Yes @ any spec/situation with the exception of TLC some places like arcane spec or deep fire with loads of crit...

Crusade is a static +80 spelldmg, only two trinkets rival it, illidan one and TLC with certain specs.

I was wondering if it's any good compared to [Sextant of Unstable Currents] for fire specc (10/48/3) on a fight that you DON'T have to re-stack it like teron for example.I guess it's fairly worse if you have to re-stack it since you need like hours with fire specc to do so.

It's probably been linked here before, but here is a pretty definitive ranking of every raiding trinket. It even factors in your spec.

SimulationCraft/Trinkets/Mage - Shadowpriest.com Wiki

If you can keep the stack up, it's one of the 3 best trinkets in the game for fire spec.

I wore 50 spell pen & maxed spell hit for our first Supremus kill, and without COE up, ~30% partial resist on fire spells.

I'll keep testing if I can convince one of our locks to put COE up and see if the 50 spell pen with COE reduces the amount of partial resists, but "very high fire resistance" doesn't mean anything without a number.

Keep in mind those calcs are probably done without the upcoming haste rating buff or 2.2 arcane missile changes.

Edit: In fact I'm sure of it, the arcane table especially looks a lot different after 2.2, with Ashtongue/TLC pretty much blowing anything else away. Quag's Eye is also looking a lot better. For fire specs, Icon would be about on part with Darkmoon when you consider having to stack the darkmoon buff versus being able to use Icon proc in tangent with combustion or other multipliers. That page doesn't have much information on how the actual calculations are done. My own simulator (work in progress, hard coded this test =p) actually has Icon hovering between +1 and -1 dps compared to Darkmoon. This depends on how long the simulation is, which directly affects Icon proc uptime.

Anyway, for Arcane specs I wouldn't invest in Darkmoon at all. For fire specs I would say, if you have an Icon already and can get something of equal or greater value for the second slot, hold off, otherwise Darkmoon might be a good investment. Quag's Eye looks like it will come close to those after 2.2, or exceed them if you can somehow manage 3 fireballs off the proc.

One more question about Darkmoon Crusade , on a fight like Gurtogg it's a good idea to stack it up with arcane missiles?(lower aggro wich you need at start/stacks up fully in 2casts).Or even generally is it a good idea to stack it up with arcane missiles?

wrt to Icon vs. DMC: Crusade for arcane specs...

Crusade models as the superior trinket, but most models don't take into account the synergy between AP+AB spam and the Icon's use.

also, people always model the worst case for Icon (use averaged over entire cooldown), rather than the average case.

those two factors make the Icon close to as good as DMC:C, therefore DMC:C is probably not worth the money.

The post you quoted by Manly is over a month and a half old. It's not that Darkmoon Card is bad, it's that after 2.2 Ashtongue Talisman of Insight should be very, very good for Arcane Missiles. Ashtongue trinket is being buffed in 2 ways. First, the haste rating itself becomes more valuable due to the haste rating formula buff. Secondly, it will actually work with arcane missiles, and have a chance to proc with each tick of AM. Simulations I've run shows that is blows any other trinket out of the water for Arcane Missile spam. Since it's all haste, however, you gain no mana efficiency, which could possibly be a concern.

Lacking Ashtongue, your choice for second trinket slot is left to basically Sextant, Quag's Eye, Icon, or Darkmoon. I haven't ran numbers for the new version of Quag's Eye yet, it may be very powerful for AM spam depending on how it procs. My simulations have shown Icon of the Silver Crescent has shown it to be about on par with the Darkmoon card. This is due to an error in the way I approached Icon originally in my spreadsheet theorycraft and it's likely this error was shared by other simulations as well. Original theorycraft was designed for fights of "infinite duration", which means that Icon would have a proc uptime of it's duration over its cooldown, or 20/120. What I hadn't considered was that this is actually the worst case scenario. Because you can activate Icon almost immediately at the start of dps, the only way to get an uptime of 20/120 is if your encounter ends after exactly 120 seconds. Any other stop time will yield a significantly better uptime. So Icon of the Silver Crescent is actually even more powerful than we thought it was, and this is completely ignoring the fact that for the first cast you can stack it against multipliers like combustion or AP, or possibly even Molten Fury if your timing is very good.

