The Ironsong Tribe

Full Version: Arcane Mage
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Here is my take on current Arcane mages for those interested in playing one and are looking for info.

Mastery is the main secondary stat, followed by Haste. You will want to find gear that has those as the two secondary stats on it.

As far as a rotation goes, I think we really have the easiest rotation. Basically you want to use Arcane Blast until you have max stacks (4) of the Arcane debuff called Arcane Charge. Hopefully you have some arcane missiles built up by that time. If you do not, you will want to continue to cast a few more arcane blasts. If you still don't have any missile charges, use Arcane Barrage to reset your debuff and try that rotation again.

You will want to take the talent Nether Tempest for the AoE damage it does. Keep in mind, that that spell will take on any buffs you currently have, including your arcane charges! So you really want to cast it at 4 stacks, and it is even better if you have some trinket procs to go with it!

Also, saving your cooldowns such as Arcane Power for when Time Warp (Bloodlust) is up makes the most sense.

Below are just my ideas for talent choices and glyph choices for Arcane Mages. They may not be the best, but they work for me.

Talents:

Level 15 -- Blazing Speed (Great for getting out of fire and other stuff on the ground!)

Level 30 -- Ice Barrier (Decent damage absorption effect, makes it slightly easier for the healers)

Level 45 -- Frostjaw (You can never have enough interrupts!)

Level 60 -- Greater Invisibility (Because, DUH! No seriously, its great for cheating death while raiding and questing!)

Level 75 -- Nether Tempest (Explained above)

Level 90 -- Rune of Power (An additional 15% damage as long as you stand in the area? And you can now place more than one at a time? Take it!)

Level 100 -- Overpowered (The name says it all)


Glyphs:

Greater Glyphs (Bigger ones)

1. Arcane Power (Great increase to damage when you use this raid cooldown!)
2. Slow (Questing: Allows you to kill stuff before they even get to you!) / Arcane Explosion (Allows you to hit more things when you are AoE-ing!)
3. Rapid Displacement (Even more ways to get out of the fire on the floor!)

Minor Glyphs (Smaller ones)

1. Glyph of Momentum (Allows you to blink in the direction you are moving, not facing. Helpful in complicated raid encounters)

The other two are cosmetic to your liking.

Just some helpful advice for Arcane Mages. Feel free to input anything else you can think of! I do not know much about Fire and Frost as I do not play them that often.

Also, it seems like Versatility will be helpful for increased damage output and mitigation. I do not know how effective Multistrike will be until I see the new raids and discover if there are a lot of fights that require AoE.
Multistrike is not Cleave. It's the best secondary stat for Frost because Frost is built off procs, and every multistrike hit has a chance to generate the proc. Arcane is based off debuffs-built-up-per-cast and Mana, so probably wouldn't value it as highly, but it'd still be a solid stat for doing additional damage-per-cast (which is somewhat important compared to Haste, where you increase DPS at the expense of Mana, which actually matters for Arcane, but I guess Haste also increases mana regen rate now, so maybe it balances itself out somewhat?).

In any case, you could probably substitute Multistrike for Haste in most situations and end up in a pretty similar spot for your damage. Crit falls a bit behind, and Versatility falls well behind (but can be nice for mitigation purposes - this is just looking at best damage output).

That all said, I haven't actually gotten back to Arcane yet, aside from a brief usage of it early on where it felt about the same as Fire to me damage-wise, but was less fun (though I suspect I was doing things wrong, or wrong-stat-selection hurt me a lot). That said, Fire was just pathetic, and even with the buff it probably still is and will remain so until you can get enough crit to keep the Instant Pyros flowing.

I swapped to Frost just to try it out since I was having so much trouble killing things solo as Fire, and was really saddened by how it was much much better than Fire. On the order of doing more than double my previous DPS even in sustained fights. It also did a whole lot more in upfront and controlled burst since Frost has a few more good buttons for that and Fire was reliant on DoT riders to bring it's DPS back up after the initial salvo... and I was getting pretty good at Fire and completely new to Frost and was geared for Fire and not Frost, so that may not even paint the full picture of the disparity. Fire was just really, really bad.