Post by nickseng
here is my mage. i'm 'stuck' in the middle between arcane and fire- both in terms of wanting to be either, and having the right gear for either. (disclaimer: i know arcane is the 'best' pve spec.)
my gear is okay (i think?) and my spec is 100% standard. i like arcane a lot, but i get this nagging feeling that i have nowhere near enough haste. should i be gemming sp + haste? should i get the haste trinket from emblems? where am i missing out here? mind, i don't suck on charts. i'm consistently top 5 if not better (not that charts are end all be all), and i think i'm fairly knowledgeable about the class.
that being said, i've always loved fire for PvE- both heroics and raids. got stuck on it in BC. now it's even cooler with instant pyroblasts and living bomb, but i know my gear is horrendously lacking for it. i'm missing a lot of hit, and i'm fairly certain that i have a pathetic crit rating for it. i know the minimum crit rating is something much higher than what i have- how would i alleviate THIS, especially considering that i'd need to gem for hit to get up to the no-love cap (which i would do because i don't really like relying on having raid buffs for hit.. and i haven't built a gear set accounting for moonkins or shadow priests yet).
thus, the title of my post- i'm certainly not sucking as arcane, but what if i wanted to go fire?
i lament the difficulty in doing so. i have a dual spec, but rebuilding an entire set of gear, one for fire, one for arcane, is kind of a daunting task to me. i fear the incoming replies of "if you aren't willing to build another set then you're just uselessly QQing." it's really a pain in the ass for a casual player who has to consider regemming, maybe re-enchanting, etc. etc., all for speccing fire which a lot of PuG raids will scoff at because it's not the bee's knees.
For most parts, Fire and Arcane gear for the same stats, ie. hit > sp > haste > crit, so you'd find the gear greatly interchangeble.
It's just that Fire needs a lot more hit, so you'd probably need to have a couple of gears/trinkets with hit on them.