Arcane Mage PvE Guide

[Vynestra]

Ok, thus, about legendary cloak : http://i.imgur.com/vKcvUHm.jpg

On the left hand side, I was at 10% mana when it procced, right hand side 93% and I always clicked off my int procs (jade spirit/trinkets). You can see that mastery does NOT change the damage from the proc, even if tooltip changes...

Edit : Just to be clear, int procs work and increase damage, mastery does not, I think it's bugged since tooltip says it should, as yesterday I tested with/without Mage armor and it was always doing the same damage.

Yeah the tool-tip is bugged. I had it confirmed that mastery isn't supposed to affect the cloak. They never fixed the tool-tip however. But no mastery does NOT affect the cloak, that is why we have the highest rppm of any mage specs, in fact highest rppm of all specs for casters lol. With haste my cloak sits at 4 rppm. Fire can get a little more out of the cloak because their's crits more.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Willemh/simple

Note that I havnt optimised my gear yet after the upgrades I got yesterday.

Looking at askmisterrobot its giving me these stats optimised:

Optimised for mastery:
15875 mastery
7008 haste

Optimised for 9762 hastecap:
13120 mastery
9763 haste

So I basically trade haste for mastery 1:1 and I'm not sure if its worth doing so.

I have lost mastery for haste, especially with kardris' that has no stats on it. It is well worth it. My main dmging spell, depending the fight can be LB if there is any sort of multi-dotting. And so far there is only one fight that hasn't had any sort of multi-dotting during the fight and that is iron juggernaut. Almost every fight has adds to it.

[Txiv]

At 88 with arcane, can anyone point me to info on how much mana you should be mantaining? Like shoud never drop below70% or 80% ? Does rotation change at mana levels? How long do you fish for missiles before you lose to much mana? Stuff like that

[Erolian]

All I can say is when the beams of anything target you and threaten to make you leave RoP scumbag hard and greater invis so someone else has to deal with it lol

[Deleted]

Hello guys , im always confused about trinkets Could u please tell wich combo i should use ? I have Normal versions of Wisholay http://www.wowhead.com/item=94513 and Cha-Ye' http://www.wowhead.com/item=94531 ( never had luck with trinkets last tier) and today got Frenzied Crystal Of Rage http://www.wowhead.com/item=102303. Any suggestions ? Thanks in advance. Mr.Robot says even Elegon trink and Shado-Pan are better ...

[Deleted]

Cleared SoO fully as Arcane. Will probably be uploading some of the fights to YouTube, but nothing particularly special, really.

Fire/Arcane are relatively equal right now, it just depends what you want more from the fight. If ST damage is more important Fire will pull ahead, but Arcane will come into its own on fights that require periodic strong burst, be it AoE or ST or cleave or whatever.
Fire will outscale Arcane and I would expect a fair bit of HC Progress to be done as Fire unless the fight specifically calls for Arcane niches.

[Vynestra]

Cleared SoO fully as Arcane. Will probably be uploading some of the fights to YouTube, but nothing particularly special, really.

Fire/Arcane are relatively equal right now, it just depends what you want more from the fight. If ST damage is more important Fire will pull ahead, but Arcane will come into its own on fights that require periodic strong burst, be it AoE or ST or cleave or whatever.
Fire will outscale Arcane and I would expect a fair bit of HC Progress to be done as Fire unless the fight specifically calls for Arcane niches.

There is like one fight where there is no cleave/aoe/multi-dotting from what I know lol. That's iron juggernaut. Every other fight has some sort of multi-dotting. Also depends HOW much it out-scales arcane and WHEN. If it's in like almost full heroic gear who cares.


Right now on a fight like nazgrim I did really well against our fire mage fyi. Once logs are working I am going to see next week what I do against our fire mage. I believe are gear is more equal now, think he is still ahead. I'll report who wins what with what ilvls after next week once we're more comfortable on the first like 8-10 fights.

