Arcane Mage PvE Guide

[Redsdrunk]

Thanks for all the help everyone. Keep up the good work.

[Shangalar]

Well I was dead on Meagera, but tonight's killing of 7 normal bosses was kind to me:

http://www.wow-heroes.com/character/...est/Shangalar/

Wushoolay's is mine! But now I have over 16% hit and nothing to reforge anymore ahaha. Maybe just switch around some sockets, but all of them have an Intellect bonus. Also, 17433 Mastery fully buffed.

[voltaa]

So for this tier I decided to switch back to fire as I felt it was the stronger spec and all that jazz, but tonight I was playing around with arcane for some normal bosses in ToT and HoF reforged as fire (I prioritize mastery over haste for my fire build) so I didn't have a lot of haste but had decent mastery and lots of crit. It turns out that this is still quite strong especially for add fights, and I would go as far as saying crit becomes far more useful than mastery on very add heavy fights (like primordius)

The playstyle I was using was to camp at 4 stacks by dotting up everything around me to fish for procs then dump missiles into whatever my main target was (ambershaper/primordius/amber monstrosity) due to basically only using instant casts, haste was greatly devalued so crit shot up.

Now, you may be asking why any of this is relevant since the build is pretty bad for single target, this allows mages to have a more effective mainspec/offspec intergration between fire and arcane, when before people may have preferred frost/arcane builds since the stat priorities were closer. I will be doing a lot more testing on this but for now I will be using my crit/mastery arcane build for heavy add fights (gonna try it for horridon next week), I don't have too much to base this on right now but I think it will end up being the better heavy AoE build for mages especially since mastery and crit scale so well off of eachother for multidotting.

anyways, I'll post a link to my logs for the night if anyone wants to look through and tell me why this is a stupid idea/bad stat priority

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-vwdrfdt62ol5ujng/

[Soulstrike]

edit: @voltaa

primordious is bit hard to judge due to rng involved with the buffs so ill go with megaera for now

your bomb uptime should be alot higher since the bomb buff the bomb is roughly 20% of arcane's damage output so have some kind of addon to track it

also on megaera try to multidot the other head for "fishing AM proc" i know its padding but for the fishing sake :P

rop uptime could be bit better but its still very good (+85% uptime is good enough)

and finally whats your opener??? my opener is AB x4 abarrage to reset and ABx4 followed by AP+AT combo, i do this because i hate the fact some of the new rppm trinket and LOTC procs very late and having to reset the stack and trying to fish up that 2 AM -_- so yeah i highly recommend you refresh your 4AC then use AP+AT

@ shangalar ill stop gemming exp/mastery gem once i can get my haste soft cap for NT (6450ish???) which will most likely be next tier t16 but yea so much hit on that trinket :P

[Shangalar]

Voltaa, for multidotting as Arcane your main stats are still haste (for faster/more ticks and faster Missiles cast time as well) and Mastery because it increases the damage of your dots especially if you are camping at 100% mana all the time. Finally, bombs don't benefit from Charges so it is best to clear your Charges with Barrage cleave on five targets.

However, since you're using two specs and don't want to reforge and regem all the time, your strategy is also good. Mages are dreadful on Primordius anyway compared to most other classes with ridiculous on demand aoe (Hellfire, Spinning Crane, Improved Serpent Sting, Fan of Knives,...)

[NPI]

I have the feeling that our manaregen is a bit low. I mean if I "accidentally" cast 1-2 more ABs at for stacks (e.g. its a bit late and I almost sleep), it takes a year to get back to 90%, even if I do only 2xAB-Abarr rotation. I would suggest Blizzard to adjust either the base mana of AB or its mana multiplicater a bit.

Its a bit offtopic, but I was thinking on how else this problem could be solved (maybe in the next expansion). My first idea is that our manaregen and gains (evo, gems, IW) could be multiplicated by 1+ the mana we missing (besides haste). So if we are at 70% mana, we could get 30% more regen, if we are at 20% mana, we could have 80% more regen than usual. This would give a nice tool for us without harming the general principles.

