TTW/Fire Mage Guide

[Krenian]

Bah my mage is honestly really a side quest type deal of me playing around with. I'm not pushing really hard on getting better. At most i'm getting her the tier 9 gear and setting her aside. This mana bar thing is confusing and I run out and I am not happy with this lol

[Sky]

If you get 2T10, you can just use Arcane Missiles everytime Missile Barrage procs! Will also mean little mana issues.

[Ryoushi]

If you get 2T10, you can just use Arcane Missiles everytime Missile Barrage procs! Will also mean little mana issues.

Can I ask how much of a DPS difference this is? I've compared both several times but only on the target dummies, always roughly the same DPS but AB0234AM obviously has much better mana control.

[Mystik]

Can I ask how much of a DPS difference this is? I've compared both several times but only on the target dummies, always roughly the same DPS but AB0234AM obviously has much better mana control.

I've been wondering the same thing. I've done tests on target dummies), with nearly the same results both ways

[Sky]

http://www.frostnova.ch/tachyon/blog...ew&id=38567936

According to this the DPS difference should be very small, but is much more mana efficient. If this results in having to evocate less, then it may be more DPS.

Doing Missile Barrage every time it procs will mean higher 2T10 uptime, which is why it works well.

[Krenian]

Maybe I should just go arcane now that I have three pieces of Tier 9. >.> Maybe it's the fact that yanno...I have shoddy gear that i'm doing so bad. lol I'll have to respec her to Arcane cause maaaaan I love Fire but I can't do Fire.

[Xodiv]

Hi there. Thanks for the guide, it's very good.

It is long though. It's good to be comprehensive but I would encourage you to take time to revise it with intent to tighten it up - remove anything that isn't conveying useful information.

I have (quite a) few comments and suggestions.

TTW/Fire Mage Guide

I don't think this is the right name. I've never seen anyone refer to the spec that way. Most mages would refer to it just as Fire spec; there is no viable fire spec without TTW, only Frostfire spec. Just name the guide Fire Mage Guide, or if you feel strongly about it Fire/TTW Mage Guide.

TTW/Fire becomes superior to Arcane past a certain gear point because how TTW/Fire scales. Arcane also suffers from reaching the soft and hard haste caps with a certain level of gear, limiting DPM potential.

I think you are overstating this. "Theoretically superior in terms of sustained DPS in a tank-and-spank encounter when we ignore ignite munching" would be accurate, but the reality is that player ability separates DPS far more than the difference between the two specs.

Arcane has a lot more burst damage than fire, and that's significant. Often doing 30k DPS for 20 seconds is a lot more important than averaging out 2-500 DPS higher. I know this is the Fire guide and clearly you are a fan of the spec but a bit more balance in giving the negatives as well as the positives would be good.

Flame Throwing

You are underrating flame throwing, and I suspect the reason is that in your guild you aren't applying the scorch debuff. Without Flame Throwing the range of scorch, and thus your range, is 30 yards. This is a disadvantage in ICC.

Ignite Munching

I think you could trim most of this section, leaving it with the basics of "this happens" and "there's nothing useful you can do to avoid it."

Burning Soul ... in combination with Improved Concentration Aura, the mage will be immune to spell pushback

70% is enough to provide full pushback protection with (normal) Concentration Aura. Improved Concentration Aura is not required.

Student of the Mind

It is worth mentioning that the first point is more valuable than the second and third points.

Focus Magic

You listed this as a major benefit the mage brings to the raid. It would be worth listing how to best use it if you see it that way.

Jewelrycrafting

This should be "Jewelcrafting". Needs fixing in multiple places.

It's not worth not using a CD if it means not being able to use it an extra time in a fight.

This is an extremely clumsy/hard to read sentence. A rewording would help.

Fire favors fights that are about 3:30 to 4:00 in length

Given the varied length of fights in ICC and some of them being significantly longer, this seems an odd statement. I know you are trying to get across that you get better average DPS where you get higher cooldown uptime, but that's ont fire specific and I think the statement as written is either pointless or incorrect.

