Stats for ST and AOE

[bookcase]

So, I get that Mastery is great for fireball damage, etc., and DoT damage right? And Crit makes it more likely to get procs. So if you're building your fire mage for ST, wouldn't you be better off stacking as much Crit as possible to get constant procs? Obviously you wouldn't ignore mastery completely, but if fire is so dependent on procs, why is crit listed as the bottom stat 99% of the time?

Here's why I ask. I'm currently playing Fire/Arcane. All of my arcane gear has Crit gems and enchants. I switched over to Fire, forgot to change my gear, and didn't understand why I was getting procs left and right. I mean I quite literally had 5 or 6 procs in a row, without combustion. And my meters were through the roof for a solid 2 minutes on the Turnip Punching Bag toy.

I'm sure there must be a reason we don't stack Crit, I'm just unsure of what that reason would be. So any ideas or thoughts would be appreciated.

[Saharez]

In my experience, for reliable sustained single target damage, you want to stack haste over crit.

Haste reduces the cooldown of fireblast and increases the rate at which you throw fireballs, which translates into more instant cast pyroblasts aswell, furthermore with the duplicative incineration azerite trait, fireball becomes nearly as powerful as pyroblast, boosting the cast speed is absolutely adviseable.

I've done alot of stat weight sims over the past week, evidence suggest that Crit is a fairly mediocre stat for the modern fire mage, while mastery is king of AoE and haste is king of single target.


To list some of the reasons crit isn't an amazing stat.
The talent firestarter makes all our relevant spell hits critical strikes at the beginning of a fight.
Combustion provides a burst phase where everything we do are critical hits aswell.
We get +10% crit chance for each consecutive noncrit.
Fireblast always crits and helps capitalizing on crits reducing the dependency on successive crits.

These abilities all reduce the value of crit, while they do nothing to diminish the value of haste, mastery and versatility.

[bookcase]

In my experience, for reliable sustained single target damage, you want to stack haste over crit.

Haste reduces the cooldown of fireblast and increases the rate at which you throw fireballs, which translates into more instant cast pyroblasts aswell, furthermore with the duplicative incineration azerite trait, fireball becomes nearly as powerful as pyroblast, boosting the cast speed is absolutely adviseable.

I've done alot of stat weight sims over the past week, evidence suggest that Crit is a fairly mediocre stat for the modern fire mage, while mastery is king of AoE and haste is king of single target.


To list some of the reasons crit isn't an amazing stat.
The talent firestarter makes all our relevant spell hits critical strikes at the beginning of a fight.
Combustion provides a burst phase where everything we do are critical hits aswell.
We get +10% crit chance for each consecutive noncrit.
Fireblast always crits and helps capitalizing on crits reducing the dependency on successive crits.

These abilities all reduce the value of crit, while they do nothing to diminish the value of haste, mastery and versatility.

Yeah I can see how that makes sense. It's just weird because every guide says Crit should be the top thing, and even when I sim, Pawn tells me to put crit gems and enchants on everything. So I'm just wondering if I should ignore more of the Pawn stuff, and just aim for certain stats instead.

[DeathDefier]

In my experience, for reliable sustained single target damage, you want to stack haste over crit.

Haste reduces the cooldown of fireblast and increases the rate at which you throw fireballs, which translates into more instant cast pyroblasts aswell, furthermore with the duplicative incineration azerite trait, fireball becomes nearly as powerful as pyroblast, boosting the cast speed is absolutely adviseable.

I've done alot of stat weight sims over the past week, evidence suggest that Crit is a fairly mediocre stat for the modern fire mage, while mastery is king of AoE and haste is king of single target.


To list some of the reasons crit isn't an amazing stat.
The talent firestarter makes all our relevant spell hits critical strikes at the beginning of a fight.
Combustion provides a burst phase where everything we do are critical hits aswell.
We get +10% crit chance for each consecutive noncrit.
Fireblast always crits and helps capitalizing on crits reducing the dependency on successive crits.

These abilities all reduce the value of crit, while they do nothing to diminish the value of haste, mastery and versatility.

Yeah I can see how that makes sense. It's just weird because every guide says Crit should be the top thing, and even when I sim, Pawn tells me to put crit gems and enchants on everything. So I'm just wondering if I should ignore more of the Pawn stuff, and just aim for certain stats instead.

Any guide telling you to stack crit is incorrect, and if you look at the one on this very forum you can see it doesn't say that.

For pawn you need to take the string simcraft or raidbots gives you and import it into pawn. Make sure to keep it updated as you upgrade your gear. The default pawn values are never going to be correct so don't use them.

