◊ Vontre

Pretty sure the problem is your mana regen options are too light to support any length of AB spam. Try adding a shadow priest at least.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

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Tharia

Don't you have a shadowpriest regularly? Just curious because you've got VT unchecked :x
I don't think arcane can really work without the extra mana from the spriest.

//EDIT Beaten ^^

 

Docjowles

Yeah it looks like I sucked at filling in that heading. Doh!

Another question about the spell sequence: It gives me long periods of AB/AM/AB/AM etc. Is this implying the AB debuff should never be allowed to reset to zero? Or am I chilling out and not casting at all to get a regen tick and let AB reset? There's no timestamps on the spell sequence like there are on the effect timings, so it is a little difficult to tell. This doesn't really matter for fire/frost but is obviously fairly critical for arcane.

 

Tharia

The point of arcane is to do as much full stack AB as possible. So you put a scorch after a AM once in a while to reset the stack, but not too often so you end the fight with 0 mana, took advantage of every clearcastprocc and do as much dmg as possible.

 

Tyrian

Can someone lock this thread and start a TC after 2.4 please

Theres more than enough significant changes: spirits big regen buffs / new abundance of (well itemised) haste gear / lowering of GCD - to warrant cleaning the slate and saying goodbye to this 100+ page thread.

 

◊ Vontre

You can assume everything is chain casted. So yeah you are riding the full stack of AB the entire time pretty much.

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Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

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Fireflash38

I agree completely. Especially since it is somewhat difficult to find where people start to talk about 2.4.

 

edifus

Is there a thread about mages using two peice T5 and 4 piece T6 Arcane spec in 2.4?
Rumors that there was, can't locate post though.

or if its hidden within this post please direct if you've seen it.

WoW Forums -> T5 2 piece + 4 T6 bonus? 2.4 Arcane mage?
is post on wow forums about it, not fully developed though

 

Duravi

In theory if you could keep up AB spam with 2pc T5 for a whole boss fight you would out dps any other spec with arcane. The problem comes when you actually try to do this. Even with 4 shadow priests or 3 SPs and an elemental shaman (not sure which would end up being the more mana regen) you will STILL go oom, and that is without even considering any passive haste, BL, drums, or IV in 2.4. In order to not go oom the fight would have to be incredibly short and your raid dps incredibly high, something you will only see when you are way overgeared for an easy boss essentially reducing it to a trash mob. This, along with having the strongest AoE, is why arcane is so great for trash.

The problem with 4pc t6 for arcane is that even with the set bonus and arcane talents, AM still sucks dps wise. Even with the ashtongue trinket and TLC it is far behind fireball. With a 3AB 1AM 1Scorch rotation the only good dps attacks you even do are going to be your first and third AB in the rotation, and that is assuming you time your first properly to begin well the AB debuff is still on. 2/3 of the time you are doing inferior dps.

 

◊ Vontre

Or you could avoid going oom by alternating between arcane blast spamming and a mana efficient dps method according to a fight's duration.

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edifus

In case my post gets looked over
Is two piece t5 and 4 piece t6 a good spec using the following rotation?:

Abx3
AMx1
Frostboltx1
with the following spec:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Mage -> Talent Calculator


46/0/15
Frostbolts have 153% crit bonus with this spec, clearcasting usually procs on AM, then time for Frostbolt with a 30% crit chance factored in on top of your normal crit chance your frostbolts will usually crit. I'm seeing 6k frostbolts currently in my rotation.
so 20% to AB
5% to AM
5% to Frostbolt
Ab spam towards end of fight with the new Haste buff might be crazy burst damage


two piece t5 would be shoulders and gloves since they have smallest upgrades in +damage and crit.
might be stupid but figure I'd toss it out

 

Icicles

this is intriguing, if it is indeed possible to hit this level of regen (even sacrificing 100-150 damage), it'd be possible to spam AB for 50-75% of most fights, no?

 

Duravi

With your level of gear 2/47/11 is going to out dps that spec for any BT/Hyjal fight, some of them by a mile. Not only is your average damage going to be worse, but you cannot stack cooldowns nearly as well as 2/47/11. You are only seeing 6k frostbolts with debuffs or c/ds. Even if I say your frostbolts avg non-crit for 2k, which looking at your spec is definitely an overestimate, your crits would be a little over 5000. Clearcast only procs 10% of the time, you are making it sound like it is always up, and if it was up you would definitely not want to use it on a frostbolt. Plug your stats and spec into Vontre's spreadsheet and use your cycle vs. 2/47/11 cycle of 8x fireball 1x scorch both over an equal period of time. By the time you get to the point where you can AB spam the last few % health of the boss you are going to be so far behind it is impossible to catch up.

