It is taken for granted amongst the wizard community that cloudburst stormstrike is a wizards highest dps spell. This is true but also misleading. Ferry Tunare has posted the following multiple times and it is largely correct with the caveat that cloudburst stormstrike should never be used when improved twincast is running. Furthermore even when twincast is not running cloudburst is not the highest dps ability in a wizards possession. BURN: Ethereal Fuse Magmatic Burst (remove if there are adds, especially if they're mezzed) Cloudburst Stormstrike Ethereal Skyblaze Ethereal Rimeblast Social hotkey with all AA nukes and quick-refresh AA deagro Anniversary Necrotic Finger SUSTAINED Magmatic Burst (remove if there are adds, especially if they're mezzed) Claw of the Flameweaver Ethereal Rimeblast Ethereal Skyblaze Cloudburst Stormstrike Social hotkey with all AA nukes and quick-refresh AA deagro Anniversary Necrotic Finger What this should look like: BURN: Ethereal Fuse Magmatic Burst (remove if there are adds, especially if they're mezzed) Ethereal Skyblaze Ethereal Rimeblast Sandwhich Force of Will Flame and Ice in between these spells SUSTAINED Force of Will, Force of Flame, Force of Ice Claw of the Flameweaver Cloudburst Stormstrike Magmatic Burst (remove if there are adds, especially if they're mezzed) Ethereal Skyblaze Ethereal Rimeblast Low Mana Force of Will, Force of Flame, Force of Ice Claw of FlameWeaver Magmatic Burst Wildflash Barrage Chaos Scintillation This is an oversimplified representation but those are the general spell priorities that a wizard should use. To understand the counters effect as I call it, it is necessary to understand a few things. The first is the importance of twincast. Twincast consumes 1x mana and 1x counters ( counters being the things that are consumed during Prolonged destruction Arcane Descruction and Improved twincast. Once the count is 0 the discs are gone) and delivers 2x the damage. It is the most significant disc that a wizard can click and wizards should always seek to maximize twincast usage. Twincast doubles dps. Therefore when twincast ends you are effectively doing half the dps that you were doing before. When there is this large a dps difference between the usage of a disc and the time directly after it total damage needs to be taken into account. It is true that in general higher dps is better but this is not true for abilities that are A. restricted by the number of counters they have and B. have a large difference in dps before and after the disc wears off When these two things are the case you need to consider the total damage of the spell because you won't be able to make up the damage difference between a burn using cloudburst and a burn using only ethereals + magmatic burst outside of a twincast setting. Although Cloudburst contributes more dps it inflicts less total damage and the time difference between the cloudburst burn and the ethereals burn is not sufficient to make up for the lost damage. In order to consider whether or not cloudburst is beneficial I conducted two different tests. One was burning with cloudburst using the following spell priority. Ethereal Fuse > Cloudburst Stormstrike > Magmatic Burst > Ethereal Skyblaze > Ethereal Hoarfrost The cloudburst burn inflicts damage d1 and lasts time t1. The second burn is the ethereals burn where you don't cast cloudburst and instead focus on maximizing the damage per spell cast. This spell priority is Ethereal Fuse > Magmatic Burst >Ethereal Skyblaze > Ethereal Hoarfrost This ethereals burn inflicts damage d2 and lasts time t2 The average damage difference between these two burns or d2-d1 was roughly 2 million damage. The average time difference or t2 - t1 was roughly 11.75 seconds. Therefore the dps required during time t2-t1 to make up for the lost damage is about 170k dps. This isn't realistic since even the best wizards tend to average around 60-70k dps over long periods of time. My personal best parse is 96k dps over 17m with a bard in the group. Assuming that your average dps is 96k you can multiply 2mil - (96k * 11.75) to find out what kind of damage you lost using cloudburst stormstrike during a full burn. The answer for 96k dps is 872000 damage. Since wizards tend to average out 70k dps over long periods the more likely figure of damage lost using cloudburst during a burn is 1177500. If you burn twice this figure is doubled and 3 times and the figure is tripled. TL;DR Don't use cloudburst during a burn Use the following spell priority: Ethereal Fuse > Magmatic Burst > Ethereal Skyblaze > Ethereal Hoarfrost One final note. Cloudburst stormstrike is not the highest dps ability in a wizards possession for one simple reason and that is the global cooldown. This cooldown which takes effect for 1.5-1.8s after any spell is casted means that the delay of an instant spell like cloudburst is 1.5-1.8s. However Force of Will is not subject to the global cooldown and therefore takes 0.5s before the next spell can be cast. This means that Force of Will is the greatest dps spell but since it cannot be twincasted it takes the greatest priority for everything outside of twincast. Therefore the only time that cloudburst takes greatest priority is for the 18s-21s twincast. Some figures for the dps of cloudburst with no discs running are ((0.42*45k) + (0.58 * 96k))/1.5 = 57k dps Figures for force of will with no discs running are ((0.42 * 58)+ (0.58 * 16))/0.5 = 81.88k dps Force of will has 1.42 times greater dps than cloudburst stormstrike does based on these calculations. In addition to being the greatest dps ability in a wizards possession it also consumes no mana and doesn't use and counters. Therefore when force of will is up during prolonged destruction it is essentially an extra spell cast. However this only slightly diminish the greatness of cloudburst stormstrike. Outside of improved twincast it should always be cast first after the forces. The spell priority outside of improved twincast is Force of Will =Force of Flame = Force of Ice > Ethereal Fuse > Cloudburst stormstrike > Magmatic Burst > Ethereal Skyblaze > Ethereal Hoarfrost. Well I hope this has been helpful. Regards.
