[Mage] How Can Arcane Damage Work?
 

Hi. My name is Jona. I'm an arcane mage.
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...ntinels&n=Jona

I'm very probably the second-best geared mage - Horde side - on my server. Yet my damage sucks in raids. Before you jump to react and say "Ahah! See! Arcane sucks!" you need to hear me out...

First, I don't have any intention of respeccing to the cookie-cutter raid fire spec. I would like to TRY it, just to understand how it works, but I don't think that's the solution to my particular problem. I am not completely opposed to fire. As a matter of fact, I use fireballs quite frequently in fights that require greater range (Prince Malchezaar, for instance), so I like to be effective with other spells as well. But, I LOVE arcane. (And I frequently play with a shadow priest so it's a nice synergy :D)

Second, I believe that my spec can dish out a shitload of damage in raids (can I say "shit"?), but I just haven't figured out the right way to do it. I have a bad habit of hitting one button over and over, which works great in most cases... (Arcane Missiles FTW!)

Third, I'm not really a "twitch" kindof player, if you know what that means. I don't pvp all that often (although I have in the past, and kicked ass at it, I just don't enjoy it). It takes me a little while before I get comfortable with my adversary. The first attempt on a boss, my damage always sucks royally, and it gets gradually better as we progress and actually start beating the guy.

So... right now I'm at a point where my guild is doing bigger raids more often (okay, we're hitting Gruul regularly and starting on Mag soon, nothing too big, but we were slow starters!) and when we get in those encounters for some reason my damage just tanks. I don't get it. But maybe I do get it... what I usually do (at least with Gruul) is be over-conservative, stay way back, and cast fireballs, and then go run and hide the very second the ground slam call comes. So that means I live through the fight, but it also means I'm dead last on damage (when I should be in the top 5 based on the damage I do in heroics and Karazhan). I figure on the next raid things will click a little better and I'll be able to be actively doing damage for more of the fight.

One of my favorite guildies is into theorycrafting and insists that I need to respec fire if I ever want to get more damage. But I'm convinced that my damage problems are largely playstyle and not so much my talents (it's definitely not gear at this point).

The thing I want help with, from you lovely, lovely people, is figuring out how to get the most possible damage out of my arcane spells during raids. I'm not concerned about mana, since I have a kickass shadow priest in my group (I actually ended the last Gruul fight with a ton of mana).

If you were a mage with my spec, in a 25+ raid fight like Gruul's Lair, AND TOO BROKE TO RESPEC, what would you do to maximize your damage?

Seriously, I really, really want to find out how folks deal with arcane spells in raids. I'm hoping there are people out there who actually manage to accomplish this.

I specced deep arcane for Gruul one night. I hated it. With 10/48/3, I could stay near the wall and spam fireballs and wait until the very last second to avoid ground slam. With deep arcane, I was in way to close, nearer to many other people. I had to stop dpsing early and had to worry about Reverberation hitting me while casting AM and destroying my DPM.

If I were you, I'd read the topics on the Mage Forum of the official site and take a look at the ones discussing deep arcane's raid viability.

The math that has been done by deep fire mages has mostly convinced me deep arcane isn't too accurate and the deep arcane mages have only offered up excuses why the math is wrong rather than supplying their calculations.

Take a look and think about things a little more.

I can't really speak for the mages.

We have an arcane mage in our guild. Top snotch gear ~3 T4 and 2t5, everything else being SSC and TK epics. But that's not the point since almost every damage dealer in our raid is equally equipped.

Well to come to the point: He always ends up on the top of the meters. Cosidering you accept the top to be ~1-5. I might have to add that he's probably the best mage I know. He's playing this class since the dawn of Wow and has never let anyone down when it comes to do serious damage.

resume: Arcane Specc CAN do a lot of damage, if you know how. I might be able to squeez some information out of him, to see what he really does.

So you say you switched from your normal cookie-cutter fire spec to arcane for an evening?

