Crit for frost mage

[Toxaa]

I wonder why some top-rated frost mages use silk bracers/belt/boots. Some of them even socket armor with spellcrit-gems. I think crit for frost mages is useless while they have shatter talent.
Is there anything I dont know, theorycrafting or something?
I want to hear good mages wearing crit-gear.

[Ryan]

I will go for crit. Nova gets dispelled too easy and i rely mostly on scorch.

[Tyveris]

Well, unfortunately crit is just too expensive compared to straight damage due to resilience. Also, our pet does more damage when stacking damage (does the crit get applied to the pet also?).

That being said, our base armor is always going to have it so potentially maybe we should be stacking crit as we will always have wasted points. I don't know. I'll try to put together a table later about the Dreadweave vs Silk damage to crit tradeoff.

[Molkon]

Good question easy answer :)

look. The dreadweave pvp items are i think made for warlocks. You have no spellcrit on them cause wlocks do their main dmg through dots and channeliung spells (i know .. not destro but destro is no good arena talent build) the typical specc 27/34/0 .. with this specc u dont need spellcrit.
im a frostmage i bought it because the + stats u get on dreadwave dont even replace the % crit.

so far molkon

[buena]

I got dreadweave this season because I also noticed that crit is far too expensive in terms of itemvalue, especially against resilience targets. My philosophy was to give up crit as much as possible as long as I could reasonably get another stat in exchange.

But I don't like how it worked out. Mages, like rogues and warriors, are a class that NEEDS to crit. I just don't think you can get around it, so suck it up and accept that resilience has nerfed you but you need to crit anyway. Season 3 I will be getting all silk items.

Still, crit IS overvalued compared to straight spelldamage. I wouldn't be using any enchants or gems with crit unless you need to do it for socket or meta bonuses.

[Reeve]

I got dreadweave this season because I also noticed that crit is far too expensive in terms of itemvalue, especially against resilience targets. My philosophy was to give up crit as much as possible as long as I could reasonably get another stat in exchange.

But I don't like how it worked out. Mages, like rogues and warriors, are a class that NEEDS to crit. I just don't think you can get around it, so suck it up and accept that resilience has nerfed you but you need to crit anyway. Season 3 I will be getting all silk items.

Still, crit IS overvalued compared to straight spelldamage. I wouldn't be using any enchants or gems with crit unless you need to do it for socket or meta bonuses.
Buena hits the nail on the head. This was my mentality in S2, and is my mentality in S3...crit is still crit. Resilience only affects it absolutely, all in all you'll have more relative crit - you'll still crit 5% more often if you have 5% more crit - and burst damage scares healers. :)

[Toxaa]

Good question easy answer :)

look. The dreadweave pvp items are i think made for warlocks. You have no spellcrit on them cause wlocks do their main dmg through dots and channeliung spells (i know .. not destro but destro is no good arena talent build) the typical specc 27/34/0 .. with this specc u dont need spellcrit.
im a frostmage i bought it because the + stats u get on dreadwave dont even replace the % crit.

so far molkon

I doubt about "stats u get on dreadwave dont even replace the % crit".
For example, Vindicator's Dreadweave Belt vs Vindicator's Silk Belt has
+6 sta
+4 int
+5 res
+6 spd
-30 crit
BUT dont be confused by big number of 30 critrating, only 21 rating goes into 1%.
Well lets compare all honor armor from s3: neck, bracers, belt, boots
+24 sta
+15 int
+14 res
+19 spd
-4.6% crit
I think the stats we gain from dreadweave is much more usefull for the mage in arena. If I want to do some serious damage, I deal it with shatter combo. The avarage crit with dreadweave clother in frost spec is 15%. Against frozen target mage have 15+50(shat)-12(res)+some% from winter chill~55%. I dont think its big difference between 55% and 60% crit. If you love crits so much, you can go for empowered frostbolt to gain 5% extra crit on frostbolt.
discuss

[Opel]

there was a topic in the mage forums (on arenajunkies) comparing s3 dreadweave vs silk, it seemed like silk was the way to go next season.

[Mattyo]

I still assert that one of the main differences between mages and warlocks is that mages crit, and crit often. This is also one of the reasons we were hit pretty hard in PvP with the addition of resilience. When we stop taking crit we basically are saying, it's OK to not crit unless we have a target snared, and I'm not down with that.

With that being said, I again will be taking the silk honor set. I am also leaning towards taking one of the staves as my main season 3 weapon. Also toying with the idea of a CSD, but I'll always be a fan of 1/2 cast AM, probably will run 2 hats.

[Hoove]

I've had the full dread and silk set from both s1 and s2. I prefer the silk and will get silk first s3 and dread 2nd. Considering you can pretty much have all of it day1 with 75k saved no reason not to try both.

I used to think resilience made +crit less valuable and piled on the dread at one point having 11k hp and 495 res. While this may be true ivalue wise it's not true when it comes to pvp. It's nice to be beefy and feel like a tank but if you aren't putting out damage you aren't doing half your job as a mage imo. 1 crit can win a match so every single % becomes that much more valuable. That's why I prefer silk now.

Don't try and over think items when it comes to pvp I used to make the mistake of doing this. You can't break a pvp battle down into a math equation to find the best answer. The best choice is to have a healthy balance of all stats including crit. It's very rare that the extra 50 dmg or 200 hp from dread is going to kill someone or save you. On the other hand 1 single crit on a unfrozen target from a frostbolt could mean the difference between kill or not. I now take this logic even further and apply to to my entire set of gear (after a certain threshold ~10k hp). Why stack on the hp and res when 1 warriors white hit is going to negate that? Instead drop the extra 1k hp/100 res you could have and get an extra 7-10crt and 100-150dmg.