Guide selection of gloves

[shalmirane]

Hi, I got those two gloves and guide recommends me the one with +9 frost damage over +18 to magic spells.
What mechanic I'm missing that it looks like I'm recommended weaker ones?

gloves-guide.png

Individual gloves:

gloves-frost.png gloves-magical.png

[ZG Support 1]

What class and spec?

[shalmirane]

Frost-leveling wizard

[ZG Support 1]

If you are frost then by default the gear system will only score the frost spell damage. You would need to manually add a score weight for any other spell damage that you would like to have on your gear.

[shalmirane]

That's what I mean - is there some difference between spell damage and frost damage?

Because if there isn't, then +18 spell damage should be always better then +9 frost damage, as first ads 9 more damage to frost spells too.

[ZG Support 1]

It really depends on what spells are considered "magic spells" for that item. However if you notice all of them say "up to ##" meaning the 18 compared to the 9 is not 9 more points of damage. Spell damage that is applied varies from spell to spell and depends on the rank of the spell. I'll use a Rank 1 Frostbolt and a Rank 5 Frostbolt as examples to show what I mean.

Rank 1 has a Spell Power mod of 0.163 (Effect #2 on the linked page) and Rank 5 has a Spell Power mod of 0.814. This means that for 9 spell power a Rank 1 Frostbolt only gets 1.467 more damage (9*0.163) and a Rank 5 Frostbolt only gets 7.326 more damage (9*0.814). So when you compare to an 18 spell power you're looking at roughly 1.5 more damage for Rank 1 and 7.5 more damage for Rank 5.

However note that Effect #2 for the Frostbolt spell ONLY lists the Frost School Damage. Since Magic is not listed as a school that affects the Frostbolt spell we do not know if that actually affects the Frostbolt spell or not. The only way to know for sure would be to keep track of combat logs and compare the average damage per hit with each item equipped while killing 20 of the same mob for each item to see if there is an average of about 7 more points of damage on a Rank 5 Frostbolt.

[shalmirane]

Now it makes sense to me, thank you