Fire The Frickin’ Lazerz!

Some of you may be aware of a healing questionaire that’s been doing the rounds of the blogosphere lately.  Well Hinenuitepo over at Death Goddess has adapated it for we dps types, and suggested that I take part.  Which is an excellent idea.  There’s been far too much namby-pamby, lovey-dovey stuff been going on in this blog lately, those tree-hugging hippy healers have practically taken over.  Let us not forget that that this is supposed to be a Mage blog, and Calli’s primary purpose in life is to turn things into small and innoffensive farmyard animals and then utterly destroy them using only the power of her mind (which now has 5% more intellect, gnome fans!).  So without further ado, let’s get down to the nitty gritty!

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary dps?
Calli, mage, usually Arcane spec.  There she is on the left, isn’t she adorable?

What is your primary dpsing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Raids.  The only time I ever log Calli is to raid or maybe do some dailies .  Most of the time I’m on an alt of some description, but when we need to bring the big guns out, I log Calli.

What is your favorite dps spell/ability for your class and why?
Invisibility is definitely, 100%, hands-down, no questions asked, the best spell mages ever had.  It’s saved me thousands of gold in repair bills.  Even if that weren’t the case, the shock on Teamspeak when everyone sees that some nab mage was the only survivor of the last wipe is always worth the ticket price.   Blink used to hold pride of place if for no other reason than you could escape a wipe on Kael’thas by Blinking through the force fields barring exit from his throne room, but Invisibility is where it’s at these days.

What dps spell do you use least for your class and why?
Can’t remember the last time I used Ice Lance unless it was slaughtering low level mobs in Darkshore while working on that last bit of Darnassus reputation.  It’s great for stomping Totems on Faction Champions in Crusaders’ Coliseum, but that’s not my job.  If Frost were ever a viable raid spec again, that would change of course.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your dps class and why?
Well unlike a certain asshat developer seems to think, we’re not the unparralelled gods of aoe that we were supposed to be.   But Arcane mages have awesome burst dps potential.  If you need something dead right now, nothing beats popping a trinket with Arcane Power and Icy Veins up and then spamming a 4xArcane Blast stack.  With 40% threat reduction on arcane spells I can usually survive it, too.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your dps class and why?
We’re still not very good at dpsing on the move, although as Arcane we’re better than most.  It’s not really much of a weakness, we still have a few tricks up our sleeve and we’re probably the most mobile of the dps caster classes.  Nothing much to complain about, really.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best dps assignment for you?
Stick me on the boss and watch the sparks fly.  Although when you do need to assign some dps to the unglamourous kiting tasks, we’re probably best suited for it.   Our dps suffers, but a shadow priest doing the same job would be 90% useless.

Rawr!

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with most and why?
Gimme more elemental shamans!  They can have my Focus Magic anytime!  Totem of Wrath and a guaranteed crit every 8 seconds makes me a very happy mage when I’m specced Fire!  A Demonology warlock with Demonic Pact and Curse of Elements wins when I’m Arcane.

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with least and why?
Any melee except Retribution Paladins.  I at least get a nice 3% damage buff from being under their Auras, but Feral Druids, Warriors and Rogues do nothing for me.  Deathknights with Ebon Plaguebringer can be fun too.

What is your worst habit as a dps?
Situational Awareness.  Hard Mode Hodir is my worst nightmare, far too many things going on for me to get my head around.  We have a Warlock who can easily do 14k dps on that fight by getting every buff available.  I have trouble going over 8k.  Just too much going on for me to process.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while dpsing?
Selfish bastard dps classes who only care about their own position on damage meters even at the cost of a wipe.  People who continue to dps Gormok the Impaler when snobolds are up.  People who won’t decurse because it means less time doing dps.  And then the shallow morons who make snide remarks about Recount afterwards without checking who did the spellstealing/decursing/crowd control, or who attacked what, not just who attacked the  most.  Really pisses me right off.  “Oh, Calli didn’t do as much dps as <player name>.”  Right, but the dps Calli did was at least on the correct fucking target, dickhead.  Check that on Recount!

