CM Gearing for Arcane

[Beave]

Has anyone run through the CM's yet in 6.2 as arcane? I'm wondering what gear you used and maybe what skills you went with. I'm not much of a Simcraft guy, so I'm not sure how you'd simulate gear for CM's because all sockets, set bonuses, and tertiarty stats get ignored for CM's besides scaling to 630. I'd rather not slow my group down trying to figure out which trinkets especially to go with, so I figured I'd ask here.

Based on early Highmaul level gearing and how CM's scale, I'm going to guess that we probably want mastery as our main secondary again rather than haste. There aren't any pets to benefit from haste, and I don't think we'd be able to stack enough it would pass mastery even if we use the tier trinket.

Since I don't tend to DE gear and instead stick it in my bags, I've got good pieces up and down the board with Mastery on them for pretty much every slot. Trinkets are really where I'm struggling. In past expansions and with other classes I've played where people do really in-depth studies on this stuff, effect on use trinkets tend to be preferred for CM's. I'm assuming I'd rather be able to proc a bunch of INT or spell power every couple of minutes for a big boss or trash pull rather than just a flat increase. That said, I've learned to love PoF and my Prismatic Crystal, and when those procs line up on a good pull.... mobs just melt away. Copeland's Clarity is mentioned in caster guides for other classes as a BiS for CM's. At 665 it grants 1100 spell power on use with a 2min cooldown and 295 crit. Scaled to 630 it's still a big boost. So I'm guessing I want 2 of those 3, but which 2 I'm not sure yet.

I'd appreciate any feedback. Otherwise I'm going to spec Nova and Crystal, stack mastery, and make my first attempt at trinkets with the Copeland's Clarity and the Tier Trinket. Even if it scales back to only a 20% increase in haste and damage, I've got to imagine the tier trinket gives that great burst you want in CM's.

[horse]

For starters: Nope, not done CM as arcane.

Now to get into trinkets. The tier trinket I would very likely use, but I would not wear it all the time. There's no equip CD on it so you could just swap it on for bosses, or any other time you intend to use AP to boost AB spam.

I am not sure how RPPM works with trinket swapping, so it could be painful to swap between tier trinket and an RPPM one. Could perhaps pick up a Quiescent Runestone if need be, it has huge flat stats.

As for PoF I really don't think you want to use that. It's a lot of stars that need to align:
1) Need to have AM procs (this one you can at least somewhat control)
2) Needs to proc early on the large pulls
3) Needs to proc on a mob that isn't gonna die from the pummeling

There's also Iskar trinket. I'd probably run that with Copeland's and swap one out for bosses. Again though, might change depending on how RPPM is affected by trinket swapping.

[Curnivore]

I suspect PoF is good considering a large part of 5mans is AOE on trash. It's the main reason frost is considered best. Otherwise it would all be arcane since most bosses are single-target.

[magictricks]

Couldn't you go with 4pc t17 so you get 10 missiles?, that's would be pretty sick for aoe I think.

[Zyrachiel]

Tier sets don't work with CM's.

Having done 8/8 gold recently I still wouldn't bother with Arcane. Frost is just way too good. Frost bomb+frozen orb absolutely destroys packs of any size. I also went with comet storm+Prophecy of Fear, using CmS exclusively for PoF procs. I was reaching 250k dps on big pulls, even beating an enhancement shaman with Mirror of the Blademaster. Used Gaze as my other trinket, lots of int, very good proc rate.
Gear and enchant for multistrike, for your other stat a mixture of crit and haste is decent, edging more towards crit. I used Frostwolf on the weapon, though thunderwolf or warsong may be better.
Spec ring of frost and greater invis, unglyph rapid displacement as the stun/root removal on blink is very handy in many cm's. You'll also want to swap frost bomb and ice nova around depending on the cm you're doing. I found ice nova very handy in ubrs for example, to stop and nuke leadbelchers from activating cannons.

[Rinoa]

@Zyra

I'd actually say multistrike isn't that good in CMs. The reason behind multistrike generally being such a strong stat for frost is because of its interaction with Frostbolt - increasing the proc chance of FFB. When you're doing CMs a very large portion of the dungeon is spent not casting Frostbolt as that's a bad spell for AoE, this devalues multistrike quite a lot meaning crit and haste become significantly more attractive.

[Zyrachiel]

@Rinoa
I suppose you're right, though I would argue that the time you spend casting frostbolt in CM's is still significant (bosses, strong individual mobs, smaller packs, specific packs). But again, my group was aiming for gold and not competitive time, so our pulls were smaller and safer, which means less AoE.
If anything, it probably goes to show that, as long as you stay away from mastery, stats won't have as much impact on your ability to get gold as your talent/trinket choice.