7.1.5 - Arcane Mage Guide - Updated: 02-16-2017

[Vorrum]

I've just been playing around on the PTR with Overpowered and found something interesting.

I was running Temporal Flux, Shimmer, RoP, SN, Chrono Shift, Unstable Magic and Overpowered as my talents, and I never once left the burn phase.

Pre-pot, 4 x Arcane Blast, MoA, RoP and burn to 40%. RoP, Activate Arcane Power, free spells for 10 seconds, back up to high mana. Burn to zero and evocate. Continue to burn to 40% as above, by which time Arcane Power will back.

Rinse and repeat, and never leave the burn phase. Seems broken, but I'm happy with it.

That seems pretty fun, any legendaries? It's a dumb question but the cord of infinity would be really good for this sort of rotation.

[Jhazz]

That seems pretty fun, any legendaries? It's a dumb question but the cord of infinity would be really good for this sort of rotation.

I have the bracers, but I feel like this could easily be achieved without them as well. To be honest, I've realised there's not much point in burning to 40% the first time around - might as well burn to 75% so that you get as many AP casts off as possible and get to sync the first one with your prepot.

[Pkm]

500% spell power on arcane orb has to be a mistake. What do you need fire mages for then. Not that I'm complaining, I'm bored of fire but I'm sure that's a data mining error.

[Tataie]

I've just been playing around on the PTR with Overpowered and found something interesting.

I was running Temporal Flux, Shimmer, RoP, SN, Chrono Shift, Unstable Magic and Overpowered as my talents, and I never once left the burn phase.

Pre-pot, 4 x Arcane Blast, MoA, RoP and burn to 40%. RoP, Activate Arcane Power, free spells for 10 seconds, back up to high mana. Burn to zero and evocate. Continue to burn to 40% as above, by which time Arcane Power will back.

Rinse and repeat, and never leave the burn phase. Seems broken, but I'm happy with it.

Whats your haste , and what cast time on AB do you have with the new talent , at 4 AC ?
Im wondering if haste will be usefull now for us , if we pick Overpowered and dump Quickening ?
A mastery / haste build ? Extra regen and short cast times for AB and AM ?

[x1xruex1x]

I think quickening might still be viable, but they're giving it both nerfs and buffs at the same time. If you're hardcore into maximizing values, then quickening might still be a good playstyle (or if you love this horrid throttling stuff).

I really think Overpowered will be nice.

I wanted to get into the PTR but it keeps saying im not eligible #cry

[toxicblackout]

hey guys, does anyone know a good mastery level (percentage) to have for arcane? I had 38% but sims and pawn had me replacing pieces to only have 31% now, which feels a bit low. Thanks!

[seoh]

you should be aiming to get ~50% and then whatever you can get beyond that on top of getting vers/crit and like 15% haste depending. at 873 I have 25/15/50/6 crit/haste/mastery/vers, and I've been following simc the entire gearing process.

[Grazer]

hey guys, does anyone know a good mastery level (percentage) to have for arcane? I had 38% but sims and pawn had me replacing pieces to only have 31% now, which feels a bit low. Thanks!

In my opinion, the biggest benefit of having more mastery is having more room for errors. I played Arcane during the whole EN-Mythic Progress and until 2 weeks ago I was at ~8k mastery rating, which is roughly 40%. Pulling decent numbers at that mastery level was possible, but a lot more work than it is now. More mastery allows you to spend more mana (obviously) which only is REALLY important if you are unlucky with Missile proccs.

With low mastery it is really painful and much more difficult to still have a full HQ burn without running out of mana during it. With higher mastery, that becomes much easier.

tl; dr version:
More mastery especially helps in unlucky pulls. It primarily makes the spec / playstyle feel slightly less punishing. The dps increase shouldn't even be that high, I think.

[Kintoun]

hey guys, does anyone know a good mastery level (percentage) to have for arcane? I had 38% but sims and pawn had me replacing pieces to only have 31% now, which feels a bit low. Thanks!

tl; dr version:
More mastery especially helps in unlucky pulls. It primarily makes the spec / playstyle feel slightly less punishing. The dps increase shouldn't even be that high, I think.

This, so much this. Fire trying to convert to Arcane here, and I'm missing tons of mastery. 30% right now. I feel like my mana bar drains in seconds. If I drop a RoP outside a burn phase, I can't even LQ burn for it's duration or I risk not having enough mana for MQ/HQ burn. It's really depressing.

THIS IS TOTALLY OPINION, but I bet high mastery is great for learning the spec, but once mastered (pun intended), other stats generate more DPS.

[danieltang34]

Hey guys I just adjusted my gears & play style a bit and managed to pull 40k~60k extra dps, hopefully some of you will find it useful
My gears are 870 (both before and after adjustments), I only have the legendary belt
I used to do the throttle LQ HQ rotation with 50%mastery and I've been doing 270~290k on 100m dummy tests (without any buff or bloodlust)
Today I decided to go all out on mastery and now I'm standing at 58%, I also swapped to erosion. In conjunction with the LQ MQ rotation, I'm now pulling 330k on dummy consistently and I even pulled 450k on nightbane (which I pulled 300k last week) and 360k on h ursoc
Basically here's what I do, RoPx1 and burn until evocation>RoPx1 10sec burn>throttle a bit and make sure I hit 40%mana just when MoA is off cd> MoA RoP AP burn> 3+1 and wait for evo> aim at 10Q when I evo>repeat RoP 10sec burn, semi throttle, MoA RoP AP burn and
3+1
It worked out so well for me and all of a sudden I became the top dps of my guild You guys should definitely try it out

[Sosaria]

^ Thanks in advance for the tip!

