Could use your help with a struggling mage.

[Deleted]

Hi guys, sorry to bother you, but due to my extremely limited knowledge of mages, I can't really figure out what our guild's new mage is doing wrong. We picked him up after a server transfer, and in the past 3 weeks he's switched from fire to arcane, and is now at a decent level of haste/mastery gear that our concerns are starting to grow about his dps.

Here is his armoury: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...zhard/advanced
And here are some logs from the past week if you have the time: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/235728/

I'm aware movement sucks for mages compared to what us warlocks/hunters get to do, but with his level of gear he really should be competing for the top, not lagging behind the pack by quite a bit in every fight! Any help would be much appreciated. He usually starts off bursting quite high, but then drops off to rock bottom once the fight is over.

[TiagoRamos]

Seems a bit low yes...and with that iLvL should be doing more... I only got a warlock, my knowladge of mages is almost 0.
Maybe, being a troll, you should expect that dps :P

[jtmzac]

His armory seems alright except he could probably reforge to the next haste breakpoint.

His uptime is very very low, he doesn't seem to be using arcane missiles anywhere near enough and his rune of power uptime is terrible.

Arcane makes up for movement with the highest stationary dps in the game. He should definitely be doing the top or close to the top dps on nearly every fight and competing with the warlock.

[Gronors]

Im just looking at the blade lord parse now: hes using RoP with scorch amd 58% of his dmg is AB hes not dropping stacks yet hes only used scorch 4 times. Either hes just not casting any damage spells half the time or hes running very low on mana with a mastery build. His nt uptime of 26 percent should also be much higher.

[Deleted]

Arcane makes up for movement with the highest stationary dps in the game.

Indeed, he's only 4 ilvl lower than me yet seems so far off I can't fathom whats wrong. Like I said he always starts strong but then seems to drop off drastically. I'll mention the Missiles and RoP uptime to him when I'm next on, and advise on potentially hitting the next breakpoint. It's a tricky situation as we very recently transferred and got a core group going, so I'm loathe to upset the balance and drop him, and would love to see him pull his socks up however possible and compete with me for the top spot.

Thank you for the swift responses, any more insight would be heavily appreciated also.

---------- Post added 2013-02-05 at 04:27 PM ----------

Im just looking at the blade lord parse now: hes using RoP with scorch amd 58% of his dmg is AB hes not dropping stacks yet hes only used scorch 4 times. Either hes just not casting any damage spells half the time or hes running very low on mana with a mastery build. His nt uptime of 26 percent should also be much higher.

I believe he may have died twice in that fight looking at the 'Deaths' section, but with Arcane Brilliance at 95% uptime and RoP at 42% it seems this may be part of the puzzle. I'm still learning how to read WoL properly as it's a recent thing, but stuff like this is really good to know.

[Gronors]

Haha didnt even check if he died or not looking at the lei shi parse now. Noticing the same thing, not dropping stacks with aBarr yet very low scorch usage even tho youre suppose to spam scorch during get away and use AE to keep stacks up only.

[Deleted]

Haha didnt even check if he died or not looking at the lei shi parse now. Noticing the same thing, not dropping stacks with aBarr yet very low scorch usage even tho youre suppose to spam scorch during get away and use AE to keep stacks up only.

Yeah he has a habit of dying, zorlok is pretty much guaranteed death during one of the attenuations, but he's been kinda thrown in the deep end as the rest of us were 9/16 already when he joined, but the fact remains that it's at the point now where continuous mistakes are starting to show. I'll look into his mana management next time i can hop into a LFR with him and see what comes up.

The point about get away with scorch/AE is something I actually mentioned to him, as he kept getting pushed back to the edge of the platform.

Anyway there have been some nice concrete responses as to how I can help him overcome these issues. Thanks a bunch, and if you ever fancy dabbling in darker powers, the warlock forums are a nice place to hang out too!

[jtmzac]

Yeah he has a habit of dying, zorlok is pretty much guaranteed death during one of the attenuations, but he's been kinda thrown in the deep end as the rest of us were 9/16 already when he joined, but the fact remains that it's at the point now where continuous mistakes are starting to show. I'll look into his mana management next time i can hop into a LFR with him and see what comes up.

