Talents
- The lvl 5 talent: Lend a hand VS static charge. Both don’t contribute to the possible max dps of the mage so neither are required.
- The lvl 10 talent: Selfish streak VS Shared streak. Selfish streak is 8% boost and for solo max dps is better than the 4% Shared streak.
- The lvl 15 talent: Runic diversity VS Runic speed. Runic diverity increased the 3th spell of a different type dps by 27.27%. The Runic speed only increases travel speed of the spell + is also broken. Easy choice again for max dps go Runic diversity.
- The lvl 20 talent: Affinity VS True affliction. The current problem with True affliction is that the initial hit is very low damage and it adds a DoT for every spell type that if it would completely tick out would increase dps. Sadly casting is about 4x faster than the DoT can do its stuff causing the DoT to be overwritten with the next spell before it is useful. I did alot of testing on it and number crunching a while ago, believe me, go for Affinity.
- The lvl 30 talent: Triplicity VS Contanimation. Contanimation helps with DoT spreading, sadly its not worth it for dps increase in the big picture with things like boss fights. Triplicity would normally be a dps increase for the time it takes to cast the spell up + the lack of possibility for good tilesets. But at the start of a fight it can be a benefit for a very small dps increase, thus choose Triplicity.
Ring affixes
To get a dps boost wearing the Crit rings which adds +35 crit each = 70 crit = 70/15 = 4.6% more crit chance. Reroll them to Empowered which adds +3% crit damage and Elite Hunter. You can’t stack Empowered twice and Elite Hunter increases your dps on Elite monsters, which is the only other affix increasing your dps.
Armour affixes
+1 projectile damage adds 1% dps of everything except for damage over time attacks (DoTs). No class dps is so dependant on DoTs for their dps that it has any major downgrade effect. For affliction mage this would be about 2.9% dps boost for adding +4% projectile damage.
The second best choice is selecting +8% crit damage. When you drink potions and have crit rings on your crit chance gets as high as 31.3%. Jumping your crit damage from 1.53x to 1.61x. So 31.3% of the time you do a bit more damage. Calculating that against the second best option which is Crit chance, you will find out that +8% crit damage increase will be a bit more dps increase than +4% crit chance increase. Simple formula:
(1.61x31.3 + 68.6) - (1.53x31.3 + 68.6) = 2.50% dps increase for crit damage
(1.53x35.3 + 64.6) - (1.53x31.3 + 68.6) = 2.12% dps increase for crit chance
So moral of the story:
- Projectile damage as first option.
- Crit damage increase for second option.
Weapon affixes
Go for bleed first. Bleed will trigger 2% of your hits (excluding DoTs) and will add 248% to the dps IF the individual bleed ticks don’t crit either. Which they do. Affliction mage is one of the worse classes for bleed but still gets an average of 4.8% dps boost out of it, which is insane.
Second choice should be Iceheart for sure. Iceheart adds a plain 5% if an enemy stays frosted, and look at that, the rotation contains frost. So get that 5% beauty boost with you.
Charged strikes is not a good option because all your affliction DoT’s will steal the crit of charged strikes. Rendering Charged Strikes boost to basically nothing. Which is an Orbus Bug btw.
The rotation
Although mage is not one of the easiest classes, luckily the rotation is the easiest of the 4 classes. For the affliction mage see the photo below:
The rotation is written down in single letters so I have to explain what they mean:
- The first letter ‘X’ can be ignored because I use that to add boosts like the 8% Selfish streak talent. (with this cast speed its always up anyway)
- Then the letter ‘b’ is used as first Fireball shot. With 0.43 seconds casttime (2.32 spells per second)
- Followed by the first Affliction ‘a’ that is not frost boosted (from Affinity which adds more DoT time). Spell cast speed is 0.55 seconds.
- Followed by the pattern in between parentheses repeated 100 times which is:
- ‘F’ frost which is boosted by the 27.27% Runic diversity talent (3th spell of different type).
- Then a weak ‘b’ fireball again.
- Then the capital ‘B’ fireballs are the Empowered fireballs which are caused by the Affinity talent that boosts the next spell after casting a fireball. This boost is 13.635%.
