[5.3] Do we have an official verdict on Mage Bombs?

[Methusula]

I don't think the Wushoolay's uptime is anything other than good RNG so I'm not giving LB credit for that.[COLOR="red"]

See this is why no one takes anything you say seriously. You can attribute higher procs from NT vs LB over an hour long test to benefit what YOU believe, but you say "oh trinket proc was luck"

TBH, all the proc info should be taken with a grain of salt. Far too small a sample size to draw ANY conclusions.

[Akraen]

That's completely understandable, Akraen. Glad you didn't go the other way with my comments. I came off a little more harsh than I should have there.

We're supposed to all be on the same side here. I seem to do okay until Serene makes a big bad "I'm a fire mage and the rest of you suck" post, or Dragon/Pewpew says something dumb, or zomgDPS reminds the world he's more successful than they are IRL.

[Roidzilla]

This is why you will remain an average mage. Apparently you haven't looked at any parses showing LB and it's trinket uptime. Remember only take part of a parse/test to try and prove you are correct!

---------- Post added 2013-05-25 at 07:00 PM ----------

No you don't do ok, you come of as a whiney mage who is out to try and prove a point when he has partial or no evidence to support his claim.

[Methusula]

We're supposed to all be on the same side here. I seem to do okay until Serene makes a big bad "I'm a fire mage and the rest of you suck" post, or Dragon/Pewpew says something dumb, or zomgDPS reminds the world he's more successful than they are IRL.

I thought Serene was Arcane? Also, I lol'ed.

[Akraen]

TBH, all the proc info should be taken with a grain of salt. Far too small a sample size to draw ANY conclusions.

We all know BF will proc more from NT than the other two bombs, just that it comes with the downside of potentially being wasted. I think I came to a reasonable conclusion today that if I can get 14 more BFs from NT over the course of a fight then NT is justified.

But how realistic is that to happen? That part I won't know until I have a few raid weeks to analyze. Logically with more haste I can get that gap to be wider and wider, maybe instead of 12 I can get it up to 14 and justify NT. It's a lot of work to get NT anywhere near LB but I will certainly try :P

The funny and dumb part here is that I wish I could just use frost bomb but that's been a wash since MoP release.

[Roidzilla]

Don't forget with all that haste you want the IV glyph....oh wait.

[Methusula]

We all know BF will proc more from NT than the other two bombs, just that it comes with the downside of potentially being wasted. I think I came to a reasonable conclusion today that if I can get 14 more BFs from NT over the course of a fight then NT is justified.

But how realistic is that to happen? That part I won't know until I have a few raid weeks to analyze. Logically with more haste I can get that gap to be wider and wider, maybe instead of 12 I can get it up to 14 and justify NT. It's a lot of work to get NT anywhere near LB but I will certainly try :P

The funny and dumb part here is that I wish I could just use frost bomb but that's been a wash since MoP release.

Yeah, I should have clarified. BF procs should be pretty straight forward. I meant trinkets and the meta gem.

[aoz]

RNG plays a role, but I was able to get 19 more BF procs out of the NT build, which accounted for 968904 additional damage from FFB. Take also into consideration RNG in the favor of NT build because I had 11 non-crit FFBs (incredibly unlucky), versus 2 non-crits in the LB build.

RNG is the only reason you saw 19 more BF procs in this test. In your first multi-target test, your living bomb test had 79 BF procs to 77 for NT. A single 10-minute dummy test for each setup isn't enough to come to a conclusion with any sort of confidence.

NT and LB have the same base duration of 12 seconds where NT starts at 12 ticks/12 sec and LB starts at 4 ticks/12 sec which is exactly 3 times as many ticks for NT as LB. LB has a 25% chance per tick to proc whereas NT has a 9% chance per tick. You get 3 chances at procing with NT for every chance with LB - the expected number of BF procs for 3 ticks of NT is 0.27 which is 8% higher than with LB.

Even though the proc rate of NT is greater than LB, it's much easier to lose procs with NT than it is LB. LB should result in more FFB usage in the long term.

Also,

Wrong, If less than 20% of FB is channeled/cast it's a dps gain to stopcast.

It isn't possible to do this without losing a GCD since it's triggered at the start of the cast.

