There is still one Arcane Mage and due to getting 13% curse of shadows (the fire Mages never get CoE), he is pretty close to them in damage. It sucks that it takes 13% damage buff and wearing 2 Tier 5 to be competitive to Fire, but it works well for him.

Another note is he doesn't have to respec Frost for Illidan, although shatter and iceblock are nice tools to have.


I have parsed quite a few Frost Mages, the EP talent gives 6% hit to all frost spells (although it could be fixed anytime), I think that is worth putting up there until it is fixed, so Frost Mages don't go over 10% hit.

Once again I notice the age-old Meta or non-Meta head argument raging.

Granted, T4 & T5 have badly distributed stats. Does nobody ever wear the engineering head? It's pretty darn sweet in terms of item budget allocation.

I know engineers are a minority but I for one am not taking off the goggles (or the CSD) for a long while to come.

I have absolutly no idea why there are some people that give the new meta game less credit than it deserves.

Someone said "It's only a 1-1.5% increase in dmg". This is actually true (dependant), but I dont think the poster knows exactly how big that is.

Let's do some math around the CSD to see exactly how good it is, and why the T5 helm can beat the Cowl from VR when you're hit capped, or will get hit capped with either of them (And seriously, if you can loot the headpiece from Vashj, you should be able to reach closer hitcap values without putting 8 hitgems in a headpiece - Not to mention how easy it is to cap as arcane for example) Let's even look at how it would look in comparision if the last piece for the 4set bonus was the helm.

I'm going to use my own dmg from our last Vashj to kill show just how good it is. Remember CSD scales with crit, so a firemage would probably get a greater value in the right group.

527816 total dmg

251940 LB crit dmg
59279 CL crit dmg

311219 total crit dmg over 610 seconds.
RED dmg = 9071 (1.72%) 14.8 DPS.

So how good is 14.8 DPS exactly?
1 spelldmg is roughly 0.33DPS~
14.8DPS = 44.8~ Spelldmg.

(assuming reaching hit cap with the stats given through the helm, distributing gems and stat items diffrently in other pieces)

Cowl from VR:
73 spelldmg
21 hit rating
39 crit rating

Cowl of Tirisfal:
99.9 spelldmg
40 crit rating
5 hitrating

27~ more spelldmg
1 more crit rating
alot less hitrating

Assuming you somehow get capped through the headpiece, the T5 helm beats the Cowl from VR because CSD is so good.
Let's assume that the head piece was the last piece you swapped to get the 4piece setbonus, then I dont think there is anything to discuss really. With 40%~ crit you can atleast count on a static 50dmg~ gain from the setbonus, and suddenly when you swapped from the cowl to the T4 headpiece you made a 80+dmg upgrade - Just like that!

To really compare meta gems I would give them a spell damage value based on my gear. % means nothing unless you at least know how much spell damage, crit etc you need for 1%.
In fact I was always remembering how much of X stat I need for 1% and use that value to convert stats, since most effects are easily converted into a +% damage (haste, crit, hit, MSD proc...). CSD can be easily converted into additional crit rating based on your current crit, as well, and you should know how good crit rating is for you.

What should be noted as a sure thing though, helms with meta sockets are obviously total crap with a meta different than MSD/CSD, when compared to anything anywhere near it in terms of progression. Spellstrike beats hands down T4/5 if you're not using MSD/CSD, and still seems to be beating T4 with my gear at least with the spellstrike set bonus included.

Doesnt matter what value you want to give it. If you say it's X% DPS that's enough. When I translated it to +dmg I merely did it to show how good it is, and it is easy to convert DPS to dmg not considering what you are using so..

Spellstrike is indeed better than T4. It's when you're closing in on T5 4 pieces it gets interesting to replace it.

The comparison is between the +X% that the CSD gives (which is a static number equal to 0.03 * the crit percentage) vs the Engineer/Spellstrike/Hexing's crit/hit rating that is given.

