Raid viable mage.Follow

A few pieces of advice:

Don't wait for your own cooldowns, go and farm the primals and may about 25-30g for a specced cooldown, I was able to build my sets very quickly this way.

You can check out wow-loot.com to see what is available to you as well once you get there.

A few obvious upgrades:

Spellfire set (completed) will give you a nice increase in your fire damage
Your second trinket is for healing (not damage)
Spellstrike set (continue farming lots of different primals or fine a niche that you can use and trade for others -- I found air to be good for this on my server)

Once you get these you can continue getting more upgrades through heroics/etc. You may want to try getting the sword from Keepers of Time or Thrallmar and getting a decent offhand to improve your damage.

The wrists can be replaced with the veterans silk handguards (a very common wrist upgrade until later)

I recommend changing your spec to be more arcane focused until you get more fire damage (at least 800, preferably over 900) before 10/48/3 becomes viable. You can do a 40/21/0 or 40/18/3 build that will give you more spelldmg thanks to mindmastery and other talents in the arcane tree.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Indeed, it wasn't so much as skipped instances as no one to do instances with. Everything I have was a quest reward, self made, or an AH buy. Even the trinket I have equipped was taken as the only dang thing I could find to put in the slot as it at least had mana regen. Hence my current situation. Skyguard rep should hit exalted by this weekend and Thrallmar rep may happen before the next total lunar eclipse. I am sure that there are many players out there in my situation. Love the game, no-one to really play with.

Myth

Get the tailored sets and you'll be a great addition to any pug, I kind of got myself into a couple of friends list and ended up doing rep runs with people from larger guilds.

Basically what you need to replace is everything but the belt, wep, wand and the illidari trinket.

Like Anobix said there's the sha'tar rep, which will allow you to get the headgear enchant (24 damage and 14 hit, right?) and another great damage trinket. There's a trinket that's more or less equivalent to the scryer's bloodgem in terms of static hit rating and damage from an aldor quest line (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30340) that you might want to check out, since spell hit = a huge dps boost in raids.
Sha'tar rep allows you to go to heroic mechanar aswell, which in term will lead to the awesome offhand/trinket from badges.

For rings I'd get the scryers exhalted one, the one from cenarion exhalted, a pvp ring, the one from steamvaults first boss, or the one from the spirit shards, mix and match here.

There's a great necklace in arcatraz I believe, though this one is fine.

For bracer go for the veteran's silk bracer, for boots either get the pvp one or perhaps the ones from slave pens hc.

And I like the pvp shoulders, the blue ones, or any arena purple will do.

If you do decide to switch the weapon, get the keepers of time revered one or the greatsword of horrid dreams from SL. Imo the thrallmar rep grind is just not worth the effort, even though you could pick up another great 1h wep on the way.
In my opinion the sword from SL is the best pre-raid sword out there for pve, in terms of effort.

Hope this helped, since I didn't re-read or anything, this is pretty much what I did though, and it works for me.

Anobix, Kapot, and Poldaran

OK, I have the Spellfire Robe made now and have most of the mats for gloves (my last piece). Primal Air actually did become what I started farming for the cash and I stumbled into that before I remembered your suggestion. Found that the Alliance has much cheaper prices for spellcloth than Horde side and even after the Booty Bay AH cash whack I am still saving about 12g for each one I buy. I should have the honor this evening for new wrist and Shatari Exalted next week for the Trinket. I haven't forgotten the rest, but so much to do.

Thanks,

Myth

I think i better trinket would be Mark of Defiance that you get from the hellfire daily quest reward.

Quick correction for Isfreak, the trinket from durnhold (old hillsbrad) is Arcanist Stone

It gives a huge increase to damage. Moreso than any trinket before the Lightning Capacitor. Haste rating is huge for us. And it procs often for me, usually 3-4 times a boss fight.

But, then again, if you're using mostly scorches, then it would be useless for you, as it can't speed spells up past the GCD.

They are very viable, and I believe the S2 spellblade has spellhit on it as well, well worth getting if you can put the time in for it.

I believe the season 2 spellblade is on par with at least t5 raids, due to the enormous amount of spelldamage, and the chunk of spell hit on it. The offhand isn't as good for pve though, since it doesn't have that much damage stats on it, mainly just stam and res. I'd suggest getting the offhand from the heroic badges, or just the nethermancer's manual from mech for now.

Getting the season 1 spellblade would probably be a better idea though, since it'll be an honor reward in a few weeks. Which is easier than having to spend months for enough arena points (about 2.8k post 2.3 patch) to buy the season 2 one. The season 1 blade is nearly on par with the dagger from prince, and will cost around 25.3k honor. This is what I'm doing anyway.

Krane, you might have a look at the sword and the dagger from ZA once it goes live. Not as good as SSC or S2, but the dagger especially is still very good.

Some observations of mine:

Your spec looks OK except that you didn't take Arcane Potency, an effective 3% crit, in favor of some crap (Magic Absorption and Arcane Impact, which isn't crap for a deep Arcane build but is for Arc/Fire). 1/3 Critical Mass vs. Blast Wave is kind of a tossup (I went Critical Mass when I was 40/21, but fell in love with BW when I went deep fire). With the gear you have right now, I'd be tempted to say deep fire would be better DPS than Arc/Fire, but it's hard to say for sure - if you want to experiment, take your damage meter and go test on Dr Boom.

Here's what you really need to be effective raid DPS though - SPELL HIT! As 40/21 with no Ele Precision and only 12 hit rating, you'll be resisted 16% of the time on boss fights, which isn't acceptable. How can you work on this (without going Scryer for the crutch trinket)?
1) Enchant your gloves with 15 spell hit
2) Get exalted with CenEx for the sexy ring
3) Spellstrike hat and legs
4) Sha'tar hat glyph (Glyph of Power)
5) Gems - some of your gems are terribad. Such as the int/mp5 ones and spell penetration ones (! spell pene has no place on a raiding mage). Don't be cheap here.
6) Neck, back, MH, OH, wnad, trinkets can also be upgraded from instance drops to pieces with spell hit.

You're on the right track, though.

Edited, Nov 1st 2007 5:38pm by Theophastus

If you don't have a shadow priest in your group, or don't have a shammy with a mana tide totem, you'll be OOM with AM spam. I know, I was there.