Today I completed a set of 3 Azerite pieces with Equipoise being one of the available traits. This gives me one set of 3x Wildfire traits (Fire), one set with 3x Flash Freeze (Frost) and one set with 3x Equipoise (Arcane).
With this in mind, Arcane sims almost 2k more DPS than Fire (my main). This has inspired me to give Arcane a whirl and try it out, though I have extremely limited experience with the spec.
I’m trying to understand the rotation. I know it’s simple, but it does appear to have some nuance to maximize DPS.
Let me know if I’m missing anything here:
charged up
Arcane Blast until about 60% mana
2a) Arcane Missiles if clearcasting procs
Arcane Power
Arcane Blast until out of mana (ignore clear casting)
4a) Use Presence of Mind before Arcane Power Ends
Evocation
Then in the “conserve” phase you repeat the above until Arcane Power is off cooldown. The only difference is once you get to 3/4 (rule of 3s) stacks you dump them with Arcane Barrage until you’re ready to use Arcane Power.
Is that essentially right? I was practicing it on a target dummy and seemed to be doing ok, but wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything crucial.
This is where the issue is at. You do a pull like this:
prepot->AB @ 2sec → CU → RoP → AP + Trinkets → AB until 2.5 seconds left of AP remains → PoM + AB x2 → RoP → AB until 0% mana → Evocation → AB (use any AM procs below 90% mana) → @70% mana use 1 more AB then Arcane Barrage → ABx4 → Arcane Barrage (the idea behind this point is that the 3rd and 4th AB after 70% mana will become empowered from Equipoise doing more conserve damage).
What you have posted above reads like as if you are not using AP on pull and allowing it to have a low up time.
Thank you!! This is exactly what I was looking for. I knew there was something that I was missing. I forgot to include RoP in general, but it was mostly the order of when to use AP in the overall rotation. The optimal rotation involves weaving AB in between your buff/utility spells, and it’s more important to your output. Fire and frost are less reliant on that specific type of nuance it seems.
Arcane is entirely dependent on it’s burn phase for dps. That’s why you always want to stack every cd you have during that window. It’s also crucial to watch your boss timers so you’re not interrupted during your burn (or can at least minimize it). If you pop your cds and have to move your dps tanks and it’s pretty much unrecoverable.
I guess in that sense it’s similar to Combustion/Fire, in that your DPS tanks if you don’t maximize your casts during its uptime. Icy Veins/Frost is much less significant than the other two specs.
I’ll test out your rotational suggestions this evening. I sim about 21.5k dps as Arcane and I was pulling about 19k dps on the dummy without any pots and my flawed rotation above, so I wasn’t too far off. Of course this doesn’t account for any repositioning that’d occur during an actual raid fight, but I digress.
Sims do assume you are fully raid buffed with food, flask, augment rune and prepots as well as 5% magic buff from DH so you’re not lookin too bad I don’t think.
About the rotation given to you above - I believe the only thing is that you DO want to use your missile procs during your burn phase, just not while Arcane Power is up especially if you are running 1 or more arcane pummeling traits it is a dps increase.
Don’t forget Arcane is also a secret rng beast. One pull I can do 30k dps on my opener with 0 crits but then the very next pull I could do 90k dps with all crits. Getting juicy crits in the opener / other AP burn phases basically makes the spec good or bad depending on your luck. Hope you have some good luck in your runs
