It's your tanks - I usually see 800 TPS minimum from mine. Get a hunter to MD during the start if you aren't already.

My first question is are you always POM/Pyro? If so one of your biggest problems is you do not have the threat reduction in the fire tree. Second Subtlety to cloak is amazing to have if your tank is building threat slowly. (I'm going off of the gear you are wearing on armory, because it looks like a raid gear selection and you are 165 hit) Also you realize that if this is your normal spec and gear set you are not hit capped.

What on earth are you referring to? And how does using PoM and Pyro somehow equate to not having Burning Soul? Not to mention, who the hell raids with 21 or more arcane and 11 or more fire anymore?

He was probably responding to Silvance's spec. Who probably specced POM/Pyro for PvP and did not spec burning soul.
Look again, he's now 2/48/11.

The thing about Naientus is that it's a gimick fight (spines, frostward, bandage, and stam), that it's a terrible measure of DPS. 800 TPS is a bit low though, but perhaps it has something to do with your tanks (bad player or low gear), raid composition or what not.
Teron is a much better DPS gauge provided that you don't get to do the constructs.

Yes i was refering to Silvance's question. He asked about threat, and said he waited for 5 stack scorch and started fireball spam. I opened his armory and he was "POM/Pyro", which is why my first question was if that is his normal spec. It was hard to tell, because he had a pvp spec in his raiding gear 9 min after asking the question. I am sorry I wasn't more clear on the subject.

Now that I know he uses 2/48/11 I know more about his situation. I still say Subtlety is the best cloak enchant you could get. When I first started Gruul and Mag I was having the same problem so what i did was give him a 10k head start. i know that is seriously cutting down on your dps time, but having to invis while trinkets and consumables are up is a little bit worse in my opinion. But on that same note the reason my tank was having trouble is the lack of hit and expertise on T4 equiv gear, and he would be slow to start, but once he got rolling he could produce threat quite fast. Ask him politely what his threat rotation is and the check it against the tanking forums.

it's not really any worse, if you can stay up against the tank for the entire fight without using any cooldowns (except invis) then you've done the maximum damage available to you - even if you didn't use a single cooldown

+resist to all schools does not include holy, as far as I know.

There is no such thing as player holy resist in this game. Only NPCs can have holy resist.

I have a quick question about the spell strike hood set bonus vs having hood of hexing/cowl of grand engineer/cowl of trisfal with the spellstike pants. what would give a maximum amount of dps since the hood of hexing has more hit raiting than spell stirke hood but the set bonus of spell stirke is nice. But getting the hood of hexing could let me gem for spell haste alot easier with the increased hit cap and im not sure if i should switch them out. could some body help me anwser my question?

The short answer is "plug in the various combinations on RAWR and see what you get". The answer for what happens when you swap one piece out for antoher depends a lot on the rest of your gear and how you value all the attributes on the gear. As an example, the +15 hit of Hood of Hexing could get you to cap (thus valuable) or it could let you swap out +hit gems or gear elsewhere to fit in more damage, haste or crit. But if it doesn't free up +hit elsewhere and you are past the cap, the extra +hit is worthless.

If you are asking strictly about the spell strike set bonus though, in isolation, here's how to convert it into spell damage (presumably you already have some way of comparing a piece of gear with larger spell damage to a piece of gear with less spell damage when deciding between pieces)

According to the comments on Wowhead, the proc comes up 5% of the time, and lasts 10 seconds. Assuming you're banging away with a 9 fireball/1scorch rotation on a boss, the proc will come up about once in two rotations. Each rotation takes about 30 seconds, os you get 10 seconds of extra spell damage every 60 seconds. 92*10/60 = about 15 spell damage. A bit more or less depending on actual rotation, maybe double that if you are scorch-spamming (but dps is lower). The answer for frost bolt on a deep frost mage is 92*10/50 or 18 spell damage. For arcane-blast-spam it's about 30

