Rawr Mage with all the buffs set shows the following relative value for mage dps from the buffs:

click the image to see full size.

With full buffs my mage’s theoretical max dps in current gear is 6175.47.

If I reset the simulation with actual buffs available during last week’s Sapphiron fight, we get the following chart and my theoretical max dps drops to 4520.38. I think this illustrates for the whole raid how important it is to stack all the buffs/debuffs that we can. I have heard from another raiding guild that when they look at the stats for a recruit they add another 1000dps to determine what they will do in their raids.

Here are the buffs I used to make the rawr charts - I may have missed some because of different naming conventions:

I recognize that optimizing for the mage is not necessarily in the best interests of the raid as a whole. I wrote this up just to point out that we may be missing some significant dps because we are not stacking all the buffs/debuffs that we can.

This site provides a detailed analysis of level 80 WoW characters. It can show you at a glance where your gear, enchants, or gems are weak. It also provides a very nice visualization of where you should be looking for gear and what raids you are geared to run.

The guild reports are downright awesome. Be.imba allows you to pull up to 40 characters in a shot by class or guild rank.

Some of these are not accurate because the character is in PvP gear.