Professor Putricide ... It’s also possible to Ice Block before the green slime reaches you to explode, causing it to stay in place for the duration of the Ice Block

I am told this has been fixed 3.3.5. I haven't exhaustively tested the behaviour but it definitely didn't behave as before when we did this fight last week.

You can use Invisibility for ... the slimes so that they stop targeting you

This is a good way to mess up your raid positioning and get people killed and I would really not recommend it.

Blood Princes- If you want to cheat on the DPS meters

This is a waste of space in your guide. And it's a waste of time to do as well.

And a final point, that you have not covered moving during the GCD cooldowns for Living Bomb and HS-Pyro, which is an important way of maximising Fire DPS.

Best wishes, X.

[Sky]

I've updated/reworded/corrected/added onto the the guide, but haven't made all the changes due to a time constraint.

I also want to recieve more input if PP really did change in 3.3.5 in regards to Ice Block.

I do Scorch in ICC, because my guild's warlocks don't like keeping Improved Shadowbolt up and rather be destro. My spec does have 1 point in Flamethrowing, but I've never found it a significant issue having to move to get into range.

I've been used to knowing the spec and calling the spec as TTW/Fire since Ulduar, so I'm surprised you've never heard the spec referred to as such before now.

Thanks for bringing up the point about directly noting about moving during the GCD using Hot Streak or Living Bomb, that slipped my mind.

What I meant about cooldowns is that the times on the cooldowns for fire favors a certain fight time, and cooldowns for other classes may favor a different fight time length.

[Sky]

Ok, I finished changing the guide, but I am not 100% certain if my list for Focus Magic is correct.

Fire mages do have strong burst, just that it is only semi-controlled.

Can any other mages provide input if Ice Block for slimes in PP really did change in 3.3.5?

I just did Heroic PP, the behavior didn't change at all for slimes and Ice Block.

[Goros]

Nothing changed in PP with ice block.

You may want to add that if you watch for phase changes early enough you can invis just before he stuns everyone and then break invis and continue dpsing while he's working at the table.

I personally prefer arcane over fire, but I'm not really geared to the point where fire becomes a superior spec. It really doesn't shine until you are in mostly 277 gear with nothing below 264.

I also like being able to dedicate my points that would normally be in Hit for fire to dps for arcane, since we only need 210 hit to be raid ready.

[Sky]

I did mention that you can use invisibility for tear gas, but I'll reword it to make it clearer on the guide.

Fire gets roughly equal/better to Arcane when you're in mostly 264 with some 251 gear, especially on fights with adds or with spell pushback. This is partly due to Arcane hitting the soft haste cap fairly easily, and having to stagger cooldowns loses some of the multiplicative benefit compared to stacking all cooldowns.

[Goros]

Are you sure about that? I've seen people run the numbers and from what I saw the modeling shows arcane and fire being neck in neck (arcane being win until all 251/264) until fire gets into almost all 277 gear...once that happens fire edges out arcane in the same gear level by around 3-500 dps overall averaged throughout the fight.

Since I'm an arcane junkie I'm going to say that since the modeling shows perfect circumstances, low latency, and a player that never fat fingers, fire loses until all 277 gear is equipped.

World of logs shows fire mages all beating arcane when in all 277, but arcane and fire show neck in neck on a ton of the fights and people's armory's show mostly 264...

[Sky]

Hmm, I think I worded what I said previously in a bad way.

Not all fights (obviously) are patchwerk style fights, which most modeling measures.

So, since most boss fights in ICC has either adds, target switching, and/or pushback, it is better to go with Fire for ICC once you have mostly 264 with some 251 gear because overall the fights will be better for Fire because Fire generally does better than arcane for those aspects.

If you -really- need high burst for Saurfang for blood beasts, or knocking up Kinetic Orbs for Blood Princes, Arcane is better, but for everything else, off the top of my head, it would be better to stick with Fire.

If people are just going to stick on a boss though, I can't imagine the numbers would be very different.

