Why is frost mage BiB prioritizing versatility as a secondary when literally every other guide has versatility as the lowest priority?
I haven’t had time yet to figure out why other guides don’t think versatility is good. It seems very counter-intuitive to me that versatility would not be good for frost mage. Frost mage has so many innate crit and haste buffs - those two stats are already at a disadvantage (on gear). It makes logical sense that mastery and versatility would creep up in relative value. (mastery less so when target count goes up, of course).
My calculations agree with this logic, obviously. I’m not sure yet what I could do to make crit/haste gain value in the calculations… I spent a good amount of time going over the calculations multiple times. In the coming weeks I’ll look into making some default gearing strategies that follow what other guides do, regardless of what the math says.
I think it is worth noting that “every other guide” in the current wow community is very misleading. Everyone just runs some sims with simc and then takes whatever it spits out and throws it on a guide, or copies another guide. It’s not like there are a bunch of people out there independently trying to figure this out. Really you have us, and simc. And that’s it.
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This takes me back to my elitist jerks days 
what are soft caps and hardcaps???
so there is a point for both crit and haste that basically means adding more doesnt change your overall dps.
for example someone with 75% crit vs 80% crit sounds like 80% would be better, but consider this.
lets say 100% = 100
if you are critting 75 times vs 80 times for 100 dmg each the net gain is 500 damage by having that much more crit.(yes i know that isnt realistically how percentiles work but just go with me)
but adding another stat say versa for a flat damage increase.
so now 75 crits for 125 damage each instead is a net gain of 1875 damage.
now that being said you can’t ever rule out errors in calculation, but you get the general idea of why sometimes its not better to add more of a specific stat.
haste has breakpoints where you literally can’t cast any faster because you’ve reached a minimum gcd. its different for every class, but with haste buffs you end up actually nerfing your potential dps because you aren’t gaining any benefit from those buffs.
Yeah - it seems to me that it is very easy to get to a point where crit and haste begin to lose significant value - not to mention having talents that provide large chunks of stats not from gear already depress the value of getting more of that stat on your gear even below the cap… I continue to question logic that pushes crit/haste as “better” than versatility on gear, even up to the true “soft caps” where shattered spells always crit and you hit the min gcd during lust/icy veins.
I don’t understand why blizzard doesn’t do away with versatility all together and replace it with crit damage on gear. So many talent trees offer large crit buffs to various abilities, which depresses the scaling potential of crit as a stat, and then you end up with specs that “don’t scale”. If they let us get crit damage on gear and therefore adjust the optimal crit to crit damage ratio, we could allow crit on gear to continue to scale well for a lot of specs into the final seasons.
honestly I just wish they made mastery more universal instead of having the versatility stat. tons of classes have mastery that effects a very small portion of their abilities or usage in combat. it makes no sense? like if im mastering my abilties why wouldn’t it be all abilities
lol or let us pick which “mastery” tree we want.
dont get me started on evoker dps mastery. tons of front loaded damage, but the end of the fight we are literally gaining next to 0 effective bonus from mastery. up to % damage based on current health… literally makes mastery in raid a terrible stat for “dps”
Yeah, evoker mastery is lazy, uncreative, and not cool at all. You are playing a dragon, and that’s the best they could come up with? Sad.