Originally Posted by Zub
Zub, the sequence of five Arcane Blasts then an Arcane Missiles is exactly what you would expect the alternating macro to produce. However, since I'm spamming the key much more quickly than the cast time of Arcane Blast, it is almost random which of the two macros actually executes when my toon can next cast. Therefore, at minimum he casts 2 Arcane Blasts (assuming only the proc macro triggers) before hitting Arcane Missiles and at the other extreme my toon can cast many more Arcane Blasts (in practice, 8 or so is the most I've seen) before casting Arcane Missiles.
Here is why it is better than just casting Arcane Missiles whenever they proc: Arcane Blasts put a stacking increase in arcane damage of the next arcane spell cast (up to four) that is used up when Arcane Missiles is cast. This buff also increases the mana used for each Arcane Blast. To optimize for max DPS, you'd just chain-cast Arcane Blasts, meaning you'd be at the max damage buff for all casts after the first four, but you'd run out of mana very quickly that way.
The optimum number of Arcane Blasts without running out of mana too quickly is five before each Arcane Missiles. Casting Arcane Missiles whenever they proc leads to poor DPS b/c you aren't building up much of the stacking damage buff before starting the cycle over again. I tried this and a number of other cast patterns, including some using Arcane Barrage, and what I recorded gives the the best DPS / resonable mana usage rate I found.
The reason I did it this way is that it will rarely cast Arcane Missiles before three or four Arcane Blasts have gone off (even if it Missiles becomes available early), yet it also allows you to just keep casting Arcane Blasts until Arcane Missiles does proc (because the proc macro gets stuck on an uncastable Missiles but the sequence will keep casting Blasts). I first tried setting up just one macro to do 6xBlast then 1xMissiles which worked well but would rarely (but devestatingly) not proc Missiles in the string of blasts and leave the mage doing nothing until he got out of combat and the macro reset.
So using my above macros you end up with a near-optimum situation where you average casting 5 or 6 Blasts before each Missiles.
One other note: when Pinot set this up, for some reason he would tend to get more sequence macro steps than proc macro steps, causing him to cast 9-10 Blasts per Missile and eat up his mana too quickly. So he deleted one of the Arcane Blasts in the proc macro and was very happy with the results - ending up casting about 5-6 Blasts per Missile - exactly what you want.
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