On Court I typically alternate Arcane Blast with unprocced Arcane Missiles during Repeat Performance. It’s a big dps reduction, but it allows me to cast non-stop without getting silenced.
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You can throw out a slow as well.
I’d add to Ashvane can be problematic. If you are unlucky with Arcing Azerite and Briny Bubbles you lose a lot of damage. Couple that on top of having to hold your initial burst usually on the first shield phase + RoP being particularly annoying with the upsurges. It may not seem like it on its face, but it can be a cluster of a fight for Arcane. I actually prefer Radiance over Ashvane on my Arcane Mage (if I’m getting bubbles and Arcing that is).
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Yeah, that’s just not true at all. The facts are staring anyone that cares to look straight in the face, Arcane is bottom 5 in almost every fight and dead last in most. In the fights that matter most, arcane is not only dead last, but dead last by a lot.
So to answer OP’s question about a guide for playing Arcane, I have no choice but to concur with everyone else and say the best advice about playing Arcane PvE right now is not to play at all. Pick a different spec, or better yet, a different class.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of arcane, but they’re not only really bad right now in the current raid, they were bad this entire expansion. Last expansion they weren’t good either, but they could be competitive most of the time if played well.
With the release of each new raid I expected Arcane’s deficiencies to be addressed. Time and again I was let down. I wouldn’t assume since it is performing so poorly that they will do anything about it. If anything they might tweak it to the middle of the pack in a couple encounters.
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I doubt this. If past history, which you accurately cited above is any indication, they won’t do anything until 9.0 and even then I give that possibility a 25% chance. Time and again the current developers have displayed ignorance and apathy towards the spec. No other spec in the entire game has been treated worse or ignored more over the past 10 years than arcane. You can count the blue posts as a quick reference, maybe 2-3 an expansion. As someone else posted, we seem to still be paying for Hellfire Citadel.
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No other class in the entire game has been treated worse or ignored more over the past 10 years than mage.
There, fixed it for ya
Let me save you from the despair gang that have crashed your thread with more doomsday warnings than a Howard Camping radio broadcast, come join us in Arcane Dream on Discord and get some real answers to your questions, Arcane is hard to make work in Eternal Palace for the majority but it is in no way a dead in the water spec for this raid - htt ps://discord.gg/Gp8AhE
The guys replying in this thread are well meaning but I disagree with them, I think I’m doing pretty well as Arcane so far in The Eternal Palace on normal, heroic and mythic (htt ps://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/22193422#) and if I can do it, a guy who grew up with pretty serious learning difficulties then so can others (and there are others who are having success with what they’ve achieved so far this tier as Arcane).
The post didn’t need fixing and that statement isn’t really true. Mage as a class hasn’t been ignored, arcane has. Fire has gone through some ups and downs but frost has been a consistent performer over the past several expansions.
The logs don’t lie Failed. Arcane is simply not good in TEP. Can you play it? Sure. But it’s much more work and isn’t optimal on most of the fights.
As for being part of a “despair gang,” do you disagree with how Blizzard has treated the spec? Do you think arcane’s bottom 3-5 on all fights in TEP puts it in a good place? Do you trust the devs to fix in in 9.0? Having no cleave in a raid where 75% of the bosses have adds really hurts us.
Your parses are great which is a testament to your skill and you having 2 incredible trinkets. But a high arcane parse is often a mediocre one for another class/spec. I’ll give you one example to show what I mean. Your best parse on Shivarra is 37400-ish. That’s fantastic and for your 434 IL gives you an 84% percentile for arcane. The raid group I cleared heroic with had a 435 fire mage who did 51,240 dps. That’s 14 thousand dps more than you with +1 IL. Now that mage was incredible, but your logs show you to be pretty amazing too. Do you think 14k dps is an acceptable difference for 1 IL? Even if we chalk it up to pure skill differential, that’s a heckuva gap.
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I would say the real world pragmatists here have tried to save OP from a failed spec.
NO YOU ARE NOT DOING PRETTY WELL!
Your DPS when it matters is complete trash!
Being not too far behind the leaders on the first few trash bosses in a raid doesn’t matter. Those bosses are a gimmie and exists solely to help gear up the raid. What matters are the end bosses, and most specifically THE end boss.
On the end bosses of the raid can you honestly say your raid team would not have been better served if you were on another class? There’s simply no question about it. You being an arcane made it harder for your team to complete the raid… it’s that simple.
Arcane is not fine. It’s not fine when top parses of arcane are eclipsed by top parses of every other spec in the game in the encounters where it matters most. That’s not fine with me at all.