So to answer your question, based on what you said, and assuming a fire mage spec, if you can regem "easier" your hood of hexing to get more than +15 spell damage or haste (haste is roughly = spell damage, a bit more or less depending on your gear level) then the switch is worthwhile. If not, then stick with what you've got. (this assumes nothing else about the two hats matter enough to you to tip the decision...hood of hexing has extra stam and int which won't do anything for your DPS but might let you blast longer or stay alive, and should certainly be considered if the damage/haste comes out about the same with both hats)

I don’t know if I looked every where I should have before posting this but I believe I’ve skimmed most of the mage info here in mechanics. Anyway I hope this is in the proper spot (I did read the rules but I tend to skim and miss things and not realize it till later…be gentle)

My mage is level 64 now, she does between 450 and 500 dps. Usually her over all damage percent is high also compared to players with lower DPS. I’m finding though that sometimes players with less DPS have a much shorter gap in damage percent versus DPS. Generally hunters and rogues. Is this because their attack speed is faster so while the damage is less during a hit the average damage done is simply greater? How do mages catch up with this? Is spell haste the answer or is it more feasible to go for high crit/spell damage. I’ll be primarily pvping to gear my mage post 70.

Also I’ve not been able to find much good information on frost mages which is what I am going for. I intended to try going heavy crit frost for pvp. Most people kind of scoff at this, but like I said on elite mobs even in instances slightly above my own level I’m pulling good numbers. I was also trying to find info on crit versus spell damage and the thread I was reading said that 30 spell damage > 20 spell damage + 10crit rating (random wow forum). That didn’t seem right to me. How would you go about figuring crit versus spell damage? (I am really embarrassingly bad at equations so if possible explain the conversion in general terms rather than primarily mathematical language) For frost mages is spell damage really always better than crit? What about for PVP?

I also am having trouble with spec. It doesn’t seem like there is any reason to start moving points into arcane or fire. Neither of the abilities at the top of the tables seem worth spending points to try and get down to anything good. I have points in arcane to increase spell hit but other than that I am just plugging points into everything frost. I’ve never had this issue with a character before. I’ve also had a hard time finding any information on a frost spec. People seem really anti frost table. I don’t even know anyone who uses it to compare point placement or pvp versus pve or end game instance specific stuff. Any information on or reference to a successful frost spec would be great especially if it performs well in pvp.

I was reading the Wiki on Amplify/Dampen Magic, and I would like a little further explanation and hopefully a source of specific boss fights where it is either good or bad to use either.

I understand that periodic effects like Hex Lords Shadow Bolts are not effected by Dampen Magic. Is there a list of specific boss fights where damage is not effected by Amp/Damp Magic? How can i tell?

I’m sorry if I put this in the wrong place. Mage “please help” didn’t seem like exactly the right spot to me. Since I’m replying to your post specifically I’ll go ahead and post here again since that makes the most sense to me. If that’s wrong…oops.

I don’t believe I am thinking wrongly, if it can be put in better terms I would like to know. You might be better educated on the subject but that doesn’t mean my question is stupid it just means I’d like more information which is often the point of questions. I’ll re-arrange it so maybe it’s a little easier to understand. I am trying to understand how my damage works versus other classes. I noticed on my own hunter and even when observing other dps classes on my paladin that often a mage who has very high DPS (damage per second) gap between it’s DPS peers in raids and such would have a smaller gap in the actual damage done (total damage done).

This is how the numbers relate on my meter it’s not exact it’s just to illustrate the difference I’m trying to understand so I can reduce it.

My mage 124532 damage 552dps 37% total damage
Random Hunter 121530 damage 378dps 35% total damage
Person three
Person four
Person five

Etc etc

My DPS is often much higher than whomever is second on the meter’s list but that isn’t true for actual damage done. My question is why are they doing more damage if my damage per second is greater and how can I remedy this. Also, I correlate DPS with damage because up until now while using a meter as an indicator of how damage is progressing as a DPS class the portion of the meter that says DPS shows a number that generally does directly correlate to over all damage. Usually folks on top of DPS are also on top of over all damage. If there is a better way and a page anyone knows of that might illustrate it please link I’d love to get my hands on it.

