Fire Mage DPS Stat Priority — The War Within (11.2)

You will want to prioritize stats as follows for both single-target and AoE:

1. Intellect;
2. Haste (a lot better than the rest);
3. Mastery;
4. Versatility;
5. Critical Strike. (usually slightly worse than the rest)

Haste is generally the best, but all the other secondary stats are usually very close in value. For most characters, critical strike is slightly worse than the rest, but this can vary depending on your current stat distribution.

Having said that, even with Haste being better, item level is still generally more important than whatever secondary stats you have on the item. We encourage players to sim themselves, if possible, to determine what stats you should aim for according to your current distribution, as this may change depending on your current values. This is because a deficiency of one stat will often cause it to become high in value relative to the others until you reach a "normalized" value. Due to this, we strongly recommend using Raidbots Top Gear instead to handle your gearing needs (see our Raidbots guide).

Using purely stat weights is never the best way to go about gearing your character. On the gear page, we go in-depth into how to best gear your character for varying types of content.

Secondary stats have diminishing returns. This means as you get more points into one stat, it will take increasingly more rating to get 1% more stats. This reduction goes as follows:

• From 0 to 30%, there is no penalty.
• From 30% to 39%, there is a 10% penalty.
• From 39% to 47%, there is a 20% penalty.
• From 47% to 54%, there is a 30% penalty.
• From 54% to 66%, there is a 40% penalty.
• From 66% to 126%, there is a 50% penalty.
• You can not get more than 126% from gear rating.

Generally, you can ignore most of this, but it does again put emphasis on using simulations to determine what stats to use. We strongly advice you to use Raidbots Top Gear to determine what gear to equip, as it automatically handles all of these complexities for you.

The gems, enchants, and consumables you will use are directly derived from your stat priority, and you can find our advice on this topic in our dedicated page.

These statistics have been obtained by combining common sense, in-game testing, and simulations using SimulationCraft.

Intellect is your primary stat. It provides you with Spell Power, which increases the damage of your spells.

Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit, which in turn increases your chances to get instant-cast Pyroblasts.

Mastery, through Mastery: Ignite, increases the damage of your Mastery: Ignite DoT.

Haste influences the cast speed of your spells. It also influences the cooldown of Fire Blast and the speed at which Living Bomb detonates.

Versatility is a flat-out damage done increase and damage taken reduction.