[Cowl of the Grand Engineer] gives over 3% from hit and crit ratings (assuming two +8 hit gems) vs the [Cowl of Tirisfal]. It's actually really simple to see if you plug in the items to a spreadsheet.

With a 100% crit rate, my damage would go up exactly 3% with a CSD.

Assuming my Fireballs hit for 100 damage, a critical hit would be for 210 damage. A critical hit with a CSD would be for 216.3 damage, a 6.3% increase on my regular hit but only a 3% increase from my actual critical hit.

I do keep forgetting that CSD gives 12 crit rating, but a Cowl of the Grand Engineer is still slightly better than the Tier 5 helm just based on the hit rating (worth 2.5% or so of a bonus). And realistically, the main thing to look at is how useless spirit is for a mage now- the 24 spirit on the Tier 5 helm is hurting it a lot more than the metagem socket.

Yeah, you're right, I misinterpreted, although it seems that it would go up 4.5% if you were frost spec, because Ice Shards multiplies the bonus from CSD.

I guess CSD is only better than the tooltip implies if you have a proper crit multiplier increase talent instead of the odd Ignite mechanic.

Honestly, though, it's more and more common to evaluate items ignoring their hit due to how easy it is to hitcap, and if you're Arcane spec(which is what performs best at the T5 gear level, and what the set is designed for) then this isn't a concern.

If you only have access to T5 content for some reason, then I'd say T5 helm with CSD is still significantly better than the Cowl.

I have a question about the weight of stats

Is there any background or additional info available on why spellhaste>spell damage?
I would assume it is up to a certain extent, any chance you could include some values up to where its not really usefull anymore to increase your haste rating?.

Around 900 spell haste rating (unless I failed utterly when I decided to see if I could do it), fireballs become GCD limited. It's not possible to reach that much spell haste rating (passively), so it's always going to give a decent boost. The problem is that spell haste gear has crappy other stats, usually.

I could, of course, be utterly failing at "the math", though.

I always thought it went spell hit > spell damage > spell crit >= haste rating

You thought wrong. For most specs spell damage and spell haste in fact give almost identical benefit, with haste marginally ahead (1haste~=1.05dmg). This is perfectly reasonable given that it does not improve DPM. Any simulator will demonstrate equivallence including Vontre's Sheet and Lhivera's TC.

Roywyn: Note it has been anounced that CSD req will change from "2 blue" to "at least two blue" some time in the future. Though at T6 level this means nothing (you still have to sub a pair of purples for a pair of +12s) but at lower ilevel it makes for better benefits as many useful items have blue socket req with decent bonuses (eg. Badge gloves, belt of blasting).

(Not aimed at Ignus) Given that we're all capable of at least plugging some stats into a web-page can we all stop re-iterating the age-old "can someone please post how much +dmg is x haste/hit/crit/croissant?" please. It's getting tiring.

If you're not hitcapped then absolutly the Grand Engineer is better, but it would be unwise to not stack hit somewhere else to cap out hit so you can get the great benefit of something that scales really well and gives you alot more than other items would when it comes down to DPS gain - assuming hit cap.

When evaluating the item vs item, it's not hard to see which one is better indeed, but as I said in my above post with calcs, if you consider getting hit capped with other items the T5 helm will win, even if you dont get the 4set bonus - and if you do it'll win by a pretty huge margin.

Think I'm more interested in T6 helm/illidary cowl over getting T5 helm tbh as an upgrade/replacement of Grand engineer. I tend to prefer getting certain stats I need via gems since it's easier to do 1:1 replacements via gems than items where it's nearly impossible.

I dont want to sound rude, but if you are at that level of raiding, why would you want the T5 over T6 or Illidari cowl in the first place?

If you're not, then well, I hate to repeat myself, but capping hit elsewhere and getting the T5 helm would be a upgrade from the grand engineer.

It's about distributing your stats to gain the most from certain items to get a overall upgrade.

