I'v had a question that has been tugging at me for a long time. Might seem pretty abstract (It feels difficult to explain in my mind through words) at first but hopefully after you read this you'll get an idea of where I am going.

My Question:

As a fire mage, can I accumulate enough crit to spam scorch to keep rolling ignites going, doing a ton load more of damage, while making my spells even more mana efficent?

Some Numbers:

Right now in game you can get 23 crit possible on gear (24 crit if you take gloves of spell mastery). Then about 5.81% Crit from Int buffed with AI and mark. Then throw on 6% crit from Critical Mass and another 4% from incenerate. Finally add another 1% crit from Wizard Oil (added due to being an easy practical buff).

Thats a total of 39.81% Crit. Basically 40%.

This would give each of spells 13.2% more mana efficency.

If I spam Scorch I get 2 chances at 40% to crit before the ignite can die.

I'd give you some math here but I don't know how to do probality of this kind and google didn't help.

I suspect the chance to crit is around 60% given two tries at 40%.

I susepect there is some crit number where your damage would go through the roof due to the amount of stacking ignites you should statistically get.

Would having a crit rating this high (40%) tremendously increase DPS due to rolling ignites with respect to the other options available to gear?




If the above it true is Crit Gear > any other option for a fire mage?

Ignite stacks to a max of 5 times with the damage of it being the first 5 crits so no.

Thats not what I am asking. I know it can only stack 5 times, but lets say you manage to consistently get your crits to stack 5 times or even 3 times in a row. Thats shitton of damage being dealt.

Well you said exponetial for it to increase exponetially the damage you have to ignite be capable of stacking higher than 5 times.

When I said that I mean exponential to the damage you would otherwise do without ignite stacks. I suppose it sounded good in my head. Ill go edit that to clarify.

The probability you will fail on rolling the ignite is the same as failing 2 crits in a row.

40% chance to crit means 60% chance to not crit.(I felt a pang of guilt when I first typed this and didn't show my work ><)

.6 * .6 = .36

Which means there is a 36% chance you will fail to roll the ignite.

Now if we take 2 fire mages with the same crit chance the chance that both of them will fail to roll the ignite is:

.36 * .36 = .1296

Which is about a 13% chance to fail on rolling the ignite.

3 mages: 4.66%
4 mages: 1.67%

A fifth mage would be trivial imo. Now the question is can you get 3-4 mages with combustion stacked high all use pyro in the begining for some big initial crits and have enough mana to spam sorch for 6-7 minutes during patchwerk.

And then your proverbial "white" damage would be so pathetic it would be a DPS downgrade to try and stack that much crit to roll ignites. Your scorches for 400 or whatever since you have so little +damage versus someone with scorches for 650-700 are not really something to write home about rolling continuously even if you're trying to roll initially combusted Pyro ignite stacks.

I guess this would parallel a Hemo rogue except via gear instead of just a spec change. Sure you think you'd benefit the raid more, but your loss in damage versus the boost to the rest of the physical dealers isn't good enough to warrant it.

I am a fire mage and I value crit very highly. More highly than the pure damage increase would suggest. Yes, rolling ignites add some insane damage, especially if you have CoE and scorch debuff on the mob, and with 5 fire mages in the raid, ignites roll all the time.

One issue is that 2% crit is a very expensive mod. All the critting in the world is not going to help if your fireball hits like a wand, so crit > all is not true. For a well-geared fire mage, crit is worth more than its stat cost so it pays to stack.

Let P(crit) be the chance to score a crit on a single scorch. Let P(hit) = 1- P(crit).

P(at least 1 crit in 2 scorches) = 1 - P(hit)**2 = 1 - 0.36 = 0.64

So you have a 64% chance to score either 1 or 2 crits when you scorch twice. How many fire mages do you need to make that a 95% chance?

P(at least 1 crit in 4 scorches) = 0.87 (2 fire mages)
P(at least 1 crit in 6 scorches) = 0.95 (3 fire mages) - so you need 3 fire mages with 40% crit if you would like to have a 95% chance for a crit to happen during any given 3 second interval.

The general formula would be: P(at least 1 crit in N scorches) = 1 - P(hit)**N. If you only have 30% crit, then you need 4 fire mages for a 94% chance.

Actually with this gear you would be pusing approx 600 fire damage with +5% hit before you factor in talent and buffs/debuffs.

Your scorches would hit for a nice sum as well as crit alot.

Keep in mind this is pretty risky with concern for threat generation. If you're spamming scorch with the intent to keep ignite on a mob, there's a very high risk of having other fire mages keep your ignite train going longer than you wanted. You also run the risk of keeping someone elses ignite on the mob when they're trying to hold back.

Keep in mind this would seriously gimp your hit% to the point of having a huge resistance rate. You can pick up a lot more stats/hit/damage by only giving up a little bit of crit and making your character more balanced.

There's another extensive thread on Ignites in this forum (http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7672), but to quickly cite some stuff I saw there, to refresh the timer on Ignite to 4s remaining, you need to get a crit between the first and second ticks of Ignite (meaning in the 2s - 4s range). It isn't practical to land two scorches in the 2s-4s range all the time, so I think the math on keeping Ignite up is a bit more complex, even for a single scorch mage.

I think the original question is this: would a fire mage do more dps with very high crit or very high spell damage? I think you'll find that you'll maximize your dps by balancing the two rather than focusing on only one, due to the way item level is calculated and the dependence of crit and damage on one another in dps calculations.

Need to make sure you have enough hit as well as that has to be factored in. 95% crit among 3 mages doesn't do you jack if they only have a 83% chance to hit the mob.

I think the currently accepted hypothesis is that WoW uses a table-based apporach. In other words, crit rate is measured over spell casts, not spell hits.

I did a quick CTProfile to test it, and yes I was wrong. Pushing 600 fire and 27% base crit from int/gear with some more crit available from changing robes to Volatile Power and Spell Mastery gloves. However I have to be more realistic in that I will never see 9/10ths of this gear myself and this will be a pipe dream to many and obtainable to only a select lucky few.

This does seem do-able, but I have to ask myself if efficiency is really what I want as Alliance with JoW/BoW easy mode for scorch mana recovery and the loss of ~120 spell damage for that 7% crit (146 or so to get 9%). Also have to consider that the ignite credited mage will have to ask for his ignite roll to stop at some point otherwise he will die while the rest of you just happily spam along. Not sure if this will be a DPS downgrade to stop for 4 seconds to let it wear off or not in the long run versus lower crit per mage and higher base damage.