Hey Blizzard,
Just another update on this situation, which I will continue to do until you buff us.
I keep getting kicked from 12s simply for playing Arcane instead of Fire, another example of community perception now being affected by Arcane’s miserable performance in all contents. Please buff us promptly.
I’m guessing balance tuning will be coming soon.
Community perception is a deeper and more insidious issue than just asking for a spec buff. Unfortunate as it is, the game is easier than ever before to reroll and play the FOTM. Pretty annoying too how tier lists are all the rage since a few years ago exacerbating this exact issue.
The crazy part is that averages are pretty close this season so far with Arcane averaging 2M at high keys and the top leaders averaging 2.3M - but Arcane is undeniably the lowest at a max of 2.5M while Unholy leads at max 3.3M.
From my experience, Arcane is at its weakest single target. Its single target numbers are absolutely anemic.
I am impressed you made it to 12’s as Arcane. I’ve been struggling to get into a key period and I am fire mage. Queue times are so long. My requests to join other groups time out and groups I make never get filled.
It’s probably due to mages like me. Community sees some good ones and some bad ones and then it will start to avoid them cause it doesn’t know.
I am newish to mage so still developing but I’m a decent player. My fire dps has been ok as Frostfire and dog crap as Sunfury. I’m sure my rotation has some mistakes at times but I got a good grasp on it most times, so my dps should be better.
I’ve come to the conclusion it’s lack of tier. I don’t have S1 (doesn’t matter much) or S2 (matters a lot) tier. They balanced fire mage around tier set giving players 85% combust uptime at 15% increased damage. So if you don’t have tier, your dps will do nothing.
I’ve seen frost mages still doing good dps without tier, so I’m going to switch until I get 4pc.
Mages in general are fairly complicated and are overly punishing when you make mistakes. Fire also indeed has an extremely strong tier set at the moment which helps enable higher uptimes on Combustion. Fire is really all about squeezing as much from Combustion as possible. But if you aren’t already abusing Combustion to its fullest potential, then getting 4p isn’t going to do that much to help you.
And all of that complexity is there only because it’s one of the original classes that never had its talent trees and core mechanics modernized and brought inline with the newer and more streamlined classes. I am specifically looking at Devastation Evoker here which is simply a better version of a Mage any way you cut it (minus the shorter range).
Liberation of Undermine Heroic - Spec Popularity vs Average Overall DPS : r/wow
Who can blame them when Arcane is currently the lowest DPS and least played spec in Heroic Raid.
That is disappointing. They actually had it in a really good spot at the launch of tww where it was fun to play and in the right place for dps.
No surprise Ret and BM have the most parses yet being on the negative side of the mean. Two of the easiest specs to play well.
If only they could all be this easy. I’m putting in the work right now to try to fix my fire dps and it’s hard. Looking at doing a new mouse and changing up how I’ve done rotations for years just to find a way to successfully maximize my combustion active time. It’s crazy how much harder mage is than most other classes, which is why you don’t see more fire mage parses in this graph. After watching the RWF, there would be thousands more fire parses if it was as easy to play well like BM and Ret.
This reminds me of Shadowland S1.
“What youre not fire? KICK!” 
Some love for our Arcane brothers+sisters here pls <3 !
(and a bit for frost too pls)
Just got removed from a +10 before it started and replaced with a Fire Mage.
I am 660 and +2’ed the key as Arcane week 1.
Talked to him a bit at the summoning stone though, nice guy.
You can queue as fire and then switch specs during the pull timer.
LOL! If it’s come to that it’s just not worth it. The problem isn’t even with underperforming specs, it’s the toxic mentality of hardcore M+ players who only want to play with others like them that don’t play the game for fun but treat it as a job and expect everyone else to do the same.
I was asked today if im brain-dead because im playing not fire.
sigh
I actually had that happen earlier today but I’m not sure if it’s just because the leader didn’t realize he had two mages lol. To be fair, I had only timed 1 10 at that time. Now I’m on a hot streak timing them!
Oh no!
While this may be true in certain cases, I don’t believe it is in all of them. I mean let’s be real: the difference between arcane and pretty much any other spec, let alone the top tier ones is so great right now, possibly among Blizzard’s top 3 “balance fails” ever, that I can’t completely blame people trying to do higher keys and saying “sorry I’m not taking the crappiest spec in the game.”
Don’t misunderstand me, there’s a TON of toxicity and elitism in the m+ community, but it’s not just that.
While M+ is very toxic. No one is going to bring a dps spec doing Aug level dps into their key they want to time.
That’s what I meant, in hindsight I guess I could have been clearer. I should have said “isn’t only” rather than “isn’t even.” But yeah it’s a mixture of both, though the elitism and toxicity are by far the bigger contributors. Folks like that are also far more likely to overreact to performance perceptions although in this particular case that’s somewhat warranted.
At the end of the day though, bringing an Arcane Mage vs. a Fire is very unlikely to make the difference between timing the key or not, especially if the player in question has the gear and/or has timed similar keys before. The hardcore M+ crowd is just overly picky and risk averse because they can afford to be. If M+ had a random queue based solely on ilvl, I guarantee you the percentage of timed vs. bricked keys would hardly change from what it is under the current system.
Clearly you have not seen the damage out put of a well geared, 4pc tier , fire mage in high keys. Especially in the dungeons with bigger pulls. Yes it can make a huge difference.