arcane-trinkets
On tanking, mages, and why rogues should die in fires
I know Ais has already apologized for the lack of updates, but I’m going to throw in another apology from myself. The past few months have been fairly hectic in that “real life” thing I occasionally indulge in: interviewing for new jobs, having a relationship end (and on the day before Valentine’s Day, too, which is good because I hadn’t met my dramatic irony quota that month), and generally trying to get more organized and focused. I’m doing pretty well now, though, and can invest more energy on projects like this site.
In game, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my tanks: my 80 prot warrior and my 80 prot paladin. Maybe it’s just making up for years of being squishy, but I love standing in front of bosses and protecting my raid. There’s still a lot of pressure in tanking: blowing your cooldowns at the right moment, making sure you’re positioning the mobs in the best possible way (I like to face them towards Ais’s boyfriend so he gets cleaved), and pushing buttons frantically to stay on top of the DPS who are just dying to rip aggro off of you. (Okay, the paladin tanking isn’t so much frenzied button pushing as lazily hitting them in order. I love my pally but warrior tanking is much more interesting and dynamic.) And yet, I don’t feel as stressed while tanking: no one’s going to spam Recount after a battle and point out how I did compared to everyone else. I can focus on being a member of a team, and working with everyone to achieve a certain goal. It’s a nice change of pace from DPSing on my mage, where I’m almost secretly hoping a rogue stands in fire and dies so I’ll beat him on the charts. I’m more than happy to give up ten-man raiding on my mage in favor of doing it on one of my shield-wearing girls.
But I do love my mage, and ICC has gotten better for Ais and me lately. I think the ranged DPS in our raid have really started working together to point out how we can make the fights a bit easier on us, and we’re beginning to function as a team. Tensions were high for a while, but I think our melee have finally realized that it’s not that half our raid is bad, it’s that the fights and our strategies for them were vastly favoring their playstyle. We’ve adapted some strategies, aired our frustrations, and I think we’re back to being a fairly laidback, happy group. (Until I watch someone keyboard turning to run out of Sindragosa’s death-grip, that is. RAGE.)
Enough about what I’ve been up to. Here’s a few of my thoughts about mage raiding in ICC:
1) Incanter’s Absorption is still worth it if you can get shielded reliably. In my raid, we’ve done crazy things where I’ll get fed shields on Rotface while I’m standing in the slime to DPS. The numbers I put out are nuts, but it just seems so gimmicky and stupid. I am actually looking forward to the nerf: too many mage mechanics are already dependent on very particular and often dumb things (Torment the Weak, I’m looking at you), and IA has always felt cheap to me. Is it fun to get shielded and watch your spellpower shoot up? Sure. But I don’t like sucking up to a disc priest and then standing in fire just to do more damage.
2) Once you get two piece mage T10, your rotation may change slightly. The top DPS rotation still is stacking Arcane Blast to four and then using Arcane Missiles when Missile Barrage procs. However, the haste boost from consuming MBAM means that your less mana-intensive rotations aren’t that far off from the highest DPS rotation. If mana is a problem for you, don’t feel bad about using MBAM when it procs after the second, third, or fourth AB.
3) Four piece mage T10 is the most ridiculously awesome set bonus in the world. Other set bonuses look at mage T10 and weep, for they will never be so amazing. It’s especially fun when we do our weekly raid quests in Naxx and have a fight that lasts only 45 seconds—you just can’t touch a mage who blows Quad Core, Arcane Power, Icy Veins, and trinket(s), and who doesn’t have to worry about mana. I am actually really surprised it hasn’t been nerfed yet.
3) Yes, we’ve heard about proposed fire changes. I think that with the IA nerf, the combustion change (down to two minutes from three, thank goodness), pyroblast now benefitting from TtW, and the Glyph of Fireball change (instead of 5% crit, the cast time on fireball is reduced by .15 seconds), fire might be more in-line with arcane mages. Maybe. Arcane gives you controlled burst and amazing single-target DPS, which are both crucial in ICC encounters. Fire does well with multiple targets, but so far that’s only Gunship. (Dreamwalker has lots of adds, but they need to be burst down quickly and a lot of them won’t be up long enough for living bomb to explode.) But we’ll see: I know Ais is itching to get back to blowing stuff up with fireballs.