I'm not too far away from it atleast, 3/5 hyjal, 5/9 BT with 7 bosses in last 8 days =D But still what my point was, I think the gain would be marginal and a waste of time to spend getting to atm. Not to mention it is my beliefe that T5 is better for warlocks to spend their points on than mages.

This should be edited to reflect how Elemental Precision effects Frostbolt

And on the topic of bugged Ele Pre for frostbolt, I'd like to add that the Cowl loses more and more value if we take the hit out of the equation... 125 hit is cake to get without taking head into account with even the most modest of gemmings given T5 level gear. I appreciate that for a fire spec far from cap Cowl and the ZA head are better, but I maintain many of you are putting down the CSD merely because you prefer the itemization of the item with the meta socket.

Fine, but this thread is not the TC thread, it's the FAQ for fresh mages coming here basically. Don't get an attitude about 'we've been over this a bajillion times, GOSH!', that's what this thread is meant to help solve.
At least put up the link to lhivera's page, Lhivera's Theorycraft Script, in the first post also, then. It's easier to use then the spreadsheet for most people.
If someone brings up things like this in the TC thread or elsewhere, you point them to this thread.

I'm working on modelling Spell Haste at the moment, so this caught my attention. I've seen the spell haste ratio quoted above (1 haste ~= 1.05 dmg) a few times on several topics here lately, and want to interject an important caveat that may seem obvious, but may not in fact be obvious to everyone: incremental amounts of spell haste will normally provide no DPS increase whatsoever.

Haste will always give you extra mobility, but haste only adds DPS once you've cast enough that you get an additional nuke. After that first extra nuke, the value of haste oscillates depending on the number of extra nukes you've cast, approaching some maximum limit defined by the average damage of your given nuke.

For example (warning, extremely simplified), if you have 20% haste (a passive 314 haste rating) and your fireballs do an average of 3000 damage, your fifth fireball is an 'extra,' and is effectively worth an additional 600 damage for each of those 5 fireballs (making the spell haste worth about 521 +dmg with empowered fireball). The next fireball you cast brings the effective bonus down to 500 damage per fireball, then 429, and so on until you've cast 10 fireballs, whereupon you're now back up to 600 additional damage per fireball.

If you're only dabbling in spell haste - say you have only 4% (62.8 rating), it's going to take you 25 nukes before you realize any benefit at all. After that, the benefit will dwindle to almost nothing until you cast your 50th nuke.

Hence, the more haste you get, the better, not just because of the raw boost it gives you, but because it's easier to actually obtain a benefit from it in the first place, and more likely that you'll maintain that benefit since the bonus nukes come more frequently.

EDIT: For "DPS" above, read instead "Damage." As others have pointed out, haste does in fact increase DPS in a linear fashion. By lazily referring to DPS, I ended up obfuscating my main point, which is that focusing on the DPS increase provided by spell haste obscures the variability of the benefits it provides at low levels.

No, that's not an accurate way of modeling the scenario. You will notice that in any scenario with random interruptions, scorch will deal a greater percentage of it's potential damage than fireball (though fireball does more damage overall). Why is this? Because scorch is much faster. Random interruption means it can happen at any time. A longer cast spell means there is more potential time lost due to an interruption. Interruption can occur at any point within the spread of a 3 second interval; the average time lost due to an interruption would be 1.5 seconds, and the maximum possible time loss is 2.99~ seconds. For a scorch, interruption can occur at any point within a 1.5 second interval; the average is .75 seconds, and the maximum possible time loss is 1.49~ seconds. Haste has a very real value here, in that a faster spell is less likely to be interrupted at a bad time. If there are no interruptions, then the spell will almost certainly reach the number of interations required to gain that 'extra' cast.

Only, you need 1570 haste rating to get 1.5s fireballs.

final_spell_cast_time = talented_spell_cast_time / (1 + spell_haste_in_percent)
1.5 = 3 / (1 + x)
x = 1 (ie: 100% spell haste -> 1570 haste)