Mage: Road to Defilemancer – Gear List and Rotation Guide

it will be mentioned in the next part, as well as searing vitality, in an expert dungeon setting things are dead before you get all dots up generally speaking. In the next part i’ll get into other builds and rotations that will pull ahead in a raid setting. 

Brent, thanks for taking the time. Seriously, it’s a good thing to see quality responses.

I was vaguely aware of server-side lag problems people had seen, but I consider that entirely a theorycrafting problem. In practice, the massive benefit of what I call the “Masher macro” is that I can bang on it like a madman whenever things get crazy in a raid situation. It’s not perfect, but it maintains an acceptable level of dps at a time when many mages simply give up, turn around and run.

Now, you might be able to get a few tens of dps out of moving Inferno out into its own macro, maybe even more, on the target dummy, but I’d be willing to go toe-to-toe with any mage who tries to manage that as a separate button in a real-world situation. In rank 4 PvP gear and a few T2 drops, I was holding my own against folks in partial HK gear using this build and those macros on everything but simple stand-and-deliver fights where nearly no work was required of the caster except to press their buttons. As soon as all hell breaks loose, the guy with three buttons to push starts to shine. A lot.

Now, as for Flame Bolt visa vis Countdown. This is an admitted flaw in the blog post where I try to simplify everything into a “rotation”. I don’t really have a rotation per se. I keep Searing Vitality up and mash my Masher button until something pops, be it the Withering/Countdown combo or the Heat Wave cooldown (now there’s a fun oxymoron!) So in practice, I would only ever miss out on the 10 second buff from Flame Bolt if I used my Combusticate macro going into the fight. Perhaps this is a good reason to move Flame Bolt up to the very top of my Masher macro and hit it once right after I have my stacks of Pillaging Stone. I’ll have to consider that, but even if I don’t, the impact of that first round of dps being down 10% is going to even out over the course of a long boss fight, and after the first time I cast Flame Bolt, the buff shouldn’t ever drop off unless I’m stuck AoEing (now there’s a topic: keeping your combat buffs up while AoEing… what a pain!)

Anyway, in practice, on a 5 minute dummy test and in real raiding, MM, T2 and PvP situations, this spec has played out beautifully (though obviously, it’s a glass cannon in PvP and I die the second anyone looks at my funny… I usually just go chloro, but every once in a while I like to see people explode

Thanks again for your comments. I’ll be following your articles with anticipation (very sorry to hear about your loss).