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other dps?
I do.  It took a long, long time to get there, but mages are in a good spot right now.  We spent an entire expansion being completely and utterly shit.  I don’t look back on The Burning Crusade with any kind of nostalgia, it was a terrible time to be anything other than a Warlock or a Shadow Priest if you were a caster.  But Wrath is a great Expansion for us.  In TBC you could do great dps as a mage, provided your entire group was set up to do nothing but buff and support you, and it wasn’t worth the effort when you could just hire a shadow priest and get half a dozen warlocks to faceroll their shadowbolt key for more return on your investment.  Thankfully those days are long gone.  When 10 out of 10 of the best raid guilds in the world said that mages were the biggest waste of a raid slot in TBC, you can only cry quietly and hope things get better in the next expansion.  And they did.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a dps’er?
Recount and World of Logs.  I’m just recently getting to know how to properly use Recount to analyse what I did and why I should be doing anything different, but it’s a great tool as long as it’s not used to spam raid chat by the moron Rogue who stood in Fire behind Koralon for 15 seconds, but did awseome dps before he died.  World of Logs is also an excellent tool, and you can run it Live to check performance while raiding.  I highly recommend it.

You want the gnome? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE GNOME!

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
Well I was once asked if I could summon someone to Stormwind.  Yes, it was a Night Elf Hunter.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new dpsers of your class to learn?
Ask me this a year or two ago and I would have said threat control.  It’s still possible to overaggro as a mage these days if you’re a complete idiot and your tank is new to the job or just incompetent.  Heck, you can overaggro even with the best tank, but you have to be a special kind of overgeared and stupid to do that these days.

What dps class do you feel you understand least?
Rogues.  I’m not terrible on my Rogue, but I should be far better.  Again, it’s a situational awareness thing, there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of if you want to do good dps as a Rogue.  Any idiot can do mediocre dps as a Rogue, most of us can do decent dps, but doing great dps as a Rogue is hard damn work!

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in dps?
Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text is very useful to remind me what procs I need to use before they fade.  Scorchio is invaluable for tracking things like Hot Streak, Polymorph, Arcane Blast stacks and Missile Barrage procs.  I used to use Clique for crowd controlling focus targets but that’s built into Blizzards’ default UI now (if you enable it).  Still use Clique for healing, but that’s a whole different questionairre.

What stat to stack, and why?
That used to be a simple question to answer, stack spellpower until your ears bleed.  Things changed in Wrath.  Generally you won’t go wrong stacking spellpower anyway, but the value of one stat changes in relation to how much of other stats you need.  At its most basic, hit rating is very valuable right up until you reach the hit cap, at which point more becomes totally worthless.  Understanding the relationship between your current spellpower, haste and crit ratings is far more complex.  The best advice I can give anyone is to use the wonderful Theorycraft-o-matic by Lhivera, Zaldinar and Zxile.  I plug myself in there, tell it what spec I am and see straight away that further hit rating is worthless, haste is worth the most, closely followed by spellpower, both of which are worth twice as much to me as any more crit.  It’s a great tool and I urge mages everywhere to use it.

My, You’re A Tall One!

My, you're a tall one!

As the more alert amongst you may have spotted already, the paid race change service that everyone and their tennis partner said would never happen… happened.  And I finally got to realise a long-held ambition…

CALLI IS A GNOME!

Let’s just count the good points.

1.  She’s a Gnome!
2.  5% more intellect, that’s 29,500 mana self buffed, friends and neighbours!  She’s one helluva smart gnome!
3.  She’s as cute as a button!
4.  Reaching your keys under the sofa has never been easier.
5.  Smaller target!
6.  Extra humiliation factor when she slaughters horde Tauren!
7.  She’s a Gnome!
8.  Groovy dance!
9.  Squeaks when hit in combat!

And now the bad points.

1.  No more human racials, might actually have to get a pvp trinket now.
2.  There is no 2!

Gnomegeddon, you better watch out, Larissa’s got competion now!

