Hey, frost mages!
Don’t say we never did nothin’ for ya. Lhivera has done some interesting testing based on information about (gasp!) warlock pets. It turns out that warlocks do more damage if they force their imps to cast by macroing the imp’s spell with their main nuke. Lhivera wondered if this would work for frost mages and the answer is yes: he noticed a 27% increase in his own pet’s DPS, which he estimates could boost his raid DPS by 3.8-5.5%. Not too shabby!
To take advantage of it, you’ll need to change your frostbolt to this following macro:
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast Frostbolt
/use Waterbolt
Unlike /petattack, this command will not cause your pet to stopcasting and start over with every keypress (something I personally discovered doing Vezax hard mode, heh). So macro up, frost mages, and make Splashy work for you.
(And don’t tell Ais I helped you out. Getting punched by a gnome isn’t fun.)
Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets!
Haven’t been posting much — as Ais said, the holidays and some real-life issues have interfered. (All good things, though!) But it’s a new year and we’ve got some questions to field. All of these are about the piece of gear that frustrates me the most: trinkets.
I’m an arcane mage currently running with Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Abyssal Rune. Should I replace one of them with the Talisman of Resurgence?
The short answer to this is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Nearly every single arcane mage should have Talisman of Resurgence: the only exceptions are if you have some combination of Reign of the Dead/Unliving (heroic or regular – you can use both), Dislodged Foreign Object (ew), Muradin’s Spyglass, or Flare of the Heavens. You can use Rawr to figure out what would be the best combination for you, but for the majority of arcane mages, we’re gonna have Talisman of Resurgence in one of those spots. Getting the badges is easy: if you don’t have one yet, farm heroics until you have the 50 Triumph needed to pick it up. In this case, Abyssal + Talisman of Resurgence is the best combo of those three. Keep in mind that Abyssal Rune is a random spellpower proc, which means it could go off as you’re moving out of fire or right before you need to kite Anub’s spikes. I still think that even with inopportune procs it’s a better choice, simply because the passive haste is so good for arcane. Good news is, Abyssal Rune is pretty easy to get: it drops from regular ToC5.
How does the Talisman of Resurgence compare to the stacking haste from Talisman of Volatile Power?
Well… the Talisman of Volatile Power is a concentrated piece of crap. Let’s just assume you’re an arcane mage. The passive bonus on the trinket is critical strike rating, which is the worst caster stat available to arcane mages right now (aside from int and spirit — and even then it’s only about a .3 DPS scaling difference between crit and int). At first glance, the haste bonus looks nice: it increases your rating by 57 each cast, which is 1.7% casting speed increase. (Casting speed is not the same as cast time, mind.) Not too shabby! Where it falls apart is the 20 second duration of the effect. Let’s assume that you have 600 haste rating and are specced for Netherwind Presence. Your AB cast time is 2.01 seconds. You pop your trinket; the next cast is 1.98, then 1.95, then 1.93. As a player, you’re not going to notice the two to three hundreths of a second cast difference, but even tiny differences do add up. But the effect only lasts 20 seconds: it’ll take you over 15 to stack it to eight (assuming perfect execution and no lag). You’ll get maybe two to three casts with the full effect. The DPS increase from this trinket is just so teeny, even stacking it with other cooldowns.
It’s … it’s just not very good. Sundial of the Exiled is much better, even for an arcane mage. Forge Ember, a blue trinket from HoS, is better. I’ll say it again: if you don’t have Talisman of Resurgence, grind the badges and get it.
But, Meta, why is Muradin’s Spyglass good if it has all that crit?
Yeah, yeah, crit isn’t very good for arcane casters. However, the secondary effect of that trinket is a stacking spellpower buff. You can’t charge it up before combat (mages with Illustration could cast a couple of spells (Slow Fall or AE) before the fight began), but you’ll be running with 180 spellpower for the majority of the fight. Fire mages will especially delight in this trinket, as the ticks from Living Bomb will maintain the stack.
Unlike Reign of the Dead/Unliving, the heroic and non-heroic versions of this trinket (and Dislodged Foreign Object) cannot be used together. (This is per the 3.3 patch notes: “Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.”)
How do I weigh a proc versus a static bonus?
