+spell damage or crit growing upFollow

Just dinged 65 on my fire mage and I've been having a terrible time with equipment - not finding it, instead, making up my mind on where to go with it.

What it inevitably comes down to is crit percentage vs spell damage bonus.

I'm hovering around 330ish for bonus damage and 17-18% for crit bonus and it inevitably seems like any small boost in one takes a big chunk out of the other.

Now I know some are going to say "Peh - you'll be 70 in five levels - dont worry about it" but its not like I'm powerleveling this toon 18 hours a day and it'll be doing heroics and Kara by the end of the week (or even month most likely). I also enjoy doing the BG daily with it so that's a partial consideration.

So what's the focus with a mage - +dam or +crit both while growing up and upon maxing out at 70?

What I've heard is that if you're frost or arcane spec, +dmg is better for leveling up simply because you don't have the big hit kind of spells that fire gives you.

For fire, +crit pays more divideds, since your normal damage is better to begin with and crits just allow for more 1 or 2 shots -- somethin that doesn't really happen for frost even if they crit.

I played frost to 70 and was quite happy following this advice (not sure where i heard it), but I don't know if it is true or not.

I always focused on +Spell Damage while leveling because fights never lasted long enough to rely on crits. If a mob goes down in 3 hits, relying on a crit for increased DPS is tough. However, spell damage will always help out. At least, that was my thought process.

I also leveled my mage by mostly hitting instances, so unfortunately, Shatter (Leveled as a Frosty) didn't help much :( Thinking about it.....maybe I should've stacked crit...or leveled Fire....or both. Oh well, what's done is done. :)

That's it in a nutshell.

Pretty close to never.

There are a number of drops from the normal instances and quest lines that will give you blues with decent +damage and spell hit. Most Kara groups have picked up on the fact that a half decent spell hit is as important as decent spell damage. After I solo leveled to 70 and crafted and otherwise got myself over the damage/spell hit threshold and found a decent guild I had access to guild members to do some of the rep quests to gain access to the heroics I missed getting honored for coming up. Had I been able to group more and run those on the way up my spell hit situation would have been much better.

Edited, Sep 5th 2008 5:24pm by MrFredII

When you have a +25% Fire Crit rate, you can consider crits "reliable" for fights. But it's about the efficiency.

To start kara, seeing how most people can carry you through to get gear it isn't that big of a deal, but a general (or at least historic benchmark) was:

~ 700 damage
~ 100 hit