Sorry.

I meant the 2nd Scorch crits before the first Ignite ticks, which sometimes cancels the first ignite all together. Atleast it did a month ago.

Robe of the Elder Scribes
Binds when picked up
Chest Cloth
170 Armor
+23 Stamina
+26 Intellect
+21 Spirit
Durability 100 / 100
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 20.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 27.
Equip: Gives a chance when your harmful spells land to increase the damage of your spells and effects by up to 130 for 10 sec.


I ended up with this drop off nightbane after tonight, no one else was interested, anyhow how does this proc stack up against something like the Incanter's Robes with decent gems in it. The proc rate is listed as 5%

I have a quick question on hit and arcane for my mage alt. He's 42/18/0.

I read somewhere in this thread that Arcane Focus actually works on hit (despite the tooltip suggesting its penetration) and that the 10% hits some sort of cap.

So how much +hit do I need for arcane blast vs a level 70 and a 73 mob? (I'll ignore the fact that scorch gets no benefits atm).

I've looked at Robe of the Elder Scribes a number of times, and have thought about it considering that we are killing Nightbane regularly... however, I just can't seem to get behind it. Although my current Robe is a bit shitty, I still can't seem to justify losing so much in the way of static stats just to have such a rare proc.

Maybe if it had some sockets, or an additional +20 static damage...we would be somewhere, but...hmm... seems rather weak in general.

A level 73 mob has 17% base resist chance.

So, assuming Arcane Focus works like Shadow Focus, you'll need 6% hit to get down to a 1% resist rate.

Your spells against lvl73 mobs have 17% change to miss. Take 10% from Arcane Focus and you are down to 7%.

I think its something like 12.5 hit ratings for each % of hit you want to achieve, and since you can't get a 100% hitrate, you'll need 6 more hits. That puts you at about 75 hit rating to cap the hit for arcane spells.

Hi there,
I'll be hitting 70 with my mage _alt_ (was main in vanilla) pretty soon and will be crafting the spellfire set, but i'm not quite sure about damage/crit values nowadays.
Now, would it be better to socket double 9damage or 5damage 4crit?
Is there by any chance a calculator for it like the rogue AEP system?

I guess my question is this:
1 damage = ?crit rating = ?hit rating

Thanks.

Not so clear cut with a mage. Depends on many factors not least of which is spec and what you do.

Hit hit and more hit (at least until you hit the 16% cap) is what you want for a raiding mage. If all you do with your mage is PvP than you need 3%.

A general formula to find how much 1% crit is worth:

C = Crit Multiplier (1.5 for Arc, 2.0 for Frost, 2.1 for Fire)
E = Effect (1 for Fireball*, 0.814 for Frostbolt*, 0.428 for Fireblast, etc.)
* = If you have 5/5 improved fireball/frostbolt AND 5/5 empowered fireball/frostbolt than 1.05 fireball, .814 frostbolt. If 5/5 than improved fireball/frostbolt AND 0/5 empowered fireball/frostbolt than .9 fireball, .714 frostbolt.
A = Average hit (changes with the amount of damage gear you have)

Q = Damage gear Equivalent (for DPS comparison)

Q = 0.01*(C - 1)*A/E

Now you could value crit more or less depending on build and what you plan to do with your mage. This just gives preview into approximating damage equivalency and crit.

Or you could grab one of the many dps excel spreadsheats in this thread and plug and play some numbers.

Just a small note - while in practice this formula is pretty good for ballpark estimation, in reality equivalence between crit, hit and +dmg isn't static and depends on how much crit/hit you already have.

I'd suggest you try out the Dr.Damage addon as, along with other things, displays the current value of 1% crit for a given spell.

I'm currently working on some better numbers for the water elemental. This is a pretty huge part of frost mage dps (15%-20% at minimum) and I don't think he's currently represented accurately enough in the spreadsheet. I've seen him hit waterbolts for 850 plus and I'm wondering where he can be getting such huge numbers for waterbolt. I'd heard he benefits from 40% of your spell damage. I had a wrath of air totem in my group when he started hitting so hard.

*sudden realization* does he get benefit TWICE from wrath of air? Aka his own 101 spell damage from the totem and 40 more from the increase to my own spell damage?

I should try modeling this.

Please post the proof.

When I did the proof, current crit rate canceled out. (here)

Remember I said the formula worked for how much 1% crit is worth. I'm comparing your crit to crit + 1. So unless the person has 0% crit or 100% crit it should work well regardless of current crit rate.

I'm not saying this formula provides the absolute "worth" of crit, but it works well for feeling out how much 1% crit is vs some +dmg gear. Does crit have more value for you because of MoE, or do you find the peaks of crits put you over threat of the tank too quickly, all valid things to take into consideration ... just like this formula.

The tradeoff between crit/hit and +dmg depends on how much of each you have, but the tradeoff between crit and hit is entirely spec. For example, a frost mage will always get 1% more dps from 1% hit or 1% crit no matter how much +dmg they have, until the hit cap obviously (assuming the traditional 1-roll model, which I believe to be correct).

To follow up on this, I happened to get Robes of the Elder Scribes last night as the only caster on Nightbane--I was curious and figured it was better to try it out rather than sharding.

Have to say, I'm still very skeptical of it. In our clear of the Netherspite trash and the boss, I had it proc a grand total of two times. Did some heroics after the raid, and while in Ramparts, I was getting a proc maybe once per boss...and every 2 or 3 large trash pulls.