 

Stein

Wouldn't it be a good idea to:

- evocate with 1s left on IV?
- IV -> snap -> IV+AP+Trinkets? pro: 100% IV/AP sync...con: 20s wait on AP in 6:20 fight
- PoM to start AB ramp up?
- snap at 2.13s?
- hold off on early AB spam to ensure enough mana to AB spam for every IV/AP for say...the first 4min of the fight?

 

◊ manly

I think we should hold off a bit on a 2.4 thread for the simple reason that things will change probably a lot. Creating a new 2.4 thread will only results in the first few pages being totally disconnected from the point where major changes are made.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

edifus

Not with my crap hit rating it won't

 

◊ Vontre

Get more hit rating....

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Ztorm

There's a lot of things you can do to quickly bring up your hit. Regemming your T5 helm, robes of hateful echoes, and T5 shoulders with Veiled noble topazes alone will raise it by 24. Changing your gear set up will also help. You're exalted with scryer, so why not use the blood gem. It's not the best trinket in the world, but +32 hit is pretty good when you're low on hit. Swapping your bracers and neck for vindicator pieces will also improve your hit and DPS. Just take advantage of all the options available to you =).

EDIT: Plus, with two other fire mages in your guild, it will be easier to maintain scorch debuffs.

 

Kavan

I've had many requests lately to describe more in detail the deep arcane IV playstyle, so I decided I might just post it here for everyone and it might also help for improving the simulator.

First the situation in 2.3 for anyone that wants to try it now. As I posted before, 2.4 on average gives 8% damage increase, so don't expect the same results as deep fire, but it's definitely workable. First regarding gear, in 2.3 spell damage is better than int unless you have good socket bonuses. While haste in 2.4 is bad, it is pointless for 2.3 arcane. Spirit also is relatively bad, no reason to get it if you can avoid it, but don't get rid of it because in 2.4 it's almost as good as spell damage.

First the reasoning behind the ABAMx3+Sc rotation. I've used ABx3+AM+Sc for a very long time. If you look through the EJ posts you'll see discussions about AB debuff - latency interaction and how it doesn't work right. Before /stopcasting change this was not so apparent, but with that change I did some testing and almost always when chaincasted the debuff does not apply on the immediate next chaincasted spell. I thought about trying intentionally delaying ABx3 chain to give enough time for debuff to properly register, but in practice I got even worse results than just chain casting it. So essentially there is 0.66 sec wasted time there. So taking this into account with my current gear in 2.3 I get 1441.17 dps/-47.7 mps.

Next thing I tried was inserting AM to get that 0.66 sec back, this gives ABAMx3+Sc without anything different on CC. So we are trading lower dps of AM to gain that 0.66 sec, but we also have lower dpm. Luckily this is countered by change in OO5SR which increases from about 13% to 26%. In the end we get 1441.08 dps/-46.03 mps. So nothing too impressive, end dps is about the same and we gain a bit short of 2 mps.

Next step is to add AM if AM procs CC. Calculations behind this are a bit more complex, but basically it comes down to probability distribution of different cycles. On one hand we're cutting cycle short, losing some of the high dps ABs, and also losing the 1.5 sec cheap AB. On the other hand we gain AM CC double dipping with the new AMs being free. End effect is a cycle with average characteristic of 1433.6 dps/-39.6 mps. A slight drop in dps, but huge win on mps side. When put next to AB spam this cycle was a clear advantage over ABx3+AM+Sc. Just for comparison if AB debuff worked correctly then ABx3+AM+Sc would give 1520.6 dps/-55.7 mps which wins over the ABAMx3+Sc.

For comparison in 2.4 (with slightly changed gear, a bit less spell dmg and more crit, favors AM TLC interaction) ABx3+AM+Sc gives 1441 dps/-4 mps and ABAMx3+Sc with AM CC gives 1437.8 dps/+5.4 mps.


For spell selection I rely somewhat on the solutions I get from LP solver, which gives distribution of spell cycles to use, but in practice one has to put them together in an order and deal with dynamics of changing environment so there is a lot of improvisation. While arcane has huge gains from external mana regen it's important to realize that you also have all the tools to operate in low mana regen environment. I've done Vashj with no sh priest and ended in top 5 dps, it all comes down to knowing your tools and reacting properly to the changes. Your sh priest will die occasionally, there is no way around it, and there are better things to do than start wanding. A cycle I use in such situation is AB-AM, with AB not being chaincasted. This cycle is cheaper than pot/gem regen so it's possible to mix it with the normal AB cycle. It's about 160 dps lower than the normal AB cycle, so yes you won't break any records, but it is a huge upgrade from wanding.

