Mage Talent Progression and Gear Progression

I came across an interesting topic today, so decided to share my thoughts on the whole thing. I'm making a couple of assumptions right off the bat about you the mage, so I'll spell it out. First off you are concerned about performing the best you can in your current gear in a raid and topping the damage meter. Second you don't mind switching between specs, including getting new glyphs, and regemming your gear to optimize your damage. This takes quite a bit of cash. In total for me to switch from Arcane spec to Fire spec I spent about 400g. That included 10g for the respec at the trainer, and the rest went towards buying gems and glyphs for my new spec.

As a mage you are going to fall into one of several categories, which I'll define for you, and this will help you determine which spec will be best for you. One last thing that I assume is that you stack as much spell power as you can. Spell power is the single biggest contributor to damage that you can get as a mage after you reach hit cap for your spec, so stack on the spell power.

Category 1:

In your gear gemmed and enchanted, you have less than 368 spell hit. This would be most mages starting off. Coming out of leveling with the best items you can get from questing and dungeons, and with a few crafted items, you should scrape up all the spell hit you can get. Ignore spell haste and spell crit at this level and focus on getting those items that will increase your spell hit. At this stage Arcane is your best friend. With an Arcane build 56/3/12 you only need 289 spell hit to be capped thanks to Arcane Focus and Precision.

Category 2:

After a while as your progress through gear having a spell hit of 368 will be within reach for you. At this point (or even before that) you want to take a look at your gear and see how your spell crit and spell haste stack up. If you are heavy on spell crit, then at this point it would make sense to go with a Frostfire build 0/53/18. If you are heavy on spell haste then you would probably want to stick with Arcane until you build up at least 20% spell crit. I prefer the Arcane spec myself, so I stay with Arcane up until I reached Category 3. You can even switch over to the Frost spec 18/0/53 at this point if you like frost. If you go frost you want to cap your spell hit, then stack on the spell power and spell haste. I avoided taking Brain Freeze in my frost build, but YMMV, so check it out for yourself.

Category 3:

You have reached the pinnacle of spell hit, you can get to 446 spell hit with gems, enchants and gear. You will most likely have a decent amount of spell crit (at least 20%) even if you haven't been trying to get spell crit. At this point fire spec outshines frostfire, arcane, and frost. The main reason is that much of the gear at this level has huge amounts of crit, spell power and spell hit, and fire spec can do slightly more DPS than frostfire once you have reached the hit cap for fire spec. The build I use here is 18/53/0. The lack of any talents for spell hit means you have to gear to reach hit cap without any boost from talents. I didn't reach this point until I had a decent amount of gear from Ulduar 10, Heroic Trial of the Champion, and Naxxramas 25.

Beyond these levels I have yet to test, but progression looks to favor staying with the fire spec as Blizzard continues to pile on the spell crit on all the mage sets. I do sometimes miss my Frost and Arcane builds, as I like them both, but without spell haste on my gear to support these builds, I am just not competitive in dps.

Difficult Choices

So patch 3.2 hit last night, and I'm feeling the aftermath. CoDS went into the new 10-man crusader raid last night and got chewed up and spit out. We wiped a few times on the very first mini-boss before figuring out that we needed to switch tanks once the main tank got the bleed effect. Also the 15-yard radius around the boss in which spell casters shouldn't stand. We finally downed him but with only 3 left alive out of our 10, and the jormungers (or however it's spelled) ate us rather quickly. I'll chalk it up as a lesson learned: we are way undergeared for that content right now, even the first few mini-bosses. I am glad we got to see a fight first-hand without already knowing the fight, and able to analyze it and down it.
So in the aftermath of the patch I started updating all my addons and updated my rawr with the new gear today, and while I was playing with rawr noticed that my spec is no longer ahead of the Frostfire nor the Fire spec in damage. So that leaves me with a difficult choice now. Do I switch specs to the more popular frostfire spec and fire spec as my main and off spec, or do I keep my good old frost spec as a back and just jump into the fire spec, or do I keep arcane as my secondary spec. I'm a bit conflicted as I have really grown to like my arcane, and I have gotten quite good at it, but I'll be starting all over again if I go with either of these new specs, and I'll now be looking for spell crit gear vs spell haste gear, which means no going back once the change has been made. I guess I have been fighting the inevitable, since Blizzard has piled on the spell crit with the Tier 8 gear, so why fight it? I'll probably swap out my frost spec first so that I can keep my arcane spec available in case I have trouble with the learning curve of a new spec. After I'm comfortable then maybe I'll drop my arcane spec as well.

Malygos and Heroic Naxxramas cleared

Just a short update today.

I picked up The Spellweaver's Downfall, as Circle of Dark Scholars downed Malygos for the first time as a guild on 7/31. It was quite a fun night, then following on the success of Malygos, our joint run with Dread Pirates full cleared Heroic Naxxramas on Saturday, which was a first for me, so I now also have the achievement for Heroic Naxxramas.

As a side note I was very dissappointed with Gown of the Spell-Weaver. According to rawr this is not an upgrade over my Tier 7 chest piece Heros Frostfire Robe. The loss of my 2-piece set bonus is the critical part in that, because if I swap in the Tier 7 head Frostfire Circlet for my Faerlina's Madness, then it would be an upgrade. I'll have to stick with the Naxx runs and see if I can't pick up that tier 7 head.

I also picked up several pieces from Heroic Naxxramas, and I was very dissapointed to find that most of it was downgrades for me. Bindings of the Expansive Mind vs my Cuffs of Winged Leviathan, reasons here are that spell crit is far less valuable than spell haste for Arcane and Frost, and I'm already hit capped, so the spell hit is worthless, and the lack of spirit. Mantle of the Corrupted vs Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads, again the loss of my 2-piece Tier 7 set bonus, the lower spell power (due to the socket in the tier piece), and the spell hit is unused because I'm already over the hit cap. The one upgrade that I did get was my tier 7.5 chest which replaces my tier 7 chest.

This all brings into very sharp focus the complexity of choosing loot. I ended up with several of these pieces because I rolled on them instead of letting them go to be disenchanted, so rest easy that I am not a total loot-whore. I use rawr on a regular basis to generate a list of upgrades from available items in game, but the interface leaves some things to be desired. I would primarily like the ability to filter the list by raid, so when I run Heroic Naxxramas I can see a list of what I need from just that raid, but in the lack of tools like this, it can be very confusing to new raiders on what piece of loot they should really go after, and what they should pass on.