[Goros]

Why would target switching matter to arcane? I raid on my arcane mage and target switching does nothing to my DPS. The Arcane Blast stacks don't happen on a target, they are a debuff on yourself. I tab target all the time and never lose dps. I would imagine fire with the need to have scorch and/or living bomb on each target would lose more DPS from target switching.

Plus the fact that arcane has faster casts would probably put arcane at an advantage. When I looked at WoL it wasn't for patchwerk fights, it was for ALL fights, top 10 ranked per fight 10/25 and 10/25 HM.

I like what you did with fire but am hard pressed to think that it does what no one says it can (or what they can show).

[Sky]

The thing is with Fire with target switching, it's possible to leave LB on the main target (the boss) and put a Living Bomb on the add, and have two Living Bombs ticking. Those LB's can possibly explode and effect the other. Even if they don't effect the other, LB is still a very high damage per execute time. The initial damage done to the add isn't as strong as Arcane, but as time gets to past 12 seconds, Fire will do more damage than Arcane if you do total damage, which would be calculated as boss + add.

It's also not as simple as Living Bomb's ticking, LB's can count towards Hot Streak, and the more adds there are, the more beneficial it is.

On Sindragosa, you can LB on all of the Ice Blocks and the LB explosion will effect the nearby Ice Blocks, causing significant damage and proccing lots of Hot Streaks.

It's why on P3 for Lich King, you can LB a bunch of Vile Spirits and then do chain Hot Streaks from the LB's exploding every GCD and proccing Hot Streak. Arcane doesn't have a possibility of doing something like that.

There's more examples, but these should give the idea for what Fire can offer for boss fights with adds.

[Goros]

I see what you're getting at, but other than some anecdotal evidence I can't find a WoL where that shows a definitive dps increase over arcane unless the mage in question is in all 277 gear.

I'm not saying it isn't possible, I just can't find anything.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

[Sky]

Well, I don't know what to tell you. Looking at WoL DPS ranking parses, Fire pretty much dominates Arcane, although that could be explained by what you said about mages in 277 gear.

Boss fight closest to Patchwerk, Heroic Festergut-

Arcane #1- 18,754
Arcane #200- 14,705

Fire #1- 23,814
Fire #20- 16,831

Boss fight with Adds, Heroic Professor Putricide-

Arcane #1- 14,989
Arcane #200- 11,709

Fire #1- 17,631
Fire #200- 14,323


Normal Festergut-

Arcane #1- 16187
Arcane #200- 13976

Fire #1- 18,465
Fire #200- 14,523

Professor Putricide-


Arcane #1- 14,000
Arcane #200- 11,964

Fire #1- 15957
Fire #200- 12976


Normal mode parses are more likely to be done with mages with less than full 277 gear, but there's still a pretty decent difference between Arcane and Fire for Normal Vs Heroic, Festergut Vs. Professor Putricide.

I know this is far from concrete evidence, but this is the best I could think of at the moment that has any sort of somewhat useful comparison.

I can't think of a way to compare gear to spec to boss fight, or a site that does that.

[Goros]

Yeah I just spent time looking at people's armories (since I'm a rawr freak) and comparing the arcane to the fire. Fire in 251/264 is inferior or neck in neck with arcane.

in 277 gear it wins.

[Xodiv]

With respect to focus magic priorities, there are two considerations: how much benefit the recipient gets, and how much uptime you get.

The second is largely irrelevant in ICC gear as all caster classes have high levels of crit and are casting crit-capable spells frequently enough. There is a slight disadvantage to DoT classes because DoT crits don't proc FM (that I know of).

The first is easy to determine as it is simply how well the recipient scales with crit. See the crit column in this table for T10-level values.

The only extra complexity is players who are crit capped, which is only likely to be moonkin, but the table seems to reflect that anyway.

Thus the priority order is:

1. Fire Mages
2. Shadow Priests
3. Elemental Shaman
4. Arcane Mages
5. Warlocks
6. Balance Druids
7. Frost Mages

[Sky]

Updated thread, thanks!