The problem is really the duration, IMO. 10s is not very long, and usually I could only get 2 fireballs in before it expired. Of course, as per usual for procs, 50% of the time it procs off the last nuke in the pull.

Given how much static +dmg I lose, I am really doubtful the math on this one evens out. I'm going to ProcWatch it tonight or tomorrow and get some more solid numbers though.

Another proc related question:

Does anyone have Eye of Magtheridon? Would it work on resisted secondary effects of spell. Let's say that I'm a raiding firemage and I take only 1p of imp. scorch. Would it proc on 66% of my Scorches? Or Winters Chill for that matter?

So after all this time do people still feel that Arcane/fire with AB, AB, scorch rotations are the best way to go for mage dps in a raid?

MY gf just levelled her mage to 70 and got Kara keyed =). She didn't play a raid mage since her frost mage in MC =).

We have one mage in my guild who always tops the mage meters. He basically just scorch spams. He also has around 45% crit with Scorch (and I can confirm from him that scorch crits too close will cancel eachother out and the ignite doesn't even appear, or even gets cancelled)

I believe that effects such as fire vulnerability can no longer be resisted as long as the spell that caused them wasn't resisted. In other words, if your scorch hits, it's a 100% chance that the vulnerability will as well.

The "1% more dps" is where mistake lies. Let's see.

Frostbolt (frost to make math easier) deals 2k damage on average, we have 0 spellhit and baseline crit, say 6%. Over 100 casts against boss we have

6 crits = 6*4000=24 000 damage
77 hits = 77*2000 = 154 000 damage

Total 178 000 damage or 1780 average frostbolt hit, adjusted for hit/crit values.

Lets increase our crit chance by 1%.

7 crits = 6*4000=28 000 damage
76 hits = 77*2000 = 152 000 damage

Total 180 000 damage or 1800 average frostbolt hit, adjusted for hit/crit values.

Increase by 20 damage, or 20/1780~1.23%. It it also obvious that more hit/crit you have, the less is the impact of adding more.

There are plenty of posts in this thread not so far back discussing this, but it is generally regarded that deep fire has the highest dmg output at high levels(~820+) of +dmg.

Which is the "best" is all play style and personal preference most likley.

I have been trying out the calculator for quite a while debating with myself whether I should take the plunge and go Arc/Fire or Deep Fire to boost my damage output. By remaining Deep Frost, I was losing roughly 200 DPS in sustained fights from going Fire. Since I am a Shadoweave tailor, I also ran the numbers for an Arc/Frost build. Based on my gear, it actually beats Deep Frost in frostbolt spam by 2 dps (more if WC is present), and using the AB rotation actually gains about 100 dps. I have generic +dmg pieces to replace my tailoring epics, but have just been putting off the experiment.

Anyway.....

My guild just downed Moroes for the first time last night (I know, welcome to January), and we had an interesting situation arise. We only had two priests (so two of the "guests" would be running around without CC). We tried letting the rogue evasion tank one while we burned it down, and then just feared the other. Kept running out of the room, so we tried to have the healing paladin tank it instead of fearing it. Also was a disaster. We had no hunter.

The strategy we wound up using was for the rogue to evasion tank one, while I kited the other one around the room Faxmonkey-style. I have a 10/0/51 spec with a full kiting package (Permafrost, shorter cooldown on CoC, etc...).

After my add went down, I put up 5 Winter's Chill (for Blobby), then did 90 seconds of Water Elemental (Coldsnap - fed by a Shadow Priest, so no mana issues for my little friend).

For this fight and our group composition, 10/0/51 seemed perfectly ideal. My question is this: are there other fights in KZ and beyond where the utility provided by the Frost tree would be so pivotal, or at least come in handy? As a mage, I really want to push the barrier of how damage I can do, but based on our previous attempts, I don't think we could have done this fight if I was unable to effectively offtank (with very minimal healing) this extra mob. And I don't think I could have done that with an Arc/Frost build. Arc/Fire with Slow might have been fine, to be honest - but then I am not gaining as much as I would be from a Deep Fire build.

Do the rest of the fights have more to do with positioning and longevity than, for lack of a better word, trickiness?

On every other fight in kara aside from moroes, just having more dps and longevity would be more beneficial to your group. The only one I can think of that it'd even remotely help to be frost would be oz opera event, for kiting tin man, but any mage can kite him easily enough, deep frost would just do more dmg while kiting.

Eh, I'm deep fire now, and can do the same exact thing just fine. When I was deep arc/fire (with Slow) it was probably even easier to kite with Slow rather than frost. (Slow is insta-cast, and you don't need to be facing the mob.) So you could go 41/20/0 or 43/18/0 and kite as well if not better than your deep frost spec. And the burst dmg of the arcane talents + fire makes holding aggro alot easier.

Anyways, if you find yourself in the same position next time (one ranged, 2 shackles) what we do is have the Moroes OT smack the loose add a couple times so it's on him while he's gaining aggro on Moroes.

I pyro pull the add we're burning down first...the rogue's opening cheapshot and crip poisons provide the snare. Right before that mob dies, I switch to the 2nd "loose" add, that has 2-3 sunders on it from the OT. I start unloading on it, pulling it off the OT, and the DPS finishes off the first add and hops on the 2nd, which I'm now kiting. It's now snared with crip poison as well, (or a frost bolt while it's still on the OT) and dies easily. We just started Karazhan as a guild last week, and my only issues as a fire mage has been aggro...and we don't run with a paladin (yet) so that can be solved easily enough with BoSalv.