Having finished pushing a couple of my alts through to their mounts recently I went back and picked up my mage again and decided to switch over from ice armor to mage armor and see what it did to my downtime. Crisp is a fire mage (obviously) and I've gotten pretty used to blowing through two or three mobs fairly trivially and then sitting down for a drink.
Mage armor surprised me.
All of a sudden I was working through 8 guys (at around the same pace) before I needed to drink. I have no clue why I'd waited so long to switch. This is brilliant! At this point, my mana pool is lasting as long as my priest's! And I can still rachet up the burst damage for those really nasty surprises. Happy about this, all is good.
Now I start wondering... Mage Armor + Arcane Meditation + Evocation + Wand Specialization (with the new autoshoot) ... is there a downtime free mage build waiting out here? Now, obviously with instants you can still drop your mana to nothing, but drifting into theorycraft let's say we have 8K mana with 360 spirit at end game. That would get you 13.4 Arcane Missiles lasting just over a minute. Over that time, this is going to get you another 1600 mana (basically another 3 AM's) without ever stopping casting.
I'm sure someone's looked at this in detail already, is there a gap in the concept that I'm missing? Skand, what's your take on this?
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savaughn,May 17 2005, 10:41 AM Wrote:Mage Armor + Arcane Meditation + Evocation + Wand Specialization (with the new autoshoot) ...
is there a gap in the concept that I'm missing?
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Right now Mage Armor + Arcane Meditation is bugged. When you log in, you have 15% mana regen. When you cast Mage Armor, you have 45% mana regen. The first time Mage Armor goes down, whether through running out, dispel, recast, or switch to Ice Armor, you lose the Arcane Medidation bonus. Thus, you're stuck with a useless talent. It will only work again after you log out and back in. Supposedly also logging back in with Mage Armor already active messes it up too.
It's something I've wanted to try myself (minus using wands too much), but I'm waiting for the bug fixes. For now I'm content to be near-downtime free in instances with Mage Armor and a little conservatism.
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savaughn,May 17 2005, 09:41 AM Wrote:I'm sure someone's looked at this in detail already, is there a gap in the concept that I'm missing? Skand, what's your take on this?
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Quark's already mentioned the issue with Arcane Meditation and Mage Armor needing constant relogs in order to stack. That's prevented me from giving this idea the full attention it probably deserves. I also haven't had the opportunity to test the new wand autoshoot.
That said, I would have to question the theorycraft assuming 8k mana and 360 spirit at end game. I'm equipped with a full set of endgame blues and I barely scrape 7k mana, and spirit (with decent spirit adders, actually) is somewhere around 200. If I sacrificed all of my stamina equipment and wore a lot of Devout, I could hit 360 spirit, but then I'd have only about 1500 hp, which is slightly not good. You'd need a lot of MC purple pieces to hit those numbers, which puts them, in my opinion, out of the range for meaningful speculation.
Skandranon,May 17 2005, 11:04 AM Wrote:That said, I would have to question the theorycraft assuming 8k mana and 360 spirit at end game. I'm equipped with a full set of endgame blues and I barely scrape 7k mana, and spirit (with decent spirit adders, actually) is somewhere around 200. If I sacrificed all of my stamina equipment and wore a lot of Devout, I could hit 360 spirit, but then I'd have only about 1500 hp, which is slightly not good. You'd need a lot of MC purple pieces to hit those numbers, which puts them, in my opinion, out of the range for meaningful speculation.
[right][snapback]77655[/snapback][/right] The numbers are just there for sample. If you just consider blue gear and no buffs the numbers are high. If you consider purple gear and all the buffs you can pick up from a raid and potions/elixirs, the numbers are actually quite low. I was talking to one priest who was suggesting she got to just over 500 spirit with full raid buffs (I haven't a clue how she pulled it off, though - that sounds really high to me). This is also totally ignoring the added issue of getting high spirit gear which tends to have a priest focus. The number of times you get to do MC is substantially limited when you start rolling against priests for the devout set.... :P
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05-18-2005, 03:12 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-18-2005, 03:13 AM by russ.)
Don't forget clearcasting. That alone drops the average price of a spell by 10%, and it can be used on expensive spells after proccing on cheap spells.
Rank 7 Scorch is a 1.5 second cast time spell that runs at 100 mana/sec. If you cast 10 scorchs, you can assume that you will get a clearcasting. This ends up being equal to around 75 mana/sec if you use Arcane Missles, 65 mana/sec if you use Blizzard.
Assuming 260 spirit, a reasonably achievable value in cloth, you get around 18 mana/sec while casting. With 7k mana, that gives you a nice two and a half complete minutes without stopping, a pretty good number, longer than most fights tend to last, and just standing during the downtime would give you a good deal of your mana back.
That, of course, ignores the bad habit of Clearcasting to proc on individual waves.
The idea, I'd think, wouldn't be to last forever, but just to last til the next Evocation cooldown... much more feasable.
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russ,May 17 2005, 09:12 PM Wrote:Don't forget clearcasting. That alone drops the average price of a spell by 10%, and it can be used on expensive spells after proccing on cheap spells.
[right][snapback]77703[/snapback][/right] And +mana regen items too.
My priest found a nice purple ring ( Mark of the Dragon Lord) which she combines with Resurgence Rod and some other +mana/tick jewelry. It noticeably improves her mana regen rate; she's pretty much kicked her drinking habit.
Kv
russ,May 17 2005, 08:12 PM Wrote:The idea, I'd think, wouldn't be to last forever, but just to last til the next Evocation cooldown... much more feasable.
[right][snapback]77703[/snapback][/right] That's actually the whole thought here. You need to chain from one evocation to the next with a high enough DPS to give you a good kill speed. I don't think a mage will ever match a warlock for sustained DPS, but I think that we could give the hunter class a run for its money.
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