I have been collecting + frost spell damage gear and i notice there is no increase in any damage caused.
Gear:
Buccaneer’s cape of frozen wrath = + 4 frost spell damage
medicine staff of frozen wrath = + 9 frost spell damage
so this stacks up to +13 frost spell damage in total.
I use rank 1 frostbolt for testing : 20 - 22 frost damage
without the gear I hit an average of 22
with the gear I hit exactly the same amount however 1 time i have hit 24.
I was expecting i would hit around 33 - 35 for average am I wrong?
I dont know if this is a bug or how it works can someone explain this thank you.
Spells have different spell damage coefficients based on cast time, if it’s a channeled spell, number of ticks, whether it’s aoe, whether it has slowing effects, etc.
Spells gain a different amount of the +dmg based on their cast time and additional effects. Higher rank frostbolts gets a bigger damage bonus than rank 1, but as a mage it’s pretty much only high rank fireball and pyroblast that get the full +dmg.
Notice that it doesn’t say “MAKES FROSTBOLT HIT 200% HARDER!!!” on your gear but
" Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to X"
You’re gonna need more than ~20 spell power to feel any difference but once you go from 0 to 250+ you feel a big increase in damage honestly.
Basically spellpower coefficients for classes and spells are all different. That’s why the tooltip “by up to X” is correct albeit lazy.
A 3-second cast Frostbolt scales with 81.4% of a mage’s spell power. That 3-second Frostbolt will be reduced to 2.5 second cast if specced into it, but it will still benefit from the rank’s coefficient.
A rank 1 frostbolt if I’m not mistaken is a 1.5 second cast, and if you take a look at the following field available on Wowhead Classic
Effect #2 School Damage (Frost)
Value: 17 (SP mod: 0.163)
https://classic.wowhead.com/spell=116/frostbolt
You will see that it only scales with 0.163x of your spellpower. Which is to say… nothing at all.
But this is expected, otherwise everyone will use 1.5 second casts in raids if they scaled with 100% of the spellpower
+spell damage only matters if it actually reduces the number of casts you require to kill a mob, which means that spellpower in low quantities is only going to matter on elite mobs or bosses. For levelling, Int/Stam/Spi is much preferable. If you go ST levelling, Int/Spi are superior because you should rarely get hit if you’re doing things right, and the Spi helps with reducing downtime between pull. If you go AoE, Int/Sta is superior because you’ll drink anyway after every pull, and you need the Sta to survive the odd blow you’ll take.
Usually +spell power items have much less intellect / stamina / spirit etc
Because the gain in damage done for sub level 60 items is so much lower than the benefit the higher stats give you they are often bad choices for gear
I’m using a level 53 stave that is essentially a stat stick +17 intellect & stamina
That’s worth far more than the 30 or so extra spell power with around +7 intellect and stamina I would get from the available daggers and off-hands at that level - I’m still using it at 57