My character may be pretty low level/gear but the questions have come up. If she’s high enough level to run into the situations it seems logical to ask why and how.

As far as elite mobs I only meant that with increased resistances, increased health, and increased level my mage was doing well with my having put most emphasis on crit rather than spell damage. It’s a little premature possibly to ask the question but it was intended as a…share your experience leme know what to look for if you’ve noticed the same thing sort of a deal. I was comparing 30 spell damage to 20 spell damage 10 crit as in…if you have a piece of gear that has 30 spell damage on it is it better than a piece of gear with 20 spell damage and 10 crit. Which was the example used on the forum that I came across. I didn’t put much stock in it, that’s why I came here. I haven’t been able to find a conversion table that would explain crit versus spell damage.



“Almost all Frost's crit comes from Shatter Combos. These gain the obvious +50% crit chance from shatter, the 5% from emp. frostbolt, and the +10% from winter's chill,”

That bit was useful thank you. I hadn’t thought of that.



As for being incoherent, sorry, seemed coherent to me. I had 3 questions which I separated in 3 paragraphs. The first to do with pve DPS and gaps that confused me concerning my meter and how to rectify that. The second to do with crit versus spell damage. Is spell damage always better and why? The third was about the frost table, another thing I’ve had trouble finding much information on. The over all theme was just that I’d been having trouble finding frost mage info in both pve and pvp situations and a request for any resources anyone might know of. And then I placed it here, which might have been wrong…but it said mage sweet informational…I was askin for some sweet mage info..It made sense to me. So far the sentence quoted above is what I've got, thanks for that : )

With a 5sec search, I discovered these relevant threads:
When to use CoR, Amplify/Dampen Magic?
http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t16014-m..._dampen_magic/

Please search yourself next time.

Toxiccrayons: I did not say your question was stupid, I said it lacked coherent vision. Your post looked like a jumbled assortment of a number of empirical observations which all seemed quite muddled and ultimately only had one question which was "why does my dmg/dps ratio differ to others", which I answered by "you have a different damage time". Nobody ever competes actual damage done because it doesn't matter. It is not an indication of efficiency, it is an indication of practice. Everyone cares how many miles to the galon your car does, not how many miles. The question on the Frost tree looked distinctly like a "teach me how to play" request, and hence I ignored it.

Elite mobs do not have increased resistances, increased health is incidental and irelevant as when we analyze DPS we always refer to Boss DPS, which assumes a boss will last anything from 2-3m in a 5man to 15m in a T5 encounter. Most of the time on this forum we assume a 5m duration as this is the duration of the Brutallus fight, which is the benchmark for Raid DPS.

You do not need to ask a "share your experience" question when there's at least 4 other threads in this same forum, some with over 100 pages of posters doing just that. This is the kind of question asked in wow.com forums. We try not to re-hash casual information at EJ. The onus is on the reader to do his/her research, educate themselves to the "corporate knowledge" of their class and then proceed to ask questions that have not been answered or were not satisfactory. It is understandable and welcome to come up with "what's the difference between 0/40/21 and 2/48/11 on fights which are very short but without bloodlust given Icon and Hex instead of Skull and Hex", because perhaps nobody has looked into it and you couldn't come up with a convincing answer after searching, but coming up with what is essentially "is crit > dmg" which has been inquired about a hundred times is not common practice.

Nevertheless, to your three inquiries:

1) The disparity in your metered damage done is irrelevant. Your results may be skewed from damage-time and/or AoE effects, which other classes do not have. They're also skewed from Poly which counts as damage time (because you're in combat) but produces no damage.

2) Once again: Never is Crit better than Damage, for any mage spec, for any situation, for any setup or raid-grouping. Adding to that, the more effective crit you have, the less value crit rating has. Crit is never, ever something you seek. It's something that "comes with gear".

3) Frost is extremely competitive in 5mans and T4 raids, as well as early T5. If you'd like further information on frost and can't find it on the forums, PM me I'll be happy to elaborate without filling the thread with elementary information on the spec.

