I’ll most likely test it out in raid this Sunday with imp scorch, ice shards, and 6% claw debuff.
My highest crit with ice shards but no ignite is 1636 using +50 dmg helm CD but didn’t have my best gear on at the time so was missing maybe 20ish frost spell power. Wasn’t using the gnomer buff at the time either. (or attacking a beast for 5% buff as a troll)
Assuming they stack additively, scorch+claw add 21% dmg.
1636 x 1.21 = 1979.56 crit
1978.56 x 1.4 = 2771.384 crit with ignite
This is a stock standard 3 second cast that crits.
Icy veins + coldsnap is 40 seconds of 20% haste, which brings the cast down to 2.5 IIRC.
Assuming 2.25 cast with no crits and hitting for 700 a cast (it will be more but I’m more geared than the average bear) it deals only 311 DPS.
A crit deals 350% of the damage of a regular attack, or 250% bonus dmg. At 33% crit chance that means crit gives your overall damage a boost of about 82.5%.
311 x 1.825 = 576.575 dps
Personally, I will be stacking icy veins, berzerking, +50 dmg helm, +7 frost weapon enchant, +15 frost+arcane elixir, power infusion after 5 stacks of scorch, potentially demonic pact, epic engi belt coin toss, and the 1% crit cloak over the 11 SP cloak.
I think my crits will be well over 3500 damage and if I can prep LOW hp I will have the 1.75 or even 2 second cast time.
I would love to get lucky and hit a big 1500-1900 dps for a few seconds. This will be my talent build.
wowhead . com/classic/talent-calc/mage/-0552020023011-0235
I think it’s definitely viable, I don’t think it will be better than hot streak, maybe with more gear at later levels but that is tricky because more crit also makes fire exponentially better because their rotation evolves higher and higher with more crit chance.
It’s one of my favorite spells and I will definitely be using it at 50/60 for my main nuke in pvp and if blizz doesn’t nerf it back to weak status I will use it for PVE also.