I'm coming from the exact opposite perspective. Except my crutch is to use my max range (fireball) spell when I'm in most boss fights that require movement or range. The thing is, I believe I can do it with my arcane and I want to learn HOW to do it. I want to be the most kickass arcane mage I can be.

The normal objections to arcane are that it's 1) too mana intensive (I have a shadow priest constantly feeding me mana) 2) The range isn't sufficient (with the right bossmod, you have more than sufficient warning to get the fuck out of the way before shit happens) 3) with the main spell being a 5-sec channel, you can't move as often without sacrificing mana (see item 1)

So for this argument, let's also assume that I have a shadow priest in my pocket (luckily I'm married to him) and I'm also able to get the movement speed buff from the fun little daily Simon quests so I can get out of the way pretty fast. Basically I want people to assume these kinds of things aren't an issue.

If you had all the mana you wanted, and could move ... pretty fast... and could only spec arcane... how would you maximize your damage?

This is a key point. The T5 2 piece set bonus is 20% more damage on Arcane Blast. It's not disputed that Arcane can do excellent damage but sustaining it over longer fights is very difficult.

This subject has been discussed to death elsewhere in this forum though.

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...ghlight=arcane
http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...ghlight=arcane
http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...ghlight=arcane

As an aside, the simon says movement speed buff only works in Blade's Edge, to my knowledge.

From watching our mages on raids, arcane is definitely *considerably* more mana intensive than Fire - it's a world of difference. We have one mage that's constantly toying with the idea of going deep arcane, and that swears by Arcane Blast / Fireball / Scorch rotations, but his damage can't keep up with deep fire mages due to mana constraints. With two shadow priests feeding him mana, I could see this being very different though, and Arcane Blast completely destroying any other mage damage source. The problem is the opportunity cost of supplying 3 mages (or 2, with a warlock) with 2 shadow priests - the expense of losing the shadow priest from another group, and having a mage lose the shadow priest group privilege does not justify the group stacking necessary to *really* make an arcane raiding build work.

1) Most fire mages have a shadow priest. I've tried a full arcane build and a shadow priest and elemental shaman were not enough to allow me to get through Magtheridon or Gruul without going out of mana (and I did less damage as I was having to be pretty conservative with mana).

2) Movement and range are an issue. However fast you move in and out you're still losing damage over the fire/frost mages who can sit at 36-41 yards and keep on nuking.

Well, for the time being, that's all I care about, since we haven't really progressed past Gruul's Lair yet. I'm trying to learn how to optimize the spells I'm currently using. Mostly I'm trying to avoid the responses that tell me to just respec. I may very well do that at some point... I just want to make sure I've FULLY exhausted all my resources as far as learning how to maximize the damage on my current spec before I change it. Because I fully believe it can happen. In other words, don't tell me to change it. Tell me why it's completely wrong and will never, ever be in the top 5 damage in a raid.

More importantly, tell me what I CAN do to ensure I'm IN the to 5 damage in a raid... any ideas on casting sequence? any ideas on trinket usage? Any ideas on elixir buffs? Think out of the box, people!! I'm posting here because I think you guys know this stuff (and I hate reading Something Awful because it hurts my eyes).

I think respeccing to the PVE raid fire spec is the easy way out of this. I need a challenge :D

BTW, I'm not going to just refer to some 100-post thread and hope to find my answer. I don't have time. If the OP doesn't relate to the question I have, I'm not going to read the whole frickin' thread. I'm not about to wade through all the pages to find something relevant. I wouldn't start a new post if I'd already found my answer within a day. (I've been looking for an answer to this for longer, FYI.)

