Top DPS Raiding Spec for 4.0?

[Vynicor]

Just hit 80 a month or so ago with my mage and will most likely be playing my mage as my new main in Cataclysm since they are breaking ret pallies right now. Quick question, is it 4.0 that will reduce the cost of dual spec? I would love to respec frost and fire in 4.0 to try out both but I'm waiting until they reduce the cost from 1000 to 100.

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Grabbing my comments from another thread here.

It's basically a replacement for rank 1 frostbolt every 15 seconds. With no haste, every 15 seconds you will be able to cast a frostbolt at 1.3s instead of 2.0s. That said, it was determined to be a fairly horrid talent. It drops you below GCD and the 0.7s every 15 seconds works out to less than 1% DPS gain. I'd go look up the actual numbers but I'm not in the mood to backtrack through the 90+ pages the beta mage thread is at.

Honestly it looks like a PVP talent for fire to get a quick slow out, and even that's debatable since fire can cast on the move. Arcane already has slow automatically applied to arcane blast targets. General vote is that it's a pretty bad talent for frost raiding. Frost PVP is sub-par to fire currently, but with so many chills and freezes, it doesn't seem all that helpful there either. Drops you far enough below GCD you can't queue a spell while casting, it just feels bad.

Early frost drops you below GCD at all levels of haste. Yes it is a very slight DPS increase, but it's a fair bit under 1% for both points in it. Dropping you below GCD means it's a pain in the ass to shatter off of and breaks rhythm, same reason we now only gain one charge of FoF per chill. Mashing your highest priority instant cast instead of trying to precast it didn't feel right, so one charge of FoF and for me at least, no early frost.

[Potato Bus]

I was actually thinking of 2/3/31

Not entirely sure how necessary that pushback protection is, but I don't need the crit for frost. On the PTR I'm at over 40% crit raid buffed with Mage Armor, so I don't need the crit from Molten or the mana from Master of Elements. 1 in Permafrost should be more than enough to keep pet alive, Piercing Chill is the one talent I'm not sold on though

[Kuni Zyrekai]

I was actually thinking of 2/3/31

Not entirely sure how necessary that pushback protection is, but I don't need the crit for frost. On the PTR I'm at over 40% crit raid buffed with Mage Armor, so I don't need the crit from Molten or the mana from Master of Elements. 1 in Permafrost should be more than enough to keep pet alive, Piercing Chill is the one talent I'm not sold on though

Piercing chill is a matter of preference, whenever you have any form of cleave situation it'll be useful as it increases the chance for BF and FoF, not to mention it slows a bunch of Saurfang's blood beasts.

I do find your choice of frostfire orb strange though, considering it's useless until 81 and the chill increase on FFB is negated by FFB's glyph.

[Potato Bus]

oh wow, I either misread that talent or they changed it since the last time I studied the trees (thought it was +dmg to FFB and changed FO to FFO)..... hmm, I'll have to work this out. Think I meant Ice Shards (Imp. Blizz 2.0) not Piercing Chill. This homework is distracting me as much as this forum is distracting me from my homework

Perhaps this then

[Xevan]

Wow, Frost for raiding? I thought I'd never see the day o.o

[Byronyk]

Will frost be viable for raiding come 4.0.1 (for 25LK H) or is fire still the optimal choice?

[zephid]

Wow, Frost for raiding? I thought I'd never see the day o.o

Frost was the raiding spec for the first two raid instances in vanilla due to mobs with high fire resistance and fire immune bosses.

[litledude]

From what I've heard, for raiding its Fire>Frost>Arcane. They are all pretty close though.

I personally will be rolling fire because of its fun factor.

[Xevan]

Frost was the raiding spec for the first two raid instances in vanilla due to mobs with high fire resistance and fire immune bosses.

Yea I'm aware, just didn't think it would happen again

[Toriankel]

I'll be running this.

Piercing chill is producing a FoF/BF proc chance cleave, early frost is bad, and no flame orb until 81. Blizzard doesn't benefit from FoF so the chill on it is useless. The automatic barrier talent is cool, but not something I can keep in my current 85 build, so I'll play around with it now. Reforge for as much mastery as humanly possible.

Hope like hell the brain freeze bug on beta isn't going out in the patch that hits live though. It'll hurt frost pretty bad if it does.

Edit: 49% additional damage to frozen targets is hawt. I can live with 0.1s longer cast frostbolts.

Why take permafrost 3/3 and glyph of ffb ?

Molten armor isn't the way to go for glyph ? I mean, when DF is on CD I know i have to use ffb when BF and FoF have proc'ed, but is it worth it ?

And about frost mastery, it applys only to FoF procs, isn't it better to reforge in haste/crit/int ?

[ProTech]

Just hit 80 a month or so ago with my mage and will most likely be playing my mage as my new main in Cataclysm since they are breaking ret pallies right now. Quick question, is it 4.0 that will reduce the cost of dual spec? I would love to respec frost and fire in 4.0 to try out both but I'm waiting until they reduce the cost from 1000 to 100.

I checked on the PTR a while back and I think it was 250G. But it was on a character already had dual talent. So yeah it was buggy, I did not learned it again just checked the price. So I would definitely wait for 4.0.1 and see the price when it goes live. It should be any week now.

[Serenah]

So I have to ask this and I hope someone can help me with it.

I have been on the PTR trying the new specs. I've been reading what people calculated and thought about fire, arcane and frost rotations and tested them.