[bookcase]

In my experience, for reliable sustained single target damage, you want to stack haste over crit.

Haste reduces the cooldown of fireblast and increases the rate at which you throw fireballs, which translates into more instant cast pyroblasts aswell, furthermore with the duplicative incineration azerite trait, fireball becomes nearly as powerful as pyroblast, boosting the cast speed is absolutely adviseable.

I've done alot of stat weight sims over the past week, evidence suggest that Crit is a fairly mediocre stat for the modern fire mage, while mastery is king of AoE and haste is king of single target.


To list some of the reasons crit isn't an amazing stat.
The talent firestarter makes all our relevant spell hits critical strikes at the beginning of a fight.
Combustion provides a burst phase where everything we do are critical hits aswell.
We get +10% crit chance for each consecutive noncrit.
Fireblast always crits and helps capitalizing on crits reducing the dependency on successive crits.

These abilities all reduce the value of crit, while they do nothing to diminish the value of haste, mastery and versatility.

Yeah I can see how that makes sense. It's just weird because every guide says Crit should be the top thing, and even when I sim, Pawn tells me to put crit gems and enchants on everything. So I'm just wondering if I should ignore more of the Pawn stuff, and just aim for certain stats instead.

Any guide telling you to stack crit is incorrect, and if you look at the one on this very forum you can see it doesn't say that.

For pawn you need to take the string simcraft or raidbots gives you and import it into pawn. Make sure to keep it updated as you upgrade your gear. The default pawn values are never going to be correct so don't use them.

I never said guides say stack crit. I said they say it's the least effective stat.

[Saharez]

I think thecomment was refering to your post about how pawn recommended you stacked crit, not that it matters.

If I had to make a recommendation for a place to sim your character, I would suggest https://www.raidbots.com/simbot

I personally spend some time verifying the math in addition I compare it to ingame data.

[Herpie]

According to my own simming stats for AoE in 335~340 gear with suboptimal secondary stats (I have to much crit, but I keep getting high item-level upgrades with crit XD)

Int -> haste for AoE with flamepatch
Mastery -> INT for AoE without flamepatch
INT -> Versatility = Haste for single target with Firestarter/searing touch + flame on + meteor

Crit is only top for me when using Pyromaniac + kindling... but these 2 talents give me crappy DPS.

[Herpie]

well...

1 raid night in, and i see many fire mages in top 10 doing particulairly well with high crit.
lucky shots because more crit=more rng?

i don't think i am very happy with the damage that comes from a haste-ST build so far, but its a bit soon to start whining.
I do feel inspired though to go against the sims and get me some crit gear and run pyroclasm to see what it can do for real.

[Devlonir]

Yeah I think it is a tough one. I understand the losing value of crit.. but there was a moment when I focused on crit when gearing and got like 40% at 330 ilvl as well as the crit weapon enchant and a trinket that boosted crit and the spec felt a lot more smooth and damage was out performing my simmed dps regularly.

Fire is made to be able to capitalize extra on good luck chains, and I wonder sometimes if our sims may under represent this fact.

Example: Crit was losing a lot of favor end of Legion as well, but crit stacking fire mages were still very succesful.

[Saharez]

I think the results we see on alllstar warcraftlogs are RNG based.

The higher your crit is, the better your chance of getting successive critical hits for extra hot streaks.

This basicly means that if you are unlucky, your higher crit will not yield extra hot streaks and you won't crit on Pyroclasm pyroblasts.
This would put you significantly lower than the haste based mage.

Simulations are made by running thousands of iterations and then provides the average dps output from different stat and talent compositions.

Simulations on the other hand does not care that one composition has a very wide margin of difference in damage output, the simulation simply adds it all together and calculates the average.

In conclusion, I believe the math behind the sims do hold up, but it is true that the best performing mages are more likely to be crit based mages which had a lucky boss fight, those same mages will likely perform worse on average.

You know which mages you looked at, take a closer look at their other fights and verify if the numbers are there consistently or if it's an outlier.

[Herpie]

hey you, think i just gotcha on Blizzard forum in the same discussion

You could be right, just as the other dude who theorized on blizz forums that it was due to crit being a more forgivable stat on high movement.

current logs feature many of the same mages across fights, but the fairest comparison would be to see if the same mage consistently performs well on certain fights, so i guess log-data won't be able to answer questions until a few raid-weeks have passed.

until then ill keep an open mind

[Saharez]

You did indeed, I figured the response would do just as much good in here

Your conclusion that it might be more fun to rely on the higher RNG of crit based builds to sometimes archieve competetive results, even if the average is slightly lower than the haste based builds, happens to be equally true aswell