While we’re on the subject of race changes, Galadan’s had a complete makeover too.

Get yer coat, you've pulled.

Now there’s a fine figure of a Dwarf if ever you saw one.  The changes are more than skin deep, however.  Galadan has also changed spec.  After being Holy for five years, I finally gave up trying to heal 5 man instances on him effectively.  He’s a great Main Tank healer, but in any instance where the entire group takes damage at the same time, which is like, every frikkin’ instance in the game, trying to keep everyone alive was making him so stressed his hair fell out.  So Galadan has crossed to the Dark Side and is now lolret.  Or is that retlol?  And should it be capitalised?  I can never remember.

You may recall this post where Galadan dabbled briefly in the waters of Retribution Cove and Protection Bay, before hastily retreating to the calm and serene safety of Holy Valley.  Well that was before Wrath of the Lich King and the big changes to Retribution.  And let me tell you, Retribution is actually more interesting than watching paint dry now.  You can still pop a Seal, Judge, autoattack and go make some coffee while you wait for the bad guy to die, but that’s so 2005, darlings.  Yes, I know, late to the party again, so sue me.  I missed the Retribution train when it boarded at LOL Central early in Wrath, but that means I also missed the “To the ground, baby!” phase, and now that Ret seems to be nicely settled I thought rather than just retire Galadan completely until Paladin healing in 5 mans wasn’t so stressful, I’d have a go at Retribution.

And it rocks.

The best part is, in Wintergrasp, thanks to the utter carnage that Ret Pallies wreaked early in Wrath and despite my being completely inept where pvp is concerned, people see a ginger-bearded Dwarf Paladin with a massive two-hander running towards them,  screaming incoherently at the top of his lungs and they… run away.  Try it yourself, it’s hilarious.

Not Standing in the Fire

Faction Champions in Crusaders’ Coliseum gets a lot of bad press.  It’s essntially the Priestess Delrissa fight from Magisters’ Terrace, except on crack.  Are you “late to the party” guy and never did Magisters’ Terrace at level 70?  Okay, here’s how it goes.

Right after you defeat Lord Jarraxus, your opposing faction leader (Garrosh Hellscream in my case) starts acting like a spoiled brat who’s had his candy taken away and demands the raid should be forced to face his champions in the next encounter.  Tirion Fordring agrees to allow it if he’ll just stop being such an emo crybaby and shut the hell up.  And so you end up facing what is basically an Arena team of opposing faction players.  Except they’re not.

All flippancy aside, it’s pretty important that you remember this is not really a pvp fight.  This is where the majority of the crying about Faction Champions arises, and I was just as guilty as everyone else when I first had to do the fight.  See, I suck at pvp.  I mean, I really suck at pvp.  If being bad at pvp was a sport, I could represent my country at it.  So I read the patch notes about how you’d have to face a number of classes of any spec and how pvp diminishing returns on crowd control was in force.  Then I played the encounter and cried as my polymorph was dispelled by the opposing Priests, my fireballs were eaten by the Shamans’ grounding totems,  the Paladins bubbled and healed up when we got down to 15% and I got melee- trained and insta-gibbed by the Rogue and Arms Warrior.

Oh noes, Blizz am making me pvp in my pve contents! QQ!!

Well, no they’re not.  All they’re doing is making you think outside of your nice comfortable kill-the-raid-boss mindset.  This is not actually a bad thing.  Allow me to elaborate.

Yes, Faction Champions, in any flavour, is a lot like a pvp fight.  As already stated you have diminishing returns on all forms of crowd control, so your first polymorph will last a maximum of 10 seconds, then less each consecutive time you cast it on the same target until they very quickly become immune.  In practice, this is not an issue anyway, since the opposing priests and paladins dispel it as quickly as you apply it.  In that respect it’s exactly like a pvp fight, but there are differences and the differences are huge.