What our Arcane Blast junkie mage does (when he's specced accordingly), is the following:

Arcane Blast
Arcane Blast
Fireball / Scorch chain-cast depending on the situation (threat, current mana, importance of mobility etc.)
and the key part:
Arcane Blast as the debuff is about to run out. Why? He starts his cast while the 2-stack debuff has ~1sec left on it, so he gets the full benefit of the increased casting speed. However, the debuff falls off while he's still casting, and mana is spent at the end of the cast, meaning he just got a free high-speed cast, for low mana cost. After this cast, cast Arcane blast once more to get up to two debuff stacks once again, then continue with Fireballs/Scorch. Rinse and repeat.

Since you're likely to have Improved Clearcasting, you probably want to go with casting a Fireball whenever you're outside of the AB rotation and you have a CC proc, scorch outside of that to proc more Clearcasts.

The 1st 2 posts I linked are 1 or 2 pages long and are on exactly this subject - they even have answers in them. I don't see why you should expect help when you're too lazy to do anything yourself. It took me less than a minute to find the relevant threads and info. I linked full mage theorycrafting thread too as I'm sure it has useful information in and you can make use of the search in thread feature for it.

I have no experience with Mag yet, but made it through Gruul without going out of mana. I actually had way too much mana at the end of the fight, which is the main reason I'm thinking that some combination of arcane/fire would be more viable for that fight for an arcane mage (as opposed to respeccing).

Also, with Gruul at least, it's not possible for every max-damage dpser to just sit there casting, otherwise I'd have been doing it (it's not like I couldn't have found a rock, if one were available, and just cast fireballs the whole time, without moving - I didn't cast a single arcane spell the entire fight, actually). For our particular raid, on the most recent Gruul kill, one of our hunters ended up topping the damage charts. Maybe he got lucky on placement in the raid and that's all it was. I like to think he's really that good . I group with the guy several times a week so I know it's probably true, but it's beside the point... well, not entirely because he usually doesn't beat ME on damage during the week. Just this one time. I'm not trying to BEAT people, though. I just think I can do a lot better than I'm doing now.

No, it's not. It's actually one of the worst boni on epic mage-sets I've encountered so far. It only applies to Arcane Blast's base damage and seems to not scale with your spelldamage. He got the bonus just recently and rolled with 4 T4 before. He's 61 in Arcane and basically just spams Arcane Missiles. The big plus for that spec is the build-in 10% hit from Arcane Focus which lets you gear completely into crit/damage. Due to Sublety he is also able to just nuke away right after the pull. He's using TLC and Icon as trinket and usually runs with Mage Armor (look at his Armory Profile). He only comes out on top of the other Mages if the Warlocks are slow on CoE, IMO. ;)

I tried Arcane myself and wasn't really happy with it. The whole spec lacks mobility and the range drove me crazy. You also don't have any means to avoid Arcane Blast-delay from Volley-casting mobs. And the AE-potential is definitely subpar.

Even though you said not to suggest talent changes I'll give you some feedback on it. When you're going for pure arcane builds the most important benefit is the high +to hit from talents. If you take Improved AM you should max out Arcane Focus (take points out of Prismatic Cloak if you want the talents you've taken in Frost and Fire tree) and gear appropriately, that is 6% hit from gear (5% with draenei shaman in group, 2% if he's got wrath totem). Your gear is severely lacking in int and spi for a pure arcane build, also invest in some proc per hit gear.

Next, take a look at Vontre's spreadsheet to determine your optimal AB cycle. You said you like hitting just one button, but that just won't cut it for arcane. You have to dynamically adjust to situation and change your cycle on the fly to adapt your dps/dpm. If you end the fight with >0 mana that's just not acceptable for an arcane mage.

As far as Gruul goes just use a standard AB cycle, stay at 30 yards all the time all the way until ground slam, rotate in air and blink to a free location.

The first thread mainly deals with the pros and cons of arcane speccing, which I'm not interested in. I'm arcane. Period. I have a specific spec that I'm not interested in changing at the moment. I linked it. I need to know what to do with it (beyond what I'm already doing, which is working so far or else I'd change it without a struggle).

