Arcane Talent Comparisons, Stat Weights, Racials, Trinkets

[Emerys]

What about the felmouth frenzy? If we gain haste breakpoint without food should we use felmouth?

[cross34]

Hi,

I've read in this thread that I should stack Haste to 1300 with 2pc, and go Haste > Mastery/Multi with 4pc. However, I noticed that Kuznam from Method is stacking Mastery (with Mastery enchants) and his Haste is only around 1000.

I was just wondering if there was a specific reasoning for him not going Haste? (Does Mastery > Haste again after a certain ilevel? Is there a certain boss/fight mechanic like AOE where stacking Mastery would be better, etc)

Thank you so much for all the information.

[Komma]

However, I noticed that Kuznam from Method is stacking Mastery (with Mastery enchants) and his Haste is only around 1000.

I was just wondering if there was a specific reasoning for him not going Haste?)

This seems like a question you should be asking Kuznam instead of Frosted.

[Dutchmagoz]

Hi,

I've read in this thread that I should stack Haste to 1300 with 2pc, and go Haste > Mastery/Multi with 4pc. However, I noticed that Kuznam from Method is stacking Mastery (with Mastery enchants) and his Haste is only around 1000.

I was just wondering if there was a specific reasoning for him not going Haste? (Does Mastery > Haste again after a certain ilevel? Is there a certain boss/fight mechanic like AOE where stacking Mastery would be better, etc)

Thank you so much for all the information.

Mastery is better for AoE DPS than haste is. Could be related to that.

[Rabona]

Method's mages also seem to have kept Fire as their secondary spec, so maybe it has something to do with that aswell?
I've armory stalked the mages from the currently top 5 placed guilds and aside from Limit's preheat (who went full multistrike - so probably enchanting for frost?!) they all at least geared to ~1300 haste rating. Paragon's mages even went a lot further than that with ~1845 haste rating (including haste enchants) and 2014 haste rating.

[Frosted]

I don't really care what top mages do. What they do is not correct by virtue of them being top mages, and the reasons why they do those things are a mystery.

[Darthy]

Lets take Hellfire assault as an example encounter, if you got PoF arcane is a viable specc here and mastery outperforms haste on this fight. They might change enchants based on the progress bosses, actually im pretty sure they do.

[adrift]

You can't really judge by looking at top mage armories during progression. Gems and enchants are cheap and will change constantly depending on what fight is being done and even what strategy is being tried at the time.

Fire is most likely the second spec for now because Xul'huroc is the current progression. If you are raiding at a level where you just want to have two specs and not worry about re-speccing them then I would say Arcane/Frost for sure at this point.

Arcane this tier is in a very strange situation because of Prophecy. It can out-perform everything on cleave fights or just pull single target numbers depending on when and how often it procs. As long as you have prophecy you can get by playing Arcane on every single fight - even on the pulls where you have bad RNG with the trinket you will still have the reliable high single target.

[cross34]

Sorry I may not have phrased my question as properly as I could, did not mean to second guess the thread if that was what was projected. I was just wondering if there are instances where going Mastery would be more advantageous than Haste, and from Dutchmagoz and Darthy's replies I guess it is for AOE. I just added the reference to Kuznam as that is where I thought of asking this.

Anyway, thank you all for the replies!

[Frosted]

Arcane APL updates giving some support to how we should deal with PC/Tome/PoF trinkets. Added a quick note about the conclusions from this in the FAQ, and a link to the relevant APL posts that are in the SimC Arcane APL thread.

[Lavok]

How does the APL currently deal with burning with Tome and OP? I know the above sims show that it technically is a dps increase not to AM during burn outside of PC, but that leaves it unclear as to how it should be handled with OP. Is there a mana threshold below which you don't extend AP anymore? Noticed that you often run to 0 mana before running out of AP if you keep extending it (unglyphed ofc). I know this is buried somewhere in the APL, but all of us don't speak fluent SimC

Edit: In other words, does the 70% threshold that seems to be what the SimC profile is looking at for AM apply also in this scenario with OP?

[Gulddreng]

Ive looked through the post on the forums for an answer to using Arcane Orb in cleave fights, do we use it on CD now that we have the set pets to summon or do we still only time it with barrage? If someone alrdy mentioned this please link, i have no idea how to simC this. Im simply looking for optimized dps with this talent

[primclash]

I noticed the trinket chart shows 695/710 mage trinkets, when they're actually 705/720 in game. Is that still accurate?

[Frosted]

Yea. It's just misnamed.

[Sectumsound]

From what I can see, the current racial weights are still using T17M, but since haste is much more important after the T18 4PC, wouldn't trolls and/or goblins become stronger races for Arcane Mages? Would be very interested to see the updated racial weights for T18.

[Wonton]

Why Mark of Warsong? I thought the value of Haste was less important above the 1350 breakpoint. Or is it still strong, but that breakpoint is the only one worth gearing for?

[hungerr]

pardon my ignorance. What happened to UM that its suddenly ranked so high now for both frost and arcane? Why take it over supernova all the sudden?

[CatsPajamas]

Why Mark of Warsong? I thought the value of Haste was less important above the 1350 breakpoint. Or is it still strong, but that breakpoint is the only one worth gearing for?

The 1350 breakpoint is important for 2-set, but once you have 4-set you stack haste so Warsong is the best enchant.

pardon my ignorance. What happened to UM that its suddenly ranked so high now for both frost and arcane? Why take it over supernova all the sudden?

Supernova's damage isn't effected by haste since it's locked by the GCD, as is ice nova. As we're stacking haste this tier (once you have 4-set) unstable magic starts pulling ahead as it has a chance to do passive damage with every cast, which we're getting a lot more of due to our haste values. Especially with our class trinket, you don't want to be wasting valuable arcane blast time during arcane power by using supernova.

Edit: Actually, there's a thread (http://altered-time.com/forum/viewtopic ... rt=20#wrap) discussing UM vs. SN performance and they found an error with how UM was performing in sims. I'd wait until the updated sims are released and see what comes of it.

[Caimion]

Since so many questions were popping up about UM, I ran some quick sims for talent comparison in BIS gear, build 20216 at 25k iterations (not sure how many Frosted typically does for the front page, but keep in mind at this level of iterations the error bars for specs can overlap by quite a bit).

The UM fix has the largest implications for UM_X_OP specs because of the reduced number of AP extensions. OP is firmly behind PC for essentially all talent combinations. UM_ROP_PC remains the highest single target spec.

[taroboba]

Thanks for that! Are these projections based on going full haste? If so, I wonder how much closer it would be going haste 25-26% > mastery or even haste 20% > mastery. With UM having a lot of rng tied to it and some fights making SN really useful (Iron Reaver bomb phase, Kilrogg for adds below, Kormrok hands), SN might be a safer choice.