I’m fairly new to Theorycrafting, and this thread has been an incredible education. I’m hoping that you will take pity on someone new to this topic and give me some advice.

From what I’ve been reading on the site here, fire spec is the way to go for high dps numbers. I am currently spec’d 0/0/61 (I like frost, what can I say) and with my current equipment my raid dps is running steady at high 500’s into the low 600’s. Our guild has just recently downed the Prince in Kara for the first time.
Currently I’m out dps’ng the fire mages in my guild, much to their confusion apparently, I imagine this is due to their spell rotation as the main dps fire mage has the spellfire set, but that’s a guess.

My question to the experts here is, how much of my equipment needs to change before I could switch to fire and see a decent increase to my dps? Should I even bother to switch?

Does anyone have suggestions on what/how much equipment changes I should have ready before switching to fire, if you even think it’s worth it given our current raiding status.
I hesitate to switch specs until I would at least have a decent increase in dps, say 50+ dps increase, otherwise, I’d rather just keep frost for survivability.

Fire is helped greatly by increased mana regen available in 25 man raids, namely Blessing of Wisdom, a shadow priest, and possibly a shaman of some sort.

Absent that, you'll find a lot of fire mages crashing on longer fights, and a guild first prince kill can potentially be one of the longer fights around.

But comparisons to other players are always flawed because they have two variables: their spec and their skill/attention. Run your numbers in Vontre's great spreadsheet for both specs, and see what you get.

You might also want to post a WWS log of your Prince fight, or, barring that, a future fight. There could be all sorts of other reasons why you're beating the fire mage on DPS - uptime, gem choice, trinket usage, etc.

You're frost. You simply aren't going to get any higher without respeccing to 10/48/3.

Spellstrike Hood/Pants, Sigil-Laced Boots and Lamp of Peaceful Radiance from Arca, Pauldrons of the Aldor, Stormherald or Nathrezim Mindblade if you can get them or Runesong Dagger from O'mrogg if you can't.

Stack hit to cap (~164 rating, shouldn't be too hard with Spellstrike/the aforementioned items) then stuff in as much crit as you can without sacrificing spell damage.

Concerning Averlea. Baring the Shatter death issue, which needs to be fixed. ;-) I am looking at the first Gruul Fight where he lived the longest.

1. He is not casting often enough. As fire he should be shooting for at least ~80% DPS Uptime. This Uptime includes Fireball and Ignites DoTs.
2. He is casting scorches too late. He is letting Fire Vulnerability fall off. If a ground slam or a silence is coming up, he should cast scorch right before it happens in order to keep the debuff going.
3. He is not chain chugging mana pots and he is not chain poping his mana gems. This is not hurting him now because he is dying to shatters but near the end he will be completely empty. If he is not doing the Orglilia daily quests or does not have the rep for the Ogre mana pots, he should in order to save his gold.
4. If you think the shatter is going to be bad.. pop Mana shield. Better a OOM mage then a dead mage.
5. If Averlea is going to get PI then he and the Priest who is going to give it to him.. need to figure out the perfect time for it. In the first fight, he got PI after Combustion and his on Use trinket had run out. PI should be casted at the same time Combustion and the trinket are used.

Gearing issues:

1. Assuming the gear he logged out of is his raid gear, Averlea needs more +hit. He needs it so that he can remove the +15 hit enchant and put on it the +20 damage enchant. He should feel free to ignore the set bonuses for gemming SpellFire. You can live doing Gruul with 4K HP before buffs even as Fire. You just need to figure out shatters. I suggest he give Gruul a few shots wearing his +Sta gear in order to get a feel for how to live.
2. SpellStrike set. He needs to get it.
3. Bracers needs to be enchanted with +damage instead of +int
4. After he gets the SpellStrike helm, he may want to re-enchant his boots with the Sta and +Run speed enchant.

I am wondering what you all think, with my gear what spec would be better. The Arcane/Fire or Deep fire specs.. and also what rotation you would use on each.

I am 10/48/3. I only have 1 piece T5 gear.. here is my armory Link

The Armory

Thank you all for the tips, Navaash i really appreciate the list of items to look for.

