One Shotting Is Here!

[Xame]

This depends on your definition of rare.  Maybe it's rare for a fire mage, who can't control his crit chance at all.

The guy I mentioned--I've talked about mage builds and gear with him, I've done raids with him, I've done BGs with him, I've modelled some of my gear after him, and tested out a less crazy-go-nuts version of what he's doing.  The only thing deciding whether he gets a one-shot or a two-shot is, one, if his cooldowns are up (and it's only three minutes--you can't just burn it whenever you want, but if you're careful and you really need some burst damage, it's there), two, whether the frostbolt is resisted, and three, if the frostbolt crits.  About a five percent chance to resist means it's really not very common, and isn't too hard to follow up with another frostbolt, or a series of high-damage instant attacks.  Shatter + Frost Nova = about 60 percent chance to crit; it's certainly not every time, but constant enough that if you can manage a spell or two then you're gonna get a crit. 

The one-shots aren't every fight.  But they're definitely not rare.

And even trinketless, without AP, all the spell damage gear means a normal frosbolt can still crit near 2,000 damage.
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Crits are not rare for a Fire mage, but are rarer for an Arcane mage (not picking up the +6 to crit in Critical Mass).

Frost mages cann't one shot but have a better sequence which leads to more steady results (dead target).

Thus spell <time> <non-crit>/<crit>:

Frostbolt 2.5s 450/900 -> close distance 2s -> Frost Nova 1.5s 75/150 -> Frostbolt 2.5s 450/900 + I-Cone of Cold 0s 475/950 -> Fireblast 1.5s 460/700. Then IAE until the cool downs are ready again or if its a rogue, blink and i-blizzard the area.

This is about 2385 dmg (expecting one crit from shatter) in 10secs. If I put on +300dmg gear (that means 2.5k health in blues!!) I can get this to 3620dmg/10 secs (assumes I only get 40% from the instant casts on the +dmg gear). The one-shot feeling comes if I get lucky and catch 3 big crits in a row in +dmg gear (4550dmg with 3k of it coming after the frost nova in the frostbolt+ICoC combo which looks like one spell because it hits all at the same time). This magic happens 3-4% of the time on a single target with this sequence and about 7secs long (you know its coming). Note that the trade off to get this amazing output to nearly one-shot a target is ~2.5-2.8k health (in blues) which means that you also get one-shotted yourself.

To push a 2k frostbolt requires almost +550 dmg gear (is this even possible?) or 523 with piercing ice, or tinket +dmg or AP w/ +320 dmg gear (and I don't get ICoC, ice block, ice barrier, I-blizzard). The Arcane/Frost is not a bad single target killing spec but is again a specialist build (every 3 mins it is just amazingly deadly to a single target but will it max your HKs?).