WotLK Mage Fire TTW Caps

[Cristo0898]

Ok so I have an arcane mage right now but want to change to fire usign the TTW spec, my concern is that right now I have only around 41% crit and I've read that the minimum for this spec to work is 45%, now changing my gems might help with this but then another concern appears and is that when changing my arcane gems to the ones required with fire (crit replaces spell power in some cases) I will lose some spell power so the question here is (I haven't find this exact detail in the guides I've read) how much spell power is necessary for fire spec? In that way I can better choose which gems to equip to be able to hit the caps necessary.

[Shadowgrippe13]

Dont undervalue haste, spirit and hit. Imo, as long as youre decent at tye game and applying combustion, you can switch to ttw the second you can get 14% hit. Even gemming all yellow sockets as sp hit i was able to pull 7.6k dps on patchwork with 31% self buffed crit. Hope this helps

[Cristo0898]

Dont undervalue haste, spirit and hit. Imo, as long as youre decent at tye game and applying combustion, you can switch to ttw the second you can get 14% hit. Even gemming all yellow sockets as sp hit i was able to pull 7.6k dps on patchwork with 31% self buffed crit. Hope this helps

I have like 19% hit right now (I know it's too much but I'm not able to get rid of it yet) so the I suppose I shouldn't have any problem switching now to TTW

[Crystalleia]

Yeah, the only 'hard' requirement is having 14% Hit.

So generally the argument of Spellpower vs Crit is that Spellpower increases your maximum damage potential (as everything hits harder), but critical increases your damage consistency. Which means that even with lower crit you can still pull off good DPS if RNG is in your favor. . . just that this will happen far less often compared to having a higher crit rating.

So Crit is important for Fire mages due to how Hot Streak works:
"Any time you score 2 non-periodic spell criticals in a row using Fireball, Fire Blast, Scorch, Living Bomb, or Frostfire Bolt"

Now, this means that at any given time your chances of proccing a Hot Streak after two Fireballs is (your crit)^2. With 45% the result is around 20%, compared to 41% giving you around 16%. So in comparison, that extra 4% Crit will increase your amount of average Hot Streaks by 25% (16% -> 20%).

That said, I don't think you should have too much problems if you manage to switch out the Hit gears soon (and in any case, staying in Arcane isn't that beneficial with that high a Hit anyway since Arcane's hit cap is like 8%, which means you waste more stats). Make sure you don't have any Hit + haste gear though (I would go so far as to recommend switching them out to a Crit/Haste or Crit/Spirit gear that's one ilevel tier below)