The short answer is that the average player doesn’t do this: you let someone else do the math and tell you whether an item is good or not. If, say, Nibelung drops and you have never seen the item before, you’re probably not going to be able to tell if the item is an upgrade for you. Even items with their proc spelled out, like Dislodged Foreign Object, are confusing: most players can tell it’s good, but they can’t tell you how good. Is it better than Reign? Is it better than heroic Reign? (The answer: I believe so.) And so the average player must do research before fights to find out what drops from what boss and then cross-reference those pieces of gear with math from trusted sources to see if it’s an improvement. Tools like Rawr help, but it takes a while for the procs to be accurately calculated and added in: Dislodged Foreign Object has yet to be modeled in the 2.3.5 release of Rawr. Blizzard seems to recognize the difficulty in eyeballing gear: we have multiple stats to juggle, procs that require a chunk of math to evaluate, and then just mind-bogglingly big numbers (think: a single weapon from Icecrown has more spellpower on it than my mage did total when I was doing Black Temple). Until Cataclysm fixes it (heh), most of us are left relying on others to do the mathy stuff for us.
That’s it for now, but if you have any mage questions, please feel free to ask either in comments, via Twitter (@empoweredfire), or shoot us an e-mail at empoweredfire AT gmail DOT com.
Quick hit: Mage T10 set bonuses
Yes, it is worth breaking the four piece T9 set bonus for two pieces of T10.
Goodnight, everybody!
First Impressions: Icecrown Citadel
Ais and I had our first peek at ICC this week. I think it’s safe to say we’re both enjoying the instance: I actually missed trash pulls and Ais is adorably geeking out over the lore. I’ve been a bit distracted during raids lately, but I thought I’d put together a few of my thoughts concerning the fights from the magely perspective.
Marrowgar
I stayed arcane for this fight, with good results: I was able to burst down the bone spikes quickly while doing solid damage to the boss. The only tricky things are the aggro reset after Bone Storms and the Coldflame, which is easily avoidable. (Pop frost ward if you find yourself taking a tick from it, particularly if you have Incanter’s Absorption.)
Lady Deathwhisper
Mages have a lot to do on this fight. In 25 man mode, random raid members will get MC’d, so be quick with a polymorph if you’re able. Depending on your raid’s strategy, you may be required to focus down adds or stay on the boss full time; either way, arcane is probably your best bet. Arcane has the superior threat reduction talents, which is very handy for DPSing down the adds (especially given that establishing and maintaining threat on them can be dicey): Ais stayed fire for this fight and found herself subject to a lot of unwanted attention. When Lady Deathwhisper empowers a Cult Fanatic, the mob will get a decidedly sexy spellstealable buff — these need to be purged off quickly, so you might as well get the benefit from stealing it. Apart from that, the fight is pretty straightforward: kill what you’re assigned to kill, avoid ghosts that are coming towards you, move out of death and decay. Piece of cake.
Faction Warships
I’m gonna level with y’all right now: I got my rocket pack and I promptly stopped listening to anything my raid leaders were saying. (Sorry Weazey and Gradar.) ZOOOM! My role was to stay on defense, so I flopped to FFB, cast living bomb on every single thing in sight, then spent my time doing Rank 9 and Rank 8 flamestrikes followed by blizzard. But, seriously: rocket packs. ROCKET PACKS. Um. I’ll pay more attention this week and report back.
Deathbringer Saurfang
All of the damage on this fight is physical, so buffing everyone with Amplify Magic is a good idea. Three of the four mages in my raid had 2/2 Magic Attunement so we split up the buffing responsibilities. I started out as FFB for the slow applied by the main nuke and so I’d have blast wave to knock back mobs close to me, but after one pull I swapped back to arcane: DPSing the mobs down quickly seemed more beneficial than kiting them around with frostfire bolts.
So, for the first four fights in Icecrown Citadel, arcane still looks to be the most beneficial. Fire or FFB will probably do better on Warships simply because of the AOE capabilities of living bomb explosions, but arcane will still do well enough. In short, arcane will do better on any fight where you’ll need single-target DPS or controlled burst; fire will do very well on any fight with multiple targets tanked near each other.
I think Ais and I have made it abundantly clear that neither of us are going frost any time soon. The buffs simply weren’t enough: simulations show it lagging drastically behind even frostfire bolt. Sorry, frost mages.
I hope you all enjoyed the first taste of ICC! It’ll be a while yet before we get more.