Edit: fixed expected FFB procs for 3 NT ticks to account for double and triple procs

[Deleted]

OK, for clarification.
NT proc more BF than LB by a few percent.
NT scale better with haste because of it's 1s tick.
NT is largelly better whenever there's more than 2 targets (and at 2 targets too)
LB is more easy to use at low haste because of the 1s GCD, but Frost is already GCD capped all times (or very near)
LB is ahead of NT in single target by 15% globally

So what ever you want Nt will be better for any fight with more than 1 targets. but LB won't be bad too as you can multi-dot it to 3 targets.

[Vaelkder]

Honestly, I wish that the argumentative slant and the personal attacks would end, and that the topic would be rediscovered and addressed.

I'm still a beginner, relatively speaking, and I openly admit that I dislike Fire Spec (I started out as Arcane Nelf and changed to Fire Worgen at the request of my Guild), as I have truly horrible RNG and can't seem to get the "feel" of Fire, regardless of the hours spent reading the forums, watching the myriad videos and firing madly away at the practice dummies, trying every combination which is recommended and/or suggested.

Fire is RNG, plain and simple, and my spending so much time reading the posts here is to try to LEARN the mechanics and begin to improve, by implementing everything possible to increase my skill (my luck/RNG stinks on ice, so I'm not going there...). I not only want to know what bomb is the logical, practical, informed and reliable choice for whatever fight is in front of me, I NEED to know this information, so that I might be able to get my numbers out of the basement and up where they certainly ought to be.

Please, please, please, stop the nastiness and stick to the topic?

Thank you.

[Deleted]

Honestly, I wish that the argumentative slant and the personal attacks would end, and that the topic would be rediscovered and addressed.

I'm still a beginner, relatively speaking, and I openly admit that I dislike Fire Spec (I started out as Arcane Nelf and changed to Fire Worgen at the request of my Guild), as I have truly horrible RNG and can't seem to get the "feel" of Fire, regardless of the hours spent reading the forums, watching the myriad videos and firing madly away at the practice dummies, trying every combination which is recommended and/or suggested.

Fire is RNG, plain and simple, and my spending so much time reading the posts here is to try to LEARN the mechanics and begin to improve, by implementing everything possible to increase my skill (my luck/RNG stinks on ice, so I'm not going there...). I not only want to know what bomb is the logical, practical, informed and reliable choice for whatever fight is in front of me, I NEED to know this information, so that I might be able to get my numbers out of the basement and up where they certainly ought to be.

Please, please, please, stop the nastiness and stick to the topic?

Thank you.

If you want to know what bomb per fight it would be something like

Jin'rokh - LB
Horridon - NT
Council - NT (This depends on your guilds strategy, if they are almost never in cleave range LB will be better)
Tortos - LB (Alot of people are suggesting NT but it can rarely cleave since mages will allways be on turtle and then boss, and turtles are pretty much spread out and not close to each other, although you can't dot 3 turtles + boss with LB so it's probably a very close tie here)
Maegera - LB
Ji-kun - LB
Durumu - LB (IF you are progressing on heroic you might wanna try NT depending on how quick the walls are dying, or rather do you have a lock/ele shaman our walls go down within 5 seconds since we use both ele + lock so it's pointless for me to try NT dot the walls)
Primordius - LB (unless you're on add duty where you shouldn't be in first place)
Animus - LB
Iron Qon - For normal it's LB for sure, not 100 % for heroic though, the cleave in the last phase of NT will indeed be very good the question is if it will make up for it's loss troughout the fight
Twin Consort - Depends how you play the fight alot, I will be using ony LB on this beacuse as soon as phase 3 starts we move Lu'lin to a corner of the room to prevent tidal from raping us so I don't have any cleave options so i'll take LB here but otherwise i you put them both in cleave range for P3 NT might be nice.
Lei Shen - LB, if you wanna do damage to ball lightning just go Glyphed CoC-> AE spam it's not worth NT spamming.

[Erolian]

Honestly, I wish that the argumentative slant and the personal attacks would end, and that the topic would be rediscovered and addressed.

I'm still a beginner, relatively speaking, and I openly admit that I dislike Fire Spec (I started out as Arcane Nelf and changed to Fire Worgen at the request of my Guild), as I have truly horrible RNG and can't seem to get the "feel" of Fire, regardless of the hours spent reading the forums, watching the myriad videos and firing madly away at the practice dummies, trying every combination which is recommended and/or suggested.

