My arcane feels so RNG based, wrong stats maybe?

Hey everyone, feel like I have arcane down pretty well. One thing im noticing is the variance on ToTM damage which usually is the difference between my burst being top, or 6-8th.

Some pulls im hitting 5-6m range on the touch drop, others im barely getting to 3m sometimes 2.8ish. Is this just crits going out making such a huge difference? I mainly have haste/mastery gear, is crit more important? As far as I can see sims want me to have more vers over crit with my current values.

Thanks for any advice!

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(I’m leaving the first part here just because, but I think I found what you’re looking for in the last paragraph)
Looking through a couple of fights (Sikran and Ky’veza) I see that you aren’t always consistent about 1) pre-casting barrage into touch and 2) using evocation before a surge.

Maybe I happened to catch you slipping up (we’re all human and we all do it), but that’s definitely something to consider. Do you have examples of two different fights where they felt different but you think you did everything correctly? Going through warcraft logs (and sometimes using wow analyzer) can help you catch things you didn’t notice otherwise.

I know that for me, I’m weighted pretty heavily towards haste and vers in my gear, and my touches tend to go closer to 3-4m. But we do also have a lot of procs to work with. The timings on when our random trinkets proc and when we activate our other trinkets can have some pretty big impacts on a fight.

Looking at Ky’veza again, I can see that you had a nice big 5.2m touch of the magi around the 2:50 mark. Looks like you cast that touch around 2:44 and activated spymaster’s web immediately afterwards. Spymaster’s web is - by far - our best trinket, and it has the biggest impact on our damage. I see that on Sikran you activated it at the end, but the touch that you buffed with it didn’t go off (I’m assuming the boss died). That can easily make the difference between your 3m and 6m touches. Bloodmallet (take it’s findings with a grain of salt) estimates that Spymaster’s web at 600 ilevel is better than literally every other trinket, at every possible item level.

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Thank you very much for the response and advice. Definitely agree on the slip ups xD

The scenarios im usually talking about is like, on pull. As mid pull i rarely try to track how much my touch is actually doing. My opener damage of touch varies wildly is what ive noticed so I assumed it varies throughout the pull.

Maybe i need to look in to more vers, mine is very low.

Icy-veins had vers on a couple of BiS pieces. I had literally zero vers and it was affecting my dps for sure. You dont need much, but a couple of pieces with vers can boost your damage by 1 to 5%.

I dont think its your sole issue, it wasn’t mine, i still had a lot to improve on. That being said making sure i always have at least some decent baseline vers seems to have helped.

Stats make a minuscule difference. The biggest thing is lining up your burst windows correctly and executing the rotation as flawlessly as possible during those times. There are usually two major problems with that (1) not using Shifting Power at the right times and desyncing your cooldowns and (2) either holding your cooldowns too long or not long enough and having to interrupt your burst window due to movement or boss mechanics. The only other major factor, and sadly it’s something you have no control over, is how quickly your group pushes a boss past certain thresholds and whether those line up with your cooldowns. There could be a massive difference in output depending on whether a boss dies before your next major burst window or just after. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter in those cases because the boss is dead.

In my experience often damage issues like this come from an errant talent. Most bosses of raid this season line up really well with arcane cooldown timings, but there are definitely moments where you need to adjust. However with tuning being relatively tight this season (a rare win) a single talent can make a huge difference and talents do vary fight to fight