BT Mage Spec: Fire or Arcane?

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Hi guys, just trying to get an idea of what spec I should go for BT. I ran fire through P2 and was getting out-DPS’d by arcane mages, but it seemed that arcane was the obvious meta for P2 given the mage Tier 5 set. with Tier 6 also including fire, will arcane still be the meta for most DPS? My P3 BiS list is making me change pretty much all my gear for Fire, and it looks like a lot of it will overlap with arcane as well.

I never did BT back in the day since I was just a kid and didnt know wtf I was doing, so my main concern is the duration of the fights causing arcane to go oom unless there is a pumper spriest in the group.

So, ultimately, the question is for BT: Fire or Arcane?

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Frost.

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arcane. As I understand it fire only starts to become better late into sunwell and requires different support .

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Fire mages are essentially destro locks raid comp-wise. Boomie and ele shaman in the group as a priority over resto shaman and spriest.

I still think Arcane (keeping 2 pieces of T5) will out-dps Fire throughout TBC. We’ll see.

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Arcane for sure

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Flames on Illidan are immune to fire.

Illidan flame phase is the hardest phase of the tier.

Probably not a good idea to be a gimped spec for it.

Supremus also has 300 fire resistance.

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Any fight they can maintain 100% arcane blast probably.

Fire is much better suited to take advantage of all the haste gear in Sunwell though.

1 Like
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Arcane until Sunwell at least. It will probably still be the best in Sunwell too.

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The T5 arcane set bonus is crazy. Fire might be more raid dps in SWP, though, due to scorch, but arcane will stay competitive for personal dps, even in Sunwell.

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Would likely still need a spriest with all the haste needed to make fire comparable to arcane. Remember in order to push fire DPS to catch arcane you’d have to drop mage armor for molten armor and probably flame caps over mana gems & destro pots over mana pots.

It wouldnt be due to scorch, but rather that arcane doesnt scale very well with haste due to already being limited by mana. If mana was removed from the equation, arcane in p5 BiS would blow pretty much every class/spec out of the water. For an example, I just simmed a 5 minute fight with phase5 gear with normal mana restraints and the result was about 2800 DPS… then I changed it to have unlimited mana support (50 innervates lol) and DPS went up 34% to 3750.

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Arcane craps all over fire till sunwell bis

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Good point.

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