I have a question thats been bugging me for the mage theorycrafters out there. What percent dps increase should a hit-capped fire mage expect to see from a 3% increase in crit chance (ie, totem of wrath)? Based on just reading talents, I was expecting 3.3% overall dps increase, but every calculator (rawr, vontre's, lhivera's) I've tested puts the value at 2.2-2.3%. What am I missing?

When you have 30% crit already, increasing crit by 3% brings you up to 33%.

30% crit leads to dealing 1+0.3*1.1=1.33 of non-crit damage. 33% crit leads to dealing 1+0.33*1.1=1.363 of non-crit damage. 1.363/1.33=1.0248 or 2.48% DPS increase (and very slightly cheaper spells which is almost neglicible).

The reason you get less is that the increase is added up to an already existing increase, so when you look at newDPS/oldDPS you get a smaller relative increase than if your oldDPS would've had 0 crit chance.

Another way to look at it is that (aside from mana returns) 1% crit adds the same amount of DPS regardless of your chance to crit (but depending on all your other stats), so the more crit you have the more DPS you have and thus the % DPS increase of 1% crit will be smaller (same DPS increase is divided by higher oldDPS).


On a side note on top of all the good comments that have already been made, 10% of your DPS coming from scorches is pretty bad. Even as the only fire mage you should still try to keep scorches to a minimum while not risking the debuff to fall off. Generally doing a scorch when there are 6 secods left (plus whatever time you may lose in the process due to casts not chaining perfectly). That way you cast a fireball immidiately after the scorch and don't have to wait to see if it got resisted, and if it did get resisted you still have time for another scorch after the fireball. An alternative is to just scorch so that it hits right before it wears off, risking 1% chance of it falling off and having to restack. I should do the math sometime to figure out which way is better but either way would give far lower than 10% scorch DPS, and higher overall DPS than what you're getting while never losing the scorch debuff (1/100 times (or once per 300 seconds) with the 2nd method and 1/10000 times (or once per 30000 seconds) with the first).

Also keeping 1 mage in charge of scorching can be nice for a 100% tank&spank fight, but in real fights it's generally not a good idea unless you have amazing communication. If you get ice tombed, silenced, flamestriked, airbursted or had the mob moved out of your range, some other mage will need to scorch, which he probably won't if he's assuming you're his "scorch-bitch". Again you could get around it and have only 1 mage scorching with great communication but I've yet to hear of someone who actually manages to do it (as in, use a "scorch bitch") properly on a one of the many fights where you could lose your ability to refresh scorch at a critical time. It's possible but hard to do and having each mage refresh scorch himself right as it's about to wear off generally gives better results when you raid with real people.

Hey Galzohar,

Thanks for the response. I see what you're saying, but using the same calculators to add 3% crit to a warlock instead of a mage gave a flat 3% increase to personal dps (plus an additional 0.4-0.6% in increased ISB uptime). This leads me to think the discrepancy lies in basic mage mechanics, rather than semantics in the output number, since the same calculator is returning 2.3% for the mage and 3% for the warlock using identical input numbers. The only thing that I could come up with would be something to do with overwriting ignites giving diminishing returns at high crit rates, but I haven't been able to find any calculations describing this. Anyways, it's bugging me because I know its probably something very obvious that I'm missing.

For warlocks crit also adds to ISB uptime (how much depends on the raid setup, check lieuler's spreadsheet in the (another) warlock DPS spreadsheet thread for reference), which means that even though the direct DPS is increased by slightly less than for a mage, there is also extra DPS from ISB procs that can up the crit value where 1% crit can get somewhere around 1% DPS increase when you account the raid's extra DPS from higher ISB uptime to that 1% crit.

If you ignored ISB, 1% crit for a destruction warlock would be slightly less powerful than 1% crit for a mage for relative DPS increase.

ISB is skewing the results in crit's favor. It is also a very valid reason why simulators largely display bullshit when simming locks. You get a huge variance from including other locks/SP and varying SP playstyle (MF doesn't consume charges, while SW and Mild Blast do) to ISB behaviour.

The main benefit from having a ToW in your group is you can change your gear around to make use of the surplus 3% hit. Dropping hit gear, particularly below T6 level, is a very effective way of gaining surpluss damage. Once 4/8 T6 it becomes hard to drop much hit so unless you're stuffed with 2.4 gear you'll end up using 1-2% of the hit buff at most. 3%crit, sadly is never anywhere near 3%dmg increase. I suspect it isn't for a warlock that high either, not unless it's him and an affli, with only 1 SP in the raid.