[cross34]

hi

i have a t15 4pc set made up mostly of lfr pieces (head, shoulders, gloves. only the legs are 522). however i also have a normal 561 (i upgraded it) t16 glove from the celestials. was wondering if the t15 4pc would still be more beneficial compared with the huge ilevel gap equipping my t16 glove would give me.

any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Libretto]

I just cleared Garrosh as arcane. Arcane is ok for the fight, but rune of power is pretty much out, incanters ward is the only real option due to the amount of macro-movement involved. Fire will likely be better for heroic progression unless you're playing a purely utility role by soloing engineers / focusing adds and not really working on the boss itself.

[DeathDefier]

Cleared SoO fully as Arcane. Will probably be uploading some of the fights to YouTube, but nothing particularly special, really.

Fire/Arcane are relatively equal right now, it just depends what you want more from the fight. If ST damage is more important Fire will pull ahead, but Arcane will come into its own on fights that require periodic strong burst, be it AoE or ST or cleave or whatever.
Fire will outscale Arcane and I would expect a fair bit of HC Progress to be done as Fire unless the fight specifically calls for Arcane niches.

Very well put, this is exactly how I feel about the situation after thinking about specs for the past couple days.

There is like one fight where there is no cleave/aoe/multi-dotting from what I know lol. That's iron juggernaut.

Malkorak, Thok, and Siegecrafter (if you get rid of crawler mines) are all single target. Paragons is also essentially single target since they heal when you kill one and aren't always stacked.

[Deleted]

-snip-

As has been pointed out; Malkorok, Thok and (for the most part) Siegecrafter. Malkorok also favours Fire due to the movement involved in the fight, Juggernaut you can cheese. Siegecrafter is close between the two. Thok surprisingly favours Arcane, and will likely continue to do so on HC due to the AoE required, but we'll see.

As I said, it depends on what the fight will need, for progression padding meters (or the ability to) means f*** all. It's about the damage on the main target and at the moment the two are very close in that sense; Arcane is ahead when allowed to tunnel but there's not a great deal of that right now.
Yes, there will be some fights which favour Arcane over Fire, but then there will be others which are vice versa, we'll just have to see exactly how hard Fire is going to scale with gear.

I just cleared Garrosh as arcane. Arcane is ok for the fight, but rune of power is pretty much out, incanters ward is the only real option due to the amount of macro-movement involved. Fire will likely be better for heroic progression unless you're playing a purely utility role by soloing engineers / focusing adds and not really working on the boss itself.

IMO the movement is almost entirely predictable and thus RoP is better. But, that's just my opinion.

[Makarena]

Played arcane for the whole 14/14 clear. Felt pretty strong on most of the fights.

[ssviolett]

Cycobi, since WoL does not work, can you tell me, how much dps you were able to pull out of ST fight? Say Malkorok.

[Deleted]

hello everyone.

Thanks to this thread, I'll give arcane a try this week, hope i'm not too rusted , I (re)start the game at 5.3 after a year break...

Anyway, cycobi, thanks for your input & stream. If you don't have your interface upload anywhere, can you provide a complete list of the addons used? Your interface just look really great !

Cheers

[Libretto]

IMO the movement is almost entirely predictable and thus RoP is better. But, that's just my opinion.

It's predictable, but too frequent. Having to cast another rune every time a desecrated weapon goes out is annoying, on top of not being able to be in a rune when killing the engineer unless your guild is tanking the boss at that end of the room for some reason. Two intermissions involve killing adds which are spread far apart and have you running a long distance down a gauntlet. The third has a single large add to kill, but again you'd be casting a rune to kill it, then another for garrosh. And garrosh's slams don't work like the add on sha of fear platforms did where you could drop a rune between two "pie slices" to avoid having to leave it, he just slams in the direction of a player, and if it's you or someone standing near you, you need to leave the rune to avoid it.

Our guild was using a "ranged all stack at X and move to Y when desecrated weapon goes out" strat, so perhaps rune is better if you're using a "ranged spread out all over the place" strat, but you can still be screwed depending where it goes, and rune is awful during the intermissions. In addition, you're not considered standing in rune when being yanked to / from the intermission area, while you can still cast.

[Deleted]

Cycobi, since WoL does not work, can you tell me, how much dps you were able to pull out of ST fight? Say Malkorok.