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I don’t need Arcane to be TOP TIER SHEET GODLIKE LOOK AT THESE BLASTS IM PURPLE GOD
I just want the devs to rework the spec to be VIABLE. I’d be absolutely okay with middle of the pack consistently.
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That’s the point most of us are trying to make on here. We’re not asking to be the top ST damage spec, the top cleave spec and the top aoe spec in the game. You’d have a raid with 2 tanks, 4 heals and 14 arcane mages. Would get boring very quickly.
What we are asking for is to have cleave of any kind, aoe that doesn’t oom you after 15 seconds (cough add orb baseline cough) and not be forced to choose ST talents at the expense of aoe ones and vice versa. In no way, shape or form is that asking to be the best dps. Fire and frost have cleave, sustained aoe and ST damage, so do most melee specs. Why should arcane be different?
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Please not orb, I don’t play frost because of orb.
Something new would be nice for 9.0.
At this point I would take another 6% buff and say thank you.
So I’m forced to raid on this Arcane Mage as it’s my only character on a guild’s server. Did Heroic Zaqul the other night. If your guild has the dps to get through the ST checks on his shield I’d suggest rolling AoE as I was able to get decent numbers by nuking adds down. It was particularly helpful because we had a few on some attempts that were transforming.
So a random lvl 20 Void Elf Mage think my DPS is trash “when it matters”; that translates in to “I have no clue what I’m talking about”.
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Just have to look at logs to see that Arcane is bad . . . at everything. That said, if your group is okay with someone playing, all is good. I’m casual, so the numbers aren’t critical, and I have never been kicked from a group for being an Arcane mage (when I actually play it).
I’m just frustrated when I play it, because I enjoy the concept and the lore, but it just doesn’t work with all the movement in pretty much every encounter in the game from raids to M+. AoE is a disaster, and desperately getting a second or two to eat between pulls is just beyond annoying. Add in that I have to totally give up at being good at either AoE or ST, and have no cleave, and there just isn’t much reason to play the spec now.
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Arcane AOE:
It isn’t great, but I don’t think it’s a total disaster. When I was doing mythic+ last week I was way behind the Demon Hunter on DPS for AOE trash fights. But I was still ahead of the rogue and other dps. This while wearing azerite with just 1 Arcane Pressure, 1 Explosive Echo, and all talents specced for single-target damage. -
Doing DPS when it matters:
Arcane’s burst cooldown phase is pretty good and it’s on a shorter cooldown than either Combustion or Icy Veins. Arcane is quite capable of delivering heavy single target damage during a critical phase so long as the mage holds cooldowns. -
I think arcane’s biggest problems are the following:
- Movement - Arcane is absolutely horrible at single-target fights that require any amount of movement.
- No Cleave - Arcane has virtually no cleave, making it an awful spec for 2-target fights.
- Talent choices - Arcane mage talents require the mage to choose either AOE or single-target. Other classes don’t have to make that choice and it’s not a very fun choice to make. If you’re doing primarily AOE you take AOE talents. Primarily single-target take the single-targe talents. A mix of both? … take your best guess.
- Not enough buttons - Arcane is seriously lacking in interesting buttons to press. It was a mistake for Blizzard to remove Arcane’s artifact ability from Legion, and to not give us Arcane Orb baseline.
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It’s odd, but I seem to have more buttons to press as Arcane than a lot of other specs. It’s all the extra crap I have to do to keep my damage up, like RoP, Charged Up, Arcane Power, etc. It’s just that none of them feel impactful, or literally do nothing but get me ready to do damage.
Also, I’d add lack of ranged AoE to your biggest problems list, along with all our Azerite traits also being entirely ST vs AoE. And there are a lot of other issues, but probably don’t need to be on the major list.
I keep thinking Arcane Blast needs a rework. For every other caster in the game, if they have a slow cast, it does good damage. Arcane is doubly punished with Arcane Blast because at low charges it takes more time to cast, and does less damage. Make it instant cast, but do less damage, and buff Arcane Missiles be the impactful spell, like it should be.
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I like how Arcane Blast works and I like melee-range Arcane Explosion.
Arcane Explosion being a melee spell is a signature part of arcane. It’s been that way from the start and it’s fine. Though I do miss not having Cone of Cold to allow us to kite groups while we AOE them. And I also really miss the shoulder legendary that gave barrage a 10% per stack chance to launch a free orb. That legendary made arcane AOE really fun and powerful.
I also prefer the way Arcane Missiles worked in Legion. It was much better as a really hard-hitting nuke for which you could store 3 charges. It gave us much better mobile dps and felt much more rewarding to cast.
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Fun with arcane was detected and an immediate stop put to it.
Sincerely, the Devs
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