Picked up old Arcane Mage but struggling to do damage & not die

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I actually started out with Fire because I just always wanted to roll Fire, but apparently that was a bad idea. So I went to sites like Icy Veins & Wowhead and they seemed to recommend Arcane for level (I’m on the Isle of Dorn), but I’m really not understanding the rotation and combos.

I’m hardly dealing any damage while taking a lot and almost dying in every fight, even with just 1 enemy. Multiple enemy fights are the worst. My barrier is gone quickly, they break out of frost nova almost instantly, I have no potions, and there’s so much happening on-screen that I can’t keep track of everything at once, and then I’m dead or my HP is so low that I have to eat food between every fight (assuming I’m far enough away to not aggro).

Any help and advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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Welcome back!

I’m sorry to hear you’re not having a great start.

Is this your character here, on Madoran? https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/character/us/madoran/jolena/

If so, your main problem is that your gear is very low for level 71. You may not be up to speed on the rotation, but with that gear even a very polished performance of the spec would feel slow.

I see you have a lot of the Mountainsage pieces at ilevel 360. Did you accept a “Gear Update” when you returned? Something like that? Even so, you must have levelled fast without getting many upgraded pieces. I would like a level 71 to be wearing about 450s, or getting towards that, and there definitely is a gear-trap at the start of TWW where it’s not possible to get a lot of new pieces quickly.

You can check the Auction House for upgrades, but levelling gear is absurdly expensive this expansion, so you may not find much.

While you are there, pick up a stack of potions! Algari Healing Potions are this expansion’s healpots.

So what can you do? Did you level through Dragonflight last year? You seem to have the achieves. Do the World Quests there offer any upgrades? The Dreamsurge event, which should be on the map in one of the four zones, offers Dreambound 454 gear for 100 Dreamsurge Coalescence, which you can get by flying through the green orbs you see in various places.

If you would rather stop for a bit and grind some gear before continuing, you can do that in DF.

Other than that, I’m not sure I can offer any quick advice to help. I play Frost myself, but even being familiar with Frost, I think I would struggle with that gear disadvantage.

As Arcane, the trick is to use the downtime between mobs to use Evocation, while keeping your Arcane Charges up as much as possible. Blast one mob, Evocate if needed, and blast another. It’s a fairly mechanical process. Letting your Arcane Charges drop means that you have to build them up again, and as a squishy clothie, you may not have the time for that.

P.S. as an afterthought

If you accepted a Gear Update, was the gear you had originally BETTER than the Mountainsage pieces the Gear Update gave you, by any chance? Did the Gear Update actually downgrade your gear?

You will have received your original gear in the mail. Worth checking.

If you vendored that gear, you can get it back through Item Restoration
https://us.battle.net/support/en/restoration

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The idea of recovering bwtween fights is pretty critical to the Arcane lifestyle when your gear is low-powered (simply because your throughput is low-efficiency compared to the mana expenditures). I always conjure a stack of mana food and I’m pretty much always having to munch a mana pastry between fights, in addition to Evocation and having Mana Gems conjured and standing by. (Eating is specifically useful for health recovery, which Evocation doesn’t help with.)

If this character is an alt, can you jimmy up some level-appropriate heirloom gear to get you back into spec and start getting quest fear upgrades?

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@Gráinne

Hello thanks for the response! The gear is the Gear Update stuff, but when I compared it to what I had, it was higher by like 20ish points, but I will definitely check out the world events for DF and see about all that gear! And ty for the clarification on the rotation. Hopefully with better gear and some pacing I can get the hang of things!

That makes sense! I do have some heirloom gear things, but I’m not sure what all I have or if it’s all leveled up, but I’ll check it out and see what I got! Ty for the advice and I will definitely pace myself better between fights! (Sorry for the odd post, but I tried to reply to both posts individually and I guess the forum system doesn’t like that lol)

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Try the addon hekili, it will help to show you what skills you should use when. It will hopefully attempt to maximize your dps so you can down things before they kill you.

Over time you will get a feel for it yourself and be able to gauge when to use what yourself in each circumstance.

I highly recommend it if you are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of buttons on your screen.