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Conventional wisdom is, of course, that Rune of Power is the best talent in the row and you'd only take Incanter's Flow if you're lazy and don't care about losing dps.

However after the nerfs to RoP, as well as obtaining legendaries and set bonuses that enhance your sustained output, it only sims at like 2-3% higher than IF. Additionally, a single messed up RoP due to unavoidable random mechanics (a possibility on most mythic fights in ToS) will pretty much eat up that 2-3%. For these reasons, as well as personal experience, I really feel that IF is a better talent in a lot, if not most, of progression content. I also do see a fair number of IF parses creeping into the top mythic parses (which is where RoP should theoretically dominate). Am I way off base here?

If you drop a Rune and pop all your cooldowns right as an "unavoidable" mechanic is coming, that's your fault, not RoP's.

You're really only seeing IF on DI and Sashimi, and that probably has more to do with sustained aoe/cleave, where IF can sometimes out perform rop.

It is not 'worth', RoP is must have if you want to be competitive with other classes. Why skipping 40% dmg buff on demand for IF buff that you can't control. Btw, IF is simming like 50-60k lower than IF for me. That is huge.

They are correct about ROP. It is a MUST TAKE if you want to play your class the most efficiently. HOWEVER. as a raid leader a majority of the time, I just use IF so I don't have to micromanage the buff before mechanics come out etc etc. To play arcane well, you need to know how long the fight will be, and were your CDs are most effectively used. If you take ROP and you don't know how to use it effectively/lack fight knowledge, you won't do as well as if you have IF.

HOWEVER. as a raid leader a majority of the time, I just use IF so I don't have to micromanage the buff before mechanics come out etc etc. To play arcane well, you need to know how long the fight will be, and were your CDs are most effectively used. If you take ROP and you don't know how to use it effectively/lack fight knowledge, you won't do as well as if you have IF.

as someone who has done raid leading as an arcane mage I would say you shouldn't put away your best spell because you don't know how to use it. Pay attention to spell timers, look track your cooldowns, and learn the fight - You can't expect those you lead to do things you won't do yourself.

I would definitely get used to using it as much as possible, dungeons and raiding, only boss im not using it on is mistress (which is where im currently progressing) in mythic as its requiring a lot of movement..
Get used to using it on pull all cds then after 1 minute with mark, rinse and repeat and you shouldnt overcap your rune of power uses
It scales with a lot of the trinkets especially the owl which does near 10% of my damage on single target fights (i own a 945 ilvl)