Mage build for Cata

Frost FTW :) hehe

I do have Arcane as a off-spec but probably won't use it until the glyphs are properly working.
 
Mages are going to get tuned down a bit here shortly...mage in my ICC10 last night was pulling nearly 20k dps on bosses...no joke.
 
lol that sounds about right where it should be :) from my PTR testing, Destruction warlock had even higher dps than the highest i could get the pre-made mage.
 
I have the same thing Alan. I was hitting for up to 19k in my 5 man random, with my highest crit hitting 45k - I kid you not. But rotation hesitation still kept my dps fairly close to the rest of the group. Mastery also matters and as instantly annoyed as I was about the segregating of some of my favorite talents (eg. Icy Veins only in frost spec, focus magic only in arcane spec) I think some of the newer talents actually boost each spec better and have greater cause for variety. I am very interested to see which spec has the most success for dps in, say, ICC because I believe other encounters will benefit the other specs.

Thoughts?
 
I would definitely agree with that. At least from before 4.0, i would say Frost was a very good spec for ICC due to the amount of AOE in there. For fights that are less than 3 mobs i think Arcane will take top spot.

I haven't been in ICC since the patch so i'm not sure how much they have gimped Blizzard. I can say that they haven't definitely buffed up the single target dps for frost.
 
From an Arcane spec point of view I highly recommend reforging haste into mastery. Of course I may be improving my build from ghastly to bearable but it made a large difference in my dps. I was hitting dummies for 5.5k and after simply doing the mastery reforge I jumped to 6.4K dps. The slower spell casting is obviously balanced by the better damage done - also slowing down a casting cycle means I am also spending less mana which affects how much damage Mastery will boost.

I'll keep updating things on my Arcane build as I hopefully improve - also documenting my mistakes so you hopefully don't do the same. :)
 
Can we post some numbers for comparison for arcane? Here is what I did tonight (this morning ;)

SP 2983
Haste 10.37% (took what I could to get hit to 17% and the rest to Mastery)
Crit Chance 38.93%
Mastery 13.29%
 
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We will be a little bit limited by our gear for how much we have in each but at least ratios should be comparable :)

SP 3172
Haste 22.42%
Crit Chance 31.00%
Mastery 12.07 (I was at 14.12% until I read Adam's post - undid most of my reforging back into hit)

Hit Chance - 10.33% - which means I don't miss until lvl 83 but then it's 6.67% to miss - thanks for pointing this out Adam...with my current gear I simply can't gain anymore hit rating though *sigh*

I know I need more crit but it seems like not too much gear is able to reforge into it.

I just reworked my stats...will need to test on a dummy now - I'm guessing I am dropping dps now for some odd reason.
 
Just an observation from the ElististJerks forums on arcane mages, consensus seems to indicate the following:

Mastery > Haste > Crit > Spirit

For the purposes of reforging, if you have spirit/crit to choose from to put to master, use spirit, if you have a choice between haste/crit, choose crit to mastery.

After reforging, stats are ...
self buffed
SP: 3162
Haste: 14.46% (474)
Hit: 17.46% (458)
Crit: 37.87% (914)
Mastery: 17.28% (426)
 
Ok, sorry, lots of updates, I updated a couple of pieces and I had to reforge everything!

For arcane:
self buffed
SP: 3173
Haste: 15.22% (499)
Hit: 17.42% (457)
Crit: 37.84% (910)
Mastery: 19.20% (514)

Big difference is the extra 2% in mastery.
 
Oh don't get me wrong, fire is good for both pve and pvp. Just never did frost before. Fire rocks. Mages are lucky that way, all three of their trees are incredible.
 
Thanks Adam - wow, does that ever make me wonder...

I have a high level of haste on my gear if i remain "non-forged" so I may post my dps results on current settings, then switch everything over to haste and see where it gets me. I am guessing I will see a drastic result of mana usage so hope the payoff is worth it.
 
Ok so Adam and I did some playing last night with our arcane builds and we found some pretty cool stuff. I increased my dps from around 6-7k to 9-10k and Adam had numbers ranging from 9.5-11k.

Both were arcane builds and both 31/2/3.

We played differences between a 4/1 rotation and a straight Arcane Barrage rotation. Each with Molten Armor and Mage Armor. So in essence we did a 4/1 rotation and AB rotation with Molten armor and mage armor.

What we noticed:
Long fights is best with mage armor up and the 4/1 rotation. There was a 1k diff between me and Adam and he does have higher crit/mastery. Thing was I did a ton more damage. He went through 3 mana gems and an evocation where as I did not use evocation and when I finally stopped I was at 75% mana or so. The only difference was I had mage armor up and he had molten. Average dps was 8-9.5k

Short fights where the boss does not have a ton of hp was best to use arcane blast with either molten armor or mage armor. We ended up doing on average 9-11k dps with this rotation. I would still lean towards keeping MA up as I lasted quite a bit longer increasing overall damage done. Even though dps was slightly lower due to the loss of crit from molten armor ~1k.

Also I noticed after reforging to haste or mastery that I could change some gems around. I opted to drop my socket bonus and stack straight INT. This is after reforging all my gear with the following in mind...haste before mastery and mastery before crit. After loosing the socket bonus and stacking int gems (I do have the veiled to bring me to hitcap) I gained 40SP, 800~ mana, and crit. Even though I lost the SB. INT increases crit, SP and mana now.

Adam, is there anything I missed?
 
I think the key was how much damage could we do, not dps, before we ran out of mana. For fights where you would be responsible for about 1 Million damage, use Molten armor, straight arcane blast rotation. If you need to do about 1 Million to 2 Million, use 4:1 rotation with molten switching to mage armor when you evocate, and lastly if you need to do 2 Million+, use 4:1 rotation with mage armor - you'll essentially never run out. The dps is about 2K difference (or lower) for each bracket.

< 1 Million: molten armor + straight AB = 10K
1 - 2 Million: molten armor + 4:1 rotation = 8K
> 2 Million: mage armor + 4:1 rotation = 6K

I think that about sums this up. I would love to do a comparison against a fire to see what the differences are.
 
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