I’m returning to WoW after skipping DF. Getting back into my mage now and heard that Arcane was pretty difficult in DF and that Blizz “Simplified” the rotation now in TWW.
So I just hit 80, queue into some normals at around 545 ilvl to get gear for heroics, and I think my damage is pitiful. I’m doing less then the NPC followers in normal dungeons.
Ok, so the written WoWhead guide for Arcane might have been a bit confusing, lets look up a video now…holy moly what did I get myself into?
https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=MAFODE8wCVk
Its like you have to base the rotation off of 3 or 4 random buffs that are applied at any given time? I’m an old fart and don’t think I have the dexterity to hit buttons the second a buff comes up. Furthermore, the native WoW UI doesn’t track buff procs like it does with things like Clearcasting, so now I’m trying to find a WeakAura that tells me what to hit next…
This is all really discouraging and I’m not happy going into raiding/M+ like this.
3 Likes
I’m not sure what you’re asking in your post. I will say that Arcane is probably one of the very best DPS specs in the game right now. If your DPS is “pitiful”, you might have a stat priority issue, a talent selection issue, or a rotational issue to work on.
I highly recommend the Wowhead guides to target what you might be having an issue with.
Arcane Mage DPS Guide - The War Within 11.0.2 - Wowhead
Sorry I guess I don’t have a question other than just asking if anyone feels similar or maybe for some advice.
That Wowhead guide is where I started and I’m following the build for M+ when I’m running dungeons right now to gear up. The video I linked in my post seems to be a video presentation version of the rotation that the guide uses and I’m thoroughly overwhelmed.
You said the follower NPCs are doing more DPS than you, and your gear is only 545. The NPCs are designed to be broken powerful, so don’t worry about them. When you get into dungeons with other real people, things will feel more natural on that front.
My advice on the rotation feeling overwhelming from that video is to just keep playing it yourself and work on little things here and there until you get that down, then work on the next thing. Experience and muscle memory is going to be way better than trying to digest a top-level player’s advice in one go.
And I have to say as well, Dragonflight Arcane Mage really was WAY, WAY worse. They verifiably simplified down the spec and made Arcane play miles better than before. It used to be very intricate and complicated for complication’s sake. Be glad you skipped that lol.
Just a heads up. That video is outdated info on arcane.
Just stick to the wowhead guide which is updated for current info 
Thanks, but the Wowhead guides rotation was also confusing, so I was looking for a secondary source in video format and became even more confused!
I guess its possible if I start off ignoring all the procs that occur like Burden of Power, Intuition, Nether Precision, and just focus on a rotation with Arcane Charges it might be easier…
Just having 4 random procs that influence the rotation and aren’t tracked via HUD scare me.
To be completely honest with you, I see those procs as basically passive. You could track them and play utterly perfectly on an almost perfectionist level, but in all reality— as long as you’re just performing your rotation and using active cooldowns correctly, you will still top damage meters. Trust me.
1 Like
Watch done off the vids on YouTube and download weak auaras. Most of the vids have a link to the wa they are using.
Once you understand the buffs/procs things get pretty straight forward.
Don’t save arcane surge or touch of the magi. As soon as they come off cd you should be using them.
Once it clicks you will be amazed at the dps you can pump out.
I tend to agree that specs that require tracking extra procs are really not friendly to new or even most normal gamers, but I will say if you do decide to grab a couple weakauras (really easy to use plug and play addon) and stick it through the learning curve nothing in this game really feels as complicated as it looks on paper
1 Like
It’s only great in ST raid profiles.
It’s pretty mediocre in aoe for M+ and the hard caps will see it fall behind further frost and fire as it keeps getting nerfs to its single target without aoe buff compensation.
Okay, forget everything I’ve said. Todays notes requires Porom to have to rewrite the entire guide right down to rotational priorities now 
So, now the videos and wowhead is outdated.
Are you talking about Spellslinger or Sunfury? We really need to specify now because it makes a huge difference, lol.
I don’t usually resonate well with guide videos. I’m more of a “see it on paper and check it off one by one.” So my (now wall of text) suggestions to you (that you can totally ignore if it’s too much to look at):
- Try to make sense of the spec talent tree before worrying about the hero talents.
- Most of the Hero tree concepts piggy-back off of base arcane tree. If you’re not understanding the base kit, the hero trees will just make everything worse
- Give Spellslinger a shot for a while.
- In my opinion (others may disagree), it has far fewer “but wait, there’s more!” concepts and is almost completely passive. Once you figure out how SS works, you can take the additional challenge to advance to Sunfury (which I, personally, think is a bit more complicated, but I’ve also been enjoying it more).
