Hi all,

Apologies for the marathon post below.

A couple of people have been asking recently about non-fire specs for raiding. I’m no expert, but having trawled a fair bit through forums of people who are, I can say the following.

In general, the two main raiding fire specs, 10/48/3 and 2/48/11 are considered the best for raiding in terms of sustained dps. The 2/48/11 gives the highest dps of the two due to icy veins, but its very mana intensive so only worth using if you’ve got a reasonable mana pool and get your pot/gem rotations right. Frost is considered better for certain encounters, particularly late BT, and arcane mostly for high geared mages who fancy a challenge as its high dps but high mana use.

HOWEVER, as in all things specs are a matter of taste and there are some very good arcane and frost raiding specs, which dependant on gear and how you play (if you’re a dedicated fire maniac you’re not going to like em) will produce dps on a par with fire. They mostly rely a lot on arcane blast and frost bolt rotations. In short, try the different specs below, check out your damage against the other mages and rest of the raid, and pick the one that seems to suit your play style and your gear the best.

I don’t see the point of rehashing what advice other people have put together, so I’m just going to summarise briefly below and provide links where you can go to read more on how to play a particular spec, including the best spell rotations. Fire, I covered in a previous post.

Frost

Don’t forget for pure frost mages, you will have the same problems with Hydross as the fire mages have with Alar!

For people who like frost and want to raid with it, the following guide to raiding frost seems to get a thumbs up:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.htm ... 3387&sid=1

These are the two main frost spec’s recommended, the first if you’ve got less mana and is the most often used, and the second for slightly best dps if you don’t need clearcasting to save mana.

18/00/43: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=oi0Vc0cZZVAMcof0oqqt

00/00/61: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=oZZVAGIsfxsiqt

Another variant – considered slightly less good for raids (considered good for karazhan level gear) but better for all round play is:

10/0/51: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basic ... 5010251551

Arcane

Arcane/frost combinations are considered to have better raid dps than pure frost specs.

This links to a short useful guide on using arcane (specifically the 40/0/21) http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.htm ... 2382&sid=1

And this links to a v.detailed guide on arcane specs, spell rotations and gear: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t25772-mage ... ost_2_4_a/

General feeling on arcane (particularly deep arcane) is it’s difficult to get the sustained high dps to be more effective than the fire specs until you’ve got a couple of pieces of T5 and is therefore NOT recommended until then. I think the shattered sun badge gear probably counts. It’s highly mana intensive in long fights and therefore best coupled with a shadow priest and good pot/gem rotation. Its also considered harder to get “right” than fire, but then people who like a challenge may relish that!

Arcane/frost (usual arcane raiding spec)

The usual arcane raiding spec is 40/0/21. There are two variants, a more pure raiding version which drops shatter:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basic ... 0010000000

And the “classic” version:

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basic ... 5010000000

Arcane/fire

Can’t find very many people who like this, but it still produces pretty high dps and gets a 4/5 score in guides.

40/21/0 http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basic ... 0000000000

Pure arcane

49/12/0: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basic ... 0000000000

This is considered one of the best pure arcane raiding specs with high burst damage, but potential mana problems in longer fights. Generally felt better to take 40/0/21 instead though.

If anyone spots a spec I've missed that you feel is good, let me know.

For a detailed overall discussion of mage dps, the following site is good:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18441-mage ... al_thread/

And do remember, for dropping your aggro when you're coming uncomfortably close to passing the tank, invisibility is your friend.

Hey all, at work and thought i'd post this to give my opinions on some raid specs. Firstly if you want to go your own way i'd advise using www.maxdps.com to tweak and calculate you own dps/dpm.

Ok in terms of specs i judge them in dps and dpm, being damage per second and damage per minute. For example on fast frantic fight like Teron gorefiend it never usually lasts 1.5 minutes or more. so a high Dps spec would benefit much more than a high dpm spec. However thats a pretty extreme example. For raw dps no spec does more dps than arcane spec spamming arcane blast. This will always do the most damage its just a fact of numbers. Although everyone knows unless you have 200 mana pots and like 14k mana its not gona last in very long fights. Alot of ppl go ffor this when they get the tier 5 2 set bonus.
in terms of dpm any spec which utilises frost spells is always top due to the fast cast time. However Fire comes second in both of these tables which is why i personally base my spec on it. I belive i'd rather have 2nd best dps and dpm than 1st dps and 4th dpm. For anyone starting kara and getting into SSC/TK i would strongly advise the cookie cutter 10/48/3 spec, i used this alot back when i wasn't in the know about dps calculation and numbers. It's very mana efficeint and does pump out quite a high dps, although it only has combustion as a popable "FINISH HIM" move. When raiding on this spec the only problem i find was (as with every fire spec) if you ocasionaly go blonde and your mind wanders you may end up poping combustion first before you've scorched up and end up wasteing it . Other than that its pretty consistent.

