Fire It Up!Follow

Every time I cast fireball, that line from the flame guys in SC2 plays in my head.

I am home from Iraq, booya.

I was playing my Warlock when our caster officer came online and the following conversation went something like this.

Him: Welcome home dude, back for good?
Me: Yep
Him: Nice, I can sit a couple of locks this week so you can suck up some gear then get you worked into the rotation.
Me: Alright, sweet man, can't wait to raid again.
Some new recruit in guild chat: I was a NE rogue until 4 days ago.
Me: Wait, you can change factions now?
Guild: Yes.
Me: OH HELL YEAH, MAGE INCOMING, Time to dust of Memnok and make him undead.
Caster Officer: Hey, gonna bring your mage over?
Me: hell yes I am.
Him: What you like playing more, mage or lock?
Me: Mage by far, I love mages.
Him: Wanna make it your main? we have lots of locks, but are short on mages.
Me: Seriously? Hell yeah, I gotta level him though after I xfer him over, he still 70.
Him: Ahh ok, so a few weeks until you can raid?
Me: I can have him 80 by, hmm, Sunday.
Him: Sunday, holy ****, really?
Me: Monday at the latest.
Him: K, let me know when you transfer him over and I will ginvite you and everything.
Me: Alright, will do.

So, instead of Memnok being leveled from 1 again, I transferred him, changed him to horde, and FILTER IS BACK BABY!

I will be posting on my leveling adventures through Northrend as a Mage as I level him this week.

See you all here on the mage forums much more in the days and weeks to come as I return to the fold.

The 80 lock is marked as alt in guild now, and mage is officially my main again. Woot.

Welcome home, Soldier.




And good you have your mage back. I shelfed my mage after the expansion was released for the DK. I'm finding out, that in a group dynamic, I do not enjoy tanking as I thought I would. While I love the DK's ability to pwn face PvE, I find myself missing the mage lately. Almost to 80, should get from 77 to 80 before the weekend. (too much work, not enough play time)


Anyways, WB!

Are you going to do frostfire? You may want to consider that after 75, even though your crit rate will be abysmal.

If you care about my input, which you don't, I found arcane and frostfire to be terribly boring.
I'll hop between Frost and Fire, depending on where the group's DPS is.
I also like when I get a cocky, know-it-all fire mage in a pug, and I out DPS him in frost. It doesn't work with the people that REALLY know their class, but, I tell ya, it's interesting to see them post DPS meters, going "Hah, two mages on top DPS" at which point I smugly reply "and one of them's frost."

The reactions are always classic, followed by a very fast /inspect, and a check of the damage output to see what spells I used.

"Nub, Frost isn't supposed to use Icelance anymore, and it's only for PvP."

/cackle.

To not go too far off-topic, the person was technically correct, and explains why frost is terribly boring raiding. The top DPS spec/rotation for frost is literally spam frostbolt, even the free/instant fireball isn't worth casting as it doesn't pick up the necessary coefficients to make it better than the already-super cheap frostbolt. So overall the abilities that you would be using in a raid (ignore 5mans, I don't know if you are speaking of 5mans or 10/25mans) are frostbolt, water elemental, and coldsnap. I guess if you are on the move it may be worthwhile to use the fireball.

Actually, a few different people have crunched the numbers, and the results are different lately.

IF glyphed for Icelance instead of Water Elemental (which was a debatable glyph in the first place), and if you can reliably ghost every icelance (I haven't missed one yet), you see a small increase (2%?) over frostbolt spam.
Note here, for those that don't know. "Ghosting" an icelance is a slightly complicated process to do, a simple one to try. Fingers of Frost makes your next two spells cast have a huge chance to crit. You can, if the timing is JUST right, send an icelance JUST after you second fof frostbolt launches (you MUST account for, and know, your latency), and it counts both frostbolts and the icelance. (Glyphed, Ice Lance does 4x its normal damage on a frozen target).

Using glyphed and ghosted Ice Lance, but ghosting a Brain Freeze proc (when available) instead of an Icelance can give up to another 1% OVER the previous method, but it depends heavily on how often BF is proccing.

I'm not condoning going into a DPS light raid and playing around with Frost unless you REALLY know the spec. My comfort with frost took me a LONG time to get to, and I have my gear set up directly for it (less hit, more haste, less crit). I cap out at 6800 on Jaraxxus, and we all know how much of a gimmick fight he is. On Patch I get ~4500-4700 depending on how my FM target does on crits. On normal bosses it's around 4K.

Fire I bring that up a GOOD amount (except on Jaraxxus, for some reason I do WAY more DPS as frost than fire on him), so Fire will always be better than frost in this expansion, there's no getting around it.

As for the excitement, arcane was boring because it was just "AB AB AB AM." That's it. Use CDs when they're up. It was the most boring thing I've done at endgame.
Frostfire just always felt meh to me. Dunno.

Frost though, requires PRECISE to the millisecond timing, as well as proc watching. Much funner than a set rotation.

Edit: More info, digging up the other stuff I've found (this was simulated using the best Frost gear available, and a small chance for a ghosted IL to not ghost):

http://elitistjerks.com/f75/t65510-raiding_frost_post_3_2_a/p1


Edited, Sep 22nd 2009 4:56am by jaysgsl

For those of you that may not visit the general forum.

http://wow.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=21&mid=1253608444250895736&num=11&page=1

I did it.

What you said does make more sense now, I just need to read up on it a bit more, still find it hard to believe it to only be behind by a couple %.

Hey Jay, as our resident frost-pve expert, you should put together a thread about it, I can link it into TGMPE as well.

Edited, Sep 23rd 2009 9:15am by Anobix


At the end of page1 in the EJ thread this is what I got out of it:



I just read through the last few pages of the EJ thread, and I think you are mis-interpreting the values of the data. I think that the 'top frost' spec is the 18/0/52 or 18/0/53 (depending on the situation that Lhivera has left to you) and even still fire is ahead of frost between 20-40% (increasing as movement is added).

Edited, Sep 23rd 2009 9:35am by Anobix

Edited, Sep 23rd 2009 9:35am by Anobix

It's okay, I tend to do about half/half of EJ/etc and my own in the various spec discussion threads that I create. I don't have the time/willpower to learn all of the coefficients by heart and do the crazy math that some people do to find out that haste just squeeked out crit (for example) at some gear level.

Brain freeze on FoF is good at a certain gear level but I think at better gear levels BF drops from being worthwhile because of its scaling without talents, but they did say that if you can consistently time it it will be a dps increase (albeit a small one)