I'm positive this would have been revealed ages ago, but forgive a stupid question. It's been proven that gems don't use rounded values, right?

A pure +dam gem and a pure +hit gem is not as good an option as two +dam/+hit combined gems, because the multistat gems have 1 more total damage. I never paid close enough attention to see if I actually got that 1 extra damage after gemming my gear.

For example, the UI would show a gem as having 4 hit and 5 damage, but the real value was 4 hit and 4.5 damage. Two of those gems would actually provide 8 hit and 9 damage, while we're expecting 8 hit and 10 damage. I can't believe something like this would have been missed, so it's stupid to ask about it I bet ... it's just been nagging me for a bit and I'm not going to re-gem my gear just to find out the obvious.

I'm not sure whether this is more of a "Post 2.4 TC" thread question ; however I'm rather desperate for an answer to the following questions :

Recently I have started raiding with my mage again after a break between November 07 and the onset of 2.3. My old 10/48/3 soon became 2/48/11 and the world of combusted icy veins brought me glee and mirth. I then more recently decided that for the gear I have and the lack of experience in BT/MH I have, frost would see me living for longer, seeing more of the fights from safety, and therefore allowing me to "get up to speed" in these newer encounters faster. It also gave me 3% more hit for frostbolts over the fire spec ; and this allowed me to swap out some seriously inferior hit rating items. Happy days farming raid materials too.

I now have opted for, and been surprised with the results of, an arcane spec of 40/0/21. Whilst my frostbolts are low on hit, my ABs are hit capped and I very much enjoy the challenge of managing my mana, my cooldowns, and generally experimenting with gear and buffs I have access to.

My questions really are - What is the new thinking on the best elixirs and flasks? if there is any...

I see now that intellect affects mana regen from spirit, yet unfortunately there's no handy hint on the mouse over in the character pane so whilst I can see my mana regen (300 while casting ish raid buffed I think) I wonder whether Flask of Distilled wisdom would be better than Supreme Power, for example, due to the mana gains. Also I have used in the past Flask of Might Restoration (Pre 2008) to help with mana management ; though most recently I have found less of an effect from this, and preferred Flask of Supreme Power. To be honest, we are working now and soon on content which our guild hasn't yet tried ; namely Archi and RoS ; having recently downed Bloodboil for the first time. I over-complicate these things.. So I will interrupt myself [with no gcd]..

Now that mages get more mana regen while casting from the arcane tree (since Nov 07 when I stopped playing) and that Icy Veins/Arcane is a fun spec that I enjoy, is there agreement on the best flasks to use whilst using AB spam interceded with 2 or more frostbolts to help the mana situation. I am tempted to use mp5 food, mighty restoration (or distilled wisdom ; I'm really not sure which of these two flasks is better, and elixirs are out of my budget for this moment) mage armor and maybe even Mark of Defiance, and try to get to a position where AB spam is viable for a whole Teron fight, Bloodboil fight or Archi fight perhaps.

Whilst I'm not looking for a "Use this. Don't use that" and whilst a "With you armory gear and WWS results Wow Web Stats Wow Web Stats you really should be fire" would not help me as I'm keen to move forward with this spec for the moment ... I would ask for someone to just throw some thoughts at me; perhaps link me some pages or direct me to responses in other threads here on the (awesome /end groupie mode, I love TC on EJ) EJ forum that can give me more information on particularly the spirit/int regen of mages now, the usefulness of the flasks I mention for this spec, and or anything else that you think can move my understanding forward.

Edit : spelling

I don't think mana regen should be an issue after this patch on any fight... Someone did throw around [Elixir of Draenic Wisdom] being about 31.5 mp/5 and increases your mana pool to boot. So that and a [Adept's Elixir] for acane is probably the best combo right now for mana regen.

A few weeks ago, I took [Ring of Captured Storms] when it drop which was a decent upgrade at the time. Now just recently I hit exalted with The Scale of the Sands and got the upgraded ring and now I've got a problem which of the 3 rings should I use.

I have : [Ring of Captured Storms] [Band of the Eternal Sage] [Ring of Ancient Knowledge]

To the best of my theorycrafting [Band of the Eternal Sage] and [Ring of Ancient Knowledge] seems to be the best combo, but when I go Dr. Boom Testing, [Band of the Eternal Sage] and [Ring of Captured Storms] seems like it out performs the other combo. I don't know maybe my spell rotation but I seriously doubt that. Any help would be appreciated.

