Anub AoE

It's no secret i'm no fan of fire and/or ffb specs in general, it's not my playstyle, it just doesn't suit me. But, with the Anub heroic fight, extremely strong AoE is of the essence, so i changed my offspec to an AoE orientated ffb spec as have the other mages (Blizzard synergy <3). After 2 weeks of working on the strats (and the for me inevitable L2P with ffb), i'm still disappointed with the results, so i've spend this afternoon working with Rawr to see what other viable AoE specs there would be. I've tried out several settings for time spend AoE-ing, tried with several ffb builds (variations in points spend in Ice Floes, Shatter, Frostbite and Frost Channeling) and then had a look at arcane/frost builds which i tested for the same settings i did for the ffb builds.

Conclusion i got from Rawr is the following arcane/frost build: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#of0Vck0IzxGuMxjbZhfcck0h:Nzi beats the ffb build i've been using sofar by far dps wise, and even beats the maxed ffb build i could come up with (same talents in frost as the arcane build linked here has, with the 20th point spend in Frost Channeling since there's no worth while 52nd talent point in the fire tree). The reasoning behind this spec beating the ffb spec imo is the same benefits go to Blizzard from the frost tree talents, and the extra spellpower gained via the arcane talents more than make up for the dps lost without LB, coupled with stronger single target dps while the adds aren't up.

My concern for this arcane/frost spec is whether it'll be mana sustainable, something i find hard to track on Rawr. Any thoughts on that would be much appreciated.

Hopefully today you can compare your spec with the other mages and see which is best

In all fairness, most top end guild's mages are probably used to playing fire, comfortable with playing fire, so why would they even consider some whackey spec? I've been running this over and over on Rawr, and yeah i know Rawr got its limitations, so if it turns out it doesn't provide better dps, i'm speccing back and will do my best (as always) to improve with it.

It's quite difficult to properly test it outside the raid situation though, partially because of the number of adds making a difference (LB on 3 vs LB on 5 matters) aswell as the raidbuffs matter (part of this arcane/frost spec's strength should be coming from the fact i got ~400 more spellpower raidbuffed as arcane than i do as fbb, part comes from having 6% more spell haste through talent points). Looking well forward to finding out! Worst case scenario it's one attempt, some gold a bit of time spend. But ooooh if it works

And <3 ya back! Good luck in college

Conclusions after 1 night of testing:

- It's mana efficient enough to sustain throughout the fight. No problems using AP, IV, haste trink during the AoE's. Just a matter of using mana gems and evo's properly.
- It (read: i) didn't beat chillout's dps/damage done in his ffb spec (although he did have my FM, so i'll take some credit for his his crits ;p), but i got very close atleast!
- I did do an average of 1.5k dps more than i did in the ffb spec.

So, it may not be *the best spec* for everyone, but it is for me