-So far my experience in terms of dps is that arcane is just insane at the moment. i crit AB for 40k (buffed only with int, molten armor, flask) on the raid-dummies. adding to a dps of roughly 25k just spamming AB. I am out of mana within a short time though.

-Fire on the other hand is fun, no doubt about it. it feels just right ... but a cannot get past 11k dps, using glyphed FFB for dot, LB, FB, instant pyro, combustion etc...
(both specs with no mastery rating yet)

So for me it would just make sense, once 4.0 is live to spec arcane as primary raiding spec, blast the living hell outta bosses, manage mana after I burned the first 70% of it (evo, switch to mage armor, always use AM on proc) until mana is back for another AB-spam-burst-phase.


But since so many people believe in fire as primary raiding spec for 4.0.1 I somehow doubt that I am right with my conclusions.
So where is the error in my theory. Help is highly appreciated.

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Why take permafrost 3/3 and glyph of ffb ?

Molten armor isn't the way to go for glyph ? I mean, when DF is on CD I know i have to use ffb when BF and FoF have proc'ed, but is it worth it ?

And about frost mastery, it applys only to FoF procs, isn't it better to reforge in haste/crit/int ?

Permafrost to heal the elemental instead of carry a stack of bandages around like I do now. Where else am I going to drop those two points for 4.0.1? Early frost explained earlier, chill on blizzard doesn't matter since blizzard isn't on FoF, shattered barrier is bad for raiding, FFO doesn't work until 81, imp. CoC is the other best bet, which actually might be worthwhile instead full 3/3 permafrost, but whatever.

Glyph of FFB is +15% damage to FFB, who cares about the minimal DoT. Molten armour glyph is 2% crit vs 5% crit frostbolt, 5% damage ice lance, 15% damage FFB.

Frost's mastery is indeed on FoF only. But unlike these days, the majority of our damage is from shatters. Frostbolt is a 2 second base cast and used as filler only. 30% FoF proc rate means you're throwing ice lance exceedingly often, brain freeze fairly often, and deep freeze every 30 seconds. All of these will benefit from the massive damage boost from mastery. As I said, I dumped as much as I could into mastery and ended up with +49% damage to frozen targets. That's obscene on DFs that were already doing massive damage, ice lance is critting damned near 20k self buffed at 80.

Can't reforge int.

[Toriankel]

Why thank you for you answers Kuni Zyrekai, your help is much appreciated and taken notice for my 4.0.1 spec

One last question if you please, i am currently sitting on 47% crit, 950 haste and 3259 spell on live ( fire spec, self buff ), what should be the required haste/crit rating for frost, dumping what is left in mastery ?

( As for the remaining points in your spec, i was thinking about the +4 yards for IL, don't know if it's worth it )

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Not a problem. Now here's the thing. Raid frost, fully buffed, needs shatters to be 100%. Shatter multiplies crit rate by 3. So 100/3==33.34%

33.34% is the goal. Molten armour without glyph brings 3%.

30.34% now the goal. Fire and locks bring 5% crit debuff.

25.34%. Feral/ele/subt/fury all bring 5% buff.

20.34% base, unbuffed crit for a fully buffed raid is your goal. Now obviously more is better for frostbolt itself or a not quite fully buffed raid, but it's no longer a high priority as the majority of damage is from other things.

For haste, same deal. Majority of damage isn't coming from frostbolt anymore, it's just a means to proc the high damage spells. Of course faster is better so I don't believe there's any form of cap on this until you manage to get 100% haste and it becomes 1.0s without CDs.

That said, I personally am frost in live and didn't have much crit to begin with so I dumped haste into mastery. For you, with 47% crit, I'd dump crit into mastery, unless you dip below whichever the above levels is acceptable to you and your raid comp.

[Toriankel]

Thank you Kuni I'll try that as soon as it goes live, and i dear say i can't whait

[ProTech]

-So far my experience in terms of dps is that arcane is just insane at the moment. i crit AB for 40k (buffed only with int, molten armor, flask) on the raid-dummies. adding to a dps of roughly 25k just spamming AB. I am out of mana within a short time though.

You cannot sustain the AB spam in a raid encounter as it will drain your mana fast as you said it. It's possible that Arcane is the best dps in a 20 sec fight against a dummy, but that doesn't mean that this will be the case in ICC when a fight lasts for 5min or more. OOM Arcane Mage does 0 damage

[Kuni Zyrekai]

Thank you Kuni I'll try that as soon as it goes live, and i dear say i can't whait

You're welcome. I'm also hoping frost is worthy of a raid spot.

If anyone else has any questions about frost, I'll be on a trip for the next two weeks so send me a PM and I'll try and get back to it if no one else is providing good answers.

[chrion]

Arcane is much better for me single target, but I dont have enough crit gear to test properly. Fire is the best AOE in the game.

---------- Post added 2010-10-05 at 12:24 PM ----------

You cannot sustain the AB spam in a raid encounter as it will drain your mana fast as you said it. It's possible that Arcane is the best dps in a 20 sec fight against a dummy, but that doesn't mean that this will be the case in ICC when a fight lasts for 5min or more. OOM Arcane Mage does 0 damage

At lvl 80 the proper way to play arcane is to stack haste and mastery, and then glygh for and use mage armor, you will literally never run out of mana. By the time your evoc is back up you will only let it channel for 1 second to get back to 100%. you can stay at or above 90% mana indefinately, therefore getting tons of bonus damage from the mastery. At 85 im sure your mana will drain fast, but at 80 you can hold 13k in 264 gear and laugh as your mana stays above 90%.