I agree with the point about counters but there are a few points I will disagree with. 1. Force of will should always be cast during the global cooldown so really spell priority doesnt come into it. 2. I think ethereal skyblaze is superior dps over magmatic burst because aoe's are not increased by focus. Otoh, I have to agree that MB is a super efficient mana v dmg spell so when Im starting to hurt for mana I switch priority to that. 3. I use ethereal incandescence over ethereal rimeblast (assuming you meant rimeblast) because I think the increased chance of getting pyromancy going outweighs the slight dps advantage of rimeblast.
Magmatic burst is superior to ethereal skyblaze on many different fronts. It does more damage, since it is a rain spell spell dmg has more of an impact on it, it uses half the mana that ethereal skyblaze does, and it has a shorter casting time. The fact that you can get more dps by using magmatic burst both in and outside of a burn is something I am relatively certain of because I have tested it extensively. Force of will should be sandwiched between spells during a burn but otherwise it is a wizards greatest dps spell and it doesn't consume counters or mana. Therefore if you have all of the forces up because of some reason or another you should use all of them before casting anything else because they have higher dps than other spells and because they do not consume counters. You made some interesting points with regard to using incandescence instead of rimeblast. There are many things about wizard that I do not know / have not had time to test out but that's something I'll be looking at in the future. Thanks for reading and responding. Cheers.
Thank you, I found this to be a quite interesting read. I'm not a Wizard, so I'm not really in a place to make a judgement on your conclusion (my comments don't necessarily mean I think your conclusion is wrong; they're intended as constructive criticism on your thought process). With that in mind, here are some of the thoughts that I had: I like the test, but did you only run it once? 2 million is a fairly significant difference in that time span, but if you only tested it once in such short a time span I'd be wary of the numbers. One possible way to test it out would be to parse out both spell lineups with spell twincast, a maxed out crit rate, etc in the GGH where buffs don't run down. You could find the average DPS over a notably longer time span, and then use that figure to determine the "average" DPS under ITC (essentially multiply average DPS by time under ITC). Now it's possible you did this (or something else) to help ensure accuracy (if so, ignore me). The main reason I'm advocating this is below, which makes the difference notably closer and may require more precise numbers: Here you're assuming that, after ITC drops off, your DPS in that instant, so to speak, is around equal to your average DPS. This usually is not the case. For those additional 11.75 seconds, you're still going to be running a 250% critical damage mod, and you'll still likely be at or near a 100% crit rate (partially dependent on PD/AD counters, which is anther subject). Assuming variables other than Twincast remain the same, your DPS in that instant should be somewhere around 58% (because of innate TC and TC aura give 16% TC chance) of what it was during ITC. I don't know what Wizards are pushing for burns under the lineup with Cloudburst (250-300K?), but 58% of that is likely still higher than your 96K figure. Depending on your burn this may or may not put you at the 170K number needed, which is why above I asked how precise the 2 million damage number is. Depending on the discs you have on, this may be true. That being said, because Force of Will does not have a mana cost it does not benefit from certain abilities (at the very least Twincast and Chromatic Haze, not sure about PD/AD), which is why it doesn't use counters. For example (this is on a Heroic Wizard): [Mon Jun 08 15:58:55 2015] You begin casting Twincast. (This is Spell Twincast) [Mon Jun 08 15:58:55 2015] Your magic splits. [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] You begin casting Force of Will. [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] You can use the ability Force of Will again in 0 minute(s) 15 seconds. [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] You can use the ability Force of Will again in 0 minute(s) 15 seconds. [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] Veuaden hit a wind nymph for 5274 points of non-melee damage. [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] Veuaden delivers a critical blast! (5274) [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] You deliver a critical blast! (5274) [Mon Jun 08 15:58:58 2015] A wind nymph is battered by a blast of energy.