Fire is RNG, plain and simple, and my spending so much time reading the posts here is to try to LEARN the mechanics and begin to improve, by implementing everything possible to increase my skill (my luck/RNG stinks on ice, so I'm not going there...). I not only want to know what bomb is the logical, practical, informed and reliable choice for whatever fight is in front of me, I NEED to know this information, so that I might be able to get my numbers out of the basement and up where they certainly ought to be.

Please, please, please, stop the nastiness and stick to the topic?

Thank you.

Look at it this way. Are there more than 3 targets you want to dot at a time for a large amount of the time? If yes pick NT. Are there 2-3 targets with high uptime that stand on or very near one another? If yes pick NT. Are there 1-3 targets that will almost never cleave one another? Pick Living Bomb. I find LB to actually be more useful on most of the bosses if you aren't cheesing the dps meter with useless damage.

[Kytal]

OK, for clarification.
NT proc more BF than LB by a few percent.

Roughly 8% more procs, but it ends up being a wash since you're more likely to overwrite procs with NT than LB. Especially when you hit several haste procs simultaneously.

NT scale better with haste because of it's 1s tick.

They scale roughly the same. There are certain breakpoints where you're getting additional (read: 3+) ticks of NT over every LB tick, but they even out overall. NT "catches up" to LB at higher haste in regards to the global CD, as LB starts at 1.0s, and NT does not.

NT is largelly better whenever there's more than 2 targets (and at 2 targets too)

Only if they're close enough you can cleave. If it's two targets that are not in NT's cleave range, you treat the scenario as single target and LB is on top. This also applies to three target scenarios where cleave is unreliable (something like Tortos, as I'm not really convinced the cleave from NT is worthwhile, but again, it's so close it's irrelevant in most cases).

On another note, I agree with Aoz - I'm glad Akraen went through with a dummy test to check some things out for himself, but RNG can easily account for the higher number of Brain Freeze procs. NT is only going to compound its problematic interaction with Brain Freeze as haste increases, which is definitely frustrating. Even on a more "realistic" haste proc scenario, with ~22-28 ticks, overwriting Brain Freeze will become more and more common. This will still exist with Living Bomb, but be much less frequent, as the number of haste required to force the ticks to be under the GCD will be extremely high.

[Neoxx]

Conclusion: Use whichever one you want, they're so close. The issue I take with this community is they are a one-liner math crunchers that simply look at things from one angle. Many of you seem to fall into the trap of just calculating tooltips rather than looking at the big picture and how our spells impact each other. Take this into real-boss-fight mechanics and it gets even further away from raw calculations. Imagine on Horridon, there is far more potential for Nether Tempest to be in the places you want it to be, with big cleave damage on adds that must go down. We know NT cleaves for more than LB explodes and it is more reliable too. You can also have more snapshot control with buffs because you don't lose anything by refreshing NT at 7 or 8 sec to grab that last charge of Electrify or grab it before running out of Tempus Repit. If you refresh too early on LB you lose far too much.

... ok ...
First of all, don't call us "math crunchers that simply look at things from one angle" when you are in fact the only person in this community who only look at things from his own little world aka Frost-Spec and tries to defend his theories with numbers that mostly provide nothing at all. Don't take this as an insult, but that's how it is everytime I see you posting in this forum.
There are 2 other pve specs and you are trying so hard to show that NT > everything, so you lost the focus on the topic a little bit ...


Second, it's great that you have done some dummy testings. The bomb damage looks pretty much like what we expected and calculated (the single target logs). RPPM procs is what we mainly have to look at, sadly you only have 1 RPPM trinket and the difference is pretty high on that one. NT proccing more BF is nothing new, this was already proven months ago, but the difference is pretty high in this logs.
I'm sure if I do the same dummy test 10 times I can link you some results where LB has more BF procs and lower uptime on RPPM procs than NT. So you can't make a conclusion of 1 test run at all. That's the reason why some people have invented tools like Simcraft.

The question for frost mages is if the number of procs is worth the lower single target dmg of NT when the proc overwrites itself between 1 GCD / 1 cast. But that's only a question for Frost-Spec obviously, with Fire-Spec it's still win/win for LB single target, don't know for arcane right now.

Oh because this would be the first time me going against the grain two months ahead resulted in me being right.

I was the first mage to go for mastery above crit and now all of you are doing it. I'm not saying I'm the best in the world, I am saying I don't believe you can solve calculus problems using algebra.

