Ran a Heroic VH last night (couldn’t sleep, thought I’d do dailies but the call came out from a guild). It all went well, at least I beat the tank on the scoreboard, I even lived through all the fights. I think I understand the encounters well enough now.
Anyway, right at the end, while I was DEing the drops, my Magely Guildy tells me something I did know.
The dots on Flamestrike don’t stack (ok, I knew that bit, or at least assumed).
However, the dots on Flamestrike(8) & Flamestrike(9) do stack.
So he was suggesting for max AoE damage a rotation like this:
Living Bomb + Flamestrike(8) + Flamestrike(9) + Blizzard it on down.
This is generally what I do anyway, with the exception of the rank 8 Flamestrike.
Tank pulls, LB, I guestimate tanking position, cast Flamestrike and hope I got position right, then spam Blizzard.
Apart from anything else I love seeing the Flamestrike dots mixed in with the Blizzard damage in the scrolling combat text.
red, blue, red, red, red, blue, blue, blue, red etc…
Now being a Fire Mage at heart (did I ever cast Blizzard pre-WoLK?), I love to see this red text interspersed in all that yucky Frost damage.
So what’s the difference…?
OK, remember I am not a theorycrafter.. I couldn’t theorycraft my way out of grade 3 maths, but here I got having a punt at it…
Starting with the basic raw stats as shown on tooltips.
Fooltipping
What you need to know about this table.
- BlizSpam = Living Bomb and Blizzard only
- FSx1 = Living Bomb, Flamestrike(9) and Blizzard
- FSx2 =Living Bomb, Flamestrike(8) then Flamestrike(9) and Blizzard
- Calc columns are just the addition of the numbers.
- I used the max damage numbers from the tooltips.. maybe you are having a good day…
So in theory, you will get a:
- 36% increase in damage if you include a Flamestrike(9) in your AoE rotation vs. Blizzard alone.
- 61% increase in damage if you include a Flamestrike(8) and Flamestrike(9) in your AoE rotation vs. Blizzard alone.
- 19% increase using both Flamestrikes vs. just using one.
An Average night out
On a more practical basis, I used my average numbers for each of the skills from my run last night (with a little fudging to make up the Flamestrike(8) numbers), and came up with this. I haven’t taken Critical strikes into account, these are just plain average hits.
Numbers I used:
- Flamestrike Hit: (9) 1578, (8) 1245 (based on .789 damage of rank(9)
- Flamestrike Tick: (9) 578, (8) 459 (based on .795 damage of rank(9)
- Living Bomb Hit: 1552, Tick: 454
- Blizzard Tick: 751
So in theory, you will get a:
- 11% increase in damage if you include a Flamestrike(9) in your AoE rotation vs. Blizzard alone.
- 16% increase in damage if you include a Flamestrike(8) and Flamestrike(9) in your AoE rotation vs. Blizzard alone.
- 5% increase using both Flamestrikes vs. just using one.
OK, so remembering I didn’t do anything smart like throw this through a real calculator, or pass it by Elitist Jerks (for all I know there is an entire thread there debunking this concept), but I think I might give it a go come Friday, and just see what happens.
Even based on the lore of averages a 16% increase is better than the lazy man’s blizzard till dead, and still a5% margin is better than just throwing down a Flamestrike(9) to start the whole AoE session.
Do you have time for all this?
My 1st thought was that I wouldn’t have enough time to get off the casts, but I would normally get 3 blizzards off in a trash combat even in a 25 man raid, and the above example is based on only 2 blizzards.
So it looks good for a bit of AoE spell rotation beyond pure Blizzard spam.
Assuming of course that all the mobs are sitting in the small Flamestrike radius, for both Flamestrikes.
So how would you cast it?
I figure a macro would be the best, one with a cast sequence.
This is for keyboard binders.
Basically:
- Normal clicking will cycle through the spells, and reset the macro after 16 seconds.
- Shift clicking will just cast Blizzard
#Show Blizzard
/castsequence reset=16 Living Bomb(3), Flamestrike(8) , Flamestrike(9), Blizzard
/cast [modifier:shift] Blizzard
Or if you are a mouse clicker:
- Normal clicking will cycle through the spells, and reset the macro after 16 seconds.
- Right clicking will just cast Blizzard
#Show Blizzard
/castsequence reset=16Living Bomb(3), Flamestrike(8) , Flamestrike(9), Blizzard
/cast [button:2] Blizzard
Anyway, enough of me creating misinformation to be spread around the web.
What do you think (or more importantly know)?
Gnomer and Out!
PS: thanks to Cynge for giving me the heads up on this.
PPS: Thanks to Lancealittle for appreciating my character name, and the way it magically sits with my new title. No matter how much Arioch thinks it’s a mouthful!
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2009/05/05/flamestrike-spam/
Hmm. I actually wondered about this, but from playing my gut feeling was that Blizzard spam actually wins out.
Of course, this depends a bit on your spec. My mage is specced the usual 0/53/18 frostfire, so my Blizzard hits a bit harder than a 18/53/0 arcane-fire mage. But that’s not the major point.
Two main factors swing me towards Blizzard:
1) Blizzard ticks can crit, flamestrike ticks don’t. Given that my Blizzard crits for 1.5k, this is not insignificant. I’m running easily with 35% crit chance with molten armor, and my gear isn’t even that good. If the difference is only 11%, the crit rate could easily swing this to favour pure Blizzard spam.
2) Blizzard’s targeting reticule is HUGE compared to flamestrike. I can’t even hit all the mobs in a H VH pack with flamestrike, unless there’s a really awesome tank who can clump them up really tightly.
Pfft. Gnomes are hardly more than a mouthful to begin with. I bet a core hound could snap you up in one bite. =)
I’m a Blizzard-spammer myself, what with being 57/3/11.
Is your flamestrike damage being boosted by talents that some of us may not have? It’s been a long time since I was fire.
One can only wonder how long the stacking of rank 8 and 9 will be viable… something tells me that is not “working as intended.”
@pockie: I have been hesitant before, but it seems like it would work, and I notice that the Theory Craft-o-Matic shows 1xFS+Bliz comes out slightly ahead… so maybe there is something to the 2xFS.
But of course I didn’t take Specs into account & those Blizzard crits are nice to see.
And as for the targeting… I was pretty happy the other night when I started to judge where the tank would pull to. He was consistent. I noticed my fellow mage was dropping his FS where the tank “was”, not where I expected him to return to… Nice to be psychic.
@Arioch: Corehounds swallow us whole… but will spit us straight back out (one end or the other) due to indigestion.
I can’t see my talents right now… but I would be surprised if I picked up FS talents.. unless I needed to fill a gap.
Ghostcrawler says class changes on hold… so maybe we get to play with this error for a while as “working as intended”