Hi everyone,
Came back to WoW for this expansion and have been enjoying it! I am playing frost and I was following icyveins for stat priority since starting to run M+. I read somewhere I should stat dump on crit and haste. Right now with a 204ilvl I’m sitting on 32% crit unbuffed. I’ve been creeping around some of the mages that are better geared and progressed farther, but it seems like I’m not going the right way with stats. Any suggestions? Trying to optimize as much as I can since I rarely raid and run M+ for the most part.
Thanks!
Right now I’ve found that trying to get to the 33% sweet spot isn’t worth it. I got to 20% crit and I think 16% haste and I was doing ok, I dropped some crit to get more haste and I’m seeing an improvement. Hovering around 20% crit seems to be the sweet spot in the current tier (around 200 ilvl) with getting haste near 20% as well or slightly more. I have to much mastery currently on my mage, but I have to take the upgrades that are dropping and sadly most of it has been haste/mast or crit/mast.
Gotcha. Thanks for the insight. What about versatility? Seems like some people are bumping that up more as well. Want to know if that’s worth farming up while dropping my crit and raising my haste. Not sure if it’s better to crit more often with lower versatility than crit less with higher versatility, you know?
You ideally want crit/haste on every piece but there are no helm, neck, bracer or pants with that combo. If you can’t get a crit/haste piece then shoot for crit or haste/vers.
You seem to have a lot more versatility than I do. Do you think that helps your DPS significantly more than just stacking crit / haste?
Only because I have access to 226 PvP gear and the bad luck with the vault, definitely not by choice. Higher ilvl pretty much always trumps stats when it comes to any thing other than neck, rings and sometimes trinkets.
Edit: Vers is not a bad stat for frost it’s just not the best so early in the xpac when we desperately need crit and haste. So to simplify
crit/haste > crit or haste/vers > crit or haste/mastery > mastery/vers when ilvl is equal
Just avoid mastery on your gear and it will be fine. In general though, pure item level is best. I basically wear my fire gear as frost and nothing really sims better even with “better” stats, unless that piece has mastery.
I was reading a stat write up on wowhead that having more balanced stats is “better” then dumping completely into one stat.
I’m sitting at 20% crit, 16 or 17% haste, and have a lot of mastery accidently right now at 16%. Vers is pretty low.
I’ve noticed simming more crit over some other stats, especially haste, shows as a DPS loss.
All the sims I’ve run show crit/haste to be equal value, vers to be .04% less, and mastery to be far lower than the others.
I’ve also been doing more overall damage than most fire mages I’ve been in groups with in equal gear, though Combustion burst far outshines me when it’s running. I just pass Fire during all the timess Combustion is down, and the damage averages out over the course of a run. Combustion being able to absolutely wreck a priority target still makes it a little better in those situations.
I use almost all haste/vers pvp gear and generally do more damage than other frost mages in equal gear also, so take all that as anecdotal evidence as you will. Just my own personal experiences and observations since the frost buff.
This is also in lower level m+and BGs, I’m a very average player.
I have never really found it a good idea to exceed 28% crit… you usually get extra sources of it from being in a raid + whatever other buffs are happening in the raid and just generally luck.
Investing into more haste will help on cleave-fights (faster ticks, lower GCD, etc.) and versatility can help both in survivability and damage.
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If you look at sims closely, there are a plethora of different combination of crit/haste/mastery/vers that can produce the same dps in any ilvl that you’re rocking. Generally, Frost cannot go wrong with stacking crit/haste, but if you don’t have these on every piece, you shouldn’t worry too much. In nearly all cases, a higher ilvl item will beat a lower one just due to base int gain.