be covered with a little planning.
The head is a bit trickier, but our pallie tank sometimes drops a judgment on it. I wonder if Thunderclap will hit it, but I haven't checked.
(Phase 3 doesn't matter, you should probably be helping with assault bots when there's no melee on the head anyway).

ES slows?