Getting Rid of the Blur

The past 3-4 weeks have been a bit of a blur.

Learning to play a Fire Mage, running raids I've never (or almost never) seen before, and trying to get geared enough to be useful have been akin to my head spinning around on a turntable like a Dee-lite video.

Groove is in the Heart,
featuring homeboy Bootsy Collins.

However, the longer my raiding has gone on, the more I've wondered just how much of my output is decided by gear and how much by skill. 

Okay, let's be real for a second: you have to know what the hell you're doing if you want to be useful in any group format in WoW. I don't mean that you have to know the entire rotation like the back of your hand, but you have to realize that --for instance-- if you're attacking a mob that has fairly low health, spamming Fireball isn't your best option. For one, it takes forever (3.5 seconds) to cast, and 3.5 seconds is a looong time for a cast on a trash mob. At that point, you're much better off spamming Scorch (1.5 second cast) to at least get some damage on a mob before they're cut down. So, that's the sort of basic understanding about your class that I'm aiming for here: once you get these basics down, you're 75% of the way there to maximizing your DPS output from skill. 

Yes, you can practice and improve your output from there, but I think at this point you get more bang for the buck by improving your gear. 

And using Cardwyn as an example, boy did my gear need improvement.

***

In order to understand the impact on gear, let me show you where Card stood when she was convinced to join the AQ40 raid:

From sixtyupgrades.com.
I can thank the Mage Lead for showing me the site.

Um, yeah. I wasn't kidding when I said I wasn't ready for Blackwing Lair, much less AQ40.

The nice thing about Sixty Upgrades is that with a click you can see the impact of an upgrade on your gear. For example, clicking on the Star of Mystara (which I held onto because of the plus to hit) gives you this:

Yikes. The Star of Mystara doesn't
even the Top 6.

The table is easy to understand. The left column is the name of the piece, the middle is the impact the gear on the Fire Spec, and the right column is where the gear can be found. If you hover over the middle column, it gives you the details in the bonuses (Spell Power, Int, Hit, etc.) 

What I did was target gear that were (relatively) quick upgrades that had a big impact. Like that silly looking turban from Upper Blackrock Spire, that you'll never ever ever see Card wearing with "Show Helm" active. Or that Robe of the Archmage that I had in my bank, which (ironically enough) has better spell power than even the T2 Netherwind Robe. Or the Fire Wand I had (also in my bank) that gives a better boost than the wand I'd been using. 

Combine all this with a few lucky rolls and drops in MC and BWL and my gear looked a bit more, well, raid worthy.

The net result was that my output went up by a decent amount over the next few weeks, something like 18-20% per week.

That was just gear, mind you, because I don't think I've gotten that much better at handling "Fiery Cardwyn" over the past few weeks than my first week or so running with the spec.

***

I suppose you could say that both gear and skill have their upper limitations; gear has a hard upper limit while skill doesn't. But skill produces diminishing returns the higher up in skill you go. The effort it takes to go from 0 - 75% is less time than to go from 75% to 90%, because you have to work longer and harder to raise your skill to that sort of level. 

Gear is just a time grind without any performance pressure: you put in the time and the drops will come. Skill is a time grind as well, but one with no set ending: you're kind of limited by your physical skillset, and the older you get the greater the limitations.

But for me, gear had the biggest impact on my performance in raids. I'm still bringing up the rear in the Mage Crew, but the gap has lessened considerably. I can now focus on skill without worrying about being such a liability compared to before, and because I've gotten a bunch of easy upgrades I can now focus on specific ones that I can target in Molten Core that have a big bang-for-the-buck to them. 

Overall, things are much less chaotic and overwhelming. For which I'm eternally grateful.