My Shadow Priest has basically no cooldowns aside from trinkets for extra damage; I guess the shadowfiend is a tiny dps boost but that’s not what he’s there for.
Well I got home from work and my wife wants to go to the movies tonight. No raiding for me! Oh well, I should still be able to get some playing time in after we get home I guess.
I just watched my way through Season 3 of The Guild and … whoa, hey, Wil Wheaton!
Kinda cool seeing him portraying the villain 
One on Cairne, my DK Tomov. FlightlessBird was kind enough to invite me to the guild. I just need to play now. I have five other toons on three other servers.
Ran a couple heroics in my frost/arc secondary spec tonight. Oddly, I seem to do comparable DPS to my arc/fire primary spec, even though I wasn’t doing much AoE. For bosses or trash, I open with Flamestrike, then spammed frostbolt, hit the instant frostfire bolt whenever it procced, mixed in a few fire blasts. I swapped glyphs to get perma-frosty, and pop my multi-mini-me on boos fights…
This is making me think maybe I’m not getting the dps I should be getting out of the arc/fire spec. I’m generally around 1800-2000 DPS in either spec. In arc/fire, for bosses I use Pom Pyro, arcane blast, fire blast, arcane barrage, arcane missiles, repeat…sometimes i just spam arcane blast then arcane missile. And the multi-mini-me. I like that spell. For trash, I open with flame strike then blizzard, repeat until dead or less than three mobs standing, then goto boss rotation.
I have noticed I get pwned on the dps meter by warlocks with lower gear score. Ive seen these 'locks hitting 3300 dps+ in heroics. I almost never top the damage chart, usually hanging around third. This does not please me.
What am I doing wrong? Bad rotation? Bad spell choice? Latency is an issue…I usually show around 1200-1400 latency, which isn’t good, but is bearable, considering it’s that or not play.
Gearwise, I’m wearing 4/5 T9, with a gear score of a little over 4900.
Ran out of edit window…
Can someone tell me how heirloom gear works? Can I buy a piece with my main, and send it to other toons on the same server? On other servers? Across faction lines? Is there a limit to how many times i can send the gear to another toon? Say buy a suit of plate, let my DK use it a while, then send it down to a lower level paladin?
Yes. My paladin bought the heirloom cloth gear for my mage, and when my mage hit 80 she mailed it all off to my priest. Who has proceeded to do nothing with it 
But someday she will …
You can’t send it to other servers, but - last I heard, don’t quote me on this - you can mail it to your other toons on the other faction (same server) as long as you don’t try to type in a message or send gold or anything.
What’s your armory?
Your issue is probably bad spell choice, bad spec + compounded by bad latency.
Your spec should look something like this:
Some prefer magic absorption and flame thrower over the 10% spirit, and clearcasting. It boils down to personal preference.
also, fire mages don’t really have much of a rotation, it’s more of a priority system based on procs.
the priority system is:
scorch>
living bomb>
if hotstreak available = pyroblast>
fireball
if you’re moving = living bomb, fire blast, cone of cold, arcane explosion
if there’s multiple mods to aoe = living bomb as many targets as you can, then blizzard on top of them
so a typical static single target boss, my casts would look like this:
- pop my cooldowns (combustion, trinkets, mirror images)
- scorch
- living bomb
- fireball fireball
- pyro
6 fireball fireball fireball etc
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/dpstime.aspx
on single target encounters, this mod can get you used to dealing with fire’s rotation.
also, think about downloading a timer mod.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/satrina-buff-frame.aspx
this is what i use, it’s a little complicated to set up, but the customization is unparalleled.
all in all, 2k DPS is give or take a third of what a 5k GS mage is capable of (YMMV with your lag).
Blizzard sent me an email today. I guess because they are working so hard on Cata, they don’t have time to proofread their messages anymore. It said thus:
“Blizzard Entertainment World of Warcraft 85 new mount coming soon, to predict more information, please visitus.blizzard-worldo.com”
Now believe me, there is nothing I would like more than to “predict more information”, but I am holding off for now.
Plus I don’t know if I am going to upgrade to WoW '85 since WoW '78 is still running so well.
I just realized – guess I wasn’t paying attention before – that the reputation-based arcanum head enchants you get for being exalted with various factions are BoA now. Here I was wearing my Wyrmrest tabard to grind out rep with them, when it turns out to be totally unnecessary (unless I want a red drake I guess). Which is good, I like my Blood Knight tabard much better.
My guild won ten beta accounts in the ER screenshot contest, wooot! Plus one that a guy already had, there’s now a bunch of very excited people in /g.
Now excuse me, I have to go bounce around the room.
Note that this is also true of the Sons of Hodir shoulders. Which goes some way toward explaining why there are 400 Relics of Ulduar in the guild bank.
Here’s my armory: Kahbueme.
My main spec is arcane/fire 53/18/0, and the secondary spec is Frost/Arcane, 19/0/52. Both specs are sort of hybridized. I do both pve and pvp, the frost version was originally envisioned as a pvp spec…
I hate the fact that I’m getting only about a third of the dps I should be getting. I’ll accept some dimisnhed performance for the lag issue, but I’m thinking most of the problem has to be something I’m doing or not doing…
Congratulations!
You lucky sumbeeches. Can I have one?
