Arcanist Gear and You

flyinfungi · 11/03/05, 11:40 PM

Our guild has been plowing through MC and I wanted to check if its it is worth getting the Arcanist Set.

The set Bonuses seem to suck IMO except for the threat reduction. Which would be nice if frost bolts were able to pull aggro. I like the stats on many of the items but should i just spend my DKP first on some of the more worthwhile items?

The items I have been looking forward to in MC have been.

Mana Igniting Cord
Ring of Spell Power x2
Azuresong Mageblade
Talisman of Ephemeral Power (Got this)

This seems very PvP sided and I'm not sure if I should go for other gear instead to have more of a PvE balance.

My second question is what talent build do you mages use?

Right now I am 31 Arcane / 20 Fire. Worked great till we got to Baron Geddon last week.
Now I should resepct.

Ayle · 11/03/05, 11:48 PM

Any mages who raid with us we try to come up the biggest reason they should loot it.

FR! PURPLE! STATS! MEDIOCRE PLS DMG!

Because alliance have BoS it must be ALOT harder than you hordes have to get people to loot the whole set.

On another note we have a new druid and new warlock who each picked up 4-5 pieces tonite... woot

newladin · 11/04/05, 12:05 AM

Originally Posted by flyinfungi,November 3rd, 2005 @ 11:40PM

Our guild has been plowing through MC and I wanted to check if its it is worth getting the Arcanist Set.

The set Bonuses seem to suck IMO except for the threat reduction. Which would be nice if frost bolts were able to pull aggro. I like the stats on many of the items but should i just spend my DKP first on some of the more worthwhile items?

The items I have been looking forward to in MC have been.

Mana Igniting Cord
Ring of Spell Power x2
Azuresong Mageblade
Talisman of Ephemeral Power (Got this)

This seems very PvP sided and I'm not sure if I should go for other gear instead to have more of a PvE balance.

My second question is what talent build do you mages use?

Right now I am 31 Arcane / 20 Fire. Worked great till we got to Baron Geddon last week.
Now I should resepct.

stop saving your points for something that might not drop for a while. an upgrade is an upgrade, and you don't have to be the first to get everythine great.

wow · 11/04/05, 12:32 AM

suck it up and start gearing yourself up for pve

all the arcanist pieces are worth something- helm, gloves, belt and bracers have fr, shoulders are a great balance of stats and +damage as well as chest, boots and pants. there is no situation where i'd use the whole set but it is far from worthless.

Elfan · 11/04/05, 9:12 AM

Originally Posted by flyinfungi,November 3rd, 2005 @ 11:40PM

Which would be nice if frost bolts were able to pull aggro.

I assure you that every dps class in the game can pull aggro and wipe the raid.

hamlet_the_lesser · 11/04/05, 9:36 AM

I always held the policy that you grab what is available to you if it is an upgrade. We had a guy save points for an azuresong and it took him 3 months to get it. in 7 months of MC I have seen 2 mana igniting cords and I have seen 1 ring of spell power. Holding off for something you have no idea when you are going to get is foolish.

Greybone · 11/04/05, 10:01 AM

Yes, point hoarding and passing on upgrades is strongly discouraged.

flyinfungi · 11/04/05, 10:12 AM

I don't mean to hoard. I mean to use DKP on an item I will find useful over a good period of time. Which now seems to smack me on the head now with the logic of Purple set > Blue set

I haven't slept yet, BAH!

phixion · 11/04/05, 10:29 AM

Only if Frostbolts could pull aggro? I promise you that if you respec and get around 300 +dmg gear and your FB's hit for alittle over 800 you can pull aggro. But yes although the arcanist set is not loaded with +dmg the 8 piece set bonus is nice for reducing your aggro for BWL encounters.

The 5 piece is nice too for domo. It allows me to be alt tabbed for 10 more seconds during the fight :D.

Stalkman · 11/04/05, 12:12 PM

I have all 8 pieces of it, and I'm pretty disappointed. It was good back in march/april before the new itemization went in. Really the only encounters it has been useful for have been the pre change broodlord (knockback massive deaggro) and pre change firemaw ( another agro tightrope). What is happening now, is with the new gear coming out for tanks to hold agro and other mage items to do damage, even if I'm going all out on a boss like the green dragons, other mages, with equivilant JP spent but different items, is going to be able to do substantially more damage me and not pull agro so the set bonus is worthless (a feral druid beat me on the last dragon kill I was on, rather disheartening, even when I was AEing druids adds).

It may be useful in future agro sensitive encounters, as long as you build your +damage items around the non body armor pieces of gear so it doesn't interfere with the bonus while still enabling you to cause some hurt, which is a pain in the ass and limits your item choices to a few drops, mostly weapons, which are always contested.

The set isn't totally worthless, the 3 piece bonus is very strong in the PvE tier of raid encounters it was designed for (mc/onyxia) and the set is a nice mix of +damage, mana/5 and fire resist. If your guild is doing that stage of the game right now it's a pretty solid set. The only problem is that practially everyone has several sets of gear for different situations, so having one set that does them all passibly OK isn't attractive anymore.

The set still has its merits, the hat is an excellent FR piece, as are the bracers and chest, but things like the shoulders, belt and gloves are pretty underwhelming, despite having some big numbers on them. Same problem with all the old sets, lots of numbers, very few stats people actually want anymore.

It's a shitty pvp set, straight up. It has mixed shadow/fire resist that will help against offensive casters, but lacks the +damage to be able to overpower enemy healers before they outlast you. Oh, and a decent portion of the +damage gear is frost only so by specing fire wearing the set you'r only further hurting yourself.

In conclusion, the set is very good in small doses. Its max utility for the vast majority of situations is the 3 piece bonus. If you're going to force people into taking pieces in slots where they don't already have a raid earned purple (which you should still definately do) allow them ample oppertunity to upgrade to non set or netherwind when the situation arises.

Blingazinga · 11/04/05, 2:16 PM

Agreeing with everything Stalkman says about gear. Since you also asked about talent builds here's what I use.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...050031123001000

It's a great PVE build for the encounters currently in the game. It puts the emphasis on making frost bolts do as much damage as possible with the most mana efficiency possible while maximizing your mana pool. If you don't want iceblock then the last point would go to Arcane Power. It's a fairly boring build but it gets the job done. During a long ragnaros fight (2 sons phases) once I broke 120k damage.

wow · 11/04/05, 4:03 PM

Originally Posted by Blingazinga,November 4th, 2005 @ 2:16PM

Agreeing with everything Stalkman says about gear. Since you also asked about talent builds here's what I use.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...050031123001000

It's a great PVE build for the encounters currently in the game. It puts the emphasis on making frost bolts do as much damage as possible with the most mana efficiency possible while maximizing your mana pool. If you don't want iceblock then the last point would go to Arcane Power. It's a fairly boring build but it gets the job done. During a long ragnaros fight (2 sons phases) once I broke 120k damage.

i dunno about doing a fight like firemaw/flamegor(lol) without imp AM, my build is something like that but with all the top tier arcane talents maxed

Blingazinga · 11/04/05, 7:02 PM

I have 280ish fire resist and fire ward. If my buffet is high enough I take damage I need to get out and let it reset anyways. Flamegor only novas when hes frenzied and I usually just frost bolt him anyways.