Question... what do you mean by 3+1?

[Kythos]

@danieltang34

Great insight!
Adapting playstyle around the arcane legendaries seems to be what is in store for all of us moving forward.

Would you mind linking your armory or sharing your stat percentages?

Interested to see where your crit/haste/vers is at with 'max mastery'

Your mana regeneration when procing cord of infinity must feel good

Also, whats your talent breakdown?

[danieltang34]

^ Thanks in advance for the tip!

Question... what do you mean by 3+1?

ooh by 3+1 i actually mean the 3AB+1Abarr conserve rotation

[danieltang34]

@danieltang34

Great insight!
Adapting playstyle around the arcane legendaries seems to be what is in store for all of us moving forward.

Would you mind linking your armory or sharing your stat percentages?

Interested to see where your crit/haste/vers is at with 'max mastery'

Your mana regeneration when procing cord of infinity must feel good

Also, whats your talent breakdown?

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/tw/% ... D%E5%AC%8C" target="_blank
i play on the taiwan server and the armory is like... in chinese, you can try the AMR link im not sure if it works for others or just me
im still toying around with a couple slots but yea most of my gears are fixed for now

[a0kalittlema0n]

Everyone is saying 50% mastery and such, I've had great success with COMPLETELY opposite stats. let me link my armory and my logs are in my sig below to see how I've performed while raid leading and obviously doing mechanics > tunneling (cause the RL can't ask for what he isn't doing ;P)

This is completely ignoring throttling as well and trying to what I call "gaming" the quickening stacks, so i just play normally.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... lfy/simple

[Kythos]

@a0kalittleman0n

please elaborate on "gaming" the quickening stacks.

with default /SimC that there is a 6-9 dps difference for me between my highest Ilvl set {878 (30crit/15 haste/35mastery/2 verse)} and a max mastery set{ ~870 (22crit/6 haste/54mastery/1 vers)}. I found my lower mastery set to be more front loaded but slowly trails off after 5-6 minutes.

after looking at your logs it appears that most of your fights are relatively quick, most Heroic EN kills <4 minutes.
how do you find your set/playstyle on longer fights?

Love the insight, I posted about the diversity in gear focus previously and am excited to see feedback, examples and logs.

[a0kalittlema0n]

"gaming" quickening is doing the throttling, where you cast slower, or go all the way up to 50 stacks an try to burn at 40+ stacks to get more damage out during AP etc. I just burn when I have AP and or RoP up, and barrage when I need to .

On longer fights you just lookup all my logged kills on longer bosses:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... 718723/12/ ToV Fights
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... #boss=1864 Xavius heroic (can also see normal)
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... #boss=1873 We used t o 2 phase it
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... #boss=1876 Renferal, the mythic one was 7:10 (keep in mind, mythic mechanics and RL again)
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... #boss=1854 Dragons is a longer fight
Even Nythendra is a longer fight, Mythic was like 7 minutes.

I mean we may kill bosses quicker, but I can't tell you what those fights would be like if they were longer, I'm pretty sure they'd be similar, usually depending on how the mana lines up at the end it changes it, but outside of that length would only decrease the overall damage due to having Heroism and Pots being a smaller overall percentage of the fight.

[x1xruex1x]

PTR Update

So I just did a couple quickie tests (since addons are wonky and combatlog isnt recording properly) but I wanted to get a rough idea of how the damage looks under different talent choices given what I know my mage can achieve on live.

Rough Results
-Temporal Flux + Overpowered + no Supernova + no Nether Tempest
-- During AP, ONLY use AB, and it achieves dps ranges up to the 400+k bracket. However a lot of testing will need to be done on this, as I know i'm not using it effectively. Opening a fight and going right into this isn't effective at all since it's keeping you near max mana, I think it'd be better used a smidge offset into the battle as opposed to immediately like we've been. This would allow our mana to regen over 12+ seconds, and then even more as we're prone to proc'ing AM during the event. I'm thinking, open up AB'ing, using MoA with RoP as normal, burning down towards maybe the 50% range (still really up in the air on Mana% ranges), then clearing out any AM or available free mana spells you have at that moment. Then RoP > AP > AB until AP ends > Wrap up with any proc'd AM's or other avail items, then just work your way to low mana, evocate, and repeat. I think this will enable us to have more modest burn phases, and higher conserve.

As I said, Im not playing at my best due to addons being weird, combatlogs not recording 100% accurately, and atop that, for whatever reason on PTR, my spells cast on key depression, not release. which screws me up hardcore since I tend to bank my next spell with a depressed keybind and release at the right moment.....

Either way, I think there's a lot to learn on the PTR right now, but I'm not going to get into super duper details until it's been out a bit more. I'll probably make a small update about Arcane Orb, and Quickening once I get my addons fixed for PTR usage, and a revision to this one here.

Afterwords I think it's about waiting.

^_^

[a0kalittlema0n]

This is the conclusion I came to as well. I did a video on it that's in my guide/youtube/sig. I think this is going to be really powerful, and I could get up to 600k on the pull bursting. Running PoM is a significant DPS increase as well.

[x1xruex1x]

This is the conclusion I came to as well. I did a video on it that's in my guide/youtube/sig. I think this is going to be really powerful, and I could get up to 600k on the pull bursting. Running PoM is a significant DPS increase as well.

Yuppers ^_^ I checked it out and subscribed finally