Yeah, Mirror Image shouldn't be included in a nuke macro. It definitely will cause some funky global cooldown shenanigans if you try to use it that way.

It's not that big of a deal. It just means you'd have to click the button twice, to cast everything up to Mirror Image, then to cast what comes after. For any other class, this could be a problem. For mages though, since you'll be spamming the button most of the time anyway, you can afford this kind of thing.

I don't think I'd agree. With the amount of haste you'll be playing with at the upper ends of content you can almost cast an entire Arcane Blast in the span of the GCD initiated by popping MI, and even with no stacks but all of your CDs up Ablast can still crit for upwards of 9k, depending on spell power. That's not something to just brush off.

So if you want a nuke macro, just put AP and IV and your trinkets with Ablast, and keep MI as a separate button/macro.

Also, I would imagine that a large enough group of mages out there, especially those that would read this looking for actual advice, wouldn't have their t10 4pc yet, so MI wouldn't exactly be a valid damage CD, unless you never EVER have to worry about threat.

actually, I just tried using this in a raid. Mirror image stops everything under it from working. I scratched my head trying to figure out what it was until I went line by line through the macro. Made for an interesting raid.

I am pretty curious about the MI thing, myself. I tried adding MI to my nuke macro a while back and similar results to jcap. It just didn't work. This seems similar to the old warrior macro where you added Execute to HS, so that you just spammed HS until Ex was up. Doesn't work anymore. Someone said these "fall through" macros were shut down by Blizzard at some point.

Actually, if you're raiding and using the Shard of the Crystal Heart, this apparently uses a GCD but also lets me pop off MI. Maybe play around with it; at least from memory, both these spells go off at the same time.

Maybe Christian wrote this pre-3.1 and never posted it. Mirror Image didn't originally trigger a GCD, but as of 3.1 (last April), it does.

You can't have Mirror Image and Arcane Blast in a simple /cast in a macro together because it will stop ("break") at the spell you have casting first, since they both trigger a GCD, and never cast the second, no matter how many times you press it.

You can't have Mirror Image and Arcane Blast in a /castsequence macro either, because it will only work while Mirror Image is not on cooldown. You would press once to cast Mirror Image and a second time to cast AB. After that, the macro would be broken until Mirror Image came off cooldown. If you revered the cast order in the sequence, it just means you'd get a second AB off before the macro broke. At best, you'd you have to put Mirror Image on a modifier in the macro, which defeats the purpose of the macro (which appears to be not having to keep up with what cooldowns are up).

I think it's better to put most of your cooldowns (trinkets, IV, AP, potion of speed - not PoM, more on that later) incl. Mirror Image on a separate button, or keep Mirror Image completely separate. *IF* you do put Mirror Image on a macro with your other cooldowns, it should come first - that is, before trinkets, IV/AP, potion - because otherwise you lose a GCD of uptime on the cooldowns. That GCD could've been an extra AB with the CD buffs still up.

Arcane Power and Icy Veins have great synergy. Depending on the length of the fight, you shouldn't pop each individually each time they're up - which is what will happen if you use this CD macro. Having the haste from Icy Veins on top of the added damage from Arcane Power allows you to get more spells off while the AP extra damage buff is up.

Further, I don't think Presence of Mind should be in the macro before Arcane Power. While the Presence of Mind buff is active (i.e. not consumed yet, as it wouldn't be in this macro), Arcane Power is disabled. When PoM is consumed, it triggers a 1.5 sec CD on Arcane Power. This means Arcane Power won't pop til your second cast of the macro (and thus would also prevent the initial AP/IV cast for synergy, even if you don't bother trying to sync them later in the fight).

You could simply move PoM after AP, but It's also not optimum to use PoM immediately after it comes off cooldown each time. In your regular rotation, you should always save PoM for the fourth (or later) Arcane Blast in each series. You want to utilize the extra crit chance from Arcane Potency for a full-stack Arcane Blast; i.e. it is better to crit on a 4th AB than a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd because of the additional damage multiplier from the AB stack.

A /castsequence macro would be better for the Frost Nova/Slow Fall macro. This would remove the need to press the modifier key (Shift, in the example).

#showtooltip
/castsequence Frost Nova, Slow Fall