Coming back to raid again?Follow

A few things I noted:

Your helm and shoulder enchants are bad, the staff enchant is behind the times. By the time you have that amount of gear I would expect you to have the rep required from Hodir and Kirin Tor.

Your gear is fine to go into Ulduar, and most guilds are killing the first two bosses of T9 (which are super easy as I understand it) and then go back to Ulduar to get more gear. As long as you find a guild that is progressing/clearing Ulduar you shouldn't have much trouble at all getting the gear out of there. Plus the fact that everything drops emblems of conquest now which allows you to get T8-esque gear + 2 pieces of T8 (+ 2 more if you do VoA as I understand).

FFB isn't really the main spec anymore, it may be with your gear level, but if you have a single piece that has hit on it I would throw that on and start gearing for fireball spec which nets higher DPS.


To find an end-game guild on your server check the oboards for your realm, wowprogress.com, and guildox.com (I believe is the website) they will list guild progression and you can try to find them on your realm etc and throw an app in.

Your gear will do fine, but you could use a bit more hit (which you should never gem or enchant for). (Un)fortunately Ulduar gear is flooded with hit, so a trip or two there will definitely net you a piece that will put you closer to the hit cap and allow you to make the respec worthwhile (because fireball spec gets 0% help from any hit talents, so you need around 14% self-buffed hit, where you have just under 9%).

Crit tends to be fine when you have the gear for Fireball, so you instead begin stacking haste as your secondary stat to spellpower.

You can get Conquest Emblems from heroics now and Triumph Emblems(the new ones) from the heroic and regular mode dailies. I've also heard that the new 5 man has some good epics, but I haven't looked at em.

Edited to mark out bad info.

Edited, Aug 15th 2009 12:02am by Poldaran

Really? Seems I was going on old information(it was initially reported that you would get it from both). My bad.




Edited, Aug 15th 2009 12:11am by Poldaran

You don't have nearly enough gear to switch to fire, if you can't get the good enchants for the head/shoulders yet you shoudln't even really be considering it.

Your meta gem is a joke, right?

chest enchant should always be +stats
spellpower to gloves
we don't use intellect gems
we don't value mp5, so your gem in your weapon is terrible. The socket bonus isn't even that good so I would just throw spellpower into it, otherwise if you need the blue gem for the meta use a purified gem.
why would you put that gem in your belt?
your second trinket is effectively worthless.


keep gearing up and when you are in full epics, with about 1900-2000 spellpower and close to self-hit capped (without gemming/enchanting for hit) consider switching to fire. Right now your two builds of choice would be frostfire or arcane.

Sorry if it was brutal, had a fun 4 hours of helping the wife move her friend's stuff out of an apartment and am wearing new contacts (never worn them before - today is my 3rd day) so I've been a little short to everyone.

To put it better, you need to be using a chaotic skyflare diamond - always - which requires two blue (read: purified) gems.

Your second trinket is bad because it doesn't work with spells, it is for hunters or something like that, but definitely not mages. Save up badges and get a sundial asap.

Our yellow gems should almost always be orange, and for arcane or fireball it should always be spellpower/haste. For frostfire it is generally spellpower/crit, but haste is fine so you don't have to constantly re-gem if you are always respeccing.

Your belt gem should generally be spellpower or the second meta color gem if you can't get a good socket bonus out of it elsewear (if that makes sense).

And keep working on your reputations, get your kirin tor and hodir rep up to get the new enchants. Unfortunately you don't have a beneficial profession, so that will go neglected, but if this isn't a super serious character or if you just want to focus more on making money then you are fine with mining/skinning. Although I would pick up tailoring or something like that and keep skinning (as you have it maxed) and tailoring doesn't take a gathering profession and you wouldn't have lost much time at all from your mining only being 77.

I'm in a similar boat as the OP. After a few months away, I am dusting off my mage alt for some Nax nostalgia.

The part about never gemming/enchanting for hit surprises me. I thought that my first priority was to get hit capped by (most) any means possible, and then work on the other stuff from there. That might just be my lingering BC mindset, though.

I'm currently working on getting into Nax for the achievements. Apparently the fact that I ran it a thousand times on my priest doesn't hold any water for my mage, and my guild fell apart while I was away, so no freebie runs.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Blackrock&n=Bradon

(For some reason, my OH isn't showing up... it's the 1st tier badge one)

So, even at my current progression level (rofl) I should not be gemming/enchanting for hit? Will that not give me problems trying to DPS bosses? I'd love the extra SP I'd get from getting rid of those.

Edit: Alright, after reading a few more posts, I see it reiterated. I'll just get rid of the gems/enchants.

Edited, Aug 17th 2009 12:05pm by Saaru

Your gear looks fine for the most part, I'm a bit confused by your hit enchant on your gloves and the enchant on the legs should always be spellpower/spirit, and your belt gem is bad. other than that it is a good start for both specs.


That being said, at your gear level both will come out to be pretty close, it all depends on the raid buffs that you get. Are you the only mage there with a lot of ranged classes (without a warlock to put up the crit debuff?) if so, I would respec fire/frostfire and make sure to put that up. If you are in a raid with little synergy for casters arcane is a good way to go, as long as you have replenishment.

@ Saaru,

Hit is indeed very important to us, but from the math that I have seen/heard people talk about it being at hit cap (or close) is a good dps increase, but trading 20 hit on gloves (for example) for 23 spellpower is a good dps increase because of the amount of hit (26.7 I believe) that it takes to reach 1% of hit. I think it really depends on the person and their goals, but I generally just gear for hit til capped but keep my gems/enchants in their spellpower/etc ways.

Edited, Aug 21st 2009 9:14pm by Anobix