The point about get away with scorch/AE is something I actually mentioned to him, as he kept getting pushed back to the edge of the platform.

I joined a team who were 10/16 and had no troubles but he might be finding it harder. He's done lfr quite a few times so he should have a pretty good idea of most of the mechanics.

On zorlok with a little practice the entire raid should be able to avoid all of attenuation just fine. As arcane you just have to remember to keep your stacks up with arcane explosion.

On lei shi the only excuse to stand still and cast is if you use greater invisibility to soak the extra damage. Otherwise you should be running against it the entire time.

As for dying a lot well mages are the definition of squishy. Our health drops 5-10% faster then nearly every other class and in normal you really have to use ice barrier or temporal shield a lot or you just die.

He might find it easier to play invocation arcane or even frost as its a lot more forgiving with movement then rune of power arcane is.

[Deleted]

Thats... very low indeed.

I think there's so many things to correct, he should just get over here and read the guide for starter.

Now. I'm not the greatest mage, I may be a little over average, and I have the same ilvl. Here's our log from last night, where we picked up 3 new unstuffed guys in our raid, so it was a little chaotic : http://worldoflogs.com/reports/3s8g2...um/damageDone/ (armory : http://eu.battle.net/wow/fr/characte...has/Daa/simple)
Feel free to compare the logs, but he should almost be able to double his damage output.

RoP uptime is low, Nether Tempest uptime is very low, not a lot of scorch cast (so either very lucky or bad mana managment, low AM use..)

He should focus on :

Using AM correctly (its our most damaging spell, more damage than Arcane Blast and no mana cost, making it awesome)
RoP uptime
Mage bomb uptime (should be 95%+)
Never dropping under 85% (or on very rare occasion)

Just working on these 4 point, he should see a drastic boost in his dps.

Here's my 2 cents .

[Deleted]

Armory-Related Issues

- Bracer Enchant should be Super Intellect

Aside from this, not a great deal wrong with his Armory. Could *perhaps* look into a more optimal reforge hit-wise but not the biggest problem


Logs and Performance Related issues

I'm not using the Logs you linked, I'm using http://worldoflogs.com/reports/vmuje...s/3/?enc=kills and I'm looking a "All kills" rather than specific kills, as this seems to be an entire performance-related issue instead of fight-specific

Here is where he's losing a LOT of his DPS:

- His overall uptime is very low.
Using death as an argument is not an excuse; if he's dying a lot compared to other members you should be looking into why this is. If he's not moving from sh*t on the floor or if he's making poor decisions, he needs to correct them

- His Nether Tempest Uptime is appaling. His uptime on boss kills is 80.1% and his NT uptime is at 45.8%, meaning his realistic NT uptime is (assuming 80.1% uptime as 100%) 532.4/929.8, or 57.2%. That is very low and needs to be improved.

- His Rune of Power usage could be better. His realistic uptime on RoP is 723.4/929.8, or 77.8%. As there is a Garalon kill and a Blade Lord kill in there, this isn't necessarily "bad" per se, but it's still below what should be expected of him

- He's not using Alter Time properly. I would ordinarily say that his bad AT usage could be down to him dying; but he's used Berserking 8 times (I don't even know if that's on CD, and if I'm honest I'm not going to bother checking, either) and Alter Time only 5. They share the same CD and should be used in tandem; he's not doing this

- He's not using Mirror Images correctly. Again, 8 Berserking casts (again, don't know whether that's the maximum number of uses or not), yet only 6 Mirror Images were cast. MI is our biggest DPET spell, and should ALWAYS be cast on cooldown, especially as they benefit dynamically from our buffs and procs and so forth

- He's not using Arcane Power correctly. He's not using AP glyph and yet only 11 uses of Arcane Power compared to 8 uses of Berserking. AP is half the CD of Berserking and even allowing for certain circumstances where waiting is better than using the cooldown (rare), he's still ~4-5 uses short of where he should be, assuming Berserking is being used on cooldown also

- Finally; he's playing Arcane very wrong. As Gronors has correctly pointed out; he's not dropping stacks with Barrage yet he's not using Scorch. Have him read up on what Scorch weaving is and how to implement it correctly into the rotation. Go from there.


