Thursday, August 13, 2009

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.

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