Demonic Souls

As you probably know, I play a mage. Since reaching level 80, I've been having serious mana trouble on boss fights that are a bit longer than the typical one. I think I can safely say I run OOM faster than any other class I've played with in an instance. And I'm the only class that I've seen rendered useless (wanding). It doesn't happen often, but it did happen. So I've been thinking, and comparing myself with other mages/casters, and I think my haste rating is quite high, possibly too high for my own good (somewhere around 240). The haste obviously increases my dps, which is good, and if I just gave up the haste I would run OOM after dishing out the same amount of damage, but it'll just take longer, so that makes no sense at all. However if I traded haste for crit%...crit is basically free damage. So I'm thinking crit>haste for mages. But how do you compare? If you have 2 items, one has haste and the other crit, what numbers are you looking for to decide which one is better? Haste is still good as it increases your dps, so if it's alot of haste compared to little crit rating, the haste would still win. Anyway, I have no answer. I hope the patch comes and solves all my mana trouble. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, that haste should be very good for healers and melee. Healers will always benefit from being able to cast faster. They might have more idle time in fights, which is good, allows them to use more dispelling or eating donuts.

as far as i can tell haste rating will be really good for melee. mine at the moment is pretty low, but i've seen some gear upgrades (much later) that would definately help. something i'm gonna work on in future for sure.

i have read that haste of about 20% is good for priests so they can get heals off quicker so i would assume that a %rating of that or less would be best for a mage. but dont quote me on that

Thats a hard one, personally, i have crit over haste, pretty much all my items are crit, not haste, and at the moment (for mage) im choosing crit. I can see the advantages of haste, but, u can still pump out good dps with crit, and, as you have mentioned, u will be able to do it over longer fights, coz you still have mana. However, according to patch notes, arcane mages get a 2 minute cooldown on Evocation, which, to be frank solves your problem immensly. As for moolander, he takes as much haste as he can get. Faster healing is great, especially on aoe mobs / bosses. Haste is awesome for healers. I also need crit, but, well, i cant have everything yet. i guess it comes to what you prefer, for dps, haste helps, you do more dps, but, for mages, personally, i go crit... Hope this halps :P Mooooo!

Yes, I agree Moo. But the question remains, what amount of crit rating is equal to what amount of haste rating in terms of added dps.

Well heres my 2 cents. Haste is one of the most fickle of stats, for some classes its a must and for others its almost useless. Same goes for builds within classes. Basically anything less than 10% spell haste isnt worth considering if you want to use it at all. You have to stack it for it to pay off. The arcane build is one that seems to scale nicely with haste, good slow nuke that gets a good return from % based modifiers, and increased casting speed will increase the frequency of procs. Other mage builds dont fair so well there, but still find it useful to a certain extent. The Frostfire Bolt build is geared around effects that proc off crits, so this stat must be stacked above everything else (exept hit). Haste will scale well with the 3.0 speed nuke but multiple crits in a row are more important. So for arcane specs id still say take a balance, you still need a decent crit return. One way you could help this is by moving some talents around to take improved Scorch. Atm it is one of the best raid buffs in the game, and could be aquired without loosing any of the key arcane talents, although you might have to say good by to some of the more fun ones like improved invis. If you type mage builds into wowwiki there are a number of sample raid builds up there, and most of them revolve around that talent.

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/mage/talents.html?tal=23000513010023015032310250532123050023003000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Related Links: