Heh..you CANNOT use it as a paladin..why?
Well...it's a gem of _trapped innocents_! A paladin never ever would keep them caged, he would free them, thus destroying the item..ahahaha..palas must be good, fools! :P :P :P

This is somewhat of a side grade to the Amulet of Vek'nilash as other's have mentioned, but pretty far superior to the Choker of the Firelord and here's why:

What you need to be interested in is how much +1% Spellcrit essentially is to +X Spelldamage for yourself: and this will differ from person to person.

This calculation is going to be slightly different depending on what your spell of choice & talent spec actually is. If as a Mage you are spec'd Fire and primarily tossing out Fireballs, its going to be different than if you are spec'd Frost and primarily tossing out Frostbolts. Similar mechanics apply for Warlocks and Shadowbolts. What you really want to watch is how much your average spell effect is hitting for non-crit. From that you can figure out about how much you would in rough equivalence between Spellcrit and Spelldamage.

The lower your average effect is hitting for, the less you will be getting out of +Spellcrit% comparatively. So when you start out, and have very little +Spelldamage gear, +Spelldamage is likely going to be granting you a fairly significant bonus compared to +Spellcrit%. Due to this, it is conceivable that for someone who is brand new to raiding and doesn't have a lot of +Spelldamage gear yet, the Choker of the Firelord might be a more significant upgrade than even the Gem of Trapped Innocents (yes, the Choker will probably be available to them a whole lot sooner than the Gem anyway, so this works out well) but over time this will change if you continue to upgrade your gear.

+Spellcrit% scales whereas +Spelldamage does not. In fact as you start adding in more and more +Spelldamage gear to your items, eventually some of the +Spellcrit% items you may have replaced earlier on can become more valuable to you than the lower end +Spelldamage gear you have.

A good example of something like this might be the Briarwood Reed vs the Eye of the Beast. When you start out in Raiding, particularly as a Mage if you are Frost Spec'd for MC & BWL, you will get far more bonus out of the Reed than the Eye - though you may end up using both together for a while. As you continue on however, your average effects may eventually balance out the two items in terms of damage value to you, and as you progress even further, the Eye may eventually outweigh the Reed in terms of their value to you - assuming you haven't found something better in the mean time to replace one of them.

But something of note here is that if you are in a guild dropping Kel'thuzad, you are probably already on the higher end of the damage spectrum. You're probably going to end up getting a larger bonus from the additional +Spellcrit% than the corresponding difference in +Spelldamage between something like the Amulet of Vek'nilash and the Gem of Trapped Innocents making the Gem more valuable in terms of damage slightly, with the difference becomming more and more pronounced as you upgrade your gear to the highest end (and probably further in expansions assuming something better for this slot doesn't become available to you).

This is only comparing +Spellcrit% and +Spelldamage of course in terms of normal damage, not +Spellhit%, and doesn't account for other strategies like Fire Mages keeping Ignites rolling etc...

Hope some of this rambling might be helpful to some of you...







Edited, Oct 16th 2006 at 12:59pm PDT by Valcronde

best neck for pvp/fire mage. hands down.

ooo shiny

Edited, Sep 19th 2006 at 7:10am EDT by Madsenffs