Curious how many Arcane mages are swapping to necro now? Looks like Deathborne and Emmeni soulbind are best overall PVE now.
EDIT: Now I’m reading Night Fae may still be better given the 3 min cool down on Deathborne…anyone got any thoughts one way or the other?
Night Fae is better for Shifting Power and for Korayn soulbind. Deathborne’s cooldown is way too high, and Emeni’s enticing Lead by Example ability is actually garbage because the radius you need to get the party member bonus is like 8 yards.
well the current #1 ranked mythic raid dps in the world (in all star points on warcratlogs) right now is an arcane mage using necrolord.
but he’s using whats probably an unintended way of stacking his trinkets, combined with lead by example and deathborne to make for some insane burst phases. i foresee the trinkets getting changed.
that said, if you primairly raid you can easily justify picking necrolord if you want to. it destroys on cleave fights and fights with specific burst phases (sludgefist).
Yeah it’s really unfortunate because (lazy) Blizzard devs and others are quick to point that player out when in reality what he is doing has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of Arcane but rather the fact that his raid is able to pull such high overall damage that he (and the rest of them) are able to burn down bosses incredibly quickly allowing him to ignore virtually all the movement mechanics that plague Arcane, not to mention the bosses die before he ever has a chance to burn through all his mana. And of course he’s getting Power Infusion… 99.9% of Arcane mages will never be in a situation where they can take advantage of that raw potential.
hm checking out this dude- he’s no#1 pretty much just because of Sludgefist- a fight where you do % increased dmg to a boss in very short windows, something Necro Arcane uniquely greatly benefits from. Amongst other Arcane mages, across all other raid fights Necro doesn’t seem to do wildly better than any other cov Arcane mage. It does slightly better on Huntsman and much worse on Sunking. Less relevant to your specific question but it’s worth noting- across all mage specs, this guy does 1-3k less on every other fight than the top fire mages. So his raid is losing out on 10-30% dmg just for 1k extra dmg on Sludge 
M+ wise, the great majority of the top Arcane mages are Night Fae because dmg across longer timelines like dungeons is going to be higher with NF because you’ll be able to use all your dmg cooldowns much more often.
So it depends on what you want: Would you rather do ~10-15% more burst dmg than Night Fae for one pull every 3 minutes provided you hold cooldowns to totally sync up all your burst abilities, or shave 16 seconds off all your cooldowns every minute, and do 10% more damage to 100% of enemies until they hit 75% health.
I will say I did a rando bg last night as Necro Arcane and it is sort of hilarious hitting people with all your cooldowns up… then again I might have had 10-20 ilvls on the enemies too idk lol
If you play more Necro Arcane in pvp, I’d be interested in hearing your experiences!
Anyone else trying out the Necro Arcane Mage?
IcyVeins currently has Necrolord as the best covenant for Arcane in both raid and m+.
WowHead says Night Fae and Venthyr are best for raid and NF for M+.
I think Kyrian has a cool setup with Arcane Harmony legendary right now being tested in discord.
It appears they’re all overall a lot closer than you’d think this patch with some use case differences depending which play style you want to do.
Im Necro Arcane I enjoy it alot just as much as I was frost