[voltaa]

@voltaa

So ya, my uptime wasn't the best since I haven't played arc at all this tier yet and was focusing too much on "wtf I can lose mana now?". Going from Invo to RoP again also made me feel like wtf I keep forgetting I can't move blah blah

anyways, my opener is to just spam/reset until I have 2 missiles and at least a trinket+jade spirit procd then berserk+AP+AT

Primordius is a pretty bad example (I was sitting at about 90% mastery) I wish I had logs for the ambershaper kill I did later in the night where I just dotted up adds and sat at about 160k until the last phase

Shang, past the haste plateaus (where I have no chance of reaching another one) wouldn't haste become greatly devalued compared to crit since I won't be getting the extra tick anyways? I understand the missiles casting faster argument but that's hardly any of my damage, I basically only casted when I had to refresh stacks (or had two charges)

[Deleted]

and I would go as far as saying crit becomes far more useful than mastery on very add heavy fights (like primordius)

Primordius is a pretty bad example (I was sitting at about 90% mastery) I wish I had logs for the ambershaper kill I did later in the night where I just dotted up adds and sat at about 160k until the last phase

Scumbag dps much ?..
Both of those fights might have a lot of adds, but the damage dealt to them is insignificant compared to the Boss dps you can do.
primordius is not a bad example because of the RnG with buffs, but because you start off by single targeting your lane blob+ maybe dotting up 2-4 others, when your raid is all mutated its full on boss. and in the end its the boss dps that matters, blobs are a mechanic.
For amber shaper blobs are also pretty insignificant as they go down fast any way if every one is dotting them up, and again its a fight where boss/monstrosity single target dps is the important part(besides the mechanics)

in other words dont always focus so much on overall dps, but on dps to the important targets.

[Psychi]

Well I was dead on Meagera, but tonight's killing of 7 normal bosses was kind to me:

http://www.wow-heroes.com/character/...est/Shangalar/

Shangalar, you've got to realize that near nobody is Arcane so those WoL ranks are near meaningless. Arcane Mages are dwindling and the number of them gets smaller and smaller exponentially the further into heroic mode ToT you go.

[Deleted]

Shangalar, you've got to realize that near nobody is Arcane so those WoL ranks are near meaningless. Arcane Mages are dwindling and the number of them gets smaller and smaller exponentially the further into heroic mode ToT you go.

ranks arent important and almost meaningless for all specs. Shangalar's dps can be an indicator of the fact that arcane is still viable.

[Psychi]

ranks arent important and almost meaningless for all specs. Shangalar's dps can be an indicator of the fact that arcane is still viable.

No. My point was that he's only ranking high because nobody plays it. Hell.. I have a rank 25 parse as arcane on Durumu from the first week Throne of Thunder opened. My dps on that fight was ~90k (and this was before the 40% damage buff to Mage bombs). Shang ranked 6th, but was only doing ~20k dps more and that's 20 days after my parse as well as the buff to Mage bombs.

[Shangalar]

Indeed, while I always enjoy having high ranks, I understand the pros and cons of every similar system. This is all my continuous effort to show that Arcane Mages are still perfectly competitive in high-end raiding and considering this is quite obvious now and there are still so few raiding Arcane mages, I have to make some other conclusion. Hell, I do a random dungeon for Valor and random people keep asking me why I play Arcane?

The spec design obviously isn't as interesting for the majority of mages as it is for me and there are no raidbots, logs or recounts which can make it different. I am sticking to Arcane, but I'm guessing Blizzard will be reevaluating their class/spec representation data sometime soon. We'll see, I'm not in a hurry.

[Deleted]

No. My point was that he's only ranking high because nobody plays it. Hell.. I have a rank 25 parse as arcane on Durumu from the first week Throne of Thunder opened. My dps on that fight was ~90k (and this was before the 40% damage buff to Mage bombs). Shang ranked 6th, but was only doing ~20k dps more and that's 20 days after my parse as well as the buff to Mage bombs.

Yes, and my point was, we don't care about ranks at all, arcane (least played) or fire/frost. I ranked top 30 on every fight with a shitty gear when fire was nerfed because I tested arcane right away, so I know how it works.

I'm just saying everyone is talking about ranks when they are meaningless as possible. 95% of people ranking are because they have the best gear, period. Not because they are skilled.

