Mage starting 10 man

[Deleted]

Hi everyone. My current guild is 6/12 normal and I'm swapping from healer to dps and I'm needing some advice. My ilvl is 500, I've been playing frost for a while. I'm wondering what spec I should be raiding with? I can't do links as I'm new here but my character is Vemel on Draenor EU if you would like to take a look. Thanks in advance.

[Bayic]

Hey man stay Frost. Until you are rocking 35-40% crit stay away from Fire or you'll have a bad time (unless you pray to RNJesus). From what I gather Arcane scales really well with 522+ ilvl gear but you're a bit far from that right now and ToT has so many movement heavy fights that Arcane is really unappealing to me (personal preference). All in all Frost scales well until you can hit 35-40% chance or are in full heroic gear where arcane and fire both take over. GL!

[Lyreth]

Bayic covered most of it, but here is my 2 cents.


Pick the spec that you enjoy. If you want to raid frost there is no need to switch away from it. Your max potential is not there, but in the end its about your enjoyment. I love playing frost, but when I got the gear I tried fire and I really enjoyed that as well. Something I see mages do is see the 38% crit as a number that means switch to fire when you reach this. In reality it is just when fire and frost can compete against each other because of the free damage of frost vs the scaling of fire. Once your gear gets better fire will perform better. One of the biggest things I see with mages is that they reach that 38% and go fire and have absolutely no idea what they are doing. A little research will go a long way with switching to fire if you go that route, but if at the end of the day you do more dps as frost and you enjoy it more you have your answer. One of the big issues other than dps with frost is it's mobility. Frost mobility can be fine if you know how to handle fingers of frost procs and icy floes, but obviously scorch is superior for moving.

[Kiry]

What both of these said, I agree. I switched from frost to fire about 38%. It's stiff, and you pray a lot. As soon as I hit ~ 42%, it was a lot smoother and the numbers are lovely.

that said.....

Frost is good consistent dps. Fire has wider dps number, highs and lows due to the rng.
Enjoy!

[voltaa]

Most of what needs to be siad has been said here but I would also like to point out that the whole "38% crit" thing is bogus. I started off the tier in my 507 mastery/haste gear from playing arcane and switched to fire right away at about 26-27% crit and it was no problem whatsoever, if you try out fire and feel comfortable with it, use it, not having the absurd amount of crit that people claim is the minimum for fire shouldn't be an issue if you are decent at the spec and practice it

[Deleted]

Thanks for the advice all. I shall stay frost for now untill I get some gear upgrades then try fire