Raid Compendium: Guild 100 PP kills by Spec

I think one of the most interesting aspects is to look at those classes where one spec is generally perceived to be "the best."

For rogues, locks and hunters there are some players who choose the "second" spec even at a presumed dps loss. For mages, nearly all go Arcane even though Fire's damage really isn't that bad. (What I mean is that I don't think you can argue Combat, Survival and Destruction all trump Fire to explain why there are more of those specs on this fight). In all four cases, the third spec is pretty dead. (We'll assume the Demo locks are mostly there for DP, which as I've said before is not ideal).

Keep the encounter in mind, too. Putricide is a fight where standing still is heavily penalized, yet healing is also not as much of a bottleneck as is damage. We see a lot of groups have a healer go dps for example, which might boost e.g. the Elemental and Shadow numbers just for this fight.

Hopefully I won't derail this thread by posting, because I find these discussions fascinating.

Some of you Fire mages are having too much fun ranting in this thread instead of focusing on what I was actually saying. :)

Is Arcane generally above Fire? Yes. The difference may only be 10% though, and Fire is still above many damage specs. Is Arcane so much higher than Fire than Marks is to Survival? Not really. Yet we see more Survival hunters (in this particular data set on one boss) than we do Fire mages. Clearly more is going on that players just gravitating towards whichever spec does the most damage. (The key word is "just." Players definitely like specs that deliver the most damage, but that does not appear to be the sole governing concern in this case.)

There are a lot of things contributing to Arcane beating other mages. Incanter's Absorption is probably way too good in conjunction with kind Disc priests. Arcane benefits a lot on movement fights like PP. Arcane benefits a lot from using those Innervates that the Fire mage can't really use and the healers (for the moment at least) don't really need. As Lhivera points out, Frost can do decent (not stellar) given the chance, but fights like Marrowgar really exploit (in a bad way) Frost's relative lack of pushback resistance.

We'd like to get the mages closer together, and that's something we're still going to work on. ("Wait until Cataclysm" is something snarky players like to say more than we do.) What we don't want to do is suddenly catapult Frost up ahead of Arcane such that every mage feels like they have to change... again. Close, without going over, is kind of the mantra at this stage. :)

Q u o t e:
Because I dont think you grasp how long some of us have been waiting for an answer to that question. "What do they think about fire dps? "

And this is how we get it. In some back water threat that isnt even about mages. In one single sentence, that makes no sense at all....It is borderline delusional to say the specs are at all close.

I tend to avoid posting in those threads with nothing but a single class or spec moaning about how low their dps is. There is no discussion there. If it's obvious to you then it's probably obvious to us.

Strunker, I know you are a champion for Fire in the same way Lhivera is for Frost. That's cool and we need that discussion. Just don't expect me to be able to chime into those discussions too often. If you make good points then I promise you, we've read (and probably discussed) them.

Q u o t e:
As I'm sure GC (and some of you) have seen in the post-3.3 Frost discussion threads, some of us have been trying to figure out why we are sometimes seeing Frost improve relative to Arcane in ICC10. Arcane Mages have suggested that Frost's lack of ramp-up time and the short Arcane Blast buff duration result in Arcane getting more heavily penalized than Frost when target-switching or movement is required.

Yeah, to be honest I originally wrote that paragraph just contrasting Fire and Arcane, but I thought the Frost on Marrowgar point was worth mentioning too. Arcane's movement generally does help it when compared to Fire, however. Fire really shines on fights where Living Bomb shines, but there just haven't been any of those in Icecrown yet. Nor do we want to shackle our encounter designers by demanding "Okay, two wings are open now. Where's the Living Bomb fight? Where's the Whirlwind / Divine Storm fight?" :)