Arcane Mage
I’ve been trying to figure out what I am doing wrong in my rotation, talents, and stat weights, but i’ve noticed that when some of the mage Youtubers display their sims, they will show a sim for AOE and it shows 16m for them, when I sim my toon with similar gear(not the same so maybe thats it?), I’m capping at 7.5m. For ST they do 6-7m, and I’m sitting at like 3-4m.
I’ve been trying to do research and find guides, match stat weights on Murlokio, Archongg and other similar sites, but I’m always behind by miles in damage. I’m just not sure what I am missing at this point that puts them so far ahead.
The reason I bring this up is that in some keys I’ve been doing, I’m getting flamed by other DPS who do 6-9m every pull, and even in my burst window, I cap at like 7m with lust. Could anyone provide insight into what they have done to achieve higher DPS numbers?
That’s tough to answer with the information you provided. Posting on your mage is a start but the only really educated player we get around here is Manather and only occasionally. Poking around the altered time discord would probably be more helpful.
The one thing I can help with is this. Instead of trying to match stats to something you found it’s best to sim gear upgrades against yourself. It sounds like you’re already simming, so if you’re using raidbots just use the top gear tab instead of quick sim.
I’ve found over the years there are often a lot of small things that can add up to the kind of discrepancies you’re seeing. Do you have set bonuses, bis trinkets, enough of a critical stat, etc. Maybe you read that mastery is good and went all in on that but have <10% haste as a result. That’s going to feel awful. Outside of that, have you cut out mistakes in your rotation? Are you changing how you play pack-to-pack, squeezing the most out of your CDs, etc.?
Sorry I didn’t notice I didn’t post on my mage. I can’t link raiderio on here but you could look up there to see too, I don’t think I have logs either, but i’ve been doing sims and right now the best I can squeeze out of my gear (mostly limited by Crests) is 4.2m ST and 6ish mill AOE I think?
I am starting to record my runs, so I’m hoping maybe that could include a way for me to get feedback. I think I’m wondering if I’m making mistakes in my rotation where there are windows that I have no CDs (Shifting power is on CD) alongside the other spells? I feel like I might be missing a lot of procs, maybe?
Maybe some insight into my toon might help? Thanks for sharing, by the way!
You’ve pushed further than I have so far, and 4 mil ST isn’t bad at all. 6mil on a trash pack with CDs up is low but I also haven’t played much arcane this season so I’m really not the best person to help. I can sustain 9 mil on the dummies over 2 bil dmg as sunfury arcane (2pc/700ilv) but I don’t really know why, I just copied the mage hub m+ build and generally tried to follow that rotation (which is very similar to ST). Tracking procs is definitely necessary for optimizing with arcane, there are a few conditionals for when to barrage. Mage-hub. com has some infographics that simplify this.
Sounds like you’re asking the right questions though, and like I mentioned you’d likely find some help over at altered time! You may not get immediate feedback from a contributor but usually if someone gives bad advice someone will appear to correct it. Best of luck!
Arcane is in an awkward place when it comes to AoE. The damage is there but it’s very cooldown reliant and slower to ramp up. Many other specs, especially for melee classes, have hard hitting AoE abilities on short cooldowns that make them available on every pull. If you’ve got two other players like that in your group they’re gonna melt everything before your TotM even goes off so your DPS on those packs will tank. But you should be able to more than make up for it on the boss fights so at the end of the run it should all be evened out.
For the raid, a lot of the bosses have vulnerability phases that tend to overlap with burst AoE moments (Araz is a perfect example) and if you’re doing what you’re supposed to you should be funneling all of your damage into the boss and just doing incidental cleave on the adds but people like to pad their numbers so there is that too.
At the end of the day, if things are dying and you’re not holding your group back the overall damage output doesn’t really matter.
A lot of the time, I’ve been comparing to Outlaw rogues, Windwalker Monks, and occasionally Demo/Aff Lock, the issue is I’m not pumping like they are, or I’m super CD reliant, which might just be more of the playstyle, but there are times when I watch some players like Manther, Preheat and some other mages where even when their CDs are down, they pump quite high and im just not sure what I’m doing wrong in those situation.
I appreciate the input, I’ll be looking at Mage Hub and maybe reaching out to people on The Alter Time discord to see if they can give more specific feedback.
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Arcane dps seems reliant on how the tank pulls imo.
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100 percent this. I ended up switching to frost because I only pug, and trying to pug and be arcane when the tank and you aren’t connected and they know how to pull around arcane cds is extremely frustrating. Frosts only concern is the tank not pulling out of blizzard.
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Arcane also has quite a bit of variance due to rng procs. ST is at the mercy of missile and intuition procs and AOE has the same issue with intuition. As others have said, it’s also heavily reliant on correct positioning of mobs.
And if you’re running it, orb barrage procs when you fire off barrage. A low rng on this can feel awful.
Worry less about stats and more on how you’re pushing buttons. If you actually want to improve beyond a basic YOLO level, you kind of need to learn to use logs and/or VODs.
Intuition is not random, despite what the tooltip says.