I made a promise when I started this blog that I would update this blog daily, and I’m doing well. Not perfect, there was that rather lengthy stretch a while back, and occasionally the internet will go kaput and I can’t update even if I wanted to. Sometimes dear ol’ dad needs help with his blog (he can put pictures on his blog now without help. I’m rather proud).
More often than not, I’ll go update one of my guides (like adding “Flame Cap” to the consumables list) and I’ll say to myself “See? I updated. HAH!” But then when you guys get to the site…. “bah, the lazy buzzard hasn’t updated yet.” And I guess that’s true. Adding a link into a guide and fixing a typo doesn’t really count as a proper update, does it?
So let’s talk about haste, specifically in relation to the specs you choose.
Meet Aristophanes Black, the most famous Orc mage in all of Azeroth:
Mr. Black is a unique mage in that he is simultaneously specced everything in the game at once, even Restoration (Arcane Rejuvination is waaaay overpowered, but don’t tell anyone else that, mmk?). Mr. Black has graciously provided his help in my investigation into spell haste.
Mr. Black’s stats are as follows:
- 600 Intellect
- 275 Spirit
- 164 hit rating
- 250 crit rating
- 1000 spell damage
For starters, Mr. Black will be asking his buddy Really High Stamina Boss to stand still and let him blast away with spells for ten minutes. And let’s see what kind of numbers Mr. Black produces, shall we?
As deep arcane with icy veins, Mr. Black is able to hold 946 DPS steady.
As deep fire with icy veins, Mr. Black has 1,125 DPS.
And as standard raid frost, Mr. Black has 1,080 DPS.
Now, let’s say Mr. Black found this awesome pair of goggles that gave him 100 haste. Now what do his numbers look like?
Arcane: 1,008 DPS, an increase of 6.15%.
Fire: 1,196 DPS, an increase of 5.9%.
Frost: 1,141 DPS, an increase of 5.3%.
Simple, see? Let’s ramp things up and see what happens when Mr. Black discovers something with another 100 spell haste on it…
Arcane: 1,061 DPS, a 10.8% increase over the original.
Fire: 1,267 DPS, an 11.2% increase over our initial value.
Frost: 1,203 DPS, a 10.2 % increase.
Huh. Would you look at that. Let’s take it up to 300 and see what happens.
Arcane: 1,082 DPS, 12.6% increase.
Fire: 1,339 DPS, 16.0% increase.
Frost: 1,264 DPS, 14.6% increase.
The conclusions here are simple. At first, haste provides the biggest benefit to arcane specs, but it scales poorly, where as fire and frost, especially fire, scale magnificently.
Thank you, Mr. Black.
What’s that? My mother eats… look, just because the numbers prove that your favorite spec doesn’t stack up to mine is no reason for-
You make a compelling argument, Mr. Black.
Mr. Black would like everyone to know that Arcane is the best spec ever for any class that exists in any and all games. Yes. Even the shotgun in Halo 2.
He would also like to take this space to say the following:
Meena? Are you busy this Friday?
I was more of a pistol fan in Halo.
The original Halo that is…
Haha, that is the most OP weapon in the history of computer games, any ranged map quickly became a pistol fight, it was always great to see a noob go “hang on, this is a machine gun but i just got mugged again by some guy with a pistol, whats going on?”
Good post but I’d like to see where the dps calcs came from and your thoughts on why Arcane scales differently early on. It doesn’t appear as if we are taking into account gear (as in the T5 arcane bonus) or what spell rotations you are using. That’s ok because by doing so you can theorycraft forever.
I would just like to see some additional commentary on why you think one build pushes out less dps when you only change the one stat (haste).