I don't know how extensively you have tested it, but I'm rather skeptical here. [44661/16617] Magmatic Burst Rk. III Classes: WIZ/104 Skill: Evocation Mana: 1681 Target: Target AE Range: 150', AE Range: 25' Resist: Fire -300 Trigger Spell DS: Yes Reflectable: Yes Casting: 3s, Recast: 12s, Timer: 6, Rest: 1.5s AE Waves: 3 1: Decrease Current HP by 13435 Base damage of this spell can be enhanced by a type 3 aug by 902. What you get as a result is 3 waves of 14337 base dmg (total 43011) that can crit but is not focusable, from a spell that takes 3s of your time (1.5s cast + 1.5s gray out). [44664/16600] Ethereal Skyblaze Rk. III Classes: WIZ/105 Skill: Evocation Mana: 5158 Target: Single Range: 200' Resist: Fire -50 Trigger Spell DS: Yes Reflectable: Yes Casting: 3.75s, Recast: 5.5s, Rest: 1.5s 1: Decrease Current HP by 33330 Base damage of this spell can be enhanced by a type 3 aug by 2381 to 35711. It takes 3.375s of your time (1.875 cast + 1.5 gray out). Ethereal Skyblaze is focused by the following: [41520] WIZ New Ethereal Incandescence Damage 7 Target: Self Resist: Beneficial, Blockable: Yes Casting: 0s Duration: 03:15:00 (1950 ticks), Extendable: Yes, Dispelable: Yes 1: Increase Spell Effectiveness by 7% 2: Limit Spells: Ethereal Skyblaze 3: Limit Class: WIZ [39758] Fire Damage 54-100 L105 Target: Self Resist: Beneficial, Blockable: Yes Casting: 0s Duration: 03:15:00 (1950 ticks), Extendable: Yes, Dispelable: Yes 1: Increase Spell Damage by 54% to 100% 2: Limit Max Level: 105 (lose 5% per level) 3: Limit Effect: Current HP 5: Limit Type: Detrimental 6: Limit Target: Exclude Caster AE 7: Limit Target: Exclude Caster PB 8: Limit Target: Exclude Target AE 11: Limit Type: Exclude Combat Skills 12: Limit Resist: Fire [41734] Kerafyrm's Prismatic Familiar Classes: WIZ/254 Skill: Melee Target: Self Resist: Beneficial, Blockable: Yes Casting: 0s Duration: 06:00:00 (3600 ticks), Extendable: Yes, Dispelable: No 1: Increase Spell Damage by 40% to 60% 2: Summon Familiar: FamiliarGreaterPrismatic 3: See Invisible 4: Limit Max Duration: 0s 5: Limit Type: Detrimental 6: Limit Target: Single 7: Limit Max Level: 105 (lose 5% per level) 10: Limit Type: Exclude Combat Skills 11: Increase Max Mana by 2400 12: Increase Current Mana by 10 per tick None of the above works for rains. I feel a little bit too lazy to do the exact math here, but I'm pretty sure that focused 35711 damage over 3.375s is more dps than unfocused 43011 over 3.0s.