Conclusion

Overall his play is very bad. He's gemmed and mostly enchanted/geared correctly, he just needs to play better, and die less. I myself am a massive DPS-whore who will do a lot to get to the top of the meters, but age-old saying of "dead DPS does 0 DPS" really applies here - I'm looking at the logs and I see his uptime being massively below the rest of the raid's, and to boot he's not even playing correctly when he's alive.

If you're a Progression-based guild I would honestly recommend just replacing him and trying to find someone better; his issues go beyond small tweaks.
If you're a casual guild just have him read up a little, there are plenty of guides here on this very sub-forum which, if he can implement the styles into his own playstyle, will help him a lot.
I would also suggest he grabs some addons to help him track his boss-debuffs and his personal Cooldowns to optimise his play.

[Deleted]

Thank you for the very specific responses, as I'm only raiding on my warlock I've only done basic research regarding mages this expansion, so the insights you have given me have been invaluable.

In all honesty our guild seems to have a curse regarding mages, they had to bench one mage in order to bring me in to kill elegon, and bench another during the transfer due to ultra-low dps also. We're onto our third mage now in 3 months and really can't seem to find a good one!

We are a casual guild in terms of play time (twice a week), but most of us have previous heroic experience and have competed for realm/faction firsts so we aren't doing this just for fun, I think me and the GM will have to have a chat about him soon and will see what comes of it. Really appreciate it and can't thank you enough.

[Holyshnikies]

He needs at least 3056 haste. 15% hit cap. Everything else into intellect and or mastery.

He should also replace his cone of cold and mana gem glyph with Arcane Power and arcane explosion.

6 stacks then missles. if no proc again for missles, fire barage. Rinse and repeat. Also, make sure he is using rune of power a lot. Sucks to cast it every time u got to move, but the damage benefit is great. He should also be using all his cooldowns at 1 time ( besides time warp unless someone pops it or he has to for a fight ).

Also have him use Reforgelite to reforge. It does better math than we can. lol. Also, lose the hit gems.

[Deleted]

He needs at least 3056 haste. 15% hit cap. Everything else into intellect and or mastery.

He should also replace his cone of cold and mana gem glyph with Arcane Power and arcane explosion.

6 stacks then missles. if no proc again for missles, fire barage. Rinse and repeat. Also, make sure he is using rune of power a lot. Sucks to cast it every time u got to move, but the damage benefit is great. He should also be using all his cooldowns at 1 time ( besides time warp unless someone pops it or he has to for a fight ).

Also have him use Reforgelite to reforge. It does better math than we can. lol. Also, lose the hit gems.

Thats really not the arcane mage rotation. Maybe is was the day1, day2 rotation, but things have changed since then. You stay at max stacks never reseting by using scorch, barrage is useless to us (except just before AT ends)

Also, AP Glyph is a dps loss on almost every fight and for it to be a dps gain you have to do some match on a encounter basis depending on how much time your group kills the boss and if BL is on pull/last 20%.

Also, missiles does more damage then AB now.

[Deleted]

He needs at least 3056 haste. 15% hit cap. Everything else into intellect and or mastery.

He should also replace his cone of cold and mana gem glyph with Arcane Power and arcane explosion.

6 stacks then missles. if no proc again for missles, fire barage. Rinse and repeat. Also, make sure he is using rune of power a lot. Sucks to cast it every time u got to move, but the damage benefit is great. He should also be using all his cooldowns at 1 time ( besides time warp unless someone pops it or he has to for a fight ).

Also have him use Reforgelite to reforge. It does better math than we can. lol. Also, lose the hit gems.

3056 Haste is only recommended, not a requirement. He's above 15% Hit but as Arcane more important to be over than under.

AP Glyph is situational. AE Glyph also situational, but would certainly say replace Glyph of CoC.

Please learn the optimal Arcane rotation before you post what you believe it to be.

ReforgeLite isn't the best option to Reforge - it's just the easiest. If I bothered to do my own maths and take the time to do so pretty sure I could come up with a better combo than it currently has for my gear but sadly I don't have the time to waste.
Hit gems are fine if he's struggling to reach hit cap. He shouldn't be in his gear, but it also depends on what gear he's taking. Going from Fire to Arcane is a complete re-hash on gear so might not be taking optimal pieces all the time. Should be wary of this.