- Then end again with the ‘A’ which is casting an affliction with a 0.55 second casttime which is getting an extended DoT time from the Frost in the past. (even though the extra DoT ticks will be overwritten before all ticks are done)
So what is the secret power of this rotation?:
- It keeps up all 3 afflictions on the target by timing shooting the next affliction before the first expires.
- The spacing between afflictions are in such a way that the “Weakness effect” from affliction which is caused by the Affinity talent, always stay up the target. Thus having a constant double weakness boost of 10%.
- The frost is timed after the affliction for two reasons. Reason 1, to get runic diversity to trigger on the frost for more dps. Reason 2, it helps building the right tilesets with minimal interference (see next chapter.)
Tilesets
You might notice the area on the big picture that is showing tileset information. The one in the picture below:
The tilesets that are used are perfect for the rotation that is used. Minimum interference and working together to get the max dps boost of 24.5% on average. Used tiles are:
- A = Affliction
- F = Frost
- B = FireBall
- 2 = 2 hits per second
- 3 = 3 hits per second
- 0 = Start of combat
AFB, AF2 and A2F are all 3 making use of the fact that in the rotation Affliction only shows up once. This gives minimal interference. Then because of the fast cast speed the few times that 3 hits per second shows up are used to hitchhike for a less interference dps boost that helps boosting the class dps even more. Lastly to fill the tileset spots the 0BA is used to trigger the tileset once early on at the start of the fight to add just a little more dps.
Other rotations + tilesets
Well that was the best mage rotation with affliction. What about the famous Fireball spam mage?
The rotation wouldn’t surprise you:
Except for, what is that ‘h’ ? Well there are two fireball mage routes. Route 1 involves casting in a specific speed range. This speed will keep the tilesets trigger by alternating between 3 and 2 hits per second. I tested that in the past and it about as good as route 2. Route 2 has some upsides from route 1, but most importantly for max dps it is the better of the two. To stop talking about method 1, I can tell you that the dps is like a few % lower, so I would call it also a viable method to use method 1. But I won’t discuss it here further anymore.
So the second method makes use of the renew of a musky. The ‘h’ stands for applying a Musky renew. Luckily a mage can stand close to the monsters and constantly recieve a renew splash from the Musky without any problems. Every 1.06 seconds renew triggers a get heal tile which is used for the fire only mage to trigger a tileset every second. The tilesets go as follows:
And the dps looks like:
Because every second either 2 hits per second tile or 3 hits per second tile is used, the start of the tileset should be 2 or 3. Then fireball and the ‘H’ which stands for getting healed are triggered in between every hits per second. If you cast slow 2 hits per second you will get the 2 hits per second tile trigger every second filling all 3 tileset spots before the first expires. Starting to cast faster will also trigger the 3BH and 3HB tiles which are used as replacements to still trigger a tileset every single second. Tilesets of length 3 expire after 4 seconds so having 3 tilesets up is no problem.
There are a few major upsides to the fireball spam:
- For once the Charged Strikes weapon affix is possible again because no damage DoT’s steal the damage anymore of charged strikes. This is handy because you aren’t doing frost for Iceheart anymore.
- Keeping up the rotation and momentum of casting is alot easier because it is only a repeat of one spell, which is basically circling around. Hence most good mages choosing this dps route.
- The fireball boost is used on every single shot (kinda true, not when standing too far from target. Which has to do with timing with hitting the spells)
- And lastly the tilesets are stronger than the Affliction mage.
Only downside is no musky, no gain. But then you still have to option to switch back to the remaining tileset spots for affliction mage anyway.
Opinion
Mage dps should stay as it is, but I would love to see tweaks on the other talents of the talent tree. Making them equally viable.Talking about what to fix about the talents with what numbers is out of the scope of this project though. Unless the devs are planning this, then I am happy to help… But talents like True Affliction and Contamination currently don’t show any competition against the better talents for overall content usefulness.
Edit: Oooooh ooooooh 
I completely forgot to mention, this is the mage dps with average cast accuracy. Which is someone casting exactly this high that it barely makes the poof sound. Because that increases dps. Sloppiest cast is the 100% dps. Exactly perfect is 110% which my program shows. Some kind of robot would be able to do 120% dps making always the most perfect spells.
Link to main post: Max dps of all 4 classes