Few points from my observations after 100 days played as an arcane mage,

I only joined the game back in Jan and lvl'd my Mage arcane all the way. At the time and until about 6weeks most people were telling me I was crazy for being arcane that Forst or Fire were way to go. I was also able to quickly show them they were wrong, arcane was a good spec both for lvl'ing and as DPS in instances/pvp and later in raids.

Now all of a sudden at 80 and having been perfectly happy with arcane up to now it's gotten to the stage where I can't seem to find gear (kept my T6 till 80) to keep my mage competitive with Fire and FFB builds. Especially after T7.5 haste in particular seems to be very hard to come by and most gear at 80 seems to favour haste over crit.

To make arcane a more competitive build I think blizzard need be change the Spell power bonus to be arcane only and make it 100% as was already suggested. At least then crit gear will come a lot closer to the value of hard to come by haste. Given the extra dmg comes at no increased mana consumption unlike haste, this could offset the advantage of the higher DPS and shorter casts times from haste though we would still obviously have to stack a lot more crit points than we had to haste for same percentages increases. Blizzard it seemed though were already weighting the amount points on items so percentage wise you seemed to be getting roughly the same %haste or %crit on items with some startling expections on pvp gear (same points hit/haste on titanforged/deadly gear making hit flavour way better value till cap then haste flavour).

2. I've found I'm still getting higher DPS doing ABABABAMAbarr over ABABABMbarr/Abar anyone else? Also due to increasing lag on my server I've removed all stopcasting on macros except survival casts which you'll want to interrupt whatever your currently doing since I seemed to be clipping and failing to cast more often than I liked. That lead me to test the timing of my casts and my haste now seems either not to be working or even apparently acting in reverse as AB and AM often take longer to cast than advertised without any debuff on me causing it. With haste enough to get AB down to 2.2s I was finding it seemed to normally take close to 3s though human reaction can account for some of it it defn seems there is something awry.

3. I only today tried out the CSD Meta, I had been using the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, I'm still seeing if I can use CSD but I know from my dummy tests the IED makes a huge mana difference and can easily mean the difference between you being able to pop a mana at 80% and Evoc at 40% and keep the full rotation (with AP whenever it procs) going almost indefinately. I also stack a fair bit of spirit and have Mage Armour and Meditation to help keep mana flowing.

Given the IED seems to proc at least once a minute often twice, at 600 mana a go it give 50-80MP5 so I think it should be strong contender for your Meta socket as an Arcane mage, the CSD should not be the automatic choice. I think when Meta sockets first be become available to you at lvl 62 as a Technomage (Mage Eng) the IED should be the automatic choice given the MP5 from it alone means you don't have to have any other mana gear.

4. Although Eng for lvling as an gnome mage was great at 80 the only really useful items are the glove attachments and as a new 80 even the lightning generator held it's own for a while. On the gloves let me point out the obvious, the pryo rockets are better dps until your doing enough DPS (about 2.5k) to make it worthwhile to switch to the accelerators. However Eng defn at 80 atm is not worth it unless you need to do it to provide bots/postbox on raid (and given there is now usually repair guys close to start of raid that isn't often needed) so if your going to lvl fast to 80 defn choose one the other professions for the bonuses they give you (why didn't I go JC/Tailoring), I'll hold my breath to see if 3.2 delivers the changes to Eng which will once again make it a valuable Mage profession.

5. People say Resistant is highly situational and just not worth it because there aren't enough fights where it comes into play. I think these people ignore the amount of fights where Nature DMG is caused. Not only does the high resistant a Mage with/without Improved GOTW + aura/totems lead to better personal survival it also frees up healers to concentrate on poor unfortunates who can't get the resistance we can.

In pvp and mobs situations it also has mana benefits because you with buffs enough resistance to fully resist some spells and get the 2% mana. To me it seems though blizzard don't want mages to have resistance in PVP, the scaling is such that you only need to negate about half the resistance before it offers no real protection. Also using the same amount of gems or enchants you can get 5 times more Spell penetration than you can resistance.

6. Instant casts, having the ability to DPS on the move is one of the arcane mages greatest strengths so I think it worthwhile to seriously consider putting points into Slow, Ice Floes and Improved Fire Blast so you can do more of it. Slow and Ice flows mean you can make the time to be able to stop and get casts off on a moving target. It's only a pity that you really have to be frost to make CoC/Ice Lance effective weapons though it's still handy if you find you have to follow a kited target for some reason. Also Prismatic cloak, without it invisibility is only half as useful. Not only does it often mean you'll can often have your invisibility interrupted before it's started and therefore become useless (okay they say there are going to fix this so dmg during the 3s of fade won't cause invisibility to fail but if your having to turn invisible it means your in trouble and 3s of trouble often results in death).

7. Melee Armour, given we generally don't stack lots of stam then arcane fortitude does make the difference between life and death. Although it won't all of a sudden turn you into a tank it will give you the extra gcd you need. Okay in an ideal world with everyone doing their job you'll never need it. Healers will be keeping you topped up so you won't die from the occasional spear etc and tanks should be be grabbing whose mobs as soon as they spawn so they will never get in range of hitting u right?

Obvioulsy in PVP even though again it wont make you a tank, it in combination with improved Ice armour (glyph and talents) will give you the gcd you need to make space, switching armour as needed is worth a GCD so I generally walk around in Ice, put up Mage if about to take magic dmg and prior to Molten Nerfs I used to have that one for the extra crit if I was about to get a couple of free shots before switching to Mage or Ice.

8. Pushback, it happens and judging from how badly I see the DPS of some fellow arcane mages drop in certain encounters where they are suffering from it it can have a huge impact. Even if that only happens to you occasionally do you really want to have to put up with comments you'll get when the tank does higher DPS than you? Maybe 3 points is enough and you can drop Arcane focus instead. Using your sockets for Hit makes sense you can get over .5% per socket and an Eternal Flame trinket will you 4% on it's own.

Sry long post was also going to rave on about the general pvp inequalities that seem to be getting worse with mages vs other classes, but this gotten to long as is.

Hit - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft has all the information you need. Raid bosses are level 83 for the calculations.

Hustlerone - you need a lot more hit

replace that green gem in your leg item,please , and try to replace the blue trinket with the one from nexus heroic,the one with hit rating.

ok,ill agree with your point.
I think Nurturing Instinct is one of the best talants for pvp feral with combination with healer

After going through page after page of impressive facts and figures I have one question...what the heck does it all mean? Is the current Blood dps spec going to be viable at all? Or is it a must to switch to the new dw spec? If so, what sort of rotation,glyphs etc are going to be used. You guys are amazing at getting to the heart of whats going to be the optimal way to set up your points, I just need a litte simplifying.

as i suspected, thanks alot for the quick answer

Pardon the intrusion. I found the "dump" in the FAQ.

Seriously.
Z

Hey guys.
I'm a hunter with around 4.3k AP unbuffed and around 30 % crit.
I just got into a new guild that raids ulduar 10 mans and prolly soon 25.
i would like some help here, does anyone have a sugestions about wich spec that is best for my own dmg in raids, and what pet that is best in raids tho.
Btw atm im survival specced and i have a tiger as pet.
Please help me.
have a nice day and thank you

can someone point me to the "BiS" list for Non Hardmode Ulduar? I found the Fury/Arms list for hardmode gear but I need the non hardmode list (fury/arms)

Thanks

This can be found around page 32 or 33 on the DPS spreadsheet thread.