Fire Mages and Frost Armor? (4 replies to this topic)

I'm curious if this is viable, because the Frost Armor for mages gives 7% spell haste. If a mage is going for a haste benchmark for an extra tick on their dots, wouldn't it just make more sense to gain 2% stats by swapping Molten Armor to Frost Armor, then putting extra points into crit? I mean right now I doubt mages could give up the crit with their gear, but later on when stats are more plentiful it seems like that may be the case.
I don't by any means claim to be an extremely knowledgeable player about all of that stuff, it is just something that came to mind so I was hoping a more experienced/knowledgeable player could explain to me whether or not that would be the case.

Edited by Mit213, 08 November 2012 - 04:55 AM.

Currently I've not seen anything simming haste remotely close to crit.  Not even close enough for the 2% extra haste and as the gear goes up crit appears to scale better and better.  It's a cool thought and worth keeping bookmarked for future checking for sure.

If you break the % back down into ratings, you get 7% haste = 2975 haste rating.
5% crit = 3000 crit rating.

The short answer is no, crit > haste for Fire.

The long answer is, if you are very close to a haste break point it is usually worth reforging to bump yourself over that break point. However, if you are swapping armours around to get over a break point there are 1 of 2 scenarios:
1) You are close to break point but can't get there by reforging - so you swap armours, then you need to reforge a TONNE of haste back to crit (almost 3k worth) so you are not way over the haste breakpoint - as being way over, is an inefficient spending of stats. Chances are, you don't have the ability to do this on your armour.

2) You are nowhere near a haste breakpoint (>5% away, say), in which case you swap armour. This puts you over the haste breakpoint (and you can reforge back some crit so you aren't well over the breakpoint), however, you just sacrificed say 2k crit into 2k haste to hit a breakpoint. Is that extra breakpoint worth such a large investment in an inferior stat? No. No it is not.

So, the longer answer, is also no. Don't do it. Use molten armour always.

Thanks for the replies. I hadn't looked into how much haste and crit it took to get 1% of each, so that explains a lot.

Your best option on breakpoints is simply choosing one that you are comfortable with that doesn't sacrifice enough crit to be a damage loss.

Also, test things for yourself like this to see with your own eyes just how the damage is effected.
I go through about 6k gold a week reforging right now... on average.

~Sage