Post by Shane Small on Jul 11, 2009 13:40:38 GMT -5
Mage Gearing and Hit Cap at Level 80
Your first prority is getting spell damage. Your second second priority is also spell damage.
Even in crit heavy Fire and Frostfire specs, spell damage will be your best stat to stack via gems for a long while.
You also want to cap spell hit, but not at the cost of using inferior gear just because it has more hit.
When you get decked out in wisely chosen Naxxramas gear, you should easily reach the hit cap. Gem for it if you're close. You can also use the Snapper Extreme food buff on bosses where you need to increase your Hit.
You want to reach 17% spell hit. You can gain 1% from a Draenei in your group, 3% from a raid debuff, 3% from talents.
Frostfire Bolt seems to gain 6% hit from Elemental Precision, a bug that's going to get fixed sooner or later.
The rest has to be obtained by gear, you need 26.232 hit rating for 1% spell hit at level 80.
That means if you have no spell buffs or talents, you need 446 hit rating for 17% spell hit chance.
Your Water Elemental and Mirror Image pets also get the spell hit from your gear, but not from your talents.
Choosing between Hit and SPow in the early stages is tough. You can read the 'Best Pre-Raid Gear' post to find good gear that provides Hit before you start raiding. Once you start raiding, however, much of the good gear that drops has Hit on it and getting Hit Capped is much easier. Note: once you are Hit Capped (17%), Hit becomes worthless! And because Hit can be boosted with raid buffs, talents, and food buffs, you need to make sure you that you aren't giving up SPow for Hit if the Hit in the raid situation (ie: raid buffs) will push you over the cap.
Crit and Haste then are your secondary DPS stats. They are vastly worse than spell power until you get around 4k spell power or more.
1 haste rating: Is worth about 0.7-0.8 spell power in full Naxxramas gear for most specs.
1 crit rating: Is worth 0.8 spell power for Frostfire, 0.7 for Fire, 0.6 for Arcane/Fire, 0.5 for Frost.
Intellect is on par with crit for Arcane/Fire and is has 1/3 of the strength of crit for the other specs. Spirit is mostly useless.
Mana is also very important, make sure you never run out of it. If you use everything at your disposal and still run out of mana, check your spec and buffs. If that still doesn't help then drop some haste, get some intellect, use Mage Armour. But don't stack spirit ever.
As for meta gems, the only acceptable choice is one of the +3% crit damage meta gems due to how it actually works.
It is worth about 150-200 DPS, which makes most headpieces without a meta socket a bad choice.
Your first prority is getting spell damage. Your second second priority is also spell damage.
Even in crit heavy Fire and Frostfire specs, spell damage will be your best stat to stack via gems for a long while.
You also want to cap spell hit, but not at the cost of using inferior gear just because it has more hit.
When you get decked out in wisely chosen Naxxramas gear, you should easily reach the hit cap. Gem for it if you're close. You can also use the Snapper Extreme food buff on bosses where you need to increase your Hit.
You want to reach 17% spell hit. You can gain 1% from a Draenei in your group, 3% from a raid debuff, 3% from talents.
Frostfire Bolt seems to gain 6% hit from Elemental Precision, a bug that's going to get fixed sooner or later.
The rest has to be obtained by gear, you need 26.232 hit rating for 1% spell hit at level 80.
That means if you have no spell buffs or talents, you need 446 hit rating for 17% spell hit chance.
Your Water Elemental and Mirror Image pets also get the spell hit from your gear, but not from your talents.
Choosing between Hit and SPow in the early stages is tough. You can read the 'Best Pre-Raid Gear' post to find good gear that provides Hit before you start raiding. Once you start raiding, however, much of the good gear that drops has Hit on it and getting Hit Capped is much easier. Note: once you are Hit Capped (17%), Hit becomes worthless! And because Hit can be boosted with raid buffs, talents, and food buffs, you need to make sure you that you aren't giving up SPow for Hit if the Hit in the raid situation (ie: raid buffs) will push you over the cap.
Crit and Haste then are your secondary DPS stats. They are vastly worse than spell power until you get around 4k spell power or more.
1 haste rating: Is worth about 0.7-0.8 spell power in full Naxxramas gear for most specs.
1 crit rating: Is worth 0.8 spell power for Frostfire, 0.7 for Fire, 0.6 for Arcane/Fire, 0.5 for Frost.
Intellect is on par with crit for Arcane/Fire and is has 1/3 of the strength of crit for the other specs. Spirit is mostly useless.
Mana is also very important, make sure you never run out of it. If you use everything at your disposal and still run out of mana, check your spec and buffs. If that still doesn't help then drop some haste, get some intellect, use Mage Armour. But don't stack spirit ever.
As for meta gems, the only acceptable choice is one of the +3% crit damage meta gems due to how it actually works.
It is worth about 150-200 DPS, which makes most headpieces without a meta socket a bad choice.