Alvira

Quoted from Manly with his permission.

Manly said in the other mage TC thread

"Well, the problem is that people are bringing the wrong arguments. There are upsides to every spec, but people trying to vouch for arcane give the arguments that don't matter. Or my favorite people trying to ague about fire spec mana.

With this said, I think this is kind of the unease of talking about arcane is that everything is situational. Everything comes into play. Mana tide, spriest dps, JOW, number of innervates, fight duration will totally change the numbers. Then I don't think many mages will agree that going full int gemming is 'acceptable' in the sense that - while optimal, it is basically 'single-sided' gemming that won't work on any other spec. I think the playstyle of arcane is quite simply all about understanding DPM. The guideline isn't hard at all. I think what kind of is missing is strategies/methodologies about how to plan your DPM ahead of time. This is something I would instinctively do, if I were to start play arcane seriously. But oddly enough it seems like nobody took the time to put more than basic outline about how to play arcane. Or maybe just everyone assumes that understanding how tools like rawr/magegraf is what it takes to know how to play, and maybe that looking at the result is good enough to satisfy most peoples desire to play well? (again, this is pure speculation)."


I am not so sure that it is that easy to plan DPM head of time for each boss. Each boss has a certain total time it takes to finish, which might vary dramatically depending on whether you had one or more people die during the fight. And your own DPM may change depending on which group you were placed in for different fights. So, all this may result in the fight taking longer or shorter than what you expected, and your own mana regeneration being more or less than what you expected.

Thus, I am not sure its that easy to plan DPM ahead of time. I mean, you could estimate that Supremus takes 4 minutes usually. But maybe a few DPS got careless and got smeared early. He still goes down, but instead, it became a 6 minute fight. You can't really plan ahead of the fight for such things.

This is why I prefer to go with the "Burn AB until you are almost out" method for most fights. Then lapse into a low mana filler spell while waiting for mana to regen up if the fight is still not over. If the fight is shorter than you expected. You would have achieved maximum DPS. If the fight turns out to be longer than you expected, you still have achieved a big chunk of your damage and you have leeway to drop down a bit as you go into cruise control until your gem and pot cooldowns are ready for you to ramp up again.

For example. We had a Rage Wintechill bug and evade on us the other day at around 50% back to 100%. Plus in the process of evading, Rage aggroed and killed some DPS. So, the fight turned out to be much much longer than expected since we had to kill Rage one and a half times with less DPSers. But I still spammed AB all the way with the intention that when I did eventually get low, I would spam my filler spell.

It turned out that despite the much longer time it took, my raid support, plus Jaina's awesome arcane brillance was able to keep me spamming AB all the way till the end of the fight even though it lasted much longer than expected. I just about ran dry as rage died. So, in hindsight, it turned out to be a good decision.