Copernicus

Theorycraft Arcane all you want.

Arcane has huge disadvantages compared to fire that have nothing to do with damage.

• Thirty yard range vs 36 or 41 yards.
• Five second roots with an up-front mana cost
• Highly lag dependent with Arcane Blast
• Contantly monitoring the self-debuff situation

An arcane spec could, if everything works out correctly, beat a 10/48/3 spec. With Tier 5, it does beat fire. But the requirements to get it to work are high. And the range issue is something that can't be overlooked or brushed aside with theorycraft- an extra eleven yards is more DPS on any fight that involves frequent movement or requires classes to not chain something or sread out.

 

Tyrian

My gear falls into that category, im not familiar with how to upload data from fights but ill try and keep track next time. Is there a dedicated place to post the swstats data? I can quite easily beat (very good) 10.48.3 fire mages with ~+1020 fire damage on gruul, fathomlord, morogrim, lurker etc. Obviously this is hear say though, ill try to get some swstats info another day.

Theres a massive amount of benefits and your 'disadvantages' are not always bad. How much does the range difference matter on most fights? Yes its nice to be at 41 yard range but its in no way *required*. Fathomlord, Lurker, Hydross - where in those fights does being at 30 yards **severley** disadvantage you? Nobody is saying its not a nice perk of fire, but its not as bad as people make out to be. In fact alot of arcane mages get pyroblast and throw a point in flamethrowing anyway, so if there was a situation where range was heavily required - we simply would stand further back - but most of the time you dont need to anyway.


Has good and bad points. Did you read the bit about the regen tick you get casting a spell after channeling 5 seconds of Arcane Missiles? Thats very good. Whenever I do arcane missiles+arcane blast I get 200 mana back from that 'tick of free regen'. I love it. Where in fire can you do this? Obviously a good mage will only cast AM if you know you wont likely have to move in that 5 second period - so being 'rooted for 5 seconds' becomes a non issues for anyone except those careless about the times to use it. Do you cast arcane missiles on gruul with a shatter incoming? No, I didnt think so.

If a mage likes to cast AM with no thought about whether he might have to move and break it within those 5 seconds because of the nature of the encounter and boss abilities, then yes - you could consider it bad.

Constantly monitoring is a skill required and not too difficult to do - just takes a little practise. If your the sort of person who doesnt like the additional responsibility to handle rotations (which is quite easy tbh) arcane wouldnt suit you - but theres its not as hard as people might imply. Lag dependant, u mean.. like scorch spam?

You might have a good point there - unfortunately I dont really know how viable the spec is for people without good raid gear.

 

Roywyn

I looked into arcane specs as well (1 piece of T5, hoping to get 2/5 soon, preparing for Al'ar) and Arcane Blast with 2/5 T5 blows stuff away pretty hard. My issue however is that I find no proper spell rotation.

You said you use AB+AB+AM, repeat. Do you let the AM debuff fall off? If you do, I personally feel that I would push a 3rd AB in there (just personal gut feeling).
However, if you don't, that would mean you run AB with 3 debuffs full-time, and I have no clue where I'd get that mana from.

Would be great I you could clear that up, since my numbers are still biased towards fire in general (mostly because the fire talents are really nice while arcane has a lot of weak fillers).
3 * Arcane Blast is a bomb, but the following Arcane Missiles and 1.5-2s of standing still while waiting for the AB debuff to get below 1.5s remaining (so that it clears at the end of the cast) pretty much kills that benefit for me. And for Al'ar, I can't weave anything in really - immune to fire, Frostbolt (3s) or another salve of Missiles (5s) take too long casting.
I don't think I can afford running AB with the full mana cost increase penalty, can I?

Edit: This is not a whine post, I'd really really love some input, especially regarding what you fellow magi do on Al'ar!

 

galzohar

I have to agree on the range, while extremely situational, in places where you need the 36+ yard range, you NEED the 36+ yard range. Sometimes even that is too short for me ;p

 

Tyrian

Yea, I was doing ~1550 arcane blasts and after getting my 2 piece tier 5 it went up to ~1850-2000 unbuffed.

I start casting the third arcane blast at ~1 sec to debuff expiry so I get the bonus reduction to cast time (1.5 seconds) and the debuff stack resets by the time the spell has finished casting and applies a fresh debuff stack. You dont 'let' the debuff fall off by waiting around - theres only a small period (0.5-1second) where you stop momentarily to ensure you will cast your 1.5 sec AB when the debuff will expire in ~ 1 second. Hope that makes sense :s

Sorry for not explaining it better earlier, but when I say I do (AB + AB + AM ->repeat) I never have AB stack more than 2. By the time Arcane Missiles finishes casting you have ~1.5-2 (depending on latency) and you I start casting AB again only when the debuff timer reaches ~1 sec. Of course, people might wish to do AB+AB+AB+AM rotations which is obviously will lead to more mana issues depending on when/where you use it - I havent actually tried this rotation out much , but would like to soon.

