Madness HC

[Northunez]

Me and my guild as many others are racing for Realm first.

We just downed Spine and im quite confused about Madness tbh. Fire or Arcane? Seen many people go either way.
Im also quite confused about when to pop CDS like combustion since i've been told not to wait too long with that and if im supposed to go arcane when and what do i burst? What did Baltha do?

Thanks in advance you're job is much appreciated here.

[Guromin]

Hi,

First of all, congratulations on defeating Spine of Deathwing. I'll be blunt in saying that my guild has not reached madness and I cannot give you a definitive answer on what is best way to go about this fight. I would recommend checking logs from WoL so see what other high-damaging mages are doing. You also didn't mention if you are a 10m or 25m guild, which is significant when determine the strategy for the fight.

Sorry I cannot be much help, but I hate to see a post go unanswered. Maybe someone with more experience in this situation can shed some light on the matter.

Again, sorry I can't be much help,

-Guromin

[Roxez]

We downed Madness last Friday. I wasn't there personally but I've had my fair share of 1-3% wipes.
But as for your problem, I would say that now after the nerfing of fire mages, arcane is the way to go. As far as I know, arcane beats fire at single target dps at the moment. And single target dps is really needed at madness, since to beat the enrage timer you have to kill everything..well, fast.

But your decision really depends on your raid setup. If you lack strong aoe which is needed in p2 (for the healing adds), fire is indeed strong. But if you have abilities available like mind sear, chain lightning etc, and you have slows (i.e. you don't need blast wave), you should go arcane. When our mage was in the raid comp, with him we had a shadow priest, elemental shaman, affliction warlock and a retribution paladin. The mage started off as fire but soon changed to arcane since we didn't have issues with our aoe damage in last phase.

But as I said, depends on your raid.

As for the cool downs, I can't really say since my mage serves as my 4th alt which I play a few times a month, but we found it best to use potions, cooldowns etc on the 4th platform tentacle, to avoid getting a third impale.

Hope you find this helpful,

Roxez, Soapbox Syndrome

[Baltha]

It depends on what your raid stumbles to.

Arcane is better if you lack burst damage to parasites/elementium bolts/blistering tentacles, this is most likely the case while progressing. If those are in order and you only lack overall dps, fire comes clearly on top, especially in the last phase. (we haven't actually used arcane on the boss since progress, this is just my gut feeling)

Combustion should be used twice on every platform, on mutated and arm. In last phase it's propably best to use combustion twice on elementium terrors and spread it to bloods, even if you end up loosing one combustion and some boss dmg.

[Northunez]

Thanks, helped me alot! Guess im off to BoT again to farm the BiS trinket.