If I ever remember to log off in my raid gear again, those of you who actively stalk my armory to see what I’m up to (and I know you’re out there!) will note that I have forsaken spellpower gems in favor of haste gems.
Shock! Le gasp! I know, eh? (Canadians do not say “I know right?”)
The reasoning is actually very simple. Fact is, there is no appreciable difference between spellpower gems and haste gems.
Well, there is, slightly. An epic +23 spellpower gem will grant me 29 DPS, whereas an epic +20 haste gem will grant me 28 DPS.
To me, a difference of one DPS is just far too small for me to give a damn, especially considering that stacking haste gems is infinitely more fun. It’s invigorating, it’s exciting. Arcane Blast has a base cast time of 1.9 seconds, and it feels absolutely out of control. In a good way.
Have you ever been on a really fast roller coaster? Think of the surge of adrenaline when you aren’t really doing anything complicated, just roaring along the track as fast as you can go. Unstoppable, relentless speed. I suspect driving a car real fast evokes a similar feeling.
That’s what playing arcane feels like with 700+ haste. I’m shooting for 800+ in my next few upgrades here, but the point is casting spells really fast is just an awesome feeling.
Pop AP/IV together, and I can crit for 15k+ every second for 15 seconds, self buffed only. Admittedly the longest string of back to back crits I’ve ever had was only 9, but the point still stands that it kicks ass.
Anyway, point is, stacking those haste gems is far more fun than stacking spellpower gems. And when stacking those spellpower gems would result in a DPS increase of less than 0.002%? It’s just no contest. Sorry, spellpower. We had some good times, but I’ve moved on. Me and haste are going steady.
In any case, arcane’s been live for a few days now, and hopefully we’ve all had a chance to try it out in raids and instances.
I’ll lay outwhat I’m getting, and see if y’all agree.
AB spam is the highest DPS, but costs ridiculously huge amounts of mana. The DPS increase over the standard rotation isn’t even that high (sub 200 DPS). Not worthwhile to spam at all outside of major cooldowns, preferably two or more combined.
The highest DPS sustainable rotation seems to be as follows: Spam AB until Missile Barrage procs, only use MBAM at 4 stacks.
Everything else seems to produce rather poor numbers.
Thankfully, there does seem to still be some judgement calls involved with the standard cycle. Even with a 40% chance to proc, there are still going to be times where you reach the 4th stack without MB proccing. This is where you actually get to use those well-practiced mana management skills I’m sure you have by now.
Do you cast another AB or two, fishing for a proc? Chances are good, but it’s certainly possible you could end up casting four or five more ABs before you get a proc. You could commit yourself to expending the extra mana, hoping for a strong proc.
Or do you hit ABarr to clear the stack, accept the hit to DPS, but preserve the mana you would’ve otherwise spent on more ABs?
Cast AB as much as you can afford. There is no magic number where continuing to cast it is a bad thing. AB spam, after all, is your highest form of damage.
Can you afford to cast nine ABs in a row? I don’t know! Is your gem on cooldown? Is Evocate ready to go? Can you count on innervate? Are you 30 seconds into the fight, or 30 seconds from the end of the fight? Do you only have 6k mana left? or 16k?
If you have the mana to continue hitting AB, waiting for a proc, you most certainly should. If you don’t, then you should hit ABarr and reset the stack.
Whether you do or don’t have the mana is something nobody can answer except yourself.
Lastly, anyone see the buff to Riding Nether Rays? Them things got HUGE. Perdition got a very significant size buff for trolls, too. (Just trolls? I don’t know! You tell me.)
So let’s recap!
My DPS got buffed.
My riding ray got huge.
My staff is bigger and longer.
Good patch, overall.
*thumbs up to stacking haste*
I’m doing it for the same reason as you: it’s just so much more fun. I’m at something like 825 haste right now in my frost spec *cough* plus the haste proc trinket off Auriaya… I know I’m getting to the point of overkill, BUT WHO’S GUNNA STOP ME??
… Global Cooldown haste cap, you say? Phooey.
Wow, just wow. You captured pretty much exactly how I feel, my addiction to haste. My friends all the time are trying to push crit on me, and it annoys the heck out of me.
I am envious, my Arcane Blast is only 2 seconds. How does 1.9 feel? You must be able to kill warlocks 2 seconds faster than I can. If only there were some more haste trinkets.
