How are you deciding which Artifact to level first?

[Naaldira]

Given that your main artifact will be ahead of alts, which may impact your DPS, how are people deciding which to commit to first, without knowing how DPS balance is going to pan out?

Should you just go with your favorite and hope for the best, or will the difference in artifact levels not really make a difference in DPS?

Or, whats your plan?

[Grumpdogg]

Unless there is a major tuning curveball between now and launch, my plan is:
* First, upgrade Fire until I have two major traits (Phoenix Reborn & Pyretic Incantation).
* Secondly, upgrade Arcane until one major trait (Rule of Threes ?).
* Expect a major balance patch during Tier 19 (as we saw during Highmaul).
* Reassess situation regarding balance and encounters.
* Continue upgrading Arcane until second major trait or max out Fire, as per assessment.

My reasoning is:
* I have chosen to focus on mastering only two specs, due to my personal time/effort/skill 'budget'.
* I have the least experience with Frost and it's current tuning makes it unnecessary to focus on.
* Fire is looking strong single target and is arguably the most versatile spec.
* Fire is particularly strong in the initial pre-raid gearing up content such as dungeons.
* Fire has a solid Tier 19 4-piece bonus, I don't see the value in the Arcane 4-piece.
* My hunch is that Arcane will be weaker initially, but will grow more powerful as we obtain higher gear levels throughout the expansion.
* Arcane traits such as Mark of Aluneth and Aegwynn's Ascendance have great scaling potential.

Thanks for reading,
Grump

[Curnivore]

There is a major difference this expansion though. Because of the spec soft gating via the artifact system, they are going to be bombarded by complains if they have at any point of the expansion any spec being considerably imbalanced. This works both ways, meaning they will get complaints either if arcane is buffed or especially fire is nerfed. This reality will either create tensions if they do nothing about it, or more likely in my opinion they will respond to that and one might take an advantage of it strategically by levelling a spec few anticipate to be good at first, but it might involve a considerable risk.

The most likely scenario is that we exaggerate about the importance of Fire at first. Anticipating the response of the players Blizzard will likely tune both Arcane and Frost to be very competitive. Fire has a probable mechanical advantage for 5mans because of the very potent passive/automatic AOE, but that might be irrelevant for raiding, especially for Arcane.

If I'm going to level the artifact of Fire at first it will not be because I believe it's going to be an OP spec for months because that is very unlikely. It is going to be because I believe the mechanics of the spec are viable when all specs are tuned similarly. That might mean we will soon see players not being Fire if the tuning brings specs closer.

PS. Right now on prepatch Fire is not on the top 5 game-wide in certain ranking parses of Warcraft Logs on the final bosses of HFC (after the FP nerf) and that shows Fire might not be as god-like as we think.

[macbeet]

In short, my plan is not to make a decision today, but to make a decision after Aug 30th.

If nothing changes I might well be ending up fire for all the fine points outlined above. Yet, there is a decent chance that things will change—I certainly hope that they change for Frost at the very least! Also, catching up on the artifacts is much easier and faster than most people anticipate, so there is no reason to overcommit at this point. For example, prior to the pre-patch I would not have expected that playing Arcane in battlegrounds is so viable. But it is, and I would not have found out if had not deferred judgement for a while.

Be a scientist: collect all the data you can before you reach a conclusion. And there are 25 days before the release left and no need to make a decision immediately upon release.

[Gorstag]

The first points have a really low cost compared to the other. For the moment i give me a limit of 13 points that i can spend in my second and eventually third spec. This can be catched really easily, and it will be a final loss of 1 talent maximum in your main spec at the release of the raid.

[gunnerRecall]

I'm leveling as frost but planning to play fire at max level. So, I'm going to put points into Ebonchill until I can get shield of Alodi and, after that, dump the rest into Felo'melorn.

I'm going to be playing that by ear, in case I decide to switch to frost or arcane due to a balancing patch/etc, but I'm going to focus most of my efforts on Felo'melorn as of right now and try to keep Ebonchill and Aluneth at least somewhat caught up.