Arcane or fire, which is more dps now?

[Micke]

thats just a lame comment about using wild magic/speed pot+combustion during molten fury

and he mentioned flame caps aswell...GG..want us to farm less thought u said?

[Daytrader]

I still have no idea what that means. Is he talking about using your cooldowns together? 'Cause fire has only 1 cooldown and all the BiS trinkets have no "On Use".

By the way, has anyone confirmed if Combustion has a "shatter" combo, sorta like Fingers of Frost.

Types of CDs for fire mages:

1. Click Trinket (2 min CD)
2. Proc Trinket (45 sec CD)
3. Molten fury (CD for the purpose of this question)
4. Icy Veins (2.4min CD)
5. Potion of Speed/Wild Magic (1-2 per fight)
6. Heroism (1 per fight)
7. Combustion (3 min CD)
8. Fight Mechanic that increases Damage (Icehowl Stun, Empowered Light/Dark, etc)

The most important thing to know in order to optimize your CD stacking is how long the fight lasts. If you know this then you know how many times your CDs will be available to you during the encounter.

Examples:
1) Fight is less than 2 mins:
-Wait till the target in Molten Fury range then pop everything. Some might pop CDs at the beginning, but you should wait till 35% target health to max your damage. Might get a Heroism at that point too.

2) Fight is 4.5 mins:
-Pop everything as soon as the target is properly debuffed, then wait for MF range to pop again after they come back up. You will get to use your click trinket 3 times, while only using IV and combustion twice.

3) Fight is 7 mins:
-Same concept. Pop CDs after debuffs are up. Try to have all your CDs back up for MF range and heroism. This might require you to not use a CD as soon as it comes up. You might need to wait a few seconds to have then line up for MF and heroism. You will get you use click trinket 4 times, IV and combustion 3 times.

Finer points:

-Depending on the fight, it may be best to use CDs during phases when your damage is greatly increased (Icehowl Stun, Empowered Light/Dark, etc). Even better to use them during these phases while in MF range!

-According to the EJ forums, Mirror Images inherit a portion of you spell power based on how much you have when they are cast. They will keep this amount for the duration of their up-time even if your spell power falls while they are up. They will not gain any spell power that you gain after they are popped, and are unaffected by heroism. This means it is best to pop them when your spell power is peaking (from a damage prospective, because the threat drop mechanic might be more valuable depending on the situation). They are a good DPSC spell if they last the full 30 seconds.

-Yes you can get a ghost charge (shatter combo) from combustion, but it will not get the 50% crit multiplier on the 4th spell.
Example: If you cast combustion while a fireball is in the air it does NOT increase that fireballs CHANCE to crit, but it does gets the 50% multiplier if it crits and consumes a charge,. If you "shatter combo" a HS pyro the 4th spell will get the extra crit CHANCE but NOT the MULTIPLIER. Combustion is a weird spell from a spell mechanic standpoint. A spells damage, hit/miss, and crit/non-crit is calculated when mana is consumed (i.e. when it leaves your hands). When the spell hits the target it looks at the target's debuffs/buffs and adds/subtracts the appropiate amount of damage. Combustion actually affects both ends. It affects your spell crit chance at the time of mana consumption, the effect being increased crit chance. And it also acts like a target debuff because the spell looks to see if it is present when it hits to determine if it should apply the multiplier. So only 3 spells will get the multiplier, but you can Shatter Combo a 4th spell to get the increased crit chance.

Combustion is best used when your spell power is peaking.

Good Luck!

EDIT: Here is an example of how CD stacking works:

http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat...99542#realtime

Look at the damage spike when i pop Potion of Speed at the same time as heroism in MF range.

[Tierticles]

Swizzle is a Fizzle it just took numerous posts to simply point the fact out.

[Ratikal]

That is some damned good info there Daytrader, as well as some damage. You did more than me as arcane and we have marginally the same quality of gear.

However, Arcane has cooldown stacking as well. IV+AP+Talisman of Resurgence+Wild Magic+Bloodlust while spamming AB4 at the perfect time nets me insane damage, but is the damage from Fire greater?

The only thing that bugs me about Fire is that it's very raid buffed dependent. It's godly in 25 man but in 10 man (especially mine being mainly melee oriented), it's lacking.

I may actually consider taking back Fire and timing my CD's perfectly. ToC has too much hit gear anyways, it's better to put it to use than DE it =P.

[Tierticles]

Potion of Speed > Potion of Wild Magic for arcane unless your at soft cap with lust up. Fire CD stacking at current gear levels can't compare to Arcane because it lacks IV and Combustion sticks around for 3 crits. Furthermore the ability to dump mana with CD's up into 4 stack AB's is far more dps output than fireball spam.

[Malentra]

Potion of Speed > Potion of Wild Magic for arcane unless your at soft cap with lust up. Fire CD stacking at current gear levels can't compare to Arcane because it lacks IV and Combustion sticks around for 3 crits. Furthermore the ability to dump mana with CD's up into 4 stack AB's is far more dps output than fireball spam.

For controllable, reliable dps, Arcane wins, which is why I think a lot of mages like it. You can pretty much do solid dps every fight once you know how to match your rotations and cooldowns to your mana. With Fire/TTW I can do sometimes higher, sometimes a lot lower, depending on how my crits and crit rate lines up. This is pretty frustrating.

Fire is comparable/better on certain fights like Holdir, and Twins (depending on how much you crit again), I think its also better for Hard mode Vezax, and maybe Yogg-Saron. Frostfire ends up better than Fire for Anub Heroic. On almost every other fight I'd rather be Arcane.

[Daytrader]

TBH, i have not played arcane since the new changes were implemented. So i do not have first hand experience. But from what I gather its really preference for the most part, and fight mechanics that determine who comes out on top.

You are correct in saying that Arcane DPS is also dependent on CD stacking. But Arcane can always go into a mana dump, where fire cannot. Arcane has to actively manage mana, where fire does not.

Fire does have a fairly large range of fluctuation in DPS compared to arcane, especially when your raid buffed crit is below 66.6% (just an observation). If you look at real time charts of fire and arcane mages you see that arcane has more frequent peaks and troughs with less variation, where fire has a longer wave length and is more spiky.

I still stress that both specs are different and difficult to compare. They offer different utility and require different gear and raid buff support. Its much easier to play arcane with 28k mana than it is with 18k mana, so gear does come into play. Use Rawr to find out which spec works best for your gear and fight.

[Skarrd]

I'm actually curious about all of these twins "top dps" things on WMO. We dump our CD's on the absorb shields, and i cap out at about 12k heroic, 15-16k normal (if it goes long enough for empowerment). heroic is just speculatively built from wipes, as i scorch both mobs as my fail anub FFB spec now and do something like lol8k on twins. i honestly cant ever see myself doing 17k dps on twins the way we run it in heroic, especially considering there's no chance of me ever getting empowered anything since we dont switch colors for the twins' aoe ability and orbs essentially never hit anybody but tanks. even if i sat still and got an empowerment, as long as im cooldowning absorbs to actually kill the boss, 17k seems out of reach. are people just fuckin with this shit and ignoring absorbs personally (while all other dps handle it) so they can be on top of WMO? cuz that seems cheesey as fuck.

[Ilikeforums]

Arcane imo... i use mage armor on those fights that last near 10 minutes it helps but i lose atleast 15% crit but most fights where the boss has under 30 mil molten armor works, Managing mana is the biggest concern of arcane you cant just mash AB for 15 casts... and fire is too unreliable RNG causes a lot of problems with crit as fire i hae about 70% crit raid buffed and ive actually come out of fights looking at recount and seeing average crit % was like 35... not worth it imo