Ok Cig, stick with me here and hear me out before you snap back a response about not caring about math or being lazy. I'm not pointing a finger at you, specifically, just doing some math about our class and using your particular style as an example for other's to have the opportunity to see some hard numbers behind some of the options. I realize that not everyone min/maxes and the game is about fun, etc, etc. But some people, like myself are interested in seeing the numbers that either support or disprove a particular spell, rotation, stat priority, mechanic, or play style. I'm only using you and your style to discuss a topic that I've not seen any real discussion about that wasn't anecdotal.
So, last night my guild had a make-up day for last Thursday. We were on Mel'Jarek, and we banged our faces against him for about half the allotted raid time. This left me with about 2 hours to kill before it was really bed time, so I decided to do a little research in regards to our conversation about Incanter's Ward yesterday.
I was able to find a combat log of a very well geared and highly skilled Mage who is deep into HoF hard modes and uses Incanter's Ward as his talent of choice in the L90 tier. This Mage's name is Paralove and he plays on the EU server Deathwing. He's got several extremely difficult feats of strength, including 10 and 25 man Tribute to Insanity while it was current content, realm first 85 Mage, and probably most impressive - I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am...dated March,
2011. So this dude is legit, and I assume he knows wtf he is doing when it comes to playing a Mage.
On the
WoL parse of his Mel'Jarek 10m Normal kill, he did 160k+ DPS and was within 8% of the ranking limit for Fire Mages. So, he didn't slouch. Using his log, I extracted some values that I used to determine (as close as I possibly could with my limited math skills) the actual percentage of increased damage he recieved over the course of the fight from using Incanter's Ward. Here's what I pulled out:
1. The uptime he maintained of Incanter's Absorption (30% buff from Incanter's Ward breaking)
2. I used an average cool down time of 10s for each cast of IW to get the amount of time he spent casting without a damage buff because IW was on cooldown.
3. I calculated his average GCD based on his raid buffed haste % and used this to determine how much time he spent doing zero damage because he was actually casting IW on himself.
4. I added these values together and the difference between the total and 100% was the percentage of time I assume he was casting under the 6% buff Incanter's Ward gives passively.
Now, I'm not going into all the math I did, because it was late at night and the notepad I was scribbling on is still on my desk at home. That's why I linked the log and described the basics of my approach. You guys can feel free to double check my math and critique my results.
What I ended up with was a total damage bonus of 9.35%, which is 75% of the theoretical maximum that I calculated yesterday. One thing I noticed about his use of Incanter's Ward was that he cast it 9 times in 7 minutes and 10 seconds, and the actual shield itself was only active for 10.5 seconds
total. This means he was only casting it when he was expecting it to be broken almost instantly. Having the shield active for an average time of 1.17 seconds per cast is pretty pro, and shows he absolutely knows the encounter. He could have cast the shield two times more than he did, but I assume that he was either CC'ing, getting out of Amber Prison, or using his GCD for something more important for the raid. I assume he could have feasibly fit in 2 or 3 more casts, which would have increased his overall bonus by about 2%.
My second step in this process was to queue myself for HoF part 2 in LFR - specifically
Mel'Jarek, use a similar spec as Paralove, as well as Cigtyme's Fireball+Incanter's Ward macro, basically mimicking Cig's playstyle as best as I could from the way it's been described here. Using Temporal Shield instead of Ice Barrier to ensure there was no interference with Incanter's Ward's shield bursting, and the Fireball+IW macro, I pulled 122k...not pro by any stretch, but ~73% of the ranking limit, which I would consider just about average or slightly above...I was third in DPS behind the hackzorz Blood DK and cleave machine Rogue. Using the same steps I used on Paralove's logs I gathered the values of the different buff uptimes of my encounter and calculted the overall damage bonus I received from Incanter's Ward on the same fight with a different playstyle (keeping IW on cool down as much as possible). The results I got were what I expected them to be. An overall damage bonus of 6.88%. The major difference in my parse and Paralove's is the fact that I cast Incanter's Ward
four more times than him in 1 minute 16 seconds less time. This led to me having a much higher percentage of time receiving no benefit from the talent at all. The shield averaged nearly 4.5 seconds of uptime each cast before it was broken, meaning that my ratio of 30% damage to 6% damage was about 4 times lower than Paralove's, on top of the fact that I had about 40 more seconds of no buff than him.
The third step I took was to look back in my logs and find a good parse where I used Incanter's Ward in the way that resembles Paralove's playstyle...basically using it when it's needed. I didn't have a previous log where I used IW on Mel'Jarek (I use Invocation there), so I pulled
my world #1 Arcane Mage Garalon LFR kill. I realize that this fight is much more condusive to Incanter's Ward's mechanics, the high movement and the constant raid-wide damage will inevitably lead to higher productivity from the spell. But hey, it was nearly 2 am and I really didn't feel like queueing for Mel'Jarek again. Using the same process once again, I pulled my uptimes from Garalon. My calculations led me to a final damage bonus of 10.84%...about 95% of what I proposed as the theoretical maximum of the talent. So, if I were going to pick an encounter where IW's mechanics clearly outshine the other two talents I would say it would be this one. I don't consider myself an elite player, and definitely not an elite Mage, so if I can squeeze out nearly max potential from this talent in this situation, I can only assume a real elite Mage could cap my theoretical max or even prove it to be set too low. I pulled 74.5k on this kill as
ARCANE...#1 in the world and 390% of the ranking limit. As a point of reference, I pulled 78.1k on my 10m kill as Fire, which was 66% of my ranking limit.
So here's the point of this wall of text:
Using Incanter's Ward when anticipating damage on Mel'Jarek, a
9.35% damage bonus was achieved by an elite player.
Using Incanter's Ward as close to cool down as possible on Mel'Jarek, a
6.88% damage bonus was achieved by an average player. (Less than 1% more than not casting the shield at all and benefiting from the 6% passive 100% of the time)
Using Incanter's Ward when anticipating damage on Garalon (an encounter seemingly designed for the talent), a
10.84% damage bonus was achieved by an average player.
So in conclusion, it's pretty obvious that using Incanter's Ward on cooldown gimps the talent's potential mightily. While using the spell in anticipation to incoming damage boasts an overall damage bonus gain of 75% over the aforementioned style (9.35% vs 6.88%). Even more, using the talent on a fight where constant damage strong enough to break the shield virtually on cooldown yields the best results by far.
I think the research and testing I've done has proven that if used properly Incanter's Ward is equally as potent a talent as the other two in the L90 tier, and on specific encounters it is without a doubt the clear-cut choice for Magi that are trying to milk every tenth of a point of DPS out of their toon possible.
I understand that you are often top DPS in LFR with your playstyle, Cig. And you are probably happy with that. But, personally, I don't compete against the other DPS in raid finder...most of the time there's no point, I'm usually #1 in my group by a pretty wide margin. I'm more concerned with competing with my self - doing my absolute best to get that "new high score", and I couldn't continue to play a certain way that I know is gimping my potential.
In the end you'll do what you want. But I know you, I've raided with you, and I like you...and I can't let you limit yourself by doing something that is so easily fixed with a little understanding. Stop using that macro and try using Incanter's Ward when you expect damage and let me know honestly what happens.