arcane spec

[ganimus]

Im just putting up some of my findings so that as i research the dps differences, i can have something to look back on.  Maybe it will help someone else too.  Its all just comments off EJ's forums, and not my thoughts.



57-3-11 or maybe 53-0-18
3 simple steps to arcane happiness

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With the current arcane shatter bug in place, according to Rawr, playing arcane is actually much simpler than it looks.

1) Your regular rotation, unless severely limited by mana, should ALWAYS be ABx3-AM-Abar, REGARDLESS of missile barrage proc. Remember to use Abar before the 5th tick of AM.

2) Your stacked cooldown rotation, unless severely limited by mana, is spam AB, use AM-Abar ONLY when missile barrage procs. Remember to use Abar before the 5th tick of AM.

3) You should try to stack your cooldowns with heroism but not at the expense of missing the 2nd use of any cooldown. You should always stack IV and AP together.


This is it. 3 simple steps cover everything there is to play arcane. This will remain to be the case until Blizzard fixes the arcane shatter bug or they acknowledge it but change arcane in a different way. Please note you are very rarely "severely limited by mana" due to current content and fights being extremely short.

I found even with a good rig and a good video card that it was a pain to time and i did miss the timing occasionally, and yes i do use quartz.
 
Does this mean to cast Abar before the 5th missle of AM is cast or in the time after it is cast, but before it lands?
I cast immediately after the 4th missile. It's easy to time (at least without MB) and works 100% of the time.

So ABx3 -> AM 1,2,3,4 -> ABarr immediately after 4th missile.

Someone should test this: Cast AB-(PoM-AB).
Make sure (PoM-AB) is macroed, and spamcast it at the end of the first cast.
Does the second AB cost +200%, get +20% damage and give you the 2nd stack of the AB debuff?
If it does, it's working correctly, and you can PoM your 3rd AB to get the highest gain from your 30% crit buff, i.e. AB-AB-(PoM-AB)-AM-ABar.

In another words, how is compared: 20sec of 20% reduced cast time in 2min cycles, versus 10% increased critical chance always up


Wow. Somehow its now 120 in the morning, and i have been reading about this topic for 3+ hours. I'm going to bed before my brain explodes from looking at graphs and wws of specs and what not.

[Sunrath (Devon)]

A few things I've noticed for those interested.

The arcane shatter is very difficult for me to time with a missile barrage proc, most likley because of lag.

To always have enough mana, (self buffed I'm at 19.4) for a boss fight, i have to be very aggressive with my evocate/gem. As soon as i hit 85-80%, i gem back to full. as soon as i hit 35-30% after that, i evocate when the encounter allows. Icy veins can be a huge help. during loethab for instance. Icy veins>evocate will give you spell push back protection, and allow you to get back to dps'ing much faster.

On trash, it's easier to ABx3>Abarr than spam AB. You get much better mana out of it. Mage armor also helps for trash as well.

I'm still not comfortable using molten armor on bosses, I OOM way too fast. I will switch if i have a clearcast or arcane power up though.

the glyph for arcane blast stacks. IE it is not 15%>30%>45% but 20%>40%>60%

[Mord]

Was playing with this spec/rotation the other day on my 70 mage..... pulled about 900 only stacking AB once and doing AM/Abar
Mana was a huge issue but that might just be my BC gear with no spir

[Sunrath (Devon)]

Discussion Gani and I were having about the arcane spec. thought others would like to see it.

19:15 [Sunrath]: mk, go ahead
19:15 [Ganimus]: when your missile barrage procs, and you cast am, do you still try to get your arcane barrage at the end?
19:16 [Sunrath]: yeah, takes a little practice, and sometimes lag will mess you up pretty bad, but the am will still go off, even if youdon't get the abarr in there right
19:17 [Sunrath]: with that much haste, it's not a great idea to not use the missile barrage
19:17 [Ganimus]: i could get the barrage to proc with the AB debuff, only when i was doing regular arcane missiles
19:17 [Ganimus]: that much haste?
19:18 [Sunrath]: the haste for the arcane missiles. and i can get the AB during an MB sometimes, but it's hard
19:18 [Sunrath]: i think it'll get easier with practice
19:18 [Sunrath]: do you use a casting bar addon?
19:18 [Ganimus]: no
19:19 [Ganimus]: what does it do?
19:19 [Sunrath]: i woudl recomend quartz and try getting used to it.
19:19 [Ganimus]: is that what quartz is?
19:19 [Sunrath]: its a much better cast bar, and you can resize it and re-color it so it's easy to keep track of
19:19 [Ganimus]: yeah. i kept reading people mentioning it while i was researching last night
19:19 [Sunrath]: yeah
19:20 [Sunrath]: i think EJ has it as one of thier must haves for casters
19:20 [Ganimus]: ok. so when do you use your cooldowns
19:20 [Sunrath]: i know evea uses it to, makes it easier to tell if she can finish a heal before getting intereupted on a boss fight
19:20 [Ganimus]: the only way i can see stacking at the beginning is by using invisibility right after
19:20 [Ganimus]: ill look into it then
19:21 [Sunrath]: pop them all as early as possible. they have a short cd, all two minutes, and with arcane potency up, you'll burn through mana, so it gives you a chance to be real aggresive with evocate
19:21 [Ganimus]: evocate before my first gem or after. i assume after correct?
19:22 [Sunrath]: evocate as soon as it will get you back to full mana.
19:22 [Sunrath]: think of evocate as an extra 70% mana you ahvn't used yet
19:23 [Ganimus]: right, i am just wondering if i should immmediately burn mana down to 30% then evocate, or burn down, use a gem, burn down some more, then evocate
19:23 [Sunrath]: evocate before the gem if your burning cd's, then use your first gem at about 80%, to top you back off
19:27 [Sunrath]: i meant to say if your not burning cd's
19:28 [Sunrath]: sorry
19:28 [Sunrath]: you don't want to spend cd time in evocate
19:28 [Ganimus]: right
19:28 [Ganimus]: except icy veins
19:29 [Sunrath]: i read somewherer that if you can evocate at the last second or so of icy veins, that it will still get the haste buff
19:30 [Ganimus]: yup
19:30 [Ganimus]: thats what ive heard
19:30 [Sunrath]: but if your taking an avoidable aoe damage, then icy veins should be used with the full evocate, so you don't take push back
19:30 [Ganimus]: as long as you start evocate while the iv buff is up, you are ok

