spell damage or spell criticalFollow

If you are going to get the boar's speed enchant on your boots I would either get the MSD or the one that you listed.

There are also a couple of others that are worth noting, one of which is the +12 stam + 5% stun resist, that can be very helpful.

You have to be CCing and doing damage in arenas, MSD works for both, and has gotten me out of a pinch on many occasions.

I suggest MSD over the CSD, which is a raiding gem, and the 12 damage/minor speed gem, which is for people who can't afford to gem their items properly.

The only viable alternative is the 18 stam 5% stun resist as Loopie mentioned.

Actually, Chaotic only requires at least 2 blue gems. MSD is kinda a pain with the "more blues than yellows", though.

Ah, thx Pol, this jogged my memory--I remember what it was now. I got it off an old EJ post; they said there was a bug such that Chaotic required exactly two blues, rather than at least two. May have been an old post (you know those long-*** EJ posts; no such thing as a necropost there), so perhaps the bug was fixed in one of the last few patches.

edit:

Yup, I'm looking forward to having this as an excuse to gem for a bit more dmg and a bit less resil. With Vengeful hat and wand finally in hand, so to speak, my resil with current gemming will be over 400. I never Arena w/o my Warlock buddy, so it's rare I get focus-fired (at least in our rating bracket), thus extra resil is kinda wasted. For some reason, people would rather sit through my sheep and/or CS than through 5 DoTs, a Deathcoil, and 2 fears. O.o lol

Edited, Mar 20th 2008 12:46pm by AynLoD

it's for this reason that a lot of people might prefer to just gem +hit and take the chaotic over mystical (since MSD is getting a little nerf again in 2.4?)

if you ask me, there aren't any marvelous caster metas aside from insightful earthstorm (more of a healer gem, but i guess it could help?)

not as awesome as they used to be (should have remained). considering how few head pieces have a meta slot (all the ones worth keeping any length of time until late-end-game are pvp "welfare epics". nothing wrong with that. just that they aren't spectacular for pve), and then comparing those against the available head gear at appropriate "tiers" of progression... incantator's and mana etched are just such a farce and putting a meta in them still won't make them worth wearing when you could pvp for a few days and get season1 (or 2 once season 4 hits)which is far better and far easier to get. for starters you need decent gear to start approaching T4 or 5, and unfortunately, the pvp gear isn't ideal for pve progression. that means you'll be wearing the wicked witch's hat or the uni-mind headdress for quite a while. the uni-mind in particular i would say is quite worth the loss of a meta slot -- can anyone prove that the gain of +hit and crit isn't worth as much as a MSD? for pvp or mage-tanking for krosh, the pvp head is better (resilience for one, and stamina for the other) but then, the question is moot.

don't forget how much purge/dispel is floating around in pvp. that mystical could be gone before you even get the chance to use it during the few seconds the proc is active. the cooldown was just uncalled for: they could have adjusted the proc rate to be satisfactory instead of forcing it to a timeline.

i personally far prefer passive, constant effects rather than undependable procs and on-use items. my gut feeling tells me that the uni-mind's hit is at least as much more damage as a MSD is, and more generally useful. perhaps even in pvp (lolcloak rogues can be made to fear you once more...).

my main gripe about metas is that none of them really do much more than an ordinary gem, they cost far more, and require you to bend over backwards to take full advantage of them.

my point regarding the preference of chaotic over msd was that chaotic's only requirement is that you have at least two blue (or green/purple) gems. MSD requires that you have more blue than yellow.

and the best +hit gems are yellow, or half yellow.

not to mention that it's difficult to arrange the available slot colors of your gear. there's a few pieces in kara (most directly relevant) that have a lot of yellow slots and really should not be socketed with off-color gems (if you're gonna ignore socket bonuses, why use gems at all?).

and last but not least, there is the mitigating argument about resilience basically negating the effect of chaotic. on the other hand, you can very very easily find yourself unable to cast for the entire proc-duration of the MSD as well. at least with the chaotic you have neutralized that much more of their resilience. it just seems to me that chaotic is naturally more useful for pvp where you aren't planted in one spot spamming your bolt-of-choice waiting for a proc to add a tiny dps spike.