Originally Posted by
voltaa
Well it wasn't so much having high end or low end gear, it was about having 1 certain piece of gear that was the difference between the spec being playable or not, I loved the design idea of cata arcane but if it REQUIRED shard to be competitive, it was the uvls of that expansion.
As a side note, there have been changes to the game that have made arcane unable to go back to the old form as effectively, most notably static mana pools, having massive pools of mana made burn phases longer and basically acted as the damage scaling for the spec, current model would end up as "burn for x seconds then conserve"