I got this comment from Artiron on a post I did about mages and Spell Hit. So I figure why not do a new post about what I feel is important to good magery.

“I am more into PvP. Some people said that spell hit rate is not that important to PvP as compares to spell penetration, spell damage and spell crit. What is your thought?”

So let us look at what each stat does; Spell hit is a combat attribute that increases a caster’s chance to hit with spells and Spell penetration reduces the target’s resistance to your spells. The last two stats are self explainatory.

So how does spell hit effect PvP? Really it doesn’t unless you are lower level then your intended victim. For both PvE and PvP you have a natural 96% chance to hit. So with 3 points in Elemental Percision or Arcane Focus you have achieved the magical 99% chance to hit making spell hit gear obsolete in PvP. Remember, even if you try to cap at 100% spell hit you will only have an effective 99% spell hit.

Spell penetration seems to be pretty pointless in most encounters. The only variable is who initiated combat. If you started combat from a tactical position you have the upper hand as no one can change into resist gear while in combat. If it was reversed and your opponent started combat then hope that they didn’t stack resistence to mitigate your spell damage.

I’m going to skip spell damage for right now and tackle Spell crit. You will see a difference in your crit damage as people gain more resilience gear. Resilience is a character attribute that reduces the chance to receive critical strikes or spell critical strikes, reduces the effect of mana drain spells, reduces the damage taken from critical strikes and spell critical strikes, and reduces the damage taken from damage over time effects.

There are 2 key statements there; reduces chance to be critically hit and reduces critical strike damage. So at level 70, every 39.4 resilience equals 1% chance to avoid being critically hit and 2% reduction in cricital strike damage. So my mage is sitting at 112 resilience, meaning he has reduced his chance of being criticall hit by 2.84% and reduced the damage taken from critical strikes by 5.68%.

Now let us look at how someone with equal resilience can hinder my stacking spell crit. My mage has 18% spell crit with Molten Armor active. So now 112 resilience almost completely cancels my Molten Armor (3%). So now I’m back to 15.16% spell crit from my gear. Personally, I wouldn’t try to stack spell crit for PvP as most people can easily have 100+ resilience.

So what stats do I focus on for my mage in PvP?

First is always resilience, no better way to ruin someones day then to resist their critical strikes. Secondly, stamina and more stamina, because a dead mage does no damage. Lastly is spell damage, pssshaw you say. Well if critting them has now has lost its umph then straight damage is the only way to burn down those pesky foes.

Here is a good situation for you, this actually happened in my last foray into AV. I was attacking a NELF MS Warrior, I had my 18% crit and a pally putting Seal of Crusader on him. So all in all 21% crit chance, I landed maybe 2 crits on him during his 3 attempts at my tower. My crits we hitting him for right at 2k and my normal damage was hitting for around 1.4k. After seeing this happen during the first attempt at my tower I made a mental note, so-and-so has resilience gear change armors when he’s around.

So when he came back for another go at my tower I was focusing on him again. This time Frost Armor was up to slow him down when he attacked me, again the survival aspect. Since I knew he had resilience gear adding that extra crit from my armor was pointless. It was time to swap to a new tactic to help slow their attempt on the tower.

So by reducing my chance to be critically hit, reducing the critical damage and increasing my HP allows me to continue nuking them from orbit. Well taking up a tactical postition will give you a few mroe seconds of DPS time before they figure out how to get to you.

Well it was 9 members of SotD and 1 queued guy. We started in Arathi Basin just to pass the time. I have never really enjoyed PvP before. It always seemed like a chore then a chance to kill people. But I have found that doing a guild premade can be fun as hell.

Our premade group consisted of:

• 2 Prot Pallys in healing gear
• 1 Holy Priest
• 1 Resto Druid
• 3 Hunters
• 1 Elemental Shammy
• 1 Warlock

In AB we ran right for the mine and capped it. Then went to the stables and killed the 2 defenders there. Next we hit the lumber mill. In about 5 minutes we had already 4 capped them and we were working together very well. As we went for the blacksmith the box came up for WSG. Now imagine, you’re in an AB winning and then 9 people all leave. I felt bad for them but the Alliance were sucking really bad anyway. They never tried to recap anything after we got it.

So then we all enter WSG and the 9 of us split into 2 groups. Not your usual defense and offense, but a group to occupy them midfield while our insurgents snuck in to grab the flag. It didn’t really work all that well, we grabbed their flag right when they grabbed ours. Everyone was like, “They are going to turtle!” Ok not everyone just the one extra person that joined our premade.

The other pally was our flag carrier, keeping Blessing of Freedom on him made any snares worthless. He did die once but we had someone there to grab the flag when he dropped it. I was enjoying watching the melee people try to kill me when I would throw on Holy Shield and drop a Consecation. I would laugh at them while healing our runner. When we had to many in our flag room trying to take their flag back we would run out to the graveyard to give us more room.

I was hoping the Alliance hunter that kept dropping snake traps would get a clue. He would drop one I would consecrate and no more snakes. Good job huntard! He never even put Viper Sting on the healers. Our biggest problem was the Psychic Scream form their shadow priest. I just popped my trinket and kept healing but having to run back was somewhat time consuming. We won and had fun doing it and that’s all that matters.