I don't know why I can't get good numbers!

[sonshinegreene]

I've been a long time reader, first time poster. I've been trying to figure out why oh why I can't seem to maximize my dps. I can only get 15k out of myself on most fights and I'm almost fully epic! I feel under powered compared to the hunters and Lock that I run with. It's driving me crazy especially on fights like Cho'gal x D So, I open myself up for your critism.
Here's my armory:
us. battle. net/wow /en/character/arygos/blackbak/advanced
And a world of logs:

worldoflogs. com/ reports/rt-dugy5gc0fregsv8f/analyze/dd/source/

So thanks in advance for the help!

[Licarius]

I've been a long time reader, first time poster. I've been trying to figure out why oh why I can't seem to maximize my dps. I can only get 15k out of myself on most fights and I'm almost fully epic! I feel under powered compared to the hunters and Lock that I run with. It's driving me crazy especially on fights like Cho'gal x D So, I open myself up for your critism.
Here's my armory:
us. battle. net/wow /en/character/arygos/blackbak/advanced
And a world of logs:

worldoflogs. com/ reports/rt-dugy5gc0fregsv8f/analyze/dd/source/

So thanks in advance for the help!

As a lock i have no idea about your world of logs, but from a gear stand point, gems, enchants etc... you're pretty much perfect....

it may just be the class/spec combo is not performing amazing at the moment?

no idea man, looks good to me....

[Deleted]

What's your rotation, i would like to know? And how quick you go oom?

[sonshinegreene]

Pre-pot, pyro, LB for start of pull, keep LB up and use hotstreaks everytime while spamming fireball, combust with a good fireball/pyro crit having all 3 dots up. I can usually make it 3/4-3/5 of the way through a fight before I even start to look at my mana gem.

[Deleted]

Pre-pot, pyro, LB for start of pull, keep LB up and use hotstreaks everytime while spamming fireball, combust with a good fireball/pyro crit having all 3 dots up. I can usually make it 3/4-3/5 of the way through a fight before I even start to look at my mana gem.

Well, seems normal to me. I instead hold always Fireblast on CD und skilled it too for the sake of more Pyroproccs. My gear isn't as good as yours and i use Mage Armor because of my small manapool. Like @Licarius said, it seems that Firemage just can't brake the limit. Maybe you gain a bit more dps when the patch goes live. They've fixed Ignite at last...

[Dully]

Two things that will help: Getting 4 piece T11 and dumping the 2 points in Arcane Concentration and putting them into Pyromaniac. I realize you haven't killed Cho'gall yet so actually obtaining 4 piece would be kind of hard, but just keep in mind that the 4 piece bonus will increase your DPS by a good amount. Also, while you won't get the full effect of Pyromaniac until phase 2, but mana shouldn't be a problem at all anymore and you'll gain much more benefit from Pyromaniac on other fights than you will from Arcane Concentration.

You don't need all three dots up for combustion to be good. Your main priority is to have a good ignite (which can usually lead to a Pyroblast! proc) rolling before you use Combustion. Looking at your WoL parse, your Combustions seemed okay, but could probably have been better. You might want to try reforging back to crit. Your ignite damage and Pyroblast! damage seemed a little low, so you might want to try reforging crit until you get 4 piece.

[graagh]

I've been a long time reader, first time poster. I've been trying to figure out why oh why I can't seem to maximize my dps. I can only get 15k out of myself on most fights and I'm almost fully epic! I feel under powered compared to the hunters and Lock that I run with. It's driving me crazy especially on fights like Cho'gal x D So, I open myself up for your critism.
Here's my armory:
us. battle. net/wow /en/character/arygos/blackbak/advanced
And a world of logs:

worldoflogs. com/ reports/rt-dugy5gc0fregsv8f/analyze/dd/source/

So thanks in advance for the help!

60-65% uptime for living bomb on the first few pulls I looked at (also the longest ones).

Need to improve on that, you will see your dps noticeably increase. You can also double dot on cho'gall when the big add is up. I do. I have a focus living bomb macro. If you have tidy frames you can keep track of these pretty easily on multiple mobs. There are other ways to do it as well.

Grab power auras and make one that shows your living bomb when its up on a target with a timer. Not too difficult to do. There are a lot of videos online showing how, but you can pretty much figure it out on your own if you choose I'm sure. It gets priority for refresh over anything other than flame orb. Flame orb also shouldn't be used when you're trying to setup a big combustion as the crits will ignite munch your big crits from fireball & pyroblast.

Make sure your tank is counting down before the pull and prepot with a volcanic potion and a pyroblast lead in hardcast. Then use volcanic potion (I have it macro'd to pyro so i use that macro for this as well typically during lust when i have a hot streak up, typically with some SP/int procs up as well).

Basically your opener should look like pot+pyro->living bomb->fireball until you have trinkets up and hot streak on CD, generally before the living bomb is over you want to have your combustion up, this requires some RNG, but it is optimal. If not you want it up after you put up the 2nd living bomb hopefully not long after, you can still have a bunch of procs/trinkets up by this point. Immediately after the combustion you want to use your flame orb and then keep it on CD for the rest of the fight unless trying to setup a combustion once again (shouldn't be a huge issue after this point).