Btw give me your thoughts on my new mage blog I am experimenting with. http://dvinven.blogspot.com/
BTW, I continue casting either until MB procs typically. I have pretty good regen, plus I have one thing many mages don’t have, Arcane Torrent.
Unless the boss is near death, inwhich case I ignore MB procs and just empty out the mana bar.
Though I like the changes in general, I’m not fond of losing my ABlast stack because I had to move, the boss has a random interrupt, it’s time to switch targets, etc. I guess the thinking is that this is supposed to create a niche for ABarr (you’re not using that GCD anyway), but I miss the flexibility of having twelve seconds to get my next spell off.
It’s pretty killer for PvP, too, nearly impossible to build a worthwhile stack to deal some reasonable damage.
I just wish they’d buff ABarr back up some. I still wince a little when I have to kill a stack with it.
I’m not disagreeing with you on haste, especially if you’re at the level that 1 point of haste is relatively equal to 1 point of sp, just wanted to point out a couple of things.
First, Haste scales with sp, so the more sp you have, the more each point of haste is worth. So while haste and sp may be equal to you now, Haste will actually exceed the worth of sp at some point, and conversely will be worth less than sp for people who are lower in sp to begin with. Also, if you have to replace sp to stack haste, you are actually lowering the value of that Haste in doing so.
The other point is that sp is dpm neutral while being a dps increase. Haste on the other hand is a dpm loss while gaining dps. This only matters if you’re having trouble with mana obviously.
PS. For you haste lovers, consider your toon’s haste rating + Potion of Speed + IV + Heroism + New Onyxia Haste Trink, 15s of pure awesome. With only 500 haste on your toon, you’d be looking at close to 1/2 second ABs (0.65s to be exact).
I should probably put that info on the site somewhere. Nearly all mage stats scale that way. The more haste you have, the more spellpower is worth, and vice versa. Same for crit and hit (at least below the cap).
In the case you mentioned, casting any faster than 1 second is a waste, really. You’re capped at the GCD, so once AB hits 1 second it’s really pointless to have any more haste.
I hit that cap basically whenever I have IV/Bloodlust (or Power Infusion! My Disc priest loves me so…) so I use Wild Magic potions myself on short fights.
Longer fights (here basically defined as anything except Sarth 3d zergs) I’ll save a haste potion for my second AP, when IV and friends are all still on cooldown.
Actually, I would very much like to see your pvp gear… you pwned me in the face with an arcane barrage in WG the other day, think you had deadly gear on..
As for haste, I really want to try drastically increasing the haste in my (right now, lackluster) set, and seeing if I can create a semi-viable frost raid spec.. yeah, I know, it’s very unlikely. The thing is, the reason I chose frost the first time around (besides everyone telling me to go fire
) is because it seemed to me like nearly half the casting time will add up to more damage after a longer period of time. Dots killed this idea, but I still want to see what would happen if I had as much haste as you do 
I don’t arena anymore, so I currently wear a mix of deadly gear, WG stuff and furious pieces.
Haste plays with fire in a kind of strange way. It’s devalued somewhat as Living Bomb and Hot Streak procs don’t benefit from haste at all, but it’s still a strong stat. Just not as strong as it is for arcane.
Ideally, fire type specs want to get their main nuke at least to 2.7 seconds, preferably faster.
Meh, I still have 2 old hateful gear pieces I need to replace..
Yeah, I actually remember reading something about how haste is more important to the Fire/ttw spec (which I currently am using) than to FFB (which I was until about 2 months ago when I finally obtained enough hit rating to switch over). It still bugs me when I see my fball hit for around 4k-5k or 6k, when I’d get crits far more often with my FFB spec, but the dps is higher with the basic fire/ttw spec for me.
It seems to me that FFB is kinda like the beginners version of the fire spec. You can get decent crit on early epic gear, but not so much hit rating. And then after you acquire enough hit, the next level of epics has more and more haste.
Blizzard planned it that way I suppose.
Next on my list is gear with more haste.. tired of fire, want to go try arcane for a bit. And hey, at the rate I’m getting new gear having a haste frost spec may be viable
I just picked up my arcane spec again, horray! I’d really like to give it a go, but… looking at my gear I get doubts about it, so it’s still secondary, something to work on… I’ve got tons and tons and tons of crit and hardly no haste at all. Sigh. Maybe doing something as drastical as trading the 23 spellpower gems is worth considering.
