Torn between Frost and Arcane

I am maining my mage for this xpack, and I am honestly torn between Frost and Arcane. I play SS Frost as I didn’t find Frost Fire to do enough damage.

I have always wanted to try Arcane but the rotation of setup needed to get damage out always seems like a nightmare and if you mess up 1 thing then you could screw up your burn window.

That said, I was looking to see with hero talents now if Arcane is easier/more forgiving rotation wise. I would probably lean towards SS there too, but if Sunfury has an easier rotation may try that out as well.

What do people think?

I wouldn’t get that freaked out about it. Arcane is not super hard, it’s just a matter of knowledge and understanding the spec.

Gotta know the fights, how your team does things, and adjust to all those variables.

Id compare Arcane to playing DoTA. It’s not that much harder mechanically than any other spec, it just requires more info to know. It took me sc minute to learn, way more so than frost, but i got it after a few days.

Or thing you should do is just look at a rotation guide and go. Spend some time reading all the tooltips and like the icy Veins page that describes the spec fundamentals and concepts

I think, when I see the logs and how better Arcane performs to the other 2 mage specs, that it’s another freaking sad season/expansion start like we had in Dragonflight S1, where if you don’t like Arcane’s convoluted bursty playstyle, you are literally screwed because Frost and Fire are basically dead raid-wise.

Is frost dead for raids? I havent really done any end game content on my frosty yet besides some battlegrounds but my damage has seemed incredibly good.

Well if you look at logs:
warcraftlogs…com/zone/statistics/38#dataset=90

Frost is 8th from bottom, fire is 4th from bottom.

So basically both frost and fire are pretty much underperforming normal/hc wise.

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Arcane feels the same in pvp about yet another season of unquestionable frost dominance.

Should there be better balance? You bet, but it’s not like frost is the historically bad spec here. Especially as the expansion advances frost and fire have always outpaced arcane in M+ and even raids.

It’s nice for arcane mages to feel like less of a niche spec, when for the longest time they’ve been the feral druid of casters.

Yeah I don’t really play PvP so I did not really want to make a comment on that.

Though the PvP damage is on a different scale as far as I know. Also in PvP there are a lot more factors just being a good dps, a good amount of utility and CC that a class can bring is also could be crucial where Frost could out perform Arcane. Though I really don’t want to make any comment on that since I have 0 experience in it.

Regarding the raids… well usually that happened with a lot of tuning and pre/post world first race tunings of the classes. We’ll see how it goes, but at this moment it doesn’t look really promising.

how is mage doing in mythic dungeons?

There is no information regarding that, since it’s not really logged. We’ll be more informed next week once M+ starts and raider(.)io will count the participation numbers by class and spec.

The only useful information we have right now are sim numbers, on magehub where you can look at 5 target sims, and Arcane just dominating Frost/Fire.

If you ask how mage is doing regarding every single other class? Then it looks pretty good as Arcane shows to be one of the strongest caster right now and provides a raidbuff, and brings the team BL.

Join the winning team. Warlocks.