Vanilla WoW Mage Guide

Table of Contents

• Talents
• Consumables
• Stat priorities
• Pre-raid Gear
• Enchants
• PvP

Stat Priorities

We have 3 aims for collecting our stats, listed from most important to least important.

Increase the damage of our spells, as to increase our dps

• Increased Spell Damage
• Chance to Critical Hit with Spells
• Chance to Hit with Spells
• Spell Penetration (not worth collecting for Pve)

Increase our mana pool and regeneration, as to increase our dmg till oom.

• Intellect
• Spirit
• Mana every 5 seconds

Increase our survivability, as to allow us to continue to deal damage

• Stamina
• Resistances

I strongly recommend downloading the addon Theorycraft. This will expand the ingame tooltip of your spells and give detailed information about the items you’re wearing and their effect on your spells.

Increased Spell Damage
An item that increases Damage done by Spells and Effects by 21 will not add 21 damage to all spells you cast. You have to look up the Spell-coefficient for our spells to see how much of your spelldamage will benefit the various spells. The theorycraft addon will actually show this while in-game, but for the sake of examples here are a few:

81.4% Frostbolt
100% Fireball
42.8% Fireblast
42.8% Scorch
14.3% Arcane Explosion

So with the example of 21 spell damage increase, you only see the full 21 damage on fireballs. Every arcane explosion will do 3 more damage to each target affected (which adds up ofcourse since it may affect many targets at once).

Chance to Hit
As a caster you will -always- have 1% chance to miss with your spells.
But also the level difference between you and your target adds further chances to miss.

Assuming you’re level 60:
Target level 60 = 4% chance to miss. 3% chance to Hit is needed for cap. (pvp)
Target level 61 = 5% chance to miss. 4% chance to Hit is needed for cap.
Target level 62 = 6% chance to miss. 5% chance to Hit is needed for cap.
Target level 63 = 17% chance to miss. 16% chance to Hit is needed for cap. (pve)

Raid bosses are level 63, so our aim is to end up with 16% chance to Hit.
You will gain 6% chance to Hit from talents, so the last 10% must come from gear.

Chance to Crit
One misconception about Chance to Crit, is that 1% more chance to Crit means out of 100 casts, an additional one of them will crit. But that’s not exactly how it works. Everytime you add one more 1% chance to Crit, you have to factor in your resist-chance into the calculation to see what it actually ends up changing.

If you have 10% chance to resist on a boss, then you will have 90% chance to hit it, in other words.
So if your crit chance is 20%, then only 90% of those will land on the target, and so the final amount of Criticals would be:
20 * 0,9 = 18 spells out of 100 casts will be a Critical hit.

I’ve made this Calculator to compare your items and see how much more valuable +Chance to Hit really is. Everytime you get another 1% Chance to Hit, you reduce the amount of Resists you do on a boss, and you also increase your Critical hit chance, because you enable another spell to potentially become a Critical hit.

Spellcaster Damage Calculator

Spell Penetration
Decreases the Magical Resistance of your target
A simple rule of thumb is that each 10 spell penetration adds 2.5% DPS increase on average, assuming the mob has any resistance in the first place since it isn’t possible to reduce enemy resistance to below 0.

In Raids it is usually the case that if resistance to a particular school is very common, then Mages will simply respec to get rid of the problem, rather than try to look for items that reduces enemy resistance. This is why we don’t use Fire talents in Molten Core.

Resistance is very common in PvP due to the various class-buffs as well as Tier 1 and Tier 2 set having a lot of resistance on it. The reason for the spell penetration is obviously to avoid having your counterspells and polymorphs be resisted by the alliance, which usually ends up with you having to corpserun.

For the sake of understanding the math behind resistances, here is a spreadsheet:

Note: some spells like polymorph, counterspell and others will either do their full effect or none at all. For those spells, their chance to resist is the “average dps lost” percentage.

Intellect
For every 59.5 intellect you have, you gain 1% chance to crit.
For every 1 intellect you have, you gain 15 maximum mana.

The critical-factor of Intellect is so small that it is negligable, and this is why it is a secondary stat, mainly it only increasing our aim of damage till oom, as more mana allows for more casts. Don’t put too much focus on Intellect. Get whatever intellect you can from your best possible spelldamage items and that will be fine. Compensate with Major Mana Potions and Demonic Runes if you tend to get out of mana too quick. If you use the Spellcaster Damage Calculator i linked earlier, you can add the Intellect into the calculations to see the benefit in damage from the intellect.

Spirit and Mana every 5 seconds
Well, these stats are absolute garbage in my oppinion.
I’d say that 1 mana/5 seconds is equal to 1 spelldamage. Others may disagree, but fact is that there are just not many fights out there which lasts so long that you end up going out of mana.

Stamina
This does not increase your dps nor our damage till oom, but the downside is reaching 0 health reduces your damage to absolute zero.
But that being said, in most raiding situations if you’re taking damage it means you’re standing at a wrong spot. Whatever stamina that you end up with after prioritizing solely on spelldamage items, is what you’re going to end up with. Don’t worry about it. Don’t pull aggro and don’t stand at a bad spot, and you’ll be fine. Again I suggest that you watch the Faxmonkey video posted earlier in this topic. It shows excellently what playstyle you need in order to survive hard fights.

Enchants

Helm: Arcanum of Focus gotten from doing the Libram of Focus quest. If you got Spellweaver’s Turban or something better, then definately go for the Zul’Gurub Enchant: Presence of Sight
Shoulder: Zandalar Signet of Mojo – requires Exalted Reputation with Zul’Gurub
Cloak: Subtlety*
Chest: Greater Stats – semi-rare enchant. Alternatively you can use Major Health to compensate for the low amount of hp from bloodvine gear
Wrist: Mana Regeneration or Superior Stamina
Gloves: Frost Power* or Fire Power*
Legs: Arcanum of Focus gotten from doing the Libram of Focus quest. If you got the Bloodvine Leggings or better then definately go for the Zul’Gurub Enchant: Presence of Sight
Boots: Minor Speed is my preferred choice, others may go with Greater Stamina or Spirit
Weapon: Spell Power*

* = Rare-enchant. Drops from bosses in Molten Core or Ahn’Qiraj.

Pre-Raid Gear

Since the two first 40-man raids will be done with Frost talents, we’ll have the Pre-raid gear items fit that pattern.
Without donations, rep-farming or drops from the summonable bosses which can only be done as part of the T0.5 quest-chains, this is what your pre-raid BiS list would look like:

Helm: Spellweaver’s Turban – Upper Blackrock Spire
Neck: Diana’s Pearl Necklace – Strat Living
Shoulder: Boreal Mantle – Blackrock Depths
Cloak: Crystalline Threaded Cape – auction House
Chest: Bloodvine Vest – crafted by tailor
Wrist: Sublime Wristguards – Dire Maul North
Gloves: Hands of Power – Lower Blackrock Spire
Belt: Ban’thok Sash – Blackrock Depths
Legs: Bloodvine Leggings – crafted by tailor
Boots: Bloodvine Boots – crafted by tailor
Ring: Don Mauricio’s Band of Domination – Scholomance
Ring: Freezing Band – Auction House
Trinket: Briarwood Reed – Upper Blackrock Spire
Trinket: Eye of the Beast – quest reward as part of the Onyxia-attunement Quest (horde) – or through a quest started by killing the last boss in Lower Blackrock Spire (alliance).
Weapon: Rod of the Ogre Magi – Dire Maul North
Wand: Bonecreeper Stylus – Scholomance