For a start, they’re all tauntable.  In the past this shared diminishing returns too, but that’s been removed in the latest build.  Taunting them doesn’t guarantee you aggro for ever, but once every 8 seconds you can get them to forget who they’re wailing on for a moment or two, so it’s nothing like pvp in that respect.  Next, all of your “oh shit” pve buttons work just fine, even if you don’t get the full duration out of them.  Fade will drop aggro, as will Mirror Image, Vanish, Feign Death, Invisibility and any other number of class skills.  You might get aggro back a few seconds later, but it gives you time to be somewhere else.  One other major difference that pissed me off immensely was that Counterspell’s magic school lockdown doesn’t work.  This may actually be the same in real pvp, I don’t know since I don’t do it.  But the sweet thing about Counterspell is that while it has the longest cooldown of any spell interrupt (24 seconds, fact fans) it has the sweetest side effect.   It locks out all spells from the same school as the interrupted spell for 8 seconds.  Imagine a Holy Paladin with their Holy spells shut down for 8 whole seconds.  You do not want to be that Holy Paladin.  Well sadly, in the Faction Champions fight, all Counterspell does is work as any other interrupt, except it’s on a 24 second cooldown.  Meh!

The one thing that Faction Champions does share with a pvp or Arena fight is that personal survivability is your problem, not your healers.  Faction Champions is the Olympic Medal Not Standing In The Fire contest.  You could have 2 tanks, 22 healers and you in the raid, and if you’re going to stand there looking pretty and continuing your nuke rotations when the melee train switches to you, you’re going to die anyway.  No healer will be able to keep your squishy butt in one piece if the Warrior/Rogue/Deathknight/Enhance Shaman/Ret Pally suddenly take an intimate interest in it.  Surviving is up to YOU.   Check Recount after one of your Champions wipes and look at the damage done to you.  I guarantee you that the opposing Mage, Shadow Priest and Warlock will all be doing far more damage than the melee classes combined.  But this damage is coming in relatively small chunks, it’s entirely manageable.  This is damage your healers can handle, whether that be through dispels or heals.  No-one should be dying from damage sustained from any of the casters unless you were low on health anyway from being battered by a melee class, and if that’s the case it was your own fault anyway.  Now look at the number of deaths on recount and see who got the killing blows.

Yep, the casters are doing the most damage, but the melee dps are the ones who are actually killing people.  If you just stand there while that Arms Warrior smacks you upside the head with a 15k Mortal Strike, you deserve to die.  And you will.  This is where we all need to get out of our nice comfortable raiders’ mindset and start thinking like an Arena team.  And I was quite frankly amazed at the number of tools I, even as a raid-specced Fire Mage, had to keep my squishy butt from getting…  well..  squished.  Let’s go through the numbers.

Ice Block.  Our old favourite.  Except in this fight, the Arms Warrior will remove it with Shattering Throw and the priests will Mass Dispel it.  Ice Block is your tool of last resort, never the first.

Mirror Image.  I want to marry this spell and have its babies.  Every mage, regardless of spec should be casting this as the fight starts, because the aggro drop works and it gives the Champions three other targets to choose from.  There’s a very good chance that if you start the fight with this spell you’ll have 30 uninterrupted seconds of pew pew on your focus target, and if he’s not dead in that time your raid failed, not you.  Note that the Mirror Images can be the focus of the Champions’ aggro, and this is a Good Thing.  Standing next to them when the Arms Warrior Bladestorms through them is a Bad Thing.  Cast it, move aside, begin the pew pew.

Frost Nova.  Another awesome spell that’s saved my ass more times than I care to remember on this fight, but as ever it’s highly situational.  Never use it when the Arms Warrior has Bladestorm up or the Rogue has Cloak of Shadows, all you succeed in doing is wasting a global cooldown and forcing yourself to wait to cast the Blink you should have cast.  Also, as in any pve situation, never, ever, ever cast Frost Nova when the mob you’re escaping from is standing next to anyone else, especially a healer.  All you’ll succeed in doing is forcing the mob to switch aggro to the closest target that they can hit, and insta-gibbing them.