[Deleted]

In all honesty our guild seems to have a curse regarding mages, they had to bench one mage in order to bring me in to kill elegon, and bench another during the transfer due to ultra-low dps also. We're onto our third mage now in 3 months and really can't seem to find a good one!

We cant find a decent warlock if the cookies would save the raid :/

Hit gems, int / hit in blue slots is just fine, otherwize if he prefers haste or mastery, use Mastery / Hit or Haste / Hit gems as long as the surplus hit can be forged to Haste/mastery its not really an issue.

[announced]

if ur mage is dying on zorlok he is bad. have him place one rune where he is.. and one directly beside him. either to the left or right of him. it doesnt matter whichever he prefers.. now he can run away from discs while hitting AE to refresh stacks if needed or using the free missile procs when hes not in danger of dying.

he has a bad trinket with the sha one ( not having Normal LOTC or heroic LOTC will hurt his dps significantly cause of alter time adding 6 seconds to the trinket buff at the start) . make sure hes casting AT with all buffs up (relic of yulon, berserking, improved mana gem if possible, bloodlust) and have him use arcane missiles more. the fact that his missile use is terribly low means hes not playing optimally. on a fight like sha he should be able to pull 80-90k single target dps if hes turreting.. possibly more. my mage would burst up to 200k then drop down to around 100 for a stand still fight. id go as low as 80-90 being 489 ilvl for movement.

if hes not at 100% or close to that on rop time hes not doing it right.

[Deleted]

if ur mage is dying on zorlok he is bad. have him place one rune where he is.. and one directly beside him. either to the left or right of him. it doesnt matter whichever he prefers.. now he can run away from discs while hitting AE to refresh stacks if needed or using the free missile procs when hes not in danger of dying.

he has a bad trinket with the sha one ( not having Normal LOTC or heroic LOTC will hurt his dps significantly cause of alter time adding 6 seconds to the trinket buff at the start) . make sure hes casting AT with all buffs up (relic of yulon, berserking, improved mana gem if possible, bloodlust) and have him use arcane missiles more. the fact that his missile use is terribly low means hes not playing optimally. on a fight like sha he should be able to pull 80-90k single target dps if hes turreting.. possibly more. my mage would burst up to 200k then drop down to around 100 for a stand still fight. id go as low as 80-90 being 489 ilvl for movement.

if hes not at 100% or close to that on rop time hes not doing it right.

Zorlok normal you can dodge easily enough with one rune.

Yu'lon is BiS w/ Heroic Sha for Mastery build. LotC is better with Haste build. His trinkets are fine.

Also, depending on the fight, 100% on RoP is near impossible. In fact, there's not a single fight where someone will get 100% on RoP without playing sub-optimally or without caring about dying. Depending on the fight anything down to ~85% is fine.

[Holyshnikies]

3056 Haste is only recommended, not a requirement. He's above 15% Hit but as Arcane more important to be over than under.

AP Glyph is situational. AE Glyph also situational, but would certainly say replace Glyph of CoC.

Please learn the optimal Arcane rotation before you post what you believe it to be.

Um, My main is an arcane mage for the past few years and I hardly ever am not top 3 dps. So yeah, Ima say I know what it is im talking about

[Deleted]

Um, My main is an arcane mage for the past few years and I hardly ever am not top 3 dps. So yeah, Ima say I know what it is im talking about

You don't even know your class optimal rotation, so, no, you don't know what you are talking about (sorry to be blunt)

It just means your raid has average dpsers. The only fight where i'm not #1 is garalon, and thats because melee do 130K+ and I can't do that on single target fights. And its certainly not cause i'm skilled or whatever, its just than arcane outdps almost every other spec atm, and by a large margin.

[Sheridanjohn]

There's a lot of good information here. Biggest thing is he needs to choose a play style, either go 6 stacks and camp there (needs to maintain high mana) or get 6 stacks then drop them. Also needs to work on up time, both NT and RoP. If he wants he should look at the aranometer addon, helps with dot tracking, mana management and stack tracking.