Are you doing a timed test or a full mana pool test? If you're doing a full mana pool test, then haste gear will generally be worse, as you're simulating a situation in which your damage is limited by mana. If you're doing a timed test, you have to see whether the duration of your dps is long enough so that you'd be able to get off any extra casts in the duration or not. The one problem with the duration test on Dr. Boom is that you can only test for so long because you don't have VT/JoW/BoW/Mana Stream/Tide/etc, unlike a real fight where you can dps for quite a while.

Logis, as some people pointed out in these mage threads...testing dmg with gear changes on Dr. Boom varies ridiculously.

So don't bother using Dr Boom for test purposes.

For practical purposes, you're better off using WWS log parses or Recount stats after a raid.


And yes Band of the Eternal Sage and Ring of Ancient Knowledge are better assuming you're hit capped.

If you're unsure of your theorycrafting just use Rawr or some dmg modeling program.

Is there a macro for fireball that has a modifier that blows all the cool downs when you press the modifier?

i imagine this would do the trick:

/cast [mod:shift] Combustion
/cast [mod:shift] Icy Veins
/use [mod:shift] Icon of the Silver Crescent
/cast Fireball

customize to your needs.

Just looking at Rawr with the best pre-2.4 gear (Ele Shaman included), I have noticed that Ring of Ancient Knowledge is better than Band of the Eternal Sage. I'm not sure if Rawr considers the proc or not, but even by my own math I have found that the Ancient Knowledge is superior. Why then did I never see a mage with 2xRing of Ancient Knowledge?

Because pre 2.4 the exalted ring proc lasted 15s, not 10s (yes despise the tooltip text). This made it the best-in-slot ring for all sub-3min fights. It was never an optimal ring for 3+min fights. Now that in 2.4 its down to 10s proc, its fairly much total garbage.

Also, you never saw a mage with double ancient knowledge ring because mana attuned band/ancient knowledge is a superior combo. The only case where that wasn't the case was for arcane spec, which could not make efficient use out of spell haste pre 2.4 because of 1.5s GCD.

Oh, of course. I was only revered pre-2.4, so I often forget that it used to be bugged. I still don't see how Mana Attuned Band would be superior, as with Totem of Wrath (and in my case, Inspiring Presence) I find it hard to create an optimal gear set (again, pre-2.4 for simplicity's sake) and drop below 9% hit to justify the hit on the Mana Attuned Band. Perhaps I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective.

I am sorry if it has been beaten to death already, but I recently rerolled from a ret paladin to a mage for end game raiding... and after keeping up with the 100+ page thread on ret pallies, it seems easier than reading the 4+ threads of mages that seem to have no connection at all

My real question is this... I wanted to raid as 40/0/21 simply because I enjoyed it far more than deep fire, but both mages I talk to, mages on here and rawr all say different things about gems....

I hear some people say int/spi gems are good, then see others with full spinels with the same spec... and it is really confusing...

Also, I remember a long time ago a mage friend of mine made a comparison that was something like 10 spell dmg = 13 hit = 16 crit (don't remember the numbers exactly anymore) Is there a general accepted comparison like that anymore including haste?

And those of you who have raided end game content with 40/0/21 what sort of rotation do you use? Is it AB spam and then drop down to AB/FBx3 rotation?

Thanks a lot for any responses, and if this info is out there somewhere if you could just direct me to even just the proper of the multiple threads that would be great :P

*edit after manly's response* So obviously I was a bit mistaken in this regard as well, originally I was saying that fireblast can have a spot if you cast it immediately after scorch. After taking what Manly is talking about into account fireblast pretty much should be used only if you are moving around and still want to do some damage.


The mages who say to go for int/spi are pretty much on track, the reason being as arcane the more mana you have the more damage you can do regardless of the fight, you can ALWAYS use more mana regardless of the length of fight because of the nature of arcane blast. The mages who gem differently usually do so not because its the optimal way to gem, they don't want to spend a few hundred gold every time they respec back and forth from fire and arcane just to keep their DPS a bit higher.