The only post in the first thread that references actual experience with the spec is regarding heroics, not raids. I'm asking about how to deal with my spec in raids, specifically.

In the second thread, there's a very helpful post, actually, but the thread degenerates from there (the next few posts are mostly about why arcane sucks, not about how to work with it)
Okay, I read more of that thread, after wading through the negative posts. Why can't people just answer a frickin question??

I have a question: Do folks actually manage to reproduce their Dr. Boom results in raids? I need more feedback.

What do people think about the AB/AB/AM/Scorch cycle? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having Imp AM? Should I put those points elsewhere?

I need to sleep on this. Maybe I'll post in that other thread tomorrow and stop bothering Goggles with this one ;)

I am 43/18 with emp. AM, imp. Fireball, ignite, imp. scorch, and flame throwing. I think arcane/fire is a fun and interesting spec. It may not be the best single target dps spec in most boss fights, but it sure isn't far behind.

Basically what I do in boss fights is:

Medium dps/dpm rotation: 2xAB, as many scorches as I can fit in with stopcasting macros, then back to 2x AB (before the debuff runs out.) AM on clearcasts. You can last very long with this, you keep up fire vulnerability most of the time, and the dps is pretty good, but not spectacular.

High dps/low dpm: 2xAB - AM - Scorch -repeat
This rotation can get pretty insane when you are lucky with procs. Clearcasting with full arcane potency and emp. AM is extremely powerful. with 30% base crit you shoot up to 60% crit per missile, for the entire volley. Crit trinkets are guaranteed to proc, adding extra burst. Also, you take full advantage of the 40% threat reduction and 10% hit, meaning you can start nuking right away (and after aggro resets) and despite all burst you are hardly prone to ever pulling aggro

Range: classic fireball spam. That's what I use on gruul. The average hit of the fireballs is lower than that of a 10/48/3 mage, but not by such a big amount to warrant calling the spec useless. Only sub 20% the fire mage pulls away, but you can put up equal burst with arcane blast spam if you got the mana for it.


All in all the point of arcane is not single target number crunching, but having unique perks.

- You have the luxury of gearing completely towards +dmg and crit, and you can ignore +hit almost completely. Even if you use an AB/Scorch rotation you can still ignore gearing +hit when you have the eye of magtheridon.
- Unlike other specs, you benefit a lot from stats, you get damage out of intellect and mage armor+arcane meditation makes spirit actually useful. Not to mention the full regen tick when you use a clearcasted AM volley (you exit the five second rule).
- You can abuse the hell out of mystical skyfire diamond (2.5 second AM volley, then stopcast macro and fire another before the buff runs our = almost 2 full AM volleys for 50% cast time, out of one proc. Again a much bigger benefit than for fire and frost. If this proc gets paired with clearcasting, the burst gets even higher.
- You have pretty much the highest crit per second count out of all mage specs, so you can get the most out of crit trinkets such as the lightning capacitor and the nexus-horn. 33/28 mages can get higher crit per second in theory, but not really at bosses because they'd have to sacrifice crit for hit.
- Playing arcane spec is actually challenging beyond one-button-spam, as you have to pay a lot of attention to procs and react accordingly. You have to weave them into your spell rotations while utilizing the your AB timers to the max. At the same time, this is also the bane of arcane, because if you are unlucky with procs, the baseline damage and efficiency is not that great.
- By far the best burst damage in the entire game. Burst damage is not as unimportant as many people think. One-shotting illhoof's demon chains with a pom-pyro, do so much damage during curator evocations that you actually out-threat tanks who had minutes to build it, bursting down a boss with AB in the end. All this might not make a big impact on damage meters and statistics, but it sure does make a difference for your raid.
- Slow: Mostly useless in raids, it's a lot of extra utility in all other aspects of the game. Solo elites while leveling, soloing elites in heroics (I can solo the felguards in heroic blood furnace and the coilfang defenders in heroic SP), harldy useless there.