Did we mention Blink?  If you have a Hunter on your team they should be laying a Frost Trap in the middle of the arena at all times.  Blink into it.  Even if the mob maintains aggro and follows you through the Blink, he’s going to run right into the Frost Trap and isn’t going to catch you in a hurry.  In that time, a tank can and should have taunted him off you anyway.  Try to save Blink for when the mob focussing you has immunity effects up and can’t be crowd controlled easily.

Invisibility.  Because it has such a long cooldown and takes so long (untalented) to activate, Invisibility is ideally used in one of two situations.  Either when everything else is on cooldown and the melee train is running for you or when it’s a wipe and you want to save yourself some repair bills.  Note that to get the most out of invisibility you should ideally be standing in the area of effect of your Hunters’ Frost Trap.  This makes the most of the few seconds it takes for Invisibility to kick in, just in case the enemy Rogue is trying to introduce you to the business end of Mister Pointy.

Polymorph.  As a crowd control effect this is almost useless in this fight, at least at the early stages.  If it lasts longer than 2 seconds before it gets grounded, dispelled or purged then you’re not playing the same fight I am.  However when all else is lost, you’re got a few seconds to spare and there’s an angry Arms Warrior bearing down on you, Polymorph can save your ass and give you time to run and your tanks time to taunt.  Bear in mind it will have no effect on a Bladestorming Arms Warrior.  Blink is always your friend in this case.

Slow.  Arcane mages only, this one.  But it’s a beauty.  If you have it, you’ll most likely be assigned to keep it up on one of the melee targets anyway, but since it’ll be getting dispelled quite often it isn’t going to make much difference if you use it to keep your ass alive and out of reach of the Retribution Paladin who’s chasing you down.  If it keeps you alive long enough for him to lose interest, it served its purpose.

Run Away.  Simple but highly effective, especially if your side have a Frost Trap or Earthbind Totem in play.

Note that all of these tricks aren’t going to be much use to you if the first indication you have that the melee train is arriving at You Station is when you start taking 15k Mortal Strikes.  The idea is to be reacting before you start getting beaten on and that can be handled in a couple of ways.

1.  Use Teamspeak/Ventrilo.  Have your two “tanks” enable Target of Target so they can see who their target is switching to and have them call it out.

2.  Use some sort of addon that alerts you when you have aggro.  I use X-Perl and it handles this as well as an incredible number of other things.  Very little grabs your attention like the word “AGGRO” across the middle of your screen as a PVE raider.  In most raids it’s usually the last thing you see before you die.  On Faction Champions it’s your cue to start getting creative.

3.  Pvp a lot.  There’s no better way to hone your sense of situational awareness.  On the plus side you’ll become a lot better at staying off the radar and at target switching if you take part in any kind of competent Arena play. 

Alternatively you could just do Faction Champions three or four times a week.  You’ll either get good at it or you’ll eat a lot of dirt.  As a Mage you’ve got a massive number of tricks up your sleeve to stay alive and continue doing damage that other classes would kill for.  Any Mage who dies early on in this fight simply wasn’t paying enough attention.  Dying in Faction Champions is always your problem, not your healers.

Welcome To The Suck

One of the Hunters in our 25 man raid is a Dwarf named Rui.  He’s a good hunter, solid dps, doesn’t make a habit of standing in the Fire, never pulls aggro… in short, nothing like the guys who are the first to get squished by Vault of Archavon bosses when you’re bored and PuG it late on a Wednesday night.  Anyone who runs with a regular raid knows that there are always “characters” in those raids.  For example, we have an excellent healing paladin named Tinuviel, but she’s pretty much known as Afkviel for reasons that I hope are obvious from the nickname.  Rui is the guy who always disconnects.  His connection sucks harder than an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.  I think Hoover is his ISP or something.  It’s become something of a joke over time.

