Mastery, any use at all?

[Adis]

It's a good idea of blizz, and i'm pretty sure most specs are finding it fine.

But us combat rogues have the worst mastery in the game! I'm reforging all the mastery on my gear possible

I will try the following for my combat rogue.

agi > hit cap > mastery > hast > crit and get a slow offhand weapon to max out the damage from my free offhand attack.

No idea if it will be any good but I will try it when I hit lvl 85.

[thatguy181]

Elemental Shaman love free bonus spells and as such love mastery.

[Zarghol]

Mastery: Unshackled Fury is very underwhelming!

Which makes it awesometime to go arms, which likes mastery, until you can get lots of hit and go fury, which hates mastery and loves crit. Reforge mastery - unforge mastery - reforge crit is so cheap and fun lalala.

Oh, I like mastery tho. Arms PvP is fun no matter what, so... Also, I think Blizz wanted mastery to be something to easily tune a class with? Like if ele shamans was overpowered in PvE and enhancements underpowered, they could nerf elemental overload to 65-70% or something and buff enhanced elements. That way, elementals do less damage, without nerfing their abilities which would make enh even worse and at least a bit nerf resto in PvP. Class balance <3

[blackeagle]

"I concur. Stacking shadowpriest mastery boosts only one of our spells (Mind Blast)"

Like saberon says it also increases DoT damage and it boosts both Mind Blast and Mind Spike, so two spells+dots. Haven't brought my shadow priest to 81 yet, so I don't know how often we use Spike yet, but mastery seems good enough.

[Deleted]

As an Unholy DK I gotta say that master is incredibly underwhelming.

FYI it increases our disease damage. Very lame. Shadow damage would make it so much more attractive. Scourge strike has a shadow portion, death coil does shadow damage and Blood plague does shadow damage. Why should Unholy incease the damage of a frost effect anyway?

[Deleted]

Actually, AFAIK, mastery also increases the Increased DoT Damage portion of the buff for Shadow Priests, not just the Mind Blast portion.

Therefore it's actual usefulness would be based on the relative uptime of said buff in relation to the percentage of DoT-based damage for a Spriest.

Since most of your damage is DoT, and 1% mastery =2.5% increased DoT damage, assuming that the Orb buff was up ~45% of the time, I would think that Mastery would be == Crit, with its worth increasing the higher the uptime on the Orb buff.

I remember reading something like this on patch notes, but the mastery tooltip doesn't suggest this behaviour. It might be just confusing, or I've misread it. I'll have to test out when I get back home if the Empowered Shadow tooltip changes if I reforge for more mastery.

In either case I remember mastery being below critical hit in value when they tested it on Elitist Jerks, if only for a little. Which still makes it a rather unwanted stat. It's also been tested (granted at level 80) that reforging to mastery from crit and haste is a notable dps loss due to how much stats you lose in order to pump up mastery.