Tier 17 optimization

[Misandry]

Sup fellow mages. First post! This is an awesome site, and a great resource. I had a question or two on optimal frost playstyle in Tier 17. The first concerns how water jet works. I am assuming, but have not fully analyzed the sim craft results, that water jet should essentially be cast on CD/when frozen orb is on CD. This seems intuitive to me but I wasn't sure if there was another optimal point to use it. I can't tell if it's worth it to leave it for another optimal point in the fight, depending on mastery levels, due to dps loss from not casting waterbolt. Maybe if there's a burn phase or if you need ice lance quickly for adds? I'm not sure.

Another question is whether improved blizzard means anything at all for us. I can't see that it will, but then again I'm new to mages and theorycrafting in general and I get easily surprised by these things.

Overall I feel good with frost right now. I was playing at a relatively decent level prior to expansion (578ilvl) despite having returned to the game in June when I picked up mage. I am enjoying how it's feeling, but we'll see when tier 17 comes out

[Mumrit]

Last I was looking at it (It's been a few months though..) water jet itself seemed to be a DPS increase for the elemental over normal water bolt. I didn't conduct any tests to see if water jet was benefiting from mastery however, but I assume it isn't.

Recalling from memory waterbolt is a 2 sec cast for 40% spell power before being modified by mastery. Water jet is about 130ish over 4 seconds. Both are reduced by haste. If my estimations based on memory are correct, I don't believe we'll be able to stack enough mastery that waterbolt surpasses waterjet unless we get three or more raid tiers this expansion.

Waterjet should be used when FO is off cool down and you can guarantee hitting with two frost bolts while no other procs are active. Not really possible IMO, so personally I just plan on having the pet spam it on cool down on most fights.

Blizzard will fit heavily into our AoE rotation. At a certain number of targets (I haven't worked out the math yet to determine how many) the rotation will effectively be FO -> Blizzard -> Repeat. It makes it so generally we won't be relying on cleave for AoE.

Edit: Looked it up, waterjet is 112.8% of SP. Waterbolt is 48.5% on a 2.5 second cast

[Frosted]

Waterjet should be used when FO is off cool down and you can guarantee hitting with two frost bolts while no other procs are active. Not really possible IMO, so personally I just plan on having the pet spam it on cool down on most fights.


Edit: Looked it up, waterjet is 112.8% of SP. Waterbolt is 48.5% on a 2.5 second cast

It's pretty easy to do - starting up WJ mid-frostbolt cast will usually give you 2x FoF off the WJ.

[Stressball]

Basically this. I've found that if I mistime it a bit I end up with only one, so it should really be used manually if you want to maximize FoF generation.

[Mageski]

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast [mod:alt] Water Jet
/cast Frostbolt

Spam the crap out of that with your alt key down when you're out of FoF procs. (Sometimes you have to hit it a few times due to your elemental's cast timer)