There were quite a few big changes to Arcane since last expansion, and I think some of us are still trying to fully wrap our heads around them. Here are some pointers, feel free to ignore them or try to work on them one at a time (don’t overwhelm yourself!). I don’t want to sound like I’m giving you advice you don’t need, but I’d love to help if I can (and I’m sure others will correct me or offer even smarter alternatives than I’ve been able to figure out):
- You don’t need to be the most optimal mage out there. A lot of talents / options probably have very small impacts on damage done. The goal should be to “learn how the spec works and why” before you start optimizing talents. Taking the talent that is “lower throughput” but also “lower impact on rotation” will help you a lot and once you’ve understood the basics, you can start to phase them out.
- Nether Precision has become a pretty fundamental part of our base kit. It sucks that the UI doesn’t track it, but if you can figure out how to manage your charges / mana / precision procs, you’re gonna be in a really good place to start learning more things.
- I know a lot of people aren’t a big fan of the “weave between blasts and missiles” style, but that’s the meta at the moment. Personally, I enjoy it, but the short version is that it means you almost never want to spam missiles anymore.
- Mana has much less of an impact than it used to, but you absolutely can still run out
- The good news is that Mana Adept is baseline (grants you 1.5% of your max mana per charge when you cast barrage). So if you do run out, there are solutions available.
- Arcane Harmony is an important talent, but the stacks can almost be ignored (especially while learning everything else).
- Harmony used to be a way to combo with Radiant Spark to make your arcane barrage absolutely enormous in one single hit. Without Radiant Spark around anymore, this effectively just means “hey, your barrage can hit harder”
- Once you’re ready to start paying attention to harmony, the only thing you really need to be aware of is if you’ve capped out on stacks so that you don’t waste any more.
- Magi’s Spark is something that, if you pick, you need to pay attention to. I recommend starting with Nether Munitions until you’re ready to play with Spark. When you are ready to look at Magi’s Spark, this is a part of why our opener is a little complicated right now:
- Spark requires you to hit your TotM with (at least) 1 blast, 1 barrage, and 1 missile to proc a nice chunky hit.
- Because of the nature of clearcasting, that’s not always possible when you cast touch on its own (a mini burn). Sometimes you won’t get the Clearcasting proc that you need, and it sucks, but there’s nothing you could have done besides hold your cooldowns (which I don’t recommend). You take the loss, and you move on.
- When you do a big burn (Evocation and Surge are used), you get a guaranteed proc of Clearcasting. This means you’ve got all the tools necessary to trigger Magi’s spark.
- The part of the opener designed around triggering Magi’s spark is:
- Arcane Surge (Grants Clearcasting and your damage boost)
- Arcane Barrage (first of 3 to trigger spark)
- Touch of the Magi (While barrage is in the air!)
- Since barrage spends all your Arcane Charges (and has travel time) and TotM grants you 4 charges, casting barrage first and THEN TotM means you can immediately refund all your charges
- This does mean you need to have a small amount of distance between you and your target to ensure the barrage doesn’t hit before you get your Touch off. I’m sure there are macros out there to make this easier and get pinpoint accuracy, but if you’re far enough away, it won’t matter
- Arcane Missiles (Consumes your proc, second of the 3 triggers)
- Arcane Blast (Third of the 3 triggers)
- High Voltage has been very weird for me to get used to, but it really helps the flow of the spec.
- It’s been quite some time since Arcane Missiles was capable of generating Arcane Charges. When it was first released, I managed to not read the second half of this talent and thought it was trash and didn’t understand why everyone likes it… It’s a fantastic enabler for the kit that boils down to “Arcane Missiles will almost always grant you an arcane charge, sometimes two!”
- This combos really nicely with Harmony. Missiles grant Harmony and Charges, Barrage consumes Harmony and Charges. The fact that your missiles can now grant charges allows you to spend more barrages without having to sit around at 0 charges for too long
- Orb Barrage can be a very useful talent even in single target situations.
- I know the guide excludes it for pure Single Target, but it can be really useful to help keep your charges high.
- For right now, I recommend not even paying attention to the following procs:
- Arcane Tempo
- Big Brained
- Impetus
- Arcane Debilitation
- Enlightened
- Aether Attunement
- To be honest, of this bunch, this is the ONLY one that I actively keep track of. The rest are too random or too small for me to want to care about. Some people track Arcane Tempo but I don’t have the attention span for that anymore
When you are ready to start looking at Sunfury talents:
- Burden of Power / Glorious Incandescence work together
- Burden of Power affects your next Blast or Barrage and Glorious Incandescence affects your next barrage
Due to the nature of Spellqueueing, we can use Burden of Power to buff our next Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage. This grants the damage bonus to both spells and (as far as I’ve been able to tell so far) will also immediately consume Glorious Incandescence - meaning if you can get this right (which I’m still trying to perfect), it’s less to keep track of!
