Arcane Mage PvE Guide

[Deleted]

General rule about that 13 163 rating breakpoint i talk so much is to go for it if u can get it without geming/enchanting haste. Only with reforges.
As arcane mage mastery rating will be always you best secondary stat.

Now about the armors - for single target go with frost armor and for multitarget (understand fights where there are atleast 2 targets in NT+ArBarr cleave range) go with mage armor. In your case i can only recommend you to follow that rule. There was recent advise here in this forum that the closer you are to that 13k haste break point the more you can forget about armor dancing and go all out mage armor for any fight.

[supervixen]

Hi Hi Again,

Any tips for Heroic Siegecrafter Blackfuse 10Man? We are using the anti-missile strat. How are you guys handling those crawler mines? Slow? Glyphed CoC? AE? Ring of Frost?

Only have a few pulls on it but I''m feeling a bit useless.

Happy Tuesday!
Cheers!
xo

[Wilderness]

Hi Hi Again,

Any tips for Heroic Siegecrafter Blackfuse? We are using the anti-missile strat. How are you guys handling those crawler mines? Slow? Glyphed CoC? AE? Ring of Frost?

Only have a few pulls on it but I''m feeling a bit useless.

Happy Tuesday!
Cheers!
xo

Are you on 10 or 25 man? Mages aren't the best class to apply slows to the mines anyway, and definitely not as Arcane. If you're on 25 then it should be being taken care of by other classes and you just focus on killing them quickly. You can put out decent damage to the mines (decent compared to most classes not named LOLCHAINLIGHTNING).

If you're on 10 man and you don't have a great comp for slows, then you may be better off switching to frost. Better slows, better burst on them through frozen orb, you have the water ele freeze and just more overall control. And if you mainly play Arcane then you will basically be geared for it already.

[supervixen]

Are you on 10 or 25 man? Mages aren't the best class to apply slows to the mines anyway, and definitely not as Arcane. If you're on 25 then it should be being taken care of by other classes and you just focus on killing them quickly. You can put out decent damage to the mines (decent compared to most classes not named LOLCHAINLIGHTNING).

If you're on 10 man and you don't have a great comp for slows, then you may be better off switching to frost. Better slows, better burst on them through frozen orb, you have the water ele freeze and just more overall control. And if you mainly play Arcane then you will basically be geared for it already.

We swapped to anti-mines strat

[Deleted]

Then i can only wish you BIG luck. From a bad experience i can tell you that going antimines tactic you will have a big troubles. Like big big, unless you have disc priest as a healer. A good one.

By my opinion antimines tactic is the only fight where RNG can decide will you kill him or not. When my guild switched down to 10 man we went in SoO zerged everything to Siegecrafter. And then the nightmare began. We started with antimines tactic and all went downhill. Fast. Trust me. Antimines tactic is the heaviest RNG fight in the instance due how missles drop. Well you might have a "little" control over it, but its too damn little to be honest.

If your guild ever go back to antimissle tactic i can recommend you 2 things - use Ring of frost, Frost nova if you are not targeted by a mine - blink in them nova them or just be the "failsave" person who nova the bombs when they are too close, glyph CoC for extra burst on those mines that are too close to the ranged group or when you blink to freeze them. As arcane mage you cant do anything more besides hard target switching to kill them and probably barrage on them if you see them stacked.

[voltaa]

General rule about that 13 163 rating breakpoint i talk so much is to go for it if u can get it without geming/enchanting haste. Only with reforges.
As arcane mage mastery rating will be always you best secondary stat.

Not necessarily true, if you take a look at some of the work that Komma did in this thread, you'll see that haste is possibly better better up until 14242. But then again if you look at some of the testing I did this week with 2.7k haste and full mastery crit reforges, you'll see that it's also viable, a little more RNG dependant but the numbers that came out on some fights were fantastic.

In short, we don't know what is 100% best right now, you can really do whatever you want outside of stacking crit then haste.

[Deleted]

Hmmmm verry intresting piece of information right there. I wonder how i missed that thread x)
I guess this will refresh my desire to go inside SoO for 100th time to kill the same bosses for 100th time and get disappointed for 100th time from the loot drops

[Shangalar]

Depending on your composition on Siegecrafter, Arcane can be quite effective in several ways:
- Ring of Frost
- Blizzard (great slow and great damage)
- Barrage cleave from boss or mines
- Living Bomb explosions

I typically go for RoF on the Empowered mine waves, Blizzard if we miss slows and Barrage cleave from boss if both our Chain Lightnings are in the raid. Sometimes I mix it up, but it all depends on what your team is missing..

[Deleted]

Dat 50% haste build for arcane with 3 wf offpieces :X

I don't know if i did something wrong, but on the first 13 bosses the performance was in some moments "Ohshitwtfarethisnumbersomgirock", BUT when i reached Garrosh... oh god i failed miserably. Was my worst performance on Garrosh so far. I dont know if it was some RNG curse, or i was tired, or whatever, but hell that was pathetic. On the bright side i did almost twice as much dps in first transition room than usual - from 3 to 4mln tops with that setup i went to 5 to 6 mln tops :X

[supervixen]

Then i can only wish you BIG luck. From a bad experience i can tell you that going antimines tactic you will have a big troubles.

