I am not a mage, but I play one on television. I mean, I read these forums for some reason anyway. The skill is definitely a huge deal. I play a Channeler, I sat down and did accuracy research and testing for myself after I noticed how abysmal my hit rates were in raid. With old ammo and ~1300 skill I had about a 70% autoattack hit rate on my bow. That's with a 15% accuracy bump from AAs and something like 10% more from raid buffs, plus the 10% on the arrows themselves. Swapping to compressed ammo alone gave me another 5-10% on average, even though I was going from 10% accuracy ammo to 25%. Upping my skills from 1300 to 1500 pushed my hit rate to 99%, with some lost attacks from frontals. My line of testing was actually: ~1300 skill+15% from AA accuracy and 10% from arrows -> 1500+ skill and compressed ammo -> 'hey i wonder if i need that weapon skill now that i have compressed ammo. oops, yep, i do!' over a few nights of raiding. Weapon skills are such an immense factor. Even running ~50% accuracy from AAs + ammo + buffs in raid, I lost a ton of hits by dipping under 1500 skill.
Accuracy is a 2ndary check from my testing. Obtusely speaking, Accuracy takes you from 90% to 99% with about 35accuracy fully buffed (at least held true for last xpac, and on a very small sample set so far true of this xpac). Meaning more accuracy was not gonna take you from 80% to 99%
why are you confused? this whole thread is about wand auto. altho it's relevant for anyone with sub-1500 skill (whichever appropriate for their auto) it looks like. particularly healers because scouts & tanks are mostly on auto-pilot of doing +skills adorns since pre-ToV pre-ToV, combination of no-brainer AAs and default gear for mages resulted in no need to white-gem +skill; with mob lvl increase outpacing +skill delta on the new gear, now mages should white-gem +skill. remains to be zeroed-in on exactly how much is optimal.
I'll probably do another round of farming with 1500 to make sure there is consistency before dropping 1 white +skill to see what that does Pools 1st boss: 92%, 95% - > 98% Pools 2nd boss: 94% - > 100% Pools 3rd boss: 80% - > 98%, 100% Pools 4th boss: 94% - > 100% Pirates 1st boss: 78% - > 92% Pirates 2nd boss: 91% - > 98% Temple Snake1: 92% -> 99% (removing frontals) Temple 3Diabos: 93% -> 100% (removing frontals) Temple Grims: 57%, 60% -> 75% - still blows for reference, 1300 -> 1500 self-buffed, group and raid make-ups roughly same
So looks like I'm normally at 1600 fully buffed (from 1500 self-buffed start) Pools 1st boss: 92%, 95% - > 98% Pools 2nd boss: 94% - > 100% Pools 3rd boss: 80% - > 98%, 100% Pools 4th boss: 94% - > 100% Pirates 1st boss: 78% - > 92%, 84% * Pirates 2nd boss: 91% - > 98%, 99% Temple Snake1: 92% -> 99%, 95%, 99% ** (removing frontals) Temple 3Diabos: 93% -> 100%, 98% (removing frontals) Temple Grims: 57%, 60% -> 75%, 86% - still blows for reference, 1300 -> 1500 self-buffed, group and raid make-ups roughly same * But upon closer examination this looks like a special case that I need to care less about. Pretty much ALL the misses are on Barin (the guy with the stunning adds, that generally you have to "hold your dps on"). So ppl force-targetted to him were (rightfully) not debuffing him likely. ** This is actually a really valuable case. The last 2 numbers (95%, 99%) were back-to-back fights with identical raids with sole exception that the Illusionist in my group was dead/afk at zone-in the entire 1st fight. The fights were close to same length (we wiped near the end of the 1st attempt to a missed curse /cringe). Illusionist apparently adds ~100 +Focus. 95% was with 1505 Focus, 99% was with 1599 Focus. This is a strong case for ~1600 Focus as fully-buffed target number.