“Everyone buffed?”
“Yep.”
“Tanks ready?”
“Ready to go.”
“Rui disconnected yet?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, let’s get this show on the road, pulling in three…”

Well let me tell you, since patch 3.2.2, I’ve been Rui, and it’s not as funny in the flesh as it is from a distance.  For years, I’ve been the guy with the connection made from solid granite.  Never miss a raid, never go offline, always there.  After patch 3.2.2 rolled out, every time Gormok the Impaler so much as looks at me in a funny way, I get dumped out to the login screen and cannot reconnect as long as the fight is going on.  And then it takes 15 attempts to connect to a character in Dalaran.  And so it goes on.

Yesterday the daily cooking quest was Rhino Dogs and the daily fishing quest was the Ghostfish, both conveniently located in Sholozar Basin.  So I hearthed to Nesingwary Basecamp, flew over to Rainspeaker Canopy to pick up this weeks’ Oracle egg and went fishing.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m pretty sure that your fishing bobber shouldn’t time out before you can see the fishing channeling bar appear.  And I’m also relatively certain that casting a line isn’t supposed to take fifteen seconds.  On a similar note, as a level 80 mage covered in 10 man Heroic and 25 man Crusader Coliseum gear with an average item level of 240, I shouldn’t be dying from the bleed of a level 76 non elite Rhino’s gore effect in the time it takes for me to get an Arcane Blast off.

There are (at latest time of checking) 32 pages of complaints on the US forums and 10 pages (in the busiest thread) on the EU forums about the instant disconnects people are suffering from Crusader Coliseum and the associated lag that plagues you afterwards.  There are no Blue solutions, but the cures suggested by the community range from clearing your dns cache (whatever the hell that is) to sacrificing a virgin to the Blood God at the next full moon.  Personally, I’ve tried everything bar reinstalling Warcraft, which is something I’m not going to do because the only difference between having a rock solid connection and one made of swiss cheese and spaghetti is that patch 3.2.2 rolled out.  And I’d not be exaggerating if I were to say I’m not best pleased with the state of affairs.

But the suckage doesn’t end there.  Usually, after being online for three hours or so, my latency will drop from 4500ms to something approaching playable and I can think about getting into a group to do something useful.  Last night we threw together an Onyxia raid for alts, and I came along to tank on my warrior, Gorn.  Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but when the raid leader says “Gorn, you tank the boss, I’ll tank the adds”, I take that to mean that the raid leader is going to tank the adds.  I don’t take it to mean that I’m going to tank the boss, help him tank the whelps, tank the elite adds when they show and hope he’s not busy admiring his nails and is quick with a taunt when the last elite is up and the boss lands at the other end of the fucking instance, because apparently, that’s exactly what “You tank the boss, I tank the adds” does, in fact, mean.  Sadly, since my balls are made of flesh rather than Madame Eva’s finest crystal, I obviously interpreted the instructions the wrong way.  Silly me.  Entirely my fault obviously.

Well, we got her down on the second attempt and at least I got a new hat out of it.

“Useful and Interesting”

There’s finally some actual Mage notes in the PTR patch notes, and the good news is, we’re not just getting some more icon changes.  The bad news is that in the short term, we’re getting a serious beating with the nerfbat.

The changes are two-fold.  First, the Improved Scorch crit buff/debuff is being slashed by 50%.  Instead of stacking to 10% crit with 5 applications, it will now only stack to 5%.  This hits Frostfire Mages pretty hard since they’re more reliant on crit for decent dps than any other spec.  This change isn’t restricted to mages alone, all similar crit buffs are getting the same beating, and of course the result affects everyone who gets a benefit from spell crit, not just mages.  But any way you dress it up, it’s 5% less crit, which means less Hot Streaks, less Master of Elements procs so less regen, and less Ignites.  This hits Frostfire Mages HARD.

And it gets worse.  Currently, glyphed Molten Armour gives us another 5% crit.  Regular readers may recall my constant whining about all of the Spirit on mage gear and the fact that Mages using Molten Armour (and we all do because we’re a dps class, remember) get exactly diddly squat use out of spirit.  Well Blizzard’s way of “making spirit a useful and interesting stat for all mages” is to remove the base crit % from Molten Armour completely and change the effect so that it provides crit as a percentage of our spirit.   You want numbers?  I got numbers.

• Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Glyph of Molten Armor – Your Molten Armor grants an additional 15% (40% total) of your spirit as critical strike rating

So in other words, fully glyphed, you’ll get 40% of your spirit as crit rating.  No need to get out your calculators, the numbers are actually pretty simple.  If you currently have fully buffed, more than 574 spirit, this is a buff over the current 5% crit that you already get from Glyphed Molten Armour.  If, on the other hand, you’re in the 99% of non-retarded mages who have been doing the sensible thing and avoiding spirit on gear because to do otherwise was gimping your dps, then this is another massive nerf. 

Let’s look at Calli as an example.  With her 645 crit rating, a full Scorch debuff up on the target and glyphed Molten Armour, and assuming an intellect buff, she has 45% base fire crit.  Considerably higher than that with FFBolt in a full raid, but we’ll go with 45% for now.   She also has 465 spirit, despite trying to avoid it wherever possible, and this is in some of the best mage gear currently available in-game.  That’s a LOT of spirit for a Frostfire mage, but it’s all high end raid gear that the majority of mages probably aren’t going to have access to.  However, what it does illustrate is that when the patch goes live even mages with the best available current gear are going to go from 45% crit to 39% crit overnight.  5% lost from the nerf to Scorch and 1% lost from the Molten Armour change.

So it’s all pretty bleak, right?  Well, not really, no.

There are positive aspects to this.  You just have to look at it all in context.  The nerf to Scorch is a nerf no matter how you try to dress it up.  But it affects everyone, not just us.  Take into account the fact that 5% crit buff/debuff that it provides is being spread across other classes (and nerfed for them too) then it means that your Fire and Frostfire Mages no longer have to be the raid’s crit debuff bots.  Scrap Improved Scorch and spend those talent points elsewhere, perhaps invest in the Arcane tree and get some useful utility talents on the way to Student of the Mind?  Rip up your Glyph of Improved Scorch and get the new Glyph of Living Bomb so your LB ticks can crit, too.  Unless you want to you’ll never have to waste time casting Scorch again.

Let’s take a look at the Spirit on gear issue too.  What we’re seeing on patch-live day is a consequence of our avoiding spirit in the past, which was a sensible policy since it pretty obviously gimped us and offered nothing useful.  There were very limited gear choices available to us if we wanted to avoid spirit.  Post-patch every single cloth drop that doesn’t include mana per 5 will be an upgrade for us.  Look at the Ulduar loot tables, you can count on the fingers of one head all the cloth gear that doesn’t come loaded with spirit.  One way or another, we’re ALL getting more spirit on our gear.  At least now it’s not going to gimp us and we’ll actually get some offensive dps benefit from it.  Sure, pound for pound, raw crit rating is still better, but have you looked at all that “healer” gear with spirit, crit and haste?  That stuff’s for us now!  Gimme!

Even in current raid content, if you suddenly start rolling on all the cloth with spirit on it (and let’s face it, that’s almost all of it) you’re still going to be able to break even on patch day from spirit alone.  I know I have a couple of items of ilevel 213 gear that I’ve acquired along the way but never managed to work into a useful gear set.  Well it’s starting to look pretty useful now.

Of course, if you’re not raiding at the moment, you’re not going to be anywhere near these stat numbers and the change to Molten Armour is going to hit you proportionately harder.  There’s no real way to sweeten that.  But one thing that needs to be pointed out here is that the change to Molten Armour finally gives us something that scales with our gear.  Something we lacked ever since the original nerf to Improved Scorch that removed the 15% damage buff.  As your spirit gets higher, and it will because our gear is dripping with the stuff, your crit will continue to improve.  Not just into Naxx and Ulduar, but beyond.

Overall, while these two changes to Scorch and Molten Armour are very definitely nerfs over the immediate and short term, I think there’s a compelling reason to be optimistic about the future.  Spirit may never be remotely interesting, but it’s beginning to be moderately useful, and it’s only going to get more useful as time goes by.