I was playng with ctprofiles tool to make the maximum possible mage gear + talent build for crit chance with scorch.

The idea was to make a "ignite supporter" , a mage with average dps but with around 40-50% crit - if he just chain scorches he will possibly make that ignite will be always on.

Heres what i came up with :
(max before TBC) :
http://www.ctprofiles.net/4412598

And what i can reach pretty easy with my current gear and guild possibilities :
http://ctprofiles.net/4412810

Keep in mind that you need to add +10% crit from fire talents to scorch.

If spell damage is not an issue, you actually want Intelligence enchants on the head, legs, wrists and weapon since Int adds to your crit rate.

editing in an example: 33.78% crit. Add another frost mage with Winter's Chill, Brilliant Wizard Oil, typical int raid buffs (mark + fort), and a moonkin, and you hit 48.57% crit.

ok?

Whe it may have been a viable thing in a low-number o ffire mage raiding environement, to support a really big ignite created by someone with more spell damage, the current changes to ignites for TBC that will most likey be in 1.13 pretty much crush that to the ground,

PS : Winter's chill only affect frost spells.

No shit.

You can get another 2% crit trinket from Thaddius as well, with a nice threat reduction too...

The name of the thread is "Max crit mage % chance ?". Not "...with Scorch". If the OP can't be assed to put that in the title...

Not every mage thread has to be about fire.

but ones where the OP asks about keeping scorch up maybe -.-

This is a great thread.

An alternate title: "Hey guys look at what I can do when I play around with CTprofile"

If you want something on topic though... since ignites have a 4 second duration, and scorch is 1.5 second cast... with lag you get 2 scorches, one of which has to crit in order keep the ignite rolling. Even with a 50% crit chance you can't depend on that happening at all frequently. So since you can't keep an ignite stack up yourself, it's much better to min/max than to try to stack crit.

"Why don't we have someone try and maximize crit to keep up our ignites? You can get about 40% to crit from gear."
"There would still be .6*.6 = 0.36 chance of failure"
"Why don't we have 2 mages maximize crit to keep up our ignites?"
"Still 13% chance of failure, meaning 1 in 8 will fail"
"Why don't we just have all our mages max crit then"
"Then we would be gimped for damage and our ignites would suck"
"Why don't we have all our mages trade a bit of crit for damage then while keeping our crit up?"
"That's what we're already doing"
"oh..."

It's generally considered a good idea to read a post before replying to it.

I was on a crusade to max my crit out too in order to keep a scorch ignite rolling, then I found out about crit scaling and got a little disappointed. Later I find out that ignite has been nerfed so that damage does not reset, and I got completely disaffected with mage damage.

I've really been enjoying my change to a fire mage now that I've added some crit to my gear, but now this whole stacking crit choice is a complete waste except for making better use of MoE.

So as a followup question, +damage is truly the king of PvE now? And stacking crit is truly pointless as a min/maxing tactic esp. for an arc/frost damage spec mage?

I ask because I'm currently playing my mage and finishing his t2, and iirc I get a free respec tomorrow with the release of the pseudo-1.13 patch with the new talents. So I can change both spec and gear somewhat significantly in the next few weeks.

I've toyed with the idea of asking a mage recruit with poor gear to become a support mage - keep Imp Scorch up and keep those Ignites rolling. But when I went to set about building a set of non-raiding +crit gear, I found that I needed lots of epics from this and that raid to make a decent set. If the mage has access to those pieces to make a good +crit set, then they'd also have access to decent +damage and would be able to dps like everyone else, which is the problem I was trying to circumvent by stacking +crit on them and making them the Ignite person.

Er... that's coming out tomorrow? Has the patch even been pushed to the PTR yet? Blizzard said that it would go to the PTR first before going live.

I'm frost. I think it's more that frost mages and fire mages each think their spec is better and the other is dumb.