[Shangalar]

I'll compete with Soulstrike

But yeah, in ToT more than ever before I feel that my dps mostly depends on whether I get targeted by the plethora of random target boss abilities, more than anything else.

[Lurkers]

Shangalar, I'm super-impressed to see someone making a go of arcane--my favorite spec since...forever. I definitely bought into the bullshit about it dying with 5.2 and have been playing frost. After thumbing through this forum, I'm definitely going to go back to arcane. I can see form your profile that you're gemming/reforging for mastery and haste (mastery > haste) and running RoP. Can you give me some advice as to rotation--are you just building to 4 stacks then dumping charges every time? Do you always run RoP? Also, I assume you run with mage armor (i only ask because I know some folks have talked about haste-oriented builds for arcane, so maybe you run frost armor sometimes).

Any advice you can give would be awesome--sorry if you've already given it somewhere else in these forums.

I'd post my account, but I'm not allowed to put links on the forum yet (new user), but if you want to look me up: Kellyann on Alterac Mountains.

[Shangalar]

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

Now, the Arcane rotation is at first glance ridiculously easy, borderline stupid: Rune of Power, keep up Nether Tempest (refreshing it at 1-0, not after 0), 4 x Arcane Blast, any available Missiles, Barrage.

That's your primary thing to practice. However, after being comfortable with that, you can start going deeper into your mana pool control. I can't tell you what to do exactly because it varies from player to player, but I can outline which questions you need to ask yourself on the fly, all the time:
- what percentage is my mana at currently?
- which special buffs are currently active? (Arcane Power, trinket procs, Stormlash Totem, Time Warp, Skull Banner)
- can I safely use one extra Blast to fish for Missiles procs?
- if I refresh Nether Tempest right now, will my procs still be up when I refresh it next time? (which you should, just as your procs are about to expire)
- should I refresh Nether Tempest now to try and get a Missiles proc while my buffs are still up?

The general strategy is to cast as many Missiles as possible, finish with a Barrage and refresh Nether Tempest with all procs up. Blast, while being a core element in our rotation, is basically a filler spell which allows you to cast 4-Charge Missiles and Barrage. For example, I always delay casting Arcane Power for a few second (when it's not coming at the same time as Alter Time) until I am at 4 Charges at which time I pop Power, use Nether Tempest and then use Missiles/Barrage. That way you'll be able to refresh NT again before Power expires and possibly even have a whole "set" with Barrage to do again while Power is active.

Play around with it. It takes time to discover all of the tiny details and it's hard to memorize them from a forum post

Finally, a fully Haste oriented build is no longer as competitive as Mastery. It might still work, but it will be far behind the other two specs and far behind Mastery. This patch we're completely limited to Rune of Power, Mage Armor and Nether Tempest. This isn't inherently bad, but some optionality is always a nice thing.

[Lurkers]

You rock. Thanks for the info.

[voltaa]

Scumbag dps much ?..
Both of those fights might have a lot of adds, but the damage dealt to them is insignificant compared to the Boss dps you can do.
primordius is not a bad example because of the RnG with buffs, but because you start off by single targeting your lane blob+ maybe dotting up 2-4 others, when your raid is all mutated its full on boss. and in the end its the boss dps that matters, blobs are a mechanic.
For amber shaper blobs are also pretty insignificant as they go down fast any way if every one is dotting them up, and again its a fight where boss/monstrosity single target dps is the important part(besides the mechanics)

in other words dont always focus so much on overall dps, but on dps to the important targets.

Not scumbag dpsing, the way my guild does primordius is after everyone is mutated group 4 just kills adds the entire rest of the fight rather than having lanes

Also I noticed in of the quotes I said that crit would outscale mastery, I meant haste

[nelsonb24]

Woops I apologize I thought I was in the frost thread for some reason, disregard me post.

[Soulstrike]

I'll compete with Soulstrike

But yeah, in ToT more than ever before I feel that my dps mostly depends on whether I get targeted by the plethora of random target boss abilities, more than anything else.

zzz i have to switch main to priest for now (healing) since my guild needs healer atm T.T will be back to mage for gear later on though!!

just as when i switch to priest Heroic horridon wand drops lei shen off hand drops vanq tier dropping everywhere >_> i hate this game