Hello, I recently decided to start playing my mage alt seriously and I’ve been stacking crit as advised, seems an obvious one.
I hit 51% crit today and I’m wondering if I should just keep going or start focusing elsewhere?
Thanks
Crit stacking went out of fashion in 8.1 or 8.2. Pyroclasm build is still viable on ST but its a long way behind BM build which likes haste/vers
What spec are you playing?
Your armory says fire, so i’ll just go with that.
I want to know, who advised you to play crit? Your build and stats look like you read a legion guide.
Don’t run firestarter, incanter’s or pheonix flames.
Don’t stack crit, you stack haste and vers.
Did you read a noxxic guide or something, like i would really like to know.
Fgs. I took my spec and crit stack advice from Icy Veins about a week ago on google 
I asked the same thing then saw the title lol edit*
Made some adjustments to my spec and it feels a little smoother. How come we don’t stack crit as fire now?
Blaster master trait was introduced in 8.1 I think, which has been our most powerful trait and gave us huge combustions.
Haste ruduces FB cd and vers puts more power into comb. Meteor has better synergy with large amounts of mastery BM produces.
Before that the Wildfire trait was our go to, this boosts the dmg of Pyro’s. Crit gave more hot streak procs, therefore the proc rate of clasm and increases pyro dmg. I actually preferred this build but every patch BM build has had something new to make it stronger.
For all its criticism azerite gear has made for really interesting spec builds.
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It mostly comes down to a boost combustion got during 8.2
8.2 introduced Memory of lucid dreams and mechagon bracers. These 2 in combination allows you to have massive combusts, where almost every global is a pyro for 10 sec.
The real reason we don’t stack crit is that crit improves your damage outside of combust, and it used to be that combust did maybe 20% of our damage due to it being such a short window and no fireblast resets.
Now i looked up a log to check for myself. And in 2 min (as in a full cycle before combustion is back) i did 7.25m, but in the first 21 seconds (combust 2 seconds into pull + 10 sec combust + 9 sec combust ignite) i did 3.31m, which is 46% of my damage.
So here’s the point. you might think then that crit would buff your out of combust damage, which is slightly the majority of your damage (54%), but 1 point of crit increases the damage outside of combust, way less than 1 point of vers does inside of combust.
Though as a side note, since i am checking ST logs, infinite stars does do quite a lot of my outside of combust damage.
And as minnji mentioned, haste also makes you able to do more consistent combusts with getting fireblast back quicker.
Now in 8.3 with infinite stars, there’s even more reason to stack haste and vers, since they buff infinite stars by a lot.
So yea, we used to stack crit to get consistent heating up, but now fire is all about the combust window, where crit doesn’t matter, but haste and vers does.
And for mastery, as already mentioned, we stack 3 traits that give us almost 400 mastery each for every fire blast we use, so we have a ton of mastery in combust from those traits.
Check title xd
That explains it
Icyveins knows as much about wow as i do about PvP
And you bois in the arena forums knows how much i know about PvP!
You sure you were looking at the right patch? icy veins changelog says that that the guide has not been changed since 13th of january, and even in 8.2 they didn’t recommend crit.
I even went back to check 8.1.5 and 8.0 (couldn’t find 8.1 unfortunately) and even there they don’t recommend crit.
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Wasn’t called that when i replied originally, it was just called “mage crit stacking”
Oh, appologies then
It’s for Arcane
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Awesome! My last question I suppose then is, what stats should I change all my crit gems to? Swap them all out for vers?
Haste.
The meta is changing again slightly. Mastery% corruption is our best corruption (inf stars for ST maybe) and once you reach about 20% bonus mastery, mastery becomes better than vers on ST.
I’m at 18% and haste is still top then vers with mastery only slightly behind.
Frost NoIL build is still simming higher for me though ST.
just a little personal opinion: For those who want to have fun playing a fire mage (spiritual son of the fire legion mage) based on the crit, it is always possible, even at high level, I play this build from the beginning of the extension and I have no problem either in raid or in mm + so the haste / versa is not the only truth, it is the simplest solution, but another way is possible 
edit : if you look at my armory you can see the stuff i use for mm+ (for raid, it’s a bit different, i use elem as major essence and lucid dream, iris and breath of the dying minor + corruption infinite stars instead of twilight devastation + some other little changes )
That’s interesting to see, not even running mecha bracers or flame on. Be nice to drop my 435 font but I can’t fathom dropping so much cleave on such a heavy cleave raid tier.
From solo PvPers perspective Im taking crit route. Everyone who does Arena stack haste & vers but I go for crit & mastery and possible leech, which keeps me alive longer while I can rely more on old school scorch spamming. Unfortunately Fire Mages have hands down the worst Talents compared to any other Classes. Almost 80% of all choices are terrible. Its fun still if I can kill people, but sadly Greater Pyro will probably be mandatory no matter the build.
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