Low parses, but early WCL data supports what I was arguing in that other thread. Fire and frost capable of similar overall damage in the fight, but frost has better utility (cc/double ice block) and a preferable damage distribution.
The 100th place fire mage beats the 1st place frost mage by about 7k dps… The first place frost mage clocks in at rank 340 when paired against fire. Not really sure how you’re calling that comparable. Admittedly there’s inherent bias due to the low number of parses, but still… You’d have more of a point if they were even on the first page… let alone the fourth.
Keestus, who’s currently 12/12M and has killed the boss you’re discussing 3 times, very succinctly explained why fire is strong on that fight.
Does that mean frost is un-viable on that fight? Nope. Does that mean that on every pull a fire mage will decimate a frost mage? Nope. Does that mean that when two mages of equal skill and gear play fire vs frost against each other, the fire mage will typically come out on top? Probably.
Heck, there are fire mages in most of those frost mage logs, that are beating the frost mages on DPS. As for the damage pattern, I personally haven’t gotten to the fight so can only say so much, but… I’m willing to take Keestus’s word for it at this point… as well as the hordes of 12/12M players that progressed the fight as fire mages.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I’m the king of saying “play what you enjoy.” (hell I’m doing it in another thread right now) But if we’re going to be talking about what’s optimal… Then no. Frost doesn’t seem optimal for this fight. Sure it’s comparable when we’re looking at 75th percentile parses, but that’s not really looking at what’s optimal.
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I didn’t mean to write a novel, but I wrote a novel. Sorry in advance.
Keestus, who’s currently 12/12M and has killed the boss you’re discussing 3 times, very succinctly explained why fire is strong on that fight.
Keestus is one of the best fire mages out there, but he is not familiar with the mechanics of FOrb and never really adequately addressed the points I made to him. He’s also probably not a statistician, like me.
The 100th place fire mage beats the 1st place frost mage by about 7k dps… The first place frost mage clocks in at rank 340 when paired against fire. Not really sure how you’re calling that comparable. Admittedly there’s inherent bias due to the low number of parses, but still… You’d have more of a point if they were even on the first page… let alone the fourth.
Specifically I’m looking at the top 25% of the fire mage parses, which is putting fire’s typical damage output at ~85k, compared to the frost parses at ~83k. There are far more fire mages than frost or arcane, so looking at rankings like that isn’t a very good estimation of how good a spec can be for a given fight. I’m not so much trying to answer the question “which spec is going to put up the biggest numbers,” as I am “Which spec is going to add the greatest average win percentage?” If you’re a baseball stats nerd like me, it’s similar to the difference between a player’s OPS and their WPA.
Does that mean that when two mages of equal skill and gear play fire vs frost against each other, the fire mage will typically come out on top? Probably.
That’s what I’m actually interested in. Because of fire’s bursty complexion, there will be occasions where the stars align for fortuitous aligning of procs (trinket/cloak/corruption/etc), which can seriously up its damage output. On the other hand, there are also plenty of instances where a player has bad luck on their bursts, and their overall damage suffers because of it. It’s not inherently a good or bad thing, just a risk that needs to be taken into consideration when looking at the numbers. Fire will be over-represented at both the top and bottom of the charts (though the bottom doesn’t qualify for kill data) compared to a build like forb which has a relatively even damage distribution. Factoring in some of fire’s natural ignite padding, it’s probably fair to say that frost can mostly keep up in overall damage.
In fact, all three of Keestus’s kills are around ~84k dps (the last on Feb 25th), so that’s a good frame for comparing to Tonicwater’s ~83k kill on Feb 29th. Let’s look at damage to the boss in each phase, to start. Il’gynoth is a dps race, but not for the entire fight (sort of). Each phase of the fight is higher leverage than the last, meaning that high damage in boss p4 is more important than in boss p2. You still need to keep up with the minimum damage threshold in the earlier damage phases or you will absolutely feel it down the road, but a small damage loss early in the fight isn’t as bad as a damage loss after the third organ kill, for example.
p1 Tonicwater: 71.1k
p1 Keestus: 73.3k
p2 Tonicwater: 84.4k
p2 Keestus: 80.4k
p3 Tonicwater: 69.5k
p3 Keestus: 61.6k
p4 Tonicwater: 81.6k
p4 Keestus: 68k
Stark difference here. Both players have roughly equal opening phases, but Keestus quickly drops off as the fight progresses, despite his 300k ST burst during the last phase. That’s the opposite of what we want.
Does Tonicwater’s parse represent the absolute top tier of potential frost damage? No, not even close. Both Keestus and the fire mage who “beat” out Tonicwater in his own raid pumped up their numbers on two things: ignite on bloods (23k for Keestus, 12k for the other mage) and the clotted corruption (10k for Keestus, 16.6k for the other mage). That’s not pure padding – you obviously do want heavy damage on the clot, but the bigger thing here is when that damage was done. The clots get beefier the longer they’re out, so you want to draw their charge to a wall near the organ for some cleave damage while focusing the organ. In Tonicwater’s case, he only had 8k damage on the clots, meaning they weren’t positioned in a way for him/her to take advantage of it. In both raids, the clot was alive longer than ideal on each organ, and ate full ignite bursts because of it. Not a point against the fire mages by means, it’s a feature to have that safeguard in there if the clot doesn’t die in timely manner… but it’s still preferable to kill them sooner. It also means that there’s still plenty of room for higher frost parses on this fight, as losing up to three 100-120k bursts is significant lost potential.
Then there’s organ damage, but this post is long enough. Short of it is, the fire mage in Tonicwater’s group peaked at 40k dps on the organs. Not good. Tonicwater doubled that damage, and did 50% more damage on the organs than Keestus.
I’m not sure I’d be the one to claim that Keestus doesn’t understand a mage mechanic.
The long and short of it is… you’re currently the guy driving to work claiming that everyone else is driving on the wrong side of the street…
If you’re right, then the logs with show that to be the case with time. That being said, they’re are currently 5 parses period demonstrating frost’s potential (less if you’re only considering the FOrb build). If one of those was on the front page (even when simply accounting damage to boss cutting away fire’s padding on the adds), I think you’d have a better point.
Again, I’ll have to see the fight on my own to determine whether I think your claims are valid or not. As it is now, from a pure sheer number of players standpoint… I think it’d be somewhat fair to consider that you may just be wrong on this.
I’d like to add that you’re also only comparing a single player to a single player here. Compare the raid outputs. They may be clustering their CDs for specific organs as an example. Also why didn’t you point out the difference between the fire mage in Tonicwater’s raid and Tonicwater’s for damage to boss?
For completeness:
Fire Mage 1 did 88.6k dps to the boss in P4
Fire Mage 2 did 79.7k dps to the boss in P4
Tonicwater did 80.1k dps to the boss in P4
Maybe that’s just DPS variances of a fire mage, but at the end of the day… It’s a bit disingenuous to leave it off with the feeling that fire is drastically reduced in performance for the final phase of the fight… Cause based on Tonicwater’s raid… it’s not.
And who knows… Maybe Keestus had a bad pull on his kill. Maybe he fatfingered another button during combust. Maybe he simply had a mechanic target him at the wrong time screwing his DPS. Anyone who progresses at that level knows that there’s large swings in output from pull to pull regardless of spec and regardless of skill. Sometimes things line up, sometimes they don’t.
From what I’m seeing based on logs… is a lot of people betting on fire (including the world first raiders), rather than frost. Some of that may be down do the variance of fire allowing for the highs that are necessitated at lower gear kills, but from what I’ve seen thus far… I doubt it’s just that.