Iron Juggernaut I finished on 279K; ~10K or so above everyone else, including Rogues etc.
Malkorok I finished on 250K, behind our Fire Mage, the fairly constant movement and knock-ups (even if you negate them with Blink) punish Arcane quite hard.

It's predictable, but too frequent. Having to cast another rune every time a desecrated weapon goes out is annoying, on top of not being able to be in a rune when killing the engineer unless your guild is tanking the boss at that end of the room for some reason. Two intermissions involve killing adds which are spread far apart and have you running a long distance down a gauntlet. The third has a single large add to kill, but again you'd be casting a rune to kill it, then another for garrosh. And garrosh's slams don't work like the add on sha of fear platforms did where you could drop a rune between two "pie slices" to avoid having to leave it, he just slams in the direction of a player, and if it's you or someone standing near you, you need to leave the rune to avoid it.

Our guild was using a "ranged all stack at X and move to Y when desecrated weapon goes out" strat, so perhaps rune is better if you're using a "ranged spread out all over the place" strat, but you can still be screwed depending where it goes, and rune is awful during the intermissions. In addition, you're not considered standing in rune when being yanked to / from the intermission area, while you can still cast.

By being predictable you should be trying to line-up movement CDs (Blink, BS) etc to make it easier; I was (almost) always the first person to move from the stack-point and almost always the first person to the new stack point; putting down RoP in time to start casting on the boss again before anyone else did unless I got Mind-Controlled.

I'll upload our kill video of Garrosh to YouTube, but in the meantime you can watch it here: http://www.twitch.tv/cycobi/c/2923344
You'll see we do the exact same thing for the desecrated weapons. Rune is far from "bad" there.

- - - Updated - - -

hello everyone.

Thanks to this thread, I'll give arcane a try this week, hope i'm not too rusted , I (re)start the game at 5.3 after a year break...

Anyway, cycobi, thanks for your input & stream. If you don't have your interface upload anywhere, can you provide a complete list of the addons used? Your interface just look really great !

Cheers

Sorry didn't see this at first!

I am planning on uploading my UI at some point; but as it's based on/around ElvUI I think I need permission from Elv to do so and would only be able to actually upload it as a plugin.

However; my addons are as follows:

ElvUI
ElvUI Shadow&Light (I've personally modified Affiniti's layout)
ElvUI AddonSkins
BigWigs
Clique
Gnosis castbars
Kgpanels
OmniCC
SharedMedia
SharedMediaAdditionalFonts
Simple3DPortraits
Skada
WeakAuras
xDamageFont

[cross34]

hi cycobi

should i keep my 4pc t15 even if i only have lfr pieces? i got a t16 normal glove and some 535 upgrades on the t15 slots i have but i don't know if it's worth it to break the set bonus. i've tried hitting dummies and there's not much dps difference, but was wondering if raid situations would be vastly different (buffs etc).

thanks

[Deleted]

hi cycobi

should i keep my 4pc t15 even if i only have lfr pieces? i got a t16 normal glove and some 535 upgrades on the t15 slots i have but i don't know if it's worth it to break the set bonus. i've tried hitting dummies and there's not much dps difference, but was wondering if raid situations would be vastly different (buffs etc).

thanks

Will depend on what pieces you have, and which ones are LFR.
If all are LFR, I'd be very surprised if the stat gain from 535+ isn't better.

[cross34]

Will depend on what pieces you have, and which ones are LFR.
If all are LFR, I'd be very surprised if the stat gain from 535+ isn't better.

my 502 t15 pieces are head, shoulder, and gloves. i have 522 t15 legs.

when i switch out of the 4pc i replace the 502 hit/haste head with 522 hit/mast boe (sorry just found out it was better itemized than the 535), the 502 haste/crit t15 shoulders for 522 mast/crit shoulders, and 502 mast/crit gloves with 561 haste/crit t16 gloves.

i think i lose around 1k mastery and 2.3k int by forcing the 4pc

[Stolberg]

Hey Cycobi, with this gear which spec would you advise me to play? I've been playing fire, switched to frost after patch.

I'd really enjoy your help

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...raeth/advanced

[voltaa]

For those interested in a quick rundown of Arcane in 5.4 I have a new updated video guide for 5.4 on my youtube channel (in my sig).