What *is* the haste cap, again? I remember calculating it once (because I could not for the life of me find it anywhere) and then forgetting about it because it was something insanely high. (This was back before Ulduar existed.) Since then, I’ve basically just never popped IV during bloodlust or haste trinket procs.
My boomkin boyfriend is having a mad affair with haste and I’m jealous.
Haste gives me mana problems. Boo, my gear.
I believe there is a sort of gear threshold where haste becomes better.
I’m sporting Ulduar and beyond type gear, so my mana pool is over 25k raid buffed. With replenishment et all based on your total mana pool…
M’thinking, similar to how haste was only a good stat for holy pallies in TBC once they had reached a certain gear level, the same is probably true of mages this expansion.
I mean, if you only have, say, 18, 19k mana, you’re going to be getting far less mana restored from those effects, meaning it will be significantly more difficult to sustain high haste values.
Really no way to avoid that though, I think.
I just need to figure out how to get rid of all this frickin’ HIT on my gear.
I’m something like 100 points over cap but too scared to try bumping points out of the mana regen/hit talents.
I’m still many points above the cap myself, and haven’t dropped the arcane hit talent yet out of a concern for respec costs! /facepalm
Which just occurred to me that’s a pretty stupid reason. I’m swimming in gold from the epic gem market, I can respec 3 or 4 times a day without noticing.
Stopped reading after “Canadian”. Dude, you’re like my evil twin!
Your evil, less competent twin!
I see you interviewing that Ensidia hunter!
And here I am puttering around in Wintergrasp whilst eating yogurt.
its all about wich raid you can aim on – iff your guild have acces to Toc hero and u can get end game eq u will get over 700 haste and 2,5k sp (like ensidia mages or from that oter guild witch was on mmo couple days before witch some gr8 achieve) and all of them (and I my self) are fire with all games 12 sp 10 haste. im like low for now cause my guild is to pour to make hero raid so im like 2,4k sp 400 haste and over 50% (fire crit raid buffed) ive tryed arcane yesterday and its like Euripides said couple posts ago – if u like it do it if no go fire cause its dps equal…
Yeah I’m in a tricky situation with my gear. I’d love to be able to swap out sp for haste by my dual spec is arcane and fire. I don’t nearly have enough gear to be able to kit out different sets so in fact I just raid with one set of gear.
I have wayyy too much hit rating on my gear but can’t get rid of it. I was up to 20.4% at one point… still sitting at 19.2 or so its just crazy. But hey… atleast I can drop EVERY hit talent out of my arcane spec which means I get arcane focus and threat reduction. Think I’m around 2400 SP 30% crit and 300 haste as Arcane. Unbuffed of course.
What’s my main -
I’m thinking of dropping some of those hit talents but I’m worried about the impact to mana regen. Was it a noticeable difference when you dropped them?
Speaking of the 3% mana reduction, it really shouldn’t be noticable.
You’ll be using more mana, for sure, but there usually shouldn’t be issues with raid buffs, evocate, et al.
I say usually because it’s impossible to generalize for every situation.
I mean, if your highest item of gear is a naxx 200 epic, chances are you don’t have the intellect to be able to afford dropping the mana/hit talents. Then again, you probably don’t have the extraneous hit for that to be a problem anyways.
The best summary I can really reach is simple. If you’re having mana problems now, they will be exacerbated. If you don’t, in all likelihood you won’t notice.
You might not be able to afford to spam AB quite so much hoping for a proc, though.
Seriously, I had a streak of 16 ABs last night without a MB proc. T’was madness.
I went ahead and dumped 2 of those points in mana reduction/hit and I’m hardly noticing.
At least not on the test dummies or in 5-mans. Our raid didn’t happen on Sunday. Not that I’m bitter about it or anything. >.<
Arcane has always been my favorite raiding spec. I got a double hemorrhoid when I had to spec fire. However, now that I am fire and used to it, I am wondering if I really should go back to Arcane or stay fire. I have mainly been gemming for sp and crit to try and get my crit up high enough to hit more hot streaks (currently at about 40%). My thinking is that if I go back to Arcane, I’m going to have to regem alot of stuff for haste, which isn’t a huge deal but would be a bit costly. My question is would it be worth it? I am in 5 pc Conq. So, should I respec or just stay fire or does it matter?