If anyone else has anything to add, i'm still listening

Karazhan/Heroic/Tailoring geared frost mage can reach around ~800 dps, but that's about it. If you want to go higher, I'm afraid that Fire (and later Arcane) is the way to go.

Since you're currently wearing Frozen Shadoweave, I suggest that you wait until you can craft the full Spellfire set right away.

Aside from that,. I'd switch Battlecast Pants for Spellstrike and your staff to a sword/offhand combo. If you can get a Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade, go for it and enchant it with Soulfrost/Sunfire and it'll last to Black Temple/Hyjal. Otherwise your choices are Nathrezim Mindblade from Malchezaar, Bloowmaw Magus-blade from Gruul or Blade of the Archmage from Honor Hold. Level 70 instances and heroics have numerous okay-ish swords/daggers if the ones listed above are beyond your reach. For an offhand, I suggest that you do some Heroics and get yourself Sapphiron's Wing Bone/Flametongue Seal. Nightbane, Netherspite and Ogri'la also have some generic offhands.

Also, ditch the Spell Penetration gems for now.

I wouldn't say you have to respec away from frost to get much better damage, I have never had an issue competing with Fire mages all the way from Kara to now that we are working our way through BT.

I think you do need a serious respec though, 0/0/61 just isn't a good PvE build, several talents are completely useless in a raiding environment. Frostbite, Shatter, Frozen Core and Improved Frost Nova are all useless when raiding. Improved Cone of Cold isn't that great and on a comparable level Arcane Impact is much more useful and will add far more to your damage in any of the AoE fights that you will encounter in SSC and TK.

I would recommend trying out the build I use: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You could switch out Improved Blizzard for Improved Cone of Cold but I prefer to control mobs when its needed.

If you want to try a serious deep frost PvE spec this one does the job and has no wasted points on things that aren't used in raids.

Next is your gear. I have focused on crit quite alot through my gearing up, +hit has never been that much of a serious issue and you can focus on it but at the lower end of the scale that you are at now you shouldn't gimp your gear too much for it. I have found 128 hit for frost to reduce my miss rate to 0.5% per raid (not counting Rage Winterchill :P). I personally wouldn't recommend you go and try and hit cap yourself at the moment but keep an eye out for nice pieces that drop while you raid it is still a very powerful stat for raiding.

Try to keep clear of Frost damage gear, it'll bite you in the ass when you get into SSC and TK and your AoE damage will suffer heavily not to mention if your guild decides to kill Hydross via single target you will have to respec. I never used shadoweave I went for T4 + Spellstrike which I felt gave me the best boost even though I am a hardcore tailor with every pattern known to man :P

Lastly don't let people discourage you from playing frost, its a great spec for raiding if used correctly

The main issues:

- Since raid builds can't have Shatter, the frost mage will have to stack crit alongside hit, whereas one that has Shatter can more or less ignore crit and just stack spell damage skyhigh.
- Molten Fury is a huge damage spike on bosses that enables mages to pull even with or ahead of other DPS classes.
- As you later mentioned, Hydross's frost immune state. (yes, Al'ar is fire immune, but a fire mage has much less of an issue with that)

Sorry - but this just means those fire mages your facing are either:

a) undergeared
b) bad
c) being very lazy

Or a combination thereof. Nobody would dispute that frost 'can do acceptable raid damage' but its certainly a big leap from that to say you can compete with **good** pve fire spec mages.

Thanks!

I don't really understand this sentence as it seems to be contradicting itself?

I didn't even mention Al'ar? It's not like Al'ar is a DPS fight and for the record I have never had to respec for Hydross either. Even if we did it single target I could just use 3xAB 4xScorch rotation and be fine.

Clearly your definition of "fine" differs from mine.

There have been times in the past where Frost was a viable alternative to Fire, but this is not one of those times. The testing and Theorycrafting have both been done to death. Coming into this thread and insisting you can DPS effectively as Frost is the equivalent of claiming that you have the ability to levitate cars with your mind.

Until there is some change done to the talent trees and/or spell mechanics involved, there's simply no discussion left to be had on the topic.