With no additional ADPS (I'm assuming Fury of Kerafyrm, 1100 spell damage, and a 3.7 (2.7+1) crit damage multiplier, which probably is slightly off for Wizards... Also I ignored Twincast): Ethereal Skyblaze : Crit=((33330*1.07)*1.3)+(((33330*1.07)*.065)*3.7)+((33330*1.07)*3.7)+((2381+1550)*3.7)+((1100*((3.75+5.5)/7))*3.7)=206815 Non_Crit=((33330*1.07)*2.3)+((33330*1.07)*.065)+(2381+1550)+(1100*((3.75+5.5)/7))=89727 (206815*.42)+(89727*.58)=138905 Damage Per Cast 138905/3.375=41157 DPS Magmatic Burst: Crit=3*(((13435*.065)*3.7)+(13435*3.7)+((902+1550)*3.7)+(1100*((3+12)/7)*3.7))=212203 Non_Crit=3*((13435*.065)+(13435)+(902+1550)+(1100*((3+12)/7)))=57352 (212203*.42)+(57352*.58)=122390 Damage Per Cast 122390/3=40797 DPS Here Ethereal Skyblaze comes out ahead in the damage front, and slightly ahead in the DPS front. It's important to note (at least) two factors: A) Magmatic Burst gains more DPS from Crit Chance and Crit Damage increases and B) The time between spell casts (the "effective" GCD) is likely actually higher than 1.5 in real-world scenarios. To illustrate the former point, here's the numbers with just black wolf on (formulas excluded for brevity; basically replace 3.7 with 5.7 and add 10% to crit rate): Ethereal Skyblaze: Crit=293546 Non_Crit=89727 Damage Per Cast=195714 DPS=57989 Magmatic Burst: Crit=326907 Non_Crit=57352 Damage Per Cast=197521 DPS=65840 With the increase in Crit Chance/Rate, Magmatic Burst pulls ahead in DPS and very slightly ahead in damage. There are other variables not accounted for (Chromatic Haze being one of the biggest) which make the analysis more complicated. Rains also have other benefits and shortcomings, including having high mana efficiency, but they're also unusable with mezzed adds. So I'm not sure if there's a clear cut answer, but I would give Magmatic Burst fairly serious consideration. Edit: Also I'm assuming that Fury of Kerafyrm affects rains. I know the SPA it uses does, but it's possible the effect itself has limitations that prevent it from being used (and I don't have it to test). This does not change the spell that wins in either example though (Magmatic Burst's DPS goes down to 37489 in the first scenario and down to 60502 in the second). Also I kind of ignored truncations, so the numbers will be off by a couple of points.
I can say that npcs will take up a counter so for a lot or the arx raids skyblaze is the better option I use it on specific raids at times off 2 raid 5 and maybe one more.
Thank you for doing the math, Sancus. Fury does work with rains. Magmatic Burst looks like a good spell to use in the post-Haze era, on some of the raids.
40 PD counters. IoG, twincast, both furies, arcane fury. Burst, Cloudburst, Skyblaze, Cloudburst, Rimeblast /1 Combat Dummy Azia in 119s, 25230k @212019 [] Silariuss 25230k@(212019 in 119s) Cloudburst, Skyblaze, Cloudburst, Rimeblast /1 Combat Dummy Azia in 117s, 22483k @192165 [] Silariuss 22483k@(192165 in 117s) Skyblaze, Rimeblast /1 Combat Dummy Azia in 158s, 29021k @183677 [] Silariuss 29021k@(183677 in 158s) Burst, Skyblaze, Rimeblast, Skyblaze /1 Combat Dummy Azia in 157s, 31161k @198478 [] Silariuss 31161k@(198478 in 157s) You do more DPS with cloudburst. You also burn through your counters faster and very likely do less damage in the aggregate, which is what is important. You do more DPS and damage with burst than without it. There are situations where burst is bad, friendly NPCs eating counters so you get 1 or 2 hits on the mob instead of 3 on a single and 4 on multiples, mezzed mobs around, enchanter actively attempting to generate chromatic haze procs. Basically, don't use cloudburst when there's anything with a counter on it in your buff/song window. Don't use burst on 1, 3, 4, 1st 1-off (and possibly others depending on how your guild handles CC and whether or not you have a wiz-friendly chanter). On a combat dummy, your best spells are Fuse > Cloudburst > Burst . In an actual raid setting its more like Claw > Fuse > Skyblaze > Rimeblast > Cloudburst > Burst.