Right now both of your specs are inefficient PvP/PvE hybrids. So, if you want to push your character to its limit, you need to do is decide on whether or not you want to play fire or arcane for PvE. These are the only two viable DPS builds for mages right now. Arcane lags behind fire in DPS, but only by a small amount.
You can look at the spec I linked you earlier if you’d like to play fire. Also, the viable arcane spec is not arcane/fire, but arcane/frost.
It relies on Icy Veins cooldown usage.
If you do go fire use these glyphs:
Fireball
Living Bomb
Molten Armor
If you go arcane use these glyphs:
Arcane missiles
Arcane blast
Molten Armor
Okay, next up, you’ve got a ton of problems with your gear. I’m assuming you PvE in this gear, but if not feel free to disregard.
This is what’s keeping you back:
- Wrong meta, go with Chaotic Skyflare Diamond - Item - World of Warcraft instead.
- Spell pen is worthless for PvE, use Purified Dreadstone - Item - World of Warcraft in blue sockets
- Wrong helm enchant, use Arcanum of Burning Mysteries - Item - World of Warcraft instead.
- Wrong shoulder enchant, use Greater Inscription of the Storm - Item - World of Warcraft instead.
- No chest enchant? Use +10 stats to chest + get rid of spell pen.
- No wrist enchant? Use +30 sp
- Wrong glove enchant. Use Spells - World of Warcraft
- If you use Eternal Belt Buckle - Item - World of Warcraft on your belt you’ll get an extra gem slot.
- No leg enchant? Use Brilliant Spellthread - Item - World of Warcraft
- Wrong boot enchant. Use Enchant Boots - Tuskarr's Vitality - Item - World of Warcraft instead.
- You bought the healer ring with your emblems of triumph. Mp5 isn’t a valuable stat for mages, you should have went with Band of the Invoker - Item - World of Warcraft instead.
- Two PvP trinkets? They share a cooldown + useless in PvE anyway.
- If you wish to go the extra mile, you can drop mining and pick up a profession that offers a DPS boost instead of mining’s HP boost. Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Enchanting all offer +DPS boosts.
14>>> I don’t know what “armor” you’re using, but it should ALWAYS be molten in PvE.
You will see a HUGE DPS improvement if you change these things.
This build is mostly correct, but there should be points taken out of Arcane Meditation and/or Student of the Mind and placed in Incineration (Fire tree).
Also, Fire starts to far out-strip Arcane in at i251/i264 levels of gear especially in ICC due to its ability to scale with two stats (Crit and Haste) not one (Haste). Hence its theoretical top-end DPS is much higher than Arcane.
Yeah, you’re right – I haven’t been arcane in very many months and was just going off memory and completely overlooked incineration. I was wondering how I got the extra points >_>
Wowza. That’s a lot to digest, but I really appreciate the effort. I’m definitely going to start working on this. Don’t think I can afford all of the enchants right now, but I can do it piecemeal.
I’ll respec, probably to the arcane model as modified by ** Daedelus**. Also wondering about taking taking improved blizzard instead of arcane meditation.
Thanks again for taking the time to post this.
Woohoo! Eilyssana: Chef de Cuisine! (160 cooking recipes learned) She officially has every Cooking achievement!
Lately I’ve been poking around the old world and exploring some nooks and crannies, and I’m really looking forward to Cataclysm so that I can fly to some currently-inaccessible spots that have caught my attention and investigate them up close. Assuming, of course, those spots still exist. And I’ve recently managed to take a couple flight routes that I’ve apparently managed to never take before. For example, my troll hunter took a flight directly from Everlook (Winterspring) to Orgrimmar and … holy crap, I never realized just how high Winterspring is, altitude-wise. That drop from Winterspring into Azshara was … breathtaking. On the Alliance side, how often do you have a reason to fly directly from Searing Gorge to Thelsamar in Loch Modan? Well, tonight I did. I discovered for the first time ever that Thorium Point is right on the other side of the hills from Gol’Balar Quarry in Dun Morogh, and the first thing you notice is the hills gradually getting snowier, and then … there are a pair of big iron cranes, identical to the ones down in the lava-filled Searing Gorge, but these are covered in snow and ice, and appear abandoned. Wish I’d thought to grab a screenshot!
There was some recent discussion of the Badlands here, and the comments were that it’s a pretty dull zone. My nelf hunter was questing there today, though, and the zone has kind of grabbed my interest. I couldn’t find any specific lore to support my theory, but after exploring around I’ve come to the conclusion that the zone was once wet and covered with lush vegetation. There are some geological clues that the current Badlands may have once been the Titan’s eastern version of Sholazar Basin and Un’Goro Crater, and its current state is the result of the eruption of Blackrock Mountain a few hundred years ago. You know those five huge stone pillars in Sholazar? Badlands has similar pillars, though not as tall, and examining the map reveals that there are/were five of them arranged in a similar, pentagonal pattern. Also supporting the idea that the area was once green and thriving, there are troll ruins at the northern edge of the zone (where the lesser rock elementals are). Trolls didn’t usually build/settle in arid wastelands (Tanaris/Zul’Farrak notwithstanding - I suspect Tanaris was once all oceanfront property, as it will soon be again). Once the Badlands became the Badlands, well, no wonder those trolls took off. I’ll wager the survivors made their way to Stranglethorn Vale.
It also occurred to me that all those light-colored boulders scattered around the zone aren’t natural formations. Many of them look rather pillar-like, so I happened to examine some of them more closely. Hmmmmmmm.