Oh god. We went back to anti-missile. Lol

Thanks though for the tips
Xo

- - - Updated - - -

Depending on your composition on Siegecrafter, Arcane can be quite effective in several ways:
- Ring of Frost
- Blizzard (great slow and great damage)
- Barrage cleave from boss or mines
- Living Bomb explosions

I typically go for RoF on the Empowered mine waves, Blizzard if we miss slows and Barrage cleave from boss if both our Chain Lightnings are in the raid. Sometimes I mix it up, but it all depends on what your team is missing..

Thanks as well Shang! Xo

[Deleted]

Hi I just cleared 10/14H on my mage alt would appreciate it if you can take a look at malkorok a fight I though I did well on (no point looking at fight where I know I made a lot of mistakes) Link. was 560 ilevel on the kill.

I also have a few questions:

Does it matter if I refresh living bomb/nether tempest 0.1 seconds after they expire or do they have a pandemic like effect?

At zero haste how many ticks does living bomb and nether tempest have?

Do channels like blizzard and arcane missiles snapshot intellect procs?

Is it ever worth using Flamestrike/blizzard?

Because arcane missiles procs arance missiles! when it's cast ends and not at the start, I end up spamming cast arcane missiles when the channel ends then quickly using arcane barrage if it doesn't proc and want to clear my stacks I assume this is what every mage does?

For frost (no point making two posts) Ice lance vs frostfire bolt which one has priority and under what circumstances?

[Shangalar]

You can refresh a bomb without losing any damage anytime between the moment of expiry and the tick before that. It is never a good idea to refresh the bomb after it already expired, that way you lose damage.

At zero Haste Living Bomb has 4 ticks and Nether Tempest has 12, feel free to check out this spreadsheet for more info: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...ZmFYa0E#gid=39

Channeled spells dynamically change damage per tick, the only thing that is "snapshot" is haste because that has to be determined at the start of the cast.

Blizzard deals exactly the same damage as Arcane Explosion. It's true that AE can generate stacks, but sometimes you won't be able to go into melee range to use it - so if you have to slow and aoe the bombs on Blackfuse, using Blizzard is a good choice. Blizzard is also a good choice for 10-man heroic Dark Shaman when the blobs start appearing.

Missiles do not proc Missiles. If you used the 4-set bonus then Missiles can possibly not consume Missiles. If you didn't use the 4-set bonus (since you don't have it on your armory), you must have seen something wrong. Or you might have just worded it poorly - but yes, when we cast Blast and we really want Missiles to proc, we spam Missiles and then quickly move to another spell if it doesn't proc.

For Frost - Brain Freeze Frostfire Bolt is higher priority than Ice Lance always.

[pyaare]

Hi,

I have been playing frost for a long time and now want to try arcane in 6.0. I have 2 heroic tier pieces and two normal ones. My question is should I prefer 4-set bonus over the heroic off set items for arcane (for frost, 4-set is weak so I am using off set items). The off set items heroic items I have are hood of swirling senses and legging of furious flame.

[Mountain Called Monkey]

I have been playing frost for a long time and now want to try arcane in 6.0. I have 2 heroic tier pieces and two normal ones. My question is should I prefer 4-set bonus over the heroic off set items for arcane (for frost, 4-set is weak so I am using off set items). The off set items heroic items I have are hood of swirling senses and legging of furious flame.

Do you have Dou-Dou Chong shoulders, Fusespark Gloves and Ebon Ritual Hood? If not, use the 4 piece.
"But I have x,y,z warforged off-pieces can't I use those?" No, use the 4 piece.

Credits to Voltaa

[Empath]

After looking at posts on both this forum and altered-time it looks like arcane will be switching back to a burn-conserve rotation in wod at level 100. But what I haven't been able to figure out is if arcane will be using a burn-conserve rotation for level 90 in the pre release patch. After testing it out on beta it feels very weird trying to burn all of my mana for a straight minute between the set bonus perks and frequent missile procs. If I understand correctly, in the burn rotation you use missile procs as you get them still? I'm also curious how much dps folks are doing at level 90 with arcane on beta. Knowing a ballpark range would let me know if I'm "doing it right".

Please help!

[Shangalar]

Ah, I keep asking the same question myself because the Draenor Perks obtained while leveling influence the burn phase significantly. My original testing and theory suggested that it's not a good idea, but that was before the most recent changes to spell power and mana costs.

I plan to have the answer tomorrow when I finish preparing the guide for Arcane in WoD.

[voltaa]

Save AP til evocation is off CD then burn in 6.0

It's a slight increase if you do it well, not a big deal if you just conserve 100%

[Shangalar]

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who made this thread live over the last 2 years. I didn't really know what I was getting into when I did this and I know I slacked with updating it for some stuff, but it's been a very pleasurable and rewarding experience. You made the whole expansion a more engaging place.

Now it's time for my new thread to be stickied and I'm much more worried about that than I was 2 years ago.