Lastly, for PvP, refer to the relevant PvP thread: [Mage] The PVP Thread In Class Mechanics it's more typical to talk of PvE.

Something I was a bit curious on as one of our priests just specced discipline temporarily was if power infusion reduced the mana cost of fully stacked arcane blast by 20% of the total mana cost or 20% of the base mana cost. This will determine how much I should pester her in early BT.

Based on how similar percentile cost modification results work, ie: AP and T5 bonus, I'd assume it's a mod to the base 195 mana cost. It's not particularly complex rocket science, however. Take your friend to Dr. Boom, ramp up, ask for a PI and see.

At the risk of being redundant, as I'm sure this topic has been covered ad nauseum, I have a question/concern about the hit cap for frost with 3/3 EP. I realize that the first page of this topic mentions the extra 1% per point in EP for frostbolt, thus making the effective hit cap for FB 126, as is mentioned on many other sites, but my recent observations are telling me different.

One example I can think of is a recent Shattered Halls run. During the first half of the run, my spell hit was about 135 or so. For the first boss (Nethekurse), my WWS report showed 6.7% FB resist. Am I reading this properly, or is something wrong with my gear? During the 2nd and 3rd boss fights, I swapped a few pieces of gear to reach ~166 spell hit, and WWS shows zero FB resists. It's quite possible that the first boss has some sort of magic resist, so this example may be poor. I'm not sure...

Example WWS: WWS Loading...

Another example that comes to mind is a recent full Kara run in which there was another frost mage with more or less equivalent gear to me. I actually had a bit more crit and our frost bonus damage was about the same. My spell hit was ~135, his was 164. I was consistently down on damage by 2% when we compared numbers. Later, when I swapped gear to get my hit to 164, our damage was about equal -- meaning my damage increased by a noticeable margin. There wasn't much AoE here... just frostbolt spam. I do not have a WWS report for this one, unfortunately.

I don't know if there is a definite answer, but just from my observations, it seems Blizzard has "fixed" the ghost hit for frostbolt. Am I missing something here? It's fine if I'm wrong, but my observations don't jive with what is currently accepted.

I know that these examples are far from being a controlled environment, but it's the best I have.

You only need 164(126 frost with EP) hit against level 73's. The bosses in a heroic are only level 72, so you should only need 6% (this means you are hit capped with EP with the ghost hit), so it's not a hit problem.We'd need a wws report really to evaluate the karazhan, as it could be any number of things.

Your sample size is simply too small to tell us anything useful - 1 resist in 15 casts on the boss.

Looking at my last wws report of tanking Zerevor, where i have 6% hit from gear my resist rates are 5.4% and 3.3%. (The resist rates on WWS are wrong as it includes the "immune" hits when he has spell warding)
Wow Web Stats

None of this is conclusive ofcourse, but I havn't yet seen anything that suggests that EP has been fixed.

That's what I figured... I realize my sample size is too small to be very useful.

I'm thinking I should just chalk this up to being a figment of my imagination...

On the other hand, wouldn't you want 164 hit anyway if the ghost hit only applies to frostbolt?

Granted, there usually isn't a lot of AoE in raids, except for maybe Hyjal trash... I suppose a few resists on a crapload of Blizzard hits won't really matter too much.

Resist rates are level based. Raid bosses are considered +3 levels (73) which is why they require so much hit. However, the highest a 5-man boss gets is level 72. Resist rate against a mob +3 levels is 17%, but resist against +2 levels is only 94%. Bugged elemental precision alone is enough to reach the cap, and even if you didn't have it at all the cap would only be 63. There has to be something else going on if you noticed a difference since swapping out for more hit does nothing.

As far as Kara goes, there are too many variables there to account for a difference in DPS between you and another mage. Just look at your own boss stats over an extended period of time (don't mix numbers with trash since their hit and lack of fully stacked winters chill most of the time will skew the results).

Yes, indeed there is more going on: you always have a 1% chance to miss.

Missing 1 out of 10 frostbolts on a level 72 mob and coming to EJ to post that Blizzard fixed the ghost hit isn't really a shining example of exhaustive research.