Don't say things like that. You are not the Messiah of frost mages and not the only one who tried it. But it's fine that you shared your results with us.

The whole game is based on formulas and calculations, so algebra is a valid way for finding the theoretically best answer.

[Akraen]

You seem to think:

a) I should be responsible for evaluating fire and arcane as well as frost.
or b) only one person can question things for his spec.

Why would I write anything about fire? I don't care about fire. Fire has millions of mages who are constantly parsing and doing stuff... fire mages can figure stuff out on their own, I'm not bothered.

I pay very close attention to frost and arcane.

And yes Breath of the Hydra won't drop. Everyone thinks loot is better on 25m, it's not that much better. You just DE 2x tank drops constantly.

And to your final point, no. You cannot use algebra to consider variables such as time, mobility, other raid dps, and so on. You can factor in RPPM but even that hasn't been done on LB/NT calculations so far. When I say you're looking at things one way, it's that you just calculate how much damage spells do rather than how much the spec as a whole does in actual encounters.

[Polarthief]

OP updated with a small section about Frost, which led to a question about Arcane.

PS: Please stop the personal attacks. We're all Mages here looking for the same goal.

[Kytal]

I like the main post, but there's a few things I disagree with. In no particular order --

1) NT vs LB on Primordius. Most of the DPS NT will do ticking off of Primordius onto Living fluids about to hit him is almost complete scumbag DPS, and shouldn't really be considered into the equation. You could make an argument for dotting the fluids close to him instead for cleave, but that's unreliable at best, and if you're counting cleave from fluid to fluid, they're already likely so close to Primordius it won't matter. If your raid is REALLY having a hard time consistently killing adds on Heroic (or if, for whatever bizarre reason, you're on fluid duty instead of the boss), NT could take the edge.

2) Brain Freeze does indeed proc more with NT than LB, but by less than 10%. This seems decent, until you consider how many procs are going to be wasted by overwriting with NT. This problem gets worse, not better, with more haste, as you'll see several procs within the course of a GCD, with no possible way to spend them. I think the additional procs from NT are intended to offset the number of wasted procs versus Living Bomb, rather than be a large boost to NT.

3) Not sure about Heroic, but adds on Lei Shen also evaporate, making applications of NT worse than throwing out glyphed CoC or flat out AEing if you group up for the ball lightning bounces. Living Bomb seems much better.

We're going to put a bunch of attempts into Heroic Consorts tomorrow, so I'll have a better idea of what talent is better, but I'm strongly leaning towards LB - the amount of time the two are close enough for cleave to be relevant probably won't outweigh the single target damage during 90% of the fight (especially with adds evaporating from melee).

[Polarthief]

3) Not sure about Heroic, but adds on Lei Shen also evaporate, making applications of NT worse than throwing out glyphed CoC or flat out AEing if you group up for the ball lightning bounces. Living Bomb seems much better.

The purpose isn't to apply bombs to the adds but rather the bonus cleave damage that goes out. Plus, Mages are pretty shitty on AoE (even with the buffs!); we typically just continue to DPS Lei Shen (at least on Normal; don't know how shit works in Heroic).

For pure DPS on LS, yes, LB is better, but it's more or less debatable.

[Kytal]

The purpose isn't to apply bombs to the adds but rather the bonus cleave damage that goes out. Plus, Mages are pretty shitty on AoE (even with the buffs!); we typically just continue to DPS Lei Shen (at least on Normal; don't know how shit works in Heroic).

For pure DPS on LS, yes, LB is better, but it's more or less debatable.

Adds die in the blink of an eye. I don't think the 5, maybe 10 seconds of cleave will outweigh the single target DPS gain LB gets for 90% of the fight.

I will agree with the AoE aspect - I wish we had something respectable outside of Frost's Frozen Orb.

[Polarthief]

Adds die in the blink of an eye. I don't think the 5, maybe 10 seconds of cleave will outweigh the single target DPS gain LB gets for 90% of the fight.

I will agree with the AoE aspect - I wish we had something respectable outside of Frost's Frozen Orb.

I gave it some thought and agreed. I swear, I think I'm on drugs half the time I make my posts.

Yeah, even with the 40% buff, my AoE still feels like shit. Stuff STILL dies faster when I spam NT on everything rather than Blizzard.




OP has been edited and updated because it looked like a pile of shit.