Mage Addon Wonkiness
Since I have long recommended Scorchio, I’ve had more than a few mages who use it ask me if I’ve noticed that it isn’t working post 3.3. Yes, yes, I have. The problem with it is that Scorchio2 tracks the procs based on your combat log, not on your aura gained, and for whatever reason Hot Streak and Missile Barrage are no longer recorded there. This means if you’re not watching your buff bar, you’ll miss your procs. The author has opted to wait and see if Blizzard is addressing this issue before overhauling the code for the addon, which means those of us who use it need to look elsewhere for solutions.
Since I was already using PowerAuras, I opted to just make a couple of alerts when I get the procs I need. PowerAuras can be a bit of a resource hog, however, so a very lightweight solution (and the one Ais is currently running with) is installing NeedToKnow to track your procs. Both addons work by detecting the aura you receive when you gain the proc and so will work even with the current combat log issues.
I still recommend Scorchio, however, for the ease of tracking your stacks of Arcane Blast, your Living Bombs, the length of time left on your mirror images, and whether the 5% crit debuff is active on your target: all of these uses are still functional and Scorchio is very easy to set up. I’m content to run with a mishmash of addons to achieve what I want for a little while, at least.
I hope you’re all enjoying the new content! I, for one, have missed massive trash pulls: doing 16k damage on them last night was ridiculously fun. We’ll see how I feel about them in a few weeks, though. Cheers!
Patch day whooo!
It’s official: 3.3 hits today! Whether you’ve been meticulously following every change and quirk on the PTR or if you’ve been completely out of the loop for the past couple of months, we’re here to help you get caught up quickly. Our guides have been updated accordingly (3.3 Raiding Guide, Ding! 80!…Now What? (for new 80s), and our Mage Leveling Guide), but if you want to jump in as soon as servers are live (whenever that may be), here are the salient points.
Arcane changes
Arcane was left largely untouched, and still looks to be be top mage DPS for single-target situations. The big change here is a bit of utility: the Arcane Empowerment talent now also adds 3% increased damage by your party or raid after a critical strike with AE, AM, ABarr, or AB. This utility buff is the same as the one provided by ret paladins and BM hunters, so for 25 man raids this won’t likely make a difference.
Fire changes
Even though I’ve only played fire a handful of times since 3.2, I’m still excited about the scorch change: one cast of scorch now applies 5 stacks of the increased critical strike chance debuff. The Improved Scorch glyph has been renamed Glyph of Scorch and now increases the damage of scorch by 20%. (No, you don’t want to pick it up. Might be fun for a PVP fire build, though.) Given that mages and locks are the only ones who can apply the crit debuff, and given that fire does very well on fights with multiple targets (particularly if they are tanked near one another), we’ll still see many fire mages in ICC.
Frost changes
Here’s where mages got the biggest overhaul, though unfortunately the changes fell short of frost mages’ initial hopes. Deep Freeze was tweaked so that it now does damage to targets immune to stun (i.e., raid bosses). A new glyph was introduced for frost mages as well, Glyph of Eternal Water, which gives you a permanent water elemental but you lose the ability to cast the nova spell. Fluffy’s waterbolt spell’s mana cost has been reduced, so you shouldn’t have to worry about him going oom too quickly. (Longer fights may require a resummon, I’m not sure.) All these changes are nice, but frost still falls very short of the potential output of arcane, fire, or even frostfire.
Other mage-related changes
Black Magic went from being a piece of crap to being the best enchant for decently geared mages. It’s decidedly better for players who have a one-handed weapon, though it’s likely still an improvement for mages with staves equipped. You’ll want to download the latest version of Rawr to get a more accurate answer dependent on your own gear and raid buffs.
Mana costs on all lowbie spells have been reduced, which means that leveling mages (and other classes) will be able to use their spells without going oom after three casts. Attack has been changed to auto-attack, and it won’t even show up on a new mage’s bars now. These changes mean mages won’t spend levels 1 through 20 wanding and meleeing, so good job on that account, Blizzard. If you’ve ever thought about leveling a mage, now is an excellent time to start!
Fire mages will no longer be able to drop on top of a mounted player, cast unglyphed blast wave, and knock him off his mount. Pity — I have to admit I enjoyed doing that after the occasional WG battle.
That’s it as far as mage-specific changes, but there are dozens more affecting all areas of play. Full patch notes can be found here. So many changes! I’m geekily excited about the macro language changing so “@” now means “target=”, but I’m likely the only one. Hey, my polymorph macro is long enough as it is.
Good luck, mages! May your servers be stable! And, hey, if you’re in Ais’s and my battlegroup, you might run into us as we’re furiously pugging heroics. 
