Mage is in a bad spot. I’m trying Kyrian arcane because of bad rng with frost gear. I’ve only been getting mastery gear, and then you play arcane and have bad rng with crits. This game is making us depend on luck instead of skill.
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I would say Aff lock. Frost mage is borderline. While frost is super easy to play (frost bolt go brr) and you’re basically spamming procs, I do think keeping IV up with TV separates the great frost mages from the ok ones.
Really good frost mages can keep IV up the entire duration of their IV CD. Now granted that is hella reliant on RNG and the fights not really favoring frost.
Affliction especially in 9.0-9.1. Aff has 5 dots and two debuffs to manage while
Also setting up burst windows.
What logs have you been looking at?
Arcane is top 4 for heroic
Top 8 for mythic.
You do realize arcane stacks crit then mastery right?
You’re looking at the 95 percentile only, I am looking at the actual number aggregates like what they use on Wowhead for their weekly analytics (same source though).
That’s a good point, that’s why I don’t like dot specs. My lock has always been Destro. But while Affliction is admittedly difficult to manage it doesn’t exactly have to rely on a gimmick like Kyrian Arcane and isn’t nearly as dependent on specific legendary/covenant combos. The archetype also doesn’t differ much from the general dot spec although Affliction is basically dots on steroids. And Affliction is kinda in the same boat as Arcane in that it shines only where it can pad numbers or it’s heavily favored by the boss mechanics.
It seems to be an unfortunate theme in WoW that the pure DPS classes with the most complex specs end up not doing nearly as well as the hybrid classes with the easy specs.
I generally use 90/95 percentile to base a specs performance because to keep what matters is playing it properly compared to all percentiles showing anyone who did a fight as arcane.
Affliction was completely reworked between 9.05 and 9.1 to the point they actually killed the spec. Originally you would put up all your basic dots, drain soul to 3 stacks of SE. then use soulrot/phantom orb, then dump all of your shards into MG (MG did more damage per dots on target) so in essence you were stacking as many dots and bursting in a small window while also managing SE stacks and haunt.
They completely gutted the single target damage Aff did too. Now you run the MG leggo that gives bonus crit for x seconds and try to maintain the crit damage buff all
Fight which is horrible. It’s why I swapped back to mage.
I agree the covenant system is stupid and specifically hurts pure dps over hybrids.
Pure dps players should be free to change specs to adapt to the situation.
As much as I don’t want to be nightfae I hope fire gets it’s ST buffed back.
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The barrage not being a critical strike does tend to sting a bit. I have been trying to at least get a higher item lvl ruby, but the game won’t give it to me. I’ve even been trying for an empyreal ordinance just to see how it’ll feel to use and the game won’t even give me that.
Bruh I can’t get a ruby to save my life.
I’m pretty lucky with iqd procs though.
Jesus, that sounds rough. I guess I should be grateful they didn’t even touch Arcane? 
Literally never gotten one to drop except once from a regular M run back at the very start of SL so I couldn’t even upgrade it when they re-introduced Valor because old items weren’t eligible. But I keep getting the stupid trinkets from Sanguine Depths every other week in the GV. 
Yeah they completely killed it’s single target to tank level damage.
They had reworked it from the above rotation to a dot/mega drain single target damage but they then gutted the talent and conduits that made it good. It was broken and needed needs but it got the fire treatment.
I started the expac on my rogue so I didn’t need it. In 9.0.5 I swapped to warlock and my buddy was like let’s pug top to get our rubies (he played a spriest).
First run it drops for me and I give it to him (bigger upgrade for him) second run it drops for him and he gives it to me.
Then Tuesday reset I get a max one out of vault