by Christian Belt
Once you have the gear to put out quality DPS, maximizing that DPS through gems can often be a trial-and-error process, costing a great deal of time and gold.
Theorycrafters make it sound simple: Spellpower trumps all, every time, always, forever. And though this is largely true, the hard and fastness of this rule varies a bit between specs and playstyles. There is no cookie-cutter “optimal” stetup that will work for every mage ever, without exception.
What I offer here are a few guidelines to follow when gemming your mage, things that are generally true to some degree regardless of your spec or playstyle. When there are exceptions, I’ll try to list those too.
In most cases, spellpower gives you the most bang for your buck.
This is almost always going to be true. But it would be a mistake to assume that the optimal gem setup for every mage is always going to be a Runed Cardinal Ruby in every slot, regardless of the color of the slot. Past a certain point, more spellpower isn’t always the best policy. Once you get in the neighborhood of 4,000 spellpower, other stats, most notably haste for Arcane mages, start to creep up on something akin to equal footing.
Lets look at the current stat hierarchy:
- Hit rating – This is the single most important stat until it is capped. It varies depending upon talents and raid buffs. Once geared in full epic gear, this should be capped in most cases, without the need for hit rating gems. If you still need hit rating to reach your particular cap, then gems are a good place to get it. Once capped, this stat ceases to be useful in the slightest.
- Spellpower – When in doubt, go with spellpower. In most cases, a Runed Cardinal Ruby is the single best gem you can put in a slot. This is your primary stat.
- Crit and Haste – These are your secondary stats. Haste is of more importance to Arcane mages, while crit is more valuable to Fire/Frostfire mages. Both have effective caps, where stacking more ceases to add value, but they are so high that most mages will never see them.
- Intellect – This is largely valuable as a mana-pool increasing stat. If you find you aren’t running out of mana in long fights quickly enough to cause problems, you have enough intellect. In most cases, this isn’t a stat you’ll need to gem for. The exception is Arcane, which has talents that convert intellect to spellpower. For Arcane mages, the value of intellect jumps to the approximate level of haste, but is still well below spellpower in terms of pure point-for-point importance.
- Spirit is useful for adding crit rating through Molten Armor, but absolutely every other stat already listed is more valuable than spirit for mages, without exception. There is almost never a need to gem for spirit.
Meta slot
This is one circumstance under which there actually is one “optimal” choice: the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond.
The extra crit rating is minimal, and not worth factoring in here. The real value comes from the 3% increased crit damage. This is a flat-out DPS increase, worth around 200 DPS for the more crit-heavy specs. It’s the best meta gem by a long distance, regardless of any variable. You might look at one of the other metas and be tempted. You might think something else sounds appealing somehow. You are wrong. In terms of pure DPS, which are the only terms a mage should care about, the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is the only choice worth making.
It requires at least two blue gems, which is a slight limitation. You’ll want to fulfill this requirement with purple or green gems, since the blue gems on offer all suck for mages.
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