[Vranx (Scott)]

I read the first post in the thread about Arcane at EJ. They said the jury is out on how much Missile Barrage might add or if its really beneficial. Do you guys use it a bunch? Its 5 talent points, if its not worth it thats a steep price.

[ganimus]

Wow, I ran a terrible pug in naxx that didnt accomplish anything, but i found out 2 things.
1) arcane is a mana sink like you only read about.  I had mage armor glyphed and on, and was using 16mp5 food with blessing of wisdom, and could still get through all my mana in a hurry if i wasnt careful.
2) i rocked the deeps.  I blew past 4k dps on one of our attempts. Unreal.  I was over 3k dps for the entire raid, trash encluded.

Vranx. I have missile barrage, but it is more of a pain than anything, because when i use regular AM i can get my arcane barrage to get the AB debuff, but when i use missile barrage, i cant get the timing right because its too fast.

[Vranx (Scott)]

If you take the points out of Missile Barrage it allows you to get three points into Frost Channeling to help the mana issues. I was also looking at Student of the Mind. Here is what I was thinking if I could drop MB:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=of0Vbu0IzxGuMtcdMZV0chsc

[Jergen]

Here is your stats from that Naxx today Gani: http://wowwebstats.com/15t2rgwbzkw2o

You broke 5k

[ganimus]

Thanks Jergen. I appreciate it, and im sorry you got roped into such a waste of a raid.
Now the questions can begin for me. 
Why was my dps time 10-15% lower than the other people at the top of the charts.
Why, if my gem use was good, was my cd use so low, and how do i fit them in without blowing my proverbial load.
I clearly didnt take the respec into consideration for +hit, because i never missed once. even though i thought i was 10 below cap.  terrible planning. =)
My crit is 13 % below my ffb crit amount, only 5% from molten armor. Where'd the other 8% go, just talent change?


Ok, who likes to see 26k arcane blast, and 20k arcane barrage??? That's freakin sweet.

[Sunrath (Devon)]

if you had the glyph for molten armor before, than molten armor was more than 5%. if not, then yeah, it was probably talents. Fire is all about crit.

your dps time was probably lower because of the time spent in evocation, or using a GCD for gems.

I'm not sure what your asking about the gem and cd use.

and if you remember, i was asking about the tool tip, because i had suddenly realized i was 3% over cap for hit.

Now I have a question. If you, little V, and I are all going arcane. Who's gonna scorch/winter's chill? 

we must not allow EYK to see this thread. He should stay FFB so we can have a scorch. 

I'd also like to say sorry for sticking you guys with that ID. when it was running smooth, we cleared three quarters in about an hour and a half. And i mean cleared, even all the trash. I had no idea it was going to become that big of a headache.

--Didn't i tell you that hunter happypappy was disgusting?

[ganimus]

Vranx, while frost channeling will help a little with mana conservation, it may not help as much as you think.  It will only reduce the base cost of the spell, it will not increase with arcane power, or with your arcane blast debuff, so when your arcane blast costs 7.8 times as much, you will only gain 4 % of the base cost. 
I still might remove arcane barrage, but im not sure.  I think i will continue to raid for a few more times, just to see how bad mana issues really are once i know exactly what is going on.

[Vranx (Scott)]

From EJ:
1- Master of Elements only refunds the base mana cost of the spell that crits. More specifically: it will refund you the unstacked AB mana cost even if you paid multiple times more.
2- Frost Channeling does not suffer from the above exception. You get a full multiplying 10% mana cost reduction no matter how many stacks of AB.

[Sunrath (Devon)]

very interesting Vranx.

i think I'll try it out and do some test runs before tonight's naxx. I like the idea of a little mana regen, and MB is useless for me with the 1/2 second delay i've always got.

I did notice the spec you linked gave up 6% to crit with Ablast though. Any reason why?

[Vranx (Scott)]

6% damage in the arcane tree and 2% crit in the fire tree to get more mana through spirit and frost channeling. I played with that build in a heroic last night and never came close to running out of mana. I switched back to the cookie cutter arcane spec for tonight.

[ganimus]

Wow. That is a great find on frost channeling vranx.   That makes it a much more viable option.    Im hoping i can get by with the increased dps and decreased mana pool tonight, but I'll definitely consider it if things dont work out.

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