Wands Uber on Test Server

[Alarick]

That said, I'll risk the lynch mob by saying it is possible to acquire some pretty dang nice levels of + crit chance and + damage from non-set items, not to mention the PvP set rewards. Thousand damage CoCs for all.
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You have to keep in mind that it's not so much an issue of if a caster can achieve high levels of +damage or +crit, but what they have to give up in doing it.

The PvP rewards are an exception to this, because they were designed this way, but almost all gear sacrifices stats for the +damage or +crit. Even the PvP set, to a degree, drops some decent stats for the +damage they provide.

For melee based classes, you replace one item to get a big increase in DPS. In doing that, you usually are not changing the stats you get from that item significantly.

For caster classes, at least with how stuff works now, having a huge amount of +damage items means not only farming for 8-10 pieces of gear, but also being that much weaker in the long run.

As a side note, I think it would be interesting to see how big a difference the lost mana would make compared to the added damage in the end game. Not taking into account the Poly + Combustion + Pyroblast combo, I could see the mana helping more in the long run for PvP. More mana means more spells, which means more damage. Can the +damage out do this amount of damage? Can it do it for the 1.5 second cast spells or instant cast spells which receive less than half of the added damage?

I'm not even going to touch the Paladin issue, because the issue with hybrid classes is touchy to begin with. It will be interesting to see where Blizzard goes with spell casting in general once more raid instances start coming into the game.