Arcane mage help stats

Arcane mage help stats

Post 25 Jul 2011 21:48

Avatar Moriad
 
Posts: 1
HI guys , I prefer to play with the fire mage , but now i want try arcane mage becouse i want to improve dps , my question its easy for yout opinion with new pacht what is the principal stats? im confused thanks for help.
(For stats i mean Critical , Haste , Mastery)

Re: Arcane mage help stats

Post 25 Jul 2011 22:11

Avatar MoshiMoshi
 
Posts: 5
Well, Im no paragon but I think it's pretty safe (At least it's what rawr and simcraft tell me ^^) to answer that (at least with my level of stuff ilevel 373 4HT11) it's

Int > Hit rating (up to 17%) > Spell Power > Mastery > Haste > Crit
Last edited by MoshiMoshi on 26 Jul 2011 07:32, edited 2 times in total.

Re: Arcane mage help stats

Post 26 Jul 2011 00:05

Avatar jaromanid1
 
Posts: 10
Well for arcane it can vary a bit. If you're wearing 4pcs of T11 then haste drops a bit. You want enough haste so that with 4xAB and a BL/TW your AB casts are 1s. Otherwise without the 4c T11 You're stat priority would probably be Int>Hit>Haste>Mastery>Crit. I read around somewhere that at high levels of gear you can go below hit cap up to ~1.xx%. By higher levels of gear I assume HMT11 gear including the 4pc set.

Re: Arcane mage help stats

Post 26 Jul 2011 05:17

User avatarGuromin
 
Posts: 190
Moriad,

Arcane mages stats do vary based on gear, but not as much as you may think. I did some of my own testing using various tools and resources to confirm Arcane mages stat weights for players without the t11 4 set bonus. From my calculations the t11 set bonus does not make haste out best stat. As of right now haste is bad no matter what you do it it. The goal of an arcane mage is to hit big and hit hard; not to hit often. Reducing the cast time of a spell does not reduce it's mana cost. Thus casting more frequently costs more mana. To an arcane mage mana is dps. Additionally we have no damage over time effects to gain additional tick marks. Although Arcane Barrage can gain additional missiles it only makes for a small portion of our damage.

Arcane mages are unique in an odd way because our best secondary stat scales infinatly with gear. In most classes mastery crit and haste's value begin to weaken as you obtain more of it. Being unevenly balanced for an arcane mage stacking mastery has no limit. It will just keep increasing the damage of your spells.

It is worth mentioning that if you do not mana an arcane mages mana correctly Mastery's value almost halves itself. Keeping yourself at 80%-90% except during the burn phase is so incredibly important to doing good damage. If your unsure on proper mana management feel free to ask.

Now that I have ranted on sufficiently I'll go ahead and be clear on the most widely accepted arcane mage stat weights for players of near-all gear levels.

Intellect > Hit > Spell Power > Mastery > Critical Strike > Haste


If you want to calculate your own stat weights to make sure that these correctly apply to your situation the easiest way to do that is using SimulationCraft. http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/ I wrote a guide on how to use simulationcraft to find your personal stat weights. I made it a quote so you could easily skip it if you already know how to do this.

I am going to focus mainly on looking at how you can look at your character in specific.

What is Theory Crafting?
Theorycraft is the attempt to mathematically analyze game mechanics in order to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of the game. Essentially Theorycrafting is the study of how the mechanics of a game work.


How can I start Theorycrafting?
There are several programs that can be used for Theorycrafting. After having used many of them I have developed a liking to Rawr and SimulationCraft.

Rawr is fairly simple. Import your character and click the magical optimize button in the options. It will tell you everything from how much dps it expects you to do and how you can improve (gems, enchants, reforging). Rawr does, however, have some major issues with being correct. Often it tells me I will do way more dps than possible for me and it makes bad suggestions. For this reason I have stopped using Rawr to optimize my gear.

SimulationCraft, which I like better than rawr, doesn't tell you what to do to improve your gear. Instead it tells you how much dps you should be able to do and your stat weights. These stat weights are individual to you and they are almost always correct. To fully utilize the power of this program you will need to use it with another program. There is a long list of other programs and cloud applications that can do this. My favorite is Ask Mr Robot.