Harassment in Warcraft
As some of you may know, Ais and I met through a community of women who play World of Warcraft. With over 7500 members, ranging from completely casual to the hardest of hardcore raiders, a lot of topics crop up repeatedly. Unfortunately, one of the issues Ais and I see all too often is about in-game harassment. Week after week, there will be a post from a woman discussing someone who is making her gaming experience miserable.
The saddest thing of all, however, is the fact that the woman very seldom identifies it as harassment or talks about how Blizzard would respond to it. She’ll say that the harasser will call her a slut in the trade channel, or whisper her from level one alts about how she deserves to be raped, or that he’ll stand in Dalaran /yelling that she’s not a real woman and a horrible bitch. The poster will talk about how she doesn’t feel comfortable signing in or that she’s worried other people will think less of her, but she doesn’t ask what to do about it. The attitude inherent in these posts is that she put the person on ignore (and any alts he happens to roll), but what else can she do? Most of the time the posts are filled with caveats: he called me a whore in Trade, but it’s not like he’s threatening me; he told my old guild that I was a bitch and no one should group with me, but I did just leave them for a raiding guild; he rolled alts to call me names, but I can’t be sure it was him. So much is done to minimize the extent of what he’s done, and there’s usually a lot of apologizing for even bringing it up as it’s “probably not a big deal”.
It is a big deal. › Continue reading
New site? For me?
I promise I won’t break it this time! Welcome to the new digs, everyone!
Been doing a lot of virtual moving lately: importing the blog entries to the new site and server-transferring my mage so I can hang out with Aislinana. (Our mages stood next to each other in Dalaran for the first time last Friday. Ais informed me that Meta looks better “in person”; I replied that Print Screen adds twenty pounds.) Getting everything set up was a lot of work, but it still beats physically moving — mostly because I don’t have to pack up my books and old Nintendo games.
And just to get some comments rolling in on the new site: what are you up to this week? Still tackling ToC? Grinding out achievements? Working on alts? Let us know! As for the Empowered Fire ladies, we’ve been chipping away at Loremaster, though Ais is way ahead of me there. Meta dinged 80 eight months before she got the achievement for 2,000 quests completed. Ais had Loremaster of Outland already and then finished up Northrend and Eastern Kingdoms this weekend, earning The Seeker title along the way. Kalimdor will be the death of us both, though. Ugh, Silithus.
Please update your links and RSS feed, and let us know if anything’s wonky. Enjoy!
Oh God I'm Not Raiding
On Monday night of this week, I informed my guild I was quitting. The decision was a long time coming: I wavered back and forth on it for several weeks, probably annoying all my friends in the process. My stress levels in real life were extremely high, and I found it spilling into my gaming time. While I’ve always taken raiding seriously, I have rarely experienced the steady stream of frustration, anger, and fatigue while playing that I have this past month. I found myself dreading logging on, even on nights where I wasn’t expected to raid. And when I realized that the real life stressors weren’t letting up, the answer became clear: I was going to have to quit. And that terrified me.
At first, I hoped that maybe quitting wouldn’t be the answer. I thought I could talk with my guild officers, let them know what was going on with me and why I was an emotional angsty jerk in raids lately. I thought I might work with them to come up with a solution: take a week off, take one or two nights a week off, something. But after four attempts to speak with officers (even signing on a full hour before raid time on two separate nights), I realized that it wasn’t going to work. They didn’t have the time to talk with me about what was going on and I didn’t think that talking was going to fix it. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and wrote a private message to my raid leader, explaining that I was going to quit and wishing them well.
I haven’t logged on to Metaneira since.
Epic Failures
I’ve been a bit quiet on the mage-front lately, probably owing to the fact that I haven’t raided on mine in several days — I’ve been spending more time leveling up my paladin and helping some guildies with Uld10 achievements on my warrior. And since I’m on the sit list for this week’s raids, it may be a while yet before I see some more arcane action.
I was talking to a guildmate about the truly epic failures we’ve witnessed in our time raiding: he mentioned the mage who blew an Immortal Naxx run by taking a hateful on Patchwerk (and I’ll just let that sink in for a minute); I joked about how our Raid Leader spent so much time talking about our heroic Anub strat that his character ended up drowning. (I guess he didn’t bother bringing his character above surface.) But in our joking, I wasn’t entirely fair: I didn’t mention my own ridiculously silly mistakes.
I’ll rectify that now… › Continue reading
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