If you don’t know what Spellqueueing is, while casting Arcane Blast, if you attempt to cast a barrage in the last few moments (I believe withing 400ms), both spells will essentially trigger at the same time, so they both get the benefit of the buff they were consuming. If you need a better explanation than that, you’ll need to find another source because that’s unfortunately the best I’ve got for you.- The strikeout text is for something that was apparently just patched out or will be soon. Whoops
- Burden of Power is not random. It generates on every 6th cast of either Blast or Barrage. I’ve found it useful to have a weakaura that tracks how many stacks I’ve got towards building a new sphere (and thus creating Burden of Power). My Burden of Power weakaura then appears on top of that one, and my Glorious Incandescence weakaura appears on top of that. So you’re sort of only tracking one proc - it just happens to be 3 procs in a trench coat.
- Arcane Soul activates for ~4.5ish seconds after your Arcane Surge buff wears off and makes it so that every cast of Arcane Barrage both 1) Grants 4 arcane charges and 2) grants a Clearcasting proc
- This means that while this buff is up, you want to do everything you can to get yourself back up to 3 Clearcasting Charges by spamming arcane barrage - just don’t accidentally barrage after the effect ends or you’ll lose all your stacks.
- If you’ve already got 3 stacks of clearcasting, you’ll want to cast missiles to consume one. There’s not much use in generating a charge that gets wasted.
- Getting back to 3 charges will enable the “blast/missiles weaving” of Nether Precision for quite some time - possibly even until your next burst phase, allowing you to do this all again.
Sorry for the long post - hopefully at least something is in there and good luck! I’m sure you’ll figure it out sooner or later!
2 Likes
You mean the double dipping of Burden of Power? I wasn’t even aware that it could be done and certainly wouldn’t have tried to play around it even if I had known. It’s such an unintuitive and gimmicky mechanic and I am actually glad Blizzard are clamping down on it. It’s basically a creative way of abusing a legitimate game mechanic (i.e. spellqueuing) to do something that it was clearly not intended for.
I fully expect them to do it for Spellslinger as well and, imo, they should have never bowed to pressure during the Beta and overruled themselves after they had initially hotfixed it. But Preheat set his followers on them like a pack of gnolls and they overwhelmed the feedback thread, lol.
1 Like
Couldn’t agree more on both points. It feels really weird but it works. It would be much better if it was more consistent though. Quite frankly, I don’t see why they don’t change it to basically guarantee 4 charges. It is a capstone talent after all and feels very underwhelming in that regard (same for all of them, really).
This is definitely a concern. I’m kind of waiting for the balance pass before raid/M+ release to see where the specs fall. Arcane might be the worst of the 3 for M+ while it’s my AOE rotation that I’m most confused with.
Well the good news is Blizzard deleted Sunfury today so nobody needs to worry about it anymore.
Just stand still and mash on AB.
That’s quite the exaggeration. I had to look it up in case others were curious:
- Mage
-
Fire
-
Living Bomb damage increased by 30%.
-
Pyroblast damage increased by 5%.
-
Flamestrike damage increased by 10%.
-
Frostfire
- Frostfire Bolt damage increased by 25% for Fire.
-
Sunfury
-
Burden of Power can no longer be double dipped by spell queueing.
-
Arcane Phoenix damage dealt reduced by 10% for Arcane.
-
Arcane Soul base duration reduced to 2 seconds (was 3 seconds).
Its like Blizz read this post with the queuing lol. Not that bad of changes, but spellslinger should be buffed a bit. Hoping Fire is in a better spot now, but not sure if those were large enough changes to bring it out of the dumpster.
I was a frost mage for the past 7 years. I recently switched to arcane. Indeed, arcane rotation feels very complicated and random. Additionally, a lot of these random procs have absolutely no visualization yet they are so critical to your damage output (think Brain Freeze visualization for frost). Other than Clearcasting, nothing is being visually visible. It is a ridiculous design if you would ask me. Arcane mages probably got used to this by having a crap ton of weak auras tracking all of these things… but that doesn’t hide the fact that the spec is not properly implemented… With that said, I am still going to play it and switch to frost from time to time to remind myself what a good spec feels like…
1 Like
If after the patch is applied, Sunfury Arcane is still top dps, will you come back and apologize for your ridiculously dramatic and extreme take?
1 Like