3.3 Spotlight: Black Magic

Black Magic is a pretty well known enchant. It costs far more in terms of materials than the 63 spellpower enchant, yet contributes a tiny fraction of it's DPS, applying a DOT for barely over 1000 damage total around once a minute.

3.3 has finally gotten around to changing it. It's now a 250 haste for 10 seconds proc. Definitely an immense improvement over the previous version, which was soundly beaten out by the ancient spellpower enchant used back in level 60 raiding. But how good is it? Should you rush out and buy all those mats right now?

Well, let's find out.
First thing to note, black magic seems to be an oddball auto-proc ability. Unlike trinkets or lightweave embroidery, it's effect has a 35 second internal cooldown, not 45 seconds. Like them, it has a very high proc rate, ensuring a proc within only a few casts after the cooldown finishes.

Modifying the usual approximation for 45s internal cooldowns to work on the shorter cooldown, this gives an expected uptime of 20%, making it 50 effective haste. Things just got pretty simple looking, right? Well, let's press on.

I'm using best in slot tier 9 scale factors. This gives black magic it's best case scenario for DPS - scale factors are lower, and spellpower better relative to other stats, at lower gear levels.

0/13/58 Replenishment Destro
Spellpower: 1.62 x63=102.06 dps
Haste: 1.45 x50=72.5 dps

3/13/55 Suppression Destro
Spellpower:  1.61 x63=101.43
Haste: 1.16 x50=58

55/0/16 Felhunter affliction*
Spellpower: 1.79 x63=112.77
Haste: 1.83 x50=91.5


0/41/30 FG/ES
Spellpower: 1.41 x63=88.83
Haste: 1.45 x50=72.5

0/40/31 Imp/Conflag
Spellpower: 1.47 x63=92.61
Haste: 1.51 x50=75.5

0/56/15 Meta/ruin*
Spellpower: 1.50 x63=94.5
Haste: 1.52 x50=76


So, as you can see, Black Magic is still not the best pick for PVE DPS. But at least it isn't a pathetic failure of an enchant, and I can live with that.

Now, as for the *'d builds - Meta/ruin should never consider Black Magic. Not only is it lower DPS, but Meta/ruin is first and foremost a support spec, and it's support is dependent on it's spellpower being stacked as high as possible. So even if it were the technical best, I would still advise against it in favor of raid DPS. For this reason, I also generally recommend against hitting favorable socket bonuses should they come up, unless the bonus give a net gain in spellpower over straight red gems.

Affliction gets honorable mention as being the best recipient of black magic, with their powerful haste and spellpower scaling in 3.3. It's still not the best, but also note that much of affliction's power in 3.3 comes from the new haste scaled corruption. Meaning if you don't have a corruption refresh in the 10 seconds you have the buff, you get considerably less benefit from it.