Thats how I do it anyway, there might be better ways because im still fairly new to arcane mage playstyle and trying to find what works best for me and my australian latency.

 

Astrik

The arguments over the intangibles could go on forever here. While they are good points, I'd still much rather just see some parses of the encounters. If an arcane mage can prove a high level of dps during meaningful raid encounters, that is going to speak quite louder than anything else you can say.

No offense intended, but 500k damage on lurker is kind of meaningless since there is no enrage timer on the encounter and the adds just keep coming. That damage for an 8 minute fight would be quite impressive. For a 12 minute fight, not so much. And we all know how much of a difference your group makeup can make. A complete WWS parse gives us the whole picture.

If you need help setting up a parse like this, there is a WWS thread in the add-on forums that is extremely helpful. And again, no offense intended, but any way you cut it, if one person is doing 500k on lurker, the rest of your dps sucks and would benefit from evaluating a good raid parse (speaking from experience here).

 

Tyrian

What are some good boss fights to benchmark - where mages from various specs can provide data to compare?

Id love to go away knowing what the best mages (in the vanilla 'best dps' spec) can do on X boss and try to equal/better it with an arcane spec and deliver the results. Ill check out the wws thread to have a look around. I dont even know what wws stands for

 

Astrik

Gruul and Mag if you are not clicking I guess are both good benchmark fights.

To be honest though, I am really more interested in the overall picture since I can look at my spreadsheet and figure out your theoretical dps. A full WWS parse gives a good overall picture so its not that difficult to compare to fire mages in equivalent situations. It seems to me that a lot of an arcane mage's viability hinges on their ability to chain together their AB cycles in a precise manner. What I am most skeptical about is the ability to maintain these cycles during complex encounters. Unfortunately I don't think there will be any real way to measure how many times a cycle had to be restarted from scratch, but that should show up in your overall dps. I am also interested in seeing what kind of damage you are getting from AM - how feasible is it to take advantage of these clearclasted/AP/trinket super AMs and how much will that raise your dps. The thought having having to sit there waiting on a random proc to get your dps bursts doesn't sit well with me but it would be interesting to see how well a good mage can take advantage of it.

 

galzohar

Taking advantage of a clearcast for a spell you would otherwise not cast is completely impossible without interrupting a spell mid-cast. If anything, lag alone makes it so you hit the macro for your next spell before your current spell had even been casted, not to mention before the server told you if you procced a clearcast. Then add reaction time for canceling to the lag and you got yourself quite a decent "attack time lost" when you try to take advantage of a clearcast for a specific spell. I would consider 0.5s as the bare minimum you'll lose, and closer 1s if you want to be more realistic. Also if you're on any kind of a rotation it gets totally screwed up when you're forced to use another spell because you procced a clearcast, but depeding on the rotation this won't nescesarily be an issue. The cast time lost due to canceling is a major issue, though.

 

Stein

I agree for the most part. Only time it works for me is when i'm nearly oom and spacing out my scorches so i can catch a clearcast. Even then it might be better to just go oom with fast scorches and start wanding.

Arcane blast lover; champion of arcane specs everywhere!

 

Kavan

I can give some wws parses for full arcane build. This is for our last Magtheridon kill: http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...bg&s=6676-7377. All mages were on cube duty, myself and fire mages with shadow priest and shaman, frost mage just with shadow priest. I'm not sure how this compares to others as skill/gear of mages in my guild is not on par I'm afraid, but at least it shows it's viable.

If you do a search of my posts you can probably find many of my comments on arcane build. I'll just add something on spell rotations. I use different spell rotations depending on the length of fight and whether I have shadow priest/jow. I'll generally use a mix of 2 neighboring rotations from the following: 1) AB spam 2) 3xAB+AM+Scorch 3) 3xAB+AM8+Scorch 4) AB+AM8. On short fights you have only AB spam and as mana requirements increase you move further on. Of course there are other rotations that can be used and it depends largely on gear/specific encounter information which gives you the optimal dps/dpm combination.

As an interesting side note a comment on arcane damage only rotations. I used to use ABx3+AMx2 as my main rotation until I checked my spreadsheet against Vontre's spreadsheet. After fixing a bug on my part I found that ABx3+AM+Scorch is the highest non-AB-spam rotation for this build, but the difference is not that big, so on a fight like A'lar I'd definitely go for ABx3+AMx2. With my gear I get the following theorycrafted values on a 7 min fight: ABx3+AMx2 928 dps/34 dpm, ABx3+AM+Scorch 952 dps/30 dpm.

