black mage spell speed/crit hit/determination...where you will go?

[ArTaN]

since high lvl spell have lot cast time and high mp request do you prefer cast 3 and hope in crit to erase all the world or maybe cast more but more weak?

[Rain_Clouud]

Hey Artan,

Well i'm going to most likely try all of them and see which performs better with the parser, i'm suspect crit and determination to do the best.

With the high level spells once you hit 44 things get easier with the "Firestarter" trait, which allows you to spam cast Fire I and gives a 40% chance your Fire III will be a free cast and instant! Which is lovely so at the moment my rotation is Thunder (Keep thunder up don't let it drop off, and if you get the instant cast make sure to use it!) > Fireball (till proc) > Fire III (If Proc)> Blizzard III

Thats basically what im doing at the moment.

Blizzard III will cost next to no mana because of your Astral Fire Buff and the cast time is increased as well and Umbral Ice III at the moment is restoring about 1600 mana a tick for me, so two ticks and im back to spamming Fire I for the proc

Hope this helped!

[mpetason]

Hey Rain_clouud you may want to change it just a bit. I find it better to start out with Fire 3 to get astral III then fire til proc. Say you've cast Fire 1 x 3 before Fire 3 procs, then you've had to waste three casts to hit Astral 3.

Solo I usually go : Thunder > Fire III > Fire 1 until proc or OOM > Blizzard III > Thunder > Fire 3 > repeat. I'm usually back up to full mana by the time the Thunder finishes being cast.

In Instances on trash I don't even bother with Thunder until the first rotation is done: Fire III > Fire 1 until proc or OOM > Blizzard III > Thunder > Fire III repeat.

[Rain_Clouud]

I was actually thinking about using Blizzard I then Fire III so its a quicker cast, cheap MP but still gives me the x3 Asteral Fire and then going into the Fire/Firestarter rotation what do you think?

Also thunder i use all the time at the start of every fight including trash, if its 3-4 mobs i thunder them up and then AoE, the more targets with thunder the higher the chance of proc, but i certainly will give you rotations a go!

[mpetason]

There are really good talks on Reddit about changing out blizzard 3 with transpose then using thunder 2 instead of 3 to fill in the umbral phase. I think the two rotations are something like:

Thunder 2 > Fire 3 > Fire til OOM (for the whole first phase using procs for Thunder 3 / Fire 3 ) transpose > Thunder 2 > Fire 3

I had trouble with transpose, and had to end up looking too much at MP. I end up doing something like:

Thunder 2 > Fire 3 > Fire til OOM ( procs for Thunder 3 / Fire 3 ) > Blizzard 3 (Since it casts a lot faster due to Astral III) > Thunder 2 > By this time if I time the Fire 3 with the next tick of Umbral III then I'm at full mana and can continue the rotation.

I guess you could use Blizzard 1 instead, I'm not positive if the Umbral I vs III has any difference on regen. It didn't seem to matter much when I was playing before, but I haven't really looked into it. If that's the case then you could fire 1 for longer, then blizzard 1 > thunder 2 > fire 3.

[Seriath]

I'm probably going to focus on acc/crit/det in that order, and just ignore spell speed if at all possible for now

As for rotation, i've been doing the following (lead fights with T3 while tank gets agro)

F3 > F1 spam w/ F3 on proc > Use TC procs as they come > Bliz3 below 700 mana** > T3 refresh (if no TC procs, if so then bliz3 again if you can get it with the hasted cast time from astral 3, otherwise bliz1) > F3(repeat)

**yes you could get one more f1 off with 700 mana, but you risk not having enough mana to cast bliz3, I'd rather play it safe than end up oom and being forced to use transpose and bliz1

The cast times line up pretty perfectly, while casting T3 you regen all your mana then get right back into astral

For burns I toss raging strikes after the F3 and with about 5s left on raging I burn swiftcast > Flare > convert > f1 and then start back with bliz3

Anyway thats what I"m going with for now

[xyaie]

If youall decide on a rotation I can probably figure out an ep value for each. I plan on leveling a black mage next so its something id likely do anyway. Only thing I cant fully model is skill speeds effect on mana. Atleast dont know how to yet.