Arcane = Fire, as far as DPS goes.
Play whichever you prefer. I prefer arcane these days, so that’s what I play.
I didn’t really notice the 3% loss in mana effeciency since I dropped the hit talents. I haven’t had a chance to raid with the new arcane but hopefully tonight I will.
Really looking foward to Twin Valk’s assuming they haven’t nerfed incanters absorption…
I’m thinking of moving those points next door to the pushback protection just for that fight, lol. I don’t have much pushback issues in other fights but those stupid colored cotton balls just screw me over.
Maybe try it this weekend so I can be ready for next week’s ToCr.
Hello
may i ask, if I have arcane focus and have precison is that calculated as 6% Hit
thanks in advance
Yes, yes it is.
Arcane mages get 6% hit from talents, if they want it.
The 6 sec duration of AB is annoying the crap out of me >.< My fav thing about arcane was the mobility, now even the thought of moving scares the bejeezus out of my dps-oriented mind. Meh.
So, we’re talking about haste?
I’ve quit wow.. but, I use to love it (I’m talking about wow and haste here). (Having a GCD after you used your skill in Aion is so weird) But I hope these little things I found might be usefull to some of you..
Whenever a shaman uses Heroism/Bloodlust you use IV if it’s not on cooldown (d’uh). But i think it’s better to go AB PoM AB, AB, .. I haven’t done any math on this, I only go by my own feeling (and sometimes Recount). But you only got super fast AB (1,4-1,6s) for about 20 seconds, so why spend all that time casting? Cast one, (macro perhaps?) PoM the next one, .. That way you can fire more AB’s in the same time
(Although not that I’m thinking about it.. I’m not entirly sure..)
But, in Trial of the Crusader there’s a nice bit of haste you can get. Abyssal Rune is one, but (hopefully (: ) there’s a spell called spellsteal on your bar. The blood elf mage has a buff that you can spellsteal, arcane haste (or somehting .., it’s been a while). Pop IV when you steal it and you’re looking at AB with a casting time of 1 second flat. (And I have about 480 haste iirc)
PoM actually nullifies any haste effects you have. As the spell is instant, it doesn’t matter how much haste you have.
Using it during a super hasted effect, i.e. Bloodlust/IV, is a waste.
It’s best to use it when you don’t have any haste effects active, that way you can get the most benefit from the cooldown.
When I joined my guild they wanted me fire because it was the highest dps according to all of the sites. I very sadly moved arcane to my secondary spec. Then I was asked to pick up frost for mana management on General Vezax and Freya hard modes. I sadly… so sadly bid goodbye to my aracane. Arcane was what I was using before it was cool, then it came into fashion and I was happy. I left it on the side always longingly looking at its nearly empty talent tree. I specced arcane from Fire/ttw last week on Thursday. I did it after 2 days of raiding last week. Last night was my first time raiding as arcane. I was beside myself with the awesome DPS I was doing. I was topping the charts doing amazing DPS. And OMG, is the Twins a freaking riot! My DPS during the twins was 9K overall in 10 man heroic! Woot. I didn’t say anything to anybody in the guild and I was so happy to welcome arcane back into my raiding life!
Now to take a look at what gems I am stacking. If I remember correctly I am using SP or SP+Haste in everything except my purples to activate my meta. Right now my haste is sitting around 550, so now I am wondering if I should swap those out…………
Oh, I do I have one question. Right now I am insanely over the hit cap. I’m not even sure how to bring it down because my gear just has so much hit built into it. I’m going to take a look tonight to see if there is any gear that I can swap out that has higher haste
.
Hit is hard to get rid of, but I’ve managed to fight myself down to 13% of it.
Sadly, most pieces sans hit with truckloads of haste have lots of spirit on them, but at least spirit provides a very tiny increase to DPS rather than none.
I’m curious… why are you using the hand mounted pyros instead of the hyperspeed accelerators?
HMP > Accelerators.
That’s basically all there is to it.
The accelerators were better pre 3.1, as the rockets took a GCD to cast, which was a pretty huge loss to DPS. Now, they are off the GCD, and can be used any time.
Also, the rockets can be used whilst moving, whereas the accelerator is wasted by movement.