 

Tempestra

I was getting a bit worried there, we hadn't had a large discussion on the merits and drawbacks of deep arcane in at least 3-4 pages. I'm glad a new champion has arisen to take up the cause.

That wow forums post that Tyrian linked reads like a real estate expert trying to sell you his secret on how to get rich quick without taking any risks or needing any money. Just spec arcane and all your ills will be cured! Hooray!

Copernicus' post sums it up just fine.

 

Tyrian

Nobody said arcane doesnt have risks or disadvantages, however moreso it has many overlooked facets, misunderstood and under-utilised potential. Thats what the post from the wow forums was getting at - I agree , however , he does sound a bit like your analogy - but its quite good/refreshing to read someone who can , very eloquently , sum up a spec/class like that. Id rather have access to that kind of information than nothing at all. No, Copernicus' post doesnt sum it up - he missed out a huge amount of detail that the wow-forums post does.

 

Sancus

Of course, 4pc T6 puts 10.48.3 ahead again :P

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Tempestra

It's me expressing my frustration at reading through another 2 pages of deep arcane that go over what's been said before. It's a horse that's been killed, beaten, burned and beaten again at least several times. It's not that I disagree with the content of the posts (for the most part) - they *do* point out the benefits of the build, but it's entirely too-often one-sided and brushes aside the drawbacks.

Vontre and several others have already done an excellent job at exploring the merits of deep arcane (opening even my eyes to the *possibility* of it being good). Tthe conclusion most people have reached is that pre-T5, the drawbacks are too high for the majority of raiding mages (see Copernicus for a summary of what said drawbacks are). Post 2piece-T5, it becomes a more viable spec, as the DPS increase possibly outweighs the drawbacks --- especially on threat-sensitive fights or when you can afford to arcane missile and stand close to the target.

What has anyone said in the past two pages that is new? Possibly the only useful insight was Kavan linking his WWS for Mag, as before all people said was useless shit like "arcane can crush the meters" or "arcane is great on trash" or "arcane dominates." Myself, I would like to see 2-piece T5 mages link more WWS on all fights, especially ones that arcane is weak on, to see both the highs and the lows.

 

Lodi

What's AM8? surely not rank 8?

 

Kavan

It actually is rank 8. The only reason why you want to reduce the dps of the cycles is to increase dpm. For me AM10 941 dps/29 dpm, AM8 897 dps/54 dpm.

 

Astrik

Thanks for the parse Kavan, very interesting.

So it looks like you used an ABx3, AMx2 cycle for that fight and did not try to change your spells based on clear casts (same crit rate for both AB and AM).


How do you feel about trying to maintain a cycle that chains together the AB debuff for the fast cast, low mana spell? Which encounters do you try to maintain that on? Also, how often do you make a concious effort to alter your cycle to take advantage of clearcasts?

PS. I have to get on our Pallies about the JOWs - thats ridiculous how much mana you got from that, lol.

 

Voley

I would love to see wws report of static fight where arcane mage with rank 8 outdamages any 10\48\3 mage. That feels like "wrong" doesnt it? Even on gruul and without downranking, it is hardly believable. And please, no situations of 2 shadow priests, innervate and shaman with mana tide.

http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/5237/sigyt7.jpg

 

Flick

shapeshift removes slow, I'm almost certain, because I know the gnomish racial removes the debuff :P

The rotation would probably be ABx1, AMx1. This does give enough time for AB debuff to be wiped off given latency and what not, I've tested this. One other benefit I didn't see mentioned was that the 5 tick style of AM allows for a lot more procs (1 capacitor shot per cast is possible). And arcane has 10% hit built in, however I'm still not sure it's viable for raid DPS and would like to see more solid number crunching about it to be sure.

 

Astrik

No one is claiming that... AM8 would strictly be for mana efficiency and to trigger procs.

 

duostrike

- Hunter slows ranged attack unlike frostbolt. Slow destroys hunters.

- Warlock slows fear casting (coupled with AM spam) he won't get a fear off. Also it slows down his shadowbolt casting. Slow is very good against warlocks.

Other than that it's good against shaman like you said also good against rogues and warriors. To be honest the only real classes it's not good against are priest/pallies and has situational uses against druids. (yes they can shapeshift out)

 

Stein

how can i get the tier6 4 item bonus when i can't remove my last two items of tier5?

Arcane blast lover; champion of arcane specs everywhere!