Strongly suggest you setup power auras to inform you when your trinkets are up as well. You could do this with other mods as well I'm sure though, whatever works for you.

Do all this stuff - get your LB uptime to around 80-85% (impossible to have 100% without overwriting, 90's maybe possible as well with good scorch use and fireball but its a judgement call as to whether u should scorch instead of fireball to get living bomb up faster, there is i believe an optimal window but it would vary from toon to toon, with gear etc., but 80-85% is a good solid number, but for you probably you should use scorch whenever the timer on living bomb matches or is lower than cast time - it's the IDEAL way to scorch weave and conserve mana). We all make mistakes here and there after all.

Also keep gems on CD. Don't hesitate to conjure more if the fight length warrants it. Use the conjure glyph and arcane bril glyph to save mana if you have to use these spells in combat in an emergency for a minor dps increase via extra mana (assuming you're using all your mana).


Hope this helped, apologize for wall of text.

---------- Post added 2011-04-14 at 10:39 AM ----------

Well, seems normal to me. I instead hold always Fireblast on CD und skilled it too for the sake of more Pyroproccs. My gear isn't as good as yours and i use Mage Armor because of my small manapool. Like @Licarius said, it seems that Firemage just can't brake the limit. Maybe you gain a bit more dps when the patch goes live. They've fixed Ignite at last...

They haven't fixed ignite and the advice given (other than sonshinegreene to some extent) so far hasn't been very helpful. And considering he provided logs demonstrating where he's failing, I don't see why there couldn't be some constructive posting in here. Certainly he can do better than he's doing. Most of us could.

I know I make plenty of mistakes, but then I have moments where I play well (and even then I'm sure I made mistakes just looking at my uptime) and can do this: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/vst12n7xbfgg2ox8/ despite being in a pretty casual raid (long story about that, but I'm sure no one's that interested). I'm willing to bet if someone went over that pull with a fine tooth comb they would find mistakes (I know they would actually).

[Zenzey]

Basically your DPS is decided by the encounter, and lots of RNG. Sometimes I reach up to 40k burst DPS, and sometimes it's hardly above 20k, a good combustion usually decides your overall DPS, at least for me. If I got a good start with a great Comb, I usually got high DPS the whole fight, including when the boss dies. As said above, 4piece T11 really helps, along with more uptime on Living Bomb, but Combustion is the key, as far as I've noticed. We're several mages in our raids, and not always the same whose topping, all depending on who got a good comb or not.

[Deleted]

They haven't fixed ignite and the advice given (other than sonshinegreene to some extent) so far hasn't been very helpful. And considering he provided logs demonstrating where he's failing, I don't see why there couldn't be some constructive posting in here. Certainly he can do better than he's doing. Most of us could.

I know I make plenty of mistakes, but then I have moments where I play well (and even then I'm sure I made mistakes just looking at my uptime) and can do this: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/vst12n7xbfgg2ox8/ despite being in a pretty casual raid (long story about that, but I'm sure no one's that interested). I'm willing to bet if someone went over that pull with a fine tooth comb they would find mistakes (I know they would actually).

Sorry Mr.Walloftext, i don't give any advices. I've hoped that someone give me one. But, considering that you talk more about how good you are, i don't really want one of yours.

[sonshinegreene]

Awesome, thank you guys for your help! I didn't realize I had such low uptime on my living bomb, I thought I was keeping it up as close to 100% as I possibly could! Guess I'll try making a mouseover macro for it, so I can just focus our mt for when the adds come out as for not having Cho'gal down....all I'm gonna say is yeah....phase 2 is a pain in the bootay!!

[Tempered]

One thing I noticed, your crit seems a bit low (yes I know armory rapes how much you actually have in game) Maybe swap the int/haste gems for int/crit. Also what's your standing crit when raid buffed I suppose would be another thing before regemming those.
Haste and crit kinda go back and forth on sims unfortunately :\

Also have you tried using CombustionHelper. I find that its rather simple to glare at over similar addons.

Lastly, like someone else said, dump one of your Arc Concentration pts. (1/3 is the biggest dps increase vs 2/3 or 3/3 against almost any sim)
Drop that point into Pyromaniac, yeah triple target but it is nice despite being situational.

[Ooby]

I only looked at a few attempts, but you actually Polymorphed people who were MC'd? If you're going to single target someone to break MC, use counter spell, even better than that, hit them all with Dragons breath and it will break multiples.

The biggest key to having a chance at good DPS, and I stress the word chance because we are big time RNG based, is to always be casting something. I know it sounds silly, and obvious, but 5 seconds of non activity while the rest of the raid is doing damage is an astonishing loss of DPS. You're low on the "active time." Which means you were not casting as much as others were. On Cho'Gall it's probably because you were paying attention to adds and what not, but you should always be casting. Running scortch while the add tank is moving the big add, turn around and refresh LB on CG while waiting for the oozes to spawn once the large adherent is down... If there's ever a time that you're running and not casting something, you're losing DPS. Even 1 second will have an affect.