The next spec is the spec i use which is the Elementalist build. I use this spec as my character is delving more and moreinto the realms of t6 instances and above and getting haste gear. The build scales very well as your haste gear increases. The spec is 0/40/21, and a crucial thing whilst speccing it is to go for 2 points in master of elements 2 in playing with fire and 2 in pyromaniac. rather than 3 in Moe which leaves you either 1% crit or dmg down. This build is not very mana efficient so pots are required. The rotation for this spec remains the same as the preivous one. However there are some raid buffs essential to maxing this build, hence i only use it as we advance further where more mid maxing and tweaking is done for groups. In most fight you can pop your trinket combustion and 1 icyveins at around the start, but mind you will gain agro and you need to save invis if possible for the end. At 20% when the molten fury talent kicks in, in an ideal situation youd have at least 50% mana ready dump threat at 21% and get heroisim drums and pop a destruction pot. that equals 865 spell haste without base haste rating. Double icyveins last for 30 seconds as does heroisim and drum last 30 seconds as well. The only limit to spell haste at the moment is global cooldown which is a minimum of 1 second. All that spell haste = 55% haste roughly. So your fireball cast time will half from 3.0 seconds to 1.5 ( you can see why we needed the agro dump now ) so if your avg spell hits for 4kdmg lets say you would normally get 10 3 second casts in the 30 seconds of buffs, however now our spell time pretty much halfs our casts in the 3 seconds effectivley double so you go from 40k total dmg in 30 seconds to 80k dmg... So the long and short of it is it owns lol But this isnt using any baste haste, so dps could be further improved by more base haste.

As a mage once you are hit capped the most effective way to increase dps is haste followed by spell damage and then crit.
per 10 points of haste you can get 6.87 extra dps. So all that haste on its own increases your dps by 86.5, that may not sound like alot but in terms of raid damage it is, especially taking into account that molten fury and your trinket will most likley being giving you 5k+ crits on the target along with scorch buff. Then take into account the higher ignite ticks and extra spell damage and you're looking at alot of dps. I've seen up to 6k fireball crits in this spec and i dont even have over 1000 base spell damage. So with a possibility of 200+ base haste and 1100 base spell damage whilst being hit capped (These numbers will increase with sunwell gear, but thats aiming a bit high to justify this spec as im sure any class in sunwell gear owns lol ) you can see the possiblity of this spec in the future. So if you're still awake congratz on reading the most boring post on the forums! However i hope you can use this info to make your own choice of spec and gear easier and if you need any conversion rates, caps or wanna chat about the class just /w me in game.

Watch it on the blonde comments

As you know I'm not convinced on the elementalist spec, but haven't tried it since icy veins came in and will be interested to see how it works for you with epic gear next time we go to SSC. I'm not sure how much it relies on having just the right mix of other classes in the raid, as we don't always have shammys for instance to get the heroism.

Agree on hit etc, though I think haste mostly comes in above damage once you are starting to get to T5 and above (assuming no icy veins). Below that, I think its more important to get a good base damage. I think you need a fair amount of haste to see a real difference on dps, but above T5 gear stats start to better allow for switching out sufficient gems etc to haste without messing up other stats. Also we might need to bump up hp a bit for BT - Glass cannon is good, but staying alive also important and reading some of the bosses, a couple of us are borderline for one-shotting

I'm glad you mention invisibility and people take note - its a really valuable tool for dumping aggro (one time we can smile sweetly at the locks..), which means being able to sustain high dps for longer. Hope you're all using it!

Interesting stuff, again makes me want to level my mage, but with all the chars ive got in the process I think it will have to wait a bit.

Arnoolin just one small edit - dpm = damage per mana - basically meaning how efficient you are and translates into sustained high dps, for boss fights etc, as opposed to high burst dps, which is nice for trash etc..