Yes. I now use burning beam whenever I have 2 mobs up and I cast it before anything else. In the past I'd wait till I had 4+ mobs to consider AEing and I don't really remember when or why I made that decision. I definitely made the assumption that ADPS would be a lot more limited with beams than it really is but after adding it to my web app, and doing more testing to make sure my numbers were good, I realized I was very wrong. Besides the SPA 124 on our Familiar and a few bard auras we really don't lose anything. It's not a very big loss. My DPS went up around 10% on Sathir's Line after making the change. After thinking about it I probably considered Self-Combustion and Splash in the past and neither of those are worth using unless you have 5 mobs. I probably thought I would either go all out AEing or not bother instead of just adding 1 spell.
I just re-read this thread I wanted to comment that your previous point on macro execution time negatively affecting dps, in the same way as if GCD was longer, appears to be very significant, a point Sancus has also presented on several occasions, I believe. I wanted to humbly take the opportunity to emphasize this point, for the benefit of readers of this thread that might not fully appreciate it. Using your tool, and adding 0.1 to the GCD incrementally, gives a drop in dps in the range of 1.3% to 5+% pr 0.1 sec This means that it is key to mage dps to fire Orb and Force manually during GCD, or the 4ish and 3ish percent that they add might be completely lost, and therefore really think about getting rid of macros in the spam key. I also speculate that one will need to autofire significantly more often than every 0.1 sec; closer to once every 0.02 sec. I am not sure what the client supports, just speculating (I think I have mine on 0.05 sec). I am sure the experts can give a better idea of this than me. Also the quality of internet might become a factor? Also the quality of the server might be a factor? (for example AB has a bad reputation with regards to connection, I don’t know how to measure it in this day and age, ping?) What seems to be a viable option is to have mash on one programmable mouse button, keeping this one depressed, and activate AA etc in GCD manually with the mouse and left click. I think this part of mage dps discussion warant the thread necro...
@Sancus: do you use Icebound Paradox? If yes, do you re-summon during combat? (targeted summon is an annoyance in this case).
The only raid I use that on is the second Tier 2 raid, Drusella's Vault, because there are some mobs in that raid that take significantly increased damage from ice. In a perfect world it isn't a bad thing to use, since it can be used during the GCD. It can't crit and its base damage is only ~12.7k, though, so the benefit of doing that isn't very high. At 5 charges that's ~63k damage, although it can be modified by a few things. It most certainly is not worth resummoning (outside of Vault). The main reason I don't use it is I find that, even with a 1s cast time, it can still slow down your spell casting slightly because of lag. That will generally outweigh any benefit it has unless it's really executed perfectly. This is especially true in RoS given how laggy the raid instances are. It's an unfortunate situation that I hope daybreak will address, but it definitely makes me less inclined to use clickies/AAs with cast times unless they give a notable benefit.