[sonshinegreene]

Ooby, thanks for the info about Counter spell and dragons breath, I didn't think to use those when people were getting mc'd x D That might help my raid overall, and I thank you for that!

[graagh]

Sorry Mr.Walloftext, i don't give any advices. I've hoped that someone give me one. But, considering that you talk more about how good you are, i don't really want one of yours.

Your advice was to wait for the patch to go live to improve his DPS. Considering there are a lot of things he's doing wrong as indicated by his logs, which he provided, that seems a little bit short sighted, don't you think? Especially since overall dps will be going down or staying about the same for fire mages (it will however be easier to get a big combustion allowing for a bit less variation between pulls and change our stat weightings to make crit better).

I do admit to having a nice pull last night and wanting to share though. It is however, a great example of the difference LB uptime can make (although Russ was also doing the SS's on Maloriak, his LB uptime was under 70% whereas mine was closer to 85%, combustions played a big roll in the damage difference as well - Russ tends to use Flame Orb on CD regardless of combustion just because it should be what you should do - if the ignite bug didn't exist).

The 2nd part of the post just lends credibility to the first part (if it wasn't logical enough to begin with).

---------- Post added 2011-04-14 at 11:46 PM ----------

Awesome, thank you guys for your help! I didn't realize I had such low uptime on my living bomb, I thought I was keeping it up as close to 100% as I possibly could! Guess I'll try making a mouseover macro for it, so I can just focus our mt for when the adds come out as for not having Cho'gal down....all I'm gonna say is yeah....phase 2 is a pain in the bootay!!

Strongly suggest you make a living bomb power aura with timer in a readily visible spot of your UI. It will make a difference. Also remember that refreshing LB gets priority over everything with the exception of the crit debuff (which frequently others provide anyway so that may not ever be a concern).

---------- Post added 2011-04-14 at 11:49 PM ----------

I only looked at a few attempts, but you actually Polymorphed people who were MC'd? If you're going to single target someone to break MC, use counter spell, even better than that, hit them all with Dragons breath and it will break multiples.

The biggest key to having a chance at good DPS, and I stress the word chance because we are big time RNG based, is to always be casting something. I know it sounds silly, and obvious, but 5 seconds of non activity while the rest of the raid is doing damage is an astonishing loss of DPS. You're low on the "active time." Which means you were not casting as much as others were. On Cho'Gall it's probably because you were paying attention to adds and what not, but you should always be casting. Running scortch while the add tank is moving the big add, turn around and refresh LB on CG while waiting for the oozes to spawn once the large adherent is down... If there's ever a time that you're running and not casting something, you're losing DPS. Even 1 second will have an affect.

Dragons breath is low priority though. You should be able to CS every MC (although you may have to wait for a second or two for it to come off CD when they first pop) - obviously just one person. But dragons breath cc's your raid for 5 seconds. That's no good at all. Unless no one else can interrupt it's a low priority spell, best never used for that purpose. Impact + CS can get him 2 interrupts and that should leave a third for someone else. Even impact is low priority due to it's 2 second stun. That's something the raid needs to sort out though.

[Fujisaw]

Ooby could have been talking about 25s where there are 3 people CC'd and a fire mage and get all 3. and a 5sec CC from dragons breath is alot better than being aoe feared forever running in stupid directions. so many times ive ran right toward the black puddles.

[graagh]

Ooby could have been talking about 25s where there are 3 people CC'd and a fire mage and get all 3. and a 5sec CC from dragons breath is alot better than being aoe feared forever running in stupid directions. so many times ive ran right toward the black puddles.

Fear ought to be glyphed if you're using it in a raid... I believe priests and locks both have them available and don't have to sacrifice, although I could be wrong.

And yes, 5 seconds of CC is better than no interrupts but you really shouldn't need to use it. His logs show he's running a 10 man.

[Fujisaw]

deffinatly if its 10s than CS is better since it happens well over 24s apart

[Ooby]

Forgive me, I DO think in terms of 25 man raids. DB may not be the best solution if only a few people are MC'd. But I'd rather point it out and have someone say to themselves "Eh I don't think I'm gonna do that," than have them not be aware that it's usable.

[Buz]

There is also a macro floating around somewhere (not sure exactly where, it's been a while) that will go through and pick the first member of the raid that is mc'd and CS them. I use that and added a target command for Cho'gall, so I can CS the mc'd person, and immediately go back to dpsing, never truly 'switching' targets.

[Kiteh]

There is also a macro floating around somewhere (not sure exactly where, it's been a while) that will go through and pick the first member of the raid that is mc'd and CS them. I use that and added a target command for Cho'gall, so I can CS the mc'd person, and immediately go back to dpsing, never truly 'switching' targets.

If you could post that macro, that would be awesome!