4) I hate trinkets so much. So very much. I lucked out and got a Muradin’s on my first ICC 10 run, but my guild has seen exactly one Reign drop in our TOC runs. Another one dropped on a pug Ais and I were in, and it went to a warlock in our guild—who then picked up the first (and only) DFO we’ve seen. I was trying to move away from the years-long feud between mages and warlocks and instead unite ourselves against rogues and DKs, but, man. *shakes fist at our warlock guildmate* I just know I’m going to be using Talisman of Resurgence until Cataclysm. (Of course, that’s not the worst of it: if I want to go back to fire for a boss fight, Rawr tells me I should use Dying Curse. *twitch* I’ll stay arcane, thanks.) Trinkets can suck my non-existent junk.
But, all in all, WoW has been treating me well lately. I love that Ais and I got Starcaller on our alts (especially since, uh, I might have been drunk at the time); I managed to get a Blood Queen’s Crimson Choker in my Sack of Frosty Treasures, which netted me quite a nice chunk of change; and we’re working on getting another mage friend of ours a Tiny Voodoo Mask trinket so we can do a voodoo gnome parade with -wait for it- 24 voodoo gnomes. (We’ll be glyphing for mirror image, of course.) Ais and I have done it with just the two of us and I will say that 14 pygmy gnomes RP walking through Dalaran will turn heads. I highly recommend it. I’m meeting new people, having fun goofing off on alts, and raiding doesn’t feel quite so tedious lately.
I hope our mage readers are faring well! How is Icecrown treating you?
Where Have We Been?
Our deepest apologies, thoughtful readers. We have had at least a month’s absence from writing awesome posts and we are here to set things right. In-game stuff has been eating a ton of our time, plus assorted bad moods and job hunts. The impetus to write is weak in the face of such things as moodiness and Icecrown bosses, as it were. But I am here to give you a peek into what sorts of oddball things both Meta and myself have been poking around with.
1.) Raiding Icecrown Citadel, hating on some rogues.
Icecrown has been exciting, seeing new content, but equal parts frustrating because we have a melee-dominated raid. While we do not lack for buffs, our raid definitely makes boss strategies for our melee, who are some of our top DPSers. We’re struggling on getting ranged/casters more benefits out of this, but has been hard going. Tempers flared quite a lot, and Putricide was like pulling teeth some days. We’ve messed with our arcane specs quite a bit to compensate for things like pushback on Festergut but ultimately went back to making use of Incanter’s Absorption because of how many of the later fights have static damage pulses or lots of raid-wide damage to take advantage of. We rock Blood Council spectacularly hard though, which is nice. Arcane is still the best spec to use, but Meta and I both bust out our Nibelung staves and go fire for trash usually. Just for kicks. We’re closing in on Sindragosa and Arthas at the moment, so hardmodes await.
2.) 10 Mans…Anyone…?
Neither Meta nor I have a stable 10man. We’ve made some progress with other raiding mains who don’t have one either, and a bunch of alts and rotating people every week or so. We even downed Rotface the other night. It’s been difficult – one night a week or only 2 or 3 hours and not everyone is fully geared enough on their alts to make a lot of fast progress. Hopefully the Captain Chin (Wrynn) buff will help us at least poke at some new 10man content. Meta has been nice enough to tank on her warrior or paladin for these runs so I get a shot at a Muradin’s Spyglass.
3.) Trinketsssss…yess…pretty trinkets…
Neither of us has a Reign of the Unliving, Dislodged Foreign Object, and I still don’t have a Muradin’s. However, both of us now have the voodoo gnome trinket from ZA. Resulting in tons of voodoo gnome parades.
4.) Our Alts have been doing well though!
We’ve been having fun doing a lot of raid weeklies and goofing off with TOC10 and even Ulduar. We did so well in Ulduar the other week that now our alts have the Starcaller title. Fancy that. We also managed Tribute to Skill (not Mad Skill, but soon!) as well. Meta’s paladin came back from her Horde vacation, and my shaman started trying out resto and really liking it. We’re both pretty nicely geared right now, although both of us could more ICC 10 for sure. See #2 though.
That’s all we’ve been nosing around doing other than old Vanilla and BC content for RP gear and mounts. Should have an update on delicious mage changes though. Fire doing tons more damage? Say it ain’t so!
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.
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