In 2.3 AP is exclusively used on AB spam, Heroism is IV+AM spam followed by AB cycle. Rest of IV is used with AB cycle. With 2.4 this changes and we get AP+IV+AB spam everytime, including Heroism. Exception to that would be if you have over about 70 passive haste, in that case clipping on AB is too big and you should only use AP+AB spam during heroism. As passive haste increases it's better to change the filler, but keep in mind that in deep arcane build all spells are lower dps than AB and AM so you're effectively losing dps. As was said before, if you can avoid passive haste then do.

As far as actual playstyle goes I usually do the following on a 5 min fight. A usual group for me is sh priest, el shaman, another arcane mage and either a frost mage or warlock. We don't do swaps for heroism and no execute advantage, so we usually get heroism at around 80% boss hp. I start with AB ramp and immediately AP+Trinkets+AB spam. I'm usually very high on threat, but I can still start the very second MT engages the boss. I continue with AB spam, using mana gem as soon as available, then mana pot. At this point it's about time for heroism and I use IV and AM spam. The rest 20 sec of heroism I chaincast AB-AM so that at about the end I exit with full AB debuff and continue with AB spam. With about 30% mana left I switch to AB cycle which can last me up to 2 min, so more than enough mana left not to OOM and below evo threshold. At around 50% boss hp I evocate. If done right pot timers just got up and AP is almost ready. I start ramping up AB again, then another chain of AP+AB spam, next batch of gem/pot. Again at around 30% mana I switch to AB cycle, use IV again, and try to OOM at end. This part is really improvisation, I'm inserting AMs, sometime not resetting AB debuff, depending on situation.

 

Vannik

Since AB spam is what would be the bulk of the DPS for this build, with this idea in mind there will be a length of time where fire spec would be superior. If you're doing this on a 10 minute fight I think it'd be hard to say that Arcane is a better raid spec than fire.

The other thing I've always been scared about is relying on other players. If a shadow priest manages to die for whatever reason, your DPS as arcane would drop far faster than your dps with fire would. Just a thought.

 

Duravi

Well some of you have mentioned having to wear 2pc t5 as a detriment I don't think alot of people yet realize how detrimental that is going to be. Just looking at the current loot we know of for 2.4 there is an item with substantially more dps for each of those slots. Keep in mind as far as boss loot goes we havent seen the majority of it and I would hazard a guess most of those items are even more powerful. Arcane may be competetive when you are an SSC/TK guild and your lacking alot of hit, but with the removal of the damage tax fireball returned to being the best scaling nuke in the game, well if u dont figure in improved shadow bolt uptime at least heh.

 

◊ manly

Well, I will have to disagree. No matter how you look at it, the 2pc set bonus is absurd when you use AB for a major part of your dps. You might lose, at the very very very worst of cases, 2-3% dps due to the item downgrading (more like 1-2%), to gain 20% on your main nuke?

That's not really an argument.

The DPS boost in 2.4 comes from the lowered GCD and the int/spi changes. This is your dps boost. Its got nothing to do with gear. If anything, deep fire will continue to be the spec that scales the best with every piece of gear that seems to be released, but it doesn't really gain anything from those 2 changes, except maybe faster scorch buildup on new targets, which is really minimal at best. So yeah, the DPS boost to arcane is 'exterior' to gear, which is why I'm saying that talks about gear making the spec not work is somewhat questionable.

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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

◊ Vontre

I think he meant that wearing 2 T5 will incur stat loss compared to items of Sunwell qualtiy, whereas fire will incur no stat loss, and this further reduces the effectiveness of arcane.

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◊ manly

Yes, and what I'm saying is that fire gains absolutely nothing from the reduced GCD change and gain nothing from the int/spi changes.

Log on with different model:
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bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

galzohar

For some reason I have a feeling the regen changes won't remain in their current form. It just seems completely overpowered with what I've seen reported from multiple classes and I doubt blizzard intended casters to have so much added mana in the patch (unless they want to competely remove shadow priests which is probably not the case).

The fact that most sunwell loot has haste may make fire scale much better with that gear than arcane, bringing it ahead (as now they seem rather equal, more or less depending on fight length and group support).

While it looks like arcane would be very viable with current gear and current patch changes, I wouldn't rush into partying about being able to play a new spec, not yet at least.


One thing I was wondering about the simulator was how does it handle mana consumeables VS dps consumeables? Seeing with the regen changes and a shadow priest fire will very possibly be able to not evocate and use no mana consumeables in even 5-6 minute fights.