How to use SimulationCraft:
After downloading and launching the application you should see the welcome screen that no one reads. It's not really import, so skip to the options tab. In the options tab there are several important things that should require your attention.

Version: Live or Beta. Leave it on live. Beta doesn't work well to my knowledge.
Iterations: How many times the fight is repeated. Increasing this will make it take longer, but increase the accuracy of it.
Length: How long the fight is.
Vary Length: This will simply change the duration of the fight from run to run.
Adds: Well, how many other targets there are. I don't use this because SimulationCraft doesn't ever seem to know what a good aoe rotation is.
Fight Style: Patchwork is standing still and HelterSkelter is a moving fight.
Target Race: This is the race of the enemy your attacking.
Player Skill: An Elite player setting will use a computer with a percent error of 0. Strive to achieve this Elite dps, but realize that it's always a good reflections of what you can realistically do.
The rest of the options don't need to be changed on this page.

In the next tab select the buffs you would like on you, Then the debuffs you want on your target.

Scaling is really important. What you select to scale is what SimulationCraft is going to tell you stat weights for. Select all of the options that apply to your class.

Skip plots for now. They aren't vital to basic SimulationCrafting.

On to Import. There are several options as to how to import your character, but most likely you will find your character on the armory using the Battle.net tab. All of the tabs work in a similar way; find your character and click import at the bottom right of the screen. Once you import a character it will appear in the History tab for your convenience to use next time. Simply double click to load the history you would like to SimulationCraft.

A series of code will appear on your screen after clicking Import. I recommend you don't edit them right now, but it is fairly self explanatory as to how to edit most of it. On this screen click Simulate! to start your characters Simulation. Depending on the number of scaling factors and Iterations this could take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

Your character has now been Simcrafted! Now to review the results and figure things out.

First it will list your character name and how much dps you should do. Keep in mind this is an average of many attempts. Your actual results may vary.

Results, Spec, and Gear,
This is the big one. The section you care about. It tells you your stat weights and dps. Scale Factors are your stat weights not in normal form. Normal form is when you take the best stat and it's value and set that equal to 1. Then all the others are scaled down proportionality. In order to get accurate stat weights SimulationCraft recommends 10,000 iterations.

Charts
Charts will tell you various things about your character that are fairly self explanatory. I use this to get a sense of importance of spell casting. It helps me to see that a silly cooldown like Flame Orb is one of my most efficient dps/cast time spells. Charts also graphs your damage sources. This is how much each of your spells should be doing. If your close to this thats good.

Great now I have all this information, but what do I do with it?

Well now you can use this information to test your rotation. If you can pull as much dps on a target dummy as it says you can, then generally that means your rotation is correct. If you can't check your rotation and the setting you used on this. Make sure you don't have raid buffs on for this.

Plug in your stats to Ask Mr Robot and it will optimize your gear! Start by importing your character. In the bottom right there is an option containing stat weights. This is where you can put your in instead of theirs. Hopefully they are similar. The first thing you will notice is that your best stat is on a scale of 100 on this site and SimulationCraft gave you yours on a scale up to 1. Simple solution! Multiply all of SimulationCraft's normalized stats by 100 to convert them for this website. Once that is imputed click the optimize button and it will give you a list of suggestions on how to improve your gear. Remember you have to be smarter than the computer. If you know something is wrong, don't trust the game. Double check it!


Well there you go! A crash course in how to run a SimulationCraft on your character. I hope it helps! If you have any comments, questions, suggestions or just want to point out a way for me to improve this feel free to leave a message bellow.



If you read the SimulationCraft tutorial I posted above you will have already read about AskMrRobot.com and it's awesomeness, however if you didn't read that you should check out the website because it will help you to optimize your gear in a way that would normally take hours apon hours. I have found it to be right most of the time. It undervalues crit for fire mages (which is a hole different long issue) and it's BiS for arcane wrongfully included the t12 items instead of the t11 set. Theoretically the t12 set is better, but in actuality t11 out-performs it until you get into heroics.

Rawr is also a theorycrafting program, however I have found it to significantly over-value haste. In fire and arcane; so I've stopped using it as a creditable resource for optimizing my gear.

Again, if you have any other questions feel free to ask. Best of luck on improving your dps and I commend you for being willing to switch to arcane for it's better damage :)

-Guromin
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