With regards to your mage friends comparison, I don't know where he got his numbers from but what Id imagine he's talking about is how much spell hit relates to spell crit and spell damage. To make this clear, this isnt how they relate to each other in terms of DPS or anything like that. The way spell hit works is you will always want to keep it topped off at 16% but beyond that point it becomes worthless (Im sure you already know this just restating it). With spell hit, the way we gear is we'll just switch out gems whenever our numbers go higher or lower to give us the same cap. So I'll often switch Veiled Noble Topaz and Potent Noble Topaz for each other. Since they both have the same amount of spell damage and they both offer either 4 spell hit or 4 spell crit, we can now say that when comparing spell hit gear to spell crit gear, 1 crit=1 hit just because of how interchangeable they are. If you wanted I can do a similar comparison with spell damage gems vs hit again. I'm sure you're noticing that with my comparison 1 hit=1 crit whereas your friend said 13 hit=16 crit, this just changes based on which gems you are using. The underlying concept is the same, your friend isnt talking about how hit crit and damage relate to each other in terms of DPS, that is virtually impossible to do 100% accurately because of the nature of crits, the more spell damage you have the more effective your crits become and vice versa, theres never one 'perfect' comparison for the two variables. All he's saying is when you're trying to choose your gear and determining how much spell hit is worth before you're maxed, it's the above ratio.

The way you want to do your AB rotation isnt really spam AB then frostbolt some and start AB up again, that looks good on paper but the main problem is that if you do this you let your AB debuff run out and thus lose your increase in DPS from that. What you instead want to do, is AB a few times, frostbolt, AB a few times, frostbolt and keep repeating the process. The key is no matter how often you cast FB, you want to at the very least cast AB enough to keep the debuff up. In this case, I cant really give a perfect rotation to use either because it depends on how long the fight is, if you have a really long fight you'll want to frostbolt more and arcane blast less, if its really short you're gonna get closer to 100% AB spam. The one thing that is worth mentioning here, when you are first starting your AB spam, you want to do AB -> FB -> AB -> FB -> AB -> FB. The reason this is important is because there is a slight delay between when the AB is cast and when the debuff is applied. The casting speed of the spell is calculated at the start of the cast, the cost of the spell is calculated on cast. So when you do AB AB AB the first AB works right, the second AB still has the slowest cast time and yet you pay for it as if it was an AB with a reduced cast time. If you split up the ABs with frostbolts, you then get the increased speed you should get from the spell cast.

Actually, you are wrong. The problem with that thread is that it was a work in progress and the final standoff position quite deviated from the start. You see, all debuffs seems to be scheduled to be ran 'later on' by the server, probably as a way to make the servers run on multiple processors and remain efficient. The end result of this is that doing scorch/fireblast is not garanteed to have them land in that order. It seems like the returned order in the combatlog matches the order they are ran on the server. And it won't always be scorch/fireblast despise the fact that logically it should be that way. So here is what happens, roughly

scorch lands, ignite debuff scheduled to be put later on the mob (this seems to be ~100ms from limited testing)
fireblast lands, ignite debuff not counting the previous one because it wasn't there yet at tiem of casting/landing.. ignite is scheduled to be applies later.

fireblast ignite ticks (scorch ignite lost)
fireblast ignite ticks

hi. this is my first entry
this looks like a very competent forum, my friend gave me the tip to visit this site.

of course i reached the hitcap of 164.
you say after hitcap haste is the more important than +dmg.
whats the relation?

is haste 2 times more important than +dmg? so it is 2:1

and crit? imo 1 critpoint is worth 0,7 dmg

please give me a relationship to these parameters

nice would be a gearlist such as follows (for shadowpriest)


shadowpriest.com :: View topic - Best Raiding Gear Available

i am going to raid bt, hyjal soon and i have to know which items i should prefer

ty very much

It varies on your gear and spec obviously, but for PvE Fire specced mages the stats work out something like

1 haste = 1.1 dmg
1 crit = 0.7 dmg

ok ty

i found lootrank.com

question how to handle this:

Loot Rank

for mage. i specced 10-48-3 (i know that 2-48-11 makes more dps but i have a lot of crafted items, so i need a good mana efficiency)

i tipped in (everything unbuffed)

i have the citcap (166) and skilled 3% in the frost tree. do i take 166 or 202 for this simulation?

+dmg 940
crit 27%
haste: 0
mp5: 0

how can the spellstrike hood be better than the head of illidan?
score of spellstrike hood is 8284 and from illidan 6793? i am confused

also the programm suggests 3x 10hit stones although i dont need all 3.

i dont understand that