So do Magician Rains also hit friendly NPCs? The only event we have on farm is Arx 1 and I'm often unable to use rains on it, so I've never tested that. If they did, that would be... crappy.
A quick table I made in excel comparing ethereal skyblaze to magmatic burst showing. In this table for each disc combination posted I basically casted Ethereal Skyblaze about 40 times and took the maximum value. For PD + Arcane Fury + Second Spire this was 331300. Since magmatic burst does the same damage every time there was no need to cast it 40 times. You can see in each case that magmatic burst does more damage except when no discs are running. Also I should mention that I have both RkIII magmatic burst and RKIII ethereal skyblaze. I also have darkwater arms so I have the maximum fire focus. Another thing I'm fairly sure that I have observed in the past is that arcane fusion has a 3x chance to proc with magmatic burst. I'm not certain of this though. In the table the expected value is simply (Crit Rate * Crit Damage) + (Non-Crit Rate)* (Non-Crit Damage). Which is essentially the damage you can expect to get from a single cast. Here is the table http://imgur.com/GF1VEoo Ultimately in game tests are the best source and if you can prove that a certain spell at its least damage can outdamage another spell at its most then you don't need to go through the trouble of averaging out long parses.
No. All procs have only 1 chance per cast to fire on rains, and they fire just before the 1st wave (i.e. after you finish casting the spell, which makes sense). On a regular nuke cast, you see the nuke damage immediately followed by the procs. On a rain cast, you see the procs immediately followed by the damage from the waves. Before the Haze nerf, rains were far behind on raids with solid ENC coverage. Now that Haze has been nerfed, your data looks promising.
Yeah I was uncertain about it which is why I didn't list it in my initial post about magmatic burst benefits. Still in most cases magmatic burst is superior to ethereal skyblaze except when no discs are running. Furthermore keep in mind that I am using maximum values for ethereal skyblaze in the table. The damage numbers are much closer than they look and can easily be influenced by things like the 4 percent crit chance from COPIV or spirit of vesagran/fierce eye from a bard. When I put 80k as the average non-crit damage for ethereal skyblaze in the table and I raise the crit rate to 0.54 Skyblaze still does 8.3k more expected damage but it still costs twice as much mana.
...and when: no Haze effect on you you are more than 25 units away from the target no mezzed mobs around the target no combatable NPCs or destructable objects around the target
Yes I'm well aware of those downsides however again it uses half the mana of Skyblaze which makes it well worth using imo. The more mana you save the less harvests you have to use which means you spend less time doing 0 dps. It also means that you can last longer on long events. Furthermore in 99% of cases a chromatic haze gina trigger will let you know when you should cast skyblaze instead. Also your chanter should be letting you know when they are burning so that you can prioritize skyblaze instead of MB.
The problem with that is, if you cast the Rain a second or two before you got a haze proc, the next wave of the rain will eat the Haze counter.
Yeah they definitely do #MageProbs On the flip side if you hypothetically before the nerf had a Haze proc every ~2.65 seconds, rains would help you use all of them (whereas traditional spells were often too slow to use all of the procs). That doesn't necessarily mean that a larger damage spell using the counter wouldn't have been preferable, but it's interesting to think about. Kinda moot after the fix though.
In the table that I posted I only used the maximum value for ethereal skyblaze and a crit rate of 91 percent. The reality is that the average is most likely around 315-320k and the crit rate will be 100 percent because you will hopefully either be using IoG or Fierce Eye or Song Of Vesagran or Glyph of courage to plug that crit chance hole. When these figures are used you gain about 47k damage each time you cast magmatic burst. Since you are twincasting magmatic burst you gain 94k damage each time that you cast magmatic burst. I think that that benefit is enough to offset the 600k loss that you will experience should you accidentally cast magmatic burst right as chromatic haze procs. Tbh though thats really up to you to decide. Maybe one day you don't have a chanter at all like in a group setting and you decide to use magmatic burst instead of shelving it. Maybe the raid is short